ホールフーズを44年築いた——ジョン・マッキー

Well, one of your themes that comes out in in listening to a lot of your is you admire entrepreneurs and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I was just listening to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's it's like he says, and even started off the episode by quoting him. He says, "Well, how much time did you work?" And he said, "All the time." all of the time. And that's a theme for oftentimes for entrepreneurs that they are. So, it's not like they're even think about working. Michael doesn't make a distinction, I don't think, between work and play. Neither do I. Because when you're really enjoying it, is it work? I mean, it's you're doing what you want to do. And it's playful. So, it takes a lot of time, but you're not thinking about it because you're loving every minute of it. You're enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well, you know? I mean, he just loved his business so much. And so all these entrepreneurs, they're 100% in and that's where their time goes. They're not, you ask Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man or if he was doing a lot of different things and it's like, no, no, not really. I think that's also true for most entrepreneurs. They're pretty focused on a few things and mostly they're focused on their business.

before we started recording, which you know, I'm essentially seeking your counsel because I think I'm just like these kind of people. Like you wouldn't spend 10 years making this podcast, reading 400 of these books. Your book was excellent by the way, which we'll talk a lot about today. I wasn't expecting to start here. If you didn't think that you were similar or there was something about them that was attractive and I feel like essentially my my entire life is my work. Now, I think one thing that we share together and we we spent several hours uh together, too. It's very obvious in your book, but also with you. You viewed yourself, I don't know if you use this word, but to me, you're definitely a missionary. And one of the things I want to talk to you about, I talked to a lot of founders about this. So, it's like a lot of co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that especially when you're a missionary, you weren't like, "Oh, I just want to like start, you know, one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food." You're like, we're going to change the way that the country eats. And that was a very distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders. Can you talk a little bit about that?

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

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

right?

I just had a lot of confidence. I think I think a lot of entrepreneurs, not that we weren't making mistakes, I just I think entrepreneurs believe, okay, I I got this from listening to the Michael Dell one on on the drive out here, in fact, is that Michael said, "Well, you you got to make mistakes. That's how you learn. That's how you you iterate." Entrepreneurs have confidence that they will solve the problems. Michael likes to figure out puzzles, right? Well, business in some way is a puzzle. It's like, and I'm doing it again with love life. It's like, okay, what does the market really want here? and okay, this isn't working. We got to do less of that. This is working. Let's do more of that. And then and then you you'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 it. So the entrepreneur has confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, solve the puzzle. And so they're willing to go ahead even though they don't know for certain because they're what they do believe is they're figuring it out. They're going to figure it out. And um people that I think my co-founders, they weren't sure we would be able to figure it out. So they and they didn't want to blow it. They didn't they want to play it safe. They didn't want to lose what they had, I think. And I was like, we're going to I didn't failure wasn't an option. I mean, I just think entrepreneurs have great confidence in their ability to solve the problems and they will figure it out and win. And I think I fell into that category looking backwards.

just because the world constantly that that Whole Foods had no patents. We were just a grocery store retailer. Anybody could see what we're doing. anybody could copy what we were doing. I was amazed. I always like to make the joke that Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City. The media never paid any attention to us either. We opened up in Times, you know, not Times Square, we opened up in in uh Columbus Circle and the this the biggest supermarket in New York and it just and it was in a basement. I mean, I think I talk in the book about how difficult the decision that was because of the capital investment. No parking in a basement. It's like we're bound to fail. But we took the risk and that store was still the highest line store at Whole Foods. Even though it's got some challengers now, it's it's ever since we opened it, just took off. And then the supermarkets discovered us, they started to take us more seriously as a competitor because of all the publicity we received. And they had to go see that store. And then the media started to pay attention to us as well. And as the media gave us more attention, more people began to buy the stock. And so we had this, you know, upward spiral of success. And one of the things is is that we can't patent anything. We don't have anybody can see what you're doing and they can and they it's easy to get your intellectual capital. Just hire away some key employees. And we were Whole Foods was fortunate because we never were taken seriously by the supermarkets until we really developed scale on our own. I think I tell the story of a of a venture capitalist who who didn't invest and his basic argument was, well, I don't think it's a big market. You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. But then if I'm wrong, uh, these other big supermarket chains will put you out of business. You can't compete with Safeway or HB or those guys. And he might have been right except that they didn't pay any attention to us. So we kept doing what they were they were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared about Walmart that they ignored us.

I mean, first of all, I'm glad we got venture capital money. Um, they I don't know if we could have grown without it. We didn't get very much, but it was enough to get us into Northern California. And then and then after that, we we four years after we got the money from them, we were public. So they they were important for us to get to where we got to. Once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer. And they got out of the car. And I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. The VCs are playing a different kind of game. The game VCs are playing is is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth. And when they hit when you get an Apple or you get a Nvidia or an Intuitive Surgical or you get one of these companies that just compounds and compounds and compounds, you can get 100x your venture capital money and that's what they're looking for. And so what ends up happening is they often times take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly because they're trying to get that exponential payoff. Remember, they've usually got these funds where the money is only going to be in that, you know, seven years. They got to start paying back. So, the entrepreneurs, they're not evergreen funds where you can keep the money in, you know, for decades. They pressure the entrepreneur to try to scale rapidly and that works for some businesses and those are happy endings. But a lot of times you take a perfectly good business that that's not going to be, you know, a multi-billion dollar business that's going to change the world, but it's still a good business and they wreck it. But they can afford a lot of failures because of the blockbusters make so much money. So it's it's it's like a batting average. They they don't have to hit a thousand. They just need to hit good enough and the blockbusters are home runs and so they make a lot of money on that. So, I'm often telling entrepreneurs that be careful with the VCs because the first thing they're thinking is they want to scale your business and they're going to tell you, "Don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round of financing at a higher level and a higher level and a higher level." But what often happens down that road is that um the business doesn't scale as well as they want it to. And then you get the round where it's kind of a crammed down round where it's a down round and the the the entrepreneurs share is diluted way down in those down rounds or they get rid of the entrepreneur and bring professional management in and they throw them out on the side of the road. I always tell young entrepreneurs don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game but they're not fundamentally aligned with you. I think for most entrepreneurs, you really want to build a business and you probably want to be here a decade now or 15 or 20 years from now still growing your business. And if that's the case, you have to be very careful about the VCs because they that's not what they want. They have seven years. They want 100x return if they can get it and they're prepared to crash your business prematurely if that's what it it takes. So, so be careful. That's that's my main main thing I tell How do the younger entrepreneurs that you're advising usually respond to that advice?

I think I now am realizing that and I have for several years. I actually, it's funny. I just thought about this story this morning. Um, and I think this is actually a really important point that I remember a few years ago having dinner with a founder. And the weird thing is I had never met him. He was a fan of the podcast. And but I'm like, I don't know if this guy's actually listening to the the podcast because he wanted to talk about like the watch he has and the car he's driving. And I found out he was selling a ton of like secondary before his company was successful at all. And it just came out yesterday, the day before, that this company that had a $2 billion valuation in like 2022 or 2021, whenever I was having dinner with them, uh, last year they did 7 million in revenue.

And they had $47 million of expenses. And I'm like, oh, you're just this guy this that sign. I was like, I don't give a … about the car you have or the watch you have. I care about what you build, not consume. you should be proud of what you have built, not that you bought you have money to buy somebody else's product. Like that doesn't impress me. And I obviously I left the dinner, never saw him again. And I [laughter] kind of forgot about him until yesterday. I'm like, "Oh, this I spent." And I was like, "You idiot, David. You have like one of the benefits of reading a book like yours or any of these biographies like you get to the end of the story and you just you're reminded that you know our life, you come to the end of the book, our life, we have limited time here and you should be ruthless with how you're spending your time." And I just gave two hours to this guy that was not even a B player. He's F. You've done nothing. You … joker. Like this is useless for me to spend any time with you. And this is why I people think I'm a little crazy where I spend almost all my time with people that have I said in the episode people like you where Michael Dell, Todd Graves, I'm obsessed with people that do things for a long time because time is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea, no predictability that this entrepreneur that started a company today is going to be successful. We're going to see and it's going to be up to them in the decisions that they make. And so I am kind of drawn to these like more missionary founders because you just make better longer term decisions. So, I'm not sure he he was a typical uh serial entrepreneurs that I know, I know a bunch of them and they do care about their businesses and for them it's more it's more they have they have a certain skill set of creating businesses and then getting them to a certain level and they're not primarily about the money for them. The fun part is creating the business and then as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy, they're they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just they're not wired to fit within that kind of corporate structure that they're creating. And all businesses eventually evolve to or almost all businesses eventually evolve to if they get any scale. They just don't like that. So they start over again. But I think those people are very interesting people. I think many serial entrepreneurs are not simply shallow people in it just for the money. I have some good close friends who made a lot of money creating different businesses that u but only like one of my good friends in Austin, a guy named Brett Hurt. He was the he he co-founded three public companies. uh his most famous one was Bizaarrevoice which does uh all did all the if you do a review on an online business you're probably using Bizaarre voice technology and uh Brett is just he said well I just love creating businesses and and uh but after after I've done it for I don't know five or six years I just get bored with it and I want to create something new.

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

Well, it was it was sort of a if I was using a metaphor, it's kind of like uh we were using a football metaphor. It's kind of like Walmart was such a massive force. They they created everybody all the supermarkets. Remember Walmart started out they didn't sell food. They were they were you know Sam Walton you read his book probably 10 times and and Sam you know he started out in kind of in the five and and dime store and that was kind of his initial model. I remember he would had his big idea to do the bigger general merchandise store and he couldn't sell it to where to the Ben Franklin the Ben Franklin. So he just went out and did it on his own. And it was only later after they s Walmart was very successful growing and they were competing with Gibson's and companies like that uh Kmart that they started thinking about food. But when they put groceries in it so disrupted the conventional supermarket industry that all they wanted to do was um figure out how to compete with Walmart. So the existing grocery stores saw the competition from Walmart and they made the drastic mistake of trying to compete on price. Yes. With the lowcost provider.

So they were ignoring you.

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

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

Oh, I mean sometimes 100 miles. When we only had one store in a market area, uh people might come in. And they wouldn't I mean it's not their everyday shop, right? They'd come in, they couldn't get this food anywhere else. They didn't have what Whole Foods was selling at at typical supermarkets. In the day, in the day, we were so unique. I always say, David, the first 20 years we existed, when people would first walk into Whole Foods Market, you could see I'd see it I'd see it again and again and again. Their jaw would drop. It was like, I've never been in a store like this. This I've never seen a store like this. Now, people don't have that feeling because it's more common. And supermarkets have up their game. But for a long time, at least 20 years, people we just were blown away the first time they came into Whole Foods Market. They'd never seen a store like that. It was so different than any other supermarket they'd ever been in. So we were very well differentiated. We were in a niche and people did not compete with us in that niche. And so we sort of owned it. But as I said, retailers don't have patents. We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. We couldn't patent our marketing. we couldn't patent our service levels

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

So the acquisitions were happening earlier in the company history.

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

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

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

we're talking the early health food industry was probably after World War II and and you didn't until you until the until my generation kind of came of age in the late 60s and early 70s you begin to see start natural food stores start to pop up that we're primarily food rather than supplements. And there came a point where we realized we're not really health food stores in the old traditional sense. We're different. We're natural food stores. Then the next iteration was what if we did a store that was a complete one-stop shop for people living this lifestyle so that we were a supermarket, a natural food supermarket. When when whole food started, there were only like three or four other natural food supermarkets in the United States. There was like Bread and Circus in Boston. There was Mrs. Gucces in LA. There was Fraser Farms in San Diego. Um, that's about it. I mean, there were some smaller stores, but they weren't. You got to be at least 10,000 square feet to be a natural food supermarket in my mind. And [clears throat] so, we opened up. I heard about those in the natural feeds merchandiser and went and studied them and thought I remember it was pivotal. It was like I could go and tell the investors, hey, I didn't invent this. There are other people doing it. It's working in LA. It's working in Boston. It's working in San Diego. Why won't it work in Austin? It'll work in Austin. Let's try it. Otherwise, I may not have been able to get the money if I didn't have at least a few prototypes already working. went and studied them, became friends with them, and uh ultimately acquired all of them. And [laughter]

But there were there were others that were opening up about the same time like like Alalfa's in uh in Boulder, Whole Food Company in New Orleans, um um Unicorn Village in Miami. There were there were others that were forming about the same time. That was an idea whose time had come. But what was the initial instinct? The initial instinct is these people are doing what I'm doing. Let me go build relationships with them. And then you realize, oh, there there's a mismatch of ambition here and I can actually acquire them because they didn't want to expand.

But Mrs. Gues, I remember that one because that was instrumental at the time. I think you guys were only selling like you weren't selling like there wasn't a butcher. There was some kind of that you were doing like$8 to $10,000 a week. And

Okay. A safer way to $10,000 a week or something like that. They were doing like hundred,000. And you're like, "Oh, that kind of opened your eyes that you could add the other product category." Correct.

Okay.

not work related. This is just friendship. Yes.

building relationships and having adventures together.

Yes. But what we do is we'd come together in a city. There'd be a host company hosting usually around a new store. We've opened up a new story. You got to see it. And so like when we hosted in Houston, we opened up our first natural food store in Houston in 1984, we hosted the natural foods network meeting in Houston. Um that became one of the highest volume stores in in the natural foods world. And within a couple of years,

You said they were trying to dra grab the steering wheel sometimes.

Yeah. Uh he just said they're want to take over the company. Let's get them out. Let's get them out of the car.

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

No, I mean I [laughter] No, seriously.

and then what happened?

But but but you see that's a different thing.

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

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

No, I'm talking about

Win-winwin.

Mhm.

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

they they were they just uh [sighs and gasps]

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

Yes. and he he transformed it with a much better, you know, Apple 2 in particular was a huge step or he didn't he didn't do the MP3 player initially, but the iPod was massively better. No, he didn't do the phone. He you could say he invented the smartphone though. Was there a smartphone?

yeah,

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

Looks like you need a new book. [laughter] That's obsession. And what I realized like most of the business and tech press hate business and tech and I think a lot of this has to do with you know

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

And where does all the taxes come from? And it ultimately comes from business as well. Whether you're taxing your the employees who are who are flourishing, this is the engine that's lifting humanity out. And the entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very very very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, he's he's created he and people like Rockefeller, they're they're lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever ever lived in terms of creating value and helping people. All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output. And that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast. And when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest. As a member of Function, you get access to test over 100 plus biomarkers from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation, and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body, and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy to understand picture of your overall health. Once you try Function, you'll immediately understand why it's the fastest growing health platform in the country. You can now join Function for just 30 $165 a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com/enra. And use code senra25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com/enra. You just mentioned Bezos and he's got a phenomenal idea. Actually,

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

Yeah, it's a good point. Why why we shouldn't run other people? Why

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

Number one.

It's I I told him when I saw him, too, because it's out of print and they own the rights. I go, please just like not even for money. You don't need more money. Just this book is so important to get in entrepreneurs hands because of the struggle, which is I think what most people identify with. But the reason I brought him up is because one of the things I love about him and what I'm trying to apply, you know, to every single thing that I work on is like he demands differentiation. He will not if somebody else has already made the product, he won't be like, "Oh, I can do that, you know, a little better." He's like, I have to have I have to invent a completely different spin on it. And the reason I think differentiation is really important because there's two things where you kind of knew at the very beginning that you were on to something very powerful. You just told an example. If somebody's driving an hour or two hours to shop at your store, that should tell you something. The other thing you have, you mentioned how uh you know you reinvested uh as in growth and as you reinvest in growth obviously sometimes you know you you're going to lose some money for a little bit but the first store was like profitable for like 2 p.m. of the first day and then like a year later there's like a hundred-year flood in Austin

Yeah. 9 months later 100year flood flood in Austin. Okay. 8 feet of water. When there's a flood it's not just water it's the stuff from the sewers comes up. So it goes, it floods your store and you have … water

getting tetanus shots

Right? That was I didn't have the language, but that's when I began to discover stakeholders, the people that care about your business. In that case, he was a customer and a neighbor, and he loved Whole Foods. It made a big difference in his life. I think you will find that most brands that are really popular, particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults. They were cult cults, meaning they had a following because I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist enthusiast of their users, their customers. Um, Apple's a great example of that, right? I mean, people would line up to get that next iPhone, you know, camp out to get the next next generation of iPhone. in the in the day. Um [clears throat] Tesla, I mean I before I I I own a Tesla and um I remember my friends talking you got to drive this car. You just if you drive this car you want to buy this car and I said I don't want a Tesla and blah blah blah blah blah. It's pretentious. Blah blah blah blah. Yeah. Soon as one of them finally taught me to drive it [laughter] and bought it the next day. Right. So because and I became a Tesla uh fan, super fan, right? So, I do think that happened with Whole Foods. People loved our stores, particularly in the early days when we were so unique, so differentiated. Um, and I remember those people would drive in a lot of times. They would tell me, "Why?" I said, "Why are you coming in?" He says, "Oh, I want to make sure my little boy never doesn't eat this poisonous food. I They just going to eat healthy food. I g my child's going to be nourished. I'm going to make sure my children grow up really healthy." And it was oftentimes those parents that were doing it for the next generation, so to speak. So, I do think um Whole Foods was benefited by that type of cultlike following.

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

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

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

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

Good food store.

You're going to like the Dyson episode because that's his whole point. He's like success isn't that interesting. Like failure is like where all the learning actually happens. And

You do learn from success as well. But you learn more from failure.

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

this this book that was my benchmark Shoe Dog.

entrepreneur autobiographies ever. I love that it's in chronological order.

It's the f I think it's the first store out of Austin. So maybe it's like in Houston or something. Yeah. And you meet with the landlord and the landlord's like, "Listen here, hippie guy." He's like, "There's not enough store. There's not enough other hippies are going to eat your hippie food." And you're like, "We're not opening. This is not hippie food." And he explained to him what it is. He goes, "This is hippie food." But he he bought into your enthusiasm. Yes. And he said that you reminded him of like a younger you.

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

And he's like, I couldn't sell the stuff because I didn't believe in the product. Now I'm selling Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of my car long before Nike is even a thing and I can't stay in stock. And he's living at his parents house, you know, not in a situation that he wants to be in. He's like, "What the hell is going on here?" And that's when he realized, oh, belief. I believe in my product. Belief is irres is irresistible. And that was like this fuel. The second thing that um you said in the book and I think you mentioned it I don't remember if this is before we were talking or when we started recording was entrepreneurs tend to remember the beginning like the early years and then maybe the later years but there's huge maybe like two decades in here and Phil Knight advised cuz he's writing that book for the benefit of future generation entrepreneurs he's like man there's so many times in the early days we were talking about what we wanted Nike to be we were having incredible conversations we were such a close-knit group and those conversations have lost to history I wish I either had a tape recorder or I wrote it down in a journal. So when I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, you need to write down what what you're experiencing. You're you think it's such an intense feeling. You think you're going to remember you're going to forget all of this and you're doing an act of service to the, you know, for the future you for two, three, four gener uh four decades down the line.

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

He got his early years but he didn't you know the Nike became this phenomenon that changed the sports apparel business changed marketing it it was huge benefit for athletes. There's a a lot of things about Nike in the story that that he doesn't go into that book. He should have written, in my opinion, he should have written a a follow-up book because I think so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred. One of the things I did in this book is I talked about how old I was at this time and I the book is is written chronologically in a way and it goes it spans it spans a 40 44 year period. Actually,

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

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

Okay. [laughter]

one thing Rockefeller did that I never uh did and [clears throat] it was a different era he he continued to vertically integrate all you know uh and and he was trying to bring order to his industry because of the the boom and bust of oil discoveries and and uh um he was he was a much more disciplined thinker than I am in terms of thinking through the whole structure and the whole system and trying to control it and I never tried to control the you know my suppliers or uh uh I never and he he was he was a totally ruthless competitor in the sense that he would he would do things that today would be illegal um but they were legal at that time people don't understand what he was doing was not was considered sharp business practices but they weren't considered to be illegal and what he would you know, he he threatened a lot of his competitors. You should sell out and you should take the stock because you're going to get a lot wealthier, but if they didn't sell out, then he basically undercut them in price uh and lose money until they until they were out. You can't do that today.

Yes. Read wise, too. Yeah, I think you got to put Musk in that category as well. People don't understand what a master strategy strategist Elon is. And think about the way SpaceX has evolved in a way. It's he's he's he's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is in terms of thinking it through. Well, I'm, you know, I'm a very competitive person. Um, I always have been. I mean, from an early age, um, competition, I think, helps me focus. Um, one of the things I got that I think in the Todd Grapes that I just listened to recently is he talked a lot about people are always telling an entrepreneur it's not going to work. And he Todd would use that as fuel. He'd say, "I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to show you." I still feel that way from time to time. People tell me the idea is not going to work. And it's like, "No, it is going to work and I'll show you." And when and and you climb this wall of skepticism. A lot of people, they get discouraged when people criticize them. It's like, you know, maybe they're right, maybe it's not going to work. The entrepreneur, I think, says, "No, you're wrong. It's going to work." And it causes him to focus even deeper and and and and and to to part of it's an ego thing to prove the other person is mistaken. And I I remember when that guy told me that um you know, you're never gonna be able to compete with those guys. You're just a bunch of hippies. It's never going to work. And you know, I I I make the joke in the book, it's like the guy had just turned us down. Why is he telling us why he's not going to invest? And I say it's like getting turned down on a date and then the girl tells you, "Well, here's why I'm not going out with you." It's like, "Hell, who wants to be told while you're not going out with me?" Um, in this case though, I I remember having a slow burn in me which said, "You're wrong. You're wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong." So, a good entrepreneur uses that criticism, uses that skepticism, uses that wall of doubt that people are throwing at his or her uh as a as a fuel. It's like, "No, we're it's going to work. I'm going to prove it." And they're they're they double down on their vision, you might say, and they're not and they and instead of many people would quit. It's for the the entrepreneur. No, no, it just makes me more determined to succeed. I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions. And you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is eight. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of eight, Matteo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using eight, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant and I was with some friends. So I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, "Who was I talking to?" And I said, "That's Matteo, the founder of Eight." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep." Matteo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an eight. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my eight ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe eight is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use eight. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress and it is next level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eight.com/enra and use the code senra to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it. But I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my eightle from me. Make sure you get yours at eight.comra. That exact same story is in Michael Dell's autobiography. I went picked it up off the shelf the other day and I I wanted to because he says something that I think is very fascinating that I reference in conversations and other episodes that I make where, you know, he's like, I'm 19 years old. I have $1,000. I'm in a dorm room of Texas and I'm going to compete with the largest company in the world in IBM. I I never doubt I never doubt Michael Dell. um he's one of my heroes and I get to spend a lot of time with him which I'm very very thankful for. But on that page he's like you know was I a little full myself at 19? He's like sure I was and he's like I think you have to be to you know do anything great. And you talk to him now it's like the guy's so impressive but he's so low ego and he's just very calm and he really is like just looks at things like a puzzle and I think a lot of the work he does comes from a very positive and like healthy place and that's why like he is one of my heroes and somebody I'm trying to emulate. Fire still burns in Michael. Even though if you don't see it, it's still there. Yes. They put self-limiting beliefs in And when you spend time with Daniel he's just like oh like get that … out of here like that doesn't exist. And he does that not in a direct way. He does that in a way of an example that it's like well I remember um one of the first times I talked to him and I was like but he's doing incredible like investing in business incubation and I know that team very well. I spent a lot of time with them and I was like how the hell did you build this like incredible business that was so difficult and then now you're you have this other thing where like he's more like a co-founder than investor but it neco housing everything he's doing with pre uh primaria and I was like did you were you always interested in investing and he goes no I didn't even think about it until 2018 and I go how did you learn how to invest he goes I listen to Patrick's podcast invest like the test [laughter] and then he's like I would listen to what the guy says. I'm like let me try that idea. I don't like that idea. I would read the book he recommended and he just essentially consumed all this information and then said I like that that fits me that's not that doesn't apply to me. I don't like this and then created his cohesive philosophy and then he actually applied it to a grand scale and I'm like oh he's got no limits. This is one of the most valuable things that you could possibly if you can instill something in yourself is just like stop believing that you have a limit. You're at a plateau, but you don't just like Bruce Bruce Lee said, you don't stay at plateaus. But not all entrepreneurs because we're seeing this in the story in the book where you have that you had that slow burn which I want to ask you a question about the slow burn in a minute and then you're meeting other people in your industry and realizing that they're not like you. Do you think your father played the role in your expansive ideas and your ambition or do you think that was completely like an inner drive? He was 20 when Pearl Harbor happened. You're you're right about that cuz I forgot in the book you ask him to step down from the board. Because you have this expansive conquering nature which you're going to use the word expansive. while you was conquering nature and he was kind of like pulling you back constantly and you guys were having a series of fights. Am I remember that correctly? But you didn't know that. Do you remember how old you were when My dad was 72. Okay. And so he had been around for the ride for 15 years up until that point. 15 years. So that had to be one of the most difficult conversations you had in your life. That's incredible. There is a ne very negative um and has to be heartbreaking story in the book. Your mother's view of foods. I don't know if you want to talk about this or not. That was your last conversation you ever had with her? Sorry to take the energy down a little bit. [laughter] You know, I I'll tell you I'll tell you. Um somebody helped me see this. I was doing a podcast and they had read the book and they had an interpretation of my mother that I'd never heard before, which was, you know, and I I realized they were right. I'd always thought that, you know, I was much closer to my uh father than I was to my mother, but my mother had grown up in this, again, this small grass drop town. Here's the ironical thing. My mother was a total rebel. She rebelled against that, you know, she left that town. She went to Houston, went to Rice University, got a went to school and got a degree. She was in a Baptist town. My my mother, she started to smoke in rebellion against their their, you know, she started to gamble. She started to drink. She started to dance. She was total rebelled against a small town of Bassrop, Texas. And the guy in the 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 never thought about it before. And I thought, you know what? Think I think he's right. I'd never I'd always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had it secretly inculcated in me and then didn't like it there. You know how we oftenimes project out onto other people the things that about ourselves that we don't like? My mother wanted to be respectable partly because she had rebelled against all of her things that that her parents had taught her and went her own path and she inculcated that in me unconsciously. The other children were more obedient. I was this rebel and uh I never credit her for it, but then I then I had on my own little ceremony. I thanked your mom, you know, thanks for helping me become a rebel because it's really helped me be successful in life. Thank you. I owe you so much for that. Metastatic breast cancer spread everywhere that's my advice for you. I would recommend that you do in your own way, if you haven't already done it, do some type of ceremony of forgiveness with your mother. Just where you actually ask for her forgiveness and you forgive her and it's like and tell her just I love you so much, mom. Thank you for everything you did for me. I wouldn't be the person I am today without you. You nurtured me in the womb. You went through labor and pain for me to be born. You wiped my butt. You breastfed me. You took care of me. You kept me alive. You nurtured me. You helped me get educated. I owe so much to you. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much. And I didn't tell you that the way I needed to tell you that while you were alive, so I'm telling you now. Please forgive me. And um and then forgive her. I've done that and I feel like I'm I'm at peace about it. Yeah. You said no way I'm ever going to do that. But you know what you what I can recommend that you could do and it'd be just as powerful. Don't take a drug, but do some serious breath work because I always tell my friends that particularly don't want to do any type of um like MDMA or psilocybin, don't want to do psychedelic, you can have a transcendent experience just through breath work. You can you can access deeper parts of your unconscious mind that you've repressed and you can relive those experiences in a safer environment because what's safer than just doing a deep breath? Do it with a guide. And you know you need to do at least an hour to hour and a half or two hours and you have to do the deep breathing. But what happens the breath activates parts of your more deeper self. It's mostly hidden from you and it it lets it come into your consciousness in a way that um you can see it and not be overwhelmed by it. It's a way to practice um uh letting go of some of the stuff that we feel guilty about that we suppressed that actually drives a lot of our behavior. aren't even conscious of it. You can have a transcendent spiritual experience through breath work and it's completely safe and hey if it gets too scary you just stop breathing so you're always in control. Remember I started I did psychedelics before I even started the company. So that's how the book starts out in the prologue. So I'd already done I mean wasn't doing it therapeutically. I was doing it I I was doing it spiritually. I was trying to access deeper parts of the spiritual being that we don't normally do that. Think of psychedelics as opening a doorway to going into parts of our mind and our greater. There's there's an interior self that's every bit as the ex 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. But there are other ways. meditation does, if pursued, breath work does. There's different types of modalities that help us access deeper parts of our consciousness. And I think to grow as a human being, we need to go deeper so we can begin to release fears, guilts, judgments that kind of hold us back. And I think every one of us can access that. Yes. I mean sometimes more seriously than other times but yes it was a it that's why as you read the book you know I'm telling the narrative but I'm also telling my own narrative my own spiritual evolution all the way to the very end of the book and it's still happening now I'm still evolving so um I I think rightly seen the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey it's also a hero's journey I I talk about the hero's journey in the book um most people do not go on their own hero's journey we have a voice. Deeper part of our being is whispering to us, telling us, urging us on to follow this, you know, entrepreneurs are following this inner voice. They're following this passion that they're that that they unleash and they create in the world. Um, you have that voice whispering to you, too. And that's why you're doing what you're doing because you're so passionate about it. Um, that is the hero's journey. In my experience, most people do not answer that call because they're too scared. They're too scared to do it. They want to they a fear of failure, a fear of people ridiculing them, fear of fear of rejection. Remember how we talked a little earlier about how the entrepreneurs are um like Todd Graves, people are telling you you're going to fail or I was saying that would just make me more determined to succeed. When you're on the hero's journey, you are determined to succeed. And you you're you're going to have a lot of setbacks and failures, but that's all part of the path. That's how you're learning. That's how you're growing. Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey. It's a journey of discovery. It's a journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life. Thank you.