 Hey, this is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie and I'm so excited about today's show. I want to play you the short clip with my guest, kind of from the middle of the interview. Check it out. I'm not even going to tell you who it is. I just want you to listen. My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over, they're marching through the institutions. They're taking everything over and taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations, it looks like they've taken over the military and it's just continuing. So I'm deeply concerned about, you know, I'm a capitalist at heart and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values and I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I've taken for granted most of my life, I think, are under threat. So that's John Mackie, the co-founder and retiring CEO of Whole Foods, the grocery store that forever changed not only how we shop for food but how we think about supermarkets. If you are as old as me and I'm pretty old, I turned 19, I was born in 1963. I had just turned 59 years old. But if you're as old as me, you remember how dreary food shopping was. You know, most of the time before Whole Foods exploded the concept, right, and the shopping space, the supermarket space, you'd walk down the produce aisle and there'd be two or three types of potatoes. Maybe one kind of eggplant, you know, the dark, black, blue, purple eggplant if you were lucky. It's kind of an ethnic food, you know, right? What's that doing? A green pepper, a sad little jalapeno or something, you know, there was nothing like the overflowing bounty that, you know, you see everywhere today. Even in big cities, I can tell you, you know, you had to roam around all over town to find oddball spices that are everywhere now that you can buy at 7-Eleven or gas stations for God's sake. You know, since it got going in 1978, Whole Foods has forced every Kroger Safeway, ShopRide, Food10, HEB Pantry, which is a great chain based in Texas, but even Walmart Supercenters to up their games when it came to the variety of what they sell and how they sell it and at what prices and all of that kind of stuff. So John is retiring at the end of the month. He was born in 1953, is in his late 60s, and his retirement is a bittersweet moment, not just for him, but for Whole Foods and all of its customers. I feel that way. Over the course of his career, John developed and evangelized for what he calls conscious capitalism or businesses that seek to create. And I'm reading from its credo. There's a website that's also in the show page links, but conscious capitalism works to create businesses that seek to create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical and ecological wealth for all of their stakeholders. And then you might be thinking, oh, you know, what is this hippie stuff going on? And what's this hippie crap about stakeholders and spiritual wealth? No, it's capital wealth. It's stock returns, right? But John is one of the hardest core, if not the hardest core, capitalist that I've ever met, but he's also an incredibly spiritual and thoughtful guy who wants to help all of us live better, more interesting lives. I've known him for, it's got to be 20 years now. And I've talked with him many times over the years for reason. There will be links in the homepage at reason.com slash podcast for this episode and to our past interviews and also to his epic 2005 debate with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, one of his heroes and former Cyprus semiconductor CEO, TJ Rogers, about rethinking the social responsibility business. For a really long time, it was always one of the highest trafficked pages on our website for years after we posted it in 2005. And for good reason, because he is speaking to where we are in a world that is past the Industrial Revolution, that is past subsistence farming, and that is rich enough so that we can start bumping our snouts further and further up Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and start figuring out how we can flourish rather than just subsist. I caught up with John at Freedom Fest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas. He was coming off the stage, he had just participated in a debate about Bitcoin and crypto, short version. He's not against them in principle, but he thinks there's a lot of scams going on in the current market. But mostly what we talked about was his time at Whole Foods and what it was like saying goodbye to the company that he had created into this international behemoth that has changed the way that we think about how we do business, how his company did an exceptional job of staying open and serving people during COVID, how he thought the government responded to things both by regulating businesses in all sorts of ways. He also is skeptical of the vaccines that have come out, certainly of the mandates. We disagree a little bit about that for sure. But we talk about all of that and more, including that creeping socialism that he's worried about that was in the clip that I played just a couple seconds ago or a couple minutes ago. And we of course talked about what he's going to be doing now that he's retiring. And the good news on that front is that John told me that he's been muzzled or he's felt muzzled by his position as CEO of Whole Foods, that in that role, he's got a fiduciary responsibility and he can't really speak his mind on a wide variety of issues because he's got to take care of shareholders, stockholders, stakeholders, you name it. But he told me at Freedom Fest that he's going to be spending part of his time post Whole Foods working on some health and wellness startups. We talk a little bit about that. But he's going to be spending a lot of his time talking about what he sees as a society that is trying to control and regulate the life out of us all from there's right wing versions of that and left wing versions. And he is going to be speaking out, un-muzzled against that. So without further ado, here is the reason interview with John Mackie. Let me ask you this, you know, the COVID era has been like a clarifying moment, right? And one of the things that I got to tell you, and I feel like I'm almost special pleading, but I live a couple blocks from the Houston Street Whole Foods in Manhattan. And, you know, when the lockdown was happening in Manhattan, I went to Whole Foods to get a bunch of stuff. And it was amazing. Like the shells were clearing out immediately. This was in March of 2020. But, you know, the next day, people were working there. The shells were filling up as quickly as they could. Talk about Whole Foods response. And like, how did Whole Foods and some other grocery store chains did this too? I mean, a lot of them. We were told, you know, there was going to be massive disruption, that all sorts of things. How did you keep it together to keep your workers healthy and showing up and food on the shelves? Well, there was massive disruptions. And it was a very difficult, very difficult time. The lockdowns, I believe history will show that that was probably the stupidest thing that the government will have done in the 21st century. Unless they get into a nuclear war, it was idiotic. And even that will be able to shop freely, right? Well, I mean, the so-called vaccinations didn't really prevent COVID. I mean, which is what you expect a vaccination to do. And there have been lots of side effects for people. My wife is a long hauler now from the booster of all things. So, and the places that locked down like New Zealand and Australia, now they have epidemic infection rates. So you're not sold on the mRNA vaccines? No. I mean, it was experimental and they didn't deliver as was promised. I thought we were getting, you know, when I get a polio vaccination, I expect I'm never going to get polio. Not that in six months I got to get a polio booster. And even if I got it, I got both vaccinations and I still got COVID, like almost everybody I know, I still got COVID. But and you don't believe that you got a lesser version of it than you might have had otherwise. That the efficacy of the vaccines is not in preventing the disease, but lessening the effects. I mean, I have lots of friends that didn't get vaccinations and they didn't get seriously ill as well. It seemed to be, statistically now, it seems to be a disease. I mean, you know, 80% of the deaths in the United States were to people that are obese. And most of them are, you know, over 70 years of age. So it was selective in its killing. It's just the media didn't really report on it. And anybody that gave a counter narrative was sort of canceled out or they weren't allowed to. So talk about how not at Whole Foods respond. So it was very difficult for us. We were an essential business. So we were able to be open for business. It was very hard on the morale of the company. Our team members were scared, right? They're being exposed probably to COVID. And they didn't in the early days, we didn't know what to expect. Was there a death sentence? It was amazing to that for all the discussion of, okay, essential workers or frontline workers, there was not a lot of empathy for grocery workers, in a way. I'm not sure what you mean by empathy. What I mean is that there was a lot of discussion of teachers. There were a lot of discussions of people who worked in hospitals and what they were putting up with. But people who were in grocery stores. The teachers, they started, they were all online. Yeah. No, what I'm saying is it's amazing to me that the people who showed up every day were the people who were working in markets, supermarkets, and drugstores. Well, we paid, we raised the pay of everybody. And it still was very hard because people were scared. They didn't know what to expect. There were no vaccinations available. Even if they didn't work, at least they never had a placebo effect, at least for many people. They didn't have that. And people were scared. Anytime anybody came down with COVID, there was 14-day quarantine. Anybody that they were, any of our team members, they might have been around were also quarantined. So we had a lot of trouble keeping the staff going because a lot of times some stores would be... I remember going into one of the downtown Austin store where I office and shopped one time and we had no cashiers available. Everybody was forced to go to self-checkout. Fortunately, we had self-checkout because there were no... Everybody was quarantined. So it was very difficult. And then also the social distancing. Our Whole Foods culture is very touchy-feely, a huggy culture. And everybody's social distancing. It's like the guy next to you might have the plague. And so nobody's touching. People are... They're isolating us all. You have like incredibly high-traffic stores too, right? I mean, it's... Yes, but you know... What happened, of course, is that Amazon helped us scale up our delivery quicker and that we would have been able to do on our own. And at our peak, 28% of our sales were coming from delivery. So... Is that on a certain level? And what was it before that? What was... Two or three percent? So it's a massive increase, but it still seems kind of low, right? Because it seemed like everybody was getting everything delivered. Well, most people weren't getting delivered. There also were pickup. But then there was people just coming in, lining up. But the difference is they would have a list and they would race through the store to get the hell out of there because they were so scared. They had to get food, but they didn't... No samplings going on. Our prepared foods business crashed. We... In fact, they wouldn't let us... Our salad bars or hot bars. Anything... Back in the day, remember, before we realized that COVID was an airborne disease, we had contaminated people worried that you could pick it up off of somebody... Surface infections. And that proved not to be true, but the fear was there. So all of our prepared food sales dropped down 80%, hot bars, salad bars, all that self-service stuff was eliminated. What is the morale like now? Because it seems like people know kind of what we're dealing with. It's a great question. I am retiring from Whole Foods in just six weeks now. Oh, wow. And I leave September 1st, 44 years. And but I've been on a grand tour to say goodbye to all 10 of our regions, been in over 100 stores in the last couple of months, saying goodbye. Morale is very high. It's very high right now. Very high. Is that because you're leaving? I think that might be the case. They sure were cheering a lot for me, so... On the way out, not when they saw you. But I think... Yeah, why is that, though? That's... I mean, that's great to hear. I think because it's... Things are normalized, meaning people are not having to wear a mask. They are... They're able to hug and touch again. They've... Team meetings have come back. Life is normalizing again for most people. And so they suffered through a couple of years of not really having any connection with their friends, right? Not going out to a bar and having a beer after work and hanging out. Now, we've gotten through it and they've survived. I think it's kind of like the joy of surviving like a near-death experience. Life is precious and you realize that you still got it. How did the merger with Amazon is... Interest... I mean, like ultimately it turned out to be pretty opportune for... Certainly for your customers. How did that work? Or did it accelerate changes in the way Whole Foods operates or the way Amazon operates? The good thing is Amazon did not try to really change Whole Foods' culture. It didn't try to make us into Amazon and Cologne. They didn't understand our culture. So that was... Sometimes we had difficult communication challenges there. But they were respectful of the culture. They helped us in technology. I mean, it's taken a while but we have our first couple of just walkout stores up and running now. But a lot of people are scared of that technology. They've also got grocery carts that can scan as you go in the grocery cart and we're now introducing those into our stores. And of course they accelerated our delivery. They were able to scale up quicker than we could have done. So they've helped us with technology. How about not necessarily Amazon, but one of the things that is incredible about Whole Foods... And I always used to think about this 25 years ago of how Whole Foods is the embodiment of global free trade. Because so much of your stuff is coming... It's sourced from all over the world. Is that coming back to normal or how stressed was that? Supply chains, what you read about and what you've probably written about is COVID has messed up supply chains around the world. I mean, so much stuff to manufacture in China. Those relationships have been definitely disrupted. Energy is a problem. The mainly like all types of... We're still opening 20 to 30 stores a year. And we've had to delay store after store after store, but you just can't get buildings. You can't get the stuff we need. Different things go scarce. So supply chains will normalize again because that's the way capitalism works. But right now that's driving up the cost of new construction tremendously. There have been tight labor. Labor has been tight. There's not a store in our company that we're not down several people. Have you... Did you find the... And I'm not sure how this would have worked in a Whole Foods context, but the expansion of federal unemployment benefits in most states increased the amount they gave and extended the version. Did that have an impact on your workers? It had an impact on our ability to hire. A lot of people were making as much money or more money not working at all. And so guess what? They chose not to work. And they've been reluctant to come back to work. It's sort of... They got used to it. Do you think that is also, I mean, fitting into a kind of generational shift? You're a baby boomer. I'm a baby boomer. There's a lot that's wrong with the baby boom, but things are different now. They are different. I've become... I remember I constantly was telling my father, as a dad, you just don't understand our generation. And I feel like I've become my father. I don't understand the younger generation. They don't seem to want to work. And I couldn't wait to work. Work for me. I started working as soon as I was able to, because that's how I could get money to spend things I wanted. Do you think they don't want to work because they don't have to, whether it's their parents or government kind of feathering the nest? I don't know. They don't only want to work if it works really purposeful and you feel aligned to it. Well, I would think at Whole Foods that that's kind of a place where it's a purposeful workplace more than... I mean, my first 10 years of jobs weren't... I wasn't because I love the work, right? I needed the money. Well, that may be so. We may be having fewer problems than Starbucks is having. I don't know for sure. But I know that we're really straining to get people hired, particularly in the cities like New York, the big ones, New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, DC. Can I ask you is that... Because I want to talk about conscious capitalism, which is one of the things that you've been pushing, that we've reached a different stage of societal development where post-industrial revolution work should be more meaningful or activity is more symbolic and imbued with deep commitments or reflections of our deep commitments. Is that part of what some people call the great resignation or whatever, that younger people aren't as quick to work because they want meaningful work? It may be, but you can't expect to start with meaningful work. I mean, you're going to have to earn it. I'm hoping I can end with meaningful work. Yes, exactly. Well, I think you're doing meaningful work ever since you joined Reason, right? You're aligned with your values with that. Unless you want to go on the record saying... No, no, no. I mean, but it takes a while to get there and I enjoyed my work. You had to pay a price to get where you are. Yeah. Some of the younger generation doesn't seem to be willing to pay that price. And I don't know why. I don't know whether it's their parents or... I mean... Well, you're a student of Schumpeter. Yeah. And I mean, are we in that stage of capitalism where it kind of starts to eat itself because we've forgotten that wealth is not a given. Wealth is a rare thing. Let me tell you something. So, yes, that may be true, but let me make a counter narrative, which is, as I just done this tour, and I've been in 100 Whole Foods market stores in the last two or three months. And because it's my last time I was touring, they knew it was the last time I was going to be in their store as a CEO. It's incredibly touchy. It is. And a lot of people come up and tell me their stories. They wanted to know how much they loved Whole Foods and they wanted me to tell them the story. And of course, Whole Foods has a massive amount of first generation immigrants working in our stores. And so many of them came up and they were crying and like this one woman in one of our DC stores, she came up and said, you need to hear my story. I joined this company 23 years ago right after I immigrated to the United States. I had three very small children. I went to work here. I've been promoted six times. My third child just graduated from college. I own a house and I own a rental property too. And she was crying when she was telling me all this. I owe Whole Foods everything. The American dream is still alive. And immigrants are still flocking over here and they can move up. And her, she's so proud of her children. They went through college. She put them through and she feels like Whole Foods gave her that opportunity. Hey, before we continue the reason interview with Nicolespi, I want to introduce you to today's sponsor. It is a company called EverydayDose.com. If you're like most people, like I used to be, you start your day with a cup of coffee. 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Yeah, Nick, what worries me right now is that me conscious capitalism is a management philosophy. It's a way you should manage your business. You should figure out what the higher purpose of your business is. And that's always going to be in value creation for other people. It's about whatever it is. You're creating some value for other people or you wouldn't have a business in the first place. Whole Foods is higher purpose is to nourish people in the planet. So secondly, it's about the stakeholders that they all matter and they're interdependent. And then it's about creating leadership that's more awake, more conscious, and then cultures that poor people flourish. That's the four pillars of conscious capitalism. But I'm very concerned that people are, that it's being co-opted, that it's a management philosophy. It's not a governance system. So ESG, and I'm oftentimes being having to defend conscious capitalism which is being conflated with ESG thinking, which is basically a political philosophy that's trying to force corporations to adhere to their particular political philosophies and taking away power from the shareholders. It's really what it's about. We're going to make those corporations and we're going to put diversity on the board and we're going to have the team members need to be, and the employees need to be represented. And the outcomes have to be a certain way, right? It's not simply that they're on the board or they're represented, but it ends up looking this way. And so that's not what conscious capitalism is. Conscious capitalism is a philosophy, a way to think about your business that is just a little bit more enlightened, a little more, and I think it's going to be a more successful way to manage your business as well. It's not about distorting the governance system, it's to take away the power from the investors. That will screw up capitalism. And maybe I think that's the intention all along. Do you think kind of the experience with COVID and an economy that has been extremely volatile for almost all of the 21st century? And leftist Marxists will say, this is the end game of capitalism. The final chapter. What's they been saying for the last three years? Of course. But then again, libertarians have been saying, inflation's coming and it finally arrives. But do you think the experience with COVID after the financial crisis, after all sorts of issues, is that going to speed up risk-taking and innovation or is it going to make people kind of more fearful, both in terms of starting companies or the way that they try out new things? That's a good question. I don't know really the answer to it. I see different statistics that show in some ways we're more innovative than we've ever been and others that say that innovation is slowing down to a crawl due to regulations. I guess what's different, it's a lot easier to get capital now. If you're an entrepreneur, it's so much easier to get capital than it was when I was starting out. They didn't even have venture capitalists really when I was starting out. That was a new thing coming up in Silicon Valley. Money's easier, but there are other problems. Labor's more difficult. The type of regulations that make, so many people just sell out now because to go public with Sarbanes-Oxley, the burden of, the financial burden on small companies makes it difficult to go public, frankly. So a lot don't, they just sell out. Or now they get the, what's the new form they do? Where you get a, what is it? A SPAT spec, I forget what it's called. But it's companies that basically are already public. They don't own anything, but they're already public so they will acquire a business wanting to go public. And that's how the company goes public. So that's a way to get a, a specialized vehicle of something or another. And it's like a dead weight loss. I mean, it's a way around regulations. So, yes, exactly. So the interesting thing about capitalism is, it's, as long as it can innovate, it will. And if you, it's a little bit like, it's like a river flowing. If you throw a rock in there, it, it, the water moves around the rock and it just keeps flowing. If you throw enough rocks in there, you can damn it up. Even then it might break the dam down or it still might route around it when you get a flood. But using that metaphor, there are a lot of rocks in the water, but innovation is still happening. But it's maybe not as, I think it's maybe a little more difficult regulatory wise today than it was. A real estate is so much harder to open. For example, it's so much harder to get permitting. In places like LA, San Francisco, to just get permission from the government to actually build anything. It used to be, they'd make you jump through a few hurdles, but the overall thing was, sure, yeah, do your business. Now, it's all politicized, Nick. If you're not unionized, maybe you don't get the permit. And you, they can always stop you by putting in or calling for study after study after study after study. How's the traffic study? What's this going to do to employment? What's this going to do to housing? I mean, it's endless. So when they, for political reasons, governments in locally now are really making it more difficult for business. A lot of small business people can't deal with it. Do you feel in the broad libertarian movement, do you feel like libertarian ideas and sensibilities? Are they ascending? Are they declining? Are they, is it kind of always a steady state of it going well someplace? No, I think I remember reading an article by you about this very question and kind of doing the proposal. I think I write it almost on a monthly basis. Well, it's because there are so many ways where we're freer than we used to be, like when we were, you and I were children, for example. And then there are other ways where we're less free. Right. So, um... So unbalanced. Unbalanced, unbalanced. Here's the thing. It's kind of like, you know, they say that when somebody praises you or somebody puts you down, it takes 10 compliments to make up for it. I think every regulation that gets in our way, it takes about 10 other regulations that are, you know, not there. Right. That are removed to make us feel like we're making progress. I think overall we're still making progress. But in terms of total numbers, but the ones that they keep taking, the ones they take away from us are painful. And it's an interesting question. And I think financially we're a lot more regulated than we used to be. Here's the thing. It's tricky because, I mean, most regulations come in after there's some kind of market failure. Or some, usually not a market failure, bad actors. And so then they punish everybody in the sector to stop. I mean, this is Sarbanes-Oxley came in after the tech bubble. Exactly. You know, and then Dodd-Frank came in after the financial crisis. Exactly right. And regulations don't, like rocks that have been thrown in the river, they don't tend to get taken away. Right. But they did back in the big deregulatory days of like when Reagan was in there, and that continued for a while. Thatcher did a lot. Maybe we'll have to have another wave of deregulation that may need to occur as the economy begins to calcify a little bit. How do you feel about the, you know, I mean, you have to deal with politics, even though like your life's work is in markets and like building value, and you're trying to like pay off or keep politics out of it. You were critical of Trump, but you were also not hysterical about him. You were, you know, he was not as bad as the alternative. That's exactly right. So, you know, it's interesting, Nick. You're going to like this because in six weeks, I will retire from Whole Foods. And I have muscled myself for the last, ever since 2009. I wrote that Wall Street Journal op-ed that created this bad huge controversy about Obamacare. About Obamacare. And if I may just to recap it about how your, the plan that you had in place was better than what was going to come in, but like life was being made extremely difficult for you. I just thought we needed to innovate in healthcare and not one size fits all, which is what Obamacare is really about. And we have the same number or slightly higher on insured people. Exactly. So, but that created a huge controversy and my board basically shut me down and said, it's like a father, they started attacking the child and I was intimidated enough to shut up. Yeah. But I hear the story, you know, Bernie Marcus was one of the founders of Home Depot and he's pretty conservative libertarian guy. He started the job creators network and so Bernie's pretty outspoken. And I read an article one time that people are constantly going after Home Depot to get them to shut up Bernie Marcus. And Home Depot has to say, Bernie retired over 20 years ago. We can't shut him up. You got to take it to Bernie. Well, I was telling my leadership team, pretty soon you're going to be hearing about crazy John who's no longer muzzled and you're going to have to say, we can't stop John from talking any longer. What are the give us a preview? Well, I got six weeks. Okay. Well, you know what? We can hold this until we can embargo it. I can talk more about politics in six weeks than I can today. What is just broadly, what is your concern? Is it that everything is more politicized? In terms of... My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over, they're marching through the institutions, they're taking everything over and taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they've taken over the military and it's just continuing. So I'm deeply concerned about, you know, I'm a capitalist at heart and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values. And I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I've taken for granted most of my life, I think they're under threat. Packing the court maybe, packing the Supreme Court because they're voting down things that... How does it feel to be in Texas? I mean, you're in Austin, so that's one of the coolest cities in America. But it's also, it's in a state that is increasingly conservative. Does that, you know, or do you have concerns about Texas as a place to live for freedom? I don't. I like living in Texas. Texans are friendly. I don't pay any state income taxes. You know, abortion laws are going to be democratized now. And people are all in panic. But that's because democracy hasn't yet gone to work yet. So if Texas has too narrow, you know, if it's only five weeks or whatever, well, there'll be candidates that run on, you know, first trimester. And democracy will change the way the abortion laws are. And they'll be more reflective of the overall state values. So I'm just going to be very interesting to see how that particular one plays out. And people can will go to different states or it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I've been reading the reason articles on that. And I don't agree with a lot of what I've read in reason about on the abortion issue, which is that It being restrictive for The reason is seems to be pretty pro Roe versus Wade. And I always thought that was bad constitutional law. And, you know, I will cop to being one of the people who I I tend to think of abortion as a fundamental right. So that way. And, you know, Roe versus Wade gave a place where the state did have an interest after a certain point. I believe it's a fundamental right up to a point. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, would you say it was a fundamental right up to the day before birth? No, I mean, you know, it's actually in the in the common law row and then Planned Parenthood. It's like up to, you know, the second trimester or viability or whatever. So the polls I show seems to say that right now Roe versus Wade was within any time before birth. Right. So polls show that about 90 percent of the population opposes that. Yeah. Yep. To birth. Right, right. But then about a huge percentage are in favor of abortion in the first trimester. Right. Yeah. For the first 15 weeks. Where I stand on it is kind of women's right to choose until we have a viable fetus that it can live. Right. Then at some point it becomes murder. But it's not in the first trimester because that's not a viable. One of the things I've been showing is since Roe v. Wade only about 20 percent, 19, 20 percent of Americans are against abortion under all circumstances. It's been remarkably constant. And what, you know, it'll be interesting as you were saying to see some states are going to become more extreme in one direction and in the other. The point is this is the perfect example of something that democracy should decide. Not the Supreme Court. They acted as legislators, I think. They were. I don't. But if it's a fundamental right up to a certain point, like it should be a fundamental right everywhere. Perhaps. But that's not what Supreme Court decides. Here's a couple of two old men talking about abortion or so. Who's never going to be pregnant. I did. Yeah. Well, you know, I have some hope for technological innovation. Yeah. But what, so what are you going to be doing when you retire? Obviously you're going to be, you're going to be embarrassing your, the corporation you spent 44 years building by being very political. But what, what kinds of activities are you going to be doing? I mean, is your conscious capitalism group, what kind of activity? So three, three things. First, I'm working on another book. This will be the whole story, the story of Whole Foods. It's going to be my most important book. It is going to be narrative, not didactic. It's going to be entertaining and funny because there's so many great stories. So this is the full memoir. Full memoir. Part about me, mostly about Whole Foods. And there's so many stories that are not known even within our own company because, you know, they were suppressed like all, because you don't want business insider getting into your business all the time. So that stuff's going to come out. It's going to be entertaining. Secondly, I'm going to do a lot more backpacking. I've got a trip planned, a hiking trip planned in Europe starting in Austria, 488 miles. I start August 18th, come back like October 3rd. Thirdly, I'm co-founding another business with some friends. It's going to be it's called Love Life with an exclamation mark. And it's not ready for prime time yet, but it's going to be kind of a combination of healthy restaurants, wellness center, gym, spa, and lifestyle medicine. So I hope to do, we're going to create a whole chain of those. Let me, as we end this, but give the short version, you know, one of the things you've been influential on through Whole Foods, but also through your writing, is a vegan diet. And you were way ahead of the curve being anti kind of seed oil and things like that. You know, tell me how you're vindicated by everything around us. Well, I'm very passionate about this. And this is my, my new business is going to be doing this directly. Nick, I'm very, I'm very discouraged. I mean, 74% of adult Americans are overweight and 42.5% are obese. And those trend lines got, the average adult American gained 27 pounds during COVID because people were just locked in and that's like a reverse then as well. Yeah, exactly. Exactly reverse then as well. That's funny. I like that. 80% of what we spend on healthcare dollars in America are dietary lifestyle diseases. We know how to reverse heart, we know how to prevent and reverse heart disease. And yet, what did doctors do? They, they don't tell them. They don't know. They, they give them a stint and then they put them on cholesterol medicine, statins, try to give them blood pressure medicine to keep their blood pressure down. They're just giving them drugs. They're not curing anything. And yet we know how to cure it. We know how to cure type 2 diabetes. We know how to cure obesity and yet we're not doing it. And you could argue there's not any money in it. It's a lot more money. A lot more money made selling drugs to people who actually don't really know. But I guess you're going to be trying to make money by offering an alternative. Yes, but it's, it's, it's, it's difficult challenge to get people to change the way they eat and live. So time will tell that we can make money doing it or not. But I've made a fair chunk of money in my life more than I need. And investing it in this new enterprise, I feel I couldn't not, I couldn't go to my grave not doing that. I'm not the kind of man who can just go lie on a beach and enjoy myself all the time. I'd like to do that for vacations, but I'm, I'm very purposeful. I need to be doing something to, I'm very purpose driven. Well, you know, thank you for talking. It's good to catch up with you. And also, I mean, thank you for Whole Foods. I remember the first time I got to introduce you at a reason event. I talked about how, you know, Whole Foods to me is a cathedral of commerce and it, you know, you revolutionize not just the stores you built, but the way food is thought about and is delivered. And it's like, it's a more interesting world because of the way you lined your produce shelves and everything else. So I, Thank you. I do think Whole Foods has had a positive effect. I hope Love Life will have even a bigger effect over time. And, hey, Nick, the best thing is I get to be more activist as a libertarian. And that's been, that's been suppressed. And I am going to be more activist. You're going to see me a lot more visible. Well, thank you, John Mackey. Thanks, Nick. This has been the reason interview with Nikolaspy. If you liked what you heard and I hope you did, please go right now to Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe or do this, make it easy on yourself and just go to reason.com slash podcast and sign up there. 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