Welcome back to my seventh annual Authors in August series for Rule Breaker Investing. This week, we get to hear from one of the great living entrepreneurs, a rule breaker who, as a young man, thought we can, we should eat better. His first store in Austin, Texas was called SaferWay, a punning jab at Safeway, of course. Well, when more than forty years later, John Mackey sold that company, Whole Foods Market, to Amazon dot com.
His empire had grown to eighty five thousand employees, sixteen billion dollars in sales regularly listed as one of top companies to work for. And perhaps most importantly, John had ignited and then led a full blown cultural revolution around better food and healthier habits since imitated by everyone from Walmart to Trader Joe's. What is it like to start something beautiful but small long ago and watch it, help it grow, grow, grow and leave the entire world off so much better for your efforts?
Let's hear the whole story only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool cofounder David Gardner. Well, I'm delighted this week to be joined by John Mackey. Full disclosure, John is a member of The Motley Fool board of directors. More full disclosure, I'm on the board of his new company, Love Life, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
And one more disclosure, John is a friend of mine, somebody I deeply esteem, I've learned so much from for over fifteen years and counting. John first joined me on this podcast in September twenty twenty talking about his new book at the time, Conscious Leadership. It's one of the better books I've ever read on the topic. I highly recommend it. But this week, we're talking about John's new book just out in twenty twenty four, which is entitled The Whole Story, and it pretty much is.
John shares his life story. The subtitle, Apt, is Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. John Mackey, welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Thanks for having me on again, David. John, we're gonna get to the book, of course, in a second. But you just saw a big launch of your first flagship love life in El Segundo, California. Take note, Los Angeles Fools, since I'm co invested. John, how was the opening? Yeah. It was fantastic. It was on Saturday, we had our grand opening.
We had several hundred people come and show up, and we did, you know, we did I did a talk on hold the whole story and we have a community gathering room. We jam about a hundred people in and and then did a book signing. You know, we did a soft company back on July ninth, but we didn't have all of our equipment. We didn't do any marketing. We wanted to work out tech technology bugs and other, you know, challenges, get the team ready for the grand opening, and it went very smoothly.
People seemed really, really excited. They came, it's there's never been anything quite like Love Life, which is this it's this holistic health membership club. It's big. It's in an old Best Buy. It's forty five thousand square feet and we have a healthy restaurant. We have a, state of the art fitness center. We have yoga, Pilates.
We have a spa that, and we have great recovery modalities, all kinds of biohacking type techniques from cold plunges, infrared saunas, cryotherapy, lymphatic massage suits, the pulseimeter. We've we've got, hyperbaric oxygen chambers. And and then, of course, we have three pickleball courts because we wanna have play and community there. And then we have a medical center.
The doctors our doctors are trained in functional medicine, integrative medicine, so east west integration, plus, lifestyle medicine. And they're medical doctors and they're very they're wonderful. And so the whole idea really is to get people to be members and then do some tests so we can establish a baseline health for our members.
And then once that baseline health is established, we could work with the wellness coach and the doctor to sort of set up a plan for you to become healthier, become the healthiest version of yourself. You have if you have some kind of disease, we hope to detect it and then work with you to reverse it. Most modern medicine doesn't do this. You you generally go see a doctor in America when you are sick.
And then unless it's an infectious disease where something like, antibiotics will work or a vaccine which might prevent a viral infection. In general, modern medicine just treats the symptoms and, don't really they don't reverse things. The leading killer in America, for example, is heart disease. It's been our leading killer for over, I don't know, a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty years now.
And, the the desert infectious diseases which used to kill us, which is, you know, from tuberculosis to, influenza to all the different, you know, smallpox, tetanus. These things have been held back by modern modern medicine. But now the chronic diseases such as, heart disease, obesity, autoimmune diseases, stroke, these kind of diseases, we don't really have solutions for through technology and through pharmaceuticals. But they can be, in most cases, reversed and prevented.
And if by living a healthy diet, eating a healthy diet, living a healthy lifestyle, and by checking in very hopefully at the earlier age better to get your baseline established Yes. And then through the wearables and then through, you know, continuous testing once or twice a year, you could establish your progress. And, we we have it all on our platform. You can you can access all this information vis a vis our app.
And then we can see people become the healthiest version of themselves, healthiest physically, emotionally, and spiritually. So that's kind of the love life vision. We're very excited about it. I don't think anybody's quite doing what we're doing anywhere in America. And I really enjoyed the LA Times article. It it there's one anybody can reference wherever you're wherever you are. There's only one love life right now. It is in El Segundo, California.
There is the app that you can use, John, you pointed to. A lot of these a lot of the benefits you get are on-site and they're high-tech, and that definitely came through that LA Times article. But, of course, a lot of this, John, is just common sense. Things like the best time to go to the doctor is when you don't need to go to the doctor. Yes. The doctor's job is to keep you from needing to see the doctor. Alright. Well, thank you for that opening, John.
We'll probably go back to love life near the end, but let's go to the book. Let's start, in fact, at the end. John, in the final chapter of your book, you reflect back on all that's come before in your book, in your life, most especially, of course, the life of Whole Foods Market. You initially called the company SaferWay. You write in chapter thirty nine reflecting on a conversation you had with your business partner and life partner at the time, Renee Lawson.
I'm gonna quote and then ask you to react. Here I go. Quote, when I first came up with the idea for SaferWay and Renee said, let's do it, Mac o Man. We thought it would be fun. That was the initial impulse. We also needed to make a living, and we wanted to do so in a way that benefited other people in the process.
If you told us then that the little venture we'd started in a Victorian house would, by the time I retired, grow to be a company with five hundred forty stores, a hundred five thousand team members, twenty two billion dollars in sales that changed the way America eats, we'd have fallen over laughing. But then we would have gotten right back up to work building the company we loved. And it was because we loved and enjoyed it so much that it became all those things we could never have imagined.
And that's why I love playing the game of life, you write, John Mackey. End of business. I love that it keeps surprising all of us. John, looking back, how much do you think the love and enjoyment that you had in building the company contributed to its success? And how has that love evolved? Yeah. That's one of the themes. That's one of the threads that goes through the whole book. A couple of threads you've you've identified there, David.
First, that from the very beginning, Renee and I, we were trying to earn a living, but we thought it'd be fun. It was an adventure. I love that word adventure. It's part of, it's part of the subtitle, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. And building a business is really the most fun I've ever had in life. It is a game. And I know, David, you love games and so do I. And business is a type of game, building a business. It's complex.
And, you know, the more complex the game is, in a lot of ways, the more challenging it is, but also the more fun it is. It takes longer to master it. Once you master something completely, it's not as fun anymore. It's kinda boring, actually. It starts to get boring. But a really good complex game like business is an infinite game. It doesn't get boring. It gets more and more fun.
So, one of the themes going through the book is the first chapter is called the game of life, and the final chapter is called the infinite game. And infinite game is a game that you play it most most games are finite games with winners and losers and a clear set of rules and and a termination point to the game. And if any game, you just continue to play it, hopefully, at higher and higher skill levels, it never really has an end to it. Life is that way. I'd argue that capitalism's that way.
I would argue that a business has potentially that way, although we know most don't last even on you know, a hundred years is really long for a business, but, it's hard to make succession in business once the founders move on, but that's another topic. Anyway, fun and games is one theme that goes through the whole book. Another one is love because the book is chronicle kind of my own spiritual awakening and my own spiritual evolution.
And that spiritual evolution was always going deeper into love, experiencing more and more love, sharing more and more love, trying to build a company based on love. And to the point where my next my last business or probably my last business, Love Life has actually got love in the name, right? Love life. Love your life. Love all of life. And, yeah, those two themes are very common and the threads that go throughout the entire book. Well, love does.
And of course, love visits us early as kids when we think, of course, of our parents, who as you say at a different few different points of the book, John, they love us in a way that no one else ever will. And it's something we should never take for granted. And, the story of your dad, one of the threads that kind of runs through the book. He was on your board for many years. He added a lot of value. He he was also a hard person to have on your board.
He eventually, unfortunately, as many of us do, ended up with a form of dementia. And so in his last years, you didn't get to have the dad that you grew up with. But I wanna go back to early chapters, early days, because you would hitchhike from Austin back to your family's home in Houston, and your dad, Bill Mackey, was an astute businessman. You mentioned he taught accounting at Rice University. He became very successful as a health care company CEO.
And at one point in the book, you you relay this conversation. You said you'd started the the business, but you were looking to this older figure, this elder in your life to give you advice. And you said, dad, and I quote, I'm here because I need to learn more about business. You pitch hiked down from Austin. I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. I appreciate all the advice you've given me, but I need to learn how to think better for myself. Where should I start? What should I read?
And he answers, son, pointing toward the shelves, here's where you start. And he pulls out a management book by Peter Drucker and then a memoir by Alfred Sloan of his years at General Motors. What was your reaction, John, and did you read them? Yeah. Of course, I read them. I'm particularly the the Drucker book, I read that multiple times. My copy is falling completely apart after all these years.
I I fortunately, I'm a, as you are, I'm a Kindle reader, so I've got it on I've got it on Kindle now. But, that was the that was the first big impact. And Drucker is such a systematic thinker about all aspects of business that he gave me a really good grounding. The Alfred Sloan, and since then, I've read many, many memoirs of entrepreneurs. And, I've learned a lot. I mean, I've learned a lot from memoirs.
In fact, I've gotten into this, podcast recently, I mean, over the last couple of years called Founders Podcast. And I don't know if you're familiar with that or not. I am. Very popular. The guy David Sundaram, he reads biographies and autobiographies of entrepreneurs and then, you know, does a sixty minute description of the book. As a result of that, for re listening to his podcast, I probably bought twenty books or so that he's recommended and read. So, yes, I am a bibliophile. I am a reader.
I love to read and I absorb information very quickly when I read. And so I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I was studying philosophy, religion, world literature, the humanities in general, psychology. And so but I disdained business when I was younger, in fact. I never thought I'd go down that path. I got interested in natural and organic foods and that led to starting a business. Then I found out how much fun business could be.
My dad being an accountant, I just kind of thought it was all about numbers and not seem kind of dry and boring to me. But there's this adventure as an entrepreneur of creating and building something and watching it grow and feeding it and you're learning as you go along. And I also found that to be, challenging but also very rewarding and fun. John, I have gotten to know the reader in you over the years. You've given me some great recommendations I've benefited from.
You are among the most widely read people that I know. And I'm curious, this is briefly departing from your book, but how about five books everyone should read by John Mackey? How about a little bonus for our listeners this week? What should we all all have read? Well, I mean, it's not it's not not kind of it's a difficult question because I've read thousands of books. Do you can you narrow it down? Are you talking about, business books? Are you talking about books that I most enjoyed?
The books that had the biggest impact on me? I love it. Thank you for for making me specify. I would say that could help me flourish as a human being. Could help you flourish as a human being. Well, the first big influence that that the thinker that had the biggest influence on me in my twenties and early thirties was Abraham Maslow. And I read all of his books, every one of his books.
And it he helped me see that that humans move up this hierarchy of needs, and you can go into self actualization. And then towards the end of his life, he started talking a lot about self transcendence. And so that those books are so positive about human potential. Maslow was one of the founders of the Human's Potential Movement. So pretty much, you can't go wrong. His books also still hold up really well. A lot of it's been integrated into mainstream psychological thinking.
But his books were so inspiring to me. I certainly recommend them. From a, from a business ethics standpoint, the book that had the I've read this book at least a dozen times, and I've read my highlights even more times than that. And that's by my one of my old philosophy professors, Robert c Solomon, Bob Solomon, and it's called Ethics and Excellence.
And, that's when I first discovered that book came out in, like, nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety, but it it's when I first discovered stakeholder thinking. And Solomon was good friends with Ed Freeman, and, you know, we both know Ed. And then after discovering I'd already been thinking about stakeholders, but I didn't have the language for it. And then Solomon gave me the language, which he got from Ed, and then I went back and started reading Ed's books.
So, Stakeholder Management's another book another book I can highly recommend. I mean, you know, books that have that super big impact on you are also world literature. So, the all the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and then in the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn, Those three authors had a huge impact on me. They just they're just the books are so incredible. There's so much, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were such great observers of human nature. Yep. You you learn.
And a good good world literature makes your world bigger and bigger and better. Let's see, you know, Ken Wilbur's books had a big impact on me and a good a good I've never read him, but you mentioned him a number of times in your book. Well, the the the good starter book on Ken is his book, it's only a couple hundred pages, it's called A Theory of Everything. And it really truly is a theory of everything.
But the integral integral thinking believes that both human beings and culture they believe everything's evolving. Everything's evolving, including human beings, including our cultures, including our minds and, and the integral thinking believes we go through sort of stages of development personally from more conventional to more modernistic to more postmodernistic and then potentially to integral and then in places beyond. So I'm I'm a great believer I've read hundreds of self help books.
I'm a great believer in continuing to grow as a human being. Of course, the book that's probably had the biggest impact on me in my entire life is A Course of Miracles which I started studying back in nineteen eighty four. And full disclosure, I I discovered that book soon after I did MDMA for the first time when it was still legal, also known as ecstasy or today in Mali. And that really reawait really awakened me to the power of love.
And then the Course in Miracles is a spiritual path to awakening deeper into love. The Course posits that we're basically sort of like the matrix that we're dreaming. We think we wake up in the morning, and we just wake up to another dream that we think that dream is real, but the dream when we're sleeping feels real when we're in it, right? The interesting thing about dreams are we're the dreamer, right?
And yet, who are all the other characters in the dream that seem to be acting independently of us? That seem to be, I mean, we don't seem to have control of them, right? And so, but in fact, we are the dreamer. We are dreaming it. And the Course says, you think it's different here, but it's really not. You are still asleep. And so, the Course is a path to awaken deeper into love.
And it basically argues that or posits that, we have certain block that love is at the core of who we are, but we have blocks to it. So judgments, anger, fear, guilt, resentment, All those attack thoughts that we have block our awareness of love's presence. So the course teaches us how to how to do forgiveness and and how to how to let go of those blocks as we become more conscious.
And as we do that, our heart opens more and more and more and we experience more and more love until according to the course, we fully wake up and more dreams. I was gonna say, we must wake up at the end. Okay. John, thank you for that. That that's that's really helpful. Those are some books. There's plenty more. Certainly. I I have a book recommendation for you, by the way, if you haven't come across this this one. Have you read a swim in a pond in the rain by George Saunders?
No. Totally recommend it to you. Can you can you can you text that? Yes. I will. Please remember I shared that with you because I think you'll look back and appreciate having read it. But you have a a modern day teacher of creative writing at Syracuse University going back through It is a phenomenal book. I think you'll love it. I certainly have. So the Russian short stories, It is a phenomenal book. I think you'll love it. I certainly have. So the Russian short stories like Chekhov and Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. So Chekhov and Turgenev, I think you'll you'll love it. So I get to give you, I don't know, a book recommendation once for every fifty you give me. Thank you for that. Let's go back speaking of books to your book, John. There's a great chapter. I've heard the story from you as a friend of yours, but you tell it, and we'll just call it the flood. I'm gonna call it the flood and the loan. Every founder of every business has a near death story, sometimes more than one of them.
John, would you tell the story of the flood and then of the loan? Yeah. So a little background, we did SaferWay for a couple of years. SaferWay was a very pure store. It was a vegetarian store. It was we didn't sell alcohol or coffee or, you know, no sugar. It was very, very pure. It was also in this old Victorian house. Renee and I ended up moving into the house and, and wasn't on a commercial street. We did everything wrong in that first location. We didn't know anything.
But we were able to escape from it, and that's a longer story in the book, and we relocated and merged with another small natural food store that we were friends with and changed the name to Whole Foods Market. And we started to we stopped being vegetarian. We started selling, meat, seafood. We started selling alcohol, coffee, and sugar, but still having high standards for natural and organic foods and no artificial ingredients, flavors, coverings, preservatives.
That first Whole Foods Market store within six months of opening had become the highest volume natural food store in the United States based on everything I could find out historically about that that era, and from my friends that had other stores, we were out distanced them all. And then nine months after the opening of the store, we had built the first Whole Foods Market knowingly in what's called a hundred year flood zone. And I remember talking to the owner of the building about it.
He told me, he says, you know, this is in the hundred year flood zone. I said, what does that mean exactly? And he said, well, it means about once every hundred years, there's the Shoal Creek's gonna, you know, it's gonna flood its banks. It's gonna come right down Lamar, and it's gonna fill up your store with about eight feet of water. And I said, You got to be kidding. He said, No. I said, Well, when was the last time that happened?
He said, Oh, it was before I was born, over seventy years ago. And I was like, Yeah, once in a hundred years. I mean I guess I can live with those odds. And and the hundred year flood occurred in the first year we were open. And so we were, we were wiped out. And even then, I should probably say that we actually, at the landlord's insistence, we built the store two feet higher. We put a two foot slab, so we actually had two feet higher the water had to get to.
But it still got there and went over went went into the store. And Renee actually swam out of the store that night. She was closing the store up. Wow. So this storm was completely ruined. We have some pictures of the flood in the book, and, we were completely ruined. And, that's when I learned about stakeholders, although again I didn't have the language for it back in nineteen eighty one. And because the stakeholders were people that loved us, they didn't let us die.
So the very next day we're cleaning up the store and all these strangers, they weren't kinda strange, I kinda recognized them, but they didn't work for us. They were helping us clean up the store. And I remember talking to him. I was like, what do you why are you why are you helping us cut the store? He says, Oh, man. I love you guys. You guys have gotta survive this. Well, I know I'm gonna do everything I can to help you guys get through this.
And and then our team members were working for free because we couldn't make a payroll, but nobody quit. They all stayed. They all they all had faith we could get back open again. And we, of course, did pay them once we were able to get open again. Our suppliers fronted us hundreds of thousands of dollars in new inventory on on our credit. Investors put in more money.
But the biggest thing was we got this hundred thousand dollar loan from our bank, which surprised me at the time because it was just on my signature and my signature was worthless. I really I couldn't believe it. The bank usually wants all this collateral and and, you know, we just breeze through it. I remember being really grateful for that. And about, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, I'm at this conference and, I'm, this guy comes up to me.
He kind of looked familiar but I didn't really recognize him and he said, Hey, John. You may not remember me but I used to work at City National Bank. And I said, Oh, I love City National Bank. They really came through for us in that flood. You know, they loaned us one hundred thousand dollars He says, that was a really great and he says, yeah, that was a great thing Mark Monroe did for you, wasn't it? He was our banker. And I said, it sure was.
I mean, if we hadn't gotten that money, I don't I don't I don't know what would have happened. I said, but it always surprised me that they gave us the loan because, I mean, I was I didn't have any net worth and I it was just a signature. He starts laughing and says, you don't know what happened, do you? And I said, well, yeah, I do. They they gave us some money. He said, John, the bank turned the loan down. You guys were not worth the credit risk.
And I said, well, no, they didn't turn the bank because we got the money. He said, no, Mark Monroe personally guaranteed the loan. And I said, Well, why the hell would he do that? And he said, He really likes you guys. He just, he said, I know they'll pay me back. Sean Mackey will pay me back for taking the rest of his life. And so he took a risk on us. I didn't even know, he never told me. So I immediately, of course, asked, God, I'd really like to get hold of Mark and thank him.
And I said, Do you have his contact information? He says, That's too late. He passed a few years ago. So, an unsung hero, but that's really what stakeholders mean. They're people that care about your business and have a stake in it. And, that's people don't understand this about business, really. Business is this win win win game where you're creating value for all of these different stakeholders. You're creating value for your customers. If they don't like you, they don't have to shop with you.
They can go somewhere else. But they do shop if they do shop with you, then they're they're getting value out of the exchange. People don't have to work for you. They're working for you voluntarily. They can get other jobs, in other words. And but and many of them do, but they are winning because they're getting paid, they're getting opportunities to be promoted, to gain new experiences and get promoted. Suppliers don't have to trade with you, but they do, and it's win win with them.
And investors don't have to invest. Whole Foods was public company for twenty five years. If you didn't like us, you could sell the stock if you didn't like what we were doing.
And then, you're part of the communities, and you're the community, you're trading with the community in all kinds of ways from, taxes to getting helping out philanthropically in the communities you're in and point I'm making is these are all these are all the stakeholders and I didn't know about them back then, but I and but when I when I read Bob Solomon's book, Ethics and Excellence, and I discovered the language, I thought I made the I connected the dots. That's who saved Whole Foods Market.
We were saved by our stakeholders. I've been trying to pay them back ever since. That is just a beautiful story. I'm so glad you told it on this podcast. The flood and the loan. I knew the flood story. I don't think I heard the loan story and the Mark Monroe story from you, but reading it in your book, it is it's really one for the ages. And thank you for sharing that.
And also how it opens up into an understanding of what business conscious capitalism anyway really is, which is an interdependent ecosystem, highly sensitive, where everybody participating is winning. Otherwise, they probably are opting out. And if we can just understand it and do it that way and buy and hold those companies, by the way, Whole Foods are pretty good one to buy and hold over the years. Well, very well put, John Mackey.
Let me let me go a few chapters later because this was an interesting part of history I was not familiar with. Three or two ago. I was not familiar with. Part of it is I'm younger. But John, in chapter ten, you were speaking to the early days of the natural foods movement. It's the early eighties. Natural and organic foods going more mainstream. It's still early enough that each big city might just have one or two really good stores. There are no national brands. There's no national competition.
And in particular, John, the Natural Foods Network, or as you call it in chapter ten, the network. Could you explain a little bit more about who was in the network and its history and its importance? Yeah. So back in the day when the the natural foods, organic industries were really getting going, the precursor to that was the the health food stores, what we referred to as pill shops because they're mostly selling supplements, a little bit of packaged food.
But natural food stores were focused primarily on food. They might have sold supplements but they were really in the food business trying to sell organic produce, whole grains, beans, nut seeds, natural meats, things like that.
And what ended up happening is that, as we began to know through actually through a trade journal called the Natural Foods Merchandiser, we began to see that we were not by ourselves, that there were other entrepreneurs out there doing similar things to what we were doing in Austin. And so we began to connect up together and we were we saw ourselves honestly, we saw ourselves as part of a movement. We we were a movement.
This is you know, this was a count we were all counterculture, mostly counterculture, sort of hippies, trying to change the way people ate, just eating natural, healthy, organic foods, just not all this processed junk food that we were starting to eat back then and now even eat more of it today. So we we saw ourselves as part of a revolution, you might say, in in trying to change the way America ate.
And so we were all separated into these distinct geographical areas, and so we were very we shared with each other. We'd get together three times a year about every four months. Somebody would host, and then we'd we'd compare a lot of cases, we'd compare financial information. We compare marketing strategies, merchandising strategies, we talk about our businesses we're doing, and so we were all learning together.
And they help make Whole Foods a lot better company as a result of what we learned from them. But then also, most importantly, we established relationships with all of them. They became friends. And, when Whole Foods after we we took venture capital money in before anybody else did. We did an IPO, initial public offering, before anyone else did. That gave us a currency and sort of one by one, most of these entrepreneurs, decided to cash out.
They they we paid them a lot of money and they became wealthy and then did what they wanna do with the rest of their lives. Well, I continue, we continue to play the game of Whole Foods. And then Whole Foods would gain what we call territory and talent. We gained new territories when we bought Bread and Circus in Boston. Now we had a platform in New England, Mrs. Gucci's in Los Angeles. When we got, Unicorn Village and Bread of Life down in Miami, we had a platform down there.
Freshfields, when we acquired them, we got Washington DC area, and so and so forth and so on. We had, you know, certain what we call platform acquisitions, and we got but we also got talent. What you always have to think about when you're trying to grow, there's always gonna be limiting factors. That's true in biology and ecosystems and ecology. I mean, food is oftentimes a limiting factor for most species, right? In business, there could be a lot of limiting factors. One might be capital.
Once we had done we went public, capital was not really a constraint any longer for us. Then the limiting factor became talent because you cannot grow without a lot more talented people coming in. So the acquisitions that we made brought in talent. Some of the very best people ever worked for the company, like Walter Robb, for example, or, Will Paradise, AC Gallo, David Lannon.
These were all some of my heroes of mine that worked for these other companies that had this massive, improved Whole Foods in so many ways when they joined the team. So, yeah, I think I got that question answered. Yeah. And I I just found it so interesting.
So the network is there, it exists because of passion that's being felt in Miami or Los Angeles, and you start to discover each other and you start to meet and then and you never quite put it this way and it's it's it's not meant in any way to be, predatory, but you ended up buying them all out pretty much, which is sort of a funny reflection. It wasn't predatory at all.
Although sometimes, I I see when I tell the stories of people, journalists start printing it that way, like, we ruthlessly took over everybody. It's like, no, we didn't. They sold to us. They they voluntarily sold their businesses not because we were threatening them. We were we were offering them so much money, they decided to cash out. Or they came to us on their own. Yeah. I mean, so many times they approached us. Would you please buy us out?
And in many cases, they then came to work for you and became some of your lieutenants and some of your superstars over the years. Yes. Yeah. I it was more difficult for the entrepreneurs that built a business to to go into a sub subordinate position to me. As I like to say today, I learned this the hard way, once you're a CEO, that's really all you're good for. It's very difficult.
And, you know, that was one of the challenges I had after Amazon bought Whole Foods was, as they told me towards the end of the book, you know, it's like you didn't wanna lose control of your business, you shouldn't have sold it to Amazon. And of course that's true, but I I they they did let me manage the business fairly autonomously until they didn't.
Yeah. Well and in fact, speaking of pure companies, John, it's, of course, pure coincidence that on the day I get to talk to the founder of Whole Foods Market, two similar world beaters in the food space are changing CEOs. Specifically, Starbucks has rocked the markets, gaining about twenty percent of its stock today by announcing it's hiring a new CEO, Brian Niccol, the present CEO of Chipotle. So Really? Wow. Did you not know that? No. I hadn't seen that today. That's today. Oh my gosh.
That is today. So David, I've been preparing for this podcast, you know, all day long. You know, I kept up with the news. None of us was expecting this, but John, since we're here together your book, The Whole Story, is often telling the back stories behind executives that you've worked with, your e team, as you would say, and how important leadership and these personalities were for Whole Foods.
So, John, today's Starbucks switcheroo has Starbucks gaining twenty percent of its market cap from about eighty billion to about a hundred billion as it hires away Chipotle's standing CEO, and Chipotle loses about ten billion off its market cap from about seventy to sixty. How can I not just throw this one on the table and say, Mackey, any thoughts? Well, I was was Howard Schultz still running the company for Starbucks? Howard was not. He had come back for a third time as CEO.
Howard, by the way, makes a very interesting appearance in your book, which we can talk about or not. What was he? He had he had since given it away to a CEO who was kinda flailing and was replaced, like, year later. CEO got replaced by Brian Nichols. Today. Yeah. Obviously, under Brian, Chipotle has done very well. So, you know, the CEO can make a big difference. I I mean, another good example in in the grocery space is I've watched how well Sprouts has done under their CEO.
That company's, market cap's gone up considerably. It's probably quadrupled under his leadership. And, so a good leader makes a huge difference. And so now, Mexican food is not the same thing as coffee. So we'll we'll have to see, but probably he has I think also I don't know what kind of agreement he had with Chipotle in terms of noncompete or, but I'm sure they're not loving him right now.
And now they there's some question about whether he's gonna try to hire any of us take any of those people away with him. Well, that would be something to watch for as well. It is it is a shocker. I mean, it's it's rare that we would see especially in kind of this industry that you know pretty well to have somebody, I mean, we're used to it in sports. Right? Oh, you just traded us your star center fielder. But we don't see this very often at this kind of scale in corporate America.
You know, now that you're now that I'm starting to rattle it around in my brain, I just realized one of the big implications and besides management skills, you know, where has Starbucks been the weakest? Food. They've never figured out food. Their their their coffees, you know, they've really got that one down and, the consistency is, you know, straight up there with McDonald's in terms of the consistency of the products.
But everything, about food has been a challenge for him and I mean even I didn't talk about this in my book but at one time Howard called me up and wanted to could Whole Foods help us with our with your food and I said, well, maybe. How many, how many, how many Starbucks are there? This was many years ago now, seven or eight years ago. And so how many Starbucks are there? And he says, well, there are over ten thousand in the United States. And I said, no, we can't. We can't. That's too big.
We you're too big for us. Maybe, I don't know, maybe he was thinking about making an offer for Whole Foods. I don't know. But nothing ever Wow. He never did and nothing ever came of it. But I know he was concerned about food and that Starbucks in other words, Starbucks is at the very top of excellence in coffee, but their food, you might say, is a harms the brand a little bit maybe. It's not not of the same quality.
So if Brian Nichols can bring, you know, food magic to Starbucks, he's gonna be a bargain for whatever they're painting. You know, one of our cottage wits around The Motley Fool, Sina Hasuna, said, you know, maybe it's Nickel whenever because he could finally be able to serve breakfast at this new company because a lot of people have asked about breakfast burritos and breakfast from Chipotle for a while. And Chipotle is not open for breakfast, I gather.
That's it. So now it will be for Brian Niccol. Okay, John, let's go back, let's go back to your book. The Happiest Day of Your Life. It was getting married to Deborah, your wife now of thirty two years and counting. Deborah is from a large Catholic family. And as I myself was raised Catholic, the story you tell in the book about your wedding day is not completely shocking to me, but it was shocking nonetheless. Would you share again your wedding day showdown moment, and reflect on it?
Well what happened? I the whole well, you know, you have to go back and we my wife comes from a Catholic family, and although she wasn't a practicing Catholic, and she was her spiritual interest went in other directions, it was very important to her family.
So we had a big Catholic wedding, and she comes from a large family, so I make the joke that we had about five hundred people at the wedding of which about about seventy five were on my side and about four hundred and twenty five were on her side. I'm not sure that was a joke. No. And, I come from a small family. Anyway, we had to go through an engaged encounter, which was we were a little bit older than most of the other kids who were getting married.
And the joke there was we had to do two weekends, and, it was basically two things. They they you had Catholic elders telling you no matter what happens, you're going to hit hard times, all marriages do, stay together. Doesn't matter how bad it is, you know, what god has joined together do not, do not tear apart. And then then also birth control. They they kept saying this was not the rhythm method, but if you look up what the rhythm method says in the dictionary, it's the rhythm method.
And that was the only acceptable form of birth control at that time that we're talking about. Got married in nineteen ninety one, so thirty three years ago. So I'm sure the Catholic Church has changed that.
But now at the wedding, you know I tell the story about how I got lost and was it gonna be late to my own wedding, but, in this case I do get there before the wedding launches and the the priest who's gonna marry us immediately pulls me aside and says, look, before I can perform this ceremony, you need to sign this paper. And I and I read the paper and it says, I agree that any children the marriage produces will be raised Catholic. And I said, you gotta be kidding me.
You're, you're, you're just putting this to me today, today? I mean, you know, at the wedding day? I mean, couldn't you have gotten this to me before? And he says, well, there's no problem, wizard. And I said, well, this is coercion. Are you telling me that if I don't sign this paper, you're not gonna perform the service? And he said, regretfully, I I will not be able to perform the service.
Wow. So I actually, you know, thought about calling it bluff, but then I realized, you know, no, this would break Deborah's heart. It would be terrible, right? It was truly coercion. And then I just decided, This is coercion. I'm gonna sign this agreement, but I don't consider it binding in any way. So, and I guess Deborah had the last laugh on this one because we never had any children. Oh, what a moment.
And that was the happiest day of your life and you explain why, understandably so, in your book despite a little bit of pressure. John, what was the second happiest day of your life and why? You know, it's kind of a joke.
It's because the IPO was definitely one of the the day Whole Foods went public in January, I believe January twenty third in nineteen ninety two we did our initial public offering which it's kind of like losing a virginity, you can only really do that one time and it was an amazing experience for our team. We were fed in on Wall Street, driving around limos and everybody was interested in what our business was about. We only had twelve stores when we did our our initial public offering.
I explained that I needed to get the venture capital hitchhikers out of our car so they didn't hijack it and take it over and hire a new driver and toss me on the side of the road. But it it was, it was think about it. This was we started SaferWay in nineteen seventy eight. This is literally fourteen years after we opened up SaferWay.
And, everybody that had faith and confidence invested their money for the long term now could could sell out for a huge gain, or they could keep the money in or sell part of it and keep the rest in. And it but the point is I had gotten the car to where I promised I could get it to and they now could the venture capitalist could exit as could, any anybody else. Any of our initial investors could exit as well well or just partially exit.
Kinda remind me of, you know, the the Warren Buffett story when he had his limited partnership and decided to, you know, get wind that down and then he bought Berkshire and kind of gave everybody an option of folding their money into Berkshire and he, anybody that didn't he kind of like took it personally a little bit. So I felt like I fulfilled my promises I'd made to our early investors And, that was a happy day for me. Also, I mean, I was on paper rich myself.
I mean, raising the relative, I was worth about seven million dollars after the IPO. But I couldn't believe it because before then, I mean, I was just super super poor guy. So, yeah. So, very happy day and, you know, it's kinda like people people wanted us. Alright. Changing gears from an IPO. I I would say few CEOs have so distinguished themselves as authors and thinkers.
Not to say that they're not all smart and deservedly successful, and some of them actually are, but but not many are such avid readers as we heard John is earlier or have debated economist Milton Friedman or have written books or led a new business movement. And here, I wanted to talk, John, some about conscious capitalism. I want you to talk some about that. But first, I wanna share this excerpt from your book, page three hundred twenty nine. I love this. Here we go.
Quote, for a while now, I'd been aware that it was hard for people to fit me into their narrow political and ideological boxes. I sold natural foods, practiced meditation, espoused veganism, and wore hiking shorts to work. I believe business should be informed by love, serve a higher purpose, and benefit all stakeholders. And yet, I pushed back against compulsive unionization. I defended capitalism and free markets.
I argued for freedom of thought and personal responsibility, and I resisted anything that resulted in more government controls and subsidies and move us away from the natural discipline and innovation of free markets toward the stultifying inefficiencies of socialism. And, quote, John, you started out as maybe the proverbial hippie who had let us say a lot of questions about business or capitalism. You've ended up here now championing capitalism done right, conscious capitalism.
It's a philosophy people have a hard time putting in a simply labeled box. Why is that? I think it's I think there's a lot of reasons. One problem is is that Marxism has such had such a huge impact on the intellectuals and still does. And and it just continues to morph into, you know cultural Marxism and this sort of and I think part of it is it's complicated but part of it is, people do not understand that business is they see it as a winner take all type of system, that it's a win lose game.
There's winners and there are losers. And the winners are people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These guys are particularly greedy because they're getting these big pieces of the pie, and and they're no more deserving of anyone else. They don't understand how markets work. They don't understand that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts have become wealthy, not because they are greedy and stole a big piece of the pie when nobody was looking.
It's because they've created more value for other people. All their wealth has been created because think about how Amazon has changed our life for the better. If you're an Amazon customer and you're a Prime member and you're getting one click and now now you can get most you can get a lot of things the same day or within twenty four hours. It's astounding. It's, and it and at good prices.
So Yes. Amazon that's why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world or Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX and the other companies he's done, PayPal. I mean, these were massive value creations for customers that people trade voluntarily. And so people don't understand that about business. And by the way, capitalism itself is inherently good. It's not that you have to be a conscious capitalist to be doing good. Capitalism inherently is creating value for stakeholders.
It's just when you become a conscious capitalist, you understand the interdependencies and you do it in a more conscious way instead of unconsciously. But most business people I mean, are there greedy business people? Yeah, of course there are. There are. Are there greedy doctors? Lawyers? Yes. Politicians? Yeah. And politicians. Human nature is not any different because you work for the government than because you're working in a business.
I mean, there are bad actors and good actors in every realm of our lives. And so, the beautiful thing about business and capitalism is if you don't serve your customers well, they have other choices. They can go somewhere else, and that acts as a discipline. It's very disciplined it's very difficult to discipline government. You just You get to vote, but that proves not to be very effective in disciplining, say, the bureaucratic state that we now live under.
But businesses, if they don't create value, then they lose customers or competitors come along and do a better job and they begin to get outdistanced and they begin to and that and that creates continuous progress. That's why I love capitalism so much. It's not a win lose game. It's a win win win win win game, win six game. Good for customers, good for employees, good for suppliers, good for investors, good for the communities that they're part of, and good for the global community.
Most people are also ignorant of how much progress humanity's made in the last couple hundred years. They're not taught that in school. They're just taught about all the mistakes and crimes and and, the bad things that happened, but they don't talk about progress, the good things that have happened.
And I always like to say that, and I'll do it here, is that if you go back to right around between eighteen hundred and eighteen twenty, so a little over two hundred years ago, ninety four percent of everybody alive on the planet Earth lived on less than two dollars a day, ninety four percent and that's adjusted for today's dollars. Eighty five percent lived on less than one dollar a day. How many people today live on less than two dollars a day?
Down to about six percent of the population, six percent too many, but that's been capitalism that's been lifting people out of poverty. If you go back two hundred years ago, eighty eight percent of everyone alive on the planet couldn't read. They were illiterate, eighty eight percent of the population. Today, that's down to twelve percent and continuing to decline. The lifespan, average lifespan two hundred years ago was thirty. Today, it's close to getting close to eighty across the planet.
We we and I could go on and on and on, child births are dead. I mean, oh, we talk about inspiring books. I let's put this one in as a late edition here. I consider it the most important book I read in the twenty first century and that is, Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. It's an incredible book, it has, had a huge impact on me and I think it should be mandatory reading because he documents so greatly how much progress humanity's made in almost every single area.
He takes on the problems like climate change and, as you make progress, there's always going to be some trade offs that occur, unintended negative consequences. But the challenge I often give young people who despair about where we are today, so I'll tell you what, I'll give you the entire history of the human race. You tell me a time it was better to be alive than right now. Humanity's When would you like to be born into? What era would you where would you like to be born?
And I will submit it's never been better to be alive than right now. I mean, if you go back two hundred years ago, you didn't have any even have modern dentistry. You didn't have any antibiotics. If you if you got like in the civil war, if you got wounded, they had to cut off your arm or leg because they couldn't stop an infection with antibiotics. It was it was it's just they didn't have, they didn't have way to they didn't have general anesthesia.
Again, I guess, you take opium and a lot of people became opium addicts as a result of that, but we didn't have, we just made so much progress in so many different ways. And and I that story is just not told. And so I'm trying to tell it as best I can. Well, I appreciate you have told it very well. I've listened over the years, and I've tried to tell it some too. And I think many hearing us, John, this week are people who are investors.
And they've been coached by me, if not other people too, to make their portfolio reflect their best vision for our future. It is an incredible time that we can be alive and save money and put that toward organizations that add value to our world and that grow for good reasons over time and that we can all become rich together. And it doesn't happen all at once. And it one year and every three, the market drops.
So it's not always straight up and it's not always easy, but my golly, pinch yourself, that you live at least I'm pitching myself that I live today. Another great book I'd recommend that I try to get anybody that's interested in in, being more optimistic besides Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, which is also great. But Jeremy Siegel's book, Stocks for the Long Run, I don't know what edition we're on. I've read all the editions.
Because, I mean, the re the stock market reflects human progress. And the new corporations that come along and disrupt things, the rule breakers Thank you. The rule breakers, they change the world, and they change the world for the better. And we make progress through the rule breakers. Yeah. So well, that's one of the by the way, I do believe rule breakers is better term than disruptors. Thank you.
Well, it's something that I've made a part of my life's work and you're much better at branding than I am. But, I do appreciate. I think it's an important phrase. It it is to me. I know. Rule breakers, rule makers, that's pretty good, Randy. Not bad. Speaking of rule breakers, John, let's move just a couple more things I wanted to kick around with you. Talk about rule breakers, Amazon.
So you've ended up selling your company to a company that is maybe the most the biggest most raging rule breaker of this generation. You do a good job speaking to the decision to sell to Amazon in your book, the whole story. On the one hand, it was at a time of real pressure that you were getting from so called shareholder activists.
Basically, predatory forces looking to take over the company from the outside, destroy its culture, dress up its short term financials in order to make some short term money. We would call that unconscious capitalism. So you were right right in the nick of that. But then along comes Amazon as a potentially amazing suitor.
On the other hand, a few pages later in your book, after staying with Amazon for five years as you eventually did, you departed and said goodbye to that thing, Whole Foods Market that you'd created that you so loved. Do you wanna share anything more here now about Amazon, your reflections on Amazon, the sale, or the reflections afterward?
Yeah. You know, the question I get asked the most from people, before the book was written but certainly since the book was written, was like, do you regret selling to Amazon? And the answer is, I regret the circumstances that made that the best alternative for our company. But it was the best alternative. If I had to do it all over again, I would make the same decision because our options were limited.
We could have we tried to get Warren Buff to buy the company, and he sort of made a joke about it. You know? Add it that my brand, I own Dairy Queen. You know? We we talked to Albertsons on an informal basis. We knew we didn't wanna be acquired by them. They would they were interested as a vehicle for them to go public, actually. And so then it was really about fighting. That's what we really thought we were gonna have to do, fight for our independence.
And that'll I'll always wonder about the path not to taken, but I decided that I actually thought we'd lose. Might hold them off for a year or so, but I thought we'd lose. We needed more time to turn the company around. And one of the things that I love about Amazon and that that I will always be happy we sold Amazon is Whole Foods.
We had the whole paycheck narrative was going really strong, and people had began to copy our our products and our and our we didn't have so much differentiation in our products. And they were undercutting us in price, and we need to lower our prices.
But to do that when you have an I mean, you have activists, it's very difficult to do because if you're selling something for a dollar and you start selling it for ninety cents, in the short run, your sales are gonna go down, your comps are gonna get terrible, and your profits are gonna go down, and you won't have time to execute. There's a lag period, maybe up to a year. So Amazon let Whole Foods drop prices four times significantly in the first two years.
It cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. But they one thing I love about Jeff and Amazon, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, those guys think really long term. They're thinking ten, fifteen years out. So that really helped us. And I very seldom hear about the whole paycheck narrative anymore. That's really kind of, peaked and gone the other direction. Also, Amazon gave an he they they they increased the pay of virtually everyone in the company within thirty days of the merger.
They went to a back in two thousand seventeen, they went to a fifteen dollar minimum wage, and that meant pretty much everybody else that was, you know, got bumped up. Every hourly every hourly worker at Whole Foods got a pay increase. And so that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars too over time.
Wow. Our suppliers not only didn't get lose business with Whole Foods, but they Amazon studied our sales and who we were selling to, and they picked up a bunch of our suppliers that went on that for the first time we're doing business with Amazon. Our investors got about a thirty percent pop, on the when the price Amazon paid versus what happened before the activist join went in. And so I think every one of the stakeholders won. So it was a win win win solution.
I mean, everything wasn't, you know, perfect. I did have some I did have some fights with some of the leadership at Amazon over the over years, and I was I always saw myself as trying to protect Whole Foods and and, I was really wanna protect our culture. And and so Amazon wasn't trying to change Whole Foods, but I always say they're they're such a powerful culture themselves, and they're such a giant company. They're like the sun.
And, you know, Whole Foods was a two hundred a Fortune two fifty company when they bought us, but Amazon was a, you know, a Fortune five company. And and, so we were like Jupiter ordering the sun. We were pretty big, but we're still caught in the orbit of of the sun. And so I I did worry about our culture being impacted and that was what I've most of my fights were about that.
And I go into some detail in the book about that one big cultural fight led me to decide to hang it up and and go on and devote myself to love life. So but in general, I'm a great admirer of Amazon. And overall, I think that, that was the right decision at the time. Stick by it. Stand stand by it. And you've now transitioned because business is a game. It's an infinite game and you love that game.
And John, is there anything else you'd like to add about Love Life before we close with our game of buy, sell, or hold? You know, only one thing is which, why am I doing it? You know, I'm I'm gonna be I'm gonna be seventy one years old in just three days. Why am I doing it? And besides, it's fun to build a business. That's the main reason. But I I know from Whole Foods, we had a program called Total Health Immersions.
We could take people that were if if and take them in a retreat like setting, do intensive education, get control of their food and their diets for one week. I was amazed how much progress people made in losing weight, lowering their blood pressure, improving their cholesterol in just a week. And the people would stay in the program, and they could lose over a hundred pounds in a year. It's it's completely transformational.
So I really feel like we figured out how to radically improve people's health. And Love Life is dedicated to that proposition, and I just don't think I'd feel good. It's it's the call of the hero's journey. I'm still being called by it. And I would not have been happy if I had just taken my money and sat on it and, you know, traveled around and had a good time and, I wouldn't fulfill my purpose. I would have gotten to the end of my life with a regret. Why didn't she try that?
You don't know if something's gonna work. There are no guarantees to level up it's gonna work. But if I hadn't tried it, I would have regretted it. I'd have wondered the rest of my life what would have happened if I had tried it. So, that's the hero's the hero's journey call. I'm still answering it, and that's the main thing to say about Love Live, except that I'm super excited about it. And I encourage people to go see our new location in Los Angeles in El Segundo south south of the airport.
And as I mentioned to the top, I'm a shareholder. I'm on the board. I also encourage those same people to do that. Alright, John. Let's close out with our game of buy, sell, or hold. These are not stocks. But if they were stocks, John Mackey, a sentence or two, are you buying, selling, or holding, and why? Let's get it started. You ready? Hit it. Alright. The New York Yankees, if they're a stock, buy, sell, or hold? You buy.
They're they're having a great season, and they've got, you know, two of the greatest players in the game, and Judge and So to. And it's the greatest franchise in the history of baseball. So how can you not buy the Yankees? Well, a lot of people hate them, and I suspect as a lifelong Astros fan, you don't like them very much, but I absolutely agree with your answer. Yeah. Well, I'm not pulling for them. I'm an Astros fan.
But if you're asking me what what the long term prognosis of the Yankees, then bye. Buy. Next one up, private land ownership. If it were a stock, buy, sell, or hold? For me, it's hold, because I own a lot of land already, and it doesn't it doesn't appreciate as much as as stocks do over the long term. People think real estate does, but it doesn't. I think that's been well demonstrated. And, again, read Jeremy Siegel's book, Stocks for the Long Run.
But on the other hand, I'm very happy with my real estate holdings, which are, you know, I own a ranch, own a house in Boulder, own a house in Austin. And, yeah, so that's part of part of my lifestyle with my wife. So I'm holding on to what I have, I'm not selling.
But as investments, I would I would I would not I'd hold and I might even sell if you were just investing in, in real estate to make big profits unless you're an expert in the field and you, you know, I can't say you can make profits in real estate, but I couldn't. So I would sell anything that wasn't personally important to me. Buy, sell or hold Kids these days. Yeah. So you you you if you rephrase that to grandkids, I'd say buy.
But I'm about to be seventy one, so I'm I'm I I guess I'll hold, but not not looking to buy anymore. Well, how about just, you know, Gen z, millennials, whatever you wanna call kids these days? What are your thoughts? My thoughts are this is still the best time to be alive in the history of the planet. The kids today People always ask me You know, the trick answer to my question is, I'll give you any other time in the history of humanity, when would you choose to be born?
My answer is, a hundred years from now. Because I think it's going to be even better. If you look back where the world was a hundred years ago, it's just amazingly better in so many ways. There's every reason to think it's going to be even, you know, ten times better than it is today a hundred years from now. So, yeah, while kids buy I think I know where you're going with this one, but maybe just a few sentences as to why. John, if they were a stock, buy, sell, or hold, labor unions?
I guess I would hold. I mean, labor unions have been in decline for a while. They're they're actually getting a little bit of a pickup. I always as I I see labor unions as a competitor, of corporations. If if you if you don't treat your workers well then that union they can always unionize that's an option And so you're kind of competing with them in a way. Competition is good.
If you're if you have a competitor trying to steal the hearts and minds of your workers, well, then you're gonna work harder to make sure they don't. So labor unions serve and they've served a very useful purpose historically cause there was if you go back and look at the labor conditions in the nineteenth century, labor unions were absolutely necessary. I don't think they're as necessary today, but in some cases, they are. So, yeah, I'm gonna say hold. Alright. And it's rule breaker investing.
How could I not close with this one, John Mackey? If it were a stock, kinda is, but it's not individual stock picking, buy, sell, or hold? Buy, baby. Buy. You betcha. Why? I wanna say because it's fun. But if you if you're a member of The Motley Fool and you and you've done what I've done, I've I've taken so many of their recommendations and bought them and held them for years and years and years, they don't all work out.
But the ones that do work out pay for I sell the losers, basically, and get I do tax harvesting every year. Yep. And then I take that money and reinvest it. And then, you know, you I just continue to see the I actually have a I have a little game going on between my my index funds, my Vanguard index funds and my Motley Fool portfolio and, you know, the Motley Fool portfolio's ahead. They're winning the game. They're beating the index funds. So there you have it. Well, thank you.
You had a very special father, and so did Tom and I. And, those dads got us on the path to understanding business and and investing and have given us, as was the case for you, advice throughout our lives. Well, John Mackey, thank you so much. The whole story is the book. What a delight to feature you in this year's authors in August. John, I don't know if you have another book in you. You probably do, but maybe not another life story.
But, I look forward to whatever you're writing or reading next. I always love If I have any other book, it'll be on love life. So hopefully, there'll be a good enough story to write someday. Alright. Well, John, thank you so much. Have a great week. Fool on. Thanks, David. You too. We'll talk to you soon. As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against.
So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about rule breaker investing at r b I dot fool dot com.