 At each of Whole Foods markets, more than 500 American stores, managers ask every team member, from the meat clerks to the baristas to the janitorial staff, to orient their work around a shared purpose, which is to make natural and healthy food widely available. This goal, according to Whole Foods CEO and founder John Mackie, is in no way inconsistent with maximizing shareholder value, as Mackie writes in his new book, At the Heart of Conscious Capitalism is a radical refutation of the negative perceptions of business and a rejection of the split between purpose and profit. At a SOHO firm debate held on February 18, 2020, Einran Institute Chair Yaron Brooke challenged this view. He believes that maximizing profit should always be the primary goal of companies and it's that focus which explains why capitalism has lifted the broad masses out of poverty. It's the message businesses should be emphasizing, he says, and it's inspiring enough. Mackie and Brooks went head-to-head at an event hosted in front of a sold-out audience of 200 people at the Brownwood Hotel and Spa in Florida. John Mackie wasn't able to make it to the event because of weather conditions in Austin, Texas, but he appeared via Zoom. A clearly articulated purpose, consciously embodied by the leadership, should be an essential element in all business organizations while also enhancing shareholder value. John, I'm going to interrupt you when you have five minutes to go, one minute to go in 30 seconds just to warn you. So take it away, John, on that resolution. Go ahead. Thanks, Gene. I'm going to bring my slides up now. Okay, great. So anyway, sorry I can't be with you. I tried very hard to get there. Bad weather. What can I say? So this debate resolution is a mouthful, is a clearly articulated purpose, consciously embodied by the leadership should be an essential element in all business organizations while also enhancing shareholder value. What the heck does that actually mean? We couldn't quite get an agreement on the topic and this was somewhat of a compromise, I think, but essentially the way I interpret it is that does business have a higher purpose besides only maximizing profits? And yeah, I think it does and that's what I'm going to talk about. So let me declare my bias up front. I am a fanatical capitalist. I believe capitalism is the most important thing that humanity's collectively ever done. And I'm going to demonstrate that briefly because people need to understand how incredible capitalism is. Starting with, we can see the increasing wealth that capitalism has produced. For most of human history, humans have been incredibly poor. It wasn't until capitalism and industrial revolution that humanity began to escape its poverty conditions. If you go back, it's unprecedented. Just 200 years ago, the world's economy was at the level of the early on is today and 94% of everyone alive were poor. Now the per capita income is growing by over 10x, with over 24x in the United States, 41x in Hong Kong, 75x in South Korea. It's incredible. How about poverty? Again, 94% of everyone alive back in 1820 was living on less than $2 a day in today's dollars. 94%. 85% lived on less than $1 a day. And freedom has a lot to do with whether or not how economically prosperous any type of country is. The more economically free it is, the higher the GDP per capita. The poorest people, it's better to be poor in a country like the United States with economic freedom than in another poorer country. So economic freedom also helps the poorest. Life expectancy has gone from about 30 years, 200 years ago now to 72.6 across the world and usually close to 80 in more developed economically prosperous countries. In literacy, it's hard to believe, but 200 years ago, 88% of every human being alive was illiterate. And that's dropped now down to about 12%. Here's the economic freedom index. I put this up there to make a couple of points. The first one is the United States, which has been number one, number two or number three for most of our history, it's fallen. Economic freedom has declined in the United States and has resolved our prosperity while still very good. It's not growing at the same rate that it once did. I put this up here because the Nordic countries are held out as great examples of socialism. In fact, their economic freedom is extremely high. They think of themselves as capitalistic, not socialistic. And Denmark and Iceland actually have higher degrees of economic freedom than the United States and these other countries are pretty darn close. I'm going to argue that business is fundamentally good because we are the value creators in the world. Business creates value through voluntary exchange with customers and with all of the different stakeholders it trades with. We are the great value creators. We create far more value than all of the governments and all of the non-profits in the world combined exponentially. And business is ethical because we make the money that we make because we do it through voluntary exchange, not through coercion, not through guns. No one's forced to trade with Whole Foods Market, for example. If you don't like Whole Foods, if you think we're too expensive, if you don't like our quality, if you don't like our selection, if you don't like our service, you go to one of our competitors. And that means everyone who trades with us is doing so because they believe it's in their self-interest to do so. And business is noble because it can elevate our existence. And finally, business is heroic because it's business that's lifting people out of poverty. It's business that has taken that 94% of the people living on less than $2 a day down to under 10%. OK, capitalism is great. I did all that because of this slide. Capitalism is the most wonderful system humanity has ever created, but it's deeply disliked. It's hated in many cases. Here you can see from these polls. And the Gallup poll shows that confidence in big business is only about 23%. I mean, 77% don't have any confidence in big business. The heart research shows that 83% of Americans think that the government benefits big corporations and the wealthy, but not over the middle class. Roper shows 2%. Only 2% of investors believe CEOs like myself are very trustworthy. And 72% believe wrongdoing is commonplace in companies. In 2018, only 45% of millennials had a positive view of capitalism, while 51% had a positive view of socialism. That's astounding. Why has it happened? It's happened because the motives of business are misunderstood. Anti-capitalists have created a negative narrative about capitalism and business. The anti-capitalists, largely the intellectuals who control and teach other universities, they've always hated business. They've always persecuted it throughout history. This is not new. Business is portrayed as greedy and selfish and exploitative and fundamentally not good. And finally, the defenders of capitalism have done a terrible job of defending the purpose and ethics of business. They oftentimes, when the critics of capitalism say, you know, capitalism is all about greed. It's all about selfishness. It's all about exploitation. Many of the defenders say, yeah, it is. So what? Yeah, people are naturally selfish. People are naturally greedy. And so capitalism takes advantage of that and helps. And that by basically using those motives, business and capitalism, through the invisible hand, create prosperity in the world. I think when we take that defense, we've automatically lost the debate with the average person who doesn't see selfishness as good, who doesn't see greed as something that they see it as Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, they think it's not good. And so the ethics of capitalism are mistrusted and disliked. And so these are the three reasons why I think capitalism is the great system that has led to the prosperity. And yet we're in danger of losing it in the United States because of these three major reasons. So that leads me to conscious capitalism. I'll talk briefly about this. I don't have that much time in 15 minutes. But it's fundamentally a new narrative, a new way to think about business. And we have four tenets, higher purpose, stakeholder, interdependence, conscious leadership, and conscious cultures. And so this debate's primarily about purpose. And I'm going to argue that businesses need to shift from focusing on profit maximization to purpose maximization. And what is the purpose of a business in the first place? Why does business exist? And it's kind of, if you go to a party and you ask people randomly what the purpose of business is, they'll look at you quizzically because they'll say, what do you mean what's the purpose of business? Everybody knows the purpose of business. The purpose of business is to make money, right? That's an odd answer. Because if you think about every other profession, what's the purpose of a doctor? Doctors make a lot of money. Doctors are well compensated, but that's not their purpose. Their purpose is to help heal people, right? Teachers educate, architect, design buildings, engineers construct things. Every one of the professions refers back to a higher purpose that's in type of creating value for other people in service of the greater public good. Great companies have great purposes. Amazon, parent company of Whole Foods now. Our vision is to be the Earth's most customer-centric company. Google, our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And the Whole Foods market, what I help co-found and beat, our purpose is to nourish people in the planet. And that has been our purpose since the very beginning, over 43 years ago now. The importance of stakeholders. All stakeholders matter. Sure, the investors matter. Of course, we should try to make as much money as possible for our investors. But all the other stakeholders matter, too. Customers matter, employers matter, employees matter, suppliers matter, and the larger community matters. They're all interdependent. They're all connected together. What I've learned in business is we have to manage the business consciously to create value for all of these stakeholders. And when we do that, we optimize profits. We optimize shareholder value. Leadership is extremely important as well. Right, we must be the change that we wish the world to see in the world. That's what Gandhi said. And as leaders, as conscious leaders, we must embody the higher purpose of the organization, the values of the organization trying to realize in the world. When Raj Sasodi and I did our research for conscious capitalism, these were the qualities and virtues that conscious leaders continually embody. More authentic and mostly intelligence, service oriented, high integrity, more spiritually involvement purpose driven. Some of the things conscious leaders do, we create a shared purpose. This is a picture of a whole foods of our team. We've got 100,000 people working for our company and they stick around for two main reasons, purpose and love, as well as, of course, compensation. We're here to make a positive difference in the world. Conscious leaders are here to make the world better in some significant way. We help people to grow and evolve. We help create win-win-win strategies. We do not simply work in terms of trade-offs. We're constantly seeking to optimize all of the stakeholders to create value for all of them simultaneously. We practice servant leadership. As Albert Schweitzer said, I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know, the only one among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. Conscious leaders serve the higher purpose of the organization. They serve all of the stakeholders. And in doing that, the business prospers and that helps the investor to prosper. Higher purpose matters in business. Business is not a profit maximization game. Business is not a machine. Business is not an algorithm. And they use algorithms, but that's not what it is. Business is certainly not war. It's not hyper-competition. It's not Darwinian survival game of the fittest, survival of the fittest game. Fundamentally, business is about the lives of real people. It is one of the most human things that we can do. We must therefore measure our success by the way in which we fulfill our higher purposes individuals and as business organizations and how we improve the lives of other people. If we do that, then if we embody these qualities, if we live with purpose, if our organizations consciously create value for other people, we will create and optimize shareholder value as well. I urge you to vote yes for the affirmative on this debate resolution tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, John. Now, Yaren Brooke, who is the chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, I will speak for the negative for 15 minutes. Take it away, Yaren. Thank you. Thanks, Gene. Thank you, Gene, for organizing this and thank you, John, who's somewhere there, for agreeing to do this debate. When Gene first approached me about this debate, we went through a whole number of different resolutions and as you can see, John and I agree on March and the nuance of how to structure resolution so that we would actually have a debate instead of a agreement festival was a real challenge. I think though we found something we actually disagree about and that is good. But let me first say that it's an honor for me to be debating John Mackie. I'm a huge admirer of his, obviously as an incredibly successful CEO, as an incredibly successful businessman who has created enormous amounts of wealth and shareholder value and as somebody who has indeed changed, I think a lot of our lives, or at least those of us who are customers and associated with Whole Foods, so it really is an honor and a pleasure for me to be debating John. Also, John is an advocate for capitalism. And you saw the graphs and of course we agree on all of that, on all the good stuff that capitalism provides. If you know anything about me, I spend my life traveling the world, trying to explain to people the value of capitalism and the benefits that it has provided, humanity or anybody who's willing to try even a little bit of it, right? To the extent that people try capitalism, people try freedom, to that extent, they are successful as societies, as countries, from economic but also social and life extension in terms of longevity, by every measure of human well-being. But what's interesting is that we've got all this success for the last, if you look at those graphs from before, really for the last 250 years, we've had this amazing success of capitalism, capitalism has produced all these amazing goods and it's extended our life and increased the quality of our living and by every measure it's been fantastic. And yet, it was all done, mostly done, for the most part done, in the name of what? In the name of profit maximization. Now, let me be clear about what I mean by profit. I don't mean that counting number that comes at the end of an income statement because we know that that can be manipulated and changed or something. I'm talking about economic profit. I'm talking about the value created above and beyond the resources deployed to create a good. So over the long run, right? So it's over the long run, the real value created through a particular activity whether it's a service or manufacturing that produces something that didn't exist before. So profit is not an accounting number necessarily, it is a projection about the added benefit over the long run that a particular activity will generate. We often use the term shareholder wealth maximization which again, and I apologize for being technical, it's not very technical, this is very simple, is basically the sum of those future profits or at least ideally represents that sum of those future profits. So when we talk about shareholder wealth maximization we're talking about trying to maximize the profitability of a business over the long run. And indeed, that's what implicitly almost every capitalist businessman has done for the last 250 years and that increase in wealth, prosperity, life expectancy, all that stuff is not just some hypothetical thing, it was created by capitalism which is some floating abstraction above our heads. That was created by business people, by business people like John, working unbelievably hard, unbelievably smart, creating businesses and making a lot of money. But how do you make money? How come all of us are better off because they made money? You know, 250 years ago that would have been a real head scratcher, right? But how is it that we are better off when they make money? Because the only way for them to make money, the only way a business makes money is by providing us, all of us, whether we're part of the business or not, with a value. We buy their products. We buy their products for more than what it costs them to produce, that's the profit. And yet our lives are better off as well. John referred to this as win, win. He added a third win, well, maybe we'll get to that third win later, but I'll just deal with two wins. The business wins because it makes a profit. I win because I got a value that I didn't have before we're both better off. And that's what capitalism has been about for the last 250 years, that gaining a profit and improving all of our lives in the process. But we have a PR problem. Capitalism has a PR problem. Business has a PR problem. And John articulated it, the world doesn't like us. Or like those of us who are capitalists or those of us who are in business, so those of us who made a lot of money in business. We have a PR problem, we are told. And we do. You saw all those, I won't repeat all the statistics about how people view business. Now, why is this? Why do they view us so horrifically? Is it because they don't know the history? Well, to some extent, people don't know. Is it because they don't understand? Well, to some extent, they don't understand. There's a gap in our economics education, there's a gap in our history education, there's certainly gaps of knowledge. But there's a much more fundamental core reason why they don't buy the story. And John alluded to it. It's because in their mind, the activity of business, the activity of generating a profit is fundamentally a self-interested activity. It's the business is making a profit of itself. Yes, everybody it touches almost, not everybody. I don't think that all stakeholders benefit, but most people it touches benefit as well. But some people get really, really rich, really, really successful. Some people are benefiting enormously. And they are labeled self-interested, and they are self-interested. John, it's not just about the money, I believe him, but it's about his purpose, it's about his passion. That's part of his self-interest. So yes, CEOs, businesses do pursue their own self-interest. But we live in a culture where self-interest is viewed morally, ethically, as a negative, as a bad thing, as something to be avoided, with selflessness, where being Mother Teresa is viewed as an ideal. And part of my objection to John's approach in conscious capitalism, in conscious leadership, is he's trying to take an ethic of selflessness and altruism, not quite, he softens it, and merge it with clearly an economic, social, political activity, social and economic activity, that is self-interested. It just is. And what most libertarians do, unfortunately, is they accept the status quo when it comes to morality. They accept the status quo about ethics that exists in our culture, and they want to somehow take capitalism and fix it, and merge it, and twist it into that ethical framework. And INRAN provides us with a real alternative. And that alternative is an alternative moral code. It's not to reject ethics, it's not to reject morality, but to center that ethics and to center that morality on self-interest, from a business perspective, on the profit motive. Profit is not something to be shunned. It's not something to be explained and softened and build purposes around it. Profit is value creation, with very few exceptions. There is no profit without the long-term, without the creation of value. I'm not talking about game stock, right? Game stock, there's profit without value creation. But that's rare and unusual. And most of the people who made a profit with game stock, my guess is, are going to lose it because it's not a winning strategy. Over the long run, profit is value creation. Financial markets price companies based on their ability to create value long-term. And I know John disagrees with this. I read his book where I think some of our disagreements got sharpened, which I recommend. I think everybody should read it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff there and a lot of stuff that I agree with. But there's also stuff I don't. Five minutes, no, no, five minutes. Five minutes, thanks. Markets are very good at identifying and pricing value. Many of us spend our lives, and our professional lives, at refining and improving markets to better reflect real value, in other words, the profit potential of a business. So I propose an alternative resolution that focuses in what I think business is really about. Business is about making money and we shouldn't run away from that. It's about, it's different than nonprofits. It's different than clubs and other types of organizations. The purpose of business is to take the inputs that the world provides us. Those inputs are raw materials, those inputs are technologies, those inputs are ideas, those inputs are human, those inputs are capital. And we arrange them in a way that adds value. And that additional value is reflected in the profit they make. So to say I want a business to maximize shareholder wealth means I want the business to maximize the value they create. Those two are synonymous. You cannot increase profits over the long run without doing exactly that, without creating that kind of value. So I propose that the purpose of a business is to maximize shareholder wealth by creating value in the marketplace. Within the context, and I agree with John with regard to kind of the way he views, some of the way he views purpose, within the context of a clearly articulated mission and you could add consciously embodied by the leadership. Where consciously would mean to me at least rational, thoughtful, fully focused, fully intentional. I would take out some of the things that John probably would include under conscious. So the alternative, when you're voting now, right? The purpose of a business is to maximize shareholder wealth, maximize long-term profit if that's easier to think of. Within the context, by creating value, within the context of a clearly articulated mission, consciously embodied by its leadership. I think that is consistent with what business actually does. It's consistent with a philosophy, with an idea that says profit is good, but profit is moral, profit is virtuous by its very nature as a value creator in a voluntary society in which we exchange and therefore a creating value of ourselves. We should never apologize for creating value for ourselves and yes, for everybody else, otherwise you don't profit. If you create stuff just for you, it's called a hobby. In order to make it a business, you have to create value for other people and that value is reflected in profits. Let's not shy away from that. Thank you all. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah, you can hear me on the air. We now go to the rebuttal portion of the debate. That's five minutes for each person. John, I take it you heard what Aaron said and we give you five minutes of rebuttal and comments. Take it away, John. Yarn is right. We agree about many things. We both, we believe in liberty, we believe in freedom, we believe in profit. So is profit good? He argues profit's good. Hey, profit is good. Profit's wonderful. I love profits. Whole Foods Market's made billions and billions of dollars we founded the company. So profit is good. But he says business is about making money. And I don't think it is. I think he's confused, he's confused the result with purpose. And maybe the best way to explain it is through an analogy. So my body produces red blood cells. And if it stops producing red blood cells, I would die. But it doesn't logically follow that just because my body must produce red blood cells, that its purpose is to produce red blood cells. I have a more transcendent purpose than simply trying to produce red blood cells. And similarly, business must make money. If business does not make money, it will die. But that doesn't mean that's why it exists. Profit comes as a result of creating value for other people. And the higher purpose of a business is found in that value creation. That's why it exists. It exists to create value for other people. If it does a good job at that, it will make money. It will make profit. I think he's putting the cart before the horse. He asked, he's talked about win-win. And I argue for a win-win-win. And what that means is when we make exchange, a good exchange should be something that's good for you and good for me, but also good for the larger community, particularly the larger communities of stakeholders. I can give you an example to get you to see my point. Let's say you wanted to murder somebody. You could contract with a, you know a guy who knows a guy and you contract to kill that person. That would be and you pay $50,000 to have this person murdered. Well, that would be a win for the person you contract with. They're getting $50,000. That'd be a win for you. You're getting rid of somebody that you don't wanna have around, exist any longer. But is that a win for the larger society? It's not, it clearly is not. And so win-win isn't good enough. We need to create win-win-win type of arrangements where it's good for you, good for me and good for the larger community that we're part of. I always feel like when I talk to objectivists that I'm talking to straw man, I'm always arguing against the straw man argument that it's of course human beings are self-interested. It's obvious that we are. I don't say that the bad thing that we're self-interested. I reject sort of a philosophy that human beings should be completely altruistic in all circumstances. But it's a straw man argument because any, if you look at human nature, you can see that human beings are clearly both. We are, we are self-interested. And we are also capable of love. We're capable and love. We're capable of generosity and kindness and forgiveness and compassion and gratitude and care. We do both. We are self-interested and we care about others. And business isn't just about maximizing profits. It's about creating value for other people. We are both self-interested and we care about other people. So it's always frustrating to me if I've had this argument before and I can never get the complexity of human nature cannot be explained strictly in the terms of self-interest. To me, it's contradictory. Although I do not want this debate to turn into a debate about what self-interest means, what selfishness means, what benevolence means, what altruism means. I just appeal to the audience to examine your own common experience. And aren't you both, aren't you both? I mean, yes, there are some few sociopaths out there who really don't care about anybody else. Maybe that's 5% of the population. But 95% of the people are not sociopaths. 95% are self-interested and care about other people. They want to make money and they want to fulfill a higher profit, a higher purpose. We're both. I want to maximize profit at Whole Foods Market. I do, but that comes because I want to maximize value for our customers. I want to maximize value for our employees. I want to maximize value for our suppliers. I want to maximize value for our investors. And I want to maximize value for our communities. That's a conscious leader attempts to do all of those things simultaneously. We are taught to think in terms of trade-off. One thing capitalism has shown the world is that it's not a zero sum game where someone wins and somebody else loses. We can create capitalism, create systems where all the different stakeholders can simultaneously win. The conscious leader does that. Every business has the potential for a higher purpose. And yes, it can have a higher purpose and it can maximize profits. There's no contradiction. They can simultaneously come. I'm done. John went over by about two minutes. Thank you. What? Repeat. 50 seconds. Okay, you got an extra 50 seconds in your rebuttal. Go ahead. I expect every last second. No. Selfish, go ahead. That's it. And there are no sociopathic disorders. We know that, so we've cleared that one up. Yeah, go ahead. So I don't want to get into the debate about selfishness that's not, although it's, I think, relevant to this discussion. But I find it funny that I was at the cues of strawmaning and in doing so, John strawmaned me. So, and that's part of what happens when you get into this. No, I care about other people. You know why? Because I care about myself. You are part of my world. I care about you because you provide me value. It's not because I'm half altruistic and half self-interested. And let me, I'll just add this. I wish, it's my greatest wish in the world, that people were indeed self-interested. I think the problem with the world is that we're not self-interested enough. There's way too little self-interest properly understood just like profit properly understood. Not the short term, you know, undemining type but real rational self-interest is just not enough of it. If there was, the world would be a much better place than there is right now. But I'd rather, I want to talk about this concept of stakeholders that John goes back to a lot and is I think at the heart of, and I think at the heart of conscious capitalism and conscious leadership as well. Everybody can be better off. Everybody can benefit. It's just not true. There are trade-offs. Of course there are trade-offs. And you cannot make decisions based on I want to maximize the world being of all stakeholders. I used to run this exercise with my students. Used to take a board and say, okay, let's list all the stakeholders and you'd be surprised and I think John would agree. How many stakeholders now? I mean pretty much everybody who has any relationship to the company is a stakeholder. Some remote, some close. All potential employees are potential stakeholders. Potential suppliers are stakeholders. And you make a list of all these stakeholders on the board and then you ask the question, okay, now we have to make a decision about whether we're moving the plant to Mexico or not. Or to, put aside Mexico that's politically incorrect, right? We're moving to from Florida to Arkansas, right? Well, how do we make a decision? Well, some employees are gonna be better off. Some employees are gonna be worse off. They're gonna be out of a job. Some suppliers will be better off. Some suppliers will be worse off. Shareholders might be better off, okay, but what about bondholders? They have more risk in moving, so they might be worse off. And you've got this chart of pluses and minuses and what do you do? It's debilitating. It's not a mechanism by which you can make decisions. The beauty of maximizing shareholder wealth is that it optimizes for all the stakeholders. If moving the plant is indeed in shareholders' best interest, then it's gonna be in certain employees' best interest. It's gonna be new employees coming in. Yes, some employees will have to leave. It's suppliers are gonna benefit because it's gonna be real profitable. Bondholders might like it in the short run, but they might like it in the long run. The beauty of maximizing shareholder wealth, maximizing long-term profit, is it integrates our decision-making and makes it possible for us to focus on a purpose, on success, on a decision matrix, rather than being completely at the whim because what actually happens? Who is the stakeholder that's actually gonna get their way? Well, it's the one that has the most political pull and what you turn then in is business into politics. Instead of business doing what business is supposed to do, maximize value, it turns into a political tug of war. I mean, some of the example John gives in the book are examples of this. He says, for example, that when Amazon bought Whole Foods, they raised everybody's minimum wage to $15 because that's what Amazon did. Amazon raised everybody $15. And to win, win, win, everybody wins. Except the people who are not gonna be hired because the minimum wage at Amazon, which is pretty simple jobs, who are ideal for young kids and ideal for maybe reformed drug addicts or people out of jail or whatever, people who have questionable backgrounds who are not gonna get $15 an hour, not even from Whole Foods, not even from Amazon. They're priced out of the market because they can't produce at 15 bucks. So I'm not saying it's a wrong thing to raise the wage within a company to 15 if that's what you decide to do, but to ignore the fact that they are trade-offs is just wrong. Now, by the way, just for Amazon, when Amazon raised it for $15 an hour, they didn't do it to maximize shareholder wealth in an economic sense. They did it to raise shareholder wealth in a political sense, right? They wanted a huge pressure, Taka Carson, Trump, the Democrats, everybody was out to get them on living wages. So they preemptively raised the wage and now they're lobbying Congress to raise everybody's minimum wages to $15 an hour, which is questionable. But they are trade-offs and there's only one way to decide on the trade-offs and that's to pick one goal, one mission, one focus. And the focus of shareholder wealth doesn't mean we chain our employees to the machines and whip them three times a day. If I wanna make money, I need to treat my employees well. I need them to produce. I need them to be the best that they can be so that my company can be the best that it can be, the same with suppliers. It's not like if I only care about shareholder wealth, I treat my suppliers really, really poorly. The opposite, I treat them really, really well because I need my suppliers in order to make a profit. And the same goes to all important stakeholders. Now, the more removed you are from the company, the fact is the less I care about you. But customers are crucial. I sell them my products. So it's not like I don't care because. Am I done? How about it's 50 seconds, no? You get you? With my 50 seconds. With your 50 seconds, okay. That's fine. Okay. I think I've said it. Okay. Okay. All right, thank you, Hannah. Now we go to the Q and A, the more riotous section of our dramatic evening with Q and A from the audience. Q and A from the moderator, that's my prerogative as well. And Q and A between the two debaters. And so mostly and certainly this evening, I'm gonna give each debater the option of asking a question of each other anytime. So first, although you can wait for audience questions from mine and then see if you wanna ask a question of the other debater. But at this point, John, do you wanna put a question to Yaron at this point? Or do you wanna wave it until later? I may wait until later. See how the other questions go. I wanna hear the questions of the audience. Okay, well, you're gonna have to hear a couple of questions from me too. Right away. And so I wanna press first with you, John, I wanna press Yaron's point that do you see that as Yaron said about the $15 that you can earn from Whole Foods, that do you see at least a societal trade-off that it means then that somebody who cannot produce $15 worth of value for the company at a profit would then no longer be a hire for Whole Foods. Do you see that societal trade-off and how do you deal with it in terms of the overriding purpose of business? What's your answer to that question, John? Well, you have to make a distinction between something that a corporation like Amazon decided to do versus forcing or coercing a higher minimum wage across the whole society. I would agree that forcing a $15 minimum wage would result in unemployment for those whose productivity does not warrant $15. In the case of Amazon, although in general I find it's not, I don't like to talk about Amazon in public because there's no corporation in the world that's more in the microscope than Amazon. I will merely make that rebuttal by saying Whole Foods employs over 100,000 people and Amazon employs over 1.5 million people all making over $15 an hour. So I mean, that's a lot of people being employed. So the idea that people are losing their jobs is probably not true at Amazon or Whole Foods Market. It costs Whole Foods Market $250 because when we raised our minimum wage, Jean, to $15, we had to raise everybody's compensation in the whole company because somebody was making $15 and they worked there for three years. Somebody who just started got it, they would make $10 and they went to $15. Well, we had to raise everybody up. And that total cost to the company was $250 million a year to start out. And I remember, I had an argument with Amazon about it because you just raised our cost, $250 million, is that, do you wanna do that? And they said, yeah, it's worth it to us. We wanna do it. But that was a decision that they made. And maybe it was probably a complex decision that was made for a lot of reasons, some of which Jean mentioned. But I do think you have to make a distinction between what a company decides to do and what the government tries to force everyone else to do. They are not the same. They're different. They have different results. You have a comment on that, yeah. And on John's answer, you have a comment. Yeah, I mean, there's suddenly a difference. I'm not denying Amazon has a right to raise the minimum wage ever they want. It would be much, it's on a different dimension if the government does it and the consequences are far more horrific. But even there, one has to recognize that, again, once you extend stakeholders to everybody, some people are not gonna be able to ever work at Amazon and at Whole Foods because we've set a particular wage. All I was trying to point out is there's a trade-off. It's not win, win, win, win, win. It's not an endless array of wins, at least not in the short term. That gives me to my other question for John. You, again, the resolution doesn't say that while also enhancing long-term shareholder value, do you ever, do you maintain then that, that enhancing shareholder value, actually I guess it doesn't say long-term, but I believe your intention was to say long-term shareholder value, do you see any contradiction ever, any trade-off at any time between pursuing the overall purpose of Whole Foods in terms of its stakeholders and enhancing long-term shareholder value? Are the two essentially, those goals always compatible? Are there ever difficult choices you have to make as a CEO between the one and the other? The purpose, the stakeholders, and the shareholder value? Is there any trade-off ever in those terms that you have to deal with? The first point I'll make, the answer is, it's complicated, so let me try to answer it. The first point that Yarn made in that, one of the points you made in the debate was that there are like infinite number of stakeholders and you have to make a distinction between the primary stakeholders who are voluntary exchanging with the business, which we list as customers, employees, suppliers, investors and the communities that business exists in. Those are the ones that are voluntarily exchanging with the business. Other ones like maybe the government or the media, unions, activists, et cetera, they could be their secondary type stakeholders. So I think it's not an infinite number of stakeholders, it's a very select group that are the ones that are most closely tied to the business who are trading with it voluntarily and who the business is trading with voluntarily for mutual gains. Are there trade-offs? The answer is, of course, there are trade-offs, but those trade-offs tend to be a failure of an imagination or my experience. If we seek to not, if we look for trade-offs, we'll find them, but if we seek to look for the when, when, when, we activate our minds to begin to look for solutions creatively that we didn't know existed. And sometimes we fail, sometimes we're unable to find the when, when, when solution, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't been able to think of it yet. So while I'll grant that trade-offs can occur, I don't think it's not in the nature of exchanges for that to necessarily be the case. And we just need to think about it differently and activate our creative intelligence, our creative minds, and we will oftentimes find solutions that create when, when, when for all the different stakeholders. That's been my experience, that's my direct experience in business. And yeah, that's my answer. Any comment from you, yeah, on that answer? Or do you have a way to cover it? I think there are trade-offs, the when, when, when, yes, you can find solutions where a lot of people are winning, but sometimes those solution means that shareholders, for example, win less. And then that is also a trade-off. It's how much you win is also an issue. We're getting back to you. Do you believe that this is not something you do intentionally in terms of your consciousness? Shareholders never win less? John, would that be your response? Let me make this point, this is a very important point. You could take any of the major stakeholders. And he says, it's like the Lord of the Rings, only the shareholders are the ring that unites them all. And anything else, there's too many conflicts. You could take any of the major stakeholders and let's take the customers, for example. And if what we wanted to do was seek to optimize customer satisfaction over the long term, because the stakeholders are all interdependent, the business would be managed the same way because you have to maximize profits in order to ultimately maximize customer satisfaction. They are all completely interdependent. You can try to optimize for any one of the different stakeholders and you will get to the same place because of the long term interdependencies that all these stakeholders have. That is a very important point that I don't think he sees and probably very few other people see as well. I can't remember the exact number, but Apple I think is sitting on several trillion dollars of cash right now. It could instead of buying back at stock, which is maximizing shareholder wealth, it could write a check to its customers. It could send checks to customers. Customers would be better off. Amazon would be fine, I mean, sorry, Apple would be fine. Yes, it's cost of raising capital in the future might rise a little bit, but customers would be ecstatic under those circumstances. But let me add, there is a difference and it's an important difference and it never comes up really. I don't, I saw it came up once or twice in John's in the book, Conscious Leadership. And that is who owns the business. Shareholders own the business. There's a passage in which John says, I can't just make decisions in what I like at Whole Foods because I'm not the owner. No, he's not. He's an agent of the owners. Right now they own as Amazon, but when it was publicly traded, he was the agent of the shareholders, not of the customers, not of the suppliers, not of any of the other stakeholders. There is an issue here, a property rights, which is important. Shareholders have a particular role to play that's not just financial, but as owners of the residual claim, which is owners of the business. They get to elect theoretically the board of directors who then guides the company. So we can't just treat shareholders as just any other stakeholder. They are the owners of the business. No more than you could treat at your local grocery store. The customers is equal to the guy who owns the grocery store. He gets to make decisions. I have just a final question. You want to make a comment, John? Go ahead. Great. Can I quickly respond to that? So no one's arguing that the other stakeholders should have ownership rights. I never argued that. I always argue against that. So of course the shareholders elect the board of directors and the board of directors holds management accountable for the performance. And no one disputes that. I don't dispute it. Some people do dispute it, but I do not dispute it. But that doesn't necessarily mean just because the owners can fire the management. What I'm arguing for is that the best way to optimize long-term shareholder value is to optimize each of the stakeholders. That there's an interdependence there. I don't think he sees the, I don't think you aren't sees the interdependent. That you, in seeking to optimize any of the stakeholders, you'll optimize all of them. He's got them sort of like they're pitted against each other. And I see that they are connected together. I'll just say I don't think they're pitted against each other at all. I think it is win-win. But I think that you have to have a decision matrix that has one goal. And by maximizing that goal, you're not, you're helping everybody else. Everybody else is a winner as well. That segues into my final question before I give it over to the audience. That directed Yaren. When you mentioned Yaren just starting with the past, that all the achievements of capitalism done by profit maximizing businessmen. Well, I think of Henry Ford. I think of John D. Rockefeller. They were nutty philanthropists, among other things. And then I've been read deeply about them, but I know that there must have been a great deal of satisfaction from Rockefeller that he was selling a standard oil that enabled poor people to be able to read at night. That Henry Ford was obsessed with his Model T to provide the average man with a car that he could drive. And then I look at Yaren Brooke, who has a purpose in life to spread the word of capitalism to the world. I think of another standard guy whom I know you are know of, John Allison, formerly of the BB-18 Bank, who does preach unrandy and self-interest and selfishness. And yet, when I think of a John Allison, I say if that selfishness, we need more of it. Because John Allison ran a bank with great integrity that was objective in his view, had a purpose. And the purpose was, of course, to lend money to creditworthy people and to keep alive the spirit of capitalism. So he got up every morning with a purpose. I've worked for profit and maximizing corporations, but I had a purpose. And so in a way, I guess I wanna ask the question of you this way, Yaren, which is that that you formulated the resolution one way and John has formulated it a slightly different way. And then I wonder, is it a question of semantics? Because so many of the people in the room whom I've spoken with, they care about what they do. They get up in the morning thinking of the business they work for as having a purpose. And therefore, if we have to choose between the one formulation and the other, isn't the formulation about purpose a much better way to advertise, to represent capitalism to the world? If it's kind of a this or that on this or the other, semantically, because you even agree that every business should have a mission and you get up in the morning with a mission. So wouldn't it be better in terms of at least presenting capitalism to the world to adopt John's approach rather than yours? That's my challenge to you. Please respond, Yaren. So first I'll say, you know, I'm the last person who's gonna be against purpose. I'm a huge believer in purpose. Each individual should have a purpose in life. You all need to craft your own purposes, you know, and it's not just one purpose. There might be a central purpose typically centered around your career, but you can have many purposes. And my, you know, but this is part of the differences. My purpose is, my moral purpose is gonna be very different. My moral purpose is my own happiness. So, and that's what gets me up every morning and everything else is subordinate to that moral purpose, right? I have lots of other purpose partly to change the world, but partially because I enjoy the battle, partially because I'll be happier in a much better world, right? So I care about other people because I care about it myself. It goes back to that. So when we say purpose, we conflated with some higher purpose that somehow needs to be out there when I think purpose is about maximizing your life, making the most of your life, making the most of the one life you have on here. And I think that the way the proposition that is formulated is a compound with regard to the enemies of capitalism. I think we're buying too much into their premise. I think we're buying too much into their assumptions, into their ideas about capitalism. No, I want to defend profit because I think profit is amazing. I think profit is incredibly, it's a symbol of value creation. I wanna defend profit because it's a beautiful thing. I want to defend profit because I love, to use John's word, I love profit, I love life, I love success, I love striving, I love everything about what business is about. So to put profit and shoulder with maximization is kind of also I think sells out to our enemies and undermines the fight for capitalism in the name of maybe good PR or appealing to their ethics. But I think their ethics are pretty bad. I think they're gonna have to change their ethics if we're gonna become capitalists. You have a comment on that, John, before we go to the audience. Go ahead. You have a comment? Yeah, I disagree. I mean, well, I disagree because look, imagine for a moment that people come to work for Whole Foods and I'm doing the orientation for them. I'm gonna say, if I'm following Yaren's philosophy, they're gonna be down to say, so glad that you've come to work for Whole Foods Market. And while you're working for Whole Foods, your purpose is to maximize profits for the company. Any questions about that? Now, what's a better narrative to say that or to say, hey, we're so glad you're working for Whole Foods Market. We're trying to sell the healthiest food in the world. Where our purpose is to nourish people and the planet. Which is going to be more inspiring for people? I mean, it's capitalism fundamentally needs a new narrative in the world. And by the way, I think he falls into the trap of the critics of capitalism by basically granting their premises. Of course, profit is good. I'm not saying that profit is not good. Profit is necessary, but that's not why business fundamentally exists in the world to maximize profit as a result of fulfilling its higher purpose. Okay, Jaren has a comment before we go to Q and A. You'll be able to say, good, Jaren. I'll just say, profit is good. Of course it's necessary because it's good. So the discomfort about all-in on profit, I think is the real fundamental difference between us. Then we're gonna go to the audience, you don't have to identify yourself. Just state your question as a question. So take it away. And if your question is directed at either one, say that, or it may be directed at, it doesn't matter. But take it away. Go ahead. Thanks for bringing the SOHO Forum to Florida. We're actually south. Thank you. We're actually south of Houston Street. No, that's good to know. That's right. We're the SOHO Forum, south of Houston. Thank you, yes. The resolution is about a clearly articulated purpose. Does it matter, Mr. Brooke, if that purpose is enhancing shareholder value or returns to the owners or for Mr. Mackey, if that purpose is evil, killing people or doing something bad like that, does that affect your interpretation and your response to the resolution? That's a question for you, John. Did you hear the question? Go ahead, John. No, but I mean, are you asking whether a purpose should be good? Is that where you're, I don't have more clarification on the question because I mean, generally we think a higher purpose of a business is to create value in the world in some place. So doing evil things would not be creating value in the world. So in a sense, it wouldn't be ethical. It wouldn't be good. And therefore it's not worthy to be considered a higher purpose. That's my answer. Okay, no comment. Any comment? We have to take this side. Let's go ahead. Well, the first comment is for John. I liked your explanation of a dialectic worldview on the Joe Rogan podcast a few months ago. And then Yuren, I have a quick question for you. Do you believe that large media companies like Fox News and CNN purposely disrupt our culture for the maximization of their own shareholder's profit? Wow. We've got a provocateur in the audience. Go ahead, Yuren. I think that part of making money in media is click bait, is attention grabbing, it's creating controversy and getting the culture wild up. And yes, they are maximizing their profit. Where do you think that goes too far to like mess with our country for profit? Because that's- I don't agree that we are being messed by the media. We're getting what we want. You don't like Fox, stop watching it. I don't. You don't like CNN, stop watching it. I don't. So, you know, when the culture is deteriorated, as our culture has deteriorated to the level where clowns like that are dominating our media, we should look at ourselves and question ourselves. We get the media we deserve. I agree. What do you think of a company like Cambridge Analytica, though, that purposely stole data in order to use it in that? Stealing is bad. I don't think anybody's gonna disagree with you. Okay. Stealing is bad. It's immoral on a variety of different levels, both in my moral framework and I think in John's moral framework. That was a good question. Thank you. John, do you have a comment on the question, on John's answer? The only comment I'll make is that, of course I agree with Yuren's said that, I don't disagree with what he said, but there's a slippery slope, I believe, that once we move away from articulating higher purposes for value creation, if it really is just about maximizing profits, it's a slippery slope to people's ethics eroding in order to just maximize profits. When we look at companies like Enron, for example, or companies that fall off the ethical, what we've considered to be good, they do it primarily because they're just trying to maximize profits. And you can say, well, that won't maximize profits in the long run. But if that's all that matters is profits, I mean, I find it interesting in like, the Enron books like Atlas Shredd, which is one of my all-time favorite novels, Henry Reardon, Dagny Taggart, these individuals, they weren't just trying to maximize profits. They were creating value for other people and profits was a result of that. And the passion that they have is what drew people to their mischaracter, in my opinion. So I do think that we have to think that if profit is the only goal, there's possibly a slippery slope as people begin to cut corners to maximize those profits. If I could take a moment to answer that question as a journalist for more than a quarter of a century, I worked for Barron's Financial Weekly, which was owned by Rupen Murdoch. My editors always wanted as much sizzle as possible out of what I wrote, but I drew the line on any sizzle that did violence to facts. I didn't want sensationalism. And of course, I wouldn't, I would have quit the job had they not respected that. And so if you're a journalist, I don't see how you can look yourself in the morning if you're spreading just sensationalism and you're not trying to report the truth and the facts as you see them. And that hopefully maximizes profits for Barron's as it hopefully did in the long run, because the readership get the impression that you're trying to report the truth as you see it to that readership. And so I didn't see any contradiction there either. Question, sir. How would you analyze a company like Turing Pharmaceutical that, Turing Pharmaceutical? 27. They basically exploited a barrier to entry barring where the FDA bars companies to competing with them. And they bought the rights to a drug that was selling for like $20 a dose. And they jabbed it up to $800 a dose. It seems to me that they existed purely to make money for their shareholders. And if that's the maximum value, then would you say that this was the virtuous company? I don't remember how well they did long-term. I don't think they did very well long-term. Neither did the shareholders. But let me just note that we live in a world, particularly pharmaceutical industry where it's very heavily regulated. What is competition? What is not competition? Where does the competition come from? Is very complex. And you would have to actually look at the facts of the case and look at why the cost. What did they do with the money? Did it go into R&D? And what happened to those people? At least one of those guys I ended up in jail if I remember, right? From one of those companies that- Well, not unrelated to them. Yes, but it's related, right? When you start doing completely unethical things, not based on value creation. Remember, I believe the long-term profit maximization comes from value creation. It doesn't just come. And I do want to address one point that John just made. Of course, what motivates you as an individual is not I'm going to make money today. I mean, unless you're in finance and then yes, that's exactly what motivates you. It gets me up in the morning. But there is a real passion around what you're doing. That's why I think the mission or the purpose, if you want to use that word, of a company, is crucial. It's crucial to motivate you. It's crucial in terms of what business you go into. You might be a CEO. John went into a particular line of business because that's where his passion is, right? And I think that's crucial. So each one of us as individuals need to pursue our own passion and our own purpose in pursuit of profit maximization. Well, I'm trying to differentiate between the two of you because it seems that if, it seems like you'd have to say that the military and pharmaceutical was behaving virtuously because if you're trying to say that profit and value are equal. If they sustained this long-term and if shareholder wealth was sustained long-term, then yes, even if we can just see the virtue, yes, there was virtue there. We'd have to go in and dig deeper to find it. Okay. Do you have a comment on that, John? Yeah, let me jump in here. So I think this is a very interesting question and I think it reveals the weakness of Yaron's position ultimately because he's by saying, if maximizing profit is the goal, then it's the goal at the highest goal. There is no higher goal than that. And I think he's moving away from that in the debate by saying there is something higher than maximizing profits. Those profits need to be earned ethically. So there is a purpose higher than maximizing profits and he tries to get around it by arguing for the long-term, over the long-term, over the long-term. But you know what? There are plenty of bad people who maximize profits and they maximize them over the long-term as well because they're not caught, they get away with it. And there's not justice and there's not always done. So I don't think even your own position, maximizing profits is the goal. Maximizing profits is, your goal is there's some type of ethical code that stands above maximizing profits. I think it's implicit in the argument you just made. Next question. Yeah, my question's for John. Whereas absent coercion, profit, money is an expression of preference. How could you measure your success in the way that you fulfill your higher purpose and improve others' lives? This is, you used a quantitative word and this is a qualitative statement. How exactly do you measure? How you fulfill the higher purpose and improve other people's lives? How do you? You can measure, you can, we don't have as good a measurements for all the different stakeholders, for example. But there are ways to measure customer satisfaction. For example, net promoter scores as well as surveys can measure it and track it over time. You see, you track it versus the industry, you track it versus other companies. You can measure employee satisfaction. There are measurements that we can do that. I'm slipping my mind right now, but the glass door, that's the one that is a good way to measure employee satisfaction. You can compare companies against each other. Each one of the different stakeholders has measurements that you can see how you're doing, vis-a-vis them. I guess the thing that I think we aren't in part company is I see the interdependence. It's clear to me. I live it. I see it every day as I build a business. And it is possible to optimize all of these stakeholders. It's not perfect. It's messy. There can be short-term trade-offs. And, but where we agree is that ultimately we do want to seek to make lots of money over the long-term because we believe that's good for the economy, good for the world. Profits help drive the engine, the energy that drives everything forward. And I agree with him that, and I applaud that defense of profits because profits are attacked unfairly and ruthlessly. I'm just, I see something that I don't think you see and that's why I think we disagree. Or he would say he sees things I don't see either, but that's why we're having a debate. Okay, I got one follow-up for you. If I'm the CEO of Eric Inc., and my stakeholders include my girlfriend, she's having a bad day. And there's cigarette butts on the bus stop at the easement outside of Whole Foods. My and the clock, can I be texting? Can I go pick up cigarette butts? Or am I to maximize my benefit to you by checking out customers as quickly as possible? Okay, you got the dilemma, John. That's a long, go ahead. Did you get the question? No, I don't really understand it. Okay, I tell you what, we'll deal with that later. And I have to say that now we just want these two people, unfortunately, we're running out of time, but to inspire the summary statements, just state your question. We can't, I don't have time for an answer, but there will be summaries from each of the debaters and maybe they'll take into account your question. So just state your question, sir. And then we'll go to the next, but what's your question? Absolutely, it's kind of like a two-fold. It's one, what is to prevent what we've already seen, which is major corporations using vast amounts of money to influence government, to prevent anybody in from competition. And then on the other side of that, when you talk about the greater community and being involved in the community, what is to prevent what we've seen over the last year, which are in the last 10 years with cancel culture, from influencing greatly people who are profitable for a company, say like a Gina Carrera being fired from Disney Plus, or even people who are getting hired for accounting jobs being asked how they'll end systemic racism. How do we prevent those two extremes? Okay, thank you. And then your question, sir. Yeah, this was for Yaron. With the extreme difficulty and high failure rate of new business owners and entrepreneurs, how do you think that the purpose doesn't increase their likelihood of success versus if it's someone who's just looking for a good idea to make money? The high failure rate. Okay, and your question, sir? Two questions, Yaron. If we replace the word enhancing with maximizing, would you agree with the proposition? And secondly, as far as value creation, the PR problem that you spoke about, would it be good to find common ground with people like John, who used to be a democratic socialist, is now successful capitalist to change young people from anti-capitalist to capitalist with kind of his inspirational message. Thanks. Okay, and then your question? My question is to John. He said Atlas Shrugged is his favorite book, the major theme of the book. I didn't say that. Oh, he said it's one of your favorite books, right? I enjoyed it. But the main theme is that altruism is incompatible with capitalism, and you are trying to make altruism compatible with this economic system when really you should be defending self-interest. That's the only thing consistent with it. Okay, I heard that comment, and then your question? Yeah, my question is for John. John, when you have a scenario where a decision might be conflicting between some primary stakeholder and your shareholders, I'm wondering if you have a clear set of principles that help you or that guide your decision-making. I would imagine any shareholder would like to understand that the leadership has clear principles that guide their decisions when a decision might conflict between a primary stakeholder and a shareholder. Thank you, and your question? Thank you. Very similar question for John, which is what if the two are competing in trust? Let's say that you have to make that decision between your altruistic purpose versus the profit. Okay, thank you. Okay, John, you're going to cover all of those questions in the five minutes that you have for your summation. I can't do that. I didn't write them down. Somebody has to remind me of the question, or I mean, I can take them one at a time. I can't take them all. Give me one or two. John, we are going to the summation portion of the evening. John has five minutes as the affirmative to sum up. So take it away, John, five minutes. Go ahead. Okay, that was to help feed my summation. Okay, I get it. This has been an interesting debate, and you and I look forward to carrying it on in private sometime when we and I can talk, and I'm sure it'll be a rich discussion. So this is not a, we don't have enough time to do this properly, and I can see you're a very passionate man, and you believe in capitalism and liberty, and so do I. We disagree on two or 3% and agree on 97%, 98%. So we're really brothers, not enemies here. However, as I put up in my initial presentation, I showed that capitalism has done all these amazing things in the world, and yet it's so disliked, and it's so distrusted. And I believe it's primarily a marketing problem, and it's because we've let the enemies of capitalism define it as greedy and selfish and exploitative, that it only cares about money. It's only about maximizing profits. Who cares if the pharmaceutical industries are screwing people or whatever? They're maximizing profits. And I think trying to defend capitalism on that basis, that's what I think it falls into the trap of our enemies, because the reality is human beings are both self-interested, and we are altruistic. We are both, we are complex beings. These things matter to us. We do seek our own good, and we seek the good of other people. It's satisfactory to give to others and help others is intrinsic to human nature. And I don't like to have that argument turned around and said that just means they're selfish about helping other people, because to me that's the contradiction. So maximizing profits is a good thing. It's just simply not the purpose of business. The purpose of business is to create value for other people. Profits is the result of that. The more value we create for people, the more money that we will make, because it's done through voluntary exchange. If we wanna promote capitalism, that's the narrative we need to tell. We need to talk about our purpose. We need to talk about the values that we're creating, the goodness and values that we're creating for other people. If we do that, capitalism, terrible reputation will begin to shift and change. As long as we're gonna try to argue that it's all about making money and maximizing profits over the long term, we're gonna lose this argument. And you know what? We're gonna lose capitalism because we're gonna become a socialistic society. I strongly urge people to begin to, all business people, whenever I get a chance, I always talk about the value creation you're giving. Yes, you're making money. That's a good thing because our society needs money. That's what drives the economy. But from an ethical standpoint, we're never gonna convince people that selfishness is good and greed is good. That's a losing argument. What we can do, we can win this argument in the world if we will talk about the value creation and that profits are therefore important because they drive the economy upwards and onwards and humanity will continue to make progress. If we don't change our narrative, we're gonna lose it all. That's my deepest fear and why I continue to champion conscious capitalism, higher purpose and stakeholders. Thank you very much. Thank you. Five minutes of summation from you, Yaren. Take it away. Okay, thanks. Thank you. And yes, John, looking forward to that private conversation, it'll be a lot of fun. And I agree, there's somebody asked about common ground. Absolutely, we're obviously both passionate about capitalism. We both have a view about what is the best way to promote it and what is underlying the fundamental premises, underlying it, and that is a debate with having. And I think the mall debate is a debate with having. I, for one, do not know anybody who says that they only care about money. That is a strong man. Nobody says that. The question is what is the purpose of a business in a particular context, in your particular life, not what is your purpose. Your purpose might be different than a business's purpose. But what is a business created to do as compared to any other institution that human beings have constructed? And it is created to do one thing, and that is create value in a particular way. There are lots of ways to create value. And many of them don't result in profit, financial profit. I think I create some value for my wife on occasion. She certainly creates value for me, right? But it's not about profit. It's not about money, right? A business is where it is about money. A business is where we measure the quantity of value created with money, in a sense, with profit, or with shareholder maximization, the shareholder of value. That's how we're measuring the creation of value. So the end is the value, there's no question. What moves the world forward is the value. But whether that value is small or whether that value is big is measured through the profit. When profit is large, when a company makes a lot of money, I celebrate. It means they've made a lot of value. They've created a lot of value in the world. It is a good thing, not a bad thing. So I think that what integrates the decision-making of a business is this idea of how do we make money doing it? And I agree completely that everything's interdependent. And I mentioned that. In order to make money doing it, we have to deal with employees in such and such a way. And we have to deal with our suppliers in such and such a way. And we have to create a product that our customers actually like, and like a lot so that our profit margins can be high. I'll refer to Apple with regard to profit margins being high, right? So of course it's interdependent because there's no way for me to actually maximize profit. Unless I bring in all these other, I call them stakeholders into the fold. And unless, you know, the resources are musted to enable the creation of value. And the only way to do that is for them to benefit as well. Of course, everything I say is in the context of moral behavior would be bizarre for anybody to come and say, yes, I believe in profit. And if you have to lie, steal, and cheat, that's okay as long as it's profit. The underlying assumption, the implicit assumption is always that we're doing it ethically. I also think that ethics is profit maximizing. I think there's no accident that Enron Stock, did you ever see what happened to it? We all know when Enron Stock got to zero, right? Ethical behavior pays. Unethical behavior is punished, punished by the authorities when it's illegal and punished by the marketplace when it might not be illegal, but it's still unethical. So, purpose is amazing. The purpose of business is to maximize shareholder wealth. And the only way to maximize shareholder wealth is by creating value. And to know to focus your energies about particular area in which you're maximizing shareholder wealth, because, you know, there's a million opportunities out there to make money. How do you know where to focus it? That is where your passion, that is where your mission, that is where your personal purpose comes in. That's why it should be framed, the maximizing shareholder wealth should be framed within the context of your mission, your purpose, your passion, your particular values. I would be, you know, I don't think John should go in to start competing with Apple. That's not where passion is, it's not always interested. He might be smart enough to compete with them, but it's not where his interests are. That's what purpose frames the context in which one maximizes long-term profits. Thank you. Thank you, John. Okay, now we come to the day tomorrow evening. Jane, please open the final vote. Please open your cell phones and cast your final vote. Again, yes, no, or undecided. You can remain undecided if you voted undecided. You can say yes if you voted yes initially. Just how do you vote now after listening to either and both debaters a clearly articulated purpose consciously embodied by the leadership should be an essential element in all business organizations while also enhancing shareholder value. I wanna thank both debaters for a very spirited and very courteous debate. It's what we pursue. There was no character assassination during this debate and that's what we eschew at the SOA Forum. This is the kind of debate we wanna put on. And as mentioned, John's book, John is unfortunately not here to do book signing, but his book is available, Conscious Leadership. Yaron will be doing book signing and sales for $20, Yaron. $20 for that book and it's well worth it. It's a bargain of 20. I can certainly tell you that. And I just wanna announce then that we will be up at Port Fest in late June. We have the results on the debate. It was a sort of close heat. The yes votes initially were 45.87% but lost by 4.5 points, so down to 4-1. So therefore, John lost a couple of points and Yaron gained by 19. So Yaron gets the tootsie roll but essentially it was very close. It was basically a little less than half voting four, a little less than half voting no, it was very close. But Yaron picked up more points from the initial to the final and therefore Yaron wins the tootsie roll. Congratulations Yaron, thank you John. Thank you.