Pod Insights Habits and Hustle Episode 495: John Mackey: From Living Above a Store to $13.7 Billion Exit - The Whole Foods Story About this episode What really happened behind Amazon's $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods? In this episode on the Habits and Hustle podcast, John Mackey, founder and former CEO of Whole Foods, reveals why he walked away from the company he built over 44 years.
We dive into how Whole Foods went from a single vegetarian store to a 540-store empire that revolutionized American eating habits. We also discuss why only 0.5% of Americans are vegan despite the plant-based movement, why protein obsession is misguided, and how Erewhon is disrupting the company he created.
John Mackey founded Whole Foods Market in 1980 and served as CEO until 2022, growing it from a single store in Austin to a Fortune 250 company. He's the author of "Conscious Capitalism" and "The Whole Story," and now leads Love. Life, a revolutionary wellness center combining health, fitness, and medical care under one roof.
What We Discuss:
03:27 - Why Erewhon has become "the new Whole Foods" and John's strategy to compete
07:46 - How John built Whole Foods with zero business education
14:50 - From pickles on hamburgers to vegetarian: John's food awakening at age 22
21:21 - The 100-year flood that almost destroyed Whole Foods after 9 months
26:50 - The hostile takeover attempt
29:17 - Meeting Jeff Bezos: The six-week whirlwind romance with Amazon
51:56 - Why John only took $1 salary for his last 16 years (and never got paid)
59:26 - Conscious Capitalism: The four pillars of building a purpose-driven business
01:09:00 - Love. Life: The one-stop wellness center that's "Whole Foods for health"
01:21:14 - Why only 0.5% of Americans are vegan and vegan restaurants are failing
01:24:42 - The protein myth: Why Americans eat too much protein and not enough fiber
…and more!
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Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/
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Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books
Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement
Find more from John Mackey:
Instagram:@iamjohnmackey https://www.instagram.com/iamjohnmackey/
Website: https://johnpmackey.com/
Transcript 18,429 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.
0:06 Jen Cohen? On today's podcast, I have somebody, John, by the way, that I have been dying to get on the show because of who he is and what he's done and all the things in between. We have John Mackey, who is the, was the, is the founder and CEO, was the CEO of Whole Foods, a place that I've been obsessed with for, I don't know, 25 years of my life. And he's on today. We're talking about all the things about Whole Foods, Amazon, his new project, Love Life, and I'm really happy to have you.
0:41 Speaker 02 I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
0:42 Jen Cohen? Oh, my gosh. This is like, this is, this is my dream come true because like, the amount of times I've, I've said to people, the one person I think would be really interesting to interview is a guy who founded Whole Foods since I'm like spending half of my life and most of my paycheck, as you know, at, at Whole Foods. On this show, by the way, we do healthy shots on here, not alcoholic shots. So we do these magic minds. Are you, are you cool with that?
1:09 Speaker 02 You want me to do a shot is what you're saying?
1:10 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I want you to do a shot with me. These are, they're healthy though.
1:13 Speaker 02 Matcha, ashwagandha, passion fruit. Yeah, looks like it's got lion's mane, cordyceps. All right, let's do it.
1:21 Jen Cohen? I have to do with the, with the, with the founder of Whole Foods. This is a big day for, well, good, big day for magic mind. Yeah.
1:27 Speaker 02 Bottoms up.
1:28 Jen Cohen? Cheers. Do you like it?
1:32 Jen Cohen? I wonder if they're sell at Whole Foods. I know they're at Arowan. I don't know if they're at Whole Foods.
1:36 Speaker 02 You know.
1:37 Jen Cohen? Sorry, you're the nemesis.
1:39 Speaker 02 I mean, it's like, if I were still CEO of Whole Foods, we'd be, we'd be approaching Arowan differently than current, current management, let's put it that way.
1:47 Jen Cohen? Let's just start with that because that was one of my questions down the, down the road on my many questions to ask you. Cause I feel that Arowan has become the new Whole Foods. Like back when, you know, Whole Foods to me was like, you'd walk in and it was like, oh, like it was beautiful and it was the shelving and everything was perfect and the food was really, seemingly very healthy, right? And I feel that it's changed over the years. We'll get to all that stuff. And now Arowan's become like the new like panacea for like, for health. What's your take on, on, on Arowan and that whole thing?
2:25 Speaker 02 Well, I hold, I have a lot of respect for Air One. I think they're doing a great job and so I admire what they've accomplished. If I was still CEO of Whole Foods, I did retire about three years ago now. We'd approach, we'd approach Air One differently. I wouldn't concede sort of the high end of the market to them. I would compete. In fact, we were, we had created a, a new brand called Ideal Market. We had the trademark for Ideal Market and we, we had one and we had a original one in Colorado. And then we opened a second one in Boulder and then we had a second one in Denver. And it was similar to a lot of the things that Air One's doing. And the idea was to open Ideal Markets in the LA market.
3:07 Speaker 02 Let's just say the, the head of marketing really didn't like that idea because she believed that it'd be difficult to support another brand, a brand name. It's just, you know,
3:17 Jen Cohen? Right.
3:18 Speaker 02 And, and that Whole Foods could compete. And I, I thought, well, we can't really move Whole Foods to quite where Air One's going, but we could create a different brand. We didn't agree, but when I, I, when I knew I was going to retire, I gave a year's notice. So it's like, I don't want to force this down the throats of the management team because they're going to clearly not do it after I go. So I just dropped it. But if I was staying on, I would have definitely done that. And it would be, it'd be a good competition. We'd push Air One a little harder and they'd push Whole Foods and, or Ideal Market and we'd see how it turned out.
3:51 Jen Cohen? That's so interesting because, you know, it's become like a bad joke, actually, Air One, because it's so expensive. It's become, it's to the point where it's like, it's stupid expensive. And we used to think that Whole Foods was expensive. Remember the whole paycheck thing?
4:05 Speaker 02 Trust me, I know, I know that well.
4:08 Jen Cohen? Right? And now I feel like Air One's now taken it to such a crazy level. I think like, who could even have, like, people are standing there in, Like there's lineups just to get in like like it's become like a tourist attraction.
4:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, one of the things that Amazon helped Whole Foods do, there are some things about Amazon
4:27 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
4:28 Speaker 02 that that I wasn't really happy with from a cultural standpoint, but one of the promises they made to us that they kept was they really helped us drop our prices. In the first two years after that merger, merger was acquisition was back in 2017. For the first two years, we Whole Foods was able to drop its prices significantly four separate times to where I almost never hear that whole paycheck.
4:48 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
4:49 Speaker 02 We're far more competitive price wise.
4:50 Jen Cohen? You are.
4:51 Speaker 02 So we do have that advantage versus Arowan. But I always wondered Whole Foods, our our first core value is to be the highest quality, natural and organic foods in the world. That was our first core value. And so I would want Whole Foods to be able to do that. If it couldn't do it under the Whole Foods brand, we'd have another brand. So it doesn't matter because that's I did retire and it was a good thing I did and the existing management didn't want to go that direction. So part of letting your child grow up is it it makes different choices than the parents might want. I I led Whole Foods for 44 years.
5:30 Speaker 02 I I you might say as a parent, it's got a good foundation, it's got good values, it's good, good peeps. But, you know, it wants to do different things than the parents might want to do. And that's part of every parent knows you got to let your child go in its own direction. It has its own destiny, so to speak.
5:47 Jen Cohen? You did a great, I mean, listen, let's just go back to the beginning before because it's funny, you just mentioned Amazon, which I have a million questions about Amazon and the acquisition and all the things. But like the fact what you built with Whole Foods is just incredible. And what was so interesting when I like was looking through your book and reading your book and watching your interviews and knowing you're going to finally be on the show. It was that like there was such a juxtaposition between who you seem to be like in like your personal life and then how you built such a juggernaut like Whole Foods because you came across so like spiritual and all the things that you do with the breath work and the psychedelics and you love like love life and all these. Ways of how you like this ideal version of like how you see the world.
6:31 Jen Cohen? But at the same time, you to build what you built like that takes hardcore like you have like that's that's a that's an entrepreneur on steroids to be able to do what you did. Was there like, how did you blend the two things like I guess your ideal? And the realistic way the world works in corporate America like you did it for many, many years.
6:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I never really was a corporate guy. And that was part of the conflict with Amazon ultimately.
7:01 Jen Cohen? Right.
7:01 Speaker 02 Was, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur and I had no business background. I take no business classes in school. But so I started this business up with really very little business background, no educational background. But I think three things happened. One is, is that as an entrepreneur, I'm willing to take chances and innovate. But then also learn from my mistakes. So I learned from many mistakes that I made. Secondly, I'm a voracious reader. So once I got interested in business, I may not have taken any classes, but I read hundreds of business books. Accounting, marketing, finance, strategy, pretty much everything I could get my hands on, I read.
7:39 Speaker 02 And then my father, though, was a good business person and he became my mentor for the first 16 years of the company's history. So, yeah, I learned a lot and got better. That's one of the secrets is to keep improving all the time. You never can let up. You have to get better and better and better. So, but I've always had a competitive side to me, which just talking about Eirwan, it comes out a little bit. But I mean, it's like, that just means I want to be the best. I want to reach the highest potential possible. It's not competitive in the sense that I hate my competitors or they're evil or bad. I mean, someone like Eirwan, I was, I got to be good friends with the former president of Trader Joe's, Doug Rowe. And he, he actually and I were deeply both involved in conscious capitalism.
8:25 Speaker 02 And, and Doug said, the Whole Foods taught Trader Joe's more than any other company. And Trader Joe's made Whole Foods a better company. That's what competition does. It makes you better. So Eirwan viewed that in that way is a, is someone that can make Whole Foods better. If we would engage with them in that way. So that's, that, that's how I blend it together.
8:47 Jen Cohen? So you mentioned Trader Joe's. I find them to be, the one thing I found, I feel is very similar between the Whole Foods and back then. Cause I feel that Whole Foods is different now and we'll get, I'll talk about that in a minute, but Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, their corporate culture, the culture is very obvious when you walk in. Like when you walked into a Whole Foods and when you walked into a Trader Joe's, you felt what they, what kind of their position was and what they stood for. There was, the branding was on, is on point, right?
9:15 Speaker 02 I think so.
9:16 Jen Cohen? Yeah, but in every way, I don't know how else they're similar, but I feel like, but Whole Foods was more high end, I would imagine, right?
9:23 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:23 Jen Cohen? But what was your favorite book, by the way? You say you read all these books for business because you never took school.
9:29 Speaker 02 It's hard to say because you know, it's like you're on a journey for books and so books have a different impact. I remember early on, I read, once I discovered Peter Drucker, management theorist, I read all Peter Drucker's management books. And his Magnus Opus was management, you know, practices, task, something else. It was a big, thick book. I sort of, that became sort of a bible for me for a while. I read that book several times. It was very well earmarked. Another book on business ethics had a huge impact on me. Former philosophy professor, I studied under at University of Texas, Robert C. Solomon, Bob Solomon. His book was called Ethics and Excellence. I probably read that book a dozen times and it's had a huge impact on me.
10:12 Speaker 02 So different books along the way have had a big impact on me. And also I read a lot of business biographies of entrepreneurs, right?
10:19 Jen Cohen? I like those.
10:19 Speaker 02 Though, you know, John, John D. Rockefeller, Rockefeller by Ron Chernow, who wrote, who did Hamilton, now has a new book on Mark Twain. Books on Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie.
10:34 Jen Cohen? Oh, you mean Carnegie?
10:36 Speaker 02 No, it's pronounced Carnegie.
10:38 Jen Cohen? It is?
10:38 Speaker 02 Yes, it got New Yorkized, but that's how he pronounced it.
10:41 Jen Cohen? Oh.
10:42 Speaker 02 Carnegie.
10:43 Jen Cohen? Okay.
10:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, and so I read all those biographies and these guys were inspiring to me. Andrew Mellon, James Hill, there's just the business biographies. In fact, there's a podcast, which I'm gonna pitch, because for anybody that's an entrepreneur.
10:58 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
10:58 Speaker 02 They need to, they need to listen to the Founder's Podcast. It's a guy named David Center, do you know about this podcast?
11:03 Jen Cohen? Yeah, very well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
11:04 Speaker 02 So, so he reads these biographies of entrepreneurs and business people and does a podcast on them. I've gotten a lot of, I've read a lot of books from Listen to This Podcast.
11:13 Jen Cohen? Yeah, that's a great idea, because I know that when you just mentioned, you know, you read a lot of books, the first question I'm gonna get is, what, if I didn't ask you the question, well, what would be his top three business books?
11:25 Speaker 02 I think I just named about 10 books.
11:26 Jen Cohen? And you're writing, because I was gonna say, that's why I had to, I had to do a follow-up question on that. Otherwise, I would be like, oh, I don't know, you know?
11:33 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly.
11:33 Jen Cohen? So, those, people always come on here and they always say, Rich Dad, you know, uh, Rich Dad.
11:38 Speaker 02 Rich Dad, Poor Dad?
11:39 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
11:39 Speaker 02 I read that book, that's pretty good.
11:41 Jen Cohen? Did you like that one?
11:41 Speaker 02 Sure, I mean, think about that as a good, a good personal finance book for people that, you know, it's very, one of the things we don't teach in school, which is criminal in my mind, is personal finance. That should be something that's taught in high school.
11:57 Jen Cohen? I agree, I know.
11:58 Speaker 02 People, people get to become adults and they don't have the slightest clue about money.
12:02 Jen Cohen? Nope.
12:02 Speaker 02 What to do about it, how to manage it, how to save it. If you, if you can master the basics of personal finance, you're well on your way to, to becoming a wealthy person.
12:11 Jen Cohen? A hundred percent.
12:11 Speaker 02 Just by saving and, and, and letting it compound over time.
12:15 Jen Cohen? A hundred percent. It's, it's interesting, because there's a lot of life skills, foundational skills, that are not taught in school.
12:21 Speaker 02 I know, why is that?
12:22 Jen Cohen? I don't know, I talk about it all the time. In fact, I'm doing a TED Talk on it in two weeks. So, I, I, I'm a big believer in that.
12:29 Speaker 02 You know what? One of my homework assignments is, which I, when I was reading the review of you, is that you've got a TEDx, it's got like 5 million views.
12:37 Jen Cohen? Oh, more than that now, but yes.
12:39 Speaker 02 Whatever.
12:39 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
12:40 Speaker 02 That's.
12:40 Jen Cohen? That's a good one.
12:41 Speaker 02 That's 5 million more times than I watched it. So, so I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to listen to it.
12:46 Jen Cohen? Thank you, that one was about being bold and asking for what you want in life. And this thing called, I, I created this thing. I coined this thing called the 10% target, which is make 10 attempts at whatever you want in life. And either two things happen, either you will get that thing or another opportunity will present itself.
13:04 Speaker 02 I love that. I mean, 10 times is, uh, that's very persistent. Most people would quit after two times.
13:11 Jen Cohen? Well, that's the whole thing. Research has shown that most people don't even make one attempt. Almost nobody makes two.
13:17 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
13:18 Jen Cohen? Almost nobody makes two, never mind one. So if you're somebody who makes 10, the chances of you getting to the, like, you know, kind of even like bumping yourself up is just, it's immensely higher.
13:29 Speaker 02 You know, so funny you say that 10, cause there's two ways that connects with my brain.
13:34 Jen Cohen? How?
13:35 Speaker 02 Well, one is I tell people that you can learn to love any food if you will expose yourself to it about 10 times.
13:42 Jen Cohen? Really?
13:43 Speaker 02 Yes. I've learned to love every vegetable by simply, it's like, it starts out, I don't like this.
13:49 Jen Cohen? Right.
13:49 Speaker 02 To, and then it goes to, you know, it's not bad, but I would never pick it on my own to, no, it's actually pretty good.
13:57 Jen Cohen? Really?
13:58 Speaker 02 To, it's my favorite food. I love that food.
14:02 Speaker 02 And it's just, you know, our taste buds turn over about every two weeks. Did you know that?
14:07 Jen Cohen? No, really?
14:08 Speaker 02 That's why it's easy to re-educate your palate. Taste buds are, are, they're just constantly, the cells are being recycled all the time. So you can teach yourself to like any food. So, moral of the story, teach yourself to like the foods that are really, really good for you.
14:21 Jen Cohen? Yeah. What do you eat then? What kind of foods would you say, did you not like that now you've trained your brain to like?
14:26 Speaker 02 All the vegetables.
14:27 Jen Cohen? Name one that you didn't like and now you eat it.
14:29 Speaker 02 I mean broccoli.
14:31 Jen Cohen? Oh, yeah.
14:32 Speaker 02 Kale, cauliflower.
14:34 Jen Cohen? Oh, so you didn't like vegetables at all?
14:37 Speaker 02 No, when I was, before I moved in this vegetarian co-op, I think the only vegetable I'd ever eaten in my life was a pickle on a hamburger.
14:43 Jen Cohen? Really?
14:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was till I was about 22.
14:46 Jen Cohen? So this is so like, like I said, you're such a like dichotomy like so you're here. You are. You built the biggest, most well-known like natural grocery store on the planet. And you were someone who didn't even like vegetables or eat vegetables or do anything with vegetables.
15:01 Speaker 02 One time in my life, but I mean, I'm just an individual, Jen. I'm just an individual. I've just gone my own. I followed my own heart and wherever it took me. And people, people change, people develop, people grow. My life's been an adventure. It's a grand adventure.
15:18 Jen Cohen? I mean, so let's go back a little bit chronological, so we can like give people a more of your backstory. Because you, you initially had a like a store called The Safer Way, which was a better take on Safeway. Right? And that ended up being whole. Can you just kind of give your better, you say it than me. So can you just kind of give a little bit of a background?
15:40 Speaker 02 So yeah, I'll give a little background. So taking up where you were when I was didn't eat any vegetables, pickles and hamburgers. I moved in this vegetarian co-op when I was 22 or 23 years old, right around that, that era. And it was, I wasn't a vegetarian. I actually was just, I was very interested in all things counterculture. That was very influenced by people that were, you know, hippies going their own way. And so I moved in and thought I'd just meet really cool people and I did. I, I, people taught me how to, I had a food awakening. I learned how to cook. I started eating vegetables, getting myself used to it and liking it. I became the food buyer for the co-op and I had thought previously to that, Jen, that was like, my body was like a car.
16:24 Speaker 02 I, you take it in, like you go to the gas station to get fueled up. You go to McDonald's or the Jack in the Box to get fueled up. So it never occurred to me that we were like a living being that has tens of trillions of cells that need to be nourished. And food could make you feel better, give you more vitality, help you be supercharged your immune system. That was all new to me. And so I began to learn that at the co-op. And then I got interested in it. So I'm reading cookbooks for fun. I'm practicing. I go to work for this small natural food store called. Uh, good foods. And I came home back to the co-op one day and I started talking to my girlfriend, who I'd met at the, at the co-op, at Prana House, the name of this co-op. And I said, Renee, what do you think if we opened up our own natural food store?
17:08 Speaker 02 You and me. And she said, oh, Mac, oh, man, I think that'd be really cool. Renee was definitely a hippie. She was like, I'm, so I'm 23 now and Renee's 19. We had no background in this at all, except I'd worked a little bit in this natural food store. But it was gonna be fun. So we, we, we went out and hustled money. We raised $45,000. Found Safer Way. Safer Way, it was very idealistic store because it was vegetarian. And we didn't sell alcohol. We didn't sell coffee. We didn't sell sugar. We did very little business. That was the, that was the takeaway. That was the takeaway, yeah. We were very idealistic, very pure, but we didn't meet the market where we found it.
17:49 Speaker 02 And we were also on a residential street. We lost half our money. We lost $23,000 in the first year. But then it was like, I started, I read all those books. My dad's mentoring me, making mistakes, learning from him. And I realized, oh, we need a different location, for one thing. We're on this residential street. Renee and I moved out of the co-op. We're living in the house now, this old Victorian house, on the third floor, sleeping on a futon couch at night. There was no shower or bathtub in this place. It was, we're not supposed to be there. It was a zone commercial. We just lived up there and we actually took showers in the Hobart dishwasher from, from the cafe. Oh, wow. Yeah, exactly. I'm pretty sure that violated most of Austin's health. I think so too.
18:31 Speaker 02 We didn't, we didn't promote it. Anyhow, so to speed up that story a little bit, we decided we gotta get a bigger location. We found some additional capital to invest. And we opened up the first Whole Foods Market. We merged with another small natural food store like Safer Way, that was, must say, a friendly rival. And together, we co-founded the first Whole Foods Market, which was a great, huge success right from the beginning. Within six months, it had become the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States. It just took off. It was one of the first, world's first natural food supermarkets. Not the very first, but one of the first three or four. And it was very successful. We were in the right place at the right time. It just went bonkers. We had a flood nine months after we opened, which almost put us out of business.
19:15 Speaker 02 But we learned a lot from the flood. We learned, A, don't build stores in 100-year flood zones. Because the 100-year flood happened the first year we were open. It's the biggest flood Austin had in 70 years. And I might add, the biggest flood that's happened in the hill country since that tragedy that just happened recently in Hunt, Texas.
19:33 Jen Cohen? Wow, yeah.
19:34 Speaker 02 That's, that's the biggest flood since the flood of 1981.
19:39 Jen Cohen? Really?
19:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, really. Mm-hmm. So.
19:42 Jen Cohen? But you rebounded.
19:43 Speaker 02 We rebounded. We got reopened. And I learned about stakeholders that I didn't have the word for. But we should have died. And our stakeholders saved us. Our customers came and helped us. Neighbors and customers helped us clean up the store day after day to get reopened again. They didn't want us to die. They loved us. Our team members worked for free until we could get reopened to pay them. And if we didn't get open, we wouldn't be able to pay them. Our suppliers gave us more inventory. Our investors put more capital in. The bank loaned $100,000 to us on my signature, which I assure you was absolutely worthless. And we got reopened, and we never looked back. And we just went on from success to success after that.
20:22 Jen Cohen? So how did you go from one store to like four stores? Did you have like, what, did you have some type of like mission statement that you were involved with?
20:29 Speaker 02 It's such a good, it's a great question. So I believe the hardest expansion a retailer ever does is going from one to two stores. You've actually, that's 100% growth. And now you have to create systems for the first time. You can't just, it can't all be tacit knowledge that you keep in your head. You need to write things down and create policies that both stores will follow. So since we had four co-founders, we kind of divided it up into, you know, one, two people at each store. But then, so it took us two years to get, after Whole Foods, it took us two years to get the second one open. Then two years after that, we got the third one open. And two years after that, we got the fourth one open. So I always tell people, to show you how Fast Whole Foods grew.
21:11 Speaker 02 At the end, when we went public in 1992, 14 years after we. We'd open the first Whole Foods Market, no, the first Safeway store. We were up to 12 stores. It took us 14 years to get to 12 stores. When I retired, 30 years later, we were 540 stores. So, once we got the formula down and it worked, we scaled it pretty rapidly. And we acquired, we acquired Mrs. Gooch's in LA. We, and we acquired Bread and Circus in, in Boston, Fresh Fields in DC. We acquired a lot of our friends and cashed out the entrepreneurs, made them very wealthy.
21:46 Jen Cohen? Right.
21:46 Speaker 02 And gave us new platforms for growth in different geographical areas. And then we took the best practices from each one of them. We didn't think Whole Foods was better than everybody else. We just, these were our peers. And so, we had an attitude of what can we learn from them that makes us better?
22:01 Jen Cohen? What would you say, because what I noticed is it did change over years. And I'm trying to remember, was it when Amazon, like, was it after the Amazon acquisition? Or was it already before the Amazon acquisition?
22:13 Speaker 02 Well, everything's always evolving.
22:14 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
22:15 Speaker 02 So, Whole Foods for most of our history was very decentralized. We were, and there's always, there's always trade-offs in organizational structure. We were very innovative. When we're decentralized, we empowered regional leadership to innovate, to create new things. A lot of them didn't work, but the ones that did work, we could copy and spread. So, Whole Foods, in fact, Whole Foods drove a lot of the entire innovation of the supermarket industry for a long period of time. But then, what happened over time, and this, this trend began before I retired. We had hired professionals and the professionals were trying to, I'm talking about a lot of MBAs. And they were trying to make Whole Foods more efficient, cut our costs so we could lower our prices.
22:57 Jen Cohen? Right.
22:58 Speaker 02 And the trade-off when you do that is that you, you centralize more things. And you take power away from the regional people. So, they won't make mistakes and make, and have a lot of waste. But the trade-off is, is you, you get less innovation, you're less creativity. People are less empowered. That trend accelerated under Amazon. And after I left, it's really accelerated because I was kind of the thing that was holding it back, saying, hey, we're losing our innovative edge. We're not really, we're just doing the same thing over and over again. That's what most retailers do, but, um, so I do think Whole Foods has changed. And, um, but you know, I didn't know how to stop it, actually, to tell you the truth.
23:37 Jen Cohen? Really?
23:37 Speaker 02 Well, once Amazon acquired the company, I didn't have the power to do it any longer.
23:43 Jen Cohen? Well, what happened? How did Amazon become the people who bought you? Like, what was, why did you even want to like?
23:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, most people don't know that backstory.
23:50 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
23:51 Speaker 02 In my book, The Whole Story, which I'm going to pitch right now, I tell the whole story of Whole Foods. It's also my personal spiritual journey. It's a memoir.
24:00 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
24:01 Speaker 02 It's very candid, very honest, and very authentic. But we didn't want to sell Amazon. It's just that Amazon was the best solution to a problem we had. And that problem was, we had shareholders or activists take a large stake in the company. I met with these guys. They were very unreasonable people. They, you know, I'll take my bad language that they were using out of it. And, but.
24:24 Jen Cohen? No, you don't have to.
24:25 Speaker 02 I met with them and they basically said, they showed this PowerPoint, which had a bunch of bullshit in it. And I said, well, I could get a copy of the PowerPoint because I think there's a few mistakes. And they says, no, we're not going to give you a copy of the PowerPoint. This is Jana Partners. It's the name of this.
24:38 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
24:39 Speaker 02 Private equity firm. And I said, well, why not? And he says, yeah, we don't want to. Yeah, we don't want to. I said, but I know, but there are a lot of mistakes there. We don't care. And they said, but we're showing it to all your investors anyway. And I said, listen, Mackey, here's what's going to happen. First, first thing we're going to do is take over your board. And once we do that, we're going to fire you. And then we're going to fire every one of your executives that doesn't do exactly what we tell them to do. And then we're going to just put you up for sale to the highest bidder. And there's not a effing thing you can do about it. And then they walked out of the room. And so it was like, okay, that did not go very well. And then it was like, we had like three or four alternatives we could do. One would be to fight them.
25:19 Speaker 02 That was probably what we thought was going to happen, which meant we'd have a struggle with them over the board first. And then if they got control of the board, we'd have a struggle with them over the shareholders. And so we could fight them all the way. The challenge of that strategy was, we needed to lower our prices. Whole Foods, the whole paycheck thing had really stuck. And there's another even more backstory I'm not going to go into that is more complicated. But we had, we had the government harassing us in certain cities and it was hurting our brand. And we were getting a lot of negative publicity, but I'm not going to go into that. But that led to Jana taking this position. And then we needed to lower our prices, but we needed time to do that. Because you're selling something for a dollar and you start to sell it for 90 cents.
26:02 Speaker 02 In the short run, your sales just dropped 10% if everything went down 10%. Your same-store sales dropped with negative 10%. Your profits probably dropped 30 or 40%. And that's going to freak out Wall Street. And so then you're playing into Jana's hands. Then it's going to like, these people are wrecking the business. We need to take it over. So we needed time to do that. We weren't going to have time with Jana as investors. So then we looked, maybe we could find somebody friendly to buy it. So we'd like to talk to Warren Buffett. And Warren, Warren, Warren, he knew all about Whole Foods, but he made a joke, which was pretty funny. He said, you know, we own Dairy Queen.
26:44 Jen Cohen? Right.
26:45 Speaker 02 And I'm famous for my junk food eating. John, this is not a good brand fit.
26:50 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
26:51 Speaker 02 For me.
26:53 Speaker 02 I think he just maybe thought we were still too expensive for a price. But anyhow, he didn't want to do it. And Albertsons, we had a talk with Albertsons. They really wanted to merge with us. But it was obvious to me that was a very poor cultural fit. And so then I kept asking this question. I really believe that if you put intentionality out into the universe, things happen. So one of my intentions, I kept asking was, what's the win-win-win solution here? What's good for our customers? What's good for our team members? What's good for our suppliers? What's good for our investors? And what's good for the larger community? And one morning I woke up and the answer pops in my brain was, what about Amazon? I'd met Jeff Bezos at a conference the year before. He and I had hit it off.
27:36 Speaker 02 We had a lot in common, science fiction, fantasy, scuba diving. We were on a panel together. Jeff says, this has been great. I want to follow up with you. Let's get together and talk. I didn't hear from him. Of course, he's going through, that's when his marriage was starting to break up and stuff like that. And then a year later, we contact Amazon, see if they're interested. They were very interested. We flew in, had a special meeting with Jeff and his top senior leaders. And we had, you know, I always liked to Tell people, you know, when you fall in love with somebody, there's always what I call the conversation.
28:08 Jen Cohen? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:09 Speaker 02 Conversation where you connect and the hearts connect and it's like, whoa, I've never met anybody quite like this. And you're, you fell in love. That happened in our first conversation with Amazon. These guys were not like I thought they were going to be. They were incredibly intelligent, which I thought they would be. Very all, very entrepreneurial, very strategic. We talked about all the things Whole Foods and Amazon could do together. And I remember our team, the three executives I brought with me, we went to a restaurant afterwards to process what had happened. And we're kind of looking around saying, that was incredible. That was incredible conversation. And then it was looking around and then we asked the question like, do you think they liked us too?
28:44 Jen Cohen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
28:47 Speaker 02 And it turned out they did. They contacted us a couple of days later, flew a team down. And then it was a whirlwind romance. Six weeks after the first meeting, we were engaged to be married. Uh, to, and, and that ended up being our solution. What I'll never know is if we'd fought, could we have won? But I felt like this was the best thing. Whole Foods dropped prices four times in those first two years with Amazon. Our team members got all got raises. All the hourly people got raises within a month of the deal happening.
29:14 Jen Cohen? Really?
29:15 Speaker 02 Yes. Amazon came in and set the new minimum wage back in 2017 at 15 bucks. So everybody that was hourly went 15 and then they staggered it up from there. So literally, I don't know, 80,000 people got pay increases. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. As did it did, cutting those prices. Those were two things that were really, really good for morale, good for our customers. Our suppliers got, not only did they not get dropped by Amazon, but they studied our movement and they picked up a lot of our suppliers. They put them into Amazon.com that weren't there before. So it was really good for a lot of our suppliers. Our investors got like 30% more money from that sale than they had previously to Amazon doing. The price of the stock went up.
29:56 Speaker 02 And, uh, our communities also developed because of our, our philanthropy, our foundations. Not only did Amazon not change that, they made additional donations to our, to our Whole Planet Foundation or Whole Kids Foundation. So they've been a good partner in a lot of ways, but you know, culturally, that's. That's been the the rubbing point. There were different culturally and to give Amazon credit there. They haven't really tried to change Whole Foods' culture in any direct way. They they they like our culture. But I the metaphor I'd come up with, Jen, is like, think of Amazon like this giant sun. And we're like a big planet in their orbit, like Jupiter. Okay, we're big. We were like a we were a Fortune 250 company when they bought us. But Amazon was a Fortune 5 company when they bought us.
30:41 Speaker 02 So even though they haven't tried to change us, the fact of the matter is their gravitational pull is so powerful that Whole Foods is nevertheless affected by it. So we're still Whole Foods, but we are changing. The gravity is affecting Whole Foods.
30:54 Jen Cohen? Well, they took away the decentralization, which, by the way, I guess after you said that, it makes sense. Like, that does make a major difference in the person, the customer's user experience, right? Because the problem I have with Whole Foods is that it's one is not the same. There's no, I I feel like the quality or caliber has gone down to the majority. There are some that you walk into still, like the one near Love Life, actually, in Manhattan Beach or El Segundo. I went in there for the first time when I went to see, when I went to Love Life. It was beautiful. It was immaculate. It was clean. It was very nicely like shelved. But I can go into five other Whole Foods and it's going to be like, kind of like, not, the quality's not there.
31:37 Speaker 02 I will tell you, I will tell you what my motto is now that I've retired in just about three years.
31:42 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
31:43 Speaker 02 It's not my problem any longer.
31:44 Jen Cohen? Right. You don't care.
31:46 Speaker 02 I do care. There's not anything I can do about it.
31:48 Jen Cohen? Right.
31:48 Speaker 02 I do care. It's like, it's, if you think about it, it's like my daughter, I make the joke that I married my daughter off to the richest man in the world.
31:56 Jen Cohen? You actually did.
31:57 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly. He was, he was only the second, he was the richest one. I married her off and then and then Elon Musk passed.
32:02 Jen Cohen? Yeah, right, right.
32:03 Speaker 02 But.
32:04 Jen Cohen? At that point, it doesn't matter.
32:06 Speaker 02 Yes. No, it doesn't really matter too much. But, I mean, I can't do anything about it. So it's, and it, the greatest gift I can give my successor is not to try to interfere in any way.
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33:31 Jen Cohen? What do you say, besides the fact, like, if you were to go back or look, we talked about all the benefits that Amazon added to Whole Foods. What would you say, besides my little rant? What would you say the things that you've noticed have been kind of like the negative things or the things that kind of haven't been up to snuff when you were involved?
33:50 Speaker 02 Well, part of it's not necessarily the fault of the existing management. The people, let's just put it this way. When I retired after 44 years, I was like the last man standing. All the people that we built the company together with, they all retired. They all retired before me. And I was working with people that were substantially younger than me that had professional backgrounds. And so the thing about profession, professionals, this is why most corporations over time begin to decline. Once the founders leave, that entrepreneurial spirit begins to come out of the, go out of the company. And it's less creative, less innovative. It's just, and it's true of almost all businesses unless they're family owned.
34:33 Speaker 02 So what ends up happening is the professionals are very smart people. They get MBAs from Harvard and Wharton and Stanford. They're very bright people, but their first loyalty is to their careers. And oftentimes, a company like Whole Foods or Amazon is just kind of a stop along the way. It's, it's an addition to the resume and then they're gonna, levers that to another higher paying job. And so their first loyalty is gonna be to their, to their own careers. And then the second loyalty is to their profession itself, because they think of themselves as professional. So as we were building the company, it was very hard, it was very easy to enlist people that were coming up through the ranks into our purpose and our mission and our, and
35:18 Speaker 02 our stakeholder theory. People bought into that. It got harder to do that with the professions, professionals, because they're, again, their loyalties were not first to the company. And so I do think that's why over time, despite all that intelligence and market research and all the things they do that, that the sort of the, the creative spark oftentimes goes out of companies as they age. And, but you know, capitalism solves for it. They, companies like Arowan come along.
35:45 Jen Cohen? Right.
35:46 Speaker 02 And so new entrepreneurs come up who aren't, it's like Whole Foods disrupted the supermarket industry. You could argue Arowan's disrupting Whole Foods, at least in LA.
35:55 Jen Cohen? Exactly.
35:56 Speaker 02 I would argue that Arowan's business model may not translate into, it translates to New York, but I don't know if it translates, maybe to Bay Area, but it wouldn't translate everywhere.
36:06 Jen Cohen? I was gonna ask you about that because one thing about Whole Foods is like you can go anywhere.
36:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:11 Jen Cohen? And it, there's scalability. Most people in Ohio or Wichita, Kansas are not gonna be able, they're not gonna be going to Arowan. It's just, it's kinda like when you go to a, when you go to a zoo and you see a lion. That's why when you, you have these tour buses who come to. L A and they all come off with their cameras and they take pictures of the Hailey Bieber smoothie at Arrow One, right?
36:32 Speaker 02 What are they charging for that now?
36:34 Jen Cohen? Twenty five dollars. Yeah, it's crazy. They're just, it's insanity. And by the way, this is the, this is the irony of this whole thing, right? I was speaking with somebody who was a big executive at Arrow One for a while. She left. And people have this optical illusion that it's healthy because it looks very pretty and they talk about having an organic bee or pollen or whatever. Most of the food there is not healthy.
36:58 Speaker 02 Right.
36:59 Jen Cohen? It's just not. When you put that much oil at the food bar, like the, the hot bar, you're now spending a fortune on like food that you can get pretty much even at Albertson's, honestly, like maybe it's like a one or two levels above, but you're spending, like I went there, I spent forty five dollars on a piece of salmon and some vegetables that I literally could have gotten for a Trader Joe's for like eleven dollars, eight dollars.
37:21 Speaker 02 Well, it's not that much different from going to like a high end restaurant, right?
37:25 Jen Cohen? Right, right, right.
37:26 Speaker 02 You're gonna pay more, but you're paying more for atmosphere, for, for service, for
37:31 Jen Cohen? But you're not getting that there.
37:32 Speaker 02 Well, again, I'm not gonna throw down an Arrow One. They're, they're doing something right. They're, they're obviously very successful and I'm very happy for them.
37:39 Jen Cohen? I think what they've done well is branding.
37:42 Speaker 02 Sure.
37:42 Jen Cohen? And how they, when you walk in, the feeling that you get, you feel like you're doing something healthy for yourself. It's the emotional thing. Companies are doing really well in the emotional.
37:52 Speaker 02 Also, in L A, because, probably because of the Hollywood culture that
37:56 Jen Cohen? Yes.
37:57 Speaker 02 Sort of, people want to be in the coolest, hippest places.
38:01 Jen Cohen? True.
38:02 Speaker 02 And Arrow One has got that niche now. That's why you say it kind of like the new Whole Foods.
38:06 Jen Cohen? Yes.
38:06 Speaker 02 Because we used to be that niche and now the, the cool people go to Arrow One. And the people see the cool people going to Arrow One and they want to go there too, because that's where the cool people are going.
38:15 Jen Cohen? One hundred percent.
38:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:16 Jen Cohen? It's TikTok friendly too. You can do, you can go there, get your little smoothie, take your little picture. Well, also it's a different time, right?
38:22 Speaker 02 Hey, you know that Love Life, we're working with Arrow One.
38:25 Jen Cohen? Are you?
38:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, we've got a, we're on their, um, we're in, we're, we have an alliance with them, a marketing alliance. People can, if you're a Erawan member, join, join one of their, their, their club. You can get a special deal at, at Love Life.
38:38 Jen Cohen? Oh, you can?
38:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:39 Jen Cohen? What is the special deal?
38:40 Speaker 02 I'm forgetting it right now, but you, you, I think you get a discount on memberships.
38:45 Jen Cohen? Oh, you do?
38:45 Speaker 02 Discount on a membership.
38:46 Jen Cohen? Cause you went from, because before even, well, gonna get into Love Life, but I want to finish with the Amazon situation with Whole Foods. Did you step down because you wanted to from Whole Foods? Or did they push you out? What was the reason behind it?
38:59 Speaker 02 Uh, I signed a five-year contract with Amazon when the merger happened.
39:04 Jen Cohen? Okay.
39:05 Speaker 02 So I had a five-year commitment, but I, I detail this in the book and some detail the whole story, but I was increasingly fighting with Amazon about cultural things. And, and you might say that, that the tipping point occurred, this is back in February of 2022. And the fight that I had with Amazon that, that tipped me was call back to work. I wanted to bring our corporate staff back into the office.
39:31 Jen Cohen? Mm-hmm.
39:32 Speaker 02 And because everybody else at Whole Foods was going to work every day, everybody going into the stores or the distribution centers or everywhere else had to go into work. But Amazon, because of Amazon, our corporate people didn't have to. They could work at home. And after a year, I didn't, I, I thought it was wrecking our culture because we had sort of a privileged elite that didn't have to play by the same rules everybody else had. And that was so not Whole Foods. We had a much more egalitarian culture. Everybody gets the same benefits. Everybody gets the same discounts. No privileged elite. So that bothered me a lot. And I could see it was affecting, people asked me about it when I go down to the stores. Hey, are the people back to work upstairs?
40:15 Jen Cohen? Really?
40:15 Speaker 02 Yes. I was there, my, but Amazon didn't want us to force anybody to come back to work. And I wanted to. So I, I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was my superior, who in almost every other way, I really loved Dave. I still love Dave. Dave and I, Dave was very smart and he was a very decisive. And a very good decision maker. I watched him make good decisions over the years and he was a very good decision maker. But he was wrong about this decision. He did not want to let me bring him back. And I I started, I was talking to him, I said, Dave, listen, trust me, I'm the general in the field. This is bad for Whole Foods. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't want to do this. It's, it's, I just, trust me, I know this is the best thing for Whole Foods.
40:59 Speaker 02 And he, he said, he, he said, it, it triggered him. And when I start, start talking about being the general in the field, trusted general in the field, and he says, "God damn it, John, why don't you just fucking do what you're told to do once? You want to argue about everything?" And I said, "Dave, can you give me another examples of me ever arguing with you about anything?" And he thinks about it and he says, "I don't fucking have to give you an example. I know it and everybody at Amazon knows it." It's like, whoa, everybody at Amazon knows it? Knows what? I mean, it's like, and I said, "Dave, I can see you're really triggered and I think maybe we, we should not have this conversation any longer."
41:40 Speaker 02 And so we got off the Zoom call and we, Dave and I had this call every month. He canceled the next two months. And then I thought, I thought, but I decided that day, I, I decided, you know what? I, I don't have power anymore at Whole Foods. I can't do what I think is best for the company. I can't protect the team members. I can't protect the culture. It's time for me to go. However, that's such a monumental decision that I didn't want to make that hasty. So I wanted to think about it for a few months. And I thought, if Dave will contact me and apologize for being a jerk, you know, maybe I'll stick around a little bit longer. But he, he canceled the next two calls we were supposed to have. And then they get back on and it was like nothing had happened.
42:21 Speaker 02 And it's like, okay, so that's how it's going to be. And so then I, another three months, everything was kind of normal, but I'd kind of made this decision, but I wanted to talk it over with people at Whole Foods that I love and trust. I want to talk it over with my wife. I wanted to make sure it was really the right decision because I knew it was, you know, it's no going back. So then it was pretty clear, my heart was guiding me and To say it was time to go, it's time to do the next thing, which by the way, leads to love life. Right?
42:49 Jen Cohen? Right.
42:50 Speaker 02 So I call up Dave and I go over it with him and say, you know, I think it's time for me to go. I think it's time for me to leave and and I'll fulfill my commitment I have on the contract. I'll finish out. So I basically gave one year's notice. And that last year at Whole Foods was arguably one of the best years of my whole career there because I had the new successor already picked, Jason Beekel. Amazon loves Jason. They want, that's who they would have picked anyway. And I'd already been mentoring Jason anyway. He was my chief operating officer. He'd been the chief technology officer. He spoke Amazon speak, so to speak.
43:23 Jen Cohen? Wow.
43:24 Speaker 02 So I basically, for the next year, let him run the company anyway. And I just made a grand tour. I visited as many stores as I could, maybe a hundred stores around the country and said goodbye. And it was so wonderful because I got so much love from people and I gave so much love and it was very teary eyed stuff. And so I had a great last year.
43:43 Jen Cohen? Wow.
43:43 Speaker 02 I wish people could, that's the best way to leave a company. And, you know, I still have so many good relationships with people there.
43:49 Jen Cohen? Do you?
43:50 Speaker 02 Sure. People still know me. I go into a store, I go into that El Segundo store to shop here. It goes next to Love Life and yeah, people know me there. They talk to me, come up and talk to me.
44:01 Jen Cohen? They do. So were you really like, so, so a lot of times when this type of situation happens, people are like figureheads, right? They're not really doing much. The five, when you were, when you were there, besides that thing that happened with David Clark, what were you really involved with before you kind of gave it to the helm to Peter, what's his name? Jason, Jason.
44:19 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, what, what, you, you think about what does a leader like me do?
44:23 Jen Cohen? Yeah. What do you do? What does a leader like you do?
44:25 Speaker 02 No, one of the things, this is a good tip for entrepreneurs out there.
44:28 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
44:29 Speaker 02 One of the questions as I grew the business that I asked myself and continued to ask me at the very end, what does the company most need me to do now? And that answer will change over time as a business grows. At the early days, that what, you know, what they needed me to do is run a store. And then the next thing they needed me to do was be get, get involved in real estate. So we could get really good real estate decisions. And part of, as, as the business would grow and I'd let go of things. One of the things that's difficult to do is let go of things that you really enjoy doing and you're really good at. But if you keep asking that question, what does the company most need me to do? It's like, okay. Like, at one point, it needed me to do something I wasn't very good at and didn't want to do, but I knew I needed to do it, which was I needed to be more public facing.
45:14 Speaker 02 I needed to speak publicly more often. I needed to tour around to the stores, connect with the team members, connect with suppliers, connect with Wall Street, just be sort of the face of the company.
45:27 Jen Cohen? Hence the media training days.
45:29 Speaker 02 That's, and I flunked the media training days, exactly. But nevertheless, and I wasn't very good at it initially, but I practiced it and I got better at it.
45:38 Jen Cohen? Ten times.
45:39 Speaker 02 Now, now I'm a very good public speaker. I'm very relaxed in front of crowds and audiences and stuff. So, anyway, the point is, it's changing and evolving over time. So, what was I, what was the company most needing me to do? Well, the last year it most needed me to do was have a really good farewell and hand the reins of power over to my successor with, you know, not dropping a baton, but doing it in a very skillful way. Before that, so you might say, after Amazon bought the company, what was my most important job? My most important job there was to, A, protect Whole Foods' culture from Amazon, while at the same time integrating as closely to them as we could to make the business more successful and efficient. I'd acquire, Whole Foods bought 23 companies over my, over my time as a CEO.
46:22 Speaker 02 So, I knew a lot about what made a good acquisition. And you know what, you know what an acquiring company wants? They don't want to hear about how good, the good old times were before the acquisition. They want to hear about the good things that are happening now and how much you like Amazon and the good things Amazon's doing for the company. They want you to be a good team player.
46:41 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
46:42 Speaker 02 So, I worked hard on that. I spent a lot of time selling Amazon to Whole Foods people and saying, and pointing out, like I just did to you a little while ago.
46:50 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I was gonna say.
46:51 Speaker 02 Why this was a good thing for the company and so that Whole Foods' people would not be rebels, but we'd be good, we'd be good team players.
46:59 Jen Cohen? Right.
47:00 Speaker 02 I also needed to work with the, you know, I knew, anyway you slice it, I was getting older. I knew at some point my time was gonna end. I always kind of thought it would end after five years. I thought, that's long enough.
47:10 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
47:11 Speaker 02 And, you know, it was clear to me, by the way, that when Amazon didn't say, "Oh, John, we don't want you to leave. Please stay. We'd like you to have another three-year contract." No contract was offered. They were not, they were not.
47:22 Jen Cohen? Right.
47:23 Speaker 02 They I don't think they're going to force me out because I was too, you know, famous or, you know, that that could be really bad if they force me out. But they were glad I was leaving. That was pretty obvious.
47:34 Jen Cohen? Really?
47:34 Speaker 02 They were happy. I was like, sure, because because I was arguing with them about culture. I was fighting back. I was pushing back. I was never a yes man.
47:41 Jen Cohen? I'm curious with the how are they doing now post Amazon? How's Whole Foods doing?
47:47 Speaker 02 Whole Foods is doing really well from a financial standpoint.
47:49 Jen Cohen? Yeah, from a financial standpoint after Amazon.
47:51 Speaker 02 Sales are very strong. Sales are growing very rapidly. I mean, I don't actually know, but when I the last year I was there, we'd gotten up to 22 billion in sales. My last year, I'd say they're probably at 26 or 27 billion now. So they're
48:05 Jen Cohen? Really?
48:05 Speaker 02 Four or five billion dollars bigger. Yeah. I'm pretty sure if Amazon wanted to sell Whole Foods, they get we paid 13.7 billion for it. It's probably worth, I don't know, probably almost twice that much, I bet.
48:17 Jen Cohen? Are you a billionaire now?
48:19 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no, no, no.
48:20 Jen Cohen? You're not because it was a public company. You probably had to give all the shares and all the people.
48:24 Speaker 02 So something people don't know about about me is just simply that I'm a wealthy guy. I have I have I have enough money, but I stopped taking any compensation back in 2006. I gave all of my stock options to our foundations. I never took a salary after that. I had enough.
48:40 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I read something that you capped your salary at a million a year.
48:45 Speaker 02 No, no, that's inaccurate.
48:46 Jen Cohen? That wasn't right. That was
48:48 Speaker 02 We capped chat GPT. What do they know?
48:51 Jen Cohen? I know.
48:52 Speaker 02 We capped we capped any the salary, the compensation anyone could make to by the time I left was about 13 times the average pay was the most anyone could make. So I think the very best paid people at at Whole Foods were making close to a million dollars a year. I was still making one dollar a year. I did only only took one dollar a year from 2006 on. So I made nothing the last when I leave 20 16 years I got paid zero, nothing.
49:19 Jen Cohen? Nothing?
49:20 Speaker 02 One dollar, except they never gave it to me. They never gave me that dollar.
49:23 Jen Cohen? They never gave you that dollar?
49:24 Speaker 02 No, I'm thinking about suing them. They owe me like thirteen dollars.
49:27 Jen Cohen? Are you allowed to go to Whole Foods right now and like pick an apple? Would they charge you for it?
49:32 Speaker 02 So you want to hear something funny?
49:33 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
49:33 Speaker 02 So at Whole Foods, we have what are called benefit hours. So you can, you can bank those benefit hours if you don't use them. So I was banking, I have, I have thousand plus paid time off hours. So I guess they probably owe me about a one dollar an hour. They owe me about a thousand dollars.
49:49 Jen Cohen? Oh, my God. Hold on a second. So when they sold, and of course with venture company, you know.
49:55 Speaker 02 I, no, I had stock in Whole Foods.
49:57 Jen Cohen? Right. I mean, that's what I say. So you took a dollar salary. How much stock did you have when you sold it to Amazon? When you, when Amazon acquired it?
50:04 Speaker 02 I'm not, I'm not going to tell you how much stock I had or how much my net worth was simply because it just gets misunderstood and, and it's.
50:12 Jen Cohen? Everyone wants.
50:13 Speaker 02 I remember telling one guy, one of my friends asked me my net worth one time and I told him and he says, "That's it? For all you did with Whole Foods?"
50:19 Jen Cohen? Mm hmm.
50:20 Speaker 02 And I said, "Are you kidding? I'm fabulously wealthy. There's nothing I can't do in life." And so it's always a good question to ask yourself, how much do you really need? In fact, I want to tell you a story. This is one of my favorite stories. You might have heard this one. Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22, were good friends?
50:36 Jen Cohen? No.
50:37 Speaker 02 They were good friends and they were both writers. So they're at this party on Long Island and at a hedge fund, at a party and they're there and Vonnegut was needling Heller. He says, "So Joe, you know, the guy that owns this place, he makes more money in a day than you've made for all the books you sold of Catch 22 and all your other, all your other books combined. Every single day he makes more money than you do. What do you think about that?" And Heller thinks about it for a few minutes or minute or so and he says, "Well, Kurt, I've got one thing he'll never have." And he said, "What's that?" "I have enough."
51:20 Jen Cohen? That's a good story.
51:22 Speaker 02 It's a good story, right? Good story. And that's how I feel. I have enough.
51:26 Jen Cohen? That's a real... You know, you don't hear that very often, right? When you have people like, someone like you who created like, you know, it's like a massive household brand, right? Like it's Starbucks, Whole Foods. Like everyone knows it. The assumption is you walked away with a lot of money.
51:42 Speaker 02 I did.
51:43 Jen Cohen? And you did. Was... No, I was gonna say. I know. But the fact that like the way... I guess it's... This plays maybe into the conscious capitalism.
51:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, sure.
51:52 Jen Cohen? Thing, right?
51:52 Speaker 02 Same principle.
51:53 Jen Cohen? Same principle. Well, could you talk about that? Could you tell people what that is? What that means? How do you define conscious capitalism?
51:59 Speaker 02 Conscious capitalism in... For the record, I've co-authored a book. It came out in 2013 with Raj Sessodia, and we're working on a second edition of it right now.
52:09 Jen Cohen? Oh, you are?
52:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, it came out 12 years ago. It needs to be updated. So conscious capitalism means that there are four pillars to it. The first pillar is every business has the potential to have a higher purpose besides just making money. And that's the biggest misunderstanding people have about business. They think it's just all about the money. It's all about profit. And that's why business and capitalism have bad brands, you might say. But in fact, the best way to understand the purpose is to use an analogy or a metaphor. Let's take my body or your body. My body has to produce red blood cells or I die. No red blood cells, I'm dead. But it doesn't follow because I need to have red blood cells and the purpose of my life is to produce red blood cells.
52:52 Speaker 02 Business, similarly, business has to make a profit or it dies. It doesn't have the money to sustain itself. It can't meet payroll. It can't pay for repairs. It has to make money or it dies. But that doesn't mean that's why it exists. It does not exist to primarily make money. That's a byproduct. It exists always to create value for its customers. That's why it exists. And the higher purpose is involved in that. So for example, Whole Foods' higher purpose, which we articulated, is to nourish people and the planet. That's our purpose, to sell the highest quality natural and organic foods possible, help nourish people, help them be the healthiest version of themselves. And if we do that well, profits result in that. So that's the first thing.
53:34 Speaker 02 Purpose is very important. First principle of conscious capital. Second one is all the stakeholders matter. What's a stakeholder? Well, stakeholder is somebody that has a stake in the business, who's voluntarily trading with the business for mutual gain. So like customers are trading with the business. You go to Air One, you pay $25 for a smoothie. They didn't make you buy that smoothie. You did it because you wanted to and so you made a trade voluntarily for your own mutual gain. Similarly, employees or team members, they work, they trade their labor and their time and their creativity and their energy for paycheck or for other types of compensation, benefits and whatnot. They don't have to work there.
54:17 Speaker 02 In fact, there's lots of other jobs they potentially could do in a competitive marketplace. So they do it for their mutual gain. Similarly with suppliers, they don't have to supply. They don't, you know, they'll like you. They don't have to trade with you at all. Their trading is always voluntary for mutual gain. Same thing with investors. They don't have to invest their capital. Communities that we're part of. So all the stakeholders matter. And so stakeholders, once you realize that, then you can see, wow, they're all interdependent. They're all connected together. Can we create strategies where all the stakeholders are simultaneously winning? Customers are benefiting, suppliers are benefiting, employees are benefiting, investors are benefiting, a win-win-win. That's the beautiful thing about business and capitalism, which people don't understand.
54:59 Speaker 02 It has the potential to be a win-win-win system that has an upward spiral indefinitely. That's why capitalism has led to so much progress in the world. It's totally misunderstood. It's been branded by its enemies, the Marxists, the socialists, wrongly and inaccurately. Third principle, leadership. We need leaders who are conscious, that have a higher purpose themselves to, not just to line their pockets and their own compensation. They're there to serve that business and make it a better business and serve all the stakeholders. And then the fourth principle is culture. We spend a lot of our lives at work. Culture matters. We have to create cultures that allow human beings to flourish and be happy and where they can find meaning and purpose and love.
55:40 Speaker 02 I always say that at Whole Foods, if you give people two things, they want to work for you forever. Give them purpose and give them love. That's what we most crave for. And by the way, that's why knowing when you have enough money is important. Because people chase after money, fame, and power. Because they think if they have those, they will get love. No. And those are very addicting. You can get addicted to any of those. You don't have to be addicted to them. But the people I know that chase after those things, they find eventually that it doesn't, no matter how famous they get, or how powerful they get, or how wealthy they get, it doesn't fill the void in the heart, which only love can fulfill. So that's what we should chase after is love, not money, power, and wealth. So, anyway, that's conscious capitalism in a nutshell.
56:25 Jen Cohen? The one that you just said, though, I think is so true and so overlooked and underrated. Because we're living in a world that values those things, money and power.
56:36 Speaker 02 We value those because we think if we have those, we'll be happy.
56:40 Jen Cohen? Right. But there's been so, you know, no matter how many times people say that doesn't bring happiness, it doesn't seem to penetrate or resonate. People still chase it.
56:48 Speaker 02 Because what you'll get when you have those things is you'll have some admiration.
56:52 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
56:52 Speaker 02 You'll have some respect. You'll have a lot of envy too, though. The more successful you are, the more envy that you create, people that want to tear you down. But admiration or respect is not the same thing as love.
57:05 Jen Cohen? Nope.
57:05 Speaker 02 Love comes from intimacy. It comes from friendship, from really being connected and intimate with somebody. We're trusting someone and loving. As you love, it returns back to you. So, we chase after the wrong things. You might say, false idols.
57:18 Jen Cohen? Yeah. How did you kind of steer away from that? I mean, you seem to be, how long have you been married?
57:25 Speaker 02 Thirty-five years.
57:25 Jen Cohen? Thirty-five years. I would imagine after you sold Whole Foods, or people, or being the CEO and founder of Whole Foods, you're probably surrounded by a lot of people who are very, who admire you, right? How do you kind of like create a life of meaning and purpose and of authenticity? When you can be surrounded by so much of that other stuff?
57:46 Speaker 02 You know, I always say that you know who your true friends are twice in your life, or at two extremes.
57:52 Jen Cohen? Right.
57:52 Speaker 02 You know who your true friends are when you are very successful. Because your true friends are really happy for you. They don't envy you. They see your success as their own success. Those are true friends. The other friends may not be your friends at all. They may secretly be wanting you to fall and fail. So you have to pay a lot of attention to be conscious. It's like you need to have a little bit of sensitivity to envy. If your friends envy you, they're probably not really true friends.
58:20 Jen Cohen? But a lot of times, a lot of times, people feign friend. They pretend.
58:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know, but you have to be discerning.
58:26 Jen Cohen? Discerning, that's the one. You've got to be discerning.
58:28 Speaker 02 The other time you know your true friends are is when the bad times come.
58:32 Jen Cohen? Yeah, that's for sure.
58:33 Speaker 02 Because your true friends really care about you and they're down there in the gutter with you or in the hard times with you. They're not secretly chortling happy, oh, finally she got hers or he got his. They're there and you can tell. You can tell they genuinely love you and they care for you and they want to help you.
58:49 Jen Cohen? Right.
58:50 Speaker 02 So it's kind of interesting. At the best of times and the worst of times is when our true friends reveal themselves.
58:56 Jen Cohen? Totally.
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1:00:29 Jen Cohen? You said your dad was your mentor for the first 16 years.
1:00:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:32 Jen Cohen? What were a couple of the big lessons that he instilled upon you or taught you that helped you?
1:00:38 Speaker 02 One of the first things my dad taught me was the best, the best capital you'll ever have in your business is the money that you retain from making money. And that's so, and that's so different than what the venture capitalists do today with these, with these startups. The venture capitalists are not necessarily your friends at all.
1:00:56 Jen Cohen? No.
1:00:56 Speaker 02 And they may not have your best interests at heart. They're, they have a business model where they, it's called a block, there's the blockbuster business model. One runaway successful idea is all they need to make billions of dollars. And so they can have a lot of failures. So they, they try to, they try to scale a lot of these businesses too quickly. And they tell them it's okay to lose money. We'll just keep raising the price round after round. And guess what? If you don't scale well, or if you start to lose money, maybe you can't get a higher price. Then you gotta, then the, then the entrepreneurs get diluted and they get a cram down round and they may get forced out and they bring in professional management to take their place.
1:01:41 Speaker 02 So my dad taught me the best capital you'll ever have is the money that you make and then invest it back in the business. So from very early on, we never tried to scale Whole Foods so much as we just tried to be successful and we kept reinvesting the money.
1:01:56 Jen Cohen? The money.
1:01:56 Speaker 02 Store after store after store. That was a very big lesson. And the second lesson he really taught me was you've got to be able to build a really good team. And the best team, that means you have to be sort of very self-aware, Jen. It's like, you gotta be know what you're good at, but more importantly, you gotta know what you're not good at. And one of the things I've noticed about entrepreneurs that become successful is their, their egos can get really inflated and it's like they think they're good at everything. You know, I was so bad at so many things that I needed to build a good team around me to compensate for all my weaknesses. And so don't hire and promote people that are just like yourself. You've already got that covered. You need to hire and promote people.
1:02:37 Speaker 02 Who have the qualities and skills that you don't have in the same degree. Because I'm a firm believer, our culture makes heroes out of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and I mean, all those guys, they're all brilliant people. But they also build great teams and those teams are what make the business successful. Entrepreneurs, the driver, but you're no better than your team.
1:03:01 Jen Cohen? Would you say one of your strongest skills was your ability to build really good teams underneath you?
1:03:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:03:07 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:03:07 Speaker 02 I do.
1:03:08 Jen Cohen? What are some other, what other skills would you say are you, what are your main?
1:03:13 Speaker 02 Well, so going along with that, well, I have a very strong sense of purpose.
1:03:17 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:03:17 Speaker 02 And I can infuse purpose and help other people to see purpose. I have a certain charisma in that regard. And because I'm so passionate and I'm an intense guy, people are very attracted to passion in general. Anybody that's passionate about something, I find it fascinating, whatever, you know?
1:03:36 Jen Cohen? No matter what it is.
1:03:36 Speaker 02 No matter what it is.
1:03:37 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:03:37 Speaker 02 They could be just a plumber, but he's really in there just working away and you can see that they're, they're figuring it out, they're solving it. It's like, wow, you're watching a master craftsman at work here. It's fascinating.
1:03:50 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:03:51 Speaker 02 And, and great actors, great, any, any type of creative person, I just find it very, very interesting. I find the people that are passionate to be the most people I most admire in the world.
1:04:01 Jen Cohen? Yeah, and people follow passion.
1:04:04 Speaker 02 They do.
1:04:04 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:04:04 Speaker 02 They do, because it helps, passion, passion comes from purpose for the most part. It's kind of connected.
1:04:09 Jen Cohen? So you think that your, your, your strongest skill set is building great, great, great people and teams underneath you? Having a lot of passion and purpose and being able to instill that and like, give, kind of like, invigorate that in others, basically?
1:04:23 Speaker 02 I think a lot of entrepreneurs have those skills. I don't think those are, I think Elon Musk has that. I think Jeff Bezos, I mean, Bezos has it. I know Steve Jobs definitely have it.
1:04:33 Jen Cohen? Well, he had it for sure.
1:04:34 Speaker 02 Yes, for sure.
1:04:34 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:04:34 Speaker 02 So, but that doesn't mean all entrepreneurs are like that. But a lot of them are these intense people that are very mission driven. And people follow them because they, you know, I remember, you know, you heard. Ever read the story about how Steve Jobs got John Sculley, who ultimately replaced him in Apple, the first guy around to work for him?
1:04:54 Jen Cohen? No, what happened?
1:04:54 Speaker 02 They really wanted to bring in this, the board was pressuring Steve to bring in a professional manager. So this guy was like president of Pepsi.
1:05:02 Jen Cohen? Oh, okay.
1:05:02 Speaker 02 So he was a big corporate, you know, Apple was kind of a pipsqueak company back then. His name was John Sculley. So, so Steve is putting, putting the pressure on him that Sculley is gonna have to give up. Big, big, you know, to come in as the number two guy under Steve. And, you know, it was a big step down, you might say, and, and so how does, you know, what did Steve convince him? He says, so John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water to people? Or do you want to come in and change the world? Because that's what we're doing. We're gonna change the world. Which do you prefer? Sugar water salesman or world changer?
1:05:38 Speaker 02 He had Sculley with that, with that.
1:05:40 Jen Cohen? Really? That's, I think I did hear that before. That's a really good story, though. But I remember hearing that now that you said it. So let me ask you something, because then you stepped down from Whole Foods. You're 70 years old, you said. Why, like, why, why didn't you just retire and go enjoy your life? Like, why did you think, okay, now I just, you know, I, I'm leaving Whole Foods. I'm gonna now start like a health and wellness facility, uh, chain or whatever.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 It's a good, good question and definitely, believe me, one I've thought all about.
1:06:11 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:06:12 Speaker 02 So, so imagine for a moment that you knew how to help thousands of people, maybe millions of people in the long run, live a healthier, more vital, longer life. And you did nothing. You just enjoyed the rest of your life. When you got to the end of your life, how would you feel? I know I can help thousands of people be healthier. And maybe over time, after I'm long gone, love life continues to grow and develop, maybe millions of people. I can't not do it. I have to.
1:06:42 Jen Cohen? Didn't you do that already with Whole Foods? I mean, people probably, you disrupted that market, right? So you kind of did that in a big way.
1:06:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, you know, I could have, in my book, The Whole Story, I talk about one of my co-founders who didn't want us to grow past one store. No, you laugh now. That first store was a goldmine.
1:07:01 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I said that.
1:07:03 Speaker 02 And I wanted to grow. And he said, John, why do we want to grow? We've got this one store. All we have to do is not blow it. We're gonna all die really rich. Let's just keep doing it. We don't have to do anything else. Let's just live the good life. And I said, Mark, I don't want to do that. That's gonna be boring. I don't want to do that. I want to, I want to build a company. I want to open, I want to open Whole Foods markets everywhere. I want to help people eat healthier all around the country. And he says, that's ridiculous. We'll, we'll probably fail. He ended up quitting. A, a, a few years later, we all, we'd gotten up to four stores and we were struggling because the new stores didn't start as well. And so we had a, some growing pains, you might say. And he was so disgusted with me, he quit,
1:07:47 Speaker 02 sold all his stock for a couple hundred thousand bucks and opened up a pizza restaurant. That was not a good financial decision on his part.
1:07:55 Jen Cohen? It was not. No, it was not. So how involved are you? It's called, it's called Love Life. How involved are you? Are you really involved? Are you tangentially involved? What's your, what's your?
1:08:08 Speaker 02 No good question.
1:08:09 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:08:10 Speaker 02 So I am CEO. I own about 70% of the stock from the capital that I put in. But it is in LA and I'm in Austin.
1:08:19 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:08:19 Speaker 02 So Michael Robertson is the operator that's there, running it. And so he's got chief responsibility for it. So I'm, I'm involved in all the major strategic decisions. I'm involved in the, we have regular meetings, executive team meetings. So I, a lot of the, the vision is, that is not solely mine, but I was the driver of the vision and what we're trying to do. It was my idea. I, I'm the ultimate creator, although I have other co-founders. But I was the one that brought everybody. Together entrepreneurs bring people together and create enterprises.
1:08:53 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:08:53 Speaker 02 So I'm, I like to say that I brought money, wisdom, passion. But I'm not going to work as hard at Love Life as I did at Whole Foods Market. I don't have that, I don't, I'm, you know, I'm going to be seventy two years old in a month. So while I'm vital and healthy, I just, I just don't, I'm not young. So I can't do the things that I could do in my twenties and thirties, forties. That's just reality. So I'm somewhere between deeply involved and tangentially evolved, someplace in between.
1:09:26 Jen Cohen? In between that.
1:09:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. But I think about Love Life, I mean, I think about it a lot every single day. So it's, it's, it is the main thing. It's the main focus of my life besides my marriage.
1:09:37 Jen Cohen? How would you describe it though? Are you trying to build a brand around like, it's not a fitness, it's like kind of like a wellness facility?
1:09:45 Speaker 02 It's a one stop holistic health club, all under one roof. Remember, it's similar to Whole Foods in this regard. When Whole Foods opened up, there weren't any other national food supermarkets. They were small stores and you had to go shop somewhere else. Our idea was we're going to be one stop shopper for anybody interested in natural and organic foods. They don't need to go to any other store. People that are making this as lifestyle choice can just shop at Whole Foods. That was a, an original idea, it may seem trivial now, but nobody believed that would work fifty years ago. Yeah, they all thought it was going to fail. And that's entrepreneurs always climb over a wall of skepticism and doubt. So we're creating a one stop holistic health center. Everything you want is at, is at Love Life.
1:10:29 Speaker 02 We've got the gym, we've got Pilates, we've got yoga, we've got physical therapy, we've got pickleball, we've got a restaurant. We've got a spa, we have primary healthcare, we have complete testing protocols so we can find out where you are. We are doing everything, it's a club, it's, it's, we want it to be ultimately become a social club like a Soho House, except all around wellness and health. We've got all the bio hacks, we have all the recovery stuff. And the fascinating thing, Jen, is because of the boomers are aging, they're interested in longevity. X's are interested in that, too. But now you have so much technology that's intervening in so many ways. We have testing's getting better. Measurements are getting better. I mean, think about AI. In five years, you know, like you see these meta glasses.
1:11:13 Speaker 02 Five years from now, maybe less, we'll be having a wearable that's plugged into us. Maybe, maybe it's an earring. It might even be an earring that's inserted into, it's connected to our blood. And it's an AI there that we're going to talk to. And we, you don't have to look at your phone anymore because the AI will do, do anything you want.
1:11:32 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:11:32 Speaker 02 And it'll also be monitoring you. It's like it'll say, uh, uh, Jen, your pulse rate's just gone up 20 points. What's going on here? Are you, are you okay? Or your blood pressure, it just really, really zoomed up. I want you to take some deep breaths, relax, tell me what's going on. So I just think we're going to have this AI integrated in our wellness and health. We're going to become much more conscious. And I, I, I really think we're on the cusp of sort of a wellness, health revolution that's going to change the world. And I'd like Love Life to be part of that.
1:12:02 Jen Cohen? Yeah, there's so many different modalities now and things like that. It's such a noisy market.
1:12:07 Speaker 02 It is, it's incredible.
1:12:08 Jen Cohen? It's very crazy. It's incredible. It's become like, you know, fitness, the wellness business is like a trillion dollar business. I mean, you know, all this. I think people are very confused because I don't know what to list. Like when there's so much noise, everything becomes just.
1:12:24 Speaker 02 Well, one of the, one of the reasons that you go to a place like Love Life is we're going to be a good editor for you. We'll, we'll be doing the research and figuring it out, just like Whole Foods was an editor for natural organic foods.
1:12:35 Jen Cohen? Do you, like, what's your forecast? Like, do you want to build out like one a year? What's your plan?
1:12:40 Speaker 02 Our first plan is to get this one profitable.
1:12:42 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:12:42 Speaker 02 And we're probably a year away from that. And then, and we're, but even before then, we're looking for a second location, which we want to really do in Austin. Cause that's where I live.
1:12:51 Jen Cohen? That's right.
1:12:52 Speaker 02 Headquartered. We can probably finance that separately if we find, but I'm very picky about locations.
1:12:57 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:12:58 Speaker 02 I'm very proud of the fact, the first 250 locations Whole Foods opened up were all successful.
1:13:03 Jen Cohen? Well, I was going to say you picked, like you picked locations. Great. Like I thought maybe when I went to Love Life, it was right beside that Whole Foods, like I was saying. Was that purposeful?
1:13:12 Speaker 02 Like it was like, yeah. Purposeful.
1:13:13 Jen Cohen? It was like in the same mall.
1:13:15 Speaker 02 I happen to know where all Whole Foods Market's best stores are.
1:13:18 Jen Cohen? Right. That must be one of the top stores, huh?
1:13:20 Speaker 02 It's, it's like number three in Southern California.
1:13:22 Jen Cohen? It is, right? Because it's so pretty, it's so nice.
1:13:25 Speaker 02 You know, Aragon opened up just down the road.
1:13:27 Jen Cohen? Oh, I saw that.
1:13:28 Speaker 02 I haven't been in there yet, but I need to go check it out.
1:13:30 Jen Cohen? I wonder if that's gonna, what's gonna, that's gonna do for business.
1:13:33 Speaker 02 I don't either. I don't know.
1:13:34 Jen Cohen? And you don't care.
1:13:35 Speaker 02 Uh, well, I, I could guess my daughter, I always gonna care about the well-being of my daughter, but I'm not interfering with her life anymore.
1:13:42 Jen Cohen? Exactly.
1:13:42 Speaker 02 If she wants to see me, she knows where I am.
1:13:45 Jen Cohen? That's a, that is a great, that's a, that's a great, I love that point. You're right. You, you married off your daughter to the richest man in the world. That's a great one. I'm just trying to think of something else I was gonna ask you, which I never did before about Whole Foods, because you're a vegetarian, right?
1:14:00 Speaker 02 Vegan.
1:14:01 Jen Cohen? Vegan?
1:14:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:14:02 Jen Cohen? So Whole Foods sells, of course, you know, meat and all the things, not vegan. Was that also, like, again, like, like, but most people are-
1:14:12 Speaker 02 Do you remember that lesson I told you I learned with Safer Way?
1:14:14 Jen Cohen? Yeah, Safer Way.
1:14:15 Speaker 02 It was a vegetarian store.
1:14:16 Jen Cohen? Yes.
1:14:17 Speaker 02 It just didn't do very much business.
1:14:18 Jen Cohen? It didn't sell.
1:14:18 Speaker 02 No.
1:14:19 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:14:19 Speaker 02 And, uh, Love Life opened a vegan restaurant here, uh, a few, uh-
1:14:26 Jen Cohen? They did?
1:14:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, uh, about, almost, is it two years ago? Three years, two or three years ago, I can't remember. Yes, it was in, uh, Culver City. We were gonna have the first Love Life in Culver City.
1:14:36 Jen Cohen? Oh, okay. Did you own that?
1:14:38 Speaker 02 Uh, yes.
1:14:38 Jen Cohen? Okay.
1:14:39 Speaker 02 It was called Love Life. And so what happened there is very interesting. We thought it was gonna be a great location. We were doing the restaurant first, and we're gonna open the medical and wellness center after that. And we had a corner location. It's where HBO's headquartered.
1:14:52 Jen Cohen? Hmm.
1:14:53 Speaker 02 Apple TV's across the street, Sony, Amazon Studios, they're all within a mile of that location. Netflix within a mile of that location. So this was like streaming headquarters for the whole United States. Guess what happened after COVID? Nobody came back to work.
1:15:09 Jen Cohen? Nobody came back.
1:15:09 Speaker 02 And so there was, it was a ghost town there. There was nobody, HBO's was just empty. Apple was gonna build another 575,000 square feet onto that. They canceled that project.
1:15:23 Jen Cohen? Wow.
1:15:23 Speaker 02 So- Pretty much every retailer in that center has failed now. And the other restaurant that opened up also failed. So we had to walk away from it, canceled out. So that was a big write off for us. We lost a lot of money there, but it was also a vegan restaurant. And so the little cafe we have in El Segundo is not vegan.
1:15:43 Jen Cohen? No, it's not.
1:15:43 Speaker 02 No.
1:15:44 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:15:44 Speaker 02 It's, it's, we call it, I call it plant four. It's got a lot of plant, but you can add in grass fed beef. I'll get all our meat from Whole Foods, by the way.
1:15:52 Jen Cohen? Oh, you do?
1:15:52 Speaker 02 Yes, it meets Whole Foods markets standards and we purchase it from Whole Foods.
1:15:56 Jen Cohen? Okay, because yeah, you can, the whole computer system I saw that was very, it was really good because you can like, take out any ingredient, it tells you how many calories and how much fat. It was a very savvy technology there.
1:16:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, thank you. So the moral of the story is, is you have to meet the market where you find it. You can't, if you're an entrepreneur, you can't force your own values on other people. And the reality is, much as I don't like it, only half, one percent of the population of the United States is vegan. That's so tiny.
1:16:28 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:16:29 Speaker 02 Vegan restaurants are failing everywhere in Los Angeles right now. I don't know if you know, restaurants in general are failing, but the vegan restaurants are just going out of business. Ones I love, like Real Food Daily, which I always came here to eat.
1:16:38 Jen Cohen? Yeah, is it going out of business?
1:16:40 Speaker 02 They're not, they don't have anything open anymore.
1:16:42 Jen Cohen? I thought they have one on Los Yenega.
1:16:44 Speaker 02 Nope, that's closed. I know, I know, because I wanted to go there.
1:16:47 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:16:48 Speaker 02 It's closed.
1:16:49 Jen Cohen? But you know what's interesting? That was really popular for a hot minute.
1:16:52 Speaker 02 LA was, along with New York, was kind of the vegan restaurant capital of the United States. But New York's losing them too. I think the younger generation, they're, they're back to the protein.
1:17:02 Jen Cohen? Protein, protein, yeah, of course. I mean, it's all about protein. Like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, social, TikTok, everything is about eating more protein, protein, protein, protein.
1:17:11 Speaker 02 You know, if I can just take one minute to critique the protein obsession.
1:17:15 Jen Cohen? Please, go ahead.
1:17:16 Speaker 02 So, you know, it's three macronutrients that our bodies need, right? There are calories, you get protein, carbohydrates and fat. And Americans are obsessed. We eat more, we eat more protein than any other country in the world. More protein than any other country in the world. We have the, we spend more money on healthcare than any country in the world and we rank. Forty eight in longevity. Have you ever heard of anybody having a protein deficiency?
1:17:39 Jen Cohen? No, in fact, actually, you also, I'm going to give you another factoid to add to that. People's liver now, more than ever, is more toxic, more, there's, there's, there's more strain. All these liver cleanses and liver companies are coming out with things because people are eating so much protein. Your body, I think, can't even digest the amount of protein.
1:17:59 Speaker 02 So here's what else people don't know what happens to these, these three macronutrients when you eat them. So extra fat that you eat that your body doesn't need, it just becomes fat on your body. Okay, the extra carbohydrates that you consume, they're the choice of energy that your body uses first. So first it burns carbohydrates for energy. Any excess carbs gets translated into glycogen and stored in glycogen. And then any, any, and then excess carbs beyond that will raise your, your temperature at night when you're sleeping. So it burns off and if it gets past then, then it'll be added to fat. Protein, on the other hand, cannot be saved by the body. You cannot save protein.
1:18:39 Speaker 02 So the protein that you don't use in the day, doesn't go into some protein repositories, you can use it the next day. If you don't need it to grow your hair, your fingernails, or repair bones, or whatever you would need to do with protein, new cells. It's just, it's just goes through a very complicated process to de, to basically turn it into something else. So it can be eliminated from the body. This, this obsession with protein comes from partly the meat industry and partly health influencers like Peter Attia, for example. And Max Huberman, never.
1:19:12 Jen Cohen? You mean Andrew Huberman?
1:19:13 Speaker 02 Andrew Huberman, they're, sorry, they're pushing, and I like, I like both those guys. I read their book, I read, I listened to Huberman's podcast and I like Peter Attia, he lives in Austin. But I think they're misguiding people on the protein. They just, they're not nutritionists themselves and I don't think they're really following the science very carefully.
1:19:31 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I mean, there's a whole thing right now, you've got two camps, right? You have the, like, you know, the animal protein and you have the vegan people and they all go, like, they butt heads a lot.
1:19:41 Speaker 02 Well, there's not much of a vegan, there's not a vegan camp, because there's, there's, there's too few of them.
1:19:46 Jen Cohen? Yeah. Too few of them.
1:19:48 Speaker 02 And I'm certainly not, I am not a, I'm an ethical vegan, but I'm not pushing that on anybody else. And I, I don't, I think, you know, I'm, I'm kind of believing the blue zones diet, that you mostly eat plants.
1:20:00 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:20:01 Speaker 02 That's how we evolved, but we also didn't evolve as vegans. We evolved as, as maybe if you go back far enough to the, the gorillas, they're vegan. Chimpanzees are 98% vegan.
1:20:12 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:20:12 Speaker 02 In general, humans grew up eating, hunting and gathering, mostly gathering, but they ate some animal food. So I think that's part of our genetic structure. You can't, it's hard to get B12. We, we don't know of a single historical culture or tribe that was strictly vegan.
1:20:27 Jen Cohen? So what do you eat? What's your day to day? What do you, what's your diet like?
1:20:30 Speaker 02 I follow, we'll call it a whole foods, plant-based diet, meaning I try to eat as few processed foods as possible. And I start out the day with a huge, I make a whole Vitamix, a smoothie.
1:20:43 Jen Cohen? Hmm.
1:20:43 Speaker 02 It's half vegetables and half fruits. I really believe, when people are obsessed about protein, did you know only about 1% of Americans eat enough fiber?
1:20:52 Jen Cohen? Yeah. By the way, I was just going to tell you, you know, fiber, 90% of Americans don't eat enough fiber.
1:20:58 Speaker 02 I think it's more than that.
1:20:59 Jen Cohen? Oh, really? I just thought, I, I just did a whole thing on fiber yesterday because I thought it's, I, I did a whole thing.
1:21:04 Speaker 02 Let's say it's 90%, fine. That means only 10% get enough fiber.
1:21:08 Jen Cohen? That's still very low.
1:21:09 Speaker 02 And who doesn't get enough protein?
1:21:10 Jen Cohen? I know.
1:21:11 Speaker 02 So it's fiber is what, when people say, where do you get your protein? My, my answer now is I get it from pretty much every food I eat. Where do you get your fiber from? Because you will not get any fiber from animal foods.
1:21:22 Jen Cohen? You get your fiber from your, your vegetables and your fruit?
1:21:25 Speaker 02 And whole grains and beans.
1:21:26 Jen Cohen? And whole grains and beans, yeah.
1:21:27 Speaker 02 And some nuts and seeds too.
1:21:28 Jen Cohen? So that's like a total other area that people are like, are, their gut health is a wreck because they're not eating enough fiber.
1:21:34 Speaker 02 And antibiotics also.
1:21:35 Jen Cohen? Yeah, and antibiotics, exactly. But I, I think protein though, especially at like, you know, middle, middle age, you know, you're, you're talking about to keep on lean muscle mass and to satiate your hunger and all these things. There's like a huge push for protein, but things in life, as you know, ebb and flow, right? Now it's all about protein. In a year from now, it's going to be all about something else. And that's what happens.
1:21:58 Speaker 02 You know what I call, I call the low carb diet? I call it the zombie diet.
1:22:02 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:22:02 Speaker 02 Because no matter how many times it gets killed, it comes back in a new form.
1:22:07 Jen Cohen? Oh my God, think about the Atkins diet.
1:22:10 Speaker 02 South Beach diet.
1:22:11 Jen Cohen? South Beach diet, keto.
1:22:14 Speaker 02 Paleo.
1:22:15 Jen Cohen? Paleo. I mean, it's all the same.
1:22:17 Speaker 02 Now, carnivore diet.
1:22:18 Jen Cohen? Carnivore diet. It's all the same.
1:22:21 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:22:21 Jen Cohen? And you know, from your Whole Foods days, like, I bet one of your biggest moneymakers was protein. Anything protein.
1:22:27 Speaker 02 It is. Exactly. It's still, if you look at sports nutrition, it still leads the category in our nutrition departments for sports nutrition, which is focused around protein and collagen.
1:22:39 Jen Cohen? Protein and collagen.
1:22:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:22:41 Jen Cohen? Do you, um, what else do you eat then? What do you eat for lunch and dinner and?
1:22:46 Speaker 02 So I, my favorite food, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I probably get fifteen to twenty servings of fruits and vegetables a day. So I eat a lot. Number two, that, you look at you, look how thin and glowing you are.
1:22:58 Jen Cohen? Oh, gosh, thank you. I'm like normal thin, but yeah, I eat a lot of it. I don't know what people, this whole nonsense about don't eat fruit is such a load of crap.
1:23:07 Speaker 02 No, it's fruits that, probably the single thing people could do to improve their health the most would be to increase their fruit consumption. Do you know, there was a study done where people ate nothing but fruit for ninety days in a controlled, where they weren't even, they were locked up for ninety days. Do you think their blood sugar went up? No, their blood sugar went down. Did they gain weight? No, they lost weight. They get as much fruit as they want. It can only be fruit. And, and the, and then, and their health got better and almost every one of their biometrics improved.
1:23:37 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:23:37 Speaker 02 Every one of them did improve. And so, but the funny thing is, I tell the story is because they set a world record. There's never been those large bowel movements in any controlled study before.
1:23:47 Jen Cohen? Are you serious? I'm sure. Well, think of, I mean, listen, I totally, I would agree. And number one, I just think that fruit is such a, it's become like this villain. It's been villainized. It's so stupid. Number one.
1:24:00 Speaker 02 Because it's sugar. They think it's sugar.
1:24:02 Jen Cohen? Because of the sugar. I haven't seen any obese person because they ate too many grapes.
1:24:06 Speaker 02 Oh, I have friends that are, that are, that are strictly fruitarians.
1:24:10 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I'm sure.
1:24:11 Speaker 02 And they're very thin.
1:24:12 Jen Cohen? And they're very thin. Because no matter what, like.
1:24:15 Speaker 02 Well, here's one way to think about it. So, a pound of vegetables, if you eat a pound of vegetables, you're getting between ninety and a hundred calories on average. If you eat a pound of fruit, you're getting about 300 calories. So to get 2,000 calories of fruit, you'd have to eat seven or eight pounds of fruit a day. That's a lot.
1:24:33 Jen Cohen? That's a lot. I can do it.
1:24:34 Speaker 02 If you, all you ate was vegetables, you'd literally starve to death because you couldn't get enough calories.
1:24:39 Jen Cohen? I know. Although I will say, I'm like, I'm a massive eater. I can eat four pounds of grapes in a heartbeat. Like, literally, but.
1:24:45 Speaker 02 How much, how many calories are in a table, tablespoon of oil?
1:24:49 Jen Cohen? Probably, isn't it like a hundred and twenty?
1:24:52 Speaker 02 Hundred and twenty, hundred and twenty calories.
1:24:54 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:24:54 Speaker 02 That's the most calorie dense food that we have. If you, if you show a plot for the obesity rate in America, it totally correlates with oil consumption.
1:25:02 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:25:03 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. Absolutely. Sugar, believe it or not, because of all the negative propaganda, sugar consumption has, has, has leveled off and began to decline.
1:25:11 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:25:12 Speaker 02 But oil consumption continues to go up and so does weight.
1:25:15 Jen Cohen? That's interesting. I mean, are you talking seed oils?
1:25:18 Speaker 02 All oils.
1:25:18 Jen Cohen? All oils. Sugar's always a scapegoat, though, but having a sugar from a Mars bar is very different than having an apple or an orange.
1:25:25 Speaker 02 Oh.
1:25:26 Jen Cohen? I mean.
1:25:27 Speaker 02 Studies show, again, because of the fiber that comes along with the fruit.
1:25:30 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:25:31 Speaker 02 And also particularly berries. Did you know berries are like the super, superfood fruits? Because the pectin, the pectin in the berries slows down tremendously absorption of the sugar into the body.
1:25:42 Jen Cohen? Oh, yeah.
1:25:43 Speaker 02 I've worn, I've, I've eaten strictly like fruits all day with a continuous glucose monitor on, and my blood sugar never spiked above.
1:25:50 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:25:51 Speaker 02 Healthy, normal. No.
1:25:52 Jen Cohen? See, I know, you're, you're preaching to the choir. I'm a massive fruit consumer. In fact, like, I can eat, like, again, I was at Whole Foods, sorry to say, yesterday.
1:26:01 Speaker 02 I'm sorry to say.
1:26:02 Jen Cohen? I'm sorry to say. I, I spent like $25 on cherries. I'm telling you.
1:26:07 Speaker 02 God, the cherries this year are so great.
1:26:09 Jen Cohen? They're delicious. I've been eating them like crazy. I'm, I'm, but that's my thing, like, and I'm not, I'm, I'm not worried about getting fat from eating the fruit. I'm worried about getting fat from other things, like not moving enough and having, like you said, too much oil. You know, when I have this, people think that, oh, I'm gonna have a salad. It's very, it's very healthy. And they're using salad dressing. It can be 2,000 calories in salad dressing because of what we're talking about. 120 calories.
1:26:33 Speaker 02 I make, I make my own salad dressing. Dressings and they're delicious.
1:26:35 Jen Cohen? How do you make yours?
1:26:36 Speaker 02 Vitamix. You know, I can even tell you the principles of how to make a delicious salad.
1:26:40 Jen Cohen? Okay, tell me.
1:26:41 Speaker 02 So the first thing is you need some kind of fat. That's why they generally have oil.
1:26:45 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:26:45 Speaker 02 But a better, healthier fat will be either nuts and seeds or avocados.
1:26:49 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:26:50 Speaker 02 So first you have a fat, then you have to add some kind of acid to it.
1:26:53 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:26:53 Speaker 02 Which could be vinegar, like a good balsamic vinegar, or it could be lime or lemon, even mustard.
1:26:59 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:27:00 Speaker 02 It could have vinegar in it. So then you have an acid. Then you want to have something that adds a little bit of salt to it. I don't, you know, you don't want it to be too salty, but you want it to be a little bit of salty, which you could get from soy sauce, tamari. Again, mustard would do for acid and salt. Add a little bit of salt and then you go either, then you either go savory or sweet. You go sweet if you add fruit to it, like blueberries or mangoes. And you go savory if you add herbs to it.
1:27:30 Jen Cohen? I love that.
1:27:31 Speaker 02 And so you, and then I've, I almost never make the same dressing twice.
1:27:36 Jen Cohen? That's so good.
1:27:37 Speaker 02 It takes five minutes to make the most delicious salad dressings you can possibly imagine. Nuts and seeds taste so much better than oil.
1:27:44 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:27:44 Speaker 02 So if you make it with almonds or walnuts or pecans or cashews or pistachios, and then you get the acid right. And then you can find, you can taste it and you can fine tune it. And then you add some kind of liquid to it, water, most likely. But you need to get the right consistency on it.
1:27:58 Jen Cohen? Yeah, it's all about the consistency. I always try to make salad dressings and I'm always off by a, by a little bit, you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not good at it.
1:28:06 Speaker 02 But did you, you can, here's the thing, if it's too thin, you just throw, throw a little bit of more nuts and seeds in it. And that will thicken it up. If it's too thick, you just add a little more liquid.
1:28:15 Jen Cohen? I'm gonna try one tonight.
1:28:16 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:28:17 Jen Cohen? I love that.
1:28:18 Speaker 02 Send me, send me an email or something to how it goes.
1:28:20 Jen Cohen? I'm a hundred percent I'm going to. This has been very fun. Thank you for being on the show.
1:28:24 Speaker 02 It's been fun. Wow, it's been fun, Jen. You're a very interesting person. I really enjoyed talking with you.
1:28:27 Jen Cohen? You're very interesting and I'm so happy we finally got this on the books because I said I, I was very, I really wanted to interview you for so long. And I wish you so much luck with Love Life.
1:28:37 Speaker 02 Thanks.
1:28:37 Jen Cohen? It's beautiful. It's, by the way, guys, I went to see it, like I said, on this, just before. It's a beautiful facility. You have everything in there. And I, I think it's going to do really well. So.
1:28:47 Speaker 02 You know, even people that don't live close to love life, we have, we do have a medical only membership. So you can just join.
1:28:54 Jen Cohen? Oh.
1:28:55 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. You can just join and we'll still give you occasional pass if you just want to come down to see the doc or whatever. But once you get the, you go in and you do the test and you do the DEXA scan and we get your blood run and we do the, we do the gut test and we get you, we get all that back, then you can always just talk to your doctor.
1:29:11 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:29:12 Speaker 02 Uh, via on Zoom if you want to.
1:29:15 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:29:15 Speaker 02 So, and you, and so, and they can still create the optimum plan for you. And if you're ever in the area, you can still come in and use the facilities.
1:29:22 Jen Cohen? And the, and the real big selling feature is the pickleball court because that's of course.
1:29:27 Speaker 02 Do you like to play pickleball?
1:29:28 Jen Cohen? I, I, I prefer other sports, but I know that people love pickleball.
1:29:33 Speaker 02 I love pickleball.
1:29:34 Jen Cohen? Yeah, everybody loves pickleball. I, I, the reason why I don't love it yet is because I'm not good at it yet. I gotta keep on playing.
1:29:40 Speaker 02 Were you a tennis player?
1:29:41 Jen Cohen? I, I'm actually going to take, I'm taking tennis now. Yeah.
1:29:45 Speaker 02 Cause the tennis players are the ones that make the easiest transition to pickleball. But you know, here's the thing, you can have fun playing pickleball. The first time you play it, it's much easier to play than, it's kind of more like ping pong than it is tennis.
1:29:57 Jen Cohen? It is like ping pong.
1:29:58 Speaker 02 And, and then you just find people that are at your level.
1:30:00 Jen Cohen? That's the thing.
1:30:01 Speaker 02 It's no fun playing against somebody that's a lot better than you.
1:30:03 Jen Cohen? Exactly. That's what it is with any sport, right? You want to find somebody who's just as good or bad as you.
1:30:08 Speaker 02 Or just a little bit better than you.
1:30:10 Jen Cohen? A little bit better. Yeah.
1:30:11 Speaker 02 That's how, that's how you get better.
1:30:12 Jen Cohen? That's right. I was gonna say not, I was gonna say I'm gonna, I misspoke. It's not getting someone who's worse. It's someone getting a little bit better. And I think it's a great social thing, right? Like to get together and do something interactive versus just staring at each other and watch and like having a meal, like playing something together. It's like, it's a shared experience. I love it.
1:30:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. And.
1:30:31 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:30:31 Speaker 02 One of the reasons we put it into Love Life is pickleball's intensely social. When you play doubles, it's like you're bonding with the person on your team.
1:30:42 Jen Cohen? Exactly.
1:30:42 Speaker 02 And then you maybe switch teams and you're still bonded with that person on the other side.
1:30:47 Jen Cohen? I love it.
1:30:47 Speaker 02 But now you're bonding with the new person.
1:30:49 Jen Cohen? I totally agree.
1:30:49 Speaker 02 And so we're trying to build this community at Love Life and pickleball really helps that.
1:30:53 Jen Cohen? Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, if you live in LA, check out Love Life. And otherwise, again, thank you for being on this show.
1:31:02 Speaker 02 It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks so much, Jen.
1:31:04 Jen Cohen? Thank you.
Previous Episode 494: Adam Schafer: The Shocking Stat That Explains Why Most Trainers Stay Broke Next Episode 496: Dr. Michael Breus: The 4-7-8 Breathing Trick That Fixes Middle-of-the-Night Insomnia Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
