John Mackey, Whole Foods Market

John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love. Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capitalism who spent over four decades building the natural foods industry. Under his leadership, Whole Foods grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, in 1980 to the world's largest natural and organic foods retailer, with over 500 stores across North America and the United Kingdom before its acquisition by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. After dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin, Mackey opened SaferWay Natural Foods in 1978 with Renee Lawson Hardy. He merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery in 1980 to create Whole Foods Market. He became known for pioneering high-quality natural foods retail, championing stakeholder-oriented business philosophy and popularizing the concept of conscious capitalism. His accomplishments include building Whole Foods into a Fortune 500 company, co-founding the Conscious Capitalism movement with Raj Sisodia, serving as CEO of Whole Foods for 44 years until his retirement in 2022, co-authoring "Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business" in 2013 and "The Whole Foods Diet" in 2017 and launching Love. Life in 2023 to focus on longevity and integrative medicine. Episode show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/john-mackey Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com Function Health: https://functionhealth.com/senra Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Fanatical Entrepreneurs: Why Work Feels Like Play (00:02:18) The Missionary vs. Mercenary Co-Founder Conflict (00:06:16) The Shirtless Hitchhiking Hippie and Johnny Rockefeller (00:08:12) Entrepreneur Confidence: Solving Puzzles and Cracking the Code (00:10:19) Flying Under the Radar: How Supermarkets Ignored Whole Foods (00:10:52) Venture Capitalists Are Hitchhikers With Credit Cards (00:14:03) Builder Entrepreneurs vs. Serial Entrepreneurs (00:16:31) Time Is the Only Filter I Trust (00:20:52) How Walmart Accidentally Fueled Whole Foods' Success (00:24:01) The Jaw-Drop Effect: When Customers First Walked In (00:27:17) Growth Through Acquisition: Building Geographic Platforms (00:29:19) Secret Allies: The Natural Foods Network (00:33:17) Mrs. Gooch's and the Revelation of Scale (00:34:52) Missionaries Sharing Financial Statements and Building Friendships (00:38:10) Never Competing Head-On With Friends (00:41:22) Going Public and Creating Liquidity for the Network (00:42:00) Continuous Learning: The Michael Dell Principle (00:44:10) Steve Jobs and Spotting Markets With Second-Rate Products (00:46:50) The Joy of Watching Team Members Become Millionaires (00:48:09) Capitalism: The Greatest Thing Humans Ever Invented (00:55:59) Cult Brands Are Built by Evangelists (00:58:01) Passion Is Infectious: The Reality Distortion Field (01:00:08) From Busboy to CEO: The Resume of an Entrepreneur (01:02:57) Learning From Near-Death Experiences (01:04:05) Money Means Freedom: Early Work Ethic (01:05:25) Shoe Dog as the Benchmark: Belief Is Irresistible (01:09:16) Documenting Time: Why Chronology Matters in Memoirs (01:11:14) Rockefeller, Bezos, and Musk: The Master Strategists (01:14:39) Using Doubt as Fuel: The Slow Burn of Proving People Wrong (01:20:04) Daniel Ek and Having No Ceilings (01:23:09) How His Father Shaped His Ambition (01:25:52) Firing His Father From the Board: The Hardest Decision (01:28:01) His Mother's Deathbed Wish and Lasting Regret (01:34:47) The Ceremony of Forgiveness (01:36:17) MDMA Therapy and Breathwork: Accessing Deeper Consciousness (01:38:54) The Entrepreneurial Journey as a Spiritual Journey (01:40:45) Conclusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  One of your themes that comes out in listening to a lot of your is you admire entrepreneurs and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I just listened to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's like he says, and he even started off the episode by quoting him. He says, "Well, how much time did you work?" And he said, "All the time, all of the time." And that's the theme for oftentimes entrepreneurs that they are so, it's not like they're, even think about working. Michael doesn't make a distinction, I don't think, between work and play. Neither do I. Because when you're really enjoying it, is it work? I mean, it's, you're doing what you want to do and it's playful. So

• 0:46Speaker 00

  it takes a lot of time, but you're not thinking about it because you're loving every minute of it. You're enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well. You know, I mean, he just loved his business so much. And so all these entrepreneurs, they're 100% in. And that's where their time goes. They're not, you ask Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man, or if he was doing a lot of different things. And it's like, no, no, not really. I think that's also true for most entrepreneurs. They're pretty focused on a few things. And mostly, they're focused on their business.

• 1:17David Senra?

  Yeah, so the conversation we were just having before we started recording was, you know, "I'm essentially seeking your counsel because I think I'm just like these kind of people." Like, you wouldn't spend 10 years making this podcast, reading 400 of these books. Your book is excellent, by the way, which we'll talk a lot about today. I wasn't expecting to start here. If you didn't think that you were similar, or there was something about them that was attractive. And I feel like essentially, my entire life is my work. Now, I think one thing that we share together, and we spent several hours together too, is very obvious in your book, but also with you, you viewed yourself, I don't know if you use this word, but to me, you're definitely a missionary. And one of the things I want to talk to you about, I talked to a lot of founders about this. So there's a lot of

• 1:59David Senra?

  co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that, especially when you're a missionary, you weren't like, "Oh, I just want to like start, you know, one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food." You're like, "We're going to change the way that the country eats." And that was a very distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders. Can you talk a little about that?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  I mean, the first one, we started it up, it was kind of like, I thought it'd be fun. We weren't trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small natural food store in a safer way. And actually, the good part of the book is dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs, they remember the early startup part of the business very well. And then they remember the last few years. And then there's the period in between they don't think about. One of the good things about writing a memoir is like, I got to rethink it all, relive it all. And, you know, my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, he just wanted to make a lot of money. And the very first store, the very first Whole Foods store, was very profitable.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  And even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet. And it was just very profitable. And he said, "We don't really need to do anything else. We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up." It's like, "Well, I don't want to do just one store. I want to open up more stores." And he went along with that, but those new stores started slow, had to grow into it. And so there even came a time where we were losing money again. And he was very angry about it. He says, "You've blown it." And I said, "No, these stores are going to be fine. They're going to grow. We wait and see." But he didn't have the patience to do that. It's like, you plant a seed, you can't be digging, you've got to let it grow. You've got to give it time, the seed to germinate and turn into something. So you have to be patient.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  It's sort of like investing, and you have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well. So, the missionary part was, as we began to grow, I began to realize, nobody's really doing quite what Whole Foods is doing. Nobody quite has the vision that we have, that I had, to be a national company, to maybe change our agricultural system, maybe be able to help people to eat healthier. I could see what was happening simultaneously. With Whole Foods' growth, America was getting sicker and sicker. That's the paradox. It almost tracks perfectly, where we see...

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I mean, David, seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight and forty-three percent are obese, and that has not peaked. It is still going up. And it's, it's, you can see it now with Make America Healthy Again, that people are beginning to respond to the fact that we are literally killing ourselves through what we're eating.

• 4:47David Senra?

  The co-founder that had the philosophical mismatch, one of them, was that the same one that you guys bought out? Was it Mark that you bought out early in?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yes, Mark, that's right. Mark, the other co-founder was with me. I mean, I mean, he was Mark's partner originally, Craig. But Craig really had a larger vision. Craig really wanted to grow the business. He really, I remember, I don't know if I told it in the book or not, but I think I might have mentioned it. But one day, early on, we were starting to grow, we were starting to go into California, and Craig said, John, we're going to be everywhere. We're going to be everywhere in America. Can you believe this? We're going to have Whole Foods markets everywhere. He says, I'll bet someday, I'll bet someday we have a store in Kansas City. For Craig, Kansas City was like the last place we'd have a store, but he thought, we'll get there someday. And I remember, I think Craig had retired by the time we finally got to Kansas City, but I remember calling him up

• 5:41Speaker 00

  and saying, Craig, we've done it. We're in Kansas City, dude. We made it.

• 5:45David Senra?

  There's a lot of things that, I mentioned this in the Founders episode I made about you. I was not expecting, because you're hilarious in the book, by the way, where it starts. You're like, you know, I'm like this shirtless hitchhiking hippie. Like, I just dropped out of college. I'm looking for like my life's mission, like what I want to do for work. And so you wouldn't think like a shirtless, you know, hitchhiking hippie, there'd be a lot of parallels between you and Johnny Rockefeller. But there definitely is. And specifically, in the early days of his career, where there was a commitment mismatch between him and his original co-founders.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true.

• 6:16David Senra?

  Wind up, he bought them out. He said, the day that he got rid of those partners, was, he looks back, is one of the smartest and best decisions of his life. You were constantly wanting to expand, expand, expand. I wanted to ask you, that's the next question I'm going to ask you. From the very first, like, from the very early days of Safer Way, and then returns into Whole Foods, and your partners were kind of like, trying to put the reins and like pull you back.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:40David Senra?

  Can you like talk us through that time of your life?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  I just had a lot of confidence. I think, I think a lot of entrepreneurs Not that we weren't making mistakes, I just, I think entrepreneurs believe, okay, I got this one, listened to the Michael Dell one on the drive out here in fact, is that, Michael said, well, you gotta make mistakes, that's how you learn, that's how you iterate. Entrepreneurs have confidence that they will solve the problems. Michael likes to figure out puzzles, right? Well, business in some ways is a puzzle, it's like, and I'm doing it again with Love Life, it's like, okay, what does the market really want here? And, okay, this isn't working, we gotta do less of that, this is working, let's do more of that. And then, and then you're constantly trying to think about how to create more

• 7:23Speaker 00

  value for your customers in ways that they don't necessarily even know they need it. So, the entrepreneur has confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, solve the puzzle. And, so they're willing to go ahead even though they don't know for certain, because they're, what they do believe is they're figuring it out, they're going to figure it out. And, people that, I think my co-founders, they weren't sure we would be able to figure it out. So they, and they didn't want to blow it, they didn't, they wanted to play it safe, they didn't want to lose what they had, I think. And I was like, we're gonna, I didn't, failure wasn't an option. I mean, I just think entrepreneurs have great confidence in their ability to solve the problems, and they will figure

• 8:07Speaker 00

  it out and win. And I think I fell into that category, looking backwards.

• 8:11David Senra?

  Why did you understand, though, that you had to expand or you weren't going to succeed? Where they thought, okay, we can just stay with this like, nice old store?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Because the world constantly, that Whole Foods had no patents, we were just a grocery store retailer, anybody could see what we were doing, anybody could copy what we were doing. I was amazed, I always like to make the joke that Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City, the media never paid any attention to us either. We opened up in Times, you know, not Times Square, we opened up in Columbus Circle, and this, the biggest supermarket in New York, and it just, and it was in a basement. I mean, I think- I talk in the book about how difficult the decision was because of the capital investment,

• 9:00Speaker 00

  no parking in a basement. It's like we're bound to fail. But we took the risk and that store was still the highest line store at Whole Foods, even though it's got some challengers now. It's, it's ever since we opened, it just took off. And then the supermarkets discovered us. They started to take us more seriously as a competitor because of all the publicity we received. And they were able to go see that store. And then the media started to pay attention to us as well. And as the media gave us more attention, more people began to buy the stock. And so we had this, you know, upward spiral of success. And one of the things is, is that we can't patent anything. We don't have any, anybody can see what you're doing and they can,

• 9:42Speaker 00

  and it's easy to get your intellectual capital, just hire away some key employees. And we were, Whole Foods was fortunate because we never were taken seriously by the supermarkets until we really developed scale on our own. I think I tell the story of a, of a venture capitalist who, who didn't invest. And his basic argument was, well, I don't think it's a big market. You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. But then if I'm wrong, uh, these other big supermarket chains will put you out of business. You can't compete with Safeway or HEB or those guys. And he might've been right, except that they didn't pay any attention to us. So we kept doing what they were, they were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared about Walmart that they ignored us.

• 10:21David Senra?

  This is one of the most surprising things. I want to go back to the venture capitalists. I'm going to handle the venture capitalists first and I want to go to Walmart because we talked about this when we had dinner. But in the book, that was one of the most shocking things where like actually Walmart played a huge role in our success. And I didn't even put it together before that. You call venture capitalists hitchhikers with credit cards.

• 10:40David Senra?

  In the book, you do not hide your disdain for them in general. Can you explain why, like you call them hitchhikers with credit cards? And like recount some of the experiences that you had with them in the early days?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  I mean, first of all, I'm glad we got venture capital money. They, I don't know if we could have grown without it. We didn't give very much, but it was enough to get us into Northern California. And then, and then after that, we, we, four years after we got the money from them, we were public. So they, they were important for us to get to where we got to. And once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer, and they got out of the car. And I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. The VCs are playing a different kind of game. The game VCs are playing is, is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth. And when they hit, when you get an Apple, or you get a Nvidia, or an Intuitive Surgical,

• 11:37Speaker 00

  or you get one of these companies that just compounds and compounds and compounds, you can get 100x your venture capital money. And that's what they're looking for. And so what ends up happening is they oftentimes take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly, because they're trying to get that exponential payoff. Remember, they've usually got these funds where the money is only going to be in that, you know, seven years, they've got to start paying it back. So the entrepreneurs, they're not evergreen funds where you can keep the money in, you know, for decades. They're pressured the entrepreneur to try to scale rapidly. And that works for some businesses, and those are happy endings. But a lot of times, you take a perfectly good business, that, that's not going to be,

• 12:20Speaker 00

  you know, a multi-billion dollar business that's going to change the world, but it's still a good business, and they wreck it. But they can afford a lot of failures because of the, blockbusters make so much money. And so it's, it's, it's like a batting average. They, they don't have to hit 1,000, they just need to hit good enough, and the blockbusters are home runs, and so they make a lot of money on that. So I'm often telling entrepreneurs that be careful with the VCs, because the first thing they're thinking is they want to scale your business, and they're going to tell you, don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round of financing at a higher level, and a higher level, and a higher level. But what often happens down that road is that the business doesn't scale as well as

• 13:04Speaker 00

  they want it to, and then you get the round where it's kind of a cram-down round, where it's a down round, and the, the...

• 13:14Speaker 00

  The entrepreneurs shares diluted way down in those down rounds. Or they get rid of the entrepreneur and bring professional management in and they throw them out on the side of the road. I always tell the young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you. I think for most entrepreneurs, you really want to build a business and you probably want to be here a decade now or 15 or 20 years from now, still growing your business. And if that's the case, you have to be very careful about the VCs because that's not what they want. They have seven years. They want 100x return if they can get it. And they're prepared to crash your business prematurely if that's what it takes. So be careful. That's my main thing I tell them.

• 13:59David Senra?

  How do the younger entrepreneurs that you're advising usually respond to that advice?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Well, for one thing, most of them don't care because I think you're a builder. Michael Dell's, a lot of these entrepreneurs you're talking about, these iconic entrepreneurs, they're builder entrepreneurs. But that's not the most common entrepreneur. Those are the ones you get the biographies about. But the most common entrepreneur is a serial entrepreneur. They just start businesses and they do them for five years and flip them. They're like somebody remodeling a house and then flipping it. And so in these cases, they're really creative. They're good at germinating things. They don't want to operate them. They don't want to really build them over the long run. And so they're okay with that, trying to scale it because they're not going to be around anyway. They want a rich exit. That's more common than you realize.

• 14:46David Senra?

  I think I now am realizing that and I have for several years. Actually, it's funny. I just thought about this story this morning and I think this is actually a really important point that I remember a few years ago, having dinner with a founder. And the weird thing is I had never met him. He was a fan of the podcast. And, but I'm like, I don't know if this guy's actually listening to the podcast because he wanted to talk about like the watch he has and the car he's driving. And I found out he was selling a ton of like secondary before his company was successful at all. And it just came out yesterday, the day before, that this company that had a $2 billion valuation in like 2022 or 2021, whenever I was having dinner with him. Last year, they did seven million in revenue.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 15:27David Senra?

  And they had forty seven million dollars of expenses. And I'm like, oh, you're just this guy, this, that sign. I was like, I don't give a shit about the car you have or the watch you have. I care about what you build, not consume. You should be proud of what you have built, not that you bought, you have money to buy somebody else's product. Like, that doesn't impress me. And I, obviously, I left the dinner, never saw him again. And I've kind of forgot about him until yesterday. I'm like, oh, this, I spent, and I was like, you idiot, David. You have like, one of the benefits of reading a book like yours or any of these biographies, like, you get to the end of the story and you just, you're reminded that, you know, our life, you come to the end of the book, our life, we have limited time here. And you should be ruthless with how you're spending your time.

• 16:08David Senra?

  And I just gave two hours to this guy that was not even a B player. He's F. You've done nothing, you fucking joker. Like, this is useless for me to spend any time with you. And this is why people take him a little crazy, where I spend almost all my time with people that have, I said in the episode, people like you, where Michael Dell, Todd Graves, I'm obsessed with people that do things for a long time because time is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea, no predictive ability, that this entrepreneur that started a company today is going to be successful. We're gonna see. And it's going to be up to them and the decisions that they make. And so I am kind of drawn to these, like, more missionary founders because you just make better, longer-term decisions.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  So, I'm not sure he, he was a typical serial entrepreneur because a lot of serial entrepreneurs that I know, I know a bunch of them, and they do care about their businesses. And for them, it's more, it's more, they have, they have a certain skill set of creating businesses and then getting them to a certain level. And they're, there's not primarily about the money. For them, the fun part is creating the business. And then as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy. They're, they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just, they're not wired to fit within that kind of corporate structure that they're creating and all businesses eventually evolved to, or almost all businesses eventually evolved to if they get any scale. They just don't like that, so they start over again.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  But I think those people are very interesting people. I think many serial entrepreneurs are not simply shallow people doing it just for the money. I have some good, close friends who've made a lot of money creating different businesses that, but only, like one of my good friends in Austin, a guy named Brett Hurt, he was the, he, he co-founded three public companies. His most famous one was Bizarre Voice, which does, did all the, if you do a review on an online business, you're probably using Bizarre Voice technology. And Brett is just, he says, "Well, I just love creating businesses and, and, but after, after I've done it for, I don't know, five or six years, I just get bored with it and I want to create something new."

• 18:15David Senra?

  Yeah, I don't have any problem with that. Like, I mean, the whole point of being an entrepreneur is you get to decide what you work on, who's around you, like that's one of the biggest choices.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Brett would never be bragging about any of his cars he drives or, you know, his wealth. It was just not, he just wouldn't do that.

• 18:29David Senra?

  Before having this conversation with John Mackey, I got to spend seven hours with him over two days. And it was during one of our conversations that John Mackey told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about Founders Podcast. He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met and he told me that if Founders Podcast existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company. That since the podcasts and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put a much higher priority on it, especially during good times. During boom times, it is very natural for a company and for human nature to not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.

• 19:13David Senra?

  Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost of goods Were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last two years. They all listened to the podcast and they've picked up on the fact that the main theme is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy-to-use corporate cards

• 19:58David Senra?

  for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. In this episode you're currently listening to, there's a shocking idea that John Mackey told me about, and it has to do with the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods' success. And it has to do with how impossible it was for other people to compete with Sam Walton and Walmart. In his autobiography, Sam Walton wrote this, "Our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your spend and optimize all of your financial operations, all on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make sure you go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time and money.

• 20:43David Senra?

  That is ramp.com. Let's go back to the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods' success, which is a very interesting part of your book.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Well, it was sort of, if I was using a metaphor, it's kind of like, we were using a football metaphor. It's kind of like Walmart was such a massive force. They created everybody, all the supermarkets. Remember, Walmart started out, they didn't sell food. They were, you know, Sam Walton, you read his book probably 10 times. And Sam, you know, he started out in the five-and-dime store, and that was kind of his initial model. I remember he had this big idea to do the bigger general merchandise store, and he couldn't sell it to where...

• 21:26David Senra?

  To Ben Franklin.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  To Ben Franklin. So he just went out and did it on his own. And it was only later, after Walmart was very successful growing, and they were competing with Gibson's and companies like that, Kmart, that they started thinking about food. But when they put groceries in, it so disrupted the conventional supermarket industry that all they wanted to do was...

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Figure out how to compete with Walmart.

• 21:53David Senra?

  So the existing grocery stores saw the competition from Walmart and they made the drastic mistake of trying to compete on price.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:00David Senra?

  With the low-cost provider.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Correct. And so they tried to cut their costs. They, and they spent less money in building out their boxes. They looked more like warehouses. They were more sterile. They went with cheap lighting. Everything, you know, everything to cut their capital investments down. Then they cut their labor to the bone. They had, a lot of them had unions, so they had to, but, so they cut, like, cut service back. And they still couldn't compete with Walmart. They were playing Walmart's game. And Whole Foods, we just were going this different direction. We'd like, well, we can't compete with Walmart on price. We're not even going to try to. We're, we're going to compete on quality. We're going to compete on service. We're going to have differentiated product mix. And so that's what we did. Is that one venture capital said, "You're a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies."

• 22:44Speaker 00

  That's true. It was true at one point. We were definitely fooded for a younger generation of more health-conscious people. But what had ended up happening is, is that as those supermarkets made their stores less attractive, we'll say to middle-class, upward-middle-class women who do most of food shopping, they wanted to come into a store that was pretty. It was beautiful. That was people that gave them good service. That took their groceries to their car. That was nice to them. That answered their questions. And they didn't get the products that Whole Foods sold, but what they got was our produce was beautiful and it tasted good. And these people were really nice to us, even though

• 23:26Speaker 00

  they had piercings and tattoos and they didn't look like, but they looked like their children, actually. So they were more sympathetic to it than you might think. And so we cracked, we kind of cracked that upper-middle-class next that bought our food for the quality and the service. And then, as that happened, we began to grow faster. Our comps went up. We were not just in our own little sort of hippie, hippieville any longer. And the supermarkets didn't pick it up. And again, until we got to, really didn't pick it up.

• 23:59David Senra?

  So they were ignoring you?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  They were. Ignoring us. It was like, using a football metaphor, coming back, Walmart was like this giant distraction and we were running downfield wide open for the touchdown pass. They were so obsessed with stopping Walmart. They'd allowed Whole Foods to to compete on a different different framework, a different different competitive strategy. The supermarkets only competed for the longest time. They only competed on price, really. They just, you know, they had nice stores with muzak in it and they never, but they were all trying to compete on price and Walmart was the killer app, so to speak, and they were trying to that's all they knew how to do is compete on that. So Whole Foods created a different business model. Once they figured it out,

• 24:42Speaker 00

  it became a lot tougher competition for us. They started copying us. They started making nicer stores, putting a bigger emphasis on their perishable foods like produce, competing with us on price instead of Walmart.

• 24:52David Senra?

  How many years did they give you the run of the field?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  That's the great question. I'd say we got the run of the field. We opened up, uh, the first Whole Foods was 1980, say, or 1978. And, uh, we didn't open up, it was 2004, we opened up Columbus Circle. So think about that. We had, you know, 20, 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us. And that allowed us to scale and compound. And they just dismissed us. They just thought, who cares about Whole Foods? They don't hurt us. We never hurt any one supermarket that much. In fact, we'd come into a new market and they'd be all, they'd compete initially, they'd try to lower prices, get some of our products. But then their sales didn't drop very much because Whole Foods would take a little bit from a lot of different groceries. We wouldn't take much from any particular one.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  So as a result, they just thought, they're not, we don't have any problem competing with Whole Foods. They just ignored us.

• 25:42David Senra?

  What was going on there? I don't understand how you would take a little bit from, you know, let's say five of the other grocery stores in the area.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Well, because we weren't, we were so differentiated, we'd take only a few of their customers. Not, not most of their customers didn't switch over, just some of them did, a few did. But a few switched over from a lot of different places. And in the early days, when we were the only natural food supermarket, maybe for 50 miles around, we had a lot of people that would drive in on the weekends and stock up and they'd buy, you know, $300, $400 worth of groceries.

• 26:10David Senra?

  How far were they driving to get to you?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, sometimes 100 miles. When we only had one store in a market area, people might come in. They wouldn't, I mean, it's not their everyday shop, right? They'd come in. They couldn't get this food anywhere else. They didn't have what Whole Foods was selling at a typical supermarkets in the day. In the day, we were so unique. I would say, David, the first 20 years we existed, when people would first walk into Whole Foods Market, you could see, I'd see it, I'd see it again and again and again. Their jaw would drop. It was like, I've never been in a store like this. It's this, this, I've never seen a store like this. Now, people don't have that feeling because it's more common and supermarkets have upped their game. But for a long time, at least 20 years, people, we just were blown away the first time they came into Whole Foods Market. They'd never seen a store like that.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  It was so different than any other supermarket they'd ever been in. So we were very well differentiated. We were in a niche and people did not compete with us in that niche. And so we sort of owned it. But as I said, retailers don't have patents. We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. We couldn't patent our marketing. We couldn't patent our service levels.

• 27:16David Senra?

  And so scale was your solution to that?

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Well, as we scaled, we could get, we could get better pricing as well.

• 27:22David Senra?

  That was one of the craziest stories in the book. That, again, I've been shopping at Whole Foods forever. I never, for some reason, I never thought about like the creation. I just figured, oh, he started the first Whole Foods and the second, and he's been doing it for 40 years, and that's how it happened. I had no idea that how much you grew by acquisition.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  The acquisitions were key because they created a platform, a geographical platform for us. To go into a new geography and create a team of people is very expensive. We did it a few times. We did it, we started in Texas. We did it in Northern California. We did it in Chicago. We did it in Northern California. But most of the other regions, like Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Florida, North Carolina, we got our platform by an acquisition. We bought out an existing company. It didn't mean we didn't get many stores. We might have gotten, you know, I think we got six stores in Boston and seven in LA and two in Florida. But that was still enough to create the platform. And from there, with that platform in place, with already support there and good intellectual capital, people that knew what they were doing, we were able to grow faster. But if you look at Whole, let's say Whole Foods has 550 stores right now. Probably of those that were stores that were acquired that still exist and weren't relocated, maybe 25.

• 28:45David Senra?

  So the acquisitions were happening earlier in the company history?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Yes, earlier, and they created a platform, a geographical platform, that allowed us to expand out from that platform, in a sense, open new stores in that area.

• 29:00David Senra?

  This is again, one of my favorite parts of the book, and I think, I want to spend some time here if you don't mind. Again, Rockefeller did this exact same thing. I mentioned it in the founders episode I did on you, where he had this thing called secret allies, that I think is one of my favorite ideas I've ever come across in any of these books. He's at the very beginning of the refining industry, you're at the very beginning of the natural foods, you know, industry. Doesn't really exist.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:21David Senra?

  You are by far the most ambitious, and I called you in the episode, like, oh, like, I should have known this. Anybody that's going to start in a new industry and come out at, built the category defining company in that industry, of course, they have this huge ambition. They're essentially a conqueror, is the way I think about you, even though I think a lot of people would not come away with that same conclusion because of how like, you know, the hippie nature that you started with. So you, what you do is very smart. You do exactly what Rockefeller did. He's like, you looked around, it's like, well, I'm doing this thing. Who else? Let me look around, not just in my area, who else is doing the same thing? And in some cases, you find out about these in like, trade journals, and then you don't just like, oh, that's interesting. No, you get on a plane and you go there and you start building a relationship.

• 30:05David Senra?

  You built a network, right? Was it an official network? Was this unofficial?

• 30:09Speaker 00

  No, we had a name for it, it was called the Natural Foods, Natural Foods Network.

• 30:12David Senra?

  Talk about this, this is- Phenomenal.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  In some ways, the natural foods industry, natural organic foods industry, came out of the health food industry. The health food industry started earlier, but it's mostly selling, it's mostly what we call pill shops. They're mostly selling supplements. And some packaged, you know, whole grains and whole grain flours and things like that. But mostly, most of their sales came from supplements. And, but that's kind of where the industry grew out of. You know, think about Jack LaLanne. And he was back in the health food day. And he was a health food champion.

• 30:48David Senra?

  It's like seventies, what year?

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no. We're talking, the early health food industry was probably after World War II. And you didn't, until you, until the, until my generation kind of came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, you begin to see start, natural food stores start to pop up that were primarily food rather than supplements. And there came a point where we realized, we're not really health food stores in the old traditional sense. We're different, we're natural food stores. Then the next iteration was, what if we did a store that was a complete one-stop-shop for people living this lifestyle? So that we were a supermarket, a natural food supermarket. When, when Whole Foods started, there are only like three or four other natural food supermarkets in the United States.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  There was like Bread and Circus in Boston, there was Mrs. Gooch's in LA, there was Fraser Farms in San Diego. That's about it. I mean, there were some smaller stores, but they weren't, you gotta be at least 10,000 square feet to be a natural food supermarket, in my mind. And so we opened up, I heard about those in the natural foods merchandiser and went and studied them and thought, I remember it was pivotal, it's like, I could go and tell the investors, "Hey, I didn't invent this, there are other people doing it. It's working in LA, it's working in Boston, it's working in San Diego. Why wouldn't it work in Austin? It'll work in Austin, let's try it." Otherwise, I may not have been able to get the money if I didn't have at least a few

• 32:19Speaker 00

  prototypes that were already working. Went and studied them, became friends with them, and ultimately acquired all of them.

• 32:27David Senra?

  You jumped to where it was going.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  But there were, there were others that were opening up about the same time, like, like Alfalfa's in, in Boulder, Whole Food Company in New Orleans.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Unicorn Village in Miami, there were others that were forming about the same time. That was an idea whose time had come.

• 32:50David Senra?

  But what was the initial instinct? The initial instinct is, these people are doing what I'm doing, let me go build relationships with them. And then you realize, oh, there's a mismatch of ambition here and I can actually acquire them? Because they didn't want to expand.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  You're giving me too much credit there.

• 33:01David Senra?

  Okay, but Mrs. Gooch's, I remember that one. Because that was instrumental at the time. I think you guys were only selling like, you weren't selling like, there wasn't a butcher, there was some kind of, that you were doing like eight to $10,000 a week in sales.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  That was a safer way.

• 33:14David Senra?

  Okay, it's safer way, eight to $10,000 a week or something like that. They were doing like $100,000. And you're like, oh, that kind of opened your eyes that you could add the other product category, correct?

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Bingo.

• 33:22David Senra?

  Okay.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Mrs. Gooch's was a huge influence early on because it's like, wow, they're doing 10 times as much sales as we're doing. And their stores are a little bit bigger, but they're not that much bigger, but they're selling, they're selling fresh meat and they've got big produce departments and so it's like, that's what we need to do too. Can't do it at a safer way, it's too small, we need a bigger location. What ended up happening, I think of it this way, we were all missionaries in a way. We really believed naturally, we saw what was happening with the processed food industry, that it was basically poisoning people. People were eating this terrible food, eating junk food diets. And we thought we need to, so we were sort of like puritans in a way. We wanted to create a, this really natural, organic revolution that could change the world.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  That's what we, and other people that were our colleagues, they were missionaries too. They were doing it because they really believed in it. And so initially, we created this Natural Foods Network because we were, we were helping each other. We were, we would get together and we'd bring our financial statements and we'd trade them. We didn't see ourselves as competitors. We each had our own geographical niche. And by exchanging information and financial information, this was making us all better, better retailers. It was sort of like, it was a club. And then we, we used to do trips together too. We called it. We did some people that were in the industry, not just retailers, but we'd call it, we had a wild man's

• 34:46Speaker 00

  group. We did some adventures together in Alaska, in Yosemite.

• 34:51David Senra?

  Not work-related, this is just friendship?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:53David Senra?

  Building friendships?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Building relationships. And having adventures together.

• 34:57David Senra?

  You would also, wouldn't you guys also travel to other stores together? And do store visits as a group?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. But what we do is we'd come together in a city. There'd be a host company. Hosting, usually around a new store. We've opened up a new store, you gotta see it. And so, like, when we hosted in Houston. We opened up our first Natural Foods Supermarket in Houston in 1984. We hosted the Natural Foods Network meeting in Houston.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  That became one of the highest-volume stores in, in the natural foods world and within a couple of years.

• 35:26David Senra?

  Was this like a collective, or do you, you felt you were like, kind of the leader of this organization?

• 35:30Speaker 00

  The guy that organized the Natural Foods Network, and I credited him in the book, is a man named Peter Roy, who was a natural networker. And Peter, he started Whole Foods Company in New Orleans, which we bought out, acquired that in 1988. And then Peter came on and helped to start Northern California. He eventually became president of Whole Foods for five years, and he left us back in 1998.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  I do some detail on that in the book. And so, he was instrumental. He worked for us for 10 years. And Peter brought the network together. And he, he helped. One of the first acquisitions we did, after Peter was we, and it was key before we went public, we acquired Wellspring Growth in North Carolina. Lex Luger and Peter were like, best friends. So Peter said, John's a good guy. We're gonna take good care of the business, we're gonna grow it. You're gonna get a big paycheck. Because we needed to go public, because I didn't want the VCs to get control of the business.

• 36:33David Senra?

  You said they were trying to draw, grab the steering wheel sometimes?

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Well, we, the founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs own 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they, they had different agendas.

• 36:47David Senra?

  There's a great story in the book, because your dad, which we'll get to, plays a huge role in your life and in the company.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:53David Senra?

  And there's like, you guys had this like, knock-down, drag-out fight. And then he pulls you into a room, with the VCs after. He pulls you into a room, he's like, we need to get rid of these guys as soon as possible.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, he just said, "Want to take over the company? Let's get him out. Let's get him out of the car."

• 37:07David Senra?

  Let's get him out of the car.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  He used more choice language about it than that.

• 37:14David Senra?

  Let's go back to this network, though. So you guys are...

• 37:16Speaker 00

  So we're developing all these relationships with these guys. What ended up happening is I did have an ambition to grow the business. Most of them wanted to stay. And when I went to Northern California, that was the first rupture in the Natural Foods Network because we'd gone out of our state and Mrs. Gooch just felt like California was theirs. I said, "Guys, LA is yours. You're there, but nobody's in Northern California. That's 400 miles away." It's like, you know, you never said you even had any ambition there. And he said, "Well, we don't, but we didn't think, you know, we'd get there eventually, and now you've gone there." So that kind of was beginning to break up the Natural Foods Network. We stopped sharing financial information.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Whole Foods sort of created some fear in some of these other entrepreneurs that we were maybe going to come into their territories. I kept saying, "No, guys, we're not going to compete with you head-on." No, I mean, I...

• 38:10David Senra?

  What do you mean, "You're not going to compete with them head-on"?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  There were markets that we stayed out of for years.

• 38:15David Senra?

  And then what happened?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Well, then we bought them. But you see, that's a different thing.

• 38:21David Senra?

  John, John, you have this... You are unbelievably humble, and I don't think that's an act, but you also are this ruthlessly competitive conqueror. Like, you admit to how competitive you are in the book.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Yes, however, but the point is, is that these were my friends, and I did not want to hurt my friends. So I never hurt Mrs. Gooch's. Didn't hurt them. I mean, maybe it lessened their upward potential someday if they'd gotten there in 10 years or if somebody else would've gotten there before them, though slow as they were going. But I didn't compete directly with anybody else's stores, ever. I didn't, I never did it. I didn't go to Portland for that reason because of Natures was there. I didn't go to Boulder until Alfalfa's and Wild Oats had sort of partnered up. And so the people that I developed those relationships with, we could pick where we went. Now, they were scared we were going to come, but...

• 39:17David Senra?

  Why would they be scared of you? What were they seeing in you?

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Well, Whole Foods got out ahead. We raised the VC money. And once we went public in 92, that was a big event because now we had this currency. And we could, the entrepreneurs could cash out and make millions and millions of dollars.

• 39:33David Senra?

  The entrepreneurs, you mean the VCs could cash out? Okay.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  No, I'm talking about.

• 39:36David Senra?

  Oh, the quiet, the people who are quiet.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  The network entrepreneurs. And they all did. What ended up happening is, is they, they had no, how could they get liquidity? I mean, the reality for most businesses is they're never going to be big enough. They either have to sell, to get liquidity, they have to sell the business. Because most of them can't go public. And how else can you get liquidity? You're going to either have an IPO, you're going to have a sale. So, most of them saw the writing on the wall. Whole Foods was expanding and they should, they should, you know, they should cash out. Most of them came to us and said, would you be interested in buying us? They, like, once we bought Wellspring, and then particularly once we bought Bread and Circus. And that was, you know, what we paid was public, and they thought, my God.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  We ended up paying, I think, Anthony, well, we paid him 28 million, but he ended up getting 30 million because he had, there was a lag period between before we could cash the stock out for him. And it was worth more after we did it, when we did our secondary offering. And so, they were like, wow, I didn't realize my business was worth this much money. And so, they came to us. A guy, Terry Dalton, in Florida, said, buy me. Why don't you come to Florida? We're great. And so, we did buy him. And so, that's kind of how it happened. They trusted me. They knew we were going to take care of their business, too. We weren't going to, you know, we were going to love their business and make it better, actually. Most of them saw what Whole Foods was doing and they admired us.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  They envied us partly, but they also admired us. And they knew if they sold out, that we were going to take care of their team members and that we were going to maintain our standards of, we weren't going to turn it into a regular supermarket. And that they felt good about that. Win, win, win.

• 41:22David Senra?

  I want to go back to your competitive drive, because I do want to talk about that. Because I think it surprised a lot of people. My question, though, I want to know from your perspective, in like, your mind, okay? Because I do the exact same thing now, where I go around. And podcasting's not, it's like, very positive song. There's no, like, there's really no competition. It's like, a lot more collaborative. But I am very curious, and I run the same idea that you did, and the same idea that Rockefeller does. It's like, I will fly across the country. Just to have like lunch or dinner with another podcast or be like, I want to download of your thoughts on how you think about your business and like what you're doing. What did you notice as you're building this network and you're meeting all these other people in all these different regions, did you think you were different from them?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Sure, I mean, but one of the things I liked about your, I just listened to on the drive here with your Michael Dell, which was impressed. I know Michael, of course, we both live in Austin. For a long time, we were the two big entrepreneurs in Austin before it became kind of an entrepreneurial hub in the last decade or so. And so I followed his career closely and I know him and he's a really good guy. Michael talked a lot about continuous learning. Remember how he talked about, you asked him, I said, well, you had to reinvent yourself like three or four times. He said, no, more like seven or eight times. Yes, because every time there was a new revolution, he had to adapt his business, right? So I continued to learn.

• 42:43David Senra?

  And you thought they were complacent?

• 42:46Speaker 00

  They were, they just, the world is constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. And if you sit still, Michael said it, he said it in his talk with you, if you stay the same, you get passed up, you're going to fail. You have to continue to evolve. New things emerge and you have to change with it. Whole Foods was changing rapidly, we're opening up bigger stores. Most of these guys didn't have the capital to try to match that. They didn't have the ambition to do it.

• 43:15David Senra?

  Let me back up. I'm not trying to say this to be, for somebody to be like an arrogant person like, oh, I'm different from all my competitors. No, it's like a really great way to spot opportunity. The fact that, you say this over and over again, is one of my favorite lines in Steve Jobs' biography, was that if you actually look at his, one of his main skill sets was that he was able to identify markets with second-rate products. Products that he thought he could just make better or think about in a different way, like he didn't invent. And you just go through all of them, from personal computing to the phone to just everything that he's done. I was like, damn, I didn't even... I didn't realize that until probably the 10th time I read that book too, or the 10th biography of his that I read. I see that a lot in what you were doing too.

• 43:58David Senra?

  So I'm not trying to be like you to say, oh, I was like better than these people. It's just like, no, I'm fundamentally looking at this industry different than they are. And I was wondering if that was obvious at the beginning when you started going around and building this network.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  I think about Steve. I mean, maybe he took products that were very early. I mean, for example, I mean, he didn't maybe invent the personal computer, but they weren't, they weren't very good.

• 44:21David Senra?

  No, he made it easier to use.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yes. And he, he transformed it with a much better, you know, Apple two in particular was a huge step. Or he didn't, he didn't do the MP3 player initially, but the iPod was massively better. No, he didn't do the phone. He, you could say he invented the smartphone though. Was there a smartphone?

• 44:39David Senra?

  No, but everybody was using cell phones and so.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Yes, but the smartphone is not just a phone. It is completely new category. You could always almost say nobody hardly invents anything because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.

• 44:53David Senra?

  But from your perspective.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:55David Senra?

  Obviously you, you felt different at that time or no?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  You know, it's hard to say, David, because I don't really know how other people are thinking. I only know how I'm thinking. I just see how they act.

• 45:07David Senra?

  Okay.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  And I just know, uh, most of these people are older than me, for one thing, and they had families. They had, they were more security oriented. They wanted the financial security. I just was always, always kind of all in. I was, so was I more ambitious? I was having a good, I really like growing the business. I think that's one thing entrepreneurs have in common. They like to grow their business. It's, you like to see, it's like, it's, it's Michael call it a puzzle he's figuring out. But also growing a business is immensely satisfying because all the stakeholders are benefiting. Your customers are benefiting, your employees are benefiting. They're getting new opportunities, new promotions.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  You're watching them flourish. One of the greatest, most satisfying things, particularly as Whole Foods was a public company before Amazon bought us for, with public for 25 years, independent. So many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives. We gave stock options to everybody that worked there. And so, so I remember going to an annual gathering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people and I got this, people got, they did standing ovation for me because they were telling me, we bought a house. I didn't think we'd ever be able to buy a house. My kids, they can go to college now. I can retire. This is so great. I never thought, and these

• 46:32Speaker 00

  are grocery people, right? They're just, you know, people that work meat cutters and just ordinary team members who never thought they would really have any prosperity in the world. That is so deeply satisfying. That's one of the things I liked about the Todd Graves talk, by the way, was he was so much into his employees flourishing. That is a tremendously good feeling.

• 46:50David Senra?

  This is one of the reasons, like, I've resisted for years, very close friends of mine were like, you should, you know, all this history, you have this stuff in your head from, you know, the history of entrepreneurship, maybe better than, maybe better than anybody else in the world. You need to start recording some of the conversations you're already having. And I was very resistant to that idea until I realized the gap in the market was like, a lot of business and tech press, and I don't consider myself a journalist, I'm sure as hell not a journalist, I'm an enthusiast. I'm obsessed with this stuff. Look what the books look like when I'm done with them. Where's the camera? Like, this, what does that look like? That is, looks like obsession.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Looks like you need a new book.

• 47:25David Senra?

  That's obsession. And what I realized, like, most of the business and tech press hate business and tech. And I think a lot of this has to do with, you know.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Well, they're not actually, they're just journalists. That's where they got channeled into.

• 47:36David Senra?

  And so, the opening was exactly, I said, well, I think, you know, as a son of a Cuban immigrant, like, I think capitalism is awesome. You have this great thing where you said capitalism was the greatest thing that humans have ever invented, which means you've bonded over. And I'm like, no, I'm gonna, I want to start hosting conversations to celebrate these kind of people, where you had this idea as this shirtless hitchhiking hippie that I want. I want to start my own little natural food store. And I'm going to continuously learn. I'm going to grow it. And as I grow it, I'm creating products that people love, which I'll get to in one second. And then I'm creating wealth for myself and others. For normal people to work at Whole Foods and be able to send their kids to college as a result of the wealth that the company is able to create. To buy a house. These are things that should be celebrated, not denigrated.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  And they're not sane because we live in a zero-sum world. We don't. We live in a win-win-win world. But people don't realize it. People, think about the history of humanity, David. For tens of thousands of years, there was really no progress in the world. It's been first the Enlightenment, science, and then the birth of capitalism. That's lifted humanity, particularly capitalism, that's lifted humanity out of the dirt. People have no reference points. 250 years ago, 94% of everyone alive, 94% lived on less than $2 a day. 94%. And that's in today's dollars. 88% of the people alive were illiterate. 88%. The average lifespan was 30.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  So many women died in childbirth. There was no modern dentistry. There was no antibiotics, no vaccines. It was horrible. People do not understand where we came from. And capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero-sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost. And the biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think on a zero-sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for

• 49:46Speaker 00

  those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers. They're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing. Their investors are seeing their capital go up that can be reinvested and compounded. We're seeing governments, where do all the...

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Or to all philanthropy ultimately comes from business. Where's, that's where the profits are.

• 50:09David Senra?

  Where's the money come from?

• 50:09Speaker 00

  And where does all the taxes come from? And ultimately comes from business as well. Whether you're taxing your, the employees who are, who are flourishing. This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. And then the entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, he's, he's created, he and people like Rockefeller, their, their lambasted is the villains, when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever lived in terms of creating value and helping people.

• 50:43David Senra?

  All of the founders and extreme leaders that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output. And that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before. They were a sponsor of this podcast. And when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest. As a member of Function, you get access to test over a hundred plus biomarkers, from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation and stress.

• 51:26David Senra?

  Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results, along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy to understand picture of your overall health. Once you try Function, you will immediately understand why it's the fastest growing health platform in the country. You can now join Function for just $365 a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com. Forward slash Senra and use code Senra 25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com forward slash Senra. You just mentioned Bezos and he's got a phenomenal idea.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  One of my heroes.

• 52:08David Senra?

  One of my heroes. I just got to spend time with him, one on one. It was incredible. He's amazing. One of my favorite ideas that he has is the fact that he's like, the idea that we have like a Forbes 400 and we have like a list of like, these are the richest people. He's like, this is, he's like, there's a better idea. Why don't we have a list for how much wealth that these people have created for others? And I think he used the example of like, you know, I don't remember what the market cap of Amazon is. It might be $2 trillion today, whatever it is. He's like, out of that $2 trillion, you know, I might own 150 billion of that.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  If you see Jeff again, when you see Jeff again, you should say, hey Jeff, I thought about your idea. Why don't we create a Bezos 1000? And you, there's an organization with AI in particular, that can be calculated.

• 52:53David Senra?

  Yeah, it's a good point. Why, why we shouldn't wait around?

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Why don't we do that? That would be so great for people, if people could begin to see how much the multiplicity of value that comes out of those entrepreneurs and how it compounds over time. It's so enormous. And the intellectuals do not see it. The average person doesn't see it. They're still stuck in, I think it's a zero sum game, that somebody's rich, somebody else is poor. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poor. That is not true. In fact, new book for you to read, it just came out. One of my good friends, Alex, Alexander Green has written a book called The American Dream. And he shows in that book how the American dream is alive and well, and it's never been better. It's, in fact, the dream is not only not dead, it's much better than it's ever

• 53:40Speaker 00

  been before. Only the intellectuals and the media cannot see it. They refuse to see it. Instead, they focus on all the things that aren't perfect yet in the society, and they're doom and gloomers. They think it's all going downhill. So that's a book you might want to take a look at.

• 53:55David Senra?

  I'll definitely check it out. I have a recommendation for you. After this, listen to the episode I just did with James Dyson, because I kept thinking about.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  You know, I'm gonna listen, because in the, in the episode I was just listening to on the drive, you said, "That's your favorite all-time autobiography."

• 54:09David Senra?

  Number one.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I thought, "Okay, that's the next one I'm gonna listen to."

• 54:12David Senra?

  It's, I, I told him when I saw him too, because it's out of print, and they own the rights, and I go, "Please, just like, not even for money, you don't need more money, just, this book is so important to get in entrepreneurs' hands because of the struggle," which is, I think, what most people identify with. But the reason I brought him up is because one of the things I love about him, and what I'm trying to apply, you know, to every single thing that I work on, is like, he demands differentiation. He will not. If somebody else has already made the product, he wants to be like, "Oh, I can do that, you know, a little better." He's like, "I have to have, I have to invent a completely different spin on it." And the reason I think differentiation is really important, because there's two things where you kind of knew at the very beginning that you were on to something very powerful. You just told, an example, if somebody's driving an hour or two hours to shop at your

• 54:53David Senra?

  store, that should tell you something. The other thing, you have, you mentioned how, you know, you reinvested in growth, and as you reinvest in growth, obviously, sometimes, you know, you, you're gonna lose some money for a little bit. But the first store was like profitable for, like, 2:00 PM of the first day, and then like a year later, there's like a hundred-year flood in Austin.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Nine months later.

• 55:15David Senra?

  Yeah, nine months later, a hundred-year flood, flood in Austin, okay, eight feet of water. When there's a flood, it's not just water, it's, the stuff from the sewers comes up, so it goes, it floods your store, and you have shit water.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:28David Senra?

  Everywhere. And then, the next day, or the days after, whatever, you guys are mopping up and taking, and trying to clean up the store.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  And getting tennis shots.

• 55:35David Senra?

  And, and getting tennis shots. And then, you go into this aisle, and you're like, "I thought I knew everybody that worked here. Who's this person?" You go over, "Hey, I'm John. I'm sorry, I guess I didn't know who you were." And he's like, "Oh, I don't work here, but I'm such a huge fan of what you're doing. I shop here several times a week. I had a day off. It's very important to me that you guys get through this, so I wanted to help in any possible way." No one does that if your product is not, one, valuable to them and differentiated.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  Right. That was, I didn't have the language, but that's when I began to discover stakeholders, the people that care about your business. In that case, he was a customer and a neighbor, and he loved Whole Foods, it made a big difference in his life. I think you will find that most brands that are really popular...

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults. They were cults, cults, meaning they had a following. Because I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist enthusiasts of their users, their customers. Apple's a great example of that, right? I mean, people would line up to get that next iPhone, you know, camp out to get the next iPhone, next iteration of iPhone in the day. Tesla, I mean, I, before, I owned a Tesla and I remember my friends talking, you gotta drive this car, you just, if you drive this car, you want to buy this car. And I said, I don't want a Tesla and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's pretentious, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, soon as one of them finally talking to drive in, I'm bought it from its day, right?

• 57:08Speaker 00

  So, because, and I became a Tesla fan, super fan, right? So, I do think that happened with Whole Foods. People loved our stores, particularly in the early days when we were so unique, so differentiated. And I remember those people would drive in, a lot of times they would tell me, why, I said, why are you coming in? He says, oh, I want to make sure my little boy never doesn't eat this poisonous food. They're just going to eat healthy food. My child's going to be nourished. I'm going to make sure my children grow up really healthy. And it was oftentimes those parents that were doing it for the next generation, so to speak. So, I do think Whole Foods was benefited by that type of cult-like following.

• 57:49David Senra?

  But the evangelism that you see present in customers, I would say that is a byproduct of the fact that those cult brands, which I completely agree with you, are started by an evangelist. You use that word multiple times in the book. Steve Jobs, obviously an evangelist for Apple, Elon, one of the greatest evangelists that we've ever seen. You knew that you had that very special skill of evangelizing. The way I think about this is like, passion is infectious.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  I didn't know I had it until it worked. I mean, I discovered it.

• 58:16David Senra?

  At what age did you discover it? Is it right at the beginning when you were starting this, your twenties?

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, even raising money the first time. I mean, think, think about this for a second. I'm out raising money, even with my friends and family, I'm raising money. I have six months of experience working in a natural food store. I have absolutely no business background. I'd worked jobs and stuff, but I'd never really been a management. I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I didn't know much about business. And these people were willing to trust their money to this young kid and his girlfriend, simply on my enthusiasm, really. At the end of the day, I was so excited, I more or less said, I know this is going to work. Trust me. And they did, and it did work.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  I think Jobs called it the reality, or somebody said about Steve, he had a reality distortion field.

• 59:09David Senra?

  Yes.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  I think I identified with that. I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs have a reality distortion field. They're able to get people to suspend their normal skepticism. And for a moment, they let them into their vision and they catch a little bit. Maybe they don't get the vision, but they see the passion. I think you've talked about how passion is infectious. I think entrepreneurs are generally passionate and they sell others on their dream. I would say that, I think I said in the book, that entrepreneurs are a little bit like panhandlers out there begging for money. But what they're doing is, they're selling dreams. They're selling dreams to people.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  And they make the dreams come alive. And people in the reality distortion field, they catch a glimpse of what's possible and then they want to get into it.

• 1:00:04David Senra?

  Was there anything you were working on before Whole Foods? What other jobs did you have?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  I make this joke, if I did a resume, it would say, busboy, cargo restaurant, dishwasher at some other restaurant, voice camp counselor, assistant manager at The Good Food Store, CEO of Whole Foods Market.

• 1:00:27David Senra?

  Were you passionate in the assistant manager of the Good Foods? Well, the what?

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Good Food.

• 1:00:32David Senra?

  Good Food Store?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, that's that's when I remember I loved working at that store. I only worked there six months and I loved it, though. It was like I'd never worked in a retail store before. I liked that because A, I liked the customers. I talked to the customers and they were similar lifestyle that I had. They were they were like me, counterculture types. The people I was working with, I liked them as well. We shared it. We were taking care of the customers. It was fun. I liked it. And I remember coming home, back to the co-op, back to Prana House. And I I had thought that day I could. I remember the day while I was working, I was looking around, loving it. And I said, I could do this. I could do this the rest of my life.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  I could open up my own store. It'd be fun. And I went back, the co-op, full of this enthusiasm. I guess Renee is the first person I sold on it because I was so excited about it. And I said, Renee, what if we do our own store? And she looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hands and said, Oh, Mac, oh, man, I think that'd be really cool. Let's do it. And I would say that if Renee had pooh-poohed the idea, maybe that would have been it. But she got excited. So I my spark led her spark and together we created Safer Way. And that led to Whole Foods Market. So that entrepreneurial enthusiasm is very important. And also entrepreneurs have to be very resilient.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  This is a quality that's underestimated because they do fail a lot. You do make a lot of mistakes. I mean, Safer Way, I could have quit if I wasn't resilient. I remember going back in Dublin down saying, we need to do this. We're we're, as I read all these books, I realized, my God, we opened this safe, small store in this residential neighborhood and it's an old house. It's cute. This terrible place to have a store. There's no cars go by here. This is terrible. We got to relocate it. And that was a terrible mistake. And fortunately, I still had enough enthusiasm that I was able to sell people on, this big store is going to work. So we raised more capital and that did work. So I think you have to be able to overcome your setbacks. And the flood could have knocked us out as well.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  There's so many times that failure is always accompanying you. And entrepreneurs in some ways are constantly learning from their near death experiences and then determined to learn and get better.

• 1:02:56David Senra?

  You're gonna like the Dyson episode because that's his whole point. It's like, success isn't that interesting. Like, failure is like where all the learning actually happens and...

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Success is interesting. I think he's exaggerating there. But you learn more. You do learn from success as well, but you learn more from failure.

• 1:03:10David Senra?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Because you have to, learn or die. I was always working, like most entrepreneurs, but I was always taking odd jobs and stuff. I worked for Astroworld for a while, even before I legally worked. My parents did something that was pretty smart. I always tell people they should do this with their kids. They didn't give us an allowance. They assigned prices for things they wanted to get done. For dishes washed, lawns mowed, leaves raked. They assigned a price for all those things. And if you wanted any money, you go did the jobs. So I, at a very early age, you know, talking 10 years old, I thought, well, I'd like to have money so I could go buy comic books. And then later, as I got older, so I could buy records. Or I can save up and buy a car. And so I eagerly worked.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  And then as soon as I could legally work, I went and took jobs. Because I wanted to earn money. Because to me, money meant freedom. I could do what I wanted to do with that money.

• 1:04:04David Senra?

  I feel the exact same way. It's exactly what, it's like, I so deeply desired control over my life. And I was actually just talking to a really close friend about this yesterday, that I saw just relentless work ethic. And I started working when I was 15. I remember my dad coming into my room and telling me, because at the time, I really wanted a car. And when I turned 16, and he's just like, "You don't have to pay rent." But I don't have any money for a car. So whatever, like you have to find a job. And essentially like you're on your own. And so since I was 15, like I never got a dollar from my family. And then they kicked me out at 18, which is a whole other thing.

• 1:04:47David Senra?

  But I felt, I think there's a lot of people like this.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Most entrepreneurs are like this.

• 1:04:53David Senra?

  The connection is just like some kind of, you know, default unhappiness with your life that realize that you're in charge of it. And I'm going to channel this intense work ethic into having achieved success. And mainly the success is not because it's monetary. It gives me control over what I'm doing. Now, the next stage of that, and I think the ideal stage is like you're actually working on something you're passionate about, you believe in. The reason I asked you what other jobs you had, because there's multiple times when I'm reading this book, I thought of Phil Knight's book Shoe Dog, which is to me, one of the greatest.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  This, this book, that was my benchmark, Shoe Dog.

• 1:05:27David Senra?

  It's one of the greatest entrepreneur autobiographies ever. I love that it's in chronological order. I love the fact that every chapter is the year that's taking place. It's just remarkable, I'm about to reread it again and make another episode of Founders. But the reason I, there's two things that you say in this book that I think are important for the next generation of entrepreneurs to understand. One, he realized that he's, he's another evangelist, right? But he didn't have the evangel until he found something he was passionate about. He like sold mutual funds, he sold like encyclopedias. And he failed left and right. And then he's like, but I'm obsessed with running, when running, just like you. Running was like something weirdos did. You don't just go out for a run at the time he's doing that. Just like it's, the funny part in one of your books, it's, you're, you're trying to get the store. It's the, I think it's the first store out of Austin.

• 1:06:12David Senra?

  So maybe it's like in Houston or something.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13David Senra?

  And you meet with the landlord and the landlord's like, listen here hippie guy. He's like, there's not enough store, there's not enough other hippies that are going to eat your hippie food. And you're like, we're not opening, this is not hippie food. And then you explain to him what it is, he goes, this is hippie food. But he, he bought into your enthusiasm.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:28David Senra?

  And he said that you reminded him. Of like a younger you.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Slight correction on the narrative. You got the essence of it right, but that was actually our very first Whole Foods Market.

• 1:06:35David Senra?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  When we were jumping up from Safer Way because Ben Powell, he was a, he would have been in, he was a lawyer from Houston. He'd been in LBJ's administration and he owned the property. So I, I was, had to sell him. I mean, entrepreneurs have to sell people on things and, and he just thought this is a crazy idea. It's, it's, you're doing a hippie food store. How can that possibly work, son? I said, I said, it's gonna work. There, I just, it's gonna work. And, and he says, there are not enough hippies in the whole world to fill up the store. And I said something like, there's more than you think. And, and then I kept going on and he started laughing, started laughing at me. And he said, "Son, you so much remind me when I was young.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  You're so full of your enthusiasm and you're so sure you're gonna be successful." And, and he says, "Let's do your damn hippie store." You know, but one thing I can tell you, son, is life's gonna teach you a thing or two before it's through with you. He was great and he was very helpful.

• 1:07:40David Senra?

  I love these people, the people that are older, further down the path, and they reach back and they give you words of encouragement or they help you. The guy that helped you at the bank, they didn't even tell you after the flood, loaned you money and didn't, he didn't even tell you till years later, he went to bat for you. Which, that's a funny story because it happens in these books over and over again. I wanna tie, go back and close the loop on Phil Knight though, and I think it's important.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00David Senra?

  Is what he realized is belief is irresistible. And he's like, I couldn't sell the stuff because I didn't believe in the product. Now I'm selling Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of my car, long before Nike's even a thing, and I can't stay in stock. And he's living at his parents' house, you know, not in the situation that he wants to be in. He's like, what the hell is going on here? And that's when he realized, oh, belief, I believe in my product, belief is irresistible. The second thing that you said in the book, and I think you mentioned it, I don't remember if this is before we were talking or when we started recording, was entrepreneurs tend to remember the beginning, like the early years, and then maybe the later years, but there's huge, maybe like two decades in here.

• 1:08:42David Senra?

  And Phil Knight advised, because he's writing that book for the benefit of future entrepreneurs. He's like, man, there's so many times in the early days, we were talking about what we wanted Nike to be. We were having incredible conversations. We were such a close knit group and those conversations have a loss to history. I wish I either had a tape recorder or I wrote it down in a journal. So when I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, you need to write down what you're experiencing. You think it's such an intense feeling, you think you're gonna remember, you're gonna forget all of this? And you're doing an active service to, you know, for the future you for two, three, four decades down the line.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  You know, since I used Shoe Dog as a benchmark, one thing I did differently than filled it in his book. I did document, I kept track of time and you don't really know the time. Do you know almost all of Shoe Dog takes place in like a five year period?

• 1:09:33David Senra?

  It's, I think it's a little bit more than that. It ends at the, with the IPO.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, he got his early years, but he didn't, you know, the Nike became this phenomenon that changed the sports apparel business, changed marketing. It was huge benefit for athletes. There's a lot of things about Nike in the story that, that he doesn't go into that book. He should have written, in my opinion, he should have written a follow up book. Because I think so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred. One of the things I did in this book is I talked about how old I was at this time. And I, the book is, is written chronologically in a way and it goes, it spans, it spans a forty, forty four year period, actually.

• 1:10:18David Senra?

  I do that all the time, even if it's not stated, where I am in a book. I will go and be like, okay, well, we're in 1969 and this guy was, when was he born? And I'd write down on the page, okay, he's 24 and this is happening. Or I'll go and be like, hey, what was he doing when he was my age? How was he thinking?

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  I do the same thing. Absolutely. And I'm thinking, because I'm trying to understand an entrepreneur and, and so by saying, well, how was I thinking and feeling at that age? I can understand them a little bit better. I, I really like the idea of, you know, by the way, you said I was, you know, like Rockefeller. You, you did draw some analogies there, but there are so many major differences there. I mean, Rockefeller is the, and I still, and maybe Elon Musk and Steve Jobs can challenge him, but, but he's probably the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived. And, and I would argue he's probably done more, even though he's hated as this Robert Baron, he's probably done more good in the world than maybe anybody but some religious leader, Christ or something.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  But, um, he, it's, it's unfortunate that he goes down in history as one of the great villains, but the intellectuals have put him there and...

• 1:11:24David Senra?

  Not in the episodes I make about him.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  No, but, uh, the reality is Rockefeller was, uh, invented the modern corporation. Oil has, has fueled the entire rise of prosperity in the world. Um, and he's totally misunderstood. Was he perfect? No. But he's still the greatest philanthropist that ever lived.

• 1:11:42David Senra?

  So you, did you take issue with me comparing you to Rockefeller?

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  I was deeply flattered.

• 1:11:49David Senra?

  Okay. The way you started, I was like, wait a minute. Okay. I didn't know if you were, took offense. I was like, no. And when I say, when I compare people to other historical people, it's always like, this one thing they did is very similar to this act that you did. Because people are, you know, dynamic.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  One thing Rockefeller did that I never, uh, did, and it was a different era. He, he continued to vertically integrate, you know, uh, and, and he was trying to bring order to his industry because of the, the boom and busts of oil discoveries and, uh...

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  He was a much more disciplined thinker than I am in terms of thinking through the whole structure and the whole system and trying to control it. And I never tried to control my suppliers. I never, and he was a totally ruthless competitor in the sense that he would do things that today would be illegal, but they were legal at that time. People don't understand what he was doing was considered sharp business practices, but they weren't considered to be illegal in what he would do. You know, he threatened a lot of his competitors. You should sell out and you should take the stock because you're going to get a lot wealthier. But if they didn't sell out, then he basically undercut them in price and lose money until they were out.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  You can't do that today.

• 1:13:06David Senra?

  One of the best quotes I ever heard from him, he was trying to buy a competitor and the competitor says, "I'm not afraid of you." And he's like, "Well, if I cut off your hand, your body will suffer." That's a very crazy thing to say. But I think you nailed the fact that he was probably one of the greatest strategists.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:27David Senra?

  I had the thought, you know, I reread things over and over again. I know you have that same habit that you'll read a book and then you'll reread, either read the entire book again a few years later, but you also read your highlights from them. We talked about this at dinner when we had dinner.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Read wise, too.

• 1:13:39David Senra?

  Yeah, they're excellent. When I read, I think I was rereading Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters for the third time, which I think are very, I think I should read them almost every year because there's just, first of all, you can read them in a weekend and there are just so many insights per minute. And in my opinion, I think the two best strategists that I've ever come across in all the reading I've done has been Rockefeller and Bezos. They kind of describe what they want to do and then they go out and do it and it's very, very similar.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you have to put Musk in that category as well. People don't understand what a master strategist Elon is. And think about the way SpaceX has evolved in a way. He's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is in terms of thinking it through.

• 1:14:19David Senra?

  No, that's a good point. I mean, he has that document, I think, called Master Strategy that he wrote, you know, 15, 20 years ago, whenever it was, at the beginning of Tesla. It's like, "We're going to do this, then we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this." And you go back and it looks very similar to what actually occurred. I want to go back to your competitive drive though, because we touched on it, but I think there's like a little bit more there.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  Well, I'm a very competitive person. I always have been, I mean, from an early age. Competition, I think, helps me focus. One of the things I got, that I think in the Todd Graves that I just listened to recently, is he talked a lot about, people are always telling entrepreneurs not going to work. And Todd would use that as fuel. He'd say, "I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to show you." I still feel that way from time to time. People tell me the idea is not going to work, and it's like, "No, it is going to work, and I'll show you." And you climb this wall of skepticism.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  A lot of people, they get discouraged when people criticize them. It's like, you know, maybe they're right, maybe it's not going to work. The entrepreneur, I think, says, "No, you're wrong. It's going to work." And it causes them to focus even deeper. Part of it's an ego thing, to prove the other person is mistaken. And I remember when that guy told me that, you know, "You're never going to be able to compete with those guys. They're just a bunch of hippies. It's never going to work." And, you know, I make the joke and the look, it's like, the guy had just turned us down. Why is he telling us why he's not going to invest? And I say, "It's like getting turned down on a date, and then the girl tells you, 'Well, here's why I'm not going out with you.'"

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  It's like, hell, who else would be told on here, "I'm not going out with me?" In this case, though, I remember having a slow burn in me, which said, "You're wrong. You're wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong." So, a good entrepreneur uses that criticism, uses that skepticism, uses that wall of doubt that people are throwing at his or her as a fuel. It's like, "No, it's going to work. I'm going to prove it." They double down on their vision, you might say. And instead of, many people would quit. It's for the entrepreneur, "No, no." It just makes me more determined to succeed.

• 1:16:49David Senra?

  I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Mateo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends. So I go over and say, "Hi." When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, "Who was I talking to?" And I said, "That's Mateo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend

• 1:17:29David Senra?

  replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep." Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your

• 1:18:10David Senra?

  existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eightsleep.com/cenra and use the code CENRA to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eightsleep.com/cenra.

• 1:18:45David Senra?

  That exact same story is in Michael Dell's autobiography. I went and picked it up off the shelf the other day, and I wanted to... because he said something that I think is very fascinating that I reference in conversation. Conversations and other episodes that I make where, you know, he's like, I'm 19 years old. I have a thousand dollars. I'm in a dorm room at University of Texas and I'm going to compete with the largest company in the world.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  You expressed some skepticism in your interview with him about.

• 1:19:07David Senra?

  I never doubt, I never doubt Michael Dell. He's one of my heroes and I get to spend a lot of time with him, which I'm very, very thankful for. But on that page, he's like, you know, was I a little fool myself at 19? He's like, sure I was. And he's like, I think you have to be to, you know, do anything great. And you talk to him now. It's like, the guy's so impressive, but he's so low ego and he's just very calm.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 1:19:27David Senra?

  It really is like, just looks at things like a puzzle. And I think a lot of the work he does comes from a very positive and like healthy place. And that's why like, he is one of my heroes and somebody I'm trying to emulate.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Fire still burns in Michael, even though if you don't see it, it's still there.

• 1:19:39David Senra?

  Yeah, but it's a positive.

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41David Senra?

  I think the positive source, but later down, I reread that entire page and he's talking about this other guy at the time. That was older than him, that was living in his city, that was doing the exact same business. And it sounds very similar to when you viewed some of your friends and then eventually competitors and some of the people you actually acquired. Where Michael's like, yeah, but I have ideas about where I could take this, that this guy can't even contemplate. And he was not saying that in an arrogant way. He was just saying like, you don't have any limits. Did you listen to the Daniel Ek episode?

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:11David Senra?

  Okay, so Daniel, this is one of the most important things about that episode and about spending any time with him. You get around him and you realize he has no ceilings. He does, there's no self, I think a lot of people. It sounds like I want to, I want to go back to the, the people you acquired. This is one of my favorite, I'm doing this for selfish reasons. This is why I'm having these conversations because I had the opportunity to learn from you. One of the things that's so incredible is I think a lot of people, and I've done this myself. They put these like fake ceilings.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  They put self limiting beliefs in.

• 1:20:42David Senra?

  But it literally like, I can't go any further than here.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:20:46David Senra?

  And when you spend time with Daniel, he's just like, oh, like get that shit out of here. Like that doesn't exist. And he does that not in a direct way. He does that in a way of an example. That it's like, well, I remember one of the first times I talked to him. Spotify is obviously incredible. And I was like, but he's doing incredible, like. Investing in business incubation and I know that team very well. I spent a lot of time with them. And I was like, how the hell did you build this incredible business that was so difficult? And then now you have this other thing where like, he's more like a co-founder than investor, but it would.

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  You're talking about Necco?

• 1:21:19David Senra?

  Necco, Helsing, everything he's doing with Premium Material. And I was like, were you always interested in investing? And he goes, no, I didn't even think about it until 2018. And I go, how did you learn how to invest? He goes, I listened to Patrick's podcast and that's like the best. And then he's like, I would listen to what the guy says. I'm like, oh, let me try that idea. I don't like that idea. I would read the book he recommended and he just essentially consumed all this information. And then he's like, I like that. That fits me. That's not, that doesn't apply to me. I don't like this. And then created his cohesive philosophy. And then he actually applied it to a grand scale. And I'm like, oh, he's got no limits. This is one of the most valuable things that you could possibly, if you can instill something in yourself. It's just like, stop believing that you have a limit. You're at a plateau.

• 1:22:04David Senra?

  But you don't, just like Bruce Lee said, you don't stay at plateaus.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  I totally agree with that. Human creativity is fundamentally limitless. There is no limit to the mind, except what we self-impose on it. And once you realize that, see, most people self-censor themselves. They don't let these ideas come through because it's like, well, that's not possible. That's crazy. That's nuts. I think entrepreneur lets a little bit more through in terms of that flow from, that emerges up through their minds.

• 1:22:34David Senra?

  But not entrepreneurs, because we're seeing this in the story, in the book, where you have that. You have that slow burn, which I want to ask you a question about the slow burn in a minute. And then you're meeting other people in your industry and realizing that they're not like you.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  They just had different, just had different ambitions. That's all. They, they, I just had a, I just wanted to grow a bigger company. They wanted, they just didn't have that vision.

• 1:23:00David Senra?

  Do you think your father played? The role in your expansive ideas and your ambition? Or do you think that was completely like an inner drive?

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  I credit many, many good things to my father. I actually think he played a counter enforced on that. And my dad, for example, he was a depression kid in World War II.

• 1:23:22David Senra?

  He was 20 when Pearl Harbor happened.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the things that one of the mistakes that I made was after Whole Foods went public, my dad was he got me to sell stock in the IPO. This Todd Gray would hate this, stock in the IPO. And he urged me to continue to sell it off. He said, John, I mean, we don't know when the next depression. My dad said he'd have made a lot more money. He was always thinking there was going to be another great depression. So he was always trying to protect himself from that because it was such a it was such a traumatic experience for him as a child, watching, growing up in that depression with his with his family. They lived through it and it never it was the biggest thing that impacted him in his life. And so in some sense, that spread to me. So you might say that's more limited. I sold it because he advised me to do it and I trusted my dad.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  But in retrospect, that was a mistake. And I really believed in I should have compounded it and compounded it and compounded it. Still made I'm still really a wealthy guy, but I could have been a lot wealthier if I had just probably followed my own instincts instead of his advice in that regard.

• 1:24:25David Senra?

  You're right about that because I forgot in the book you ask him to step down from the board.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31David Senra?

  Because you have this expansive conquering nature, which you're going to use the word expansive. I'll use conquering nature. And he was kind of like pulling you back constantly and you guys were having a series of fights. Am I remember that correctly?

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  That's correct, but I think in that case, my dad, he was in he was already being impacted by the Alzheimer's that was diagnosed a couple of years later.

• 1:24:50David Senra?

  But you didn't know that it was unknown.

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  Do not know that I just didn't understand why he'd gotten so conservative. Because he'd been very supportive of my expansive mode. And at the time, I just thought, you know what? Now we're worth so much money and a lot of my father's wealth was created by Whole Foods. He had his own, he has his own business, but I think he made more money from Whole Foods than he did in his other business. I thought, he just doesn't want to lose what he has. He's in a different era in his, he can't rebuild. So for him, he wants to be more conservative. And I just said, he's getting super conservative. That's why I said, Dad, sell half your stock, cash it out, keep the other half, let me compound it, but let me go. We're going to grow this thing. It's going to be an incredible company. Just let me do it.

• 1:25:33David Senra?

  Do you remember how old you were?

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  Forty.

• 1:25:34David Senra?

  You were forty and he was, what, seventy?

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  My dad was seventy-two.

• 1:25:38David Senra?

  Seventy-two.

• 1:25:38Speaker 00

  Same as I am right now.

• 1:25:39David Senra?

  Okay. And so he'd been around for the ride?

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:25:43David Senra?

  For fifteen years up until that point?

• 1:25:44Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Yeah, fifteen years. That's right.

• 1:25:47David Senra?

  Fifteen years?

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:25:48David Senra?

  So that had to be one of the most difficult conversations you had in your life?

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  That was the most difficult conversation. The most difficult thing I ever did was firing my dad from that board. Took all the courage I had. I love my dad so much and it hurt him so badly. So hard to do. But it was also a pivotal event in my own evolution. Because that was when my mentorship was over. He still advised me, but from that point onward, I really, you know, I was on my own. I was not going to follow him any longer. Before then, I pretty much did whatever my dad suggested. I didn't buck him. I argued with him, but I often caved in because I had so much love and respect for him and his own. And that was a good thing. My dad made so many good decisions that helped Whole Foods. But at

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  that point, I was just basically, I'd grown up. I remember saying, Dad, forty years old, I'm going to make these decisions now. I'm not going to just do what you want to do. And that's why I want you to get off the board because I don't want us to be fighting. It's turning our relationship apart. I remember he said, "Son, you think forty is pretty old, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, forty is old." He said, "It's nothing. You think you know some things? You know a little bit more than you did when you were twenty-five and started the business, but frankly, son, you still don't..." He said, "You've barely got your nose under the tent. There's so much you don't know." And I said, "Well, that may be true, but I'm going to find out on my own. I'm not going to do what you tell me to do any longer, particularly when it comes to growth. We're going to grow this

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  business. And you should sell half your stock. You've got all the financial security you need." And watch what happens to the other half. And I always tell the, I tell this story in the book that a year later, he, the half that he'd sold was worth as much, could be double the stock price in a year. Had the half the stock that he owned was, was more valuable than it was prior to selling half of it. So he'd already, he'd already made it all back. So he did, he, and a few years later, even though the Alzheimer's started to grip him, my dad told me that I had made the right decision and that he was proud of me and we, you know, we were back on really good terms.

• 1:27:53David Senra?

  That's incredible. There is a very negative and has to be heartbreaking story in the book. Your mother's view of Whole Foods.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04David Senra?

  I don't know if you want to talk about this or not.

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, my mom, again, another depression child and I was named after her father, who was a doctor. And what my mother, growing up in Bastrop, Texas, kind of in a poor, you know, I guess almost white trash type of thing back in that rural, you know, little tiny town, very small town ways, Baptist community.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  My mother, the most important thing for her was she really wanted to be respectable. She wanted, she wanted her children to rise in society and be seen as respectable citizens. And my sister, the eldest sister, you know, she went on and got a master's in French liter, went to Wellesley, got a master's in French literature and a PhD in psychology and, you know, went on to teach. Here I am, scoring really high on IQ tests, you know, great aptitude, A's when I was interested in something, maybe not so good when I wasn't. And, you know, kept, I kept dropping out of college and I start this grocery store business. My mother could never get over the idea, really, that I was not respectable.

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  That she'd go to her bridge parties and talk to the other mothers and their sons were going on and their daughters were going on and becoming doctors and lawyers and they were, they were engineers.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  College teachers, professors, they were, they were, she saw them as respectable people in society. She thought a grocer was, you know, really a second-class citizen. And so her son, in her mind, "I wasn't an entrepreneur." She didn't even know what an entrepreneur meant, I don't think. "I wasn't a successful businessman. I was a grocer. And I had squandered, I didn't finish college. I'd squandered all the money and the love they'd invested in me." And she thought I was a failure. And I remember, and I tell the story in the book, the very last time I, I ever saw my mother in my life was back in 1987. She'd had a stroke a couple of years later, and she was basically partly paralyzed and bedridden.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  And I went to see her, and it turned out the last time I'd ever see her, because she died a couple of weeks after I saw her. And she, so I say, on her deathbed, she begged me, she said, "John, will you do this for me? Will you make this promise to me? I'm your mother. I've nurtured you, I've born you, I've given you so much. Please, please, please, please, promise me you will go back to school and get your degree and make something of your life. You have so much potential, you know? You scored so well on all these IQ tests and aptitude tests, and you're just nothing but a grocer." I said, "Mom, I'm not a grocer. I'm a businessman. I'm building this business. Whole Foods is going to be this great company."

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  She's, "John, it's just little grocery hippie stores, you know? Nobody's, you know, you're not doing, you're wasting your life." And I, and she said, "Please, promise me. Please, promise me. It's the only request I have. Please, promise me." Now, I look back and I, you know, I kind of wish I'd, I'd lied and just did a white lie to make my dying mother happy. But I was, you know, it's 1987, I guess now what I'm, I'm 34 years old. And I just, Mom, I'm never going back to school. I'm not gonna go back. I'm building Whole Foods. And it's gonna be this amazing company. It already is an amazing company. It's gonna be even amazing. I said, maybe I will get an honorary degree someday because I'm gonna make a lot of money

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  and I'm gonna, university's gonna give me an honorary PhD, which actually did happen. And, and she died a very disappointed person. And, you know, that, that her son, who she had so much hope in, had, had wasted his life. So she died. We were alienated when she died.

• 1:31:54David Senra?

  That was your last conversation you ever had with her?

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Her last conversation. She died a couple of weeks later. You know, the funny thing is, my mom has been, I, I think about my parents. My dad died in 2004. My mom died in 1987. And I still have conversations with them. I mean, I mean, in my mind. And, you know, I, I asked for forgiveness with them and I give them forgiveness. And what I wouldn't do to have, you know, I'd probably pay all my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents. That'd be so great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate all the things they did to me and how much I love them. And also, hey, Mom, I turned out okay. And so we'll call that a, a minor regret in my life that I couldn't make my mother happy on her deathbed.

• 1:32:41David Senra?

  Give me one minute. That's fucking...

• 1:32:46David Senra?

  That's heavy.

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  Should I take the energy down a little bit there?

• 1:32:49David Senra?

  No, don't apologize. That was absolutely incredible. I think it's very important.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  You know, I'll, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, somebody helped me see this. I was doing a podcast and they'd read the book and they had an interpretation of my mother that I'd never heard before, which was, you know, and I, and I realized they were right. I'd always thought that, you know, I was much closer to my father than I was to my mother, but...

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  My mother had grown up in this, again, this small Bastrop town. Here's the ironical thing. My mother was a total rebel. She rebelled against that, you know, she left that town. She went to Houston, went to Rice University, got a girl, went to school and got a degree. She was in a Baptist town. My, my mother, she started to smoke in rebellion against their, their, you know, she started to gamble. She started to drink. She started to dance. She was total rebel against a small town of Bastrop, Texas. And the guy that I was talking to about it said, you know, John, you probably got your rebel side not from your father, but from your mother. I'd never thought about it before.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  And I thought, you know what? Think, I think he's right. I'd never, I'd always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had it secretly inculcated in me and they didn't like it there. You know how we oftentimes project out onto other people, the things that, about ourselves that we don't like? My mother wanted to be respectable, partly because she had rebelled against all of her things that, that her parents had taught her and went her own path. And she'd inculcated that in me unconsciously. The other children were more obedient. I was this rebel. And I never credited her for it, but then I, then I had on my own little ceremony, I thanked your mom, you know, thanks for helping me become a rebel because it's really helped

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  me be successful in life. Thank you. I owe you so much for that.

• 1:34:47David Senra?

  The reason that just impacted me and the reason I want to talk to you about, because like when my mom died, I was around that same age and we were estranged. Like the saddest thing is she died like a, just horrific death. Metastatic breast cancer, spread everywhere. And the last two years of her life, like that's not life. That was not living. That was suffering. And what I'm like.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  That's my advice for you. I would recommend that you do, in your own way, if you haven't already done it, do some type of ceremony of forgiveness with your mother. Just where you actually ask for her forgiveness and you forgive her. And it's like, and tell her, just, "I love you so much, Mom. Thank you for everything you did for me. I wouldn't be the person I am today without you. You nurtured me in the womb. You went through labor and pain for me to be born. You wiped my butt. You breastfed me. You took care of me. You kept me alive. You nurtured me. You helped me get educated.

• 1:35:57Speaker 00

  I owe so much to you. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much. And I didn't tell you that the way I needed to tell you that while you were alive, so I'm telling you now. Please forgive me." And then forgive her. I've done that and I feel like I'm at peace about it.

• 1:36:13David Senra?

  That actually is a good, like, lead into, I think, one of the most important things that are in the book. And you also talked about this when we had dinner. You recommended MDMA therapy for me.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said, "No way I'm ever gonna do that."

• 1:36:26David Senra?

  Which I still haven't. Talk about the inner work that you did.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  But you know what? What I can recommend that you could do, and it'd be just as powerful, you don't take a drug, but do some serious breath work. Because I always tell my friends that particularly don't want to do any type of, like MDMA or psilocybin, don't want to do a psychedelic. You can have a transcendent experience just through breath work. You can, you can access deeper parts of your unconscious mind that you've repressed. And you can relive those experiences in a safer environment. Because what's safer than just doing deep breath? Do it with a guide. And, you know, you need to do at least an hour, an hour and a half, or two hours. And you have to do the deep breathing. But what happens? The breath activates parts of your more deeper self. It's mostly hidden from you.

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  And it lets it come into your consciousness in a way that you can see it and not be overwhelmed by it. It's a way to practice letting go of some of the stuff that we feel guilty about, that we suppressed, that actually drives a lot of our behavior and are not even conscious of it. You can have a transcendent spiritual experience through breathwork. And it's completely safe. And hey, if it gets too scary, you just stop breathing. So you're always in control.

• 1:37:45David Senra?

  When did you start realizing you needed to fix something that was inside your mind as you're building the company? Was it early when you were starting the company?

• 1:37:52Speaker 00

  Remember, I started, I did psychedelics before I even started the company.

• 1:37:55David Senra?

  You tell this crazy story about doing LSD and I think you were...

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  That's how the book starts out in the prologue. So I'd already done, I mean, I wasn't doing it therapeutically. I was doing it, I was doing it spiritually. I was trying to access deeper parts of the spiritual being that we don't normally do. That, think of psychedelics as opening a doorway to going into parts of our mind and our greater... There's, there's an interior self that's every bit as the excellent, bigger than the excellent universe, maybe bigger, that we don't, because we're so focused on living in the material world, we're not conscious of this deeper part of our being. Psychedelics open a door to it, but there are other ways. Meditation does, it pursued, breathwork does. There's different types of modalities that help us access deeper parts of our consciousness.

• 1:38:41Speaker 00

  And I think to grow as a human being, we need to go deeper so we can begin to release fears, guilt, judgments that kind of hold us back. And I think every one of us can access that.

• 1:38:53David Senra?

  Were you doing this the entire time you were building Whole Foods?

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, sometimes more seriously than other times, but yes, it was a, that's why, as you read the book, you know, I'm telling the narrative, but I'm also telling my own narrative, my own spiritual evolution, all the way to the very end of the book. And it's still happening now, it's still evolving. So I think rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey. It's also a hero's journey. I talk about the hero's journey in the book. Most people do not go on their own hero's journey. We have a voice, deeper part of our being is whispering to us, telling us, urging us on to follow this, you know, entrepreneurs are following this inner voice, they're following

• 1:39:39Speaker 00

  this passion that they're, that they unleash and they create in the world. You have that voice whispering to you too, and that's why you're doing what you're doing because you're so passionate about it.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  That is the hero's journey. In my experience, most people do not answer that call because they're too scared. They're too scared to do it. They want to, they have a fear of failure, a fear of people ridiculing them, feel of fear of rejection. Remember how we talked a little earlier about how the entrepreneurs are like Todd Graves? People are telling you you're going to fail, or I was saying that would just make me more determined to succeed. When you're on the hero's journey, you are determined to succeed and you're going to have a lot of setbacks and failures, but that's all part of the path. That's how you're learning, that's how you're growing. Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  It's a journey of discovery, it's a journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life.

• 1:40:40David Senra?

  John, that's a beautiful place to close. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation.

• 1:40:44Speaker 00

  Thanks for talking to me again, David. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

• 1:40:47David Senra?

  Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.