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David Senra: John Mackey, Whole Foods Market

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John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capitalism who spent over four decades building the natural foods industry. Under his leadership, Whole Foods grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, in 1980 to the world's largest natural and organic foods retailer, with over 500 stores across North America and the United Kingdom before its acquisition by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. After dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin, Mackey opened SaferWay Natural Foods in 1978 with Renee Lawson Hardy. He merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery in 1980 to create Whole Foods Market. He became known for pioneering high-quality natural foods retail, championing stakeholder-oriented business philosophy and popularizing the concept of conscious capitalism. His accomplishments include building Whole Foods into a Fortune 500 company, co-founding the Conscious Capitalism movement with Raj Sisodia, serving as CEO of Whole Food

John Mackey: Well, one of your themes that comes out in listening to a lot of your... is that you admire entrepreneurs, and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs to be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I was just listening to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's like he says, and you even started off the episode by quoting him, he says, "Well, how much time did you work?" And he said, "All the time. All of the time." John Mackey: And that's a theme, oftentimes for entrepreneurs, that they are... So, it's not like…

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