{"slug":"john-mackey-dropout-who-changed-america-eats","show_id":"davidsenra","title":"John Mackey: The Dropout Who Changed How America Eats","display_title":null,"title_orig":"David Senra × John Mackey","dek":"Whole Foods' moat was incumbent distraction, not patents: Walmart pulled supermarkets into a losing price war, giving it 20 to 25 years to scale unnoticed. Scale defended a copyable model; the 1992 IPO supplied acquisition currency and an escape hatch from VCs owning 34%. Mackey's regret over boom-time cost discipline remains a risk to compounding.","lang":"EN","date":"2026-01-04","published_at":"2026-01-04T13:00:54+00:00","duration_min":101,"source_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8zqsiePKsg","source_label":"YouTube","rss_url":null,"youtube_id":"U8zqsiePKsg","youtube_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8zqsiePKsg","thumbnail_url":null,"chips":["person:David Senra","person:John Mackey"],"provenance":[["SOURCE","YouTube captions"],["SYNTH","claude-fable-5"],["CLEAN","gpt-5.6-luna"],["VERIFY","gpt-5.6-luna"],["PARTICIPANTS","gpt-5.6-luna"],["TRANSLATE","gpt-5.6-luna"]],"title_alt":"John Mackey：改变美国饮食方式的辍学生","display_title_alt":null,"dek_alt":"Whole Foods的护城河不是专利，而是Walmart分散了传统超市注意力，带来20到25年的扩张窗口。零售模式易被复制，规模与1992年IPO提供了防御、收购同行及摆脱VC控制的资本。Mackey承认繁荣期费用纪律不足，成本控制仍是复利故事的监测风险。","lang_alt":"ZH","tldr_md":"- **Whole Foods' real moat was incumbent distraction, not patents — Mackey argues retail has no defensible IP, so survival meant scaling before anyone noticed.** Walmart's entry into groceries \"hypnotized\" the supermarkets into a price war they couldn't win, leaving Whole Foods \"running down the field wide open for the touchdown pass.\" SaferWay opened in 1978, the first Whole Foods Market in 1980, and serious attention did not arrive until the 2004 Columbus Circle opening — \"20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us. And that allowed us to scale and compound.\"\n- **Mackey's bluntest advice to founders is on venture capital: VCs are \"hitchhikers with credit cards\" playing a blockbuster game misaligned with builders.** Seven-year fund clocks push premature scaling — \"don't worry about your burn rate\" until the down round dilutes you or \"they throw them out on the side of the road.\" Whole Foods' VCs owned 34% and would have taken control on the next round; the 1992 IPO was explicitly the escape hatch. \"Don't give up control of your business to the VCs.\"\n- **The consolidation playbook: build a cooperative network of peers, then use public currency to acquire many of them.** The Natural Foods Network traded financial statements and took wilderness trips together until Whole Foods' Northern California move ruptured it; after the Bread & Circus deal ($28M, worth ~$30M by cash-out), peers realized their only liquidity path was selling, and \"most of them came to us.\" Of roughly 550 current stores, only about 25 are surviving acquired boxes, but the deals seeded nearly every geographic platform.\n- **The most tradeable confession in the episode: Mackey told Senra that if Founders had existed when he was young, \"Whole Foods would still be an independent company\" — because history's great entrepreneurs relentlessly control costs, and he failed to prioritize expense discipline during boom times, echoing Carnegie's view that savings in costs are permanent while profits are cyclical.**\n- **Co-founder philosophy mismatch is a recurring founder trap: Mackey bought out Mark, who wanted to bank one profitable store (\"We've got it made.** Let's just not screw it up\"). His counter: a business compounds like an investment — \"you plant a seed, you can't be digging, you've got to let it grow\" — and the same difference in ambition later led many of his network peers to sell to Whole Foods, often without Mackey competing directly against them.\n- **Differentiation beat price competition: Whole Foods took \"a little bit from a lot of different groceries,\" so no single incumbent ever felt the hit enough to respond.** Customers drove up to 100 miles to stock up $300–$400 at a time, and for the first 20 years first-time shoppers' \"jaw would drop\" — part of the cult-brand pattern Mackey says often accompanies popular early consumer brands, from Apple to Tesla.\n- **The personal cost of the missionary path is the episode's emotional core: at 40 he fired his 72-year-old father from the board — \"the most difficult thing I ever did\" — and his mother died in 1987 believing him \"nothing but a grocer,\" begging on her deathbed that he return to college.** He also regrets selling IPO stock on his Depression-scarred father's advice instead of letting it compound.\n- **Mackey's macro frame: capitalism is a \"win, win, win\" prosperity machine, not zero-sum — 250 years ago 94% lived on under $2/day, 88% were illiterate, average lifespan was 30.** He and Senra sketch a \"Bezos 1000\" — ranking entrepreneurs by wealth created for others rather than kept — and Mackey calls Rockefeller \"probably the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived,\" lambasted as a villain while being among history's greatest value creators.\n","digest_md":"### 1. Fanatics don't distinguish work from play\n- Mackey's opening observation about Senra's archive of entrepreneurs: the successful ones are fanatics, citing Michael Dell's answer to how much he worked — \"All the time. All of the time.\" His gloss: \"When you're really enjoying it, is it work? ... You're loving every minute of it.\" Most great founders aren't Renaissance men; \"they're pretty focused on a few things, and mostly they're focused on their business.\"\n- The memoir process itself surfaced a blind spot he flags for other founders: entrepreneurs remember the startup years and the last few years vividly, but the decades in between go dark — writing forced him to \"rethink it all, relive it all.\"\n\n### 2. Missionary vs. mercenary: the co-founder buyout\n- The original Safer Way ambition was modest — \"we just wanted to open up a small natural food store\" — but co-founder Mark wanted to stop at one very profitable store: \"We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up.\" When new stores started slow and losses returned, Mark said \"You've blown it.\" Mackey's rebuttal became his compounding creed: \"You plant a seed, you can't be digging, you've got to let it grow... you have to let a business compound over many years.\"\n- Senra draws the Rockefeller parallel — buying out under-committed partners as one of the best decisions of a career — and Mackey confirms Mark was bought out while Craig stayed and shared the larger vision. Craig's benchmark for the company's expansion: \"I'll bet someday we have a store in Kansas City.\" Years later Mackey called him: \"Craig, we've done it. We're in Kansas City, dude.\"\n- The mission crystallized with growth: nobody else had the vision \"to be a national company, to maybe change our agricultural system\" — while America got sicker in parallel. His numbers: 74% of Americans overweight, 43% obese, \"and that has not peaked.\"\n\n### 3. Expansion wasn't ambition — it was survival without patents\n- Why he couldn't sit still: \"Whole Foods had no patents. We were just a grocery store retailer. Anybody could copy what we were doing.\" Retail IP walks out the door — \"just hire away some key employees\" — so scale became a key defense, alongside the better pricing scale bought.\n- His model of the entrepreneurial mind, borrowing Dell's puzzle framing: entrepreneurs proceed without certainty because \"they have confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, solve the puzzle.\" His co-founders \"wanted to play it safe... didn't want to lose what they had. I was like — failure wasn't an option.\"\n- The VC who passed delivered the thesis against them: \"You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies... these other big supermarket chains will put you out of business.\" Mackey's verdict: \"He might've been right except that they didn't pay any attention to us... They were hypnotized by Walmart.\"\n\n### 4. VCs are \"hitchhikers with credit cards\"\n- Mackey concedes the money mattered — it got Whole Foods into Northern California, and four years later they were public — \"Once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer, and they got out of the car.\" But the structural warning stands: VCs run a blockbuster model hunting 100X (Apple, NVIDIA, Intuitive Surgical), with seven-year fund clocks, so \"they oftentimes take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly.\"\n- The failure path as he tells founders: \"Don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round at a higher level, and a higher level\" — until the cram-down round dilutes the entrepreneur \"way down,\" or \"they get rid of the entrepreneur and bring professional management in, and they throw them out on the side of the road.\" Bottom line, delivered categorically: \"Don't give up control of your business to the VCs... They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you.\"\n\n### 5. Builders vs. serial entrepreneurs — and the F-player dinner\n- Mackey's pushback on Senra's builder-worship: biography subjects are builders, but \"the most common entrepreneur is a serial entrepreneur\" — house-flippers of companies, good at germinating, bored by operating. Many aren't shallow: his friend Brett Hurt co-founded three public companies (Bazaarvoice) and simply says \"after five or six years, I just get bored... and I want to create something new.\" They feel \"trapped by their own creations.\"\n- Senra's confession as counterpoint: dinner with a founder who talked watches and cars, sold heavy secondary early — the company had a $2B valuation around 2021–22 and just reported $7M revenue against $47M of expenses. His takeaway: \"I care about what you build, not consume... time is the only filter that I trust.\" Mackey's gentle correction — that guy wasn't necessarily a typical serial entrepreneur; \"Brett would never be bragging about any of his cars.\"\n\n### 6. Walmart was the giant distraction that gave Whole Foods the field\n- The mechanism: when Walmart added groceries, it so disrupted supermarkets that \"all they wanted to do was figure out how to compete with Walmart.\" They played Walmart's game — cheap boxes, warehouse aesthetics, labor cut to the bone — and still lost, while Whole Foods refused: \"We can't compete with Walmart on price. We're not even going to try to. We're going to compete on quality... service... a differentiated product mix.\"\n- The unintended gift: as supermarkets made stores less attractive, middle- and upper-middle-class women were drawn to beautiful stores with real service, staffed by people with piercings and tattoos who \"looked like their children, actually.\" Mackey's football metaphor: \"They were so obsessed with stopping Walmart that it allowed Whole Foods to compete on a different framework... we were running down the field wide open for the touchdown pass.\"\n- The window, dated precisely: SaferWay opened in 1978, the first Whole Foods Market in 1980, and no serious attention arrived until Columbus Circle in 2004 — the basement store with no parking that \"was bound to fail\" and instead became, and remains, the highest-volume store. \"We had 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us. And that allowed us to scale and compound.\" Once competitors woke up, they copied the model and competition got much tougher.\n\n### 7. The stealth mechanics: take a little from everyone\n- Why incumbents never counterattacked: \"We would take only a few of their customers... but a few switched over from a lot of different places.\" No single supermarket's comps dropped enough to trigger a response, so \"they just ignored us.\"\n- The demand signal underneath: when Whole Foods was the only natural-foods supermarket for perhaps 50 miles around, people drove in — \"sometimes 100 miles\" — to stock up $300–$400 at a time. And for the first 20 years, first-time shoppers' \"jaw would drop... They'd never seen a store like that.\" Differentiation, not price, owned the niche.\n\n### 8. The Natural Foods Network: missionaries who traded financial statements\n- The industry genealogy as Mackey tells it: post-WWII \"health food\" was pill shops selling supplements; the late-60s/early-70s counterculture birthed natural food stores; the supermarket format came later. When Whole Foods started there were only three or four natural-foods supermarkets in America — Bread & Circus (Boston), Mrs. Gooch's (LA), Frazier Farms (San Diego) — which he found via the Natural Foods Merchandiser and used as proof for investors: \"I didn't invent this... Why wouldn't it work in Austin?\"\n- Mrs. Gooch's was the pivotal jolt: SaferWay did $8,000–$10,000 a week; Gooch's did roughly $100,000 in stores not much bigger, with fresh meat and big produce. \"Bingo\" — that showed Mackey what they needed to add and helped force the jump to a bigger location and the first true Whole Foods Market.\n- The network, organized by \"natural networker\" Peter Roy (later Whole Foods president for five years), was genuinely cooperative: \"We'd bring our financial statements, and we'd trade them. We didn't see ourselves as competitors.\" Plus a \"Wild Man's group\" doing adventures in Alaska, Yosemite, and Belize — relationships first, each with a geographic niche.\n\n### 9. Then he bought many of them — trust as acquisition currency\n- The rupture came when Whole Foods entered Northern California and Mrs. Gooch's claimed California: \"Guys, LA is yours... but nobody's in Northern California. That's 400 miles away.\" Financial sharing stopped; fear crept in. Senra's challenge — \"You are unbelievably humble, but you also are this ruthlessly competitive conqueror\" — draws a real distinction from Mackey: \"These were my friends and I did not want to hurt my friends... I didn't compete directly with anybody else's stores ever,\" staying out of Portland (Nature's) and Boulder for years.\n- The 1992 IPO changed the game: \"now we had this currency.\" Peers had no liquidity path — too small to go public — so once Bread & Circus fetched $28M (worth roughly $30M by the secondary), \"they were like, 'Wow, I didn't realize my business was worth this much money.' And so they came to us.\" Terry Dalton in Florida: \"Buy me.\" They sold because \"they trusted me... We were going to love their business and make it better. Win, win, win.\"\n- The strategic payoff: acquisitions were geographic platforms, not store counts — six stores in Boston, seven in LA, two in Florida — with existing support and intellectual capital to grow from. Of roughly 550 current stores, perhaps 25 are surviving acquired boxes, but nearly every region outside Texas, Northern California, and Chicago started with a deal.\n- Going public was also defensive: founding investors held a majority but VCs owned 34%, and another private round would have handed them control. His father's verdict after one fight, \"with more choice language\": \"They want to take over the company. Let's get them out of the car.\"\n\n### 10. Continuous learning and the abolition of ceilings\n- On why he outran his network peers: not arrogance but evolution — echoing Dell's claim of reinventing himself \"more like seven or eight times\": \"The world is constantly evolving... If you stay the same, you get passed up.\" Most peers were older, had families, and were more security-oriented; \"I just was always kind of all in.\" His honest hedge: \"It's hard to say, David... I don't really know how other people are thinking. I only know how I'm thinking.\"\n- Senra's companion thesis: Jobs's core skill was spotting markets with second-rate products; Daniel Ek's example illustrates having \"no ceilings\" — learning investing from scratch post-2018 by consuming and filtering ideas. Mackey generalizes: \"Human creativity is fundamentally limitless. There is no limit to the mind except what we self-impose on it... most people self-censor themselves.\"\n- The satisfaction of growth, made concrete: 25 years public and independent before Amazon, stock options for everyone, and a standing ovation from meat cutters and ordinary team members — \"We bought a house... My kids can go to college now.\" \"That is so deeply satisfying.\"\n\n### 11. Capitalism is win-win-win — and the \"Bezos 1000\"\n- Mackey's core numbers on why zero-sum thinking is the intellectuals' great error: 250 years ago \"94% lived on less than two dollars a day... 88% were illiterate. The average lifespan was 30.\" Capitalism \"lifted humanity out of the dirt,\" and all philanthropy and taxes ultimately trace back to business. Musk \"gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates.\"\n- Riffing on Bezos's idea of ranking people by wealth created for others rather than kept, Mackey proposes it live: \"Why don't we create a Bezos 1000?\" — with AI, the multiplied value could actually be calculated. He also plugs friend Alexander Green's new book *The American Dream*: the dream is \"not only not dead, it's much better than it's ever been before.\"\n- His Rockefeller assessment, with the caveats intact: \"probably the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived,\" probably more good done than anyone \"but some religious leader or Christ,\" yet remembered as a villain. Key differences from himself: Rockefeller vertically integrated and controlled suppliers, and used tactics \"considered sharp business practices\" then that \"would be illegal\" today. On strategists, he adds Musk to Senra's Rockefeller-and-Bezos pantheon: \"He's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is.\"\n\n### 12. Evangelism, the reality distortion field, and cult brands\n- Mackey on discovering the gift: \"I didn't know I had it until it worked.\" With six months' experience at the Good Food store and zero business background, he raised money on pure enthusiasm — \"I know this is going to work, trust me.\" His theory: charismatic entrepreneurs have reality distortion fields; \"entrepreneurs are a little bit like panhandlers, out there begging for money, but what they're doing is they're selling dreams.\"\n- The origin spark: coming home from the store to the co-op — \"I could do this the rest of my life\" — and pitching Renée, who \"grabbed my hands and said, 'Oh, Mackey, I think that'd be really cool. Let's do it.' ... My spark lit her spark.\" The landlord story, correctly located at the very first Whole Foods Market: Ben Powell, an ex-LBJ administration lawyer — \"There are not enough hippies in the whole world to fill up the store\" — won over by enthusiasm: \"Let's do your damn hippie store... but life's going to teach you a thing or two before it's through with you.\"\n- Proof of cult status: after the 100-year Austin flood (nine months in, eight feet of water) put sewage through the profitable first store, Mackey found a stranger mopping — a customer on his day off: \"It's very important to me that you guys get through this.\" His conclusion: \"Most brands that are really popular, particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults... built by the evangelist enthusiasts among their users and customers\" — Apple's iPhone lines, his own conversion to Tesla after one drive.\n- Senra's *Shoe Dog* tie-in — Phil Knight's realization that \"belief is irresistible\" (he couldn't sell encyclopedias but couldn't keep running shoes in stock) — and Mackey reveals *Shoe Dog* was his memoir's explicit benchmark, though he documented what Knight left out: Knight's book covers roughly through the IPO, while Mackey's spans 44 years with his age tracked throughout.\n\n### 13. Firing his father — and the compounding regret\n- The most consequential admission, from their conversations: Mackey said if *Founders* had existed when he was younger, \"Whole Foods would still be an independent company\" — he'd have prioritized cost control, especially in boom times, per Carnegie's mantra that profits are cyclical but cost savings are permanent.\n- His Depression-child father pushed him to sell stock in the IPO and keep selling — \"we don't know when the next depression...\" — advice Mackey followed out of trust and now labels a mistake: \"I should have compounded it and compounded it and compounded it. I'm still a really wealthy guy. But I could have been a lot wealthier if I had followed my own instincts.\"\n- At 40, with his 72-year-old father turned inexplicably conservative — Alzheimer's was diagnosed a couple of years later, unknown to Mackey at the time — he fired him from the board: \"The most difficult thing I ever did... Took all the courage I had.\" His father's parting shot: \"You've barely got your nose under the tent. There's so much you don't know.\" Mackey's terms: sell half your stock, watch the rest — and within a year the stock doubled, making the retained half alone worth what his entire pre-sale holding had been worth. Even after Alzheimer's had begun to grip him, his father said he'd made the right decision \"and that he was proud of me.\"\n\n### 14. The mother who died calling him a grocer — and gave him his rebellion\n- The heaviest passage: his mother, raised in a poor, small-town Baptist environment in Bastrop, Texas, craved respectability, and on her deathbed in 1987 begged: \"Promise me you will go back to school and get your degree... you're just nothing but a grocer.\" He refused — \"Mom, I'm not a grocer. I'm a businessman... Maybe I will get an honorary degree someday\" (which happened) — and \"she died a very disappointed person. We were alienated when she died.\" His hedged regret: \"I kind of wish I had lied and just did a white lie to make my dying mother happy.\"\n- The reinterpretation, credited to a podcast interviewer, that changed his mind: his mother had been the rebel — she left Bastrop for Houston and Rice, smoked, gambled, drank, and danced against her upbringing — \"I had always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had secretly inculcated it in me,\" then projected onto him what she disliked in herself. He held \"my own little ceremony\" thanking her.\n- Turning pastoral with Senra, estranged from his own mother when she died of metastatic breast cancer: Mackey recommends doing \"some type of ceremony of forgiveness... ask for her forgiveness, and you forgive her.\" Senra says he still talks to his dead parents and, \"I'd probably pay my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents.\"\n\n### 15. The entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey\n- Having recommended MDMA therapy to Senra at dinner (\"you said, 'No way I'm ever going to do that'\"), Mackey offers the drug-free alternative: guided breathwork, an hour to two hours — \"you can have a transcendent spiritual experience through breathwork, and it's completely safe, and if it gets too scary, you just stop breathing.\"\n- The inner work predates the company — the book opens with LSD, done \"spiritually,\" not therapeutically — and continued throughout: \"There's an interior self that's every bit as big as the external universe, maybe bigger.\" The memoir is deliberately a double narrative: the business and \"my own spiritual evolution... It's still happening now.\"\n- The closing frame: \"Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey. It's also a hero's journey.\" Most people never answer the inner voice's call — \"they're too scared... fear of failure, fear of ridicule\" — while entrepreneurs use skepticism as fuel, the way that a rejected VC's criticism left \"a slow burn in me which said, 'You're wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong.'\"\n","transcript_md":"John Mackey\n\nWell, one of your themes that comes through in listening to a lot of yours is that you admire entrepreneurs, and you find one of the common threads among successful entrepreneurs to be that they’re basically fanatics. They’re just completely into their businesses. I was just listening to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael says—and you even started off the episode by quoting him—“How much time did you work?” And he said, “All the time. All of the time.”\n\nThat’s a theme for entrepreneurs. It’s not like they’re even thinking about working. Michael doesn’t make a distinction, I don’t think, between work and play. Neither do I, because when you’re really enjoying it, is it work? You’re doing what you want to do, and it’s playful. So it takes a lot of time, but you’re not thinking about it because you’re loving every minute of it and enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well. He just loved his business so much, and all these entrepreneurs are 100% in. That’s where their time goes.\n\nYou ask Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man or if he was doing a lot of different things, and he was like, “No. No, not really.” I think that’s also true for most entrepreneurs. They’re pretty focused on a few things, and mostly they’re focused on their business.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, with the conversation we were just having—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes, exactly.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBefore we started recording, I was essentially seeking your counsel because I think I am just like these kinds of people. You wouldn’t spend 10 years making this podcast and reading 400 of these books—and your book is excellent, by the way, which we’ll talk a lot about today—if you didn’t think that you were similar to them or that there was something about them that was attractive. I feel like essentially my entire life is my work.\n\nI think one thing that we share—and we spent several hours together, too—is that it’s very obvious in your book, and also when talking to you, that you’re definitely a missionary. One of the things I want to talk to you about—I talk to a lot of founders about this—is co-founder conflict. It’s very obvious that, especially when you’re a missionary, you weren’t like, “I just want to start one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food.” You were like, “We’re going to change the way that the country eats.” That was a very distinct philosophical mismatch with some of your early co-founders. Can you talk a little bit about that?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThe first one, when we started it up, it was kind of like, “That ought to be fun.” We weren’t trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small natural-food store called Safer Way.\n\nA good part of the book is dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs remember the early startup part of the business very well, and then they remember the last few years. There’s a period in between that they don’t think about. One of the good things about writing a memoir is that I got to rethink it all and relive it all.\n\nMy original co-founders, particularly one of them, Mark, just wanted to make a lot of money. The very first store—the very first Whole Foods Market—was very profitable. Even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet, and it was just very profitable. He said, “We don’t really need to do anything else. We’ve got it made. Let’s just not screw it up.”\n\nI didn’t want to have just one store. I wanted to open more stores, and he went along with that. But those new stores started slowly and had to grow into it. There even came a time when we were losing money again, and he was very angry about it. He said, “You’ve blown it.” I said, “No, these stores are going to be fine. They’re going to grow. You wait and see.” But he didn’t have the patience to do that.\n\nIt’s like planting a seed: You can’t keep digging it up. You’ve got to let it grow. You’ve got to give the seed time to germinate and turn into something, so you have to be patient. It’s sort of like investing. You have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well.\n\nThe missionary part was that, as we began to grow, I began to realize nobody was really doing quite what Whole Foods was doing. Nobody quite had the vision that we had—or that I had—to be a national company, to maybe change our agricultural system, and maybe be able to help people eat healthier.\n\nI could see what was happening simultaneously with Whole Foods’ growth: America was getting sicker and sicker. That’s the paradox. It almost tracks perfectly. David, 74% of Americans are overweight, and 43% are obese, and that has not peaked. It is still going up. You can see it now with “Make America Healthy Again”—people are beginning to respond to the fact that we are literally killing ourselves through what we’re eating.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe co-founder who had the philosophical mismatch—was that the same one that you guys bought out? Was it Mark that you bought out early on?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes, Mark.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat’s right, Mark. The other co-founder was with me. He was Mark’s partner originally—Craig—but Craig really had a larger vision. Craig really wanted to grow the business.\n\nI remember—I don’t know if I told it in the book or not, but I think I might have mentioned it—one day early on, we were starting to grow and starting to go to California. Craig said, “John, we’re going to be everywhere. We’re going to be everywhere in America. Can you believe this? We’re going to have Whole Foods Markets everywhere.”\n\nHe said, “I’ll bet someday we have a store in Kansas City.” For Craig, Kansas City was the last place we’d have a store, but he thought, “We’ll get there someday.” I remember—I think Craig had retired by the time we finally got to Kansas City—but I remember calling him up and saying, “Craig, we’ve done it. We’re in Kansas City, dude. We made it.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere are a lot of things that I mentioned in the founders episode I made about you. I wasn’t expecting it because you’re hilarious in the book, by the way, especially at the start. You’re like, “I’m this shirtless, hitchhiking hippie. I just dropped out of college. I’m looking for my life’s mission and what I want to do for work.”\n\nYou wouldn’t think that a shirtless, hitchhiking hippie would have a lot of parallels with Johnny Rockefeller. But there definitely are, specifically in the early days of his career, when there was a commitment mismatch between him and his original co-founders. He wound up buying them out. He said the day he got rid of those partners was, looking back, one of the smartest and best decisions of his life.\n\nYou were constantly wanting to expand, expand, expand. That’s the next question I’m going to ask you. From the very early days of Safer Way and then what turned into Whole Foods, your partners were trying to put the reins on you and pull you back. Can you talk us through that time of your life?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI just had a lot of confidence. It’s not that we weren’t making mistakes. I just think entrepreneurs believe—I got this from listening to the Michael Dell episode on the drive out here—that you have to make mistakes. That’s how you learn. That’s how you iterate.\n\nEntrepreneurs have confidence that they will solve the problems. Michael likes to figure out puzzles, right? Well, business is, in some way, a puzzle. I’m doing it again with Love.Life. It’s like, “What does the market really want here? This isn’t working. We’ve got to do less of that. This is working. Let’s do more of that.”\n\nYou’re constantly trying to think about how to create more value for your customers in ways that they don’t necessarily even know they need. The entrepreneur has confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, and solve the puzzle. They’re willing to go ahead even though they don’t know for certain, because they believe they’re going to figure it out.\n\nMy co-founders weren’t sure we would be able to figure it out. They didn’t want to blow it. They wanted to play it safe. They didn’t want to lose what they had, I think. Failure wasn’t an option. I just think entrepreneurs have great confidence in their ability to solve the problems. They’ll figure it out and win. I think I fell into that category, looking backward.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy did you understand, though, that you had to expand when they thought, “Okay, we can just stay with this nice old store”?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBecause the world is constantly changing. Whole Foods had no patents. We were just a grocery-store retailer. Anybody could see what we were doing, and anybody could copy what we were doing.\n\nI was amazed. I always liked to make the joke that Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn’t until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City that they started to take us seriously as a competitor.\n\nThe media never paid any attention to us, either. We opened up in Columbus Circle, not Times Square, in the biggest supermarket in New York. It was in a basement. I talk in the book about how difficult a decision that was because of the capital investment, the lack of parking, and the fact that it was in a basement. It was like, “We’re bound to fail.”\n\nBut we took the risk, and that store was—and still is—the highest-volume store at Whole Foods, even though it’s got some challengers now. Ever since we opened, it just took off. Then the supermarkets discovered us. They started to take us more seriously as a competitor because of all the publicity we received, and they had everybody go see that store.\n\nAnd then the media started to pay attention to us as well. As the media gave us more attention, more people began to buy the stock, and so we had this upward spiral of success.\n\nOne of the things is that we can't patent anything. Anybody can see what you're doing. It's easy to get your intellectual capital—just hire away some key employees. Whole Foods was fortunate because we were never taken seriously by the supermarkets until we really developed scale on our own.\n\nI think I told the story of a venture capitalist who didn't invest, and his basic argument was, “Well, I don't think it's a big market. You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. But then, if I'm wrong, these other big supermarket chains will put you out of business. You can't compete with Safeway or H-E-B or those guys.” He might've been right, except that they didn't pay any attention to us, so we kept doing what we were doing. They were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared of Walmart that they ignored us.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is one of the most surprising things. I want to go back to the venture capitalists first, and then I want to go to Walmart, because we talked about this when we had dinner, but in the book, that was one of the most shocking things. You're like, actually, Walmart played a huge role in our success, and I didn't even put it together before that.\n\nYou call venture capitalists “hitchhikers with credit cards.” In the book, you do not hide your disdain for them in general. Can you explain why? You call them “hitchhikers with credit cards,” and recount some of the experiences that you had with them in the early days.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nFirst of all, I'm glad we got venture capital money. I don't know if we could've grown without it. We didn't get very much, but it was enough to get us into Northern California, and then, 4 years after we got the money from them, we were public. So they were important for us to get to where we got to. Once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer, and they got out of the car.\n\nI tell entrepreneurs this all the time: VCs are playing a different kind of game. The game VCs are playing is kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth, and when they get an Apple, an NVIDIA, an Intuitive Surgical, or one of these companies that just compounds and compounds and compounds, they can get 100× their venture capital money. That's what they're looking for.\n\nWhat ends up happening is they oftentimes take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly because they're trying to get that exponential payoff. Remember, they've usually got these funds where the money is only going to be in that fund for, you know, 7 years. They've got to start paying back. The funds are not evergreen funds where you can keep the money in them for decades.\n\nThey pressure the entrepreneur to try to scale rapidly, and that works for some businesses. Those are happy endings. But a lot of times, you take a perfectly good business that's not going to be a multibillion-dollar business that's going to change the world, but is still a good business, and they wreck it.\n\nThey can afford a lot of failures because the blockbusters make so much money. It's like a batting average: They don't have to hit 1,000. They just need to hit well enough, and the blockbusters are home runs, so they make a lot of money on that.\n\nI'm often telling entrepreneurs, “Be careful with the VCs, because the first thing they're thinking is that they want to scale your business. They're going to tell you, ‘Don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round of financing at a higher level, and a higher level, and a higher level.’”\n\nBut what often happens down that road is that the business doesn't scale as well as they want it to. Then you get the round where it's kind of a cram-down round, a down round, and the entrepreneur's share is diluted way down in those down rounds. Or they get rid of the entrepreneur, bring in professional management, and throw them out on the side of the road.\n\nI always tell young entrepreneurs, “Don't give up control of your business to the VCs.” They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you. I think for most entrepreneurs, you really want to build a business, and you probably want to be here a decade, or 15 or 20 years from now, still growing your business.\n\nIf that's the case, you have to be very careful about the VCs, because that's not what they want. They have 7 years. They want a 100× return if they can get it, and they're prepared to crash your business prematurely if that's what it takes. So be careful. That's the main thing I tell them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow do the younger entrepreneurs that you're advising usually respond to that advice?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWell, for one thing, most of them don't care, because I think you're a builder. Michael Dell is a builder. A lot of these entrepreneurs you're talking about, these iconic entrepreneurs, are builder entrepreneurs. But that's not the most common entrepreneur. Those are the ones you get biographies about.\n\nThe most common entrepreneur is a serial entrepreneur. They just start businesses, and they do them for 5 years and flip them. They're like somebody remodeling a house and then flipping it, except in these cases, they're really creative. They're good at germinating things. They don't want to operate them, and they don't want to really build them over the long run. So they're okay with trying to scale them because they're not going to be around anyway. They want a rich exit. That's more common than you realize.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think I now am realizing that, and I have for several years. Actually, it's funny—I just thought about this story this morning, and I think this is actually a really important point.\n\nI remember, a few years ago, having dinner with a founder. The weird thing is, I had never met him. He was a fan of the podcast, but I was thinking, “I don't know if this guy is actually listening to the podcast,” because he wanted to talk about the watch he had and the car he was driving. I found out he was selling a ton of secondary before his company was successful at all.\n\nIt just came out yesterday or the day before that this company—which had a $2 billion valuation in 2022 or 2021, whenever I was having dinner with him—did $7 million in revenue last year.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWow.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd they had $47 million in expenses. I'm like, “Oh, you're just that kind of guy.” I was like, “I don't give a shit about the car you have or the watch you have. I care about what you build, not what you consume. You should be proud of what you have built—not that you bought something, or that you have money to buy somebody else's product. That doesn't impress me.”\n\nObviously, I left the dinner and never saw him again. I'd kind of forgotten about him until yesterday. One of the benefits of reading a book like yours, or any of these biographies, is that you get to the end of the story and you're reminded that our life is limited. We have limited time here.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou should be ruthless with how you're spending your time. I just gave 2 hours to this guy who wasn't even a B player—he's an F. You've done nothing, you fucking joker. This is useless for me to spend any time with you.\n\nThis is why people think I'm a little crazy. I spend almost all my time with people that have, as I said in the episode, people like you—Michael Dell, Todd Graves. I'm obsessed with people who do things for a long time.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nRight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTime is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea—no predictive ability—that this entrepreneur who started a company today is going to be successful. We're going to see, and it's going to be up to them and the decisions that they make.\n\nI'm kind of drawn to these more missionary founders because you just make better, longer-term decisions.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSo I'm not sure he was a typical serial entrepreneur, because a lot of serial entrepreneurs that I know—I know a bunch of them—and they do care about their businesses. For them, it's more that they have a certain skill set of creating businesses and then getting them to a certain level, and it's not primarily about the money.\n\nFor them, the fun part is creating a business. Then, as you start to staff it up and build a bureaucracy, they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're not wired to fit within the kind of corporate structure that they're creating, and all businesses eventually evolve to—or almost all businesses eventually evolve to—if they get any scale.\n\nThey just don't like that, so they start over again. But I think those people are very interesting. I think many serial entrepreneurs are not simply shallow people doing it just for the money.\n\nI have some good, close friends who've made a lot of money creating different businesses. One of my good friends in Austin is a guy named Brett Hurt. He co-founded 3 public companies. His most famous one was Bazaarvoice, which did all the—if you do a review on an online business, you're probably using Bazaarvoice technology.\n\nBrett says, “Well, I just love creating businesses, but after I've done it for, I don't know, 5 or 6 years, I just get bored with it and I want to create something new.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, I don't have any problem with that.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. The whole point of being an entrepreneur is that you get to decide what you work on and who's around you. That's one of the biggest joys.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut Brett would never be bragging about any of the cars he drives or his wealth. He just wouldn't do that.\n\nBefore having this conversation with John Mackey, I got to spend seven hours with him over two days, and it was during one of our conversations that John Mackey told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the \"Founders\" Podcast. He had listened to over 100 episodes before we met, and he told me that if the “Founders” podcast had existed when he was younger, Whole Foods would still be an independent company. Because the podcast and all of history’s greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put a much higher priority on it, especially during good times.\n\nDuring boom times, it’s very natural for a company, and for human nature, to not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again: “Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace.” Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie’s view, any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent.\n\nLet’s go back to the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods’ success, which is a very interesting part of your book.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWell, if I was using a metaphor—it’s kind of like, we were using a football metaphor—Walmart was such a massive force, they distracted everybody, all the supermarkets. Remember, when Walmart started out, they didn’t sell food.\n\nSam Walton—you’ve read his book probably 10 times. He started out in kind of a five-and-dime store, and that was his initial model. I remember he had this big idea to do the bigger general merchandise store, and he couldn’t sell it to Ben Franklin.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTo Ben Franklin.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSo he just went out and did it on his own. It was only later, after Walmart was very successful and growing, and they were competing with Gibson’s and companies like that, Kmart, that they started thinking about food. But when they put groceries in, it disrupted the conventional supermarket industry so much that all they wanted to do was figure out how to compete with Walmart.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo the existing grocery stores saw the competition from Walmart, and they made the drastic mistake of trying to compete on price?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWith the low-cost provider.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nCorrect. And so they tried to cut their costs. They spent less money building out their boxes. They looked more like warehouses. They were more sterile. They went with cheap lighting—everything to cut their capital investments down. Then they cut their labor to the bone. A lot of them had unions, so they had to cut service back, and they still couldn’t compete with Walmart because they were playing Walmart’s game.\n\nWhole Foods was going in this different direction. We said, “Well, we can’t compete with Walmart on price. We’re not even going to try to. We’re going to compete on quality. We’re going to compete on service. We’re going to have a differentiated product mix.” And so that’s what we did.\n\nIn fact, one venture capitalist said, “You’re a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies.” That’s true—it was true at one point. We were definitely focused on a younger generation and more health-conscious people.\n\nBut what ended up happening was that as those supermarkets made their stores less attractive to, we’ll say, middle-class and upper-middle-class women, who do most of their food shopping, they wanted to come into a store that was pretty, that was beautiful, where people gave them good service, took their groceries to their car, were nice to them, and answered their questions.\n\nThey didn’t get the products that Whole Foods sold. But what they got was beautiful produce that tasted good, and these people were really nice to us, even though they had piercings and tattoos and didn’t look like them—they looked like their children, actually. So we kind of cracked the upper-middle-class market next, and they bought our food for the quality and the service.\n\nAs that happened, we began to grow faster. Our comps went up. We were not just in our own little hippieville any longer. The supermarkets didn’t pick it up. They really didn’t pick it up.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo they were ignoring you?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThey were ignoring us. Using our football metaphor, Walmart was like this giant distraction, and we were running down the field wide open for the touchdown pass. They were so obsessed with stopping Walmart that it allowed Whole Foods to compete on a different framework, a different competitive strategy.\n\nFor the longest time, the supermarkets only competed on price, really. They had nice stores with Muzak in them, but they were all trying to compete on price. Then Walmart was the killer app, so to speak, and that’s all they knew how to do: compete on that.\n\nSo Whole Foods created a different business model. Once they figured it out, it became a lot tougher competition for us. They started copying us. They started making nicer stores, putting a bigger emphasis on their perishable foods like produce, and competing with us on price instead of with Walmart on price.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow many years did they give you the run of the field?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat’s a great question. I’d say we got the run of the field. We opened the first Whole Foods in 1980, SaferWay in 1978, and we didn’t open up in New York until 2004, when we opened up Columbus Circle.\n\nThink about that. We had 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us. That allowed us to scale and compound. They just dismissed us. They thought, “Who cares about Whole Foods? They don’t hurt us.”\n\nWe never hurt any one supermarket that much. In fact, we’d come into a new market, and they’d compete initially. They’d try to lower prices against one of our products. But then their sales didn’t drop very much, because Whole Foods would take a little bit from a lot of different grocery stores. We wouldn’t take much from any particular one.\n\nAs a result, they just thought, “We don’t have any problem competing with Whole Foods.” They just ignored us.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat was going on there? I don’t understand how you would take a little bit from, let’s say, 5 of the other grocery stores in the area.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBecause we were so differentiated, we would take only a few of their customers. Most of their customers didn’t switch over; just some of them did. A few switched over from a lot of different places.\n\nIn the early days, when we were the only natural-food supermarket maybe for 50 miles around, we had a lot of people who would drive in on the weekends and stock up. They’d buy $300 or $400 worth of groceries.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow far were they driving to get to you?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSometimes 100 miles. When we only had one store in a market area, people might come in. It wasn’t their everyday shop, right? They’d come in because they couldn’t get this food anywhere else. They didn’t have what Whole Foods was selling at a typical supermarket.\n\nBack in the day, we were so unique. I always say, David, that during the first 20 years we existed, when people would first walk into a Whole Foods Market, you could see it—I’d see it again and again and again—their jaw would drop. It was like, “I’ve never been in a store like this.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNow people don’t have that feeling because it’s more common, and supermarkets have upped their game. But for at least 20 years, people were just blown away the first time they came into a Whole Foods Market. They’d never seen a store like that. It was so different from any other supermarket they’d ever been in.\n\nWe were very well differentiated. We were in a niche, and people did not compete with us in that niche. So we sort of owned it. But as I said, retailers don’t have patents. We couldn’t patent a natural-food supermarket. We couldn’t patent our product mix, our marketing, or our service levels.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd so scale was your solution to that?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWell, as we scaled, we could get better pricing as well.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo that was one of the craziest stories in the book. Again, I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods forever, but for some reason I never thought about its creation. I just figured, “Oh, he started the first Whole Foods and the second, and he’s been doing it for 40 years, and that’s how it happened.” I had no idea how much you grew by acquisition.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThe acquisitions were key because they created a geographical platform for us.\n\nTo go into a new geography and create a team of people is very expensive. We did it a few times. We started in Texas, we did it in Northern California, we did it in Chicago, and we did it in Northern California. But most of the other regions—Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Florida, and North Carolina—we got our platform by an acquisition. We bought out an existing company.\n\nIt didn't mean we didn't get many stores. We might have gotten 6 stores in Boston, 7 in Los Angeles, and 2 in Florida. But that was still enough to create the platform, and from there, with that platform in place, with support already there and good intellectual capital—people who knew what they were doing—we were able to grow faster. Let's say Whole Foods has 550 stores right now. Probably, of those acquired stores that still exist and weren't relocated, maybe 25.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo the acquisitions were happening earlier in the company's history?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes, earlier. They created a geographical platform that allowed us to expand out from that platform and, in a sense, open new stores in that area.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is, again, one of my favorite parts of the book, and I think I want to spend some time here, if you don't mind. Again, Rockefeller did this exact same thing. I mention it in the Founders episode I did on you, where he had this thing called secret allies, which I think is one of my favorite ideas I've ever come across in any of these books.\n\nHe's at the very beginning of the refining industry, and you're at the very beginning of the natural foods industry.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt doesn't really exist.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nRight.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou are, by far, the most ambitious. I called you in the episode—I thought, “I should have known this.” Anybody who's going to start in a new industry and build the category-defining company in that industry, of course they have this huge ambition. They're essentially a conqueror, which is the way I think about you.\n\nEven though I think a lot of people would not come away with that same conclusion because of the hippie nature that you started with, what you do is very smart. You did exactly what Rockefeller did. You looked around and thought, “Well, I'm doing this thing. Who else? Let me look around—not just in my area—who else is doing the same thing?”\n\nIn some cases, you find out about them in trade journals, and then you don't just think, “Oh, that's interesting.” No, you get on a plane, you go there, and you start building a relationship.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou built a network, right? Was it an official network? Was this unofficial?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes, we had a name for it. It was called the Natural Foods Network.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTalk about this. This is phenomenal.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nIn some ways, the natural and organic foods industry came out of the health food industry. The health food industry started earlier, but it was mostly what we call pill shops. They were mostly selling supplements, some packaged whole grains, whole-grain flours, and things like that, but most of their sales came from supplements. That's where the industry grew out of.\n\nThink about Jack LaLanne. He was back in the health food era, and he was a health food champion.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas that the 1970s? What time period?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNo, we're talking about the early health food industry, which was probably after World War II. Then, until my generation came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you began to see natural food stores start to pop up that were primarily food rather than supplements.\n\nThere came a point where we realized we weren't really health food stores in the old, traditional sense. We were different. We were natural food stores. Then the next iteration was, what if we did a store that was a complete, one-stop shop for people living this lifestyle? We would be a supermarket—a natural food supermarket.\n\nWhen Whole Foods started, there were only 3 or 4 other natural food supermarkets in the United States. There was Bread & Circus in Boston, Mrs. Gooch's in Los Angeles, and Frazier Farms in San Diego. That's about it. There were some smaller stores. You've got to be at least 10,000 square feet to be a natural food supermarket, in my mind.\n\nI heard about those in the Natural Foods Merchandiser and went and studied them. I remember it was pivotal. I could go and tell the investors, “Hey, I didn't invent this. There are other people doing it. It's working in Los Angeles, it's working in Boston, it's working in San Diego. Why wouldn't it work in Austin? It'll work in Austin. Let's try it.”\n\nOtherwise, I may not have been able to get the money if I didn't have at least a few prototypes that were already working. I went and studied them, became friends with them, and ultimately acquired all of them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou jumped to where I was going.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBut there were others that were opening up around the same time, like Alfalfa's in Boulder, Whole Food Company in New Orleans, and Unicorn Village in Miami. There were others that were forming about the same time. It was an idea whose time had come.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut what was the initial instinct? The initial instinct was, “These people are doing what I'm doing. Let me go build relationships with them,” and then you realize, “Oh, there's a mismatch of ambition here, and I can actually acquire them?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNo.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBecause they didn't want to expand?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYou're giving me too much credit there.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay, but Mrs. Gooch's—I remember that one.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBecause that was instrumental. At the time, I think you guys were doing $8,000 to $10,000 a week in sales. There wasn't a butcher.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat was at SaferWay.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay, at SaferWay, $8,000 to $10,000 a week or something like that.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThey were doing $100,000, and you were like, “Oh!” That kind of opened your eyes that you could add the other—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—product category.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat's right.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCorrect?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBingo.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nMrs. Gooch's was a huge influence early on because it was like, wow, they were doing 10 times as much sales as we were doing. Their stores were a little bit bigger, but they weren't that much bigger. They were selling fresh meat, and they had big produce departments. So that's what we needed to do too. We couldn't do it at SaferWay; it was too small. We needed a bigger location.\n\nBut what ended up happening—I think of it this way—we were all missionaries in a way. We really believed in natural foods. We saw what was happening with the processed food industry, that it was basically poisoning people. People were eating this terrible food and eating junk food diets, and we wanted to create this really natural, organic revolution that could change the world.\n\nWe were sort of like Puritans in a way. Other people who were our colleagues were missionaries too. They were doing it because they really believed in it.\n\nInitially, we created this Natural Foods Network because we were helping each other. We would get together, bring our financial statements, and trade them. We didn't see ourselves as competitors. We each had our own geographical niche, and by exchanging financial information, we were all becoming better retailers.\n\nIt was a club, and we used to take trips together too. We did have some people in the industry who weren't just retailers. We had a Wild Man's group. We did some adventures together in Alaska and Yosemite.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis wasn't work-related? This was just friendship?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBelize, yes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBuilding friendships.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBuilding relationships.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nAnd having adventures together.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWouldn't you guys also travel to other stores together and do store visits as a group?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOh, yes. What we'd do is come together in a city, and there'd be a host company, usually around a new store. “We've opened up a new store. You've got to see it.”\n\nWhen we hosted in Houston, we opened up our first natural food supermarket in Houston in 1984, and we hosted the Natural Foods Network meeting there. That became one of the highest-volume stores in the natural foods world within a couple of years.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas this like a collective, or did you feel you were kind of the leader of this organization?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThe guy who organized the Natural Foods Network, whom I credit in the book, was a man named Peter Roy, who was a natural networker. Peter started Whole Food Company in New Orleans, which we bought out in 1988, and then he came on and helped start Northern California.\n\nHe eventually became president of Whole Foods for 5 years, and he left us in 1998. I go into some detail about that in the book. He was instrumental. He worked for us for 10 years and brought the network together.\n\nOne of the first acquisitions we did with Peter—and it was key before we went public—was Wellspring Grocery in North Carolina. Lex Alexander and Peter were best friends, so Peter said, “John's a good guy. We're going to take good care of the business. We're going to grow it. You're going to get a big paycheck.”\n\nWe needed to go public because I didn't want the VCs to get control of the business.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou said they were trying to grab the steering wheel at some point?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes. The founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs owned 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would've gotten control of the business, and they had different agendas.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere's a great story in the book because your dad—which we'll get to—plays a huge role in your life—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—and in the company.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd there's this knockdown, drag-out fight between you guys, and then he pulls you into a room with the VCs afterward. He pulls you into a room, and he's like, “We need to get rid of these guys as soon as possible.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. He just said, “They want to take over the company.”\n\n“Let’s get them out. Let’s get them out of the car.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Yeah. Let’s get them out of the car.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“He used more choice language about it than that.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Let’s go back to this network, though.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“So, we’re now developing all these—”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Relationships with these guys. What ended up happening is I did have an ambition to grow the business. Most of them wanted to stay, and when I went to Northern California, that was the first rupture in the Natural Foods Network because we’d gone out of our state, and Mrs. Gooch’s felt like California was theirs.\n\n“I said, ‘Guys, LA is yours. You’re there, but nobody’s in Northern California. That’s 400 miles away. You never said you even had any ambition there.’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t, but we didn’t think—we’d get there eventually, and now you’ve gone there.’ So, that kind of began to break up the Natural Foods Network.\n\n“We stopped sharing financial information. Whole Foods sort of created some fear in some of these other entrepreneurs that we were maybe going to come into their territories. I kept saying, ‘No, guys, we’re not going to compete with you head-on.’”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“What do you mean you’re not going to compete with them head-on?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“There were markets that we stayed out of for years.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“And then what happened?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Well, then we bought them. But you see, that’s a different thing.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“John, John. Come on, man. You are unbelievably humble, and I don’t think that’s an act, but you also are this ruthlessly competitive conqueror. You admit to how competitive you are in the book.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Yes. But the point is that these were my friends, and I did not want to hurt my friends.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Okay.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“So, I never hurt Mrs. Gooch’s. It didn’t hurt them. I mean, maybe it lessened their upward potential someday if they’d gotten there in 10 years or whatever. Somebody else would’ve gotten there before them, though, slow as they were going.\n\n“But I didn’t compete directly with anybody else’s stores ever. I never did it. I didn’t go to Portland for that reason because Nature’s was there. I didn’t go to Boulder until Alfalfa’s and Wild Oats had partnered up. So, with the people that I developed those relationships with, we could pick where we went.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Why would they be scared of you? What are they seeing in you?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Well, Whole Foods got out ahead. We raised the VC money, and once we went public in 1992, that was the big event because now we had this currency and all—”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“The entrepreneurs? You mean the VCs could cash out? Okay.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“No, I’m talking about the—”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Oh, the acquired—”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Natural entrepreneurs.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“The people that were acquired. Okay.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“And they all did. What ended up happening is they had no—how could they get liquidity? The reality for most businesses is they’re never going to be big enough. To get liquidity, they have to sell the business because most of them can’t go public. How else can you get liquidity? You’re going to either have an IPO or you’re going to have a sale.\n\n“So, most of them saw the writing on the wall. Whole Foods was expanding, and they should cash out. Most of them came to us and said, ‘Would you be interested in buying us?’ Once we bought Wellspring, and particularly once we bought Bread & Circus, what we paid was public, and they thought, ‘My God.’\n\n“We paid Anthony $28 million, but he ended up getting $30 million because there was a lag period before we could cash the stock out for him, and it was worth more when we did our secondary offering. They were like, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize my business was worth this much money.’ And so they came to us.\n\n“The guy, Terry Dalton, in Florida said, ‘Buy me. Why don’t you come to Florida? We’re great.’ And so we did buy him. That’s kind of how it happened. They trusted me. They knew we were going to take care of their business, too. We were going to love their business and make it better, actually.\n\n“Most of them saw what Whole Foods was doing, and they admired us. They envied us partly, but they also admired us, and they knew if they sold out that we were going to take care of their team members and that we were going to maintain our standards. We weren’t going to turn it into a regular supermarket, and they felt good about that. Win-win-win.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“I want to go back to your competitive drive because I do want to talk about that. I think it surprised a lot of people. My question, though, is that I want to know from your perspective and your mind, okay?\n\n“Because I do the exact same thing now. Podcasting is very positive-sum. There’s really no competition. It’s a lot more collaborative. But I am very curious, and I run with the same idea that you did and the same idea that Rockefeller does. I will fly across the country just to have lunch or dinner with another podcaster because I want a download of your thoughts on how you think about your business and what you’re doing.\n\n“Did you notice, as you were building this network and meeting all these other people in all these different regions, that you were different from them?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Sure. One of the things I liked about your Michael Dell interview, which was impressive—I know Michael, of course. We both live in Austin. For a long time, we were the 2 big entrepreneurs in Austin before it became an entrepreneurial hub in the last decade or so. I followed his career closely, and I know him. He’s a really good guy.\n\n“Michael talked a lot about continuous learning. Remember how he talked about—you asked him, you said, ‘Well, you had to reinvent yourself 3 or 4 times.’ He said, ‘No, more like 7 or 8 times.’ Yes, because every time there was a new revolution, he had to adapt his business, right? So, I continued to learn.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“And you thought they were complacent?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“The world is constantly evolving. It’s constantly changing. If you sit still—Michael said it in his talk with you: ‘If you stay the same, you get passed up. You’re going to fail.’ You have to continue to evolve. New things emerge, and you have to change with them.\n\n“Whole Foods was changing rapidly. We were opening up bigger stores. Most of these guys didn’t have the capital to try to match that. They didn’t have the ambition to do it.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Let me back up. I’m not trying to say this so somebody can be an arrogant person—‘Oh, I’m different from all my competitors.’ No. It’s a really great way to spot opportunity: the fact that you see this over and over again.\n\n“It’s one of my favorite lines in Steve Jobs, that if you actually look at one of his main skill sets, it was that he was able to identify markets with second-rate products—products that he thought he could make better or think about in a different way. He didn’t invent any of them, and you can just go through all of them, from personal computing to the phone to everything that he’s done.\n\n“I was like, ‘Damn, I didn’t even realize that until—’ It was probably the 10th time I’d read that book, too, or the 10th biography of his that I’d read. I see that a lot in what you are doing, too. So, I’m not trying to say, ‘I was better than these people.’ It’s just, ‘No, I’m fundamentally looking at this industry differently than they are.’ And I was wondering if that was obvious at the beginning when you started going around and building this network.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Well, I think about Steve. Maybe he took products that were very early. He may not have invented the personal computer, but they weren’t very good.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“No, he made it easier to use.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Yes. He transformed it with something much better. The Apple II, in particular, was a huge step. Or he didn’t do the MP3 player initially, but the iPod was massively better.\n\n“No, he didn’t do the phone. You could say he invented the smartphone, though. Was there a smartphone before—”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“No, but everyone was using cell phones, and so it—”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Yes, but the smartphone is not just a phone. It is a completely new category.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“You could almost say nobody invents anything because they’re always taking other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“But from your perspective—”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“Yeah?”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Obviously, you felt different at that time, or no?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“It’s hard to say, David, because I don’t really know how other people are thinking. I only know how I’m thinking. I just see how they act.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“Okay.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n“I just know most of these people were older than me, for one thing, and they had families. They were more security-oriented. They wanted the financial security. And I was always kind of all-in.\n\n“Was I more ambitious? I really liked growing the business. I think that’s one thing entrepreneurs have in common: They like to grow their business. You like to see it grow. Michael called it a puzzle he’s figuring out.\n\n“But growing a business is immensely satisfying because all the stakeholders are benefiting. Your customers are benefiting. Your employees are benefiting. They’re getting new opportunities and new promotions. You’re watching them flourish.\n\n“One of the greatest, most satisfying things—particularly because Whole Foods was a public company before Amazon bought us, publicly independent for 25 years—was that so many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you’re on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you’re not one of the most senior executives.\n\n“We gave stock options to everybody who worked there. I remember going to an annual gathering, and we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I got this…”\n\nThey gave me a standing ovation because they were telling me, “We bought a house. I didn’t think we’d ever be able to buy a house. My kids can go to college now. I can retire. This is so great.” And these are grocery people, right? They’re just people who were meat cutters and ordinary team members who never thought they would really have any prosperity in the world.\n\nThat is so deeply satisfying. That’s one of the things I liked about Todd Graves’s talk, by the way. He was so focused on his employees flourishing. That is a tremendously good feeling.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is one of the reasons I’ve resisted for years. Very close friends of mine told me, “With all this history you have in your head from the history of entrepreneurship—maybe better than anybody else in the world—you need to start recording some of the conversations you’re already having.”\n\nI was very resistant to that idea until I realized the gap in the market was that a lot of the business and tech press hate business and tech. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I’m sure as hell not a journalist; I’m an enthusiast. I’m obsessed with this stuff. Look what the books look like when I’m done with them. Where’s the camera? What does that look like? That looks like obsession.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nLooks like you need a new book.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s obsession. And what I realized is that a lot of the business and tech press hate business and tech.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThey’re just journalists. That’s what they got channeled into.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd so the opening was exactly this: I said, “As the son of a Cuban immigrant, I think capitalism is awesome.” You have this great thing where you said capitalism was the greatest thing that humans have ever invented—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—which you and I have bonded over. And I’m like, “No.” I want to start hosting conversations to celebrate these kinds of people, where you had this idea, as a shirtless, hitchhiking hippie: “I want to start my own little natural food store, and I’m going to continuously learn. I’m going to grow it, and as I grow it, I’m creating products that people love,” which I’ll get to in a second.\n\nThen I’m creating wealth for myself and others—for normal people to work at Whole Foods and be able to send their kids to college as a result of the wealth that the company was able to create, to buy a house. These are things that should be celebrated, not denigrated.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThey should be. And they’re not seen because we live in a zero-sum world. We don’t. We live in a win-win-win world, but people don’t realize it.\n\nThink about the history of humanity, David. For tens of thousands of years, there was really no progress in the world. First came the Enlightenment and science, and then the birth of capitalism lifted humanity. Particularly capitalism has lifted humanity out of the dirt. People have no reference points.\n\nTwo hundred and fifty years ago, 94% of everyone alive—94%—lived on less than $2 a day, and that’s in today’s dollars. Eighty-eight percent of the people alive were illiterate. Eighty-eight percent. The average lifespan was 30. So many women died in childbirth. There was no modern dentistry, no antibiotics, and no vaccines. It was horrible.\n\nPeople do not understand where we came from, and capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero-sum game where somebody won and somebody else lost. The biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, is that they still think we’re in a zero-sum world.\n\nThey’re obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. They don’t understand that it’s this prosperity machine that’s creating more—not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they’re touching.\n\nThey’re creating value for their customers. They’re creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing. Their investors are seeing their capital go up, which can be reinvested and compounded. We’re seeing governments—\n\nWhere does all philanthropy ultimately come from? Business. That’s where the profits are.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhere does the money come from?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nAnd where do all the taxes come from? They ultimately come from business as well, whether you’re taxing the employees who are flourishing. This is the engine that’s lifting humanity out of the dirt, and the entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine.\n\nSomebody like Elon Musk gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. He and people like Rockefeller are lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever lived in terms of creating value and helping people.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou just mentioned Bezos, and he’s got a phenomenal idea.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOne of my heroes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOne of my heroes. I just got to spend time with him one-on-one. It was incredible. He’s amazing.\n\nOne of my favorite ideas that he has is the fact that we have a Forbes 400, and we have a list of the richest people. He’s like, “There’s a better idea. Why don’t we have a list for how much wealth these people have created for others?”\n\nI think he used the example of, I don’t remember what the market cap of Amazon is—it might be $2 trillion today, whatever it is. He’s like, “Out of that $2 trillion, I might own $150 billion of that.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWhen you see Jeff again, you should say, “Hey, Jeff, I thought about your idea. Why don’t we create a Bezos 1,000?” There’s an organization, with AI in particular, that can calculate it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, that’s a good point. Why shouldn’t we remind other people?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWhy don’t we do that?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy don’t we—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat would be so great for people if they could begin to see the multiplicity of value that comes out of those entrepreneurs and how it compounds over time. It’s so enormous, and the intellectuals do not see it. The average person doesn’t see it. They’re still stuck in the idea that it’s a zero-sum game—that somebody’s rich, somebody else is poor; the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.\n\nThat is not true. In fact, there’s a new book for you to read that just came out. One of my good friends, Alexander Green, has written a book called The American Dream. He shows in that book how the American Dream is alive and well, and it’s never been better. In fact, the dream is not only not dead, it’s much better than it’s ever been before.\n\nOnly the intellectuals and the media cannot see it. They refuse to see it. Instead, they focus on all the things that aren’t perfect yet in society, and they’re doom-and-gloomers. They think it’s all going downhill. That’s a book you might want to take a look at.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’ll definitely check it out. I have a recommendation for you. After this, listen to the episode I just did with James Dyson.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYou know why I’m going to listen to that? Because in the episode I was just listening to on the drive, you said that’s your favorite all-time autobiography.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNumber 1.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. So I thought, “Okay, that’s the next one I’m going to listen to.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI told him when I saw him, too, because it’s out of print and they own the rights. I said, “Please, just not even for money. You don’t need more money. This book is so important to get into entrepreneurs’ hands because of the struggle,” which I think is what most people identify with.\n\nThe reason I brought him up is because one of the things I love about him, and what I’m trying to apply to every single thing that I work on, is that he demands differentiation. If somebody else has already made the product, he won’t just say, “Oh, I can do that a little better.” He’s like, “I have to invent a completely different spin on it.”\n\nThe reason I think differentiation is really important is that there are 2 things where you knew, at the very beginning, that you were onto something very powerful. You just gave an example: If somebody is driving 1 or 2 hours to shop at your store, that should tell you something.\n\nThe other thing is that you mentioned how you reinvested in growth. As you were investing in growth, obviously sometimes you’re going to lose money for a little bit. But the first store was profitable at 2:00 PM on the first day.\n\nAnd then, a year later, there's a 100-year flood in Austin.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. Nine months later.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, nine months later. A 100-year flood in Austin, okay? Eight feet of water. When there's a flood, it's not just water. The stuff from the sewers comes up. So it floods your store, and you have shit water everywhere.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd then, in the days after, you guys are mopping up and trying to clean up the store.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOh, and getting tetanus shots.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd getting tetanus shots. And then you go into this aisle, and you're like, “I thought I knew everybody that worked here. Who's this person?” You go over and say, “Hey, I'm John. I'm sorry. I guess I didn't know who you were.” And he's like, “Oh, I don't work here, but I'm such a huge fan of what you're doing. I shop here several times a week. I had a day off. It's very important to me that you guys get through this, so I wanted to help in any possible way.” No one does that if your product isn't valuable to them and differentiated.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nRight. I didn't have the language, but that's when I began to discover stakeholders—the people that care about your business. In that case, he was a customer and a neighbor, and he loved Whole Foods. It made a big difference in his life.\n\nI think you will find that most brands that are really popular, particularly in their early days, were kind of cults. They were cults, meaning they had a following, because I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist enthusiasts among their users and customers.\n\nApple's a great example of that, right? I mean, people would line up to get that next iPhone, just camp out to get the next iteration of the iPhone back in the day. Tesla—I own a Tesla, and I remember my friends talking: “You've got to drive this car. If you drive this car, you'll want to buy this car.” And I said, “Ah, I don't want a Tesla,” and blah, blah, blah. “It's pretentious.” As soon as one of them finally taught me to drive, I went out and bought it the next day, right? And I became a Tesla fan, a superfan.\n\nSo, I do think that happened with Whole Foods. People loved our stores, particularly in the early days, when we were so unique and so differentiated. I remember those people would drive in. A lot of times they would tell me—I said, “Why are you coming in?” She goes, “Oh, I want to make sure my little boy doesn't eat this poisonous food. He's just going to eat healthy food. My child's going to be nourished. I'm going to make sure my children grow up really healthy.” And it was oftentimes those parents that were doing it for the next generation, so to speak.\n\nSo I do think Whole Foods benefited from that type of cult-like following.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut the evangelism that you see present in customers, I would say, is a byproduct of the fact that those cult brands—which I completely agree with you—are started by an evangelist. You use that word multiple times in the book.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSteve Jobs, obviously, was an evangelist for Apple. Elon is one of the greatest evangelists that we've ever seen. You knew that you had that very special skill of evangelizing. The way I think about it is: passion is infectious.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI didn't know I had it until it worked. I discovered it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWait, okay. At what age did you discover it? Right at the beginning, when you were starting this, in your 20s?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWhen I started—yeah, even raising money the first time. Think about this for a second. I'm out raising money, even with my friends and family. I have 6 months of experience working in a natural food store. I have absolutely no business background. I'd worked jobs and stuff, but I'd never really been in management. I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I didn't know much about business.\n\nThese people were willing to trust their money to this young kid and his girlfriend simply on my enthusiasm. Really, at the end of the day, I was so excited, and I more or less said, “I know this is going to work. Trust me.” And they did, and it did work.\n\nI think Jobs called it the reality distortion field, or somebody said about Steve that he had a reality distortion field. I think I identified with that. I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs, have a reality distortion field. They're able to get people to suspend their normal skepticism, and for a moment, let them into their vision, and they catch a little bit. Maybe they don't get the vision, but they see the passion.\n\nI think you've talked about how passion is infectious. Entrepreneurs are generally passionate, and they sell others on their dream. I always say that entrepreneurs are a little bit like panhandlers, out there begging for money, but what they're doing is selling dreams. They're selling dreams to people. They make the dreams come alive, and people in the reality distortion field catch a glimpse of what's possible, and then they want to get into it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas there anything you were working on before Whole Foods? What other jobs did you have?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI make this joke. If I did a résumé, it would say: busboy, cargo restaurant, dishwasher at some other restaurant, boys' camp counselor, assistant manager at the Good Food store, CEO of Whole Foods Market.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWere you passionate as the assistant manager at the Good Food—what?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nGood Food.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nGood Food store?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. That's when I remember I loved working at that store. I only worked there 6 months, and I loved it, though. It was like I'd never worked in a retail store before. I liked it because, A, I liked the customers. I talked to the customers, and they had a similar lifestyle to mine. They were like me, counterculture types. I liked the people I was working with as well. We shared a purpose; we were taking care of the customers. It was fun. I liked it.\n\nI remember coming home, back to the co-op, back to Prana House, and I had thought that day—I remember, while I was working, I was looking around, loving it—and I said, “I could do this. I could do this the rest of my life. I could open up my own store. It'd be fun.”\n\nAnd I went back to the co-op full of this enthusiasm. I guess Renee was the first person I sold on it because I was so excited about it. I said, “Renee, what if we do our own store?” And she looked me in the eyes, grabbed my hands, and said, “Oh, Mackey, I think that'd be really cool. Let's do it.”\n\nI always say that if Renee had pooh-poohed the idea, maybe that would've been it, but she got excited. So my spark lit her spark, and together, we created SaferWay, and that led to Whole Foods Market.\n\nThat entrepreneurial enthusiasm is very important. Also, entrepreneurs have to be very resilient. This is a quality that's underestimated because they do fail a lot. They make a lot of mistakes.\n\nI mean, SaferWay—I could have quit if I wasn't resilient. I remember going back and doubling down and saying, “We need to do this.” As I read all these books, I realized, “My God, we opened this SaferWay, small store in this residential neighborhood, and it's an old house. It's cute, but it's a terrible place to have a store. No cars go by here. This is terrible. We've got to relocate it.”\n\nThat was a terrible mistake. Fortunately, I still had enough enthusiasm that I was able to sell people on, “This big store's going to work.” So we raised more capital, and that did work.\n\nI think you have to be able to overcome your setbacks, and the flood could have knocked us out as well. There are so many times that failure is always accompanying you, and entrepreneurs, in some ways, are constantly learning from their near-death experiences, then determined to learn and get better.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou're going to like the Dyson episode because that's his whole point. He's like, “Success isn't that interesting. Failure is where all the learning actually happens.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSuccess is interesting. I think he's exaggerating there. But you learn more. You do learn from success as well—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat's his point.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n—but you learn more from failure.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, for sure. For sure.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBecause you have to. Learn or die.\n\nI was always working, like most entrepreneurs, but I was always taking odd jobs and stuff. I worked for Astroworld for a while. Even before I legally worked, my parents did something that was pretty smart. I always tell people they should do this for their kids.\n\nThey didn't give us an allowance. They assigned prices for things they wanted to get done: dishes washed, lawns mowed, leaves raked. They assigned a price for all those things. If you wanted any money, you did the jobs.\n\nSo, at a very early age—we're talking 10 years old—I thought, “Well, I'd like to have money so I could go buy comic books.” Then later, as I got older, so I could buy records, or I could save up and buy a car. And so I eagerly worked.\n\nAs soon as I could legally work, I went and took jobs because I wanted to earn money. To me, money meant freedom. I could do what I wanted to do with that money.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI feel the exact same way.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat's exactly what I felt. I so deeply desired control over my life. I was actually just talking to a really close friend about this yesterday, that I had this relentless work ethic and started working when I was 15.\n\nI remember my dad coming into my room and telling me, because at the time I really wanted a car. When I turned 16, he was just like, “You don't have to pay rent, but I don't have any money for a car. So whatever—you have to find a job, and essentially, you're on your own.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd so, since I was 15, I never got a dollar from my family. Then they kicked me out at 18, which is a whole other thing.\n\nI think there's a lot of people like this, where the connection is just some kind of default unhappiness with your life, and you realize that you're in charge of it. I'm going to channel this intense work ethic into trying to achieve success.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nAnd mainly, the success is not because it's monetary. It gives me control over what I'm doing. Now, the next stage of that, and I think the ideal stage, is that you're actually working on something you're passionate about and believe in.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe reason I asked you what other jobs you had is that, multiple times while I was reading this book, I thought of Phil Knight's book, “Shoe Dog,” which is, to me, one of the greatest—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThis book was my benchmark: “Shoe Dog.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt's one of the greatest—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nEntrepreneur autobiographies ever.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAbsolutely. I love that it's in chronological order. I love the fact that every chapter is the year in which it takes place. It's just remarkable. I'm about to reread it again and make another episode of Founders.\n\nThe reason I bring it up is that there are 2 things you say in this book that I think are important for the next generation of entrepreneurs to understand. First, Phil Knight realized that he was an evangelist. But he didn't have that evangelism until he found something he was passionate about. He sold encyclopedias—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nHe sold encyclopedias.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nRight. And he failed left and right. Then he's like, “But I'm obsessed with running,” at a time when running, just like you, was something weirdos did. You didn't just go out for a run at the time he was doing that.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nRight. That's right.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe funny part in one of your books is that you're trying to get the store. I think it's the first store outside Austin, so maybe it's in Houston or something.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou meet with the landlord, and the landlord's like, “Listen here, hippie guy. There aren't enough other hippies who are going to eat your hippie food.” And you're like, “We're not open, and this is not hippie food.” Then you explain to him what it is, and he goes, “This is hippie food.” But he bought into your enthusiasm.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd he said that you reminded him of a younger version of himself.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSlight correction on the narrative. You got the essence of it right, but that was actually our very first Whole Foods Market, when we were moving up from SaferWay. Ben Powell was a lawyer from Houston. He'd been in LBJ's administration, and he owned the property, so I had to sell him on the idea. Entrepreneurs have to sell people on things, and he just thought this was a crazy idea. He said, “You're doing a hippie food store. How can that possibly work, son?” I said, “It's going to work.”\n\nHe said, “There are not enough hippies in the whole world to fill up the store.” I said something like, “There's more than you think.” I kept going on, and he started laughing at me. He said, “Son, you remind me so much of when I was young. You're so full of enthusiasm, and you're so sure you're going to be successful.” Then he said, “Let's do your damn hippie store.”\n\nYou know, “one thing I can tell you, son, is life's going to teach you a thing or 2 before it's through with you.” He was great, and he was very helpful.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI love these people—the people who are older, further down the path, and reach back to give you words of encouragement or help you. The guy who helped you at the bank after the flood loaned you money, and he didn't even tell you until years later that he'd gone to bat for you. That's a funny story because it happens in these books over and over again.\n\nI want to go back and close a loop on Phil Knight, though, because I think it's important.\n\nWhat he realized is that belief is irresistible. He said, “I couldn't sell the stuff because I didn't believe in the product. Now I'm selling Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of my car, long before Nike is even a thing, and I can't stay in stock.” He's living at his parents' house, not in a situation he wants to be in, and he's like, “What the hell is going on here?” That's when he realized, “Oh, belief. I believe in my product. Belief is irresistible.” That was like this fuel.\n\nThe second thing that you said in the book—and I think you mentioned it; I don't remember if this was before we were talking or when we started recording—is that entrepreneurs tend to remember the beginning, like the early years, and then maybe the later years. But there's a huge gap—maybe 2 decades in here.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd Phil Knight, because he was writing that book for the benefit of future generations of entrepreneurs, said, “Man, there were so many times in the early days when we were talking about what we wanted Nike to be. We were having incredible conversations. We were such a close-knit group, and those conversations have been lost to history. I wish I either had a tape recorder or had written it down in a journal.”\n\n“When I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, ‘You need to write down what you're experiencing.’ It's such an intense feeling that you think you're going to remember it. You're going to forget all of this, and you're doing an active service for your future self 2, 3, or 4 decades down the line.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSince I used “Shoe Dog” as a benchmark, one thing I did differently from Phil in his book is that I documented it. I kept track of time. Do you know that almost all of “Shoe Dog” takes place in a 5-year period?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think it's a little bit more than that, but it ends—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWith the IPO.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe IPO.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. He got his early years, but he didn't go into how Nike became this phenomenon that changed the sports apparel business and changed marketing. It was a huge benefit for athletes. There are a lot of things about Nike in the story that he doesn't go into in that book.\n\nIn my opinion, he should have written a follow-up book, because I think so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred. One of the things I did in this book is talk about how old I was at the time. The book is written chronologically, and it spans a 44-year period, actually.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI do that all the time, even if it's not stated where I am in a book. I'll go and be like, “Okay, we're in 1969. When was he born?” I'd write down on the page, “Okay, he's 24 when this is happening.” Or I'll ask, “What was he doing when he was my age?”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI do the same thing.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow was he thinking? Do you?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nAbsolutely. I'm thinking because I'm trying to understand an entrepreneur. By saying, “How was I thinking and feeling at that age?” I can understand them a little bit better.\n\nI really like the idea of—I mean, you said I was like Rockefeller. You did draw some analogies there, but there are so many major differences. Rockefeller is the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived. Maybe Elon Musk and Steve Jobs can challenge him, but he's probably the greatest entrepreneur who ever lived.\n\nI would argue he's probably done more good in the world than maybe anybody except some religious leader or Christ or something. It's unfortunate that he goes down in history as one of the great villains.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNot in the episodes I make about him.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNo, but the reality is that Rockefeller invented the modern corporation. Oil has fueled the entire rise of prosperity in the world, and he's totally misunderstood. Was he perfect? No. But he's still the greatest philanthropist that ever lived.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, did you take issue with me comparing you to Rockefeller?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI was deeply flattered.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay. The way you started, I was like, “Wait a minute.” I didn't know if you took offense. When I compare people to other historical people, it's always, “This one thing they did is very similar to this act that you did,” because people are dynamic.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOne thing Rockefeller did that I never did—and it was a different era—is that he continued to vertically integrate the industry. He was trying to bring order to his industry because of the boom and bust of oil discoveries. He was a much more disciplined thinker than I am in terms of thinking through the whole structure and the whole system, and trying to control it. I never tried to control my suppliers.\n\nHe was a totally ruthless competitor in the sense that he would do things that today would be illegal, but were legal at that time. People don't understand what he was doing. They were considered sharp business practices, but they weren't considered illegal at the time.\n\nHe'd threaten a lot of his competitors: “You should sell out, and you should take the stock because you're going to get a lot wealthier.” But if they didn't sell out, then he basically undercut them on price and lost money until they were out. You can't do that today.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOne of the best quotes I ever heard from him was when he was trying to buy a competitor. The competitor said, “I'm not afraid of you.” Rockefeller said, “Well, if I cut off your hand, your body will suffer.” That's a very crazy thing to say, but I think you nailed the fact that he was probably one of the greatest strategists.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI had the thought: I reread things over and over again, and I know you have that same habit. You'll read a book and then reread it, either reading the entire book again a few years later or reading your highlights from it.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes. We talked about this at dinner.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. Readwise, too.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah, they're excellent.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think I was rereading Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters for the third time, which I think are very valuable. I think I should read them almost every year because, first of all, you can read them in a weekend, and there are just so many insights per minute.\n\nIn my opinion, the 2 best strategists I've ever come across in all the reading I've done have been Rockefeller and Bezos. They describe what they want to do, and then they go out and do it. It's very, very similar.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah, I think you've got to put Musk in that category as well.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nPeople don't understand what a master strategist Elon is. Think about the way SpaceX has evolved. He's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is in terms of thinking it through.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNo, that's a good point.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe has that document, I think, called “Master Strategy,” that he wrote 15 or 20 years ago, whenever it was, at the beginning of Tesla. He's like, “We're going to do this, and then we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this.” You go back, and it looks very similar to what actually occurred.\n\nI want to go back to your competitive drive, though, because we touched on it, but I think there's a little bit more there.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWell, I'm a very competitive person. I always have been, from an early age. Competition, I think, helps me focus. One of the things I got, I think, from the Todd Graves episode that I listened to recently is that he talked a lot about how people are always telling an entrepreneur, “It's not going to work,” and Todd would use that as fuel.\n\nHe'd say, “I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to show you.” I still feel that way from time to time. People tell me the idea is not going to work, and it's like, “No, it is going to work, and I'll show you.” You climb this wall of skepticism.\n\nA lot of people get discouraged when people criticize them. It's like, “Maybe they're right. Maybe it's not going to work.” The entrepreneur, I think, says, “No, you're wrong. It's going to work,” and it causes them to focus even deeper. Part of it is an ego thing, to prove the other person is mistaken.\n\nI remember when that guy told me, “You know, you're never going to be able to compete with those guys. You're just a bunch of hippies. It's never going to work.” I make the joke in the book: The guy had just turned us down, so why is he telling us why he's not going to invest? I say it's like getting turned down on a date and then the girl tells you, “Well, here's why I'm not going out with you.”\n\nIt's like, “Hell, who wants to be told why you're not going out with me?” In this case, though, I remember having a slow burn in me that said, “You're wrong. You're wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong.”\n\nA good entrepreneur uses that criticism, uses that skepticism, uses that wall of doubt that people are throwing at him or her as fuel. It's like, “No, it's going to work. I'm going to prove it.” They double down on their vision, you might say. Instead of quitting, as many people would, the entrepreneur says, “No, no, it just makes me more determined to succeed.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat exact same story is in Michael Dell's autobiography. I went and picked it up off the shelf the other day because he says something that I think is very fascinating, something I reference in conversations and other episodes that I make. He's like, “I'm 19 years old. I have $1,000. I'm in a dorm at the University of Texas, and I'm going to compete with the largest company in the world, IBM.”\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYou expressed some skepticism in your interview with him about this.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWell, I never doubt Michael Dell. He's one of my heroes, and I get to spend a lot of time with him, which I'm very, very thankful for. But on that page, he's like, “Was I a little full of myself at 19?” He's like, “Sure, I was.” And he's like, “I think you have to be to do anything great.”\n\nWhen you talk to him now, the guy is so impressive, but he's so low-ego.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nAnd he's just very calm. He really—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, I agree.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n—just looks at things like a puzzle, and I think a lot of the work he does comes from a very positive and healthy place. That's why he is one of my heroes and somebody I'm trying to emulate.\n\nFire still burns in Michael, even if you don't see it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt's still there.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOh, yeah, but I think it's a positive source.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBut later down, I reread that entire page, and he's talking about this other guy at the time who was older than him, living in his city, doing the exact same business. It sounds very similar to when you viewed some of your friends, who eventually became competitors, and some of the people you actually acquired. Michael was like, “Yeah, but I have ideas about where I could take this that this guy can't even contemplate.”\n\nAnd he was not—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nUh-huh.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\n—saying that in an arrogant way. He was just saying, “You don't have any limits.” Did you listen to the Daniel Ek episode?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYes.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOkay. So, Daniel—this is one of the most important things about that episode and about spending any time with him. You get around him, and you realize he has no ceilings. There's no self-imposed ceiling.\n\nI want to go back to the people you acquired, because it's one of my favorite things. I'm doing this for selfish reasons. This is why I'm having these conversations: because I had the opportunity to learn from you.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOne of the things that's so incredible is that I think a lot of people—and I've done this myself—put these fake ceilings in place.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThey put self-limiting beliefs in.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBut, literally, like, “I can't go any further than here.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nRight, right.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWhen you spend time with Daniel, he's just like, “Get that shit out of here. That doesn't exist.” And he does that not in a direct way. He does that by example.\n\nI remember one of the first times I talked to him. Spotify is obviously incredible, but he's also doing incredible work investing in business incubation, and I know that team very well. I spent a lot of time with them, and I was like, “How the hell did you build this incredible business that was so difficult, and then now you have this other thing where…” He's more like a co-founder than an investor.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou're talking about Neko?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nNeko, Helsing, everything he's doing with Prima Materia. I was like, “Were you always interested in investing?” And he goes, “No, I didn't even think about it until 2018.” I go, “How did you learn how to invest?” He goes, “I listened to Patrick's podcast. That's the best.”\n\nHe said, “I would listen to what the guy says, and I'm like, ‘Oh, let me try that idea. Oh, I don't like that idea.’ I would read the book he recommended.” He essentially consumed all this information and then decided, “I like that. That fits me. That doesn't apply to me. I don't like this.”\n\nThen he created his cohesive philosophy, actually applied it on a grand scale, and I'm like, “Oh, he's got no limits.” This is one of the most valuable things that you could possibly do. If you can instill something in yourself, it's just: Stop believing that you have a limit. You're at a plateau, but you don't stay there. Just like Bruce Lee said, “You don't stay at plateaus.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI totally agree. Human creativity is fundamentally limitless. There is no limit to the mind except what we self-impose on it, and once you realize that, you see that most people self-censor themselves. They don't let these ideas come through, because it's like, “Well, that's not possible. That's crazy. That's nuts.”\n\nI think an entrepreneur lets a little bit more through in terms of that flow that emerges up through their minds—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThe possibilities.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—but not all entrepreneurs, because we're seeing this in the book—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nWell, sure.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—you have that slow burn, which I want to ask you a question about in a minute. Then you're meeting other people in your industry and realizing that they're not like you.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThey just had different ambitions. That's all. I just wanted to grow a bigger company. They just didn't have that vision.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDo you think your father played a role in your expansive ideas and your ambition, or was that completely an inner drive?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI credit many, many good things to my father.\n\nI actually think he played a counterforce on that. My dad, for example, was a Depression kid who came of age during World War II. He was 20 when Pearl Harbor happened.\n\nOne of the mistakes that I made was after Whole Foods went public, my dad got me to sell stock in the IPO. Todd Graves would hate this. He urged me to continue to sell it off. He said, “John, I mean, we don’t know when the next Depression…”\n\nMy dad would have made a lot more money. He was always thinking there was going to be another Great Depression, so he was always trying to protect himself from that because it was such a traumatic experience for him as a child, growing up during the Depression with his family. They lived through it, and it was the biggest thing that impacted him in his life.\n\nIn some sense, that spread to me, so you might say that’s more limiting. I sold it because he advised me to do it, and I trusted my dad. But in retrospect, that was a mistake. I really should have compounded it and compounded it and compounded it. I mean, I’m still a really wealthy guy, but I could have been a lot wealthier if I had probably followed my own instincts instead of his advice in that regard.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou’re right about that, because I forgot: in the book, you ask him to step down from the board.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nMm-hmm. Yeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBecause you have this expansive, conquering nature—which, you’re going to use the word “expansive”; I’ll use “conquering nature.” He was kind of pulling you back constantly, and you guys were having a series of fights. Am I remembering that correctly?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat’s correct. But I think in that case, my dad was already being impacted by the Alzheimer’s that was diagnosed a couple of years later.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut you didn’t know that?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI did not know that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt was unknown. Okay.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI just didn’t understand why he’d gotten so conservative, because he’d been very supportive of my expansive mode. At the time, I just thought, “You know what? Now we’re worth so much money,” and a lot of my father’s wealth was created by Whole Foods. He had his own business, but I think he made more money from Whole Foods than he did from his other business.\n\nI thought, “He just doesn’t want to lose what he has. He’s in a different era in his life. He can’t rebuild, so he wants to be more conservative.” I just said, “He’s getting super conservative.”\n\nThat’s why I said, “Dad, sell half your stock, cash it out, keep the other half, let me compound it, but let me go. We’re going to grow this thing. It’s going to be an incredible company. Just let me do it.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDo you remember how old you were when you—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nForty.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou were 40, and he was what? Seventy?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nMy dad was 72.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSeventy-two.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThe same age as I am right now.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay. And so he had been around for the ride for 15 years up until that point?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, no. Yeah, 15 years, that’s right.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nFifteen years.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. So that had to be one of the most difficult conversations you had in your life.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat was the most difficult conversation. The most difficult thing I ever did was firing my dad from the board. It took all the courage I had. I love my dad so much, and it hurt him so badly. It was so hard to do.\n\nBut it was also a pivotal event in my own evolution, because that was when my mentorship was over. He still advised me, but from that point onward, I really was on my own. I was not going to follow him any longer.\n\nBefore then, I pretty much did whatever my dad suggested. I didn’t buck him. I argued with him, but I often caved in because I had so much love and respect for him. That was a good thing. My dad made so many good decisions that helped Whole Foods.\n\nBut at that point, I had basically grown up. I remember saying, “Dad, I’m 40 years old. I’m going to make these decisions now. I’m not going to just do what you want me to do. That’s why I want you to get off the board, because I don’t want us to be fighting. It’s tearing our relationship apart.”\n\nI remember he said, “Son, you think 40 is pretty old, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah, 40 is old.” He said, “It’s nothing. You think you know some things—you know a little bit more than you did when you were 25 and started the business—but frankly, son, you still don’t. You’ve barely got your nose under the tent. There’s so much you don’t know.”\n\nI said, “Well, that may be true, but I’m going to find out on my own. I’m not going to do what you tell me to do any longer, particularly when it comes to growth. We’re going to grow this business, and you should sell half your stock. You’ve got all the financial security you need, and watch what happens to the other half.”\n\nI always tell this story in the book: a year later, that half that he’d sold was worth more than it had been before he sold it, because we doubled the stock price in a year. Half the stock that he owned was more valuable than it had been prior to selling half of it, so he’d already made it all back.\n\nA few years later, even though the Alzheimer’s had started to grip him, my dad told me that I had made the right decision, that he was proud of me, and we were back on really good terms.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s incredible. There is a very negative—and it has to be a heartbreaking—story in the book: your mother’s view of Whole Foods. I don’t know if you want to talk about this or not.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah. My mom was, again, another Depression child, and I was named after her father, who was a doctor.\n\nMy mother grew up in Bastrop, Texas, in what was, I guess, almost a poor, white-trash kind of environment back in that rural, little tiny town—a very small-town Baptist community. The most important thing for her was that she really wanted to be respectable. She wanted her children to rise in society and be seen as respectable citizens.\n\nMy sister, the eldest, went to Wellesley, got a master’s in French literature and a PhD in psychology, and went on to teach. Here I was, scoring really high on IQ tests, with great aptitude and A’s when I was interested in something—maybe not so good when I wasn’t—and I kept dropping out of college and started this grocery-store business.\n\nMy mother could never get over the idea that I was not respectable. She’d go to her bridge parties and talk to the other mothers, whose sons and daughters were becoming doctors and lawyers. They were engineers, college teachers, and professors. She saw them as respectable people in society.\n\nShe thought a grocer was really a second-class citizen. In her mind, her son wasn’t an entrepreneur—she didn’t even know what an entrepreneur meant, I don’t think. I wasn’t a successful businessman. I was a grocer, and I had squandered all the money and love they had invested in me. She thought I was a failure.\n\nI remember—and I tell this story in the book—the very last time I ever saw my mother was back in 1987. She had had a stroke a couple of years later and was basically partly paralyzed and bedridden. I went to see her, and it turned out to be the last time I would ever see her because she died a couple of weeks after that.\n\nOn her deathbed, she begged me. She said, “John, will you do this for me? Will you make this promise to me? I’m your mother. I’ve nurtured you, I’ve borne you, and I’ve given you so much. Please, please, please promise me you will go back to school and get your degree and make something of your life. You have so much potential. You scored so well on all these IQ tests and aptitude tests, and you’re just nothing but a grocer.”\n\nI said, “Mom, I’m not a grocer. I’m a businessman. I’m building this business, and Whole Foods is going to be this great company.”\n\nShe said, “John, it’s just these little grocery hippie stores. You’re not doing anything. You’re wasting your life.” And she said, “Please promise me. Please promise me. It’s the only request I have. Please promise me.”\n\nNow I look back, and I kind of wish I had lied—just told a white lie to make my dying mother happy. But it was 1987. I guess I was 34 years old, and I just said, “Mom, I’m never going back to school. I’m not going to go back. I’m building Whole Foods, and it’s going to be this amazing company. It already is an amazing company. It’s going to be even more amazing.”\n\nI said, “Maybe I will get an honorary degree someday, because I’m going to make a lot of money, and a university is going to give me an honorary PhD,” which actually did happen.\n\nShe died a very disappointed person. She believed that her son, in whom she had placed so much hope, had wasted his life. We were alienated when she died.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat was the last conversation you ever had with her?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThat was our last conversation, and she died a couple of weeks later.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe funny thing is, my mom has been dead—I think about my parents. My dad died in 2004. My mom died in 1987. And I still have conversations with them, in my mind. I ask them for forgiveness, and I give them forgiveness.\n\nWhat I wouldn’t do to have one more night with my parents. I’d probably pay my entire fortune to have one more night with them. It would be so great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate all the things they did for me and how much I love them. And also, “Hey, Mom, I turned out okay.”\n\nWe’ll call that a minor regret in my life: that I couldn’t make my mother happy on her deathbed.\n\nGive me one minute. That’s f***ing heavy.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nSorry to take the energy down a little bit there.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo. Don’t apologize. That was absolutely incredible. I think it’s very important.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI’ll tell you, somebody helped me see this. I was doing a podcast, and they had read the book. They had an interpretation of my mother that I’d never heard before, and I realized they were right. I’d always thought that I was much closer to my father than I was to my mother.\n\nBut my mother had grown up in, again, this small Bastrop town. Here’s the ironic thing: My mother was a total rebel. She rebelled against that. She left that town, went to Houston, went to Rice University, went to school, and got a degree.\n\nShe was in a Baptist town. My mother started to smoke in rebellion against their ways. She started to gamble, drink, and dance. She was a total rebel against the small town of Bastrop, Texas.\n\nThe guy I was talking to about it said, “You know, John, you probably got your rebel side not from your father, but from your mother.” I had never thought about it before, and I thought, “You know what? I think he’s right.” I had always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had secretly inculcated it in me, and then didn’t like it there.\n\nYou know how we oftentimes project onto other people the things about ourselves that we don’t like? My mother wanted to be respectable partly because she had rebelled against all the things her parents had taught her and went her own path. She had inculcated that in me unconsciously. The other children were more obedient. I was this rebel.\n\nI never credited her for it, but then I had my own little ceremony. I thanked her: “Mom, thanks for helping me become a rebel, because it’s really helped me be successful in life. Thank you. I owe you so much for that.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe reason that just impacted me, and the reason I wanted to talk to you about it, is because when my mom died, I was around that same age, and we were estranged. The saddest thing is, she died just a horrific death: metastatic breast cancer that spread everywhere.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd the last 2 years of her life—that’s not life. That was not living. That was suffering. What I’m—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI have some advice for you. I would recommend that you do, in your own way, if you haven’t already done it, some type of ceremony of forgiveness with your mother. Just actually ask for her forgiveness, forgive her, and tell her, “I love you so much, Mom. Thank you for everything you did for me. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without you.\n\n“You nurtured me in the womb. You went through labor and pain for me to be born. You wiped my butt, you breastfed me, you took care of me, you kept me alive, you nurtured me, and you helped me get educated. I owe so much to you. I’m so grateful for you. Thank you so much.\n\n“And I didn’t tell you that the way I needed to tell you while you were alive, so I’m telling you now. Please forgive me.”\n\nAnd then forgive her. I’ve done that, and I feel like I’m at peace about it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat actually is a good lead-in to, I think, one of the most important things in the book. You also talked about this when we had dinner: You recommended MDMA therapy for me.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah, you said, “No way I’m ever going to do that.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhich I still haven’t. Talk about the inner work that you did.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nBut you know what I can recommend that you could do, and it would be just as powerful? You don’t have to take a drug. Do some serious breathwork, because I always tell my friends who particularly don’t want to do any type of MDMA or psilocybin, who don’t want to do a psychedelic, that you can have a transcendent experience just through breathwork.\n\nYou can access deeper parts of your unconscious mind that you’ve repressed, and you can relive those experiences in a safer environment. Because what’s safer than just doing deep breathing? Do it with a guide. You need to do at least an hour to an hour and a half, or 2 hours, and you have to do the deep breathing.\n\nWhat happens is that the breath activates parts of your deeper self, which are mostly hidden from you, and lets them come into your consciousness in a way that you can see them and not be overwhelmed by them. It’s a way to practice letting go of some of the stuff that we feel guilty about, that we’ve suppressed, that actually drives a lot of our behavior, and we’re not even conscious of it.\n\nYou can have a transcendent spiritual experience through breathwork, and it’s completely safe. And if it gets too scary, you just stop breathing, so you’re always in control.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhen did you start realizing you needed to fix something that was inside your mind as you were building the company? Was it early, when you were starting the company?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nRemember, I did psychedelics before I even started the company.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou tell this crazy story about doing LSD, and I think you were—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s how the book starts out, in the prologue. So I had already done—\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nI wasn’t doing it therapeutically. I was doing it spiritually. I was trying to access deeper parts of the spiritual being that we don’t normally access.\n\nThink of psychedelics as opening a doorway to going into parts of our mind and our greater self. There’s an interior self that’s every bit as big as the external universe, maybe bigger, that we don’t—because we’re so focused on living in the material world—we’re not conscious of this deeper part of our being. Psychedelics open a door to it.\n\nBut there are other ways. Meditation does, if pursued. Breathwork does. There are different types of modalities that help us access deeper parts of our consciousness.\n\nI think to grow as a human being, we need to go deeper so we can begin to release fears, guilt, and judgments that hold us back. I think every one of us can access that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWere you doing this the entire time you were building Whole Foods?\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nYes, sometimes more seriously than at other times. But yes. As you read the book, I’m telling the narrative, but I’m also telling my own narrative—my own spiritual evolution—all the way to the very end of the book. And it’s still happening now. I’m still evolving.\n\nI think, rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey. It’s also a hero’s journey. I talk about the hero’s journey in the book.\n\nMost people do not go on their own hero’s journey. We have a voice—a deeper part of our being—that is whispering to us, telling us, urging us on to follow this. Entrepreneurs are following this inner voice. They’re following this passion that they unleash and create in the world.\n\nYou have that voice whispering to you, too, and that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing, because you’re so passionate about it. That is the hero’s journey.\n\nIn my experience, most people do not answer that call because they’re too scared. They’re too scared to do it. They have a fear of failure, a fear of people ridiculing them, and a fear of rejection.\n\nRemember how we talked a little earlier about entrepreneurs, like Todd Graves, and people telling you you’re going to fail? I was saying, “That would just make me more determined to succeed.” When you’re on the hero’s journey, you are determined to succeed.\n\nYou’re going to have a lot of setbacks and failures, but that’s all part of the path. That’s how you’re learning, and that’s how you’re growing. Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero’s journey, and a hero’s journey is a spiritual journey.\n\nIt’s a journey of discovery. It’s the journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nJohn, that’s a beautiful place to close. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nThanks for talking to me again, David.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI really enjoyed it. Thank you.\n\nJohn Mackey\n\nOf course. Thank you.","tldr_md_alt":"- **Whole Foods 真正的护城河不是专利，而是行业巨头的分心——Mackey 认为零售没有可防御的 IP，因此活下来就意味着在别人注意到之前先做大。** Walmart 进入杂货市场后，“催眠”了超市，让它们陷入一场注定打不赢的价格战，Whole Foods 则“在球场上一路无人盯防，直奔达阵接球区”。SaferWay 于1978年开业，第一家 Whole Foods Market 于1980年开业，直到2004年Columbus Circle门店开张，市场才真正注意到它——“20到25年里没人关注我们，而这让我们得以扩张并复利增长。”\n- **Mackey 对创始人的最直接建议，针对的是风险投资：VC 是“带着信用卡搭便车的人”，玩的是与建设者错位的爆款游戏。** 7年基金期限会逼迫公司过早扩张——先告诉你“不用担心烧钱率”，直到下一轮下调估值把你严重稀释，或者“把他们扔到路边”。Whole Foods 的 VC 持有34%股份，下一轮融资后就会取得控制权；1992年 IPO 明确成了脱身通道。“不要把企业控制权交给 VC。”\n- **整合打法是：先建立同行合作网络，再用上市公司的货币收购其中许多成员。** Natural Foods Network 成员互换财务报表，一起去荒野旅行，直到 Whole Foods 进入北加州打破了这种关系；Bread & Circus 以2800万美元成交、套现时价值约3000万美元后，同行意识到出售是自己唯一的流动性出口，“大多数人都来找我们”。Whole Foods 目前约550家门店中，仍在运营的被收购门店只有约25家，但这些交易几乎为每个地区平台都埋下了种子。\n- **本期最具交易价值的坦白是：Mackey 告诉 Senra，如果他年轻时就有 Founders，“Whole Foods 今天仍会是一家独立公司”——因为历史上最伟大的企业家都会不懈控制成本，而他在繁荣期没有把费用纪律放在优先位置，这也呼应 Carnegie 的判断：成本节约是永久的，利润则具有周期性。**\n- **联合创始人之间的理念错配，是创始人反复踩中的陷阱：Mackey 买下了 Mark 的股份；Mark 想守着一家盈利的门店（“我们已经做成了。**别把它搞砸就行”）。 Mackey 的反驳是，企业会像投资一样复利增长——“种下一颗种子，就不能不停地把它挖出来看，必须让它生长”——后来，他与网络中许多同行在 ambition 上的差异，也促使他们把公司卖给 Whole Foods，且很多时候 Mackey 并没有直接与他们竞争。\n- **差异化击败了价格竞争：Whole Foods“从许多不同的杂货店各取一点”，因此没有任何一家既有零售商受到足够严重的冲击，愿意作出回应。** 顾客有时会开车100英里来采购，一次花300–400美元；而在最初20年里，首次进店的顾客都会“惊讶得下巴掉下来”——Mackey 认为，从 Apple 到 Tesla，早期热门消费品牌往往都会形成这种信仰式品牌效应。\n- **走传教士路线的个人代价，是本期最具情绪张力的核心：40岁时，他把72岁的父亲从董事会解雇，称之为“我做过最困难的事”；1987年母亲去世时，仍认定他“不过是个杂货商”，临终前哀求他回大学读完学位。** 他还后悔听从饱受大萧条影响的父亲的建议，在 IPO 后卖出股票，而不是让资产继续复利。\n- **Mackey 的宏观框架是：资本主义是一台“共赢、共赢、共赢”的繁荣机器，而不是零和游戏——250年前，94%的人每天生活费低于2美元，88%的人不识字，平均寿命只有30岁。** 他与 Senra 勾勒出“Bezos 1000”设想：不按个人留住的财富，而按为他人创造的财富为企业家排名；Mackey 称 Rockefeller“可能是有史以来最伟大的企业家”，尽管他被骂成恶棍，却也是历史上最伟大的价值创造者之一。","digest_md_alt":"### 1. 狂热者分不清工作与娱乐\n- Mackey 开场谈到 Senra 的企业家档案：成功者都是狂热分子。他引用 Michael Dell 对“你工作了多少”的回答：“一直在工作，永远都在工作。”他的解释是：“当你真的很享受它时，这还算工作吗？……你享受每一分钟。”大多数伟大创始人都不是文艺复兴式的全才；“他们通常只专注于少数几件事，而且主要专注于自己的企业。”\n- 回忆录写作本身也暴露出他提醒其他创始人注意的盲点：企业家对创业初期和最近几年的记忆最清晰，中间数十年却一片模糊；写作迫使他“重新思考一切，把一切重新经历一遍”。\n\n### 2. 传教士与逐利者：买下联合创始人的股份\n- 最初的 Safer Way 目标很朴素——“我们只想开一家小型天然食品店”——但联合创始人 Mark 想在1家高利润门店上停下来：“我们已经做成了。别把它搞砸就行。”新店开局缓慢、亏损再现后，Mark 说：“你把它搞砸了。”Mackey 的反驳后来变成他的复利信条：“种下一颗种子，就不能不停地把它挖出来看，必须让它生长……必须让企业经过很多年实现复利增长。”\n- Senra 将其与 Rockefeller 买断缺乏投入的合伙人相提并论，称这是其职业生涯中最好的决定之一；Mackey 证实，Mark 被买断，Craig 则留下来并认同更大的愿景。Craig 对公司扩张的预言是：“我敢打赌，总有一天我们会在 Kansas City 开一家店。”多年后 Mackey 打电话给他：“Craig，我们做到了。伙计，我们已经进 Kansas City 了。”\n- 随着公司扩张，使命变得清晰：没有其他人拥有“成为一家全国性公司、甚至改变农业体系”的愿景，而美国人的健康状况也在同步恶化。他给出的数字是：74%的美国人超重，43%肥胖，“而且这还没有达到峰值”。\n\n### 3. 扩张不是野心，而是没有专利时的生存\n- 他无法停下来的原因是：“Whole Foods 没有专利。我们只是一家杂货零售商。任何人都可以复制我们的做法。”零售业的 IP 会直接走出公司大门——“只要挖走几个关键员工”即可复制——因此规模成了核心防御手段，规模还带来了更低的采购价格。\n- 他借用 Dell 的拼图比喻来描述创业者心态：创业者在没有确定性的情况下继续前进，因为“他们相信自己最终会想明白、破解代码、解开谜题”。而他的联合创始人“想要稳妥一点……不想失去已有的一切”；对 Mackey 来说，“失败不是选项”。\n- 一位曾拒绝投资的 VC，给出了针对他们的完整论点：“你们不过是一群给另一群嬉皮士卖食品的嬉皮士……那些更大的超市连锁会把你们赶出市场。”Mackey 的结论是：“他说的可能没错，只是他们根本没注意到我们……他们被 Walmart 催眠了。”\n\n### 4. VC 是“带着信用卡搭便车的人”\n- Mackey 承认资金确实重要：它帮助 Whole Foods 进入北加州，4年后公司上市——“有了公众资本之后，我们不再需要那些搭便车的人，他们也就下车了。”但结构性风险依然存在：VC 玩的是押注100倍回报的爆款模式，目标是 Apple、NVIDIA、Intuitive Surgical 这类公司；7年的基金期限会让他们“经常拿一家好企业，试图让它扩张得过快”。\n- 他向创始人描述的失败路径是：“不用担心烧钱率，我们会在更高的估值、更高的估值上再融一轮。”直到下压轮融资把企业家“大幅稀释”，或者“他们把企业家赶走，引入职业经理层，再把他们扔到路边”。他的结论没有任何保留：“不要把企业控制权交给 VC……他们可能很会说，但从根本上并没有与你站在同一边。”\n\n### 5. 建设者与连续创业者——以及那场 F-player 晚宴\n- Mackey 反驳 Senra 对建设者的崇拜：传记中的主角确实都是建设者，但“最常见的企业家其实是连续创业者”——他们像公司炒房者，擅长孕育企业，却对运营感到厌倦。很多人并不肤浅：他的朋友 Brett Hurt 联合创办了3家上市公司，包括 Bazaarvoice，只是坦白说：“5、6年后我就会觉得无聊……我想创造一些新的东西。”他们会觉得“被自己的创造物困住了”。\n- Senra 则讲了一个反例：他曾与一位创始人共进晚餐，对方一直谈手表和汽车，并且很早就大量套现；公司在2021–22年前后估值达到20亿美元，最近却披露收入700万美元、费用4700万美元。他的结论是：“我在意你创造了什么，不是在消费什么……时间是我唯一信任的过滤器。”Mackey 温和地纠正说，这个人未必是典型的连续创业者；“Brett 绝不会炫耀自己的任何一辆车。”\n\n### 6. Walmart 是让 Whole Foods 获得空场机会的巨头干扰\n- 机制在于：Walmart 增加杂货业务后，彻底扰乱了超市行业，以至于“他们唯一想做的就是想办法与 Walmart 竞争”。它们照着 Walmart 的游戏规则来——便宜的盒状门店、仓库式装修、把人工成本压到极限——却仍然输掉了竞争；Whole Foods 则拒绝跟随：“我们不可能在价格上和 Walmart 竞争，甚至不会尝试。我们要在品质、服务和差异化商品组合上竞争。”\n- 意外的礼物是：超市把门店做得越来越没有吸引力，中产和中上阶层女性于是被漂亮的门店和真正的服务吸引过去；店员打着耳洞、纹着身，“实际上看起来就像她们的孩子”。Mackey 用橄榄球比喻说：“它们太专注于拦住 Walmart，反而让 Whole Foods 可以在另一套框架下竞争……我们一路无人盯防，直奔达阵接球区。”\n- 这段窗口期有明确的时间坐标：SaferWay 于1978年开业，第一家 Whole Foods Market 于1980年开业，直到2004年Columbus Circle门店开张，行业才真正注意到它。那家位于地下、没有停车位、原本“注定失败”的门店，后来成为、至今仍是销售额最高的门店。“20到25年里没人关注我们，而这让我们得以扩张并复利增长。”竞争对手醒悟后开始复制这一模式，竞争也骤然加剧。\n\n### 7. 隐形打法：从每个人那里拿一点\n- 既有零售商始终没有发起反击，原因是：“我们只会拿走他们少数顾客……但这些顾客分别来自许多不同的地方。”没有任何一家超市的同店销售下滑到足以触发反应的程度，于是“他们就直接忽略了我们”。\n- 需求信号其实很强：当 Whole Foods 可能是周围50英里内唯一一家天然食品超市时，顾客会开车过来，“有时要开100英里”，一次采购300–400美元。而在最初20年里，首次进店顾客都会“惊讶得下巴掉下来……他们从没见过这样的店”。占据这个细分市场的关键是差异化，而不是价格。\n\n### 8. Natural Foods Network：互换财务报表的传教士\n- Mackey 讲述的行业谱系是：二战后，“健康食品”主要是卖保健品和补充剂的药丸店；60年代末、70年代初的反主流文化催生了天然食品店；超市形态则更晚才出现。Whole Foods 创业时，美国只有3、4家天然食品超市——Boston 的 Bread & Circus、LA 的 Mrs. Gooch's、San Diego 的 Frazier Farms——他通过 Natural Foods Merchandiser 找到它们，并用来向投资人证明：“这不是我发明的……为什么在 Austin 就不能成功？”\n- Mrs. Gooch's 是关键刺激：SaferWay 每周销售额8000–10000美元；Gooch's 的门店并没有大多少，却能做到约10万美元，并且有鲜肉和大型果蔬区。“Bingo。”这让 Mackey 看清他们需要补上的品类，也推动公司迁入更大门店，开出第一家真正意义上的 Whole Foods Market。\n- 由“天然网络人” Peter Roy 组织的这个网络确实带有合作社性质；Peter Roy 后来担任 Whole Foods 总裁5年。“我们会带来财务报表，彼此交换。我们没把自己当成竞争对手。”网络里还有一个“Wild Man's group”，一起去 Alaska、Yosemite 和 Belize 探险——关系优先，每家公司占据一个地理利基。\n\n### 9. 后来他收购了其中许多人——信任就是收购货币\n- Whole Foods 进入北加州后，Mrs. Gooch's 声称 California 属于自己，关系由此破裂：“伙计们，LA 是你们的……但北加州没人做，那离这里有400英里。”财务信息不再共享，恐惧开始蔓延。Senra 质问：“你谦逊得令人难以置信，但同时也是一个冷酷无情、不断征服的竞争者。”Mackey 则强调其中的区别：“他们是我的朋友，我不想伤害我的朋友……我从来没有直接与任何人的门店竞争过。”他多年避开 Portland 的 Nature's 和 Boulder。\n- 1992年 IPO 改变了游戏规则：“那时我们有了这种货币。”同行没有流动性出口——规模太小，无法上市——所以 Bread & Circus 以2800万美元成交、在二次出售时价值约3000万美元后，他们惊呼：“哇，我没意识到我的企业值这么多钱。”于是他们来找 Whole Foods。Florida 的 Terry Dalton 直接说：“买下我。”他们出售是因为“他们信任我……我们会珍惜他们的企业，并把它做得更好。共赢、共赢、共赢”。\n- 战略回报不在于门店数量，而在于地理平台：Boston 有6家店，LA 有7家，Florida 有2家，收购对象自带支持体系和知识资本，Whole Foods 可以在此基础上继续扩张。在约550家现有门店中，至今仍保留的被收购门店大约只有25家，但 Texas、北加州和 Chicago 之外的几乎每个地区，都是从一笔交易起步。\n- 上市也带有防御属性：创始投资人持有多数股权，但 VC 持有34%；如果再进行一轮私募融资，控制权就会落到 VC 手中。父亲在一次争吵后给出的结论，用了“更粗俗的措辞”：“他们想接管公司。让我们把他们赶下车。”\n\n### 10. 持续学习，取消成长上限\n- 他之所以跑赢网络中的同行，不是因为傲慢，而是因为持续进化；这呼应了 Dell 所说的自己“更像是重新发明了7、8次”：“世界一直在变化……如果你停留在原地，就会被超越。”大多数同行年纪更大、有家庭，也更重视安全感；“我就是一直处于全押状态。”他也坦率保留了一点不确定性：“很难说，David……我并不知道其他人是怎么想的，我只知道自己是怎么想的。”\n- Senra 的伴随论点是：Jobs 的核心能力在于发现那些被二流产品占据的市场；Daniel Ek 的例子则说明了什么叫“没有上限”——2018年后，他从零开始学习投资，通过大量吸收并筛选观点来建立能力。Mackey 将其概括为：“人的创造力从根本上是无限的。心智没有边界，除非我们自己给它设限……大多数人会自我审查。”\n- 成长带来的满足感有具体体现：在被 Amazon 收购前，公司保持了25年上市且独立运营，为所有人提供股票期权；肉类切割工和普通团队成员起立鼓掌：“我们买得起房了……我的孩子现在可以上大学了。”“这种满足感非常深。”\n\n### 11. 资本主义是共赢、共赢、共赢——以及“Bezos 1000”\n- Mackey 用一组核心数字说明，零和思维是知识分子最大的错误：250年前，“94%的人每天生活费低于2美元……88%的人不识字，平均寿命是30岁。”资本主义“把人类从泥土里拽了出来”；所有慈善和税收最终都追溯到企业活动。Musk 只拿到了自己创造价值中“非常、非常、非常微小的一小部分”。\n- Mackey 借鉴 Bezos 按“为他人创造的财富”而不是“自己留下的财富”给人排名的想法，提出把它做成现实项目：“为什么不创建一个 Bezos 1000？”随着 AI 发展，被创造出来的倍增价值实际上可能计算出来。他还推荐朋友 Alexander Green 的新书《The American Dream》：美国梦“非但没有死亡，反而比以往任何时候都好得多”。\n- 他对 Rockefeller 的评价保留了所有限定条件：“可能是有史以来最伟大的企业家”，做成的好事可能比任何人都多，“除了某个宗教领袖或 Christ”，但最终却被记成恶棍。他与 Rockefeller 的关键差异在于：Rockefeller 做了垂直整合并控制供应商，而且当时使用的某些“被视为精明商业手段”的做法，“今天会是违法的”。谈到战略家时，他把 Musk 加入 Senra 的 Rockefeller 与 Bezos 阵营：“他领先于人们意识到的程度，远不止几步。”\n\n### 12. 传教、现实扭曲场与信仰式品牌\n- Mackey 说，自己直到传教能力奏效后才发现这项天赋：“我之前不知道自己有这个能力，直到它真的起作用。”在 Good Food 工作仅6个月、完全没有商业背景的情况下，他只靠热情募资：“我知道这一定会成功，相信我。”他的理论是，有魅力的企业家拥有现实扭曲场；“企业家有点像街头乞讨者，在外面乞求别人给钱，但他们真正卖的是梦想。”\n- 最初的火花来自他从门店回到合作社时的念头：“我可以一辈子都做这个。”他向 Renée 提议后，她“抓住我的手说：‘Mackey，我觉得这真的很酷。我们干吧。’……我的火花点燃了她的火花。”第一家 Whole Foods Market 的房东 Ben Powell 曾是 LBJ 政府的律师，他说：“全世界的嬉皮士加起来也填不满这家店。”但最终被热情说服：“那就开你的该死的嬉皮士商店吧……不过人生会在它结束教训你之前，先教会你一两件事。”\n- 信仰式品牌的证据来自 Austin 百年洪水：开业仅9个月、第一家盈利门店就被8英尺深的水淹没，污水灌入店内；Mackey 赶到时，却发现一个陌生人在拖地——那是一个休息日仍赶来的顾客：“你们能挺过这一关，对我非常重要。”他的结论是：“大多数真正受欢迎的品牌，尤其是在早期，都有点像邪教……它们是由用户和顾客中的传教士式狂热者建立起来的。”Apple 的 iPhone 排队如此，他自己也是在试驾一次 Tesla 后完成转变。\n- Senra 将《Shoe Dog》带入讨论：Phil Knight 意识到“信念不可抗拒”——他卖不出百科全书，却无法让跑鞋保持库存。Mackey 透露，《Shoe Dog》正是他写回忆录时明确对标的作品，但他记录了 Knight 没有写出的部分：Knight 的书大致写到 IPO，而 Mackey 的回忆录覆盖44年，并一路记录自己的年龄变化。\n\n### 13. 解雇父亲——以及不断复利的遗憾\n- 在与 Senra 的谈话中，Mackey 做出了最具影响力的坦白：如果他年轻时就有 *Founders*，“Whole Foods 今天仍会是一家独立公司”；他本应优先控制成本，尤其是在繁荣时期，坚持 Carnegie 的信条：利润具有周期性，但成本节约是永久的。\n- 出生于大萧条时期的父亲推动他在 IPO 时卖出股票，并持续卖出——“我们不知道下一次大萧条什么时候来……”Mackey 出于信任听从了建议，如今把它定义为错误：“我本该让它不断复利、不断复利、不断复利。我现在仍然非常富有，但如果听从自己的直觉，我本可以富有得多。”\n- 40岁时，72岁的父亲不知为何变得极其保守；几年后父亲被诊断出 Alzheimer’s，当时 Mackey 还不知道，于是他把父亲从董事会解雇：“我做过最困难的事……用尽了我所有的勇气。”父亲临别时说：“你才刚把鼻子伸进帐篷，还有太多东西你不懂。”Mackey 的安排是卖掉一半股票、观察剩下的一半；不到1年，股价翻倍，仅保留下来的那一半就价值相当于他出售前全部持仓的价值。即使 Alzheimer’s 已经开始侵蚀父亲的认知，他仍说 Mackey 做出了正确决定，“并且为我感到骄傲”。\n\n### 14. 母亲至死称他为杂货商——也把反叛性传给了他\n- 最沉重的一段来自他的母亲：她在 Texas 的 Bastrop 一个贫穷、小城镇 Baptist 家庭中长大，渴望体面；1987年临终时，她哀求道：“答应我，你会回学校拿到学位……你不过是个杂货商。”他拒绝了：“妈妈，我不是杂货商，我是商人……也许有一天我会拿到荣誉学位。”这后来确实发生了。但“她带着极大的失望离世，我们在她去世时已经疏远”。他带着保留地后悔说：“我有点希望自己当时撒个小谎，让临终的母亲开心。”\n- 一位播客采访者帮助他重新理解母亲，这改变了他的看法：母亲其实才是那个反叛者——她离开 Bastrop，去了 Houston 和 Rice，抽烟、赌博、喝酒、跳舞，反抗自己的成长环境。“我过去一直把自己的反叛性归因于父亲，但我意识到，是母亲暗中把这种特质灌输给了我。”后来，他把自己不喜欢母亲的部分投射到了他身上。他举行了“一场属于自己的小型仪式”向母亲致谢。\n- Senra 自己也曾在母亲因转移性乳腺癌去世时与她关系疏远；Mackey 转而建议他进行“某种宽恕仪式……请求她的原谅，同时原谅她”。Senra 说，他仍然会和已故父母交谈，“我可能愿意拿出全部财富，换和父母再共度一晚”。\n\n### 15. 创业之旅就是英雄之旅\n- 晚餐时 Mackey 曾向 Senra 推荐 MDMA 治疗，后者当时回答“我永远不会做那种事”；这次 Mackey 提供了不使用药物的替代方案：引导式呼吸练习，持续1到2小时——“通过呼吸练习，你可以获得超越性的精神体验，而且完全安全；如果感觉太可怕，只要停止呼吸就行。”\n- 内在探索早于公司的诞生：书的开篇写到 LSD，使用方式是“出于精神目的”，而不是治疗目的；此后这种探索贯穿始终：“人的内在自我，其规模完全不亚于外部宇宙，甚至可能更大。”这本回忆录有意讲述两条并行叙事：企业发展，以及“我自己的精神进化……直到现在仍在发生”。\n- 结尾的框架是：“如果看得正确，创业之旅也是一场精神之旅，也是一场英雄之旅。”大多数人从未回应内在声音的召唤——“他们太害怕了……害怕失败，害怕被嘲笑”；而企业家会把怀疑当作燃料，就像那位拒绝投资的 VC 留下的批评，在 Mackey 心里形成了“一股慢慢燃烧的火：‘你错了，我会证明你错了。’”","shows":{"name":"David Senra","hosts":"David Senra"}}