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My guest today is the CEO of Whole Foods and an author of several books, including Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Leadership. And this is what we really got into with the ideas of socialism and Marxism on the rise. Today, he went into depth about why he believes that capitalism and especially capitalism with good ethics is the best thing for the world. We got to talking about all kinds of good stuff. It went long. This is a good one. I really enjoyed his company.

I really enjoyed talking to him. We even had disagreements. Oh, but I like him a lot.

Please welcome the great and powerful John Mackey government podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, joined by our podcast My Night All Day.

Hello, John. Hey, Joe, nice to meet you. Likewise, thank you for welcoming me to Austin and thanks for the food. No one's ever brought me food here.

I'm a grocer. That's what I do.

I know, but you brought me actual frozen meat. So thank you very much for frozen meat. Some vegan cheese. Yeah. That will go to friends. It's really good. It's really good. Taste good or is it good for you? It both.

It's just made strictly out of almonds, that's all. It's there. Oh really. Yeah. Taste it. It's a cream cheese with chives in it. It's delicious.

I really just like almonds. Can I just have.

You can but you'll like the cheese. Give it a try. I know you're open minded man. Yeah. Yeah.

Well try, I'll try your vegan cheese. OK, but you're sending me mixed signals. You give me frozen elk meat and vegan cheese.

I'm, you know, covering all bases. What I want to talk to you about. Well, first of all, you have a book. The book is Conscious Capitalism.

Now, that book that's out is Conscious Leadership. Oh, it's a sequel to you already have that book. Right. But I have this one right here. Yeah. Because I brought that today.

And Conscious Leadership, a sequel to Conscious Capitalism.

Right. That for a lot of people, those are that's an oxymoron.

That's jumbo shrimp or military intelligence. Right. Conscious capitalism today. And in this day and age, this very strange time, there's a large section should say a large segment, but it's a very squeaky wheel. There's a segment of our culture that thinks that capitalism is evil.

Yeah, I'm not I'm not I'm not in that classification. I in fact, I think the opposite. I think capitalism is the greatest thing humanity has ever done. It's been captive.

If you go back just 200 years ago when capitalism was really getting going, 94 percent of the people alive on the planet Earth lived on less than two dollars a day. And that's adjusted for inflation, 94 percent.

Today, it's under 10 percent. If you go back 200 years ago, the average lifespan was 30. Now it's seventy two point six. We're heading and the advanced countries, it's about 80 illiteracy rates 200 years ago where 80 percent of the world couldn't read. Now it's down to 12 percent. But can you attribute that solely to capitalism or wouldn't you attribute that to innovation and technology?

That's the right name for capitalism. Karl Marx called it capitalism.

What it really is a better name, which we talked about in conscious leadership is innovation ism. Continuous innovation is how humanity progresses. But it's its business that takes the innovations of science and puts them into forms that create value for other people. So it's it's it's it's been capitalism or innovation ism that's lifted humanity out of the dirt, that's transforming our world even as we speak.

It's amazing just what's happened in the last in my lifetime. It's astounding all the progress that humanity has made. And we're going through a tough year right now. So it doesn't work in a perfect linear line. But the trend lines are clear.

The book I always try to get everybody to read is Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment. Now, you have to take a look at that book.

No, I haven't, but I'm a big fan of a lot of his work.

Yeah, that book just documents. It's just unbelievable how he documents progress since the Enlightenment.

It's incredible the the problem that a lot of people have with capitalism as they attribute capitalism to to greed, attribute greed and the problems, the world and environmental destruction and ignoring climate change. And they attribute that to capitalism. And they think that the way out of this is socialism, some type of socialism.

But in my opinion, the people that are saying that, I don't think they I don't I don't think there's anything wrong with contributing and contributing to a better community in terms of making health care more affordable or free, making education more affordable or free. But you got to human beings need incentives in order to perform. And that's that's just human nature, whether we like it or not. If you want a system that allows for a continual progress of innovation, like constant innovation, you've got to give people incentives to do that.

They have the incentive to test the human animal strives to achieve for whatever reason and totally agree.

I mean, it's not like socialism hasn't been tried in the last hundred years. 42 countries have tried socialism and there have been 42 failures.

Isn't it amazing that it's still popular because people just believe, well, because a new generation doesn't know their history. Yeah. And they just believe it hasn't been done right yet.

Yes. It'll this time give me the power and I'll make sure it gets done right.

Yeah, but it can't be done right. It's intrinsically flawed.

And they fall back on the Scandinavian argument. What about Sweden and Denmark and Norway. But those those if you look at the Economic Freedom Index, those are some of the most capitalistic countries in the world.

And the Economic Freedom Index, for example, Denmark's listed one place below the United States. It's like number 12, Sweden like number 20. The United States is like number thirteen or fourteen. So Iceland is even is the freest of those Scandinavian countries.

So Sweden has held up as a as an example. But what people don't realize is the corporate income taxes in Sweden are only 21 percent. They have no inheritance taxes at all.

They have universal vouchers for education. So free competition in education, not a monopoly.

They do. They are probably in a lot of ways more capitalistic than Americans are.

So what is it that they used? They point to when they point to the Scandinavian countries? What are they using it as an example of them being a shining light of socialism?

In some sense, they're still stuck in the 60s when Sweden did an experiment with socialism before it moved away from it. They're still living in the 60s.

And yet they tried it and their economy tanked. What did they try? Hard. They tried.

They they they socialized industry. They they they they had government own the means of productions and most of these large corporations.

And they had very high business taxes. And they a lot of people like Bjorn Borg is a good example. It was driven out of Sweden or Ingmar Bergman driven out for unbelievably high taxes. So, hey, just like you've been driven out of California.

Yeah, I wasn't driven out of it because of that. If California was still open the way Texas is, I would have stayed. I saw the writing on the wall with many things. One of them was that they were closing restaurants and bars and comedy clubs and they weren't closing them in other states. And I didn't I didn't think that they were recognizing that there's there's an impact health. Wise, but there's also a health impact if you destroy the economy and that that impact, like you're not people that get covered, most people survive, right?

When your economy tanks and 40 plus percent of your businesses are gone, I don't think economically you're going to bounce back nearly as well. I think I think it's a very dangerous place to be like Los Angeles right now. If you're a business owner, it's a dangerous place to be because all of a sudden governors are acting like autocrats.

And they're I mean, there was a recent ruling, right, where he lost in court because he's passing legislation on his own. He's making mandates on his own that the rest of the state doesn't agree with and they're not going through the normal process. Right. And they've stopped him from doing that now. But look, they still just put it they imposed a curfew in Los Angeles of 10 p.m. just to just random curfew. Like what is how is that stopping?

All you're doing is limiting people.

You limiting you're not there's no emphasis whatsoever on strengthening people's immune system or on health and all this emphasis on tanking the economy, all this emphasis on closing businesses down. And I just saw the writing on the wall and I'm like, this place is fucking doomed.

I think you're I think you're telling the truth there, Joe, I agree. I just can't believe that. Before, it didn't matter that much, your governor was or who your mayor was when everything was going well, people didn't think about it that much, you know, you would be like, oh, you know, the mayor and whatever the fuck his name is, he's kind of goofy.

Who cares? Let's go to work and you just do your normal thing. Go. This is America. How bad can they fuck this up? And then you realize in time of crisis when they assume these powers they never had before and then you realize how insanely hypocritical they are.

Thankfully, our governor, the governor of California, not my governor anymore. I got a Texas license. Now give me some knuckles. Congratulations.

Thank you.

But when they caught him at that restaurant, the French Laundry, you know, eating with no mask on inside, no social distancing, all the things that he tells day, tells everybody to put a mask on in between bites of food and he's not doing it himself. You like. OK, this is this is exactly like his aunt, Nancy Pelosi, when she got busted, go into a beauty parlor with no mask on while they were all closed down its rules for you, but not rules for them.

And it's it's disgusting, right?

I mean, is it really about the covert or is it about the rules? I mean.

Well, the question human beings love telling people what to do. They did. They really do. And if they have a reason why they can justify that, that it seems feasible like covid, then they just start imposing those rules.

And if people are frightened, they're more likely to go along with those rules to imagine if instead of doing what they did, imagine if they spent a lot of time telling people how to strengthen their immune system. Imagine if they distributed free vitamins.

Imagine if they put money into keeping these hospitals well staffed, hired more people and maybe even possibly tried to talk about opening up alternative hospitals if there was some overflow, but allowed people to go to work, told people, look where your mask, social distance, take care of your health, take your vote, do all these things. But we can't fucking take the economy for nine months and not expect disaster. Well, we actually have some good examples out there.

And even though it gets a lot of criticism, the way Sweden handled it is probably, again, more in line with how America might have handled it in the previous decades.

Is that comparable, though, because Sweden is so small in comparison me of Stockholm, you have some cities, but you have all these like small villages and people are generally healthier. They're two.

I think it's comparable in the sense that. In general, people are the best judges for what's best for themselves. I mean, government can give advice. They made recommendations to people in Sweden.

They just didn't coerce them. They just didn't force them to have a curfew here or their kids went to school.

And people in general, people can make good decisions for themselves. And their families are the ones that should be making the decisions, not the government, 100 percent.

I couldn't agree more. And that is the difference between the way Texas approach this and the way California did. That's what drove me out of California.

Yeah, the high taxes are stupid, but I like living there because friends were there because where is it more beautiful in the whole world?

In California? It's an amazing climate.

It's it's it's just very, very, incredibly beautiful place. I learned a lot from fires, too, I. Well, that's true. I love to I love to visit California, but I wouldn't want to live there.

The the comedy community there is pretty awesome. It's the Comedy Store and the Improv. I mean, it's just two of the best clubs in the world and they're right in this one city. And the community of comedians is just fantastic.

And the fact it was L.A., was it the Silicon Valley, so to speak, of comedy, maybe better.

Yeah, because Silicon Valley is I mean, there's other parts of the world that have technology hubs. There's not really another comedy hub other than New York.

Chicago, not really. No.

Chicago is Second City, which is an improv hub. It's different. You know, there's a great history of sketch comedy out of there. Of course, you know, second cities where, you know, Belushi came from, a lot of great sketch comedians came from. But as far as standup is really L.A. in New York, it used to be Boston had a big part of it in Boston. Still, as a small community, Austin has right here Austin, Texas, as a small community, that's always been very good.

Like Kinnison and Hicks, Hicks actually came out of here. Have you done stand up in Austin here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did Stubb's barbecue last week to go and then I did Volcan Gas Company the week before. So, yeah, I'm I'm getting rolling again. Ultimately, I'm going to open up a club here.

So you still love doing stand up. It's the most fun. It's the most fun.

John, I know I'm not interviewing you, but when you were like a kid, were you like, were you the class clown? No, I came later. Yeah. Yeah. You were a good boy.

No, no, I wasn't a good boy at all. Most of my friends thought I was crazy. I never thought it was going to be a comedian.

Like if you talked to the people that I went to high school with, you told me earlier that that comedians such as a general rule are kind of screwed up.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. As a general rule, to want to do that, to want to humiliate yourself, get on stage.

And the failure of the bombing is some of the most intense emotional pain a person can never subject themselves to or be.

Is it worse than like getting rejected by a girl that you're in love with?

It's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. That's how I usually describe it.

But it's different and worse because some guys would probably like doing that because there's some people that I'd be like, Watch, mom, this is who I am.

And then they they would enjoy it. Get over them.

Yeah, get over it. Mom, no one likes bombing. Somebody might like suck it a thousand dicks. Father, mom, no one likes bombing.

It's just an awful feeling because you're demanding attention and you don't deserve it. And the audience is like, you don't deserve this and you know you don't deserve it.

So you have this like deep self-hate, but you have to get through that to get good at it. It's an inevitable part of the whole process of doing standup.

You kind of sync up with the audience. Can you kind of tell what's going to land that night?

You change your your show, so to speak, as you pick up the feeling in the audience how you move around a little depending upon how you feel and how they feel. But, you know, you have an act in your act is but you have a lot of different things, a lot of things you could do.

Yeah, there's a lot of things you talk about.

I mean, like say, I don't think this jokes can land with this particular audience.

You go through you go through them. They they need to hear this.

It's you know, it's it gives you an opportunity to try to figure out a better way to word it or a better way to justify your position or a better or a softer way to land it. And, you know, it's like this like there's a lot of different weird things that are going on when you're doing comedy. Comedy is kind of like mass hypnosis. That's what it's like.

You know, I do a lot of public speaking, so I have learned that there's you know, you have to sync up with the audience. And I can I can just tell whether this is going to land well with this particular group or there's not.

And I, I sort of adjust on the fly.

I still have a speech I'm going to give, but I do alter it as I go along. I shorten some stuff, length and other stuff, and I substitutive. I think that's going to bomb out so well.

I think public speaking like what you're doing when you're standing up and. Talking about a very particular subject is almost more open ended because you really never know what kind of crowd you're going to get, whether they're going to be in a good mood or a bad mood, whether they're bored or hot or cold when you go to see comedy.

Generally, people go there because they want to have fun.

So they have a good perspective when they get there. Like I've come here to have fun, laugh. I hope these comedians are funny. Like you go there with a little bit of a smile on your face when you sit down. OK, here we go. It's going to be fun. Yeah.

And so they have a predisposition to want to laugh. And yes, they're not going there to judge. They're going there to laugh. And some people are.

But those people are you know, they already didn't like you before they went there or, you know, some people that think they're going to we're want to go and heckle Chaum, which is campy, but generally clubs kick those people out.

Really, most people that come to comedy clubs, they go because it's fun. Look, I still love comedy as a as an audience member. I enjoy it as a customer. It's fun. I love watching great comedians. It's feels good to laugh. I love I love their creativity.

Do you learn a lot from other comedians? Yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. You learn what makes you laugh. You like sometimes I'll I'll see someone performing and it'll give, it'll inspire me. I'm like, wow, that guy really put a lot into that or wow her writing is so, so clever and I'll make it fire up your neurons gets excited.

You do your all your own writing. Yes. Yeah I do all my own writing. Is that common or unusual or the most. Most comedians do that.

Yeah. There's only a few comics and like occasionally. Am I giving you any material right now Joe. No, not yeah.

OK, maybe that'll happen occasionally. Comedians are right. Taglines for each other like Michelle Woolf gave me a great tagline after we did a show together the other night. She gave me a really nice tagline. I was like, oh, right, right. When she said, Oh, it's nice.

I'll tell you later. I have to have to pay to go to the club. I'll tell you, I don't want to say it all off. I didn't know you censored yourself when you were doing this.

Not censoring myself, John, by making me feel uncomfortable. I can be sensitive.

It's it's Austins, a particularly good place to comedy because there's a great history of stand up comedy in Texas, like Kinnison, who's arguably one of the greatest of all time.

You know, this is where he cut his teeth. This is where it all went together for him.

So, Austin, when I first started doing standup, I was selling out in Houston before I was selling on anywhere, because for whatever reason, they had this longing for that kind of raw comedy that you really it's hard to get a lot of places that are maybe a little bit too politically correct, like are certain places where there's so work.

They're almost like they want to laugh, but they want to call you out on your comedy almost as much as they want to laugh.

And they don't want to get criticized for laughing on something that they shouldn't laugh at.

Right. We have we were talking about this before the show. They should go in disguise. Yeah, right. Like Groucho Marx. Exactly.

Exactly. Glasses and mustache. Well, you get some great disguises today. You know, the prosthetics and all the stuff that they can do today. Yeah. If you want to go to a comedy show and just laugh the most horrible shit, maybe some of them are doing that.

It's John. I don't think people think that far in advance. Maybe like a very, very small percentage of the population.

Have you been to a lot of stand up comedy? I haven't, no.

I confess I'm just been working my ass off for.

I think it would be interesting for you, just from the perspective of the fact that you do a lot of these public speaking gigs.

You know, like I think you I think whenever you get the chance to see someone else perform in a different way, like I like going to see musicians because I have zero talent.

I have no musical talent at all. So when I go to see a musician, I can just enjoy it solely as an audience member.

I don't have to remove myself from the like like as a fellow comic.

I'll judge someone's delivery or timing, even though I'm trying to just enjoy it.

There's always going to be a part of you that's like I was kind of clunky, like, why is he set it up like this? But when you go to see music, I could just enjoy someone performing. I think I'd get something out of that.

I'm going to give it another try. I'll tell you.

I'll tell you when I'm in town.

Next, back to the subject of capitalism, capitalism and Marxism and socialism. This right now, we're in a wave of this, right? It's become more popular now. I would say over the last, particularly during the Trump administration, the concept of socialism at least has become more more publicly discussed than any time that I can remember in my life. Why do you think that is?

I think it's because the generation that's coming up is I mean, you have to understand, the academic community is is I always say the intellectuals have always been the enemy of business, enemy of certainly the enemy of capitalism. And but why is that?

I think because in a in a market society, which has been rare in history, we haven't mostly had market societies, but they're not very important in a market society. The intellectuals are very important, generally not as important.

But are they the ones that inspire the minds of the people that create and maybe innovate in the industry?

They don't have the same social status that the entrepreneurs have and Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos.

So I think it's an ego issue, the social status issue.

I think about it this way. If you're going to school, OK, and the people that end up teaching in the universities were always the smartest kids in the school generally.

And they and they did well in school. I mean, smart in terms of doing well in school. And they go on to college and then they go and get a Ph.D. and then they that's all they know in a school that's that's been their universe. Right. And they excelled at it and they were smarter than the other kids in school. And now these other kids, they go to college and they get a degree in business and they're in a fraternity and and they make a lot of friends in relationships and think and they make more money than the intellectuals do.

And that seems like that's completely unfair and unjust world, that this less smart people are making more money than the smart people do.

And they have more status in the society. And I think I think that's under under underlying it is a resentment and envy of a society that doesn't judge them to be as important as they judge themselves.

That's interesting, but I think it's a very flawed perspective. And first of all, the term smart is a weird term.

I said smart in terms of school. I didn't say in terms of street smarts or ability to do things to connect with people.

There's emotional intelligence. I'm merely saying they're good at taking tests, writing papers, abstracting thoughts, essentially.

Yeah, but this is what I'm saying, that just the term smart, it's almost like the problem is it's like a blanket term, right? It's like drugs only applies to a bunch of different things that don't necessarily seem to be related.

But the people that are interested in that pursue that. The fact that they can't understand that there's an intent like Elon Musk is a great example.

If you don't think Elon Musk is intelligent, you're either you're you're not very intelligent yourself.

You don't think Elon Musk is intelligent, you're delusional or you're a liar or you're in denial. Right. It's it's one of those things. Is something wrong with the way you think?

He's clearly intelligent, but there's people that call him a fool and the guys running like four different businesses simultaneously, they're all successful.

And he's innovating with when it comes to space travel in a way that you would assume that someone have to dedicate most of their life just singularly to that task to be able to figure out past NASA how to shoot a rocket up into space and have it land. Right. And then reuse it. No one's been able to do that besides him or up until he did it. And I think Jeff Bezos his is doing the same thing.

Yeah. To Blue Origin. Yeah. They're are obviously two of the great entrepreneurs of this particular era.

But I think Jeff Bezos is actually engineering these things.

But if you think about it, the the intellectuals have always disliked business. They've always discriminated against the merchant classes, the Jews in the West, Chinese in the east. There's really been no historical period where intellectuals praised business maybe a little bit around the time of Adam Smith up until probably Riccardo and Mouthes wrote in the early 19th century, for the most part, business people have been seen. They're disruptive, they change things. They upset the status quo.

They they innovate. Well, a lot of people don't like innovations. It's threatening. It changes, it changes social status.

It changes wealth relationships that it's almost like capitalism is like a genie that got out of the bottle.

And they're trying very hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle as much as they can.

And I think if you think about it that way, you'll understand we're never going to win the intellectuals over. I mean, I speak in universities all the time. And the students I'm an entrepreneur myself identify that way. Students love. When I talk about conscious capitalism, I say you can do good and you can do well.

There's no contradiction here. You're not you're the good guys here. You're not the bad people about this.

I do. I've debated a number of socialist. And what what is their primary argument?

Their primary argument is, is that business is greedy and selfish and it's about motivations that that that business people have the wrong motivations. And a lot of ways, conscious capitalism is an answer to that. It's a complete answer to that because in the book. Conscious leadership as well, we're basically arguing that business isn't primarily about maximizing profits. Business is primarily about creating value for other people and through creating value for other people. You do make a profit, but it's the value creation that comes first.

The profits come second in exchange. Right. And it's almost if you are creating value, then you are profitable and then you can reinvest those profits and you and you have this upward spiral. So that's that business has the potential for higher purpose.

It's not primarily about greed. Greed is found in human nature, Joe. It's not just found in business people. There are plenty of greedy governmental officials, plenty of greedy politicians, greedy lawyers. Greed is endemic to the human nature. Business people either have no more or no less than it.

It's just part of who we are. Has anyone ever laid it out in a way that's very compelling, like when you have these debates with socialists and someone, has anyone ever laid it out in a way where they have a point where you see their point? The always the best way to do a debate is completely understand the other side's position. Yeah, I understand it as good or better than they understand it. And so I've read widely in socialistic literature.

I think I do understand it. It's it's it's a type of utopianism. It's a it's an attempt to change human nature. If we would all be if we would all love each other and if we'd all share equally, then the world would be a better place.

And hey, guess what? It probably would be if if we were naturally that way. But we're not naturally that way. We we look first generally for ourselves and our own families and then our and our growing circle of relationships that we develop.

We want we don't it's not natural to it's natural to want your own children to have advantages. That's that's just human nature. To want your children to flourish because you raised them, you love them. And somehow or another to say that's unfair is cutting against human nature. People are always going to look for four advantages or privileges, so to speak, for their children.

You know, people don't like when people have advantages and have and have victories because then someone has to lose. And when someone loses the weight, that's someone losing with a bad feeling, with that person being victimized like this.

So here's a big idea we talk about in conscious leadership. We have a chapter called Find Win Win Win Solutions. The metaphors that we use to think about society tend to be very binary, good versus evil, light versus darkness, win versus lose.

And so they tend to think of business as a win lose game. Somebody wins and somebody else is losing. But the beauty of capitalism is it's a win win win game.

It's an infinite game. It's a game because the customers are winning or they wouldn't trade. The employees are winning. How are the customers winning? They're getting products and services and and there's competition to make those services and products better.

The employees are winning because they have jobs and opportunities to grow.

Benefits are paid and they do that voluntarily, not forced to work for any particular company. They do it because they think it's in their best interest when for the employees, the suppliers who are trading with the business, they're winning as well. Or they wouldn't make the exchanges. Investors are winning or they wouldn't make the investments. And the larger society is winning because business is the engine that creates all the money that goes into nonprofits and governments. Without business, there is no government and there is no and there is no nonprofit sector because those are ultimately supplied through what business creates.

So business is a win win win game. All of these stakeholders are winning and that's why capitalism lifts society up. Socialism is an attempt to reverse that back to a win lose game, and that's why it always fails.

And that's why capitalism attempt to bring it back to a win lose game.

And what were the ones that are winning, so to speak? The business people are clamped down so they're not allowed to win. It's like we're going to take your success and we're going to redistribute it. So that is, again, you said earlier on incentives matter, but we're going to take away the incentives for business to really flourish and succeed. They should do it from altruistic reasons. And we may do some things for altruistic reasons, but you cannot build a society around it when you're talking about win, win, win.

This is a very in many ways it's I see what you're saying, but there are things that are negative that are associated with profit and innovation and particularly expanding industry. Right.

Particularly environmental impacts. Like when you talk when you say win, win, win, like there's there's very rarely when you're especially when you're dealing with creating and designing and building things, you've got a negative impact in some way environmentally to two points.

First of all, historically, socialism has been far worse, worst polluter than in capitalist house countries. Well, if you just look at the environmental destruction that the Soviet Union left behind it, it was a complete disaster. Right.

But that's this is socialism done wrong, John. We're going to do it right here. Has done it right, Joe? No, no one's done it right. But the Soviet Union is a bad example. No, Stalin was.

Yeah, but all of Eastern Europe, where there's no incentive to protect the common good in socialism and they don't when the government has a monopoly of all decision power making, they don't tend to look out for the environment. That's one of the myths.

You also take away agency from people and you take away their desire to improve and do better. And without incentive, people just don't perform the same way.

But the beautiful thing about business, let's concede a partial truth to what you said, that there will be unintended negative consequences, as you say, environmentally.

Well, that's why you have to regulate business to a certain extent. That's why you have to make people responsible for their environmental pollutants.

And because Binit business innovates and has an incentive to innovate, business can innovate and create solutions to those environmental problems.

And let me stop you there for a second. When you say make people responsible for their environmental pollutants, then we're going to have to deal with another aspect of capitalism.

And that's the the fact that special interest groups and lobbyists have on politicians because they create laws that shield these big businesses from consequences, from these negative actions. So by saying that they have to clean up their problem, the only way that's ever going to happen is if they're not protected, if they don't use that influence and money, totally agree.

So this is where I think a lot of people have a valid argument against capitalism, because capitalism is kind of fucked over our our our our system of government in a way, because money has gotten so deeply involved with super PACs and lobbyists and there's so much money involved that it changes the way we we govern things.

Is that a flaw of capitalism is not a flaw of government? I think it's a flaw of government. But that government has been influenced by capitalism, by capitalism's desire for universal growth, the constant growth. The the sad truth is that humanity is not perfectible, we can never create the perfect system and the attempt to create the perfect system, the perfect seem to me the good capitalism is not perfect. It does not because human choices and what people want varies people to.

Capitalism will sell cigarettes to people because that's what people want. It gives them pleasure, but it's bad for their health. But they're they're they're giving people what they want.

It's the same thing in any type of externality that's not that's not deliberately done to harm the society. It's sort of a byproduct.

Right. But this is why win, win, win doesn't really work. It's not really win, win, win. It's win most of the time, but with some negative consequences that are better than the alternative. Right.

But what you strive for is to is to take those externalities or those negative consequences and try to through good government to to minimize them or less.

I'll give you an example. So you used to live in L.A.? Well, when I went to L.A. back in the early 80s.

It was like going to New Delhi today. I couldn't see my lungs hurt less than 24 hours, but through good regulations, the air in L.A. is a fraction as polluted as it was 40 years ago. We have been able to clean it up. That is an example of how you can take the worst impacts of industrialization and ameliorate them or lessen them.

What do you think about the government of Ellas decision or the government or governor of California or others decision to eliminate all sales of combustion engine cars after 2035?

It's easy to. My first thought is, is that a lot of times people make these proclamations in the future that they'll never be around to see the ultimate. That actually realized meaning it'll be somebody else's problem then, so it's a politician will make promises and claims for the future that they won't themselves ever deliver on.

Yeah, so I. I think that's well intentioned in terms of lessening environmental externalities from the internal combustion engine or from carbon production, however, is it realistic? Is it possible? I don't think so.

Well, there's also people that argue that it's not even well-intentioned. If you look at the actual impact of dragging minerals out of the ground to make these batteries, that the production of electric cars, it's not a zero impact on the environment at all. It's like there's profound impacts. There is there's no escape.

You know, humanity ever since humanity has been around, know it's had a negative impact on the environment.

Right. If the hunters and gatherers wiped out most of the large animal species that they could that were wild, they did it everywhere they went. They did it in Europe, they did it in North America. They did it in Australia. Agriculture is when you take a lot of land under cultivation, you're going to you're going to mow down the jungles and they're going to graze cattle. That's going to have a negative impact on the environment. There's no escaping human manatee's impact on the environment.

It's always going to be there because guess what? We're part of the environment. The question is, how do we you can create the win win win. You just can't create perfection where we solve some problems.

And when new problems come up, every generation has to begin to solve the problems of the the problems that the parents couldn't solve.

I agree with you that capitalism is a better alternative. And I agree because of all the things that we talked about, that it gives more incentive that the that having innovation and having these incentives creates better alternatives for people in terms of, like how to live their life. It gives them in terms of medicine and in terms of what what's going on in the medical industry, saving far more lives, fixing far more people that have been injured. And I agree with all those things.

I think that sometimes we tend to want to put things in these very simplistic packages like Win, Win, win, and I don't necessarily think that's a win win win is it's an ethical framework that you can use to think about situations like you and I've met today, so.

We can create win wins between each other, you know, reciprocity, I do. In fact, we're probably doing that right now.

I have a new book that I love people to read, and you give me some vegan cheese and you're not paying me anything to come on your show.

And I usually get a lot of money, too, and I don't. I speak. So it's a win win.

We're both gaining or we wouldn't be doing this show speak with generally that these business conferences mostly want to learn about mostly business conferences. So people want to learn how you trade shows. Trade shows mostly.

One guy told me one time, he said he was very honest.

He said this was a few years ago. And he said and there were like three pretty well-known business speakers, including myself. And and I said, how did you get all three of us?

And he said, you were all three were a lot cheaper than Hillary. And the point is cleaner.

And he told me, he said, look, it's simple. We have a trade show. They're mostly going to be on the floor. This is the one time I can get everybody in around the industry because they'll come in to hear you speak or they hear the other speakers. So we're paying you to put to put butts in the seats so we can hold our trade show together. So that's a win win. It's good for me.

They're paying me money. It's good for them. We're getting butts in the seat to listen to their to their trade shows feel.

And also, you want to give people. I want to get my message out there.

Yeah. I want to get my message out there about conscious capitalism. This message, is this something that you have sort of developed over the years of arguing with people about it now?

It's mostly from what we did at Whole Foods because I had no background in business. Right.

I'm an entrepreneur.

I didn't get started here. Right in Austin. That's right.

The first store here are 40 over 42 years ago.

Jesus, you look great. How old are you? 67. You look very good. Well, thank you. Tell you right now, look, win, win, win, win, win relationship and all that Whole Foods.

I'm eating all that healthy Whole Foods.

That is one thing that you guys did do. That's very interesting. Right?

You created a market where like if you tell people I go to Whole Foods, you know, people like, oh, well, you care about your health.

Like it's synonymous with healthy foods. Even in the name of Whole Foods.

That was our brand when we were up and comer. And then when we got really rich. America loves the up and comer.

But then once you have become really successful, you're making a lot of money. They start to turn on you.

Oh, no. Well, we became whole paycheck. Who said that?

I don't know. But whoever did I wish I never saw it. You never saw that until right now. You just shit on yourself in a way that I never see. All I heard was Whole Foods. I never heard whole paycheck.

Then your team didn't do good research. I have no team.

So does this when you sold to Amazon? No, no. The whole paycheck thing's been around for a long time because the whole paycheck. Meaning because it's so expensive.

Yes, because initially when we were up and comer you, if you shop at Whole Foods, you were showing everybody. You were sort of. You were definitely.

Yes. And you were hip and cool.

And then the narrative went sour because it's like you're a fool for shopping there because you can get the same food cheaper elsewhere.

So you're going to whole paycheck. So the narrative turned negative, so to speak.

I still see that pretty much all the time, although since our merger with Amazon, we've cut our prices many, many times.

How did you do that? Amazon allowed Wholefoods to think long term again. We needed to cut our prices. But when you're a public company, if you're selling something for a dollar and you say, you know what, we need to sell this for 90 cents and you start selling it for 90 cents, in the short run, you just cut your sales 10 percent because you're not selling anymore of it. Over the long term, people will realize, man, I can get a good deal for 90 cents.

I have to pay a buck for it and they start to shop with you more and your sales will go up. But when you're a public company and the market's very short term oriented, you pay a heavy price in the short term for reducing your prices.

And Amazon is willing to think long term and let Wholefoods do that. Just Jeff Bezos got that long money, son.

He has a long money because he's had he's had a lot of brilliant ideas and put together pretty, pretty good team.

Yeah. What keeps that guy working when you when you have 150 in the bank, 150 billion, what keeps you going?

Well, most of it. He has it and doesn't have it in the bank. He's got it in stock a few and he's got a few in the bank probably. I feel like he can probably relax. I mean I think I think the same thing that keeps me going at age 67.

I mean, building something is great fun building Whole Foods. I don't you know, I've got plenty of money, Joe. I don't need to work. I just like it.

Do you still run Whole Foods? Like, what's your relationship? Still CEO, still CEO. So you still work long hours.

I don't work as long today as I did when I was in my 20s and 30s. There's no question about it because I was putting a lot of 80 hour weeks and year after year after year after year.

Now you're building you know, it wasn't work. It was play. Yeah, I was having a blast. It was fun. Elon Musk has famously said that if you're in a tech startup and you're not working 120 hour weeks, you won't succeed.

Yeah, I never been in a tech startup, so I can't speak for that. The grocery business wasn't quite that hard, but we did put a lot of 80 hours.

That seems like not a lot of time to sleep. And I'm a great believer in sleep, sleep. I like how many hours are left, how many hours are in a week.

Well, let's see, there's 24 hours, 168 hours a week.

160 is only about 48 hours of sleep. That is ridiculous, Elon.

So that's well, I don't know if all I did was 48 hours divided by seven. That's almost seven hours a night. If all you did was work and sleep, I don't know when he eats, maybe have to eat.

When you're working, you have to eat. I would work and eating and you got to go to the bathroom some time. I got to scratch that out.

So you sleep seven hours a night and just stay at work? Yeah. I don't actually think you have to put a lot of energy into build anything.

Yes, but if you're doing it right, we talk a lot about conscious capitalism is about higher purpose. If you have a purpose that's animating you, it doesn't feel like work, it feels like play. It also attracts people to you that share that same purpose.

This is something that I find very frustrating and people that don't recognize that it is incredibly difficult to build a successful business when they just want to tax the shit out of people and take all that money.

Like, do you think it's easy to make something like Whole Foods? Do you think it's easy to make a company like Tesla? Do you think it's it's not easy. It's an insanely difficult task.

That's why most people don't do it exactly. When someone does do it and they have become successful, then other people start looking at it and go, well, they have all this money, they should contribute more or they should do this. Or, you know, you're talking about some people have suggested some extraordinary tax rates in order to get us out of this current recession. And then I talked to business people and they say that is the exact wrong approach because that's actually going to stifle business and business.

The only thing that's going to bring us out of this, if you incentivize businesses to take risks and to be open and to make more profits, then more people are going to get jobs, then the economy bounces back. But if you give them a gigantic tax burden, they're going to be less likely to take chances. They're not going to be able to survive. And people on the outside who've never built a business like Whole Foods, they don't seem to see that.

They don't see it.

The reality is, is that. People like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They are their good capital allocators, so to speak, they're not going to waste that money. That money is going to be reinvested to create new and more dynamic businesses that will help the innovations, will help our society move forward when you just redistribute that money. There's no more additional innovation. It's just it's just being consumed.

This whole idea that it's consumption that drives the economy is fundamentally a myth. It's mostly creativity and innovation that drives the economy. So we need to keep that money in the hands of our most creative people, which are entrepreneurs, a creative business, people. And for some reason, I probably I think because of envy, it seems so unfair. Again, we are in a win lose model. If Jeff Bezos has 150 billion dollars, then that's unfair in some sort of cosmic way.

That's unfair. And they believe that somehow or another others have less. So there's like this fixed pie in Jeff took a big piece of it, or Elon Musk has taken a big piece of it. But it's not a fixed pie. That's the wrong metaphor for innovation. ISM is continually growing the pie.

And in fact, humanity is demonstrably better off because of the capitalist, because of the innovation.

Let me play devil's advocate, because this is the way they look at it. They would say, well, when you get to that sort of a position like a Jeff Bezos, we have one hundred and fifty billion dollars.

You can exert your influence on people in a way that's detrimental to society. You've achieved too high of a position.

You have too much power, and you will probably lose use that power to loosen regulations, to bribe politicians or influence politicians and to get laws passed that are better for your business and stifle competition.

I think that's a powerful argument. And if and when it happens, you have to push back against you have to resist it. I think most business people are not doing that. I think I don't see that Jeffs trying to pass or you know, or I don't see I don't see Jeff trying to pass laws.

No, I don't think the reason I'm not saying he is if he was boy, would they come after him. Yeah. Because he's born so hard, they be like that motherfucker who doesn't have enough.

But I know that before when Whole Foods was we were a public company for 25 years.

And we we had the government go after a few times for well, they tried to stop our we tried to make an acquisition of a of a company called Wild Oats back in 2007. We actually made the acquisition, but the FTC tried to stop it. We end up going into court with them and we actually won in court. And very interesting. The FTC has their own court and they after we won in the federal courts, they said, well, now we want to take it in our court.

You know, courts horrific. They have their own court. They have their own courts. Don't you wish you had your own court take you to Whole Foods court, motherfucker?

I'll take you out to see it. All right. But you know, the People's Court, you don't win in the FTC court. You don't win in that court so well.

How many people have won in that court?

I think when I looked at it at that time, this back in 2007, I think 46 of the 48 previous cases, this is from memory. So I could be wrong, had lost.

They should go to court, so someone should take them. But here's the thing. I asked our attorneys, OK, we're going to lose in this court, in their court, they what happens? And, well, then you appeal that back to the federal courts. And then after that, if they want to go to the Supreme Court, if they'll take it. So how much is it going to cost me to just fight them in their own courts?

They say it's going to cost you thirty million dollars in legal fees, not to mention a lot of executive time. It's like, oh, man. Thirty million.

We're going no, we're going to lose. And then we have to spend another thirty million dollars to go to the appeals of.

Beyond that, the lawyers love it, by the way. Of course they want you to do it like divorce lawyers.

Yes, exactly. They love it's how people fight. Guys should not talk.

Don't talk, don't try to work this out because he's going to try to, you know, try to steal your money. He's going to try to steal that money. He's a piece of shit.

Look at them. Look at him. So again, so what did you do you want settling?

We ended up, yes, we ended up. They let the merger go through and we agreed to sell off a bunch of stores. Oh, and that was that was the best we could do. How many stores that sell off where we put up about.

Thirty for sale, and we only about about I don't know, I think five or six we sold out five or six.

When someone is involved in that kind of a fucked up scenario where you bring them to FCTC court where no one wins, if you do win, like ultimately a Supreme Court, that they should take it out of the salary of the people that forced you into doing that.

It should be worth it for you to go to war, those rich guys should make the government do that with all their power. Yeah, you know, if the rich guys are so powerful, how come we have such high tax rates?

Because you make a lot of money, but don't just shield it.

Didn't Donald Trump 700 bucks in taxes? I don't know what he paid in taxes because we never actually saw, as we just heard what The New York Times said he paid. But we don't really know for sure because we never really saw the taxes or The New York Times would never lie.

But of course, not that funny that that's a funny thing to say.

Now, boy, that used to be like if you said that in 1980, people would agree with you.

Depends on how you say it to today. Well, there's a lot of dummies that think The New York Times never lied today, but they've been caught lying. Unfortunately, there's a problem with journalism in particular today.

And it's that it's not just journalism now. It's a business that is sort of in a very fucked up place where sensationalism is very important to the business model.

Yeah, the click the click through to click bait. Very important. Very important in nobody's buying physical copies anymore, so they can't just rely on subscriptions.

They just.

Did you see that in recent documentary The Social Dilemma. Yes, I did. That was kind of creepy. I had Tristan Harris on the podcast a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very disturbing, you know, because you see how this all plays out and you know, you're seeing it right now online with the election results.

We are, yeah. Civil war looks like we're heading to a civil. Yeah.

And then you have like the real wacky sections of both. You know, you have the Q and on one side and the intifadas on the other side and like, oh, it's so nuts.

Like it is crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. That Sidney Powell lady, she seems unhinged.

We'll see what she can deliver the goods or not.

I'm very curious to see how this all plans out are pans out rather.

But it just. You know, it just seems like the most divided I can ever remember this country being definitely in my lifetime the most divided, which is exactly what they were talking about in the social dilemma.

And they were literally saying that what's happening with these algorithms, what's happening with these echo chambers that people are involved with in social media, what's happening with the way it the way it influences the mind to gravitate towards these things that upset people and to rile people up and get people more and more interested in these particular polarizing subjects, like we're headed towards almost like a civil war.

Yeah, you know, of course I do. Well, I think the social dilemma is a good movie and a lot to learn from. And I do think it it overstates it. And and in our book, Conscious Leadership, we talk about cultural intelligence in the book, particularly the very last part of the appendix. And we talk about how there there are three major types of worldviews that exist in the United States that are that are clashing with each other.

The first one is more of a traditional worldview of heritage values that that might be traditional Christianity or traditional Judaism, combined with belief in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, sort of very traditional values.

And and and then you have the modernist worldview, which is science, rationality, capitalism, success, getting ahead. And that's the second. And now we have a progressive worldview that hasn't been around that long. But it's it's a third major world view. And I think statistically, we think about 30 percent of the population is in the traditional world view. About 50 percent is in the modernist worldview, and about 20 percent is in the progressive worldview.

And these all these worldviews are struggling with each other to dominate, to have their values become the law of the land. And everybody must conform to their values because their values are correct. So that's that we think that's the essence of this cultural struggle going on. And we win it.

And we argue in the book that there's a fourth we call post progressivism, which basically recognizes all the values, have good things about them, and they have some bad things about them. Right. So they have dignity's and disasters. And if we're going to we're going to get through it. We need conscious leaders who will be able to take the the best things about each one of these worldviews and integrate them together so that we can give each of the world views enough to feel like this is a society worth belonging to.

If we try to cram one set of values down everybody else's throats and force that into law, we're going to have a civil war because America is not going to stand for it.

Yeah, I like that perspective that there are good things and bad things about these sides. And that's one of the things we're talking about.

Like we're so polarized today and something you were talking about with capitalism because you're saying, hey, John, it's not perfect. And capitalism is a modernistic sort of part of the modernistic world view. And it's not perfect.

There are some problems and challenges with it, but the dignities of it are tremendous. And we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater just because it's not perfect, because there is no perfect solution to any of these problems.

We're going to muddle our way through like we always do is now.

When you look at the positive aspects of all these different schools of thought and you look at progressivism, which is the one that is probably the most on the rise today. Why is it the most on the rise?

Like, what do you think when you say you look at you might you might say that you can see each of these worldviews comes out of the previous world view. So if you go back 200 years ago, 250 years ago, the modernist worldview is just being born. The founding fathers of our country were early modernist people like Franklin and Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton.

These were early modernist, but almost everybody else was a traditionalist and that we created the foundation to create really the world's first modern society, which was the United States. Now, progressivism, in a way, is a reaction to the disasters of modernism, like modernism does have negative environmental impacts.

And so part of it is that we have to solve those problems. And so progressivism is partly about solving that problem, things like racism and sexism and homophobia or whatever. These are also aspects that progressive is reacting to, to say that this is not fair.

This is not just so that the really beautiful thing about progressivism is that it's striving to give dignity to all these different sort of marginalized people that. We're always, you know, used to get beat up when they were young, so to speak, in a more modernistic traditional society.

The problem is, is that when you begin to force your values on everybody else and then we begin to get a lot of blowback on that.

And that's true for progressivism as well. It needs to harmonize with traditionalism and modernism and not treat those as the enemies that must be conquered.

The things that progressivism, the things that resonate with a lot of people is the uplifting of the impoverished education in poor communities where the traditionally education has been substandard.

All all these different things that I think.

For whatever reason, our government or our society has we've aired, there's a problem in not not not dealing with those those issues.

So I would I would take a little different interpretation. Actually, modernism is dealing with it. Modernism has been lifting humanity up, as I argued earlier, and.

OK, but it's not. It's not. But it's not done a great job. It's actually done a very good job. But it hasn't it hasn't finished the job. So progressivism is correct to recognize that there are some people being left out that the rising tide is not lifted, all the boats. What about those that are being left behind? What about them? They're absolutely right. We need to take care of them. We need to find solutions to their problems.

But it's not by throwing modernism out, right? It's not. It's by taking modernism and then and then adding on a greater sensitivity for those who are downtrodden, who are who are who have bad educational system.

This is where you can take some of the good aspects of progressive. Exactly. These are the aspects that I identify with, as do I. Yeah. So the ideas of progressivism when it comes to dealing with impoverished communities, dealing with crime ridden communities and coming up with strategies to help the people that are stuck in those spots. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. That if you take away that once once that gets starts getting implemented on a wide scale, then a lot of the arguments against capitalism will start to fade. Hintze, conscious capitalism.

Is that in your book, right? Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it's about right here by John Mackey and Roger available on Amazon and it Wholefoods. You can get it at home. Probably Barnes and Noble. Sure.

Dealing with this debate and dealing with this argument has anyone or have just having these conversations over long periods of time, like I know you have, has this shaped your perspective in any way like having to formulate these very clear arguments? Of course, yeah.

I mean. You can't really think clearly, I think dialectically, Joe, I need push back, I need a devil's advocate because I'm always around, bro.

OK, well, you're apparently not always around. You travel a lot, haven't traveled that much. But but but you need a real devil's advocate.

Well, you need your ideas need to stand the test of of being struggled with. Right.

That's a real problem with people that don't want to hear the other perspective. We're stuck. And that's your social dilemma issue. When we get stuck in an echo chamber. If we only if you're if you're a traditionalist and you only watch Fox News, for example, then you're not going to get a wider perspective. But if you're progressive and you only read The New York Times and watch CNN and MSNBC, you may not be getting a wider perspective either.

We need to expose ourselves to the wider context of information that's out there.

That is a philosophy that I think should be taught in school that is as important as mathematics and history. There's a there's a thing about challenging ideas and looking at your own ideas in a in an objective way. I think one of the things that I've worked very hard at doing is not being married to any of the ideas that I have in my head. And I don't they are not mine. They are an idea.

And even though I have espoused these ideas, even though I've defended these ideas, if something comes along that shows me that this idea is flawed or inaccurate, I have made a very positive, a very conscious, positive effort to abandon those ideas or reexamine them.

I've got a metaphor for it that you are happy to loan it to. You can have it, too. It's like ideas are like I've got clothes on here today, but they're not who I am. I'm just wearing them today. Right. And I'll put these aside and I'll wear different clothes tomorrow.

The clothes are not me and the ideas and beliefs I have are not me either. Right. When when they don't fit any longer, I set them aside and I get new clothes that fit better. And it's that's a that's a very liberating way to think about your beliefs and your ideas, because otherwise if you identify yourself with what you believe that means, if somebody criticizes one of your beliefs, many people take it as a personal attack, that somehow they're they're saying, I don't have worth because they disagree with my views.

No, they're just saying they don't like the clothes that you're wearing, but that's not who you are. So I'm not my beliefs. They are just what I'm wearing for right now.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. And I think there is a real problem with people looking at people's ideas and judging them and their value as a human being based on those ideas. But we do it because most people are married to their ideas and we're taught to defend our ideas to the death that these ideas are core to who you are as a person. They're core to how you identify, how you think of yourself.

It's like the Matrix. You got to free your mind. You free your mind.

Well, it's very freeing in being able to recognize you're wrong and say you're wrong. It's very it's very freeing. It is.

And we resist it. But when you resist it and you know you're wrong, you feel like a loser, like inside your head. You know, you're full of shit.

You know, I don't I don't experience it that way. So one of the things I try to do is see a Whole Foods market, as I always try to admit my mistakes in a very public way, because I feel like that helps everybody else admit their own mistakes. Yeah. And I'll just say, you know, I was wrong about that. I made a mistake. Sorry about that. And because then if you admit you made a mistake, you can learn from it.

You don't have to make the same mistake again. And it also gives everybody permission if hey, if John is going to admit his mistakes and I can admit my mistakes, too, and you have a much more open dialogue with people. Nobody is infallible. Is all knowing. Is never right. Always right. Never wrong.

Yeah. That's a great philosophy. It's very important. I mean, nobody wants a dictator that they have to walk on eggshells around and, you know, they have to pretend that this person is only making good decisions. When you think that I mean, that's the argument against Donald Trump, right? I mean, never says he's wrong, never admits he's wrong, doesn't show any empathy.

I'm not going to defend Trump. Oh, dear. I will merely say that which presidents in our lifetime ever admit they made any mistakes? I just that's just not something I see politicians do very often.

Well, Governor Newsom made a mistake when he went to that restaurant. He admitted it when he got busted.

Well, but only when he got busted and he couldn't you couldn't deny you're not going to believe what is what I say are your own eyes. So.

Well, then he lied, though. I said he was outside. Right.

He didn't anticipate photos coming out after he gave them and he didn't know how many people were going to be there.

Yeah. And he says I should have just turned around right then and there. So I thought you knew I was going to be there.

Yeah, but who knows who his buddy.

I guess when you're caught red handed, it's hard to continue to.

Well, look, I'm not the governor, but if someone says Joe Rogan for governor, I think that's a great idea. I like our governor. I like Governor Abbott. I like I like Governor Evans, too.

When. You go to a party, if someone says we're going to have a party over my house during times of covid, I'd be like, how many people are going to be there that be like one of the first questions I asked, like, I don't I don't want to go to a party with 500 people. I don't know anybody. Of course not breathing. Everybody's funky air.

I would ask that, and I'm not even the governor, I'm not even telling people you have to close their businesses, and I would ask that forget about looking hypocritical just for my own health.

You know, the Newsom example, though, is a is a kind of a personal example, you know, we always are quick to point out hypocrisy in people. But I'm saying that very seldom do you ever see a politician or a president or senator or a governor admit they made a policy mistake.

Right. So you don't see Governor Cuomo in New York saying that, gosh, I should never send those people to nursing homes, really made a mistake. Good point. We don't see the obvious mistakes ever admitted.

But don't you think that in that situation there would be a legal problem? Because if he did admit that that's a mistake publicly, they would probably sue the shit out of him.

You're talking about they could still suing, whether they admit it or not.

But they would have the evidence. They would have his own his own testimony publicly that he made a mistake. You would not be able to argue against that. Look, I think we both agree. Good point. Clearly, he made a mistake. That's a giant mistake.

And it's responsible for thousands of deaths.

Yeah, I mean, it's going to it's hard to argue that you take people that are covid positive. You send him to a nursing home where folks are older and their immune systems are compromised and a lot of them die. I mean, I don't know what number died, but I know that there have been reports in places where there have been covid deaths where an enormous percentage of them were in nursing homes, more than 20 percent.

No, no, Joe, I think it's over 50 percent in the United States or close to it. And I mean, 95 percent have comorbidities.

Right. So you imagine being in that situation when you're an older person and you're just like trying to ride out your last days and the governor sends sick people back to the nursing home and you realize that Mary down the hall is coughing up a fucking storm now.

I mean, we're way out of where I'm kind of a little bit out of my comfort.

And that's what I want to do to people I know. But we don't know what really what what the governor might have been thinking. I believe his intentions were probably good. He was very worried they were going to be they were going to have too many cases. They weren't getting enough hospital beds. No, I'm sure it's probably a mistake. But it was it was it was made with good intentions. And I don't think it was made with bad intentions to hurt people.

I don't think so either. I don't think he did it to try to kill old people. Exactly.

I think he just made an error of actually trying to save lives. He just made a mistake. And. Well, and people make mistakes when you're in a situation like that where there's not much you can do when you are stuck.

You know, I was talking to a nurse and she was explaining to me and she's a nurse and covid Ward, and she was explaining to me the decisions that they have to make. She's like during like the peak when when it was, you know, all the beds were full.

She's like, we really were in situations where we're like, we have to send this person home and they're going to die.

And there's no room for four new people to come in.

So we literally have to send we have to take people that are terminal triage. Yeah, there's not much you could do.

And I go, well, what it how do you protect their family from getting it? She's like, you can't. Like, oh, my God. So you're sending people who are dying of covid home and they were likely going to infect their family. Yeah, yeah. Tell their family, take all the precautions they can. But if you have to do it, you have to do it.

That's when you're in a situation where there's no good.

And that's not a win win, right? Yes. That's not a win win win either. No. Yeah, it's it's hugely unfortunate, but it's also unprecedented. Right. Like when Mario Cuomo became governor or Andrew Cuomo, rather, became governor, he didn't think that this is something that he was going to have to encounter. He probably had strategies in play for economic growth, for, you know, dealing with law enforcement, all these different problems that a governor would face, taxes, all these different things, and probably never thought, well, there might be a thing that kills all these old people.

If I send them back to nursing homes. I'm sure there was not a plan for it. No. Well, that's one thing about this. It's why I don't ever want to be governor.

Joe, please don't everybody hate you think they hate you when you became successful with whole paycheck as we wait to you know, I him. Governor. Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, and then if you become president, it's even worse than literally half the country hates you.

Like how many people are trying to kill you. Yeah, I don't know of anybody trying to kill me. Congratulations.

That's probably like one butchers thing in this part of your your time doing this, your time spent like as a leader, as you know. Do you understand better the pitfalls of these leaders because of the fact that you should be the leader of a corporation? Absolutely. Absolutely.

You just have a lot of responsibility. And if you're a leader, you're also being paid to make good decisions. And if you make good decisions, a lot of people benefit.

And if you make bad decisions, a lot of people might suffer.

So you got to have a high batting average here, Joe. You can't you're going to make a few mistakes. But you you make those mistakes hopefully at a smaller level, not at the biggest level.

And I've made plenty mistakes at Whole Foods. And one of the reasons I've been successful is I've just learned from a lot of my mistakes. As I say, I have a lot of scars and but they've made me better to.

Now, when you do have these very strong ethics and morals that you operate your company by, but you're also you're incentivized by profit, do you make a conscious effort to explain or to espouse these ideas to the people that are working for you and what we do? I mean.

Our quality standards, our core values, our higher purpose, these are all we actually have a program at Whole Foods now called Cultural Champions, where people go through a program and get certified to be a cultural champion. And it's very important because we I mean, we have 100000 people working for Whole Foods, and every year we're hiring 10 to 20000 new people. Well, exactly. And so they're not going to know the purpose. They're not going into the core values and they're not going to know what the is about or even they're not going to know the history.

You have to help. You have to continually educate and teach people who you are, what you stand for, or otherwise it's going to disappear.

One thing you guys have done and I don't know how you did it, a lot of people there are friendly, like how have you done that? Like in Boulder? I've found people to be friendly. I found people to be friendly.

And Park City, Utah, I found people to be friendly in Los Angeles and the valley in the city. Like you've got a lot of friendly employees, like, is this something that's been like a core tenant of the. It is.

It's one of our core values. We call it team member growth and happiness. We actually want our people working for us to be happy. And I'll tell you what I've learned. There's two things that people want at work above all else. I mean, they want to earn a paycheck, too. But besides, if you take if you get the money right, there's two things that people want which will make them long term committed to your organization. The first one is everybody wants to have a sense of purpose.

They want to feel like their work is actually contributing. It's you know, they're not just making widgets. They're doing something that's actually creating value for other people. Purpose matters.

And secondly, they want to feel like somebody gives a shit about them that that they're cared for, that they're that. And if you do those two things, if you give people purpose and love, then you're giving them probably the two things they most desire in life is purpose and love.

And we try to do that at Whole Foods. And to the degree people are friendly, it's partly because they're experiencing both of those or at least one of them.

What's great about that to me is that because your business has been so successful and it's such a popular spot for people and people are very aware that it's like that, my hope is that this is going to be contagious and that other businesses are going to go, you know, we're going to follow the Whole Foods model and we are going to create an environment where it's family, people are loved, they're cared for.

And then the people that come there, we want them to be appreciated. We want everybody who works for us to be happy that they have a job here, feel like they belong, feel like they're doing something good.

I absolutely agree. The second chapter of our book, Conscious Leadership, is Lead with Love. Love is something that we don't think about in our corporations. And we have these sort of hyper competitive models, mental models about the way the world works. There are war metaphors, kill or be killed. We're going to let's go to the war room.

Let's let's create our campaign. Let's go motivate the troops. We're using war metaphors or we're using Darwinian metaphors.

This is survival of the fittest. It's a jungle out there.

Only the paranoid survive or they are sports metaphors where we're winners, losers and winning isn't everything.

It's the only thing we've got this idea of hyper competition.

And when you're at war, there really isn't any place for love. I mean, love. Check it at the door because we got a war to fight Will after that.

So do that in your personal life and love, though, the love.

I don't mean romantic love. I don't mean sexual love.

I mean the love that you feel towards the people you're working with, the people that you're serving, your customers that can't that that's part of the most important part of being a human being.

We have to bring that part with us to work. It can't hide out in the closet. We have to be able to connect with people and. That's one of the great things that we need to have happen in corporations, if you're asking how can we make corporations better? Cindy Powles talking about Release the Kraken, I'd say that what she said, that's what she's been saying.

I would say let's release love, let's let love out of the closet. Let's let love be what we build organizations around. It's so much better way to live.

The only argument I would say against that would be that you don't love your competitors. You're out there to kick their ass. Right.

If you're playing on a team and you're supposed to go up against another team, you want to be as amped up, as aggressive, as motivated and as focused on victory as possible. That's why so many corporations adopt these sports metaphors, right?

Yeah, but that's the reality, is that it's not that competition is not part of corporations or business. It is. Is it the main part? It actually isn't the main part. It's about creating value for customers. That's why the business exists. Competitors and you. I never hated any of my competitors. I mean, I always saw my competitors as people that could teach me things, things they were doing better than Wholefoods was doing. Like one of the best competitors Wholefoods competes against anywhere in the whole world is is HCB here in Texas.

Very, very good competitor. And we've learned a lot from HCB. They've made us better as a company.

And the words learned from HCB. What have we learned from HCB?

If I was to be specific about how hire sketchy late night coffee they know well, HCB opened up a concept called Central Market, and that was back in the early 1990s. And it was a took a lot of Wholefoods ideas and expanded and made and bigger stores.

So one thing I learned from it, HCB was to do bigger stores and and we started getting progressively bigger stores.

The central market joints are pretty nice. They are there. There are worthy competitor. And so our competitors can be our allies in the sense that they help us improve.

How if you don't have a good competitor, then you're not going to be pushed. Take one of my favorite sports, tennis.

We happen to be blessed with possibly the three greatest tennis players of all time playing at the same exact time Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic and twenty, twenty and 18 masters, a grand slam championships.

Those three guys are the top three of all time and grand slam championships if.

If they didn't have the other two, they wouldn't be the same player they turned out to be because that pushed them to get better and better and better. And by the way, that is the beauty of capitalism versus socialism. There is competition. There is innovation that's occurring that you have to you have to stay on top of. You have to incorporate yourself, and then you have to challenge to out innovate the other people to stay ahead, so to speak.

And socialism doesn't have that incentive to innovate, and that's why it stagnates in the long run. So competition is part of business. I don't want to say it's not there. It's just not the most important part. It's not it shouldn't dominate everything else. It has its place, but it shouldn't be the the be all reality of business and all be.

Yeah, it'll be OK. I understand what you're saying and I agree with you in terms of competition. Obviously, you know, I come from a martial arts background and that's everything. If you don't have people in the gym that are better than you, you will not get better. You don't want to be the man like you want to be surrounded by other people that are better than you. It's almost always the best way to improve and grow because you have a metric to gauge yourself.

You can compare against them and you also can study them. Yeah, what you know, how are they doing that? How are they doing that sidekick that?

Well, one of the things let me show you one of the beautiful things about martial arts. It's always been the case. Martial artists are very open.

Collaborative. Yes, very collaborative. Because that's taught like from the beginning, particularly in jujitsu and jujitsu.

It's there's no secrets like everyone is trying to show you what they're doing. Like, one of my best friends is Eddie Bravo, who's a world renowned jujitsu instructor and competitor. And he he's like, I am teaching my students how to beat me. He goes, I'm getting these younger, faster, stronger people. I'm showing them all my tricks. And that makes me stay one step ahead. And this is like this is the philosophy of martial arts.

It's very you you never want to have no competition. That's a terrible place to be.

It's the philosophy of excellence. Yeah. And excellence is a big part of corporations and it's a big part of capitalism.

Yeah, it's a big part of everything. But when you actually go to a competition, you want to smash that person, you want to love them.

Yeah, but you may be loving him after the competition, yes, might be your best friend. I'm sure it's a friendly competition. You're not literally trying to kill them, right? You're not really wanting to to to offend them, to crack their head, and they never get up again.

This is a concept, this concept we're describing, whether it applies to martial arts or to business, that a socialist would have a very difficult time grasping that you can both be loving and ultra competitive and that these things are not mutually exclusive.

And in fact, they help. It helps.

They are yin and yang. They they they work well together.

So this is if I'm I'm going to put words in your mouth. This is probably one of the things that frustrates you the most about these ideas, these progressive ideas, is that they when they apply them to business, they don't really understand business.

They don't work. Yeah, they don't work. That's the problem. And that is the disaster of progressivism.

You mean the people don't work or the ideas or the ideas don't work, but the ideas are a great example is collective agriculture.

And we're going to put everybody we're not going to do individual farming plots. We're going to China almost put it starve itself to death.

And you had millions and millions of people die from starvation by collectivizing the agriculture, even though the Soviet Union had already failed to do it.

So China did it and they forced all the people to collectivize their agriculture. And then the result was terrible idea because they didn't have the incentives that were there any longer to try to optimize their production. And as a result, starvation, mass starvation occurred until China wised up. They had finally some communist said, let's let them own at least a small little plot themselves, that they get to keep what they produce for their families. And that proved to be so productive, it gradually took over the entire agriculture.

They went back to capitalism in agriculture in China.

So it wasn't that the issue with the colonists as well in America, when they first started growing wheat, they combined all their food together and then they realized like, hey, this is not working.

We have to make people earn their own.

You know, I think one of the reasons this idea will always be there, Joe, is that's how we operate our families when we're growing up. We're just small kids.

The family shares. Right. And your your and then we ask when we get older, why can't we make the whole society like the family?

And the answer is because it's too damn big to do it that way. And when you try to do it that way, you get you get the slackers and the people who don't want to work being parasites on the others.

And you end up with the free rider problem.

And ultimately, that's the problem with socialism is a free rider problem that they've never been able to solve for except through coercion and putting people in labor camps and things like turn them into slaves so they can't solve that problem except by by by sort of super coercion. And that's why it doesn't work. Well, it's never going to work. And why capitalism, with all its flaws, is a system that does work, that we can make better, we can make more conscious.

We can do it better than we're doing it.

What do you think about the concept of universal basic income?

Yeah, I you know, no, I mean, I don't think that's a good idea. But when you have a situation like a pandemic where so many people, through no fault of their own, are being forced out of work, they cannot work.

That's isn't that a temporary situation?

But isn't that a good argument for universal basic income, at least for a temporary situation?

Well, when people are sick, they need to be taken care of. When they're healthy, they don't need be taken care of. They need to stand on their own two feet.

Right. But when you have a situation where they can't stand on their own two feet because they're literally not allowed to work like California, I mean, California, they're they're just there right now shutting down restaurants that serve outside.

Yeah, well, I mean, the the alternative is not to shut down the economy.

No, listen, I agree, but there's a lot of people that they get really hysterical about this and they think this is the only way we're going to save people. There's a lot of people out there with terrible health and they think that what we need to do is shut everything down and that's the only way we're going to be safe. I was reading this woman's Twitter the other day.

I just someone said something ridiculous and I'm like, oh, my God, and check this person out. And they were talking about, hey, you know, I am ready to lock everything down for five weeks. I don't go outside. I stay away from everybody. I order my my groceries delivered. I'm ready to lock down for five weeks.

I'm like, this is the most simplistic and individual perception of this problem, that everyone should do what you're capable of doing, that most people can't do this if they have a fucking business like they can't.

I'm ready to lock down for five weeks. Well, congratulations to you.

But some guy who runs some whatever figure out whatever store it is or whatever kind of business they need to be there.

In order to be open, to stay, to stay alive, there's no other way to keep that business alive. They have rent, they have overhead, they have their employees.

You know you know the history of the 1918 1919 influenza epidemic. That's the worst pandemic that we know of in our modern history. And that's only 100 years ago. And.

50 million people died worldwide. I mean, how many people died worldwide and covid a couple million at this point and the population was four times greater than they didn't shut anything down back then.

I mean, the population was four times greater than it was four times greater now than it was one 25 percent at one point eight billion people back 100 years ago across the world.

So you could scale that up pretty, pretty largely. Exactly. And that was a killer that didn't just take people with comorbidities. It took children. It took healthy adults. It it was nondiscriminatory disease. And we took precautions, people, you know, social distance.

But at the end of the day, the economy did not shut down. Humanity went on with their lives. And this is not nearly the same type of pandemic that we had back then. It's it's very interesting, the time that we live and the reaction that we're having today to covid being so very different than the reaction we had to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, which was far more destructive. It's it's I don't know. It's just food for thought.

It's very interesting.

Well, what was the difference what's the difference in the reaction of today versus the reaction from 1918? Their action back then was. Individual responsibility to to do what was necessary to protect yourself and your family, but other than that, life went on and there was no governmental not nearly the same level of the had mask mandates, though, didn't they?

If you if you go back and read about it, that not any kind of national type of mass mandate, certain small communities did it.

It was just all so much smaller in scale. I didn't even know they wore masks.

We've been looking at it because we were looking at a lot of photos from back in the day.

It's kind of crazy because they did. Yeah. I mean, people were scared and they wanted to protect themselves and their family and they did what they thought was necessary. It's just interesting how much different we're reacting to this one to me.

And we are we are doing great, great harm. And we don't see the harm that we're doing. We don't see the small businesses failing, the suicide rates going up, the domestic violence, the isolation, the mental or emotional health problems people have by not being able to connect with each other, not being able to physically touch. Yeah, the kids.

And they're missing out in school in person that I speaking as as a as a man who was once a little boy, a little boys need to they need to play.

They also need to connect to the needs they need. They can't just watch a screen.

Yeah. Kids I have they need to be more interactive to kids in school right now. And it's soul sucking watching them stare at a laptop. And then I sat in in my daughter's room once and watched the teacher teach the class. And Jesus Christ, this lady could have not been less motivated. It was horrible to watch, you know, motivating or motivated.

They're they're lazy or hoping.

Hopefully these vaccinations are all going to be as effective as they reporting and will not have side effects. And that that a year from now will be this will be in the rearview mirror. Are you going to wait?

You're going to dive right in with Jeff Bezos, calls you up to say John got the get the vaccine.

Everybody come over.

You know, I haven't decided yet. I've had to do for covid test, including one today to get in early on.

For how many of you had. Oh, my God, I don't even know. Or you do it every time you come in.

Yes, it's we were trying to figure it out. I remember I counted like fifty something of them.

They've done over fifty to say more. So you'll be an early adapter of the of the vaccination just so you don't have to do the damn test.

And I want to wait and see what's going on. But if, if it's proven that doesn't have any side effects and how the fuck are you going to do that?

It might take a few years to know that for sure. Yeah. Can you wait?

I don't know, man. It's like I'm kind of a vaccination guy, to be honest. Like, I know I've had all the vaccinations I have as well. You can imagine, I think, oh, those.

And here's the thing about vaccines, man. Like if you even have a conversation about vaccines, people get their hackles up.

What are you about to say? What are you saying?

Are you an anti vaccine, not an anti vaccine by any stretch of the imagination. I've been vaccinated. My children have been vaccinated. I believe in vaccines. I believe vaccines are the reason why we don't have smallpox. Why wouldn't I have polio? When I hear about measles cases rising, I get angry because he's fucking hippies don't want to vaccinate their kids and they send them to school with other people's kids. And these people get fucking measles.

It's it's and for adults, it's dangerous. Right? It's like measles is a creepy disease.

I believe in vaccines. However, I believe that this is a new thing.

Did you have measles?

I don't think it's because I'm older than you.

I had measles. I don't know if I had I had all those diseases. I can't because there were no vaccine. I had chicken pox. I had measles. Yeah. I had almost all that stuff. I mean, when I was a kid, there was no polio vaccination.

Oh, my God. I know.

So when polio was running around in the community, they closed the swimming pools down. Yeah. That's when my mother would not let us go out and play for a while.

Polio is an excellent example why vaccines are so important. Exactly, because it was a terrifying disease that destroyed people and permanently. I know. And when I was a kid, we would want someone to have chicken pox. They would bring kids to that person's house. So you would get chicken pox, because if you get chicken pox as a young kid, it's better than if you get chicken pox as an adult. I do not know why, but they would they would encourage kids to get chicken pox.

You build up an immunity to.

Yeah, my wife had shingles recently, so I went and got a shingles vaccination. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's supposed to be horrible. That's why it was horrible.

Yeah. And I believe in vaccines, but I also believe that you're not going to be a guinea pig. No. Well, there's people that have already done that. There's brave folks that have decided to get shot up. Yeah, but you want your friends to do it and you want your friends to say, I did and I feel fine. Everything's great.

I'm no, I don't want that either. What do you want? I want them to assure me that it's not going to be devastating in terms of the side effects. I would hate to have encouraged people to. Take something and then find out two years from now that there's some residual side effect that's devastating neurologically saying your liver is starting to fail, who knows what it could be?

And the way it's been described to me, that won't be the case the way it's been described to me by doctors.

That's an unfounded fear because of what this is a messenger or in a vaccine, and that this is not the type of vaccine that you it's just essentially delivering your body, this sort of message that encoded with common cold virus, that what it does is it makes your body develop the proteins to fight off the disease.

Sounds like these are vaccination breakthroughs. Yeah. That might transform vaccinations in the future. I hope so.

I hope so, too. Look, I think modern medicine is amazing. I do worry about stuff, though. I you know, I don't I don't want to make a mistake, and I don't think you do either.

And when it comes to admitted making lots of mistakes, but this is not one I want to add to my repertoire. When it comes to this virus, though, it's so difficult to be confident one way or another. Like if it was a virus that just you go, oh, you'll you'll survive ninety nine point whatever percent of the people survive, you're going to be fine. There's people that are these. This is what gets me these long haulers, covid long haulers who have like serious like there's a guy named Cody Gerbrandt.

He's a former bantamweight champion of the UFC. He got covid in August. He's a young stud. He's a healthy guy like top flight, mixed martial arts fighter. And he has had blood clots.

He's had like some serious problems and fatigue and still bothering him to this day. He was supposed to compete last weekend. It's just this past weekend. He's supposed to fight for the flyweight title. And he could not he couldn't make the card. So they got a replacement for him. But it's because of covid.

If you want to look at like young, healthy people, that is one of the best examples you're ever going to get of a young, healthy person. He's a professional cage fighter. I mean, he's really fucking healthy.

But covid has done a number on him, like he's got like some pretty serious issues.

Yeah.

And certainly I don't want to get covid myself, but the reality is pretty much you could have anecdotes for any type of disease or somebody that had a bad reaction to that disease.

Yeah, but that's a rare one, right? Blood clots and all the stuff that people are fatigued months and months later for a coronavirus. That is it's unusual. And that's the problem, is that this well, this disease has so many unknowns to it. It's there's so many mysteries. So many people get it and they don't even know they have it.

So it seems now that, you know, Mano, which a lot of people get when they're teenagers, it turns out that that's connection to Epstein Bar. So I know people that had mono when they were kids or teenagers. And now as adults, they have this Epstein bar, which is attacking their thyroid. So that virus never went away. It's still there. It's still affecting them. And it's the reality of of existence. There are all these viruses out there.

I mean, like I think a gallon of seawater has ten billion viruses in it. I mean, it's it's that we live in a universe of viruses and.

Yeah.

And again, I think it's even less than a gallon in that extraordinary viruses or real little those mass people where those viruses, you know, that unless you got that in 95 and plexiglass chances are that little piece of cloth that's keeping the virus.

One of the things that freaks me out, like when people dive in a lake somewhere and they get some brain eating amoeba, you know, just drop of seawater, a surface drop, one drops got ten billion.

Ten million. Ten million. That's why I got my gallon gas in my. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a lot of viruses. Don't be drinking. I've seen one drop ten million for a fucking drop. What do you do when you get a mouthful. Seawater.

You just say, well, here's the good news. We deal with viruses. We got an amazing immune systems and we've been of all co evolving with viruses for hundreds of thousands of years. Sure. And guess what? We're co evolving with covid now.

Yeah, well, this has been my frustration the entire times that there's been no discussion about strengthening your immune system.

There's legitimate strategies include, ah, eating healthy food. That's all right. I mean, there's legitimate Stratasys Strategies for keeping your body healthy and strong and keeping your immune system strong.

Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting, Joe, because I've watched my friends during the eight or nine months we've been dealing with this stuff, maybe almost nine months, they tended to go one of two directions. One was to say, you know what, I'm going to get this. I'm locked down. I'm going to eat super healthy. I'm going to eat right. I'm going to exercise. I don't get enough sleep. I'm going to stop taking as many toxins.

And they they they got healthier. They lost weight, their immune system. Got strong and then had other friends that were isolated, they felt lonely there, their consumption of alcohol went way up, for example, and they and they gained weight and their immune system is less strong. So humans respond differently to stress like this.

Yeah, I went the route of saying my best chance to hold off covid is to get my immune system as strong as possible. I went that route.

Yeah, well, that's that's the right route to go. That's the route you better go.

If you own Whole Foods, they are going to be. I always say that won't be good for my business if I die of a heart attack. Yeah, right. At least not for another 25 or 30 years. You kind of have to be healthy.

There'll be a lot of people that will secretly laugh if I do croak from something like that's like see a lifetime of eating all that healthy food.

And he died at a young age.

Do you practice what you preach? Are you a healthy eater or do you have like a few bad habits?

I don't think I have any bad habits, but I, I don't think have any bad habits.

But I do occasionally indulge myself. But you said indulgent habit.

OK, indulge with me. Probably. I mean, I occasionally might have a bowl of coconut ice cream.

That's it. Coconut ice cream. That's how you go crazy.

I didn't say go crazy. I said indulge myself. But in general, I mean, I you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a hundred percent plant based guy, so and I eat lots of fruits.

That's why you give me that fake cheese. You're one of those.

It's not fake cheese. It's all in cheese. Is cheeses a dairy product. Who says I do?

OK, well then I'll yield forever. Cheese has been a dairy product.

There's cheeses made from dairy cows. What about sheep cheese or goat cheese?

Yeah, it's still animals from milk.

So from milk. OK, it's coming from animals. And this is almond cheese coming from almonds. Yeah, but that's like almond water or almond milk. Almond milk is it's almond milk.

It's not some weird shit you're doing with water and almonds. There's nothing to do with milk. There's no tits on almonds. Come on, bro.

I think you can if you look it up in the dictionary, you will not see cheese saying it must have tits to be cheese.

No, but it's a milk product. You need to come up with a new name. I'm happy for it to come up with a different name. Someone needs a name.

I don't believe in the word police language. Language evolves sort of organically, so to speak. New words get added all the time. Right. And I don't believe in the police that are trying to say that word can't be said that I understand.

So if you're a full plant based guy, you don't need any meat at all. No. Even when you're drunk. No, he has to.

That's when I'm really drunk. I may not remember. Well, you know, that's the thing. They say that like 84 percent of of vegans eat meat when they're drunk. Yeah.

Did you ever hear the one I made that number up. I know that ninety three point six percent of the people make up their own statistics.

I think it's 100 percent the the thing about plant based diet is you got to really make sure that you're supplementing correctly. Right. You have to make sure you have a good, healthy supply of V12 and all your different.

I think because I think the Twelve is the only one you really have to worry about.

The only one. What about amino acids? What about proteins?

You ever heard anybody being deficient in protein that's not also calorie deficient?

Well, by deficient, meaning the reaction to their body or their bodies optimized, I would say no. Yeah. I mean, yes, I have seen it because people they lose body mass, they lose muscle mass, they lose strength and vitality. And I think you probably know that muscle mass and body mass strength is directly connected to longevity.

You have to have enough protein so your body can repair itself so that if you're lifting weights, you're going to grow muscles. You have to have enough. You have to have adequate protein stores. But the extra protein, your body has to then go through complicated reactions to convert that into fuel, which actually puts the stress on the kidneys. On average, Americans eat about twice as much protein as they actually need.

You talking about glucose Genesis when you're taking protein and converting it into sugar, when you're that's damaging to the kidneys, it has been real evidence. It shows that you can do a search on it. Yeah, I have. I don't think there is. It's actually a natural progression when you're eating meat.

If you're like there's people that are on meat only diets and the their body produces its own glucose.

I mean, I think you'll hate to get into a debate. You're getting this weird plant based debate. Plant based people get real edgy when you start talking about their diets.

I'm not going to get really edgy about it. Hey, I've got my book there for you. The Whole Foods diet. Take a look at it. Take a look at it. See a lot of plants on this.

Steak's where we actually allow in that particular diet. We allow up to ten percent of your calories from man.

Oh, you allow it. Mm. Do you did you always eat plant based or did you slowly gravitate towards it?

I was vegetarian in my early 20s and then I added fish and then back in 2003, I became 100 percent plant based, but for ethical reasons. I think that's why in the book The Whole Fish Diet, we allow ethics aside. We think a little bit of animal foods is consistent with good health, primarily based on molluscs.

You know, one of the things that I've heard about Mouse is they're so primitive, they're actually more primitive than plants.

I don't know if they're more primitive than plants, but they don't have well-developed nervous systems. So they may not be able to experience pain. Yeah, as we know it, like as far as we know, plants respond to stimulation.

We don't have any evidence. They experience pain.

Well, the idea that this might be consistent with ethical. Yeah. Veganism, I've heard that argument said very well. And that not only that, but you could there sustainable. You can harvest them and grow them and that they're they're they're nervous system is set up. So they're moving in some way, like they close their shells and open their shells, but not in the sense that you wouldn't consider them an animal. But you can get animal protein from them.

By the way, earlier we're talking about things like to be clear, we're talking about things like clams, clams, oysters. Yeah, because I think like an octopus we're not talking about oh, those are super intelligent.

They're creepy, intelligent.

Ever see them open jars? They spin the jar.

No, but did you see that documentary that's just come out recently called My Octopus Teacher. No. Oh my God. It's fantastic. You should watch that show.

There is a great Instagram handle to follow. Is it octo nation? Is that what it is? I think it's octo nation. See if we can. Do you know what I'm talking about? There's a fantastic institute as it is. There's a fantastic Instagram page that just they're in love with octopus and octopi and they're constantly highlighting all the cool things about octopus, particularly their their ability to camouflage themselves and hide. Oh, they're amazing.

I just was diving just a few weeks earlier this.

Look at that thing. Oh, my God. And they can change their colors. They're so cool.

They're one of the coolest animals, no doubt about it. They're so strange.

Like my friend Remy Warren, he used to have a television show called Apex Predator where he would basically study all these predators. And they're the methods that they use to hunt. And he studied octopus.

And he's like he's like they're aliens. They are. You show me what they're doing is like there's nothing like this. There's no other animal like this.

And during the course of his show, like he developed this like profound respect and appreciation for octopus.

They're amazing. I was on a scuba diving just a few weeks ago in the U.S. Virgin Islands on a night dive and actually saw an octopus get to get a crab.

I was plunged on the crab and it just sort of. Just sort of you ever see that video that they they had to do a they put a camera in a tank, the aquarium, because they were losing sharks and they're trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

So they put a camera in there to watch in terms of the octopus were killing the sharks.

How big was the octopus? Not big with the sharks.

Well, the octopus was basically the same size as the sharks. Not I mean, it wasn't a big shark, a small shark. But, you know, they never thought an octopus would hunt a shark. And the octopus was just sitting there chilling. All camouflage and shark sharks are kind of dopey. You know, sharks are not intelligent. They just turn around.

They're just clingers. They're just they're the cleanup crew.

They eat a lot of things and kill a lot of things. And but they're mostly cleanup's. Yeah. And this watch this watch swimming by the octopus is like bits come here.

Just wraps them up.

But the octopus looked exactly like the coral. Back it up again Jamie, so we could see what it looked like go from the beginning. OK, the crazy thing is, like you literally look how it changes color right before it's almost like he sees red and so it jacked this shark and slowly pulled it into its body and then just ate it up.

For whatever it's worth. If you watch my octopus teacher, which is a really unbelievable film work, the camerawork is incredible. This guy follows this octopus around for a full year and along the coast of South Africa, and he's a free diver. No tanks, you know, holds his breath for several minutes.

And the big enemy of the octopus, there were sharks, these pyjama sharks, they were called and they would hunt for the octopus and the octopus would have to put Shoma sharks.

Here it is. Yeah. Here it is. My octopus teacher pyjama sharks. Yeah, I heard of a pajama shark.

So this octopus is hanging out with his. Oh yeah. They got to be buddies. That's so wild out there.

There's a shark. Oh wow.

Oh no. He sees his buddy eject. Yeah. That's kind of rough. He didn't die from that, though, what the octopus released one of his arms. He lost an arm and he grew it back. Do you know the female octopuses are much larger than the males, as much as 25 percent larger than the males. And they I didn't know that sometimes have sex with the males and sometimes they pretend they're more likely to kill them and eat them.

They they cannibalize the males. They they hold on to them and eat them for days.

Sort of like the spiders, the black widow spiders. Yeah.

But different because the black widows do it every single time there is one. They observe this one octopus.

He got real greedy. He made it with this female 13 times 13. That's how annoyed she must have been while she waited till the 14th time. And she's like, not today, bitch. And she grabbed him and and ate them and killed them.

But because the females far larger physically, the male has to be like, real skittish about like, what do you think I feel today? Hungry.

There needs to be a revolution in the social structure of octopus. What are you laughing to make?

I want to make a more equal spectacle about this.

And the first thing it says, like they have tricks they do the first thing that they do is they disguise themselves as another, Gallet says, and sneak into a female den.

Well, that's what cuttlefish do me. That's the cuttlefish move.

Oh, I love cuttlefish. Yeah. Male octopus. Oh, sorry. I have a big problem. Female octopuses. Each male wants to mate and pass on his genes to new generation. Trouble is, the females often larger and younger than he is. So there's a constant risk that instead of mating, the female will strangle him and eat him.

The males have a host of tricks to survive, though. Yeah, good luck. Some of them quite literally, mate at arm's length.

Well, you know why they actually release their arms. Each arm that an octopus has is actually a penis. So they actually got eight pounds. Yeah, they have sex with their arm.

So when we have a lot we can we there's a lot we can learn. There's a lot we can learn from octopus.

Yes. I don't know how they masturbate though. They're probably the real problem. It's like rubbing penises together.

It's not very productive like but I think each arm is a penis, but for whatever, either way their arm is most certainly a penis. And when the woman, the female octopus is attacking, they will release their arm. They literally will give her the arm, they let her snap the arm off and then she eats the arm.

Better to keep the other seven arms. Well, I guess, yeah, that's imagine. I mean, there's a divorce metaphor in there somewhere. It's sex is dangerous. What can you say?

Well, it's also weird they regenerate their arms, which is pretty, pretty crafty. Yeah. You know, that's what you know, when they catch stone crabs, they catch them and they just snap off their claw and then throw them back and then just grow a claw. Oh, you mean women.

People catch. Yeah, exactly.

It's one of the weirder fish or weirder types of seafood because it's one of the rare ones where you can catch the thing, snap off one of their limbs and chuck them back. You can keep part of them and they still survive.

And then probably they I suspect they survive less long with only one claw than if they had a couple of claws.

Yeah, I would imagine. But they haven't they have a chance to survive. Yeah, they have a better chance.

Better chance.

And if they just get immediately eaten that just to correct that eight eight arm penis thing, the only one says that they have their main tool is they're specialized mating arm. It works like the other arms, but it has some special ability to bend, stretch and exert suction.

So they have one arm that's a special penis arm, has some extra bells and whistles as this says.

Do they grow that one back if she steals it? I imagine that's the one you don't want to offer up. Maybe. Maybe you're tired of it.

It's got a special tip, obviously.

Maybe they're tired of, like, worried about getting eaten, like, oh, great. She took my penis. Good. I could relax for a couple of weeks. Why grows back. Stay away from these vicious broads. They're goddamn cannibalistic instincts. So he only has one of those yeah, and it goes there's a quick there's a picture of it. I haven't seen a picture of that one, Groesbeck. There's the picture of what it looks like.

Oh, Jesus. Go all the way. Oh, wow. It goes into our brain on your head.

Oh, my God. No wonder why she wants to kill him. It's probably annoying, right? Her ovaries are in the back of her head. That's nuts. So the testes.

Wow. So he's got to sew his testicles in the back of his brain and her. What a strange animal man they are.

You said they're aliens. Yeah, they really are. I mean, if we found them on some far off planet, we would not be stunned.

Like if they didn't exist here and we found them somewhere else would be like, oh, alien life.

We're just so accustomed to some of the more bizarre things. Squid are also bizarre.

Oh, yeah. And so are cuttlefish. Yes, cuttlefish. We were talking about cuttlefish before the Eric Weinstein is the one who told me about the cuttlefish strategy that male cuttlefish will pretend to be female and they'll do that in order to trick the females into being friends with them. And then they get some.

Like male feminists, basically the same thing, I'm not going to go there and it says that they have the whole old school arm reach around like that, guys like at the movie theater, they don't even go inside the den.

That's for them to safely mate and slide it in. And then just like they're not even in the same room technically, while they just reach in and just get into her brain.

What a bizarre method of mating, you know, linking brains.

Females have, you know, they have different tastes. Yeah, some of them, too.

Don't be sexist. Listen to this guy. Yeah, that's a weird animal to eat octopus because they're smarter than dogs.

They're really smart.

Do you intelligence. One of the variables you use in determining when animals will eat and not eat.

Yes and no. Because pigs are intelligent. But I'll eat wild pigs because pigs are invasive. And it's a real problem in terms of like management of wildlife and the amount of animals that you have and what kind of destruction they can do to ground nesting birds and other, you know, species that are native to the area.

Invasive animals are a gigantic issue, and pigs in particular are one of the most devastating invasive species that we have in North America for sure. But worldwide, in Australia, there are giant problems. There are actually now an increasing problem in the hill country here.

Oh, yeah, no, I have a friend that lives half hour out of town and he's got them, which is that's not very far.

We wipe out their natural predators. No, there are no natural predators. I've never had any here.

They were brought in here from Russia and from other countries that they're a very durable animal that breeds constantly and they're natural predators are, you know, for if you're going to keep a population of pigs down, you've got to have some fucking monsters out there.

Like if you want to have their natural predators, their natural predators are not just going to stop at pigs. They're going to eat all sorts of other animals and domestic animals and livestock and like, yeah, they're invasive big cats or.

Yeah, or wolves would probably be natural predators for these pigs.

But you need so many of them. They're so prolific, they breed so often, they breed three or four times a year.

And so, you know, you've got to get out to protect our land.

So I'm not the guy, but I will eat them and I will kill them. But the the pigs, the wild pigs in the when when they're six months old, they're viable. So they start having sex and breeding at six months old and they'll they'll breed a litter three times a year sometimes, which is crazy. So they'll have four or five piglets three times a year. So one pig could be responsible for as many as 20 other pigs, one female in a year.

And I have a friend who works on a ranch and he says you have never seen anything like the devastation these things do when they move in and find a crop like so, they'll have a crop of food that, you know, these folks need for their livelihood and then a pack of wild pigs come in and just destroys it. Wow. Well, so it's pretty wild to see. And some of them are huge.

We own we own a place 40 miles west of Austin and we see a lot of the pig pig scat plus where they dig. Mm hmm. So we don't actually see them because they're nocturnal. Yeah, they hunt them at night.

Yeah. Which is really crazy of friends that do them with night vision goggles and night vision scopes and, you know, and there's people that hunt them with helicopters as well, which is very unique to Texas. They have these helicopter hunts and they they they say that this other than capturing them and traps like this, one of the most effective ways to do it.

Well, you've got me I'm a grocer who sells meat, but I'm a plant based guy who doesn't eat it. So you've got me in a paradox there.

Well, that is that weird for you? Do you have an issue, an ethical issue with selling the meat, or do you make sure that the farmers or the ranchers that do sell you guys the meat hold up very strict ethics?

We try to do the latter. Although I'll tell you a story. The very first story I opened up before Whole Foods was called Safer Way and is vegetarian store. And it it was not only vegetarian, it was very pure.

We we didn't really sell sugar, refined sugars or white flour, even didn't sell coffee. And we also did very little business. We were not we were we were so narrow in the marketplace, we weren't successful.

And it wasn't until we we relocated that store, merged with another store, changed the name to Whole Foods Market and opened a bigger store that sold meat, coffee, alcohol, you know, all that natural and organic foods, but a full spectrum that that we became successful.

So was that in many ways like a battle for you? A little bit, because you have this one idealistic perspective of what a supermarket could be versus this.

It wasn't it was a battle. It I put it this way. It's like what I learned is that in order to do the most good in the world, in order to help the most people, you have to be willing to meet the marketplace where you find it.

If you stand, I try to stand above the marketplace and you're too pure for the marketplace, then you're not going to help anybody. You're going to fail. You're going to go out of business. Ultimately, customers vote. They decide whether you prosper or fail. And Safeway was going to fail because we.

What would it be possible to do it today? Maybe so today. The world's different today than it was in 1978. But back then we were going to fail. We lost half our money in the first year in 1978.

Starbucks wasn't around was a no, no, no. Actually, Starbucks was I don't think it were around. They were getting close to being around.

Nobody knew how addictive coffee was back then. Oh, yeah, they did.

But they didn't really they did that they were drinking instant coffee like Folgers and Sugarhouse or Dunkin Donuts.

That's where I used to drink.

But I never thought that coffee would be a thing that would be on every corner. Like there's a place in Houston. And Lewis Black used to joke about it where you'd be on it was in River Oaks. It was across the street from another Starbucks. There was a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks. It was the strangest thing.

That's like, well, New York City, they got them practically in Manhattan on every block.

Yeah, but this was across the street.

Yeah, well, there was a cartoon once that said I just opened up a Starbucks in the bathroom in the bathroom of Starbucks. But people are so addicted to it.

It's so strange how addicted they are to getting their Starbucks fix. You know, they use their apps. And so when you are selling no coffee back then or you doing it because you don't believe in coffee, you think coffee is bad for you or did you make a decision?

Is it a fair trade issue now?

It was we just didn't think it was a healthy food, so we didn't sell it. And then now we do sell it. We sell probably I'm sure we sell probably one of the largest coffee distributors in the United States now. Probably.

Yeah, you probably are, I think, out of. I think they've done studies on moderate coffee consumption.

They've shown that to not have a detrimental effect, there's no nutritive value in coffee except for perhaps some antioxidants. But the studies do indicate that moderate consumption of coffee is consistent with longevity. Yeah. So I don't think it's a it's not a it's not like smoking cigarettes.

It's not there's a cognitive benefit to it, too, that some people think it's worth the squeeze mental stimulant.

Yeah. The problem is, I have to admit that I'm a decaf guy.

I got offered coffee, but it tastes like shit.

Why not just drink? I'm going to sneeze. What's so dangerous today? Thank God I've been tested.

Absolutely, unless you got infected and you haven't shown up yet, I didn't taste better. Why don't you drink tea? Why would you want decaf coffee? I like decaf espresso and taste really good. Well, you have to like regular espresso.

I want to I want to feel that juice getting in the veins. Well, the darkness I've taken that I was recovering, it took me when I got off the caffeine back in the year 2000, I had first of all, I had physical withdrawal, symptoms of headaches that lasted horrible headaches that lasted about a week before the headaches went away. And then I was exhausted. I was tired and all I could think about if I would have a cup of coffee or some tea right now, I'd feel good again.

I'd have energy back.

Yeah, exactly. Done it. However, however, after 30 days, after 30 days, I'd gotten the caffeine out of my system like caffeine, about seven days to completely leave your system. And my my adrenals began to be reestablished. I kind of got my own energy, but I know that's bullshit.

What adrenals that that what you just said is bullshit, that you're taxing your adrenals.

That's some voodoo nonsense that those holistic people like to tell you.

That's that's true. Yeah. No, I've read it.

There was a study on it recently where they were talking about, like, what it would actually take to tax your adrenals. And what people are talking about is a withdrawal from caffeine, which is real.

Let me let me let me withdraw that statement, because that wasn't the point of it. The point was that once I got my own vitality back, I was no longer at the serve.

I was no longer servant of the caffeine, which would determine when I felt good and when I didn't feel good, I just had my natural flow of energy and vitality. And having compared the two states, this is a preferable state in my mind, a lot better.

I believe that the problem I was having is that that adrenal thing, this is the thing that people say that a lot of people say I'm not I'm not a that's what I've read.

So but I don't know it for any certainty.

So, yeah, I've read it. I would.

But I what I do know is I felt a lot better when I got off the well, I'm sure when I got off the caffeine you have a I mean it's a stimulant and that's what caffeine is.

And you got to pay that. You create a debt, you got to pay that stimulus back.

Yeah, but I was recently read this article by nutritionists. It was explaining like what would have to be what would have to go wrong in your system for you to tax your adrenals. And that's just not how it works and you're just dealing with a stimulant and that your body is getting off of that stimulant. And like any other stimulant, there's going to be withdrawal. Right.

But it's not that you're taxing your adrenals.

OK, yeah, but see, people say things like that, like you're polluting your kidneys or damaging your kidneys by eating too much protein.

You know, what can I say? I've read possibly different studies and articles you have in different books.

Well, I had so many people explain things to me here where, you know, I had some ideas that I had in my head that I thought was correct in terms of nutrition and what's good and what's bad for you and you.

Let me let me give you a couple of facts that you might find interesting. First of all, there's been only one diet that's been proven to reverse heart disease, and that is a Whole Foods plant based diet.

Don't think that's true. I know what you're saying, but I've actually read that that's not true either, that this proven to reduce heart disease, that that's not what's reducing heart disease. What's reducing heart disease is healthy behaviors, and that you're making this change in terms of eliminating toxic foods. You have processed foods.

And so do you have any other studies that show you can reverse heart disease without being on a Whole Foods plant based on reverse it, reverse it?

See, that's the thing. It's like nutritionists have explained to me that there's a giant flaw in these epidemiology. This is not epidemiology, citing what epidemiology this house, which is these are controlled studies.

Both Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn, they're the two giants reversing heart disease just because of a plan.

Just strictly.

No, not just a plant based diet, a Whole Foods plant based low fat diet that's been proven to reverse it.

I don't know if that's true. It is true. OK, we're going to find out of it is when Jamie pull something up, because I've read something about how that was bullshit, too.

And it was by and in my book, by the way, I saw the studies in the book, The Whole Foods.

Oh, I'm sure you've read some things. Me say that. Let me give you the other facts. OK, so do you know about the Blue Zones? Yes, I do. OK, well. Five blue zones, their diets are remarkably similar. They're basically eating about on average, according to Dan Buettner, good guy to have on your show some time, like Yorba Linda, right.

Yorba Linda, California, Loma Linda, Loma Linda, Loma Linda, the 70s.

Linda, I'm thinking you're Bamuthi. You know, I think you're you're we're talking about kaf we're talking about caffeine.

You got that may be your choice your more time, but you know that one's that's the Seventh Day Adventist. But but there's also the the Okinawa. Ikaria, Greece.

Right. Because you understand healthy user bias. Right. This is like the great example of the Seventh Day Adventists. They don't drink any alcohol. They exercise every day.

There's they have many more positive habits. And you apply those positive habits. And the fact that a vegetarian diet, you could assume that the reason why they're healthy is because of the vegetarian diet.

That's not what I'm saying, because none of the blue zones, except for a small subset of the Seventh Day Adventists are actually vegetarian. Most of them just eat small quantities of animal foods, about 10 percent of their calories, which is what we recommend in this book. Right.

But they're almost all very active. Yes, but we don't have any examples of longevity in any culture that eats a heavy meat diet. None.

Longevity, longevity, musci, living the Messiah, the average you know, the average age from USSI. Not 45. Well, don't they fuck up lions with spears or whatever? That's not a risky business. It may be, but it's not a good example.

Yeah, how about the. But I was just saying intuits. That's another one that's used there. They're usually they have the highest heart disease.

Stop right there because that's not normal. This is a recent occurrence with them because of cigarettes and alcohol, Western diet and changing the way they live, like the introduction of cigarettes and alcohol as what the fuck those people up.

I'm merely saying and I put the challenge to you, show me examples of long live peoples that are heavy consumers of animal foods because, well, I don't know of any specific long term studies that have been done on people who are eating a lot of animal food and are also very active and and healthy and making healthy choices outside of that. The problem with alcohol and cigarettes and all these other things that people tend to eat tend to take in and consume when they're also consuming animal foods, is that all those things get lumped in together.

I agree. And the Blue Zones doesn't claim that it's just diet it. They actually believe there's many factors.

There's the amount of movement that people do, the healthy community, that they have some type of purpose, higher purpose, spirituality or Jamie, just Google plant based diet has not been shown to reverse heart disease because this article that I was reading, I wish I had saved it.

Mind you, I want to keep saying it's not just a plant based plant based.

I can be remarkably unhealthy if you're eating junk, if you're eating the vegan cheeses all the time, you're saying Whole Foods and vegetables, lots of fruits and vegetables, beans, whole grains, small quantities of nuts and seeds.

That's extremely healthy diet. And if you add a little bit of animal foods to it, then it's still going to be a really healthy diet. And that's what the blue zones do.

I think we can all agree on is that eating toxic food, eating processed food, not healthy. We do agree on not exercising, living a sedentary lifestyle, consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. All these things are detrimental to your health. Absolutely.

I'll even go so far as to say that. A a vegan junk food diet is about the most unhealthy diet you can eat because you're just eating processed foods. Animal foods are actually Whole Foods, right? And they have a variety of nutrients in them. You can get them all from plants except for beef.

So what do you think is bad about animal foods other than the ethics from a health standpoint?

The depends on how much you eat and if you eat too much of it, then we see the heart disease, we see cancer. These all correlate very closely with.

But now you're talking about epidemiologic studies.

Yes, but epidemiology, we can't do controlled studies on people over the long term.

Right. But you understand that the people that you're seeing high rates of cancer and heart disease aren't consuming grass fed steak and salads. What they're consuming is cheeseburgers, fries and milkshakes and soda and all sorts of bullshit. So when they do a study on someone, they say, how often do you eat meat? And they say, I eat meat five days a week. And they go, oh, look at the incidence of cancer in people that fill out the study and say they eat meat five days a week.

That's where I understand these correlations and connections.

It's like it's like I do this debate all the time, too. And so I I understand your position on this.

And all I would say is find the other epidemic where the epidemiological studies to support your point of view.

There aren't any epidemiologic studies that support my point of view. What do you mean? If you want an epidemiology study that supported the fact that animal foods are not bad for you, you would have to find groups of people that only eat animal foods and don't consume alcohol and cigarettes and then compare to people that do and find out what the variables are.

Right.

I think people who do consume cigarettes and do consume alcohol and do consume processed foods and sugars and excess, you know, corn syrup, foods and all the shit that we know is a part of a standard American diet. Right.

Are you saying that people that consume animal foods are more likely to consume processed foods, cigarettes and alcohol?

They are, because people have been told that animal foods are bad for you. So when people like fuck it and they just have a cheeseburger, particularly if you're talking about the average American, the average American, they're getting their meat. They're probably not eating at grass fed rib eye. They're probably eating a cheeseburger that they get from Jack in the Box or someplace like that. So you're getting processed foods, you're getting meat, but you're also getting sugar and corn syrup and all sorts of other nonsense.

That's the problem with these epidemiologic studies. And you know that.

Yeah, but you're you're talking about a pretty small group. If you've got the whole world to work from, there are lots of the world eats animal foods that are grass fed and the same type of results show up.

They're generally the more same type of results in terms of what the term heart disease and cancer and with people that occasionally.

Like, what are the what are the studies you're talking about? I can usually like me to send some studies.

No, I want you to tell me right now, because you're saying it like you know it for a fact. Like what studies are showing that people that consume grass fed meat and vegetables are showing the same levels of heart disease and cancer as people that eat the standard American diet. Since I don't have those studies in front of me.

They don't exist passing out the standard American diet if I can. I can tell you it's toxic eating horseshit, drinking soda.

It's not good for your body. Terrible, right?

Well, that's where we agree. We agree. Processed foods are bad.

So when you're getting the standard American diet, I think they apply. Let's see what the DEMYTHOLOGIZE study where they're saying, oh, this person eats meat five days a week. Well, what else do they eat? The problem with those studies is they're so flawed.

If you are not making someone fill out a form, you're having an argument with somebody besides me, somebody you've had an argument with in the past, because I'm not saying that you're you're overreacting to things that I'm saying based on some other discussions you've had in the past.

I don't think I'm overreacting. If you're interested, I will send you studies, I mean, and I can I can tell you that the studies contradict what you're saying and that the epidemiology cannot do because it's not as good as a randomized controlled study, which are hard to do in nutrition, does not make them worthless. It just means that they're not a complete answer.

But they they do point in certain directions, but they're conveniently pointing to this meat argument versus all the other stuff they're eating, which we've shown to be bad for you. It's people have been eating meat since the beginning of time, but not in very large quantities generally.

Depends on what people. Yeah, it depends on which people I mean, people that have been around Buffalo and that's all they can eat. They ate nothing but buffalo.

So the animals that we are closest to from an evolutionary standpoint are the chimpanzees, the bonobos and the gorillas. We're not exactly the same, but they're the closest relatives we have in nature, the gorillas are 100 percent and by the way, they're pretty damn big. They get enough protein.

The gorilla have a completely different digestive system, not completely different. It's very different. They eat only leaves and grass and bark and shit.

You know, it's very different. The chimpanzees are about 95 percent plant based and they're the closest to us. They're about 99 percent get so excited when they kill monkeys.

If you ever watch those videos, like the David Obey of it, eat out.

They eat about five percent of their calories. Studies show that about five percent of their calories man Whole Foods. And again, I'm not arguing that we don't eat any humans. We clearly evolved as omnivores. But in general, we were mostly gatherers who we couldn't preserve most animal foods. We didn't have the technology to preserve it. So we feasted and we could get it. But you could smoke some of it and dry some for jerky. But in general, we didn't have massive supplies in animal foods.

We were mostly eating plants with a little bit of animal foods. That might be the optimum human right.

But you also understand that most plants are inedible. Most plants are inedible, too. Yeah. And most animals are edible.

That's probably true, so well, so whenever they do you think got a chance to eat plants? There's a lot of probably real careful with what they could eat and what they couldn't eat because most of it was inedible and not much of it even toxic. Most if they can catch an animal and eat it, they're almost all edible.

How many different animal foods do you eat? How many different ones? Give me a rough estimate.

Hmm. Eggs, meat, fish. No, but maybe 20 different kinds. Probably something like that. How many different plant foods do it?

Well, I live in Western society where I can go to Whole Foods and I can get tomatoes and all kinds of avocados, stuff that's not even grown here.

I mean, when we when we were for a different world, when we were foraging, we knew what were toxic plants because we'd had our grandparents died for.

Exactly. Yeah.

And so but there was a huge variety of plants.

We ate massively diverse diets when we were out foraging, probably far more diverse than we eat today, even though there's a Whole Foods market, just because there were so many different foods out there in the wild, in the in the woods and the jungles. This will have to be a conversation, we can have it another time, probably, but what's your point? I agree with you that there's probably a lot of if I was I was talking about.

Well, you were saying that that. We can eat any kind of animal, but we can't eat any kind of plan, and I'm saying there's so much more abundance of plants to choose from than our normal diet or in our when we were foragers than animals, animals were for sure, a much smaller percentage of our total calorie consumption probably has a really hard to catch.

But they also think that one of the reasons why we became human beings was because of hunting. And that's directly correlated to the increase of brain size cooking meat and hunting and having more access to protein.

So you understand that's a theory. That's not science. That's just a theory. Right. It's one of the most probable theories, one of the most accepted theories, one in terms of the increase in human brain size.

But there's an equally theory that that probably when we became root eaters is when we really got brains.

I've never read that theater. That theory, rather, when we became route eaters, that's what our brains were started eating.

Tubers. Yeah, rabbits aren't gigantic brains. They're not big to readers. They're fairly rapidly carrots.

Men, you watch Bugs Bunny. Yes, so how do those blue whales get so damn big, just eaten krill, plankton? Well, they eat a lot of things. They don't just eat. I think the blue whales are plankton eaters. That's it.

That's all they think there are other whales that are definitely eating. Yeah.

Listen, we're not whales, right? This is going to be a weird conversation that whales still never figured out for humans that were were great apes.

And we've evolved similar to what? I don't like those.

How come this animal can do it? We're not that animal.

We know the blue zones that the people that eat mostly plant based diet to live the longest. There's a massive amount of evidence if you open your mind to it.

Oh, well, this is my mind's open. Those blue zones are also people that are very active. There's a direct correlation between physical activity.

I think people who live a vegan diet that follow a vegan diet but are healthy and exercise are far better off than someone who lives a sedentary lifestyle and even even eats healthy meat.

I think the key is healthy. Like if you're going to be a healthy person, you need physical activity and that there's a direct correlation between physical activity and longevity and health benefit. Of course. Absolutely right.

Well, this is what you see a lot in these blue zones as well, right? Yes.

I mean, I'm merely saying what's true. There's one factor. Diet is a factor, is not it may be one of the most important factors, but it's not the only factor for longevity, but the longest lived people's. What they have in common is they all move. They all have families and communities. They and they also mostly plant based Whole Foods, plant based diet. That's mostly what they eat with some animal foods. I'm not none of them are vegan except for a small subset of the Adventists, but they are mostly plant based eaters that have a small 10 percent of their calories in animal feed.

At least that's what the studies show. The studies also show that they're also very active. Yes, they are very active. Yeah.

It's just not because they're running around, which is because their natural lifestyle moves are up.

You find anything, uh, I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this topic that I wish I could have my answer and you'd have a researcher that I read recently, I think the article was basically stop saying that a vegan diet versus heart disease. And it was explaining all the problems in that logic.

I didn't find that specific one. But there's an article here from the British Heart Foundation that talks about this. And I think that started with a small study of twenty two people that did plant based and four of them had some reversal. This article here, though, currently goes into deeper studies and. Says that there isn't really a good study about it. Exactly. I can find something to this, mind you. A study published in 2014 looked at 198 patients to further investigate whether eating a plant based diet could stop or reverse heart disease.

It found that of the 177 patients who stuck to the diet, the majority reported a reduction in symptoms, and 22 percent had a disease reversal confirmed by test results. But that study didn't just rule out animal products. It also cut out added oils, processed foods, sugar, refined carbohydrates, excess salt, fruit juice, avocados and nuts. Physical activity was also encouraged and prescribed medication continued. This is the problem with saying that. And this this is not just there's not just one of these that's like this.

It's basically the same thing. You're talking about people that make healthy choices. And that's what a reverse heart disease also change their diet and eat healthier, but not just a plant. I mean, not just eat plants and a plant based diet, but also remove processed foods and sugars.

Of course, a Whole Foods plant based low fat diet. That's the three that's proven to reverse heart disease.

Yeah, but all these people also cut out sugar. Refined carbohydrates are not fruit juice. Those are not healthy. Exactly, but they cut out the bullshit that was killing them. It wasn't that plant based diets, reversing heart disease. They cut out the things that were killing them. This is what the other article that I wish I could find it.

So I guess what I'm saying is show me a study that people eat, cut out all the processed foods, eat a high percentage of their calories in animal foods, say 30, 40 percent of their calories from animal foods and reverse heart disease.

In any studies showing that the people are cutting out toxic things that we know are toxic, I don't believe animal foods are toxic. I think people have been eating animal foods from the beginning at times.

So I think the problem is these things that we haven't been eating since the beginning of time, processed carbohydrates, sugars, fruit juice, all the bullshit vegetable oils, all these things that people have been added to their diets fairly recently, that coincides with a direct uptick in heart disease.

So your hypothesis is, first of all, I don't have a hypothesis. This is just shit that I've read.

OK, so what you believe from the shit you've read is that you could eat a high animal food diet, cut out all the process stuff and you'd reverse heart disease.

I think that if I were you I have heart disease. I have got heart disease is because they eat shit and they don't exercise. I think that is where heart disease is coming from. I don't think plants are going to fix your heart, I think it comes from both and you think it just comes from the processed foods. That's where we part company. Yeah, that is probably where a company, I think plants are good for. Don't get me wrong.

So I think eating healthy and eating whole foods we both agree are good for you. I just don't think that is bad for you. I don't think in small quantities meat is bad for you, but I think in large quantities it starts to clog up your arteries and your propensity to cancer goes up, because I think that's what the science shows.

I don't think the science does show that.

I don't think the science shows that large donors send you the clogs, your heart clot begins, large clogs your arteries.

Is that what happened to high fat content of the meat over time clogs up your arteries? Yes.

You know, I'd like to sit you down with a doctor who disagrees with you and have you got to go back and forth with it because it's a complicated issue.

Diet is a very complicated issue and it goes along with so many different things that people choose lifestyle choices. When you see the results, like how healthy or how sick you are, there's a lot of factors that go into there.

But people that are plant based tend to lean on that one factor.

They tend to lean on this one aspect of their lifestyle choices that seems to be improving health. And I don't think I don't think you could do that as much as I don't think that you can lean on me as being a cause of cancer. When you look at epidemiologic studies where people that eat meat five days a week but also consume a bunch of bullshit.

So clearly, we're going to not agree on this one. I think we need to make studies that show, like if they had a study where they took someone or took a group of people, a large group like in that study, and they took them off of the standard American diet and fed them grass fed beef and vegetables and then had them exercise on a regular basis.

I bet we would see similar results.

First of all, if you did it again, it's a matter of degree. If you're feeding people vegetables, fruits and vegetables and they're not and you take out all the shit, that's a pretty healthy diet right there.

Yeah. It's just not the healthiest diet I think you could eat, but it's a lot healthier than the standard American diet. So you're going to get some good results on it.

I'm merely saying and that the studies that we know that have actually reverse heart disease cut out all the shit and also limit oil or don't have any oil limit total fat consumption and also limit animal foods.

That's worked. Now, maybe others will work as well. As you say, we should do a study where they eat 30 percent of their calories in animal foods, cut out all the processed carbohydrates and see if that reverses heart disease.

I agree. Let's do the study. But as far as I know, no studies been done. So that for now, based on what we know now, we do know that if you eat a Whole Foods plant based low fat diet, you can reverse your heart disease because it's been proven repeatedly.

We do know that if you cut out all the shit that we know gives you heart disease, it will reverse heart disease. And if you eat whole foods along with that and exercise, you'll be healthier. What we don't know is that meat gives you cancer. We don't know that meat gives you heart. Not saying that meat hurts you.

First of all, I never said that meat, which gives you cancer. But you said that. I'm saying plant based diet has been shown to reverse heart disease. I don't think that's what I'm going to send you on. I think what we can say is that cutting out all the things that we know are very unhealthy, exercising and eating plants are probably good for it because they're Whole Foods.

You can say that we we aren't certain that the meat is a contributing factor, but we cannot say that the studies that have reversed it didn't include meat. No, maybe meat was neutral. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. So you might be right. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying that you don't have any studies on your side in reversing heart disease. Meat has been cut out along with the crap and heart disease gets reversed.

Maybe meat had nothing to do with it. Maybe if they if they kept the meat in, they still would reverse heart disease. But no studies have shown that. That's all I'm saying.

But this study is all changing lifestyle. It's not just a plant based diet. That's right.

I'm not saying it is. I mean, it's. Well, but actually, the price actually set Esselstyn Esselstyn studies.

They only changed diet. Ornish changed had people moving and meditating. Esselstyn, if you read prevent reverse heart disease by call with Esselstyn and his studies, all he did was control for diet and that. And and. Well, it's amazing statistic, the amount of people that reverse heart disease, so we'll have to we'll have to have a further conversation. I'm going to send you I'll send you some data.

And I think the idea that meat is not but bad for you is a fairly recent idea.

I think that people have been first of all, you have to go back to the sugar industry bribing scientists to say that saturated fat and not sugar is what caused heart disease. And I'm sure you're aware of that.

I'm I've had a debate with Nina Schultz and I've argued with Gary Taubes before. So I see it differently than they do. You see what differently the fact that the sugar industry bribed scientists that sugar.

You know about that. All right, you got to read through my book, OK, but before I do that, you know that the sugar industry has been proven to have bribed scientists to alter results so that they prove they were they're pointing to the idea that it was saturated fat that was causing heart disease instead of sugar.

There you know about that, right? I know that sugar is bad for people, but would you know that scientists were bribed by the sugar industry? This has been proved that The New York Times wrote a whole story about it and we already said they never lie.

I think we didn't quite come to that because that's what we said. But you do know that they did that, right? That it has been proven that they know.

I don't know that. I don't believe it's been proven that sugar causes heart disease. There might have been a bribe somewhere.

I said, yes, that's what I said, that that the sugar industry bribed scientists to. Try to alter public opinion and show that it was saturated fat that was causing heart disease and take the blame off of sugar.

I do believe that saturated fat is a contributing factor to heart disease, and I believe the evidence is pretty overwhelming.

50 years ago, sugar industry quietly paid scientists to point blame at fat. So what?

Well, that's a big deal. It changed the way people think about diet because people were saying, oh, my God, saturated fat is giving you heart disease and they were OK. But this is why people started thinking this way. They were thinking this way because of the sugar industry, the sugar industry bribing scientists. Regardless of whether or not but right now, regardless of whether or not we agree or disagree on anything else, you don't have to admit I think this is a giant issue.

You don't think the dairy industry, the egg industry in the cattle industry bribe scientists? They they they do.

I would like you to show me some study. Oh, my God. They see how we can do this, they see how we can both do this. They figure they fund studies.

Yes, they do, in order to try to prove their products are healthy for me. They fund studies to try to prove their products are healthy. But do they bribe scientists to lie? No. Do no one is defending the sugar industry, right?

I think you're I think you're making the logical fallacy. The fact that the sugar industry acted unethically, that proves that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. No.

Or contribute to it changes the perception of people when it comes to meat and health. And I think it did. And I think it has ever since then. You know, people saw this and read this. And in their mind, meat became saturated fat, saturated fat became heart disease, and it became a dangerous thing to eat too much meat.

So here's an interesting question for you. How much do you think total animal food consumption has gone up in the United States per capita in the last 80 years, I assume is probably pretty high?

Yeah, it's gone way up because we have more access to food, right, with factory farming.

And we are eating fast food. We are eating more animal foods than ever before.

Right. We're also eating the sugar industry in the sugar industry failed.

The sugar industry failed in its task to to get people to stop eating. No, it didn't, because the task wasn't to try to get stopped, people to stop eating meat. It was to get people to not worry about eating sugar and consume more sugar and not have any fear about the health consequences of consuming sugar. Because it wasn't sugar that was giving people heart disease. It was fat.

Nobody's defending sugar in this discussion. I'm certainly not happening. Sugar. Why?

They bribe people. They didn't bribe people so that people would hate fat. They bribe people. So they would take the blame off of sugar.

I already concede that point, but it doesn't make saturated fat good for people in large quantities.

It's not. It clearly not. And I will continue studies on it. And actually I've got it in my book and I've got studies quoted in the book.

Well, I don't know if that's true. You know, I mean, there's been a lot of people that have eaten what they call a carnivore diet and reversed a lot of symptoms that they've had with autoimmune diseases. And there's different people that have different reactions to foods. There's certain people that eat nuts and they get deathly ill. There's certain people that eat them and they they're very healthy. There's people that have vegan diets and they don't have any problems with it.

And there's other people that have severe issues with it.

That's true. There's diversity and there may not be one diet that could solve all human problems.

No, I don't think there is. I don't think anybody would say there is anybody that's being ethical and honest. I think human beings, biodiversity and human beings is pretty extreme. You know, depending upon where your ancestors came from, depending upon what body type and blood type, there's a lot of different issues. That's my problem. I don't think that you could say that a plant based diet is the right diet for everybody or that it's good for everybody.

I didn't say that. I don't say it in my book. When you did say it's the only diet that's been shown to reverse heart disease. And I don't really think it has.

But the burden of proof, the burden of proof is to give me one study where it's not. Well, that's not true.

Well, so I've I've made the claim prove me wrong.

There's a lot of factors that led to reversing that heart disease.

And I think when you look at all those factors, particularly the eliminating sugar that we know is a toxic substance, the adding of exercise, the eliminating of oils, all these different things that we know are not good for you, I think those are contributing factors.

If you wanted to say it's been shown that a Whole Foods plant based diet, plus eliminating all these toxic things have been shown to reverse heart disease, I'd be right there with you. Good. That's what I'm saying.

Everybody eliminates that part, including, you know, left that out. Well, when you said it, you said whole food, plant based diet.

He didn't say eliminating all these things that have known that have been shown to cause heart disease.

So what is a Whole Foods diet? You go to Whole Foods and fill your shopping cart. Whole Foods diet is actual Whole Foods, fruits, vegetables, beans.

So it's not sugar, it's not oil.

So when I say a Whole Foods plant based diet, I mean no sugar, no refined grains, no oil, none of the shit that you're talking about.

That's what a Whole Foods like exercise.

Plus these people eliminated all these things they were eating before that gave them heart disease.

Esselstyn studies were only dietary based. He did. It was a Whole Foods plant based low fat diet. And if you read my chapter on heart disease and in the Whole Foods diet, you know what? I'd love to have this conversation with you some to other, but even diet based, you're still eliminating all these toxic things. Exactly right. That's a good thing. So no one has proven that a Whole Foods plant based diet, along with those toxic things, like if you if you had all of the good foods that we know, whether it's, you know, animal foods, molluscs, all those different things, if we could just all come to an agreement.

There's things that people eat then that we've been eating, particularly over the last few decades in this country that are just bad for. Yeah, we promise we get in these ideological discussions of meat versus plants.

And this is where things people tend to sort of gravitate towards one side or the other and ignore all the different different aspects of this conversation, like what we're talking about here with eliminating sugar or exercise.

If you said a Whole Foods plant based diet, plus adding exercise and eliminating foods that we know to be toxic is better for you.

There's not a single person who's going to argue that. The problem is everybody says it's a whole food plant based diet, that this is what's doing the good. But I think what's doing the good is a lot of things.

So exercise, eliminating toxic foods like sugar and all those vegetable oils, all the bush well, Whole Foods diet eliminates those things.

So that's redundant. If the Whole Foods diet, it's not going to have sugar, refined grains or oil in it because those aren't Whole Foods. Understood.

But the problem is what I do when I'm going to those people were taking those those consuming those bad things before.

I want I want to put this challenge to you. I want you to just because I think call with Esselstyn to work on heart disease is worth looking at for you because he didn't do anything but diet. So he didn't have exercise in his program.

He didn't have stress reduction. He didn't have meditation or anything else in there. He just had diet. And it was a Whole Foods plant based low fat diet. It did reverse heart disease. It's so he's clearly eliminated all those other aspects.

It's a Whole Foods plant based diet. So no toxins because those Whole Foods. Right.

So let's see. Let me lems the thing is, that's the convenient that's the thing that's conveniently left out. You can say Whole Foods plant based diet. But it's not just that.

It's eliminating toxic foods. Yes. It's not just eating good food.

So what we need to do, what you need to do or you need to come up with some evidence or somebody needs to do that you can throw in my face is a Whole Foods meat based diet has eliminated all these toxins will also reverse heart disease.

Right. You can do that.

Then I'll remember how we talked about beliefs earlier that they're just a suit of clothes. You produce that evidence and I'll take off the suit of clothes because I'm actually about being intellectually have an intellectual integrity.

I've come to my conclusions based on my own dispassionate study. So if you produce the evidence, I'll probably change my mind.

What do you think? But I'm going to get along. What do you think people are doing wrong when they're eating a vegan diet and they have all these health problems? They're eating a junk food vegan diet. They're not eating a Whole Foods vegan diet. They're eating junk food. That's they're eating all these toxic foods that we're talking about. That's that's not everybody.

Chris Hemsworth was eating like he was having vegan. He was having like a plant based Shaikh's in the morning and eating Whole Foods.

And he started developing all these kidney stones and had a lot of oxalate.

I have no idea if he's having a lot of problem. Oxalate chances are he was eating a lot of a huge amount of green leafy vegetables.

Sure. Right. Yeah, I was eating in too large quantities. I was oscillates and it could cause problems in your kidneys. So all I know is that I've been doing this wasn't Chris Hemsworth.

There was Liam. Right. Yeah, which one's for Thors, Chris? Yes, the other one, Liam. Which one's Thor? I love it. You got to go that way.

So. But what we do know, what we agree on, let's go back to what we agree to, what we agree on is we should be not eating all this crap.

Yes, we agree. We agree on that. And I think we agree that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

Yes, yes, yes, sure. Then we agree on 90 percent of it, then it's a question of how much animal foods. Ah, good for us, and that's where we're that's where we may differ, but probably we're not even that far apart there because I'm saying you can eat some animal foods and have a really healthy, healthy diet and lifestyle.

It's a question of how much.

And at a certain point, I believe that the the the saturated fats, the cholesterol from the animal foods will begin to clog up your arteries. And it's not that they cause cancer, but they can be. I believe cancer promoters, at least, you know, has also been proven.

There's a big issue with eating cholesterol, along with simple carbohydrates and things like, mom, I'm with you on this food.

Since we agree on the simple carbohydrates, we don't have to argue about that. Yeah, or you and I, we are simpatico.

We sync up on that. Cut the sugar out. Cut the cut. What about oil?

How do you feel about that one? Well, I'm not a big fan of vegetable oils. Good. Yeah. Is there any other kind of oil. Yeah.

I mean, you can have animal based oils. I mean, I actually cook and beef.

Oh you mean like buth and butter. Yeah. I was just thinking those weren't oils but they're fat. Yeah. Well beef tallow renders down into oil. Right. It's, I think that there's a lot of people consuming a lot of processed shit. I think this is where we absolutely meet in the middle, whether it's vegetable processed shit. Like I have a friend who's vegan who eats all kinds of wacky vegan delights, all these little treats and all this.

I read this fucking ingredients.

It's garbage preservatives and nonsense and but it's vegan. So it's it's ideologically acceptable. Right.

You know, things fall into these they fall into these little groups like this. This this aligns with my religion. So I'm going to eat this.

There are plenty on the on the paleo keto. There's lots of little groups on the animal food side to cheer.

So everybody it's almost like diet. In fact, this one might be a more interesting discussion than you and I batton each other about this one.

It's interesting to me how many sort of little cults there are in food now.

There are all these little nutritional food cults and it's and everybody thinks they're right. It's almost like a religion. Well, diet is religion.

You're eating one way and you hope you're right. And if you you know, the problem with eating right is that if you're eating something and it's good for you, takes a while before you feel it, you're not sure.

And then also there's a mind fuck going on. You know, a lot of people that get into a certain diet, whether it's keto or other, I tried kill for a while.

There's there's certain things that you do where you start mind fucking yourself that you're on the right path.

And I do feel better. I feel better. But, you know, there's people that do that with faith healing. You know, it's hard for people to decide what makes them feel better.

There's holistic fake medicines that people like.

What does that stuff called? What are those homeopathic homeopathic medicines that they're fucking sugar pills? There's literally nothing to them. And yet people take them. They claim they feel better. Chiropractor's. Oh, I feel better. I feel better.

Well, I do see a chiropractor. I do feel better. You know how chiropractors are invented.

It doesn't matter.

A magnetic healer who came up with it in a science in the hundreds came up with this idea that by adjusting people's spines, you're going to fix all these illnesses.

And so do you know that when you go to a chiropractor, where doctors come from, they used to bleed people, but they don't anymore, you know?

Right. You know, the chiropractors, doctors, like when you go to a doctor of chiropractic, how much time do you think they spent in medical school?

Well, they didn't go to medical school. They go to zero zero medical school.

How many how many nutrition classes did doctors take in medical school? They don't take much, about eight hours. That's why you go to a nutritionist and not a standard American doctor. But when you go to a chiropractor, they call themselves a doctor or their doctor of chiropractic. Right.

And it was invented by a magnetic healer who was killed by a sun son, ran him over in a car. His son was a con man. And that's the guy who wound up spreading this whole religion of chiropractic medicine, adjusting babies and shit.

I don't think it's a religion, but clearly you don't go to chiropractors. Ibin I do. I yeah. I've had I saw a chiropractor today, in fact. Yeah, it feels good, right.

Quack, quack, pop, pop, feel good. But this feels good too. I just did that on my knuckles. I chiropractic my knuckles.

I can't do that anymore. They just didn't want to go. Wow. How about that. Wow. Amazing. But my point is that there's no evidence that that is doing anything to you physically.

If you go to a doctor, OK, and you have a serious issue, like you've got a broken arm and they have to put, you know, plates in it and screw it in place and put in a cast, there's real evidence that that works. They've shown it. They've healed people. Yeah.

So doctors can are pretty good at healing bones. They're not too good with cancer. They're not too good with heart disease.

They're a lot better with cancer than they've ever been ever in history. They're closing in on fixing that, in fact, there was an article just today that there was a think it's in Israel.

They've figured out a way to have genes that actively go after surgically go after cancer. There was an article, was it Scientific American? There was an article today about a fantastic breakthrough in cancer therapy, CRISPR. Yes.

They're using CRISPR to do this and they've figured out a way to actively target the way they described it with surgical revolutionary crisp.

Yeah. CRISPR based genome editing system treatment destroys cancer cells. Breakthrough may increase life expectancy in brain and ovarian cancer. See, so you can't say that doctors are not good at treating cancer because they're constantly working on it and they're making but breakthroughs like this all the time.

It's just a theoretical breakthrough and I hope it's correct.

But hey, Joe, here's the reality that's not theoretical. Researchers have demonstrated that CRISPR Casse nine system is very effective in treating metastatic cancer is a significant step on the way to finding a cure for cancer. The researchers developed a novel lipid nanoparticle based delivery system that specifically targets cancer cells and destroys them by genetic manipulation. They practice this on animals. This is not like a theory. This is something they're actually doing with CRISPR.

I'm I'm all for it, but I haven't seen it yet, my mind just look around, mind you. Well, here's the reality. The reality is, is that. We spend 80 percent of our health care dollars on lifestyle, dietary diseases that doctors can't help us with at all. You can say there's a cure for cancer. The best way is to have a strong immune system because we get cancer all the time and our immune system just deals with it.

Yeah, but there's babies that get cancer. You know, cancer is a genetic issue.

Sometimes people have a systemic like their body has a vulnerability to cancers. And the reality is, can't say that babies suck it up and have a better die.

All all biological carbon based lifeforms have a propensity or animals have a propensity to cancer.

Right. But that's why it's fascinating when doctors and researchers can come up with treatments, novel treatments like this. So to say that doctors and chiropractors are on the same tier. I didn't say that. But that's the example you used when I was talking about a chiropractor's are full of shit.

I don't I don't have the same I don't hold doctors in the same high esteem that you do. I've worked with lots of doctors and they generally don't know what they're talking about there. And how can you say that?

Because so many doctors that are experts in their field develop people.

You know, you're talking about the sugar industry bribing somebody. The pharmaceutical industry bribes doctors every single year, all their continuing education or these junkets to golf golf resorts and where they get continuing education about the new wonders of these drugs that except for vaccinations and antibiotics, most of these drugs don't cure anything. They just deal with symptoms.

Well, I agree with you on that. And I agree with you that there is a gigantic problem with pharmaceutical industries having influence over doctors. My wife's mom's a nurse, and she would tell us stories about how these pharmaceutical companies would take everybody out to dinner and these fancy restaurants and pay for everything. And they weren't bribing you, but they kind of work. That is kind of a bribe, kind of a bribe. And they would let you know, okay, you know, if someone comes in and they got this problem, we got this and reciprocity.

I do you a favor. You do me a favor. Yeah, it's sneaky.

And they they'd send you on trips and, you know, you go on these conferences that these pharmaceutical companies would put together. No, I agree with you. There's there's certainly some influence that the pharmaceutical companies have over doctors.

And certainly there's there's an unpleasant exchange that goes on between them.

But to say that doctors aren't doing any good is crazy.

I didn't say they aren't doing any good.

You're what did they say? How would you say it? I just I just said I don't have a lot faith in them.

Yeah. I mean, if you have. Look. Doctors, if you have first aid, if I if I have cuts and I need stitches, I want to I want to orthopedic surgeon. If you have a blown. Absolutely.

Hey, I've had both of my hips resurfaced. Oh, you have. And I found the best surgeon in America.

I think that to do that such you blow out your hips, you know, we don't really know.

Probably the doctor thought I played competitive basketball in high school, college and city league for years.

And he thinks that I had a I was really small when I when I got to high school, I was only five feet tall and I grew about a foot in a couple of years.

And he says that there's a disease that when you're growing that rapidly and if you have a lot of contact in the hip area, like you might get for martial arts or you might get from football or basketball, from jumping and all that lateral movement, that my hips were not quite in the socket.

So my cartilage wore out prematurely and I was bone on bone when I got the surgeries done. But you know, what a miracle. I don't have any real pain in my hips occasionally.

But for the most part, I I'm pain free doctors.

So sort to make clear surgeons.

I mean, if you need surgery, you need first aid like a broken bone.

Now, I think I think we're on the same page. What you're saying is that doctors overprescribe medication correct. And under prescribed healthy living and diet and doing all the things that we know to be positive for the for the human body. Exactly.

No, I agree with you because they don't get enough training and they don't get enough training in and in healthy living.

Know that's a fact. Like, I had a conversation with the doctor was telling me you don't need vitamin supplementation. You just, you know, just eat a good diet, you know, what's a good diet? Where are you going to get vitamin D three, a business model that I'm kicking around investing.

And it would be a business model where you have doctors and you have a whole team.

So Joe Rogan goes in there. We do. With a complete workup of everything about your blood, your total health. And then we began to customize our ideas to get you to live an extra 10 or 15 years and increase your health span.

How can we optimize Joe Rogan? How can we optimize your health and wellbeing in a team of people that are working with you, studying you, you're paying a monthly fee to get this. It's kind of concierge medicine, but not just dealing with getting a prescription from this doc so you can get your Viag or whatever from the doctor.

It'd be about about them optimizing your long term health and well-being. I think that could be I think that is going to be a big future business.

Then you would have to have people actually go out and do things like, Mike, you're going to have to work out.

Yes. Well, think about it. We have personal trainers mean we have executive coaches that corporate leaders frequently get. Why not have a wellness coach who's with a team of a doctor and wellness coaches who are helping you to optimize your absolute peak performance that you can get?

Have you ever thought about implementing something like that for employees at Whole Foods?

I have thought about that. It's pretty expensive to do it. Yeah, that would be the problem. Right.

One thing we do at Whole Foods, though, if you work for the company, we gave you a 20 percent discount for being a team member. But then we measure your for biometrics. If you're interested to get a higher discount, you're if you don't smoke, if you smoke or if we detect nicotine in your blood and you're out, we don't. And then it's about your body mass index and a man is big and shoe. We do a height to waist ratio so that you wouldn't be penalized for being.

Yeah, I'm obese by a BMI measurement bit, but not by a height waist ratio. So we do it both ways and give you the benefit of whichever one you get the best score on.

Why not just do their body fat? So you know that it's a little harder to measure because the cost of doing the callipers.

Yeah, yeah. That's that's not that big a deal.

And they also do things now that electro magnetic or whatever it is, hold on to these handles on it.

Shoot. So maybe we need to examine how we could do that more effectively.

Yeah, but we also do blood pressure and cholesterol and then and then based on how you score on those, you can get up to a 30 percent discount based on your overall health. So we create an incentive for our people.

Oh, that's great. So the people that shop at Whole Foods that work there get a giant discount.

They get already. They already get a discount. They could get 10 percent of their health. They could get we have four different levels we call a a bronze, silver and gold levels. Whatever do to get gold. What do you have to do? You have to have a BMI that's under 24 cholesterol.

That's either total cholesterol under one fifty or LDL under eighty.

I think that's a that's a hot button debate.

But blood pressure, I think I don't want to have that debate with you right now.

No, it's not me, man. It's Carnivore, M.D., this guy, Paul Saladino. This and and then, you know, blood pressure under 115, under 75, 115 of 75.

And what do you get if you hit gold to get gold, your blood pressure, 120 over 80, your cholesterol number. What do you get? Like four for gold?

You're going to get a bronze, silver, gold, platinum, platinum, platinum. The highest level, you get 30 percent discount. Oh, that's a sweet discount.

Gold. Twenty seven oh silver, 24 and 22 for bronze.

That's nice. So you incentivize people to make healthy choices. Do you give them any sort of a gym membership or something along those lines that would help? Right.

That's a good idea. We haven't done that. Yeah. What if what if you had a thing at Whole Foods where you had a small gym attached to Whole Foods, we offered classes for employees. Take some of that Jeff Bezos money.

Yeah.

The problem in action, the problem is we actually do locate close to gyms and sometimes our stores work out deals with the gyms to incent people to use that. Oh, that's great.

But having having a gym on to every store would be expensive. We we don't even have one on our corporate offices, although we're thinking about how do you not have a gym in your corporate office?

I think it's the egalitarian culture.

Would it be fair for the people that global support to have a gym when the people in the stores don't have one?

I understand, but we had the same benefits for all our team members, regardless of where they work.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's very nice.

If you're a cashier at Whole Foods, you got the same benefits I do.

What do you do personally in terms of exercise and to make sure that you stay healthy so.

When I was younger, I played competitive basketball and I was a runner for a long time, and now I'm a long distance backpacker.

Oh, you reckon? Yeah, I've hiked the Appalachian Trail twice.

Have you really? Jesus Christ. Pacific Crest Trail. Wow. Isn't that like months? The first time I did it, I took a I took a sabbatical four and a half months.

You took a four and a half month sabbatical to walk. Yeah. Was great.

Was so fun and so crazy. I made a ton of friends. The guys I met on that trail I still go hiking with every year. I really do. It's kind of like being in the Marines.

You had this deep bonding you have with people. Well, you know, you're walking all the way across the continent.

You get so frigging fit. Oh, my God. Even when I got into Maine, I was still getting fitter. But you know what? As soon as you stop hiking, 10 hours a day goes away.

It goes away pretty quick.

I've traveled with people that work on ranches and you try to keep up with them. And like you, just your ankles want to fall because they're moving all the time. They're constantly doing it. It's and for them, it's not even a workout. It's a normal part of their everyday life.

So their legs are just totally conditioned to be able to hike up those hills and walk constantly. People don't realize, like, how difficult hiking is. It's like, what do you do for exercise? Oh, I go hiking like, oh, slacker. Like hiking is hard, man.

It depends on how how it it could be. If you go for a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood, it's not too hard. But the Appalachian Trail, that is another level.

You know, it's it's it's wonderful.

I love being out in nature. That's if you ask me what my favorite form of recreation is, it's getting out into nature, some form or fashion. I love I love hiking and I love long distance backpacking. And I do it ultralight. So, I mean, it's like I've got it down to a science.

So when you say backpacking, so you're sleeping out there in the camp, the whole deal.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, there's a lot a lot of CEOs that are willing to do that, I don't know.

But remember the second time I hiked it, I did it over four years because I couldn't take that much time off.

When I retire sometime in the next few years, it's going to go, hi, I'm going to go hiking a lot to be out on those trails.

There's so many people right now that are aspiring CEOs that want to be some big time baller like you. And they hear this and like, oh, when when when I retire, I'm going to go walking and like, fuck you.

Well, you're supposed to be out there and you're supposed to be on a yacht and. Doing crazy shit. Well, I may do some of that, too, and not mutually exclusive, I can only I can't hike 12 months a year or so. I like that. I can do some of that other stuff that they're not mutually exclusive.

Now, when you do it, do you ultralight camp, too? You bring like a very like the tent and.

Yeah, so like my base weight before food and water is about six and a half pounds.

And so that's pretty light.

And my tent weighs 12 ounces, my backpack itself weighs about 14 ounces and my sleeping bag is going to weigh about 20, 21 ounces.

And how do you know how much food to bring?

You've got time out like I know how far you have to plan it out. So and when you're going to resupply. But in general, I'm going to consume about. Pound and a half to two pounds of food a day, and so I have and I just I know how much I need to take it.

What do you bring? Do you bring bars? Do you bring whole food? Like what do you bring on the first couple of days? I'll definitely take some whole foods like apples, maybe even some snap peas and peanut butter and stuff like that. Yeah, I, I do.

And I do a lot of high calorie stuff here. Yeah, I do a lot of nut butters trail mix.

I also avocado's sort, you know, Whole Foods, whole grain crackers, things like that, but then once you're a few days in, you kind of can't do that anymore because you don't have access to supermarkets.

I also might take a sandwich out for the first day or some hummus or something like that. You have to parachute you healthy foods down.

Well, what I what I will actually do is what most people do is they they mail drops, have somebody's mail, drop the food. And I usually do is, is I usually have a car support that I meet up with every once or twice a week and then get resupply that.

Oh OK, that's good. And I have to say I'd like to spend one, take one day a week off and go into a town and get a massage, eat some town food which tastes really good after been on the trail food for.

Is it hard to find vegetarian foods when you go to these towns?

You know, I would say it used to be when I when I hiked Appalachian Trail the first time in 2002. So it was pretty hard back then. But there's there's plant based foods everywhere.

But if you're exhausted, don't you want a meatloaf gravy?

I know this will surprise you, but I have I have lost my taste for it now. Well, it's not surprising at all when you get used to certain types of diets like that's what your body seems to create.

Yeah.

You know, that's one of the big learnings I have about food in general, is we will like whatever food we eat. So we I've reeducate my palate. When I was a kid, I ate the standard American diet, junk food. Right. I just say crap, cocoa puffs for breakfast, sweet rolls, burgers and fries shakes.

You know, the stuff that still most Americans eat.

And I didn't eat any any vegetables at all. None. Zero.

None pickles on a burger. That was it. Wow. And then it's hard core. Yeah.

But then when I, when I began to wake up dietary and nutritionally, I taught myself to like every type of plant food I like any kind of plant food, because once you expose your palate to a food about ten times or so, you'll start to like it.

Well, I would 100 percent say that the standard American diet is fucking terrible for you. I think that it's a real problem and access and people are hungry.

So if you're just driving around, they should have some sort of a vegetarian based fast food.

That's good for you. How come no one's figured that out yet?

Because there's all these Jack in the box and so a couple of Donalds, a couple of points.

It's a real problem because statistically now 70 percent of American adults are overweight and forty two and a half percent of Americans are obese.

Forty two and a half. That's crazy and crazy social crazy number.

And and by the way, it's getting worse. We have not peaked yet. Could be 50 percent and another five or six or seven years.

It's incredible. So we're escalating. Yes, we're escalating. This is a this is a crisis in America. We are eating ourselves to death. And it's mostly the things we agree about. Yeah, junk.

Sugar. Sure. Garbage, garbage. So.

So. Here's here's what I believe evolutionary is what's happened to humanity, so when we were out foraging, which we did for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunters and gatherers or gatherers and hunters.

Our real problem was getting enough food. That's always been humanity's major problem. And so we've evolved a palate that craves calorie dense foods.

We like food that has a lot of calories in it.

It tastes really good and but we just couldn't get it in nature. Maybe it could occasionally get he could pull down a wild game. Occasionally you can eat it, gorge on it because you eat as much as you could because you couldn't preserve it. Well, it still was kind of lean gamey stuff, right?

Because they weren't they weren't being fattened up on corn like the like the pork and chickens and beef that we eat today or we get honey, for example, we might get a couple of hundred bee stings if we could get that delicious honey, but it was just scarce. And so we crave it. And that's our problem. That's our genetics are working against us because we can eat calorie dense food every single meal, every day of our lives, and we just get fatter and fatter and fatter.

And that's our that's our existential dilemma, that not just Americans, the whole world.

Yeah. It's because we've exported the American diet across the world.

So when he said this to me once and it really resonated like that, this is the only time ever where poor people are fat.

Exactly. There's never been a time in history where you could be poor and fat.

Used to be the rich people were fat in the poor. People eat the traditional diet and they were not getting enough calories, so they were thin. It's almost reversed itself today.

A lot of the more richer people, they hire personal trainers, they learn more about food.

They eat whole foods, whether it be plant based or meats or both, and they just take better care of themselves.

It's such a catch 22 for folks to because when you're tired and you're exhausted and a lot of times when people have poor nutrition, they're tired and they're exhausted, it's very difficult to manage your your appetite. Like when I'm tired, I have to stay the fuck out of the kitchen. That's with me. Like last night, I was tired. I worked out pretty hard. And I'm a glutton. I have a real problem. I eat way too much.

I just sit down, I'll gorge myself and I'm like, stop, stop.

When I keep eating, especially pasta, I have a giant problem with pasta. I will just get fat as fuck if I can eat all the pasta I want. I don't I just can't stop myself. Like if I have a big bowl of spaghetti, I just keep shoving it in my face even after I'm full. If I eat meat, I will stop when I'm full.

I guess it's the satiety, whatever it is, you know, the the whatever causes you to be satisfied by consuming it.

So I'm good. But fucking pasta, I just keep going.

So if you're eating typical white pasta, that's a very calorie dense food. Doesn't have any fiber in it. I think part of what creates satiety is fiber.

So when you're eating lots of fruits, vegetables, then why does steak make you so satisfied?

That's because of the the fat also creates satiety if we don't eat it too fast.

So we we get it's like this fat sends a signal to our systems to say, wow, that's that's a big load I've got in there.

So fat does a similar type thing. Fiber does it though without the calorie load.

So I eat, I eat a I eat a lot, I also eat a lot of food, but I've just, I'm just eating a lot of fiber.

I bet if you and I sat down, you'd be astonished at how much I eat. When you think a lot, what you think of it is a lot.

I eat a stupid amount of food, man.

Well, you're you're you're working it off somehow or another somehow. Barely.

I exercise sometimes just to keep you from getting too fat.

But my problem, my my number one problem is pasta. There is something about that food in particular pasta with tomato sauce. I can just eat it until I explode. You need to keep that out of your house then.

Yeah, I should, but I don't. That's also a problem. I shop when I'm hungry. Yeah, that's not good. You are. You are. You are just the kind of customer Wholefoods likes.

Yeah. I walk down that cookie aisle. You guys have some awesome vegan cookies by the way.

This is why you see that this you're tempted by these foods that are actually really unhealthy for you.

Mm hmm. I think I think this this is good because we all are. Yeah, we are tempted we're tempted by these calorie dense foods. But once you're aware the calorie density is in our friend, then we can start making different choices.

You guys have these vegan cookies. Who makes these goddamn cookies? It's like Auntie somethin's come in a brown paper bag.

Lady Galatis baking cookies. You got to get an A.. Well, maybe there is an Uncle Eddie vegan, Uncle Sam Brownback, Uncle Eddie. I guess maybe it is uncle that he's there. That's it.

Oh, those those there's a peanut butter chocolate chip one.

That is. Why don't I think it was a.. Because I assume that's a woman. Because they say so good. I assume it's like someone's aunt.

So she'll like this. The only time I really eat that food is when I'm going on a long distance hike.

And trying to get enough calories is a problem because I'm hiking 10, 12 hours a day and I'm burning 5000 calories. And I've got to I got to get more calories in me. My my wife says, John, you should admit to the world that they're really the only reason you like to go backpacking is because it gives you the excuse that you crave to eat crappy food.

That's not crappy.

The delicious to just not something you should eat all the time. There's just not help find the peanut butter chocolate chip ones. Those are the jam I, I eat those with whole milk.

Oh, big glass of milk and dunk those suckers in there.

I know you don't fuck with milk, but I hate to tell you this, but you know, when I get when I need a snack like that, I just eat an apple.

Oh how boring.

I'll apples with apples are so good.

I love apples because I'm just joking. I eat apples before I work out. It's my favorite pre workout food because I workout generally early in the morning and if I'm tired and I'm like, God, I need something, I need something, I almost always go with an apple. That's it right there.

And look at that. Those are the ones. And if you're a vegan, you can partake. You won't have the milk. You could drink it with some bullshit almond milk. These are crazy curser. You doing this?

I just zoomed in instead of taking. Oh, look how good that is.

Those are so good. Those are those are very good. But with Joe, that's that's your enemy.

It is. It is my enemy.

Uncle Eddie is not your friend. Well, I don't have it a lot, but I do see you come home and I start devouring pasta.

Pasta.

I have that stuff once, maybe twice a year. I'll eat a bag of those like a whole bag. That's the problem.

What else are you putting on your what else are you putting on your pasta?

Just garlic and tomato sauce. That's really what I like. Are you using like a whole grain pasta? You should use a whole grain pasta.

No, no, no, no. I'm eating what's bad for me. I'm not sure what I'm eating. Pasta I generally buy. What does it double? Zero pasta from Italy. I try to buy. I order it from Amazon.

Is that Italian your background? Yes. So you got that. You got that excuse? Yeah.

I don't have the desire to cook lasagna and I'm very fortunate that I don't have that desire because every now and then my wife will make lasagna. And I if I come home, like especially if it's late at night and I've just done stand up and I find lasagna in the fridge, that lasagna doesn't have a fucking chance.

It's going down. But I know it's bad for me, you know.

I know. But those, you know, carbohydrates and large just large quantities like that are so bad for me.

You probably won't want to do this, but. My wife and I, we we had a brown rice pasta. It tastes really good and and then homemade delicious pasta sauce, a lot of garlic and onions and mushrooms.

And then we'll add that we'll add veggies on top of the pasta and then we'll drown it in the sauce.

It's really delicious. It's not that many calories. That doesn't sound too bad.

I actually like hemp pasta. I've been eating or I never had to have. Very good. Yeah. Yeah, it's guilt free. Yeah. That doesn't doesn't feel nearly as bad for you, but it's something I like about knowing that it's bad for.

Is it really imposter's. It just white pasta. It has a little bit of hemp seed in it.

No it's hemp, it's green. It's like a green polsby. Yeah. Yeah. There's a few different brands that I purchase. I wish I could remember the name but I do not have it hand.

But again I buy that I love, I love him seeds so I might try. Oh I love him. I love him. Protein and protein powder is fantastic.

I use, I use hemp seeds and my smoothies.

It's good stuff. Yeah. And it's easy to digest and it's, it's got all the amino acids. It's one of the best, most complete proteins in terms of plants. I know. Yeah. That's why I take it super easy for your body to digest. There's something about hemp protein like if I know I have to work out in an hour, I hesitate with some forms of protein, like specifically whey like whey my body doesn't digest that well, taste pretty good.

Like you can get a lot of delicious whey protein supplements, like powders and stuff.

But it's a gas factory. It's, it's maybe my stomach may not agree with your particular bacteria, you know, of the gas and all that stuff.

You know, we have a microbiome that's increasingly become aware how important that is for our health. Like people to say they can't digest beans. I say, well, because you've got to feed the bacteria that digest beans. So if you always avoid beans, you're not growing the bacteria to digest the beans.

But aren't there some people that just have a genetic propensity to have a there's a I'm sure there's a genetic propensity for pretty much everything. So there's that's a definite yes.

But people just can't fuck with beans.

Well, but what if I was their coach? I would say, you know what? Beans are really healthy foods. What we're going to do is we're going to first start with lentils. We're going to just we're going to have you eat a couple tablespoons of lentils today. And then we're going to what'll happen over time is you feed the microbiome and you'll get the type of bacteria that will be able to digest legumes.

And for example, I haven't had meat in so long that I probably try to eat some meat. I probably wouldn't be able to digest it.

Probably be an ecstasy of cooking of al-Qaeda. I might have enjoyed eating it, but my digestive system wouldn't be able to handle it because I don't have the bacteria I'd have to regrow the bacteria to digest.

I wonder be interesting to watch.

You might love it so much. You might. What was I was talking all kinds of crazy shit about not eating meat. Got so good.

You know, I don't I know that you're, I, I'm way past that. I just don't have that craving any longer.

I believe you. I've got though I've got it for both of us. You got it and you got a plastic rating, too. That's the one I need to get rid of. But here's the thing, Joe. I think you're just a guy that, you know, you're just living a big life.

You know, you're just a you're a big man. You're living a big life.

You have a lot of passion. You have a passion for life. You have you have.

That's a nice way of saying I'm a glutton. Well, gluttons have a passion for life.

Yes. But you if you were just a glutton. Yeah. And you weren't doing all these other amazing things, then that would be a true accusation. But you're sort of a glutton for life.

I am a glutton for life. But if there's one part of my life, my personality that I'm embarrassed by, it's my consumption of food that I shouldn't be eating. Because when I started, like particularly pasta, it's just I know I'm not supposed to do it. It's the one thing that I know I'm not supposed to do.

I just keep doing it. Well, you have to make a deal with your wife not to have it in the house. There's no deals.

I'm going to buy it.

But but, you know, so, you know, you're going to do things you don't want to do and you have it around anyway.

Well, while I'm enjoying it, that's the problem is the mouth pleasure. During the 15 minutes or so that I'm sitting down eating that bowl, probably not even fifteen, probably five.

I'm eating a big bowl. Spaghetti the mouth. Pleasure that I get. I'm going to that's what I'm just going to accept it and that's worth it to you.

The crazy thing is I will feel like shit for a full day afterwards, you know, like I'm trading five minutes of mouth pleasure for a full day of feeling like shit.

You know, I feel that way about about good red wine. Oh, me too.

So so what I've learned partly from my you know, you're the watches that measure my sleep is whenever I consume any alcohol.

Mm. I don't sleep as long and I don't sleep as deep.

Yeah. And I see it now. I see the statistics, I mean and when I don't drink I sleep longer and deeper. What do you use. What kind of watch this.

This is I, I just switched over to this watch. This is a fancy car. It's only a three three fifty. It's a chorus apacs. Those are really good. I've heard of those.

Well I love about this is battery time since I'm a long distance backpacker. This one, this one goes without recharging for about 30 days. Whoa. How does it do that. It's just got the most amazing battery.

And if I want to use it full GPS mode on my hiking and whatnot, I can get like four full days without having to charge. That's incredible.

It is. A lot of those are good for a day, which is. I know which is.

Which is why I switched from the Apple Watch to this one because. Because it does this. And does it monitor your heart rate? You sleep also. Everything everything the Apple Watch does.

Yeah, I use a woop strap. I use this thing which is good for about five days and I do notice that when I drink my recovery's shit.

But I'm telling that story because to me, the real pleasure of something like red wine is when it's convivial, when you're doing with friends and you're going to have a long conversation and you're going to laugh and you're going to joke, you're going to tell stories and you're just going to have a lot of fun for me.

Red wine enhances that conviviality and I'm willing to make the trade off occasionally.

I'm not slaveholders occasional, you know, about every 12 hours or so.

No, I'd say I'd say on average, I probably average probably a glass a week, but I tend to bundle that up.

So it might be I might not have anything for three weeks then I might have three glasses of wine over an evening.

Yeah. My problem is once I have one glass, you're gone. Yeah, well, that's the problem, right? Then your inhibitions are lowered and you know, like, look, I'm home.

I'm not going anywhere. Look, look, look, look, look.

What I do in order to not do that is. I have my glass and then I don't let them fill it up when it's only halfway, right, if you're at a restaurant or whatever, because then you're sneaky, then you lose track of how much you're actually drinking.

You're having a good time. So you just keep drinking. Mm hmm. So I make a decision. OK, I'm gonna have fun tonight, but I'm going to have two glasses or one glass, two glasses or three glasses, never more than that, because I'm going to it's just not worth the pain.

Yeah, that's the problem is you have that third glass you kind of lit after the third glass.

There'd be no stop there. There's four and five. Are you doing shots? Is planted on the table and having one fun hell of a have a fun time but feeling terrible the next day.

Do you ever supplement with glutathione afterwards. I never have tried to drink. Yeah, it helps a lot with your liver.

Your liver's ability to process alcohol makes a big impact.

Is that right? Yeah. A doctor told me about it, if you believe it or not. Doctors know some things.

Some well, this doctor is very good. Shout out to Dr. Gordon.

That's just a glutathione is amino acid. Yes. Yeah.

It aids in your body's ability to process alcohol to just give you the excuse you need to drink more.

I know, but it does help. It doesn't really it's not a good enough excuse. It's still doing a lot of damage, but. Right. But it does help. And another thing that helps with me is if I drink water and I saw my electrolytes.

Yeah, I do that to such a big the problem is then you're going to get us to a that's going to pay pee, but you got to deal with that.

You know, interesting thing I discovered about you today is that your man has these very great passions about things that you or defend these. Absolutely. You know, we had I don't know if you're going to edit any of this, but we argued probably for thirty minutes about heart reversal with meat and plant based stuff. And you you're so passionate about, you've got to cut the crap out. You got to cut the crap out. And then and then you start saying, man, I just love pasta.

These Uncle Eddie's cookies are so incredible.

And it's like, I find that fascinating.

You are your and but I also like that about you a you're not you're not a hypocrite. I mean, you're not you're not you're not pretentious. But I'm not lying. You're not lying. You're authentic.

That's what I'm looking for. You're authentic. You're the real Joe Rogan shows up. And I so I like that about you because I like authentic people.

And then you're willing to say this isn't bad for me, but I choose to do it anyway.

In a sense, you're doing it consciously, then you're making a conscious, conscious trade off, although you say sometimes you lose control, then you go unconscious.

Is that true? Well, not that bad. If I do eat pasta, like legitimately, it's no more than once a week. It's rare. It's very rare. I sit down and eat a big the problem is once I'm eating, I'm like, fuck it, we're doing it.

And then I go. But the majority of my diet is very healthy. The vast majority of my diet, I mostly wild game. So I hunt. So I'm eating elk meat. Are you getting those pigs? I haven't here. I have in the past. I've shot pigs in California, but I've been invited to do it out here in Texas. But unfortunately, a lot of people in Texas are not eating them. They're shooting them and then leaving them there, which is I'm not interested in that, but I am interested in you know, you eat what you kill.

Yeah, I eat.

I used to have chickens when I lived in California with coyotes, ate them all.

It's rough, rough, rough couple of days in the house.

But then those eggs were fantastic. And those are, you know, when you have free range chicken eggs and have a dark orange.

I have eggs. I mean, I have chickens. Do you eat the eggs? I don't. I'm why I give them away. I should have brought you some today.

You think they're bad for you? The honest answer is I stopped eating eggs for a very bizarre reason, which was that when I first became plant based in the media, we got really interested in it. And I said, well, do you are you pure? And I said, no, I eat eggs for my own chickens. So every time I was talking to the media, they always want to ask me about the chickens and the eggs. And I always had to explain it.

And I got so sick of explaining and I said, you know what, they're going to stop eating these damn eggs. I don't ever have to answer this question again. Really?

Really. I wish I was your friend back then. I said, John, fuck those people eat those eggs. It's like, oh, no, you may harm us.

You misunderstand. It's it's not that I they were scolding me. I just wish I understand I was bored. Oh, I was the question. Yeah, I understand.

And so once I just said no, I don't eat any I just 100 percent I get it.

But you can't alter what you're eating because you don't want to talk about it. That seems crazy, especially chickens and eggs. It's such a free ride.

You feed them, they're healthy, you eat their eggs, they're good for you.

We give them away. Our friends love. Well, that's nice. But you don't think about frying when the bridges up, when no one's around.

You know, I, I, I did the first couple of years and then I stopped doing it and I haven't had any excess and I haven't missed it.

Bill is a good buddy. Mine's a hilarious comedian. He goes, he goes, you want to get fucking confused. He goes Google are eggs good for you.

And then just start reading it. I know that's worse than his coffee. Good for you. That's one of those things where you can find a hundred articles that say eggs are the greatest food in the world and one hundred articles say eggs are going to kill you.

And just like, you know, to go through the research, you know, I eggs are a paradox because eggs have a lot of they have a lot of good things in them. Yeah. That's why they show up. It's like they're really good for you. They have a lot of nutrients in them. Then they also have things that we think of as particularly good. So that's why it's a paradox. That's why you get opposite.

Yeah, well, he's also just get people that think they're 100 percent good for you and people that think they're 100 percent bad for you.

Right. It's like he's just saying like and it's what we're talking about essentially, like the argument of plant based versus paleo, you know, versus now Carnivore, which has been introduced. I had a very compelling conversation with Paul Saladino for three hours where he's talking about the benefits of a nose to tail carnivore diet eating today. Yeah, eating organs, organ meats and the importance of organ meat and that it's like it's pretty interesting.

Like a lot of people that eat that way are very healthy. And then a lot of people that eat vegan are healthy. It's like you could get lost in these conversations and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong.

A lot of ways you have to find out what's right for you. Yeah, but you have to be kind of objective about it.

Meaning you can't just fall into confirmation bias, because if you do that, it's like I've seen a lot of people say, you know, it's so confusing you you Google or X, good for you and you get such contradictory information.

So, you know, I'm just going to eat what I want. Yeah. Then you're doomed. Then you're just going to eat calorie dense foods that taste good for you and, you know, screw yourself up, get fat.

I think having cheap meals is not a bad move. And that's what I basically do when I have big bowls of pasta or sit down with a bag of cookies. I don't think it's bad to reward yourself, but I think the majority of what you consume should be it should taste good, but be good for you. And I think that that's where people need to make the choices correctly. I agree.

I see it the same way I, I you say cheat meal. I think it was just an occasional indulgence. Yeah, because because life is not meant to be purely aesthetic. It's meant to be joyous. Yes. And we're going to die anyway. So we should we should have some, some joy in our lives, but we'll have the most happiness and joy in life if we're also healthy. So if we go too far in indulging ourselves, we may be suboptimized in the long run.

Now, when you say you're going to die anyway, when you see these CRISPR people and all this crazy genetic manipulation, if they start rolling out some new technology that extends life far into the future, like I've heard that if you can make it to 2050, you're basically going to live forever.

Yeah, that's Ray. Ray Kurzweil has been making that. Yeah. A singularity, right.

Yeah, he's 2045, right. Yeah.

So he thinks if we get a sense we're extending the lifespan of a couple of years, a decade and it's accelerating, perhaps we'll get to a place where. So the joke there. It's when I get to be 100, I'll be able to live forever as I age 100. Well, they don't think that, though, they think they're going to be able to reverse.

The idea is that whatever is causing aging, what's causing the deterioration in the quality of your life, that that's all disease and that it's a disease that we've accepted. We call it old age. But really what it is, is a slow disease that everyone has.

And if they can get you back to your prime, wherever that would be, you imagine if you could be a 25 year old man again, John, out there with with the wisdom I have.

Yes. Living your life because just out there free and happy. Yeah. So here's the thing. There's another theory. There are a lot of theories. Right. Theory that I favor is that.

DNA made a deal a long, long time ago, or it was the decision was made, maybe not consciously, it evolved this way.

It said DNA is immortal, but the holder of the DNA is expendable. And so DNA is immortal. We're all DNA in the DNA. We we we send that on. The DNA is in mortal. The DNA is in every species. Every life form has DNA in it. DNA is what's driving it. DNA is the immortal being. And we're not and we're the DNA programmed.

So they're basically saying we're going to reprogram the DNA maybe.

But every life form ages and dies and DNA doesn't. DNA is immortal. And I think that's the deal that was made not I mean, that's just what DNA did. It's like it's hard to keep these lifeforms alive. But I can keep the the sex part of me alive. And I can through sex, I can spread it and I DNA will continue to live. That's what I think is going on.

I think that's an interesting way to look at it. But I think, as you said earlier, that the average age that people die, that used to be 30 or whatever it was. And now due to our understanding of nutrition and science and medicine, we've extended it all the way to 80 in the Western world. Right. I feel like that's how we're going to look back at people who died at 80, like these poor fucks. They didn't have genetic engineering.

They didn't understand that as you get older, you have a better understanding and maybe you can achieve enlightenment in your lifetime. You could be free of all the bullshit that holds people back.

And yeah, I read I read a great science fiction series. The first one was Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

And and.

It's a long story because it has three novels based in it, but the essence for what it relates to what we're talking about is the people that we sent some people to Mars and they evolved over time and they came back to the Earth and they had developed certain Martian drugs that would extend our lives about another 50 years. And if you took the drugs and they were quickly made illegal, so of whole black market for them.

And so they called it the third's that the third's because they'd have this other third to their life.

And the thing is, is that humanity became a lot wiser because as we get older, we do tend to get why I'm a lot wiser today at 67 than I was when I was 40 and a lot wiser 40 and I was at 20.

So if my brain doesn't degenerate through Alzheimer's or dementia, it seems reasonable to think I'll be wiser to 100 than I am at 67. Yeah.

And think if we were able to extend that into 120, 130, a lot of these problems that we have wars and all this irrationality would start to disappear because we just become older and wiser as a species.

That's what we would hope. Yeah, or you have Donald Trump, he's 74 years old.

He's not a young man. And he doesn't seem I mean, he says the most ridiculous, preposterous shit.

He says shit that you would cringe at saying if you were 30.

Right.

Well, some people live longer, maybe wiser today at 74 than he was at 30. That's a good point. So we don't we'd have to have a comparison. I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is. Yeah. You'd have to compare him to his younger self. That's the thing. Like, maybe if you give morons enough time, they eventually will get to a point where the one hundred and sixty, they're just sort of apologizing to everybody.

Maybe so like, I'm so sorry I was so dumb. I didn't know.

But, you know, here's the thing about politics. You can afford to have half the half the people hate you. I can't I can't have half my customers, half my team members boycotting.

All right.

Do you know, Joe, back in 2007, I wrote an op ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on a Whole Foods is sort of what we were doing for health care, because at that time we didn't have Obamacare wasn't in place yet. And President Obama had asked for suggestions. So I just sent out what what Whole Foods was doing. And The Wall Street Journal put an unfortunate title on that, which is Whole Foods answer to to health care and to Obamacare or something like that.

And so it was just an op ed piece. It's no big deal. It's just one guy's opinion. Right. So we had.

Hundreds of boycotts around the country, if Whole Foods Market, Facebook, there was a signature page and three hundred fifty thousand people signed up, so they were going to boycott Whole Foods Market, my board of directors got.

Thousands of letters, emails, text, demanding that I be fired. And then it set this whole I was with the Tea Party was going on to the Tea Party, then was doing courts and it was like, Hello everybody. I just wrote an op ed piece. I was just an opinion piece. It's just my opinion. I didn't even I didn't. But they attacked Wholefoods.

Yeah. So what I learned the lesson. My scar on that one is if I go out into the public and I express any kind of political opinion, chances are now it's cancer culture. Back then they were just there trying to cancel me back then, actually, yeah.

I just wasn't a culture thing I didn't label. So I've learned to be a little more careful about voicing. Someday when I retire from Whole Foods, I'm going to be unleashed.

When that happens, you got to come back macchi unpleasant and get nutty. I'll help you launch a podcast. Why not?

I think that that's very unfortunate, you know, because I think having an opinion about something is especially when a person has achieved a level of success, where they've seen a lot of things and they've had to navigate a lot of things.

That's that's those are the people that want to hear from like, why is someone so upset about a person, just a public person? Your opinion about an issue that we're all dealing with?

I think it's because we talked about before earlier today that some people identified their beliefs with who they are. So when you express opinions that differ with their beliefs, they experience it as a personal attack. And that's why they get so upset and angry. You and I don't do that. You could be telling me that. I think your plant based diet is full of shit, John. And it's like, OK, well, you're entitled to your opinion.

And we'll have to compare notes here, but I don't take it personally.

Well, that's evidence that we're still having fun, as heated as things got. Exactly. Because we aren't our opinions, you know, but we don't identify our opinions as an essence of who we are. Other people do. So opinions are very frightening and threatening to politically, too, especially when politics are involved.

And I remember those days of the early days of the Obama administration. People were so upset at him. Those Tea Party people think we're going to have a civil war in this country.

Joe, I don't think we are, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. It's not good. It's the most polarizing, I think. I thought the Tea Party times were tough, but Obama wound up being the successful president and pulled us out of the 2008 crisis, even though there's a lot of dispute as to whether or not he should have bailed out the banks. At the end of the day, things are going pretty well towards the end of his presidency.

You know, whether people liked him or didn't like him. This is a different animal. This this the situation we have now where Trump is claiming that the election has been stolen and there's a large percentage of people to think that's the truth. And then there's other people that are like, you know, they voted for Biden just because they hate Trautwig. There's a lot of this on. A lot of people are really excited.

Well, in this case, they're either going to be able to prove the claims or not. Yeah. And doesn't look good. There's not much time there. There's not much time to prove it. Yeah. So we'll have to see it unfold and how it how it what happens. So I don't know. It's very bizarre.

It's the most bizarre political time of my life or at least as an adult. Yeah.

As we were talking about earlier, this is the situation that they talked about in the social dilemma, this same polarizing mom. But it's more accelerated now than I've ever felt it.

Do you do you feel like you're being manipulated by social media? I'm just curious.

No, I don't listen. Yeah, I don't either. Actually, I'm not on any social media.

I'm sure it's manipulating me in some way. I'd be naive to say it doesn't it's got to have some sort of an effect on me.

You have your you tweet, though, right? Yeah, but I do what I call post and ghost where I post and then I run away. I don't read.

So you don't you don't you don't get caught up in the hubbub. No. And I very rarely tweet most post things on Instagram and they're very non-political. Most of it is just interesting things.

You know what, you need to learn the lessons from your social media and apply it to your pasta eating.

I kind of have because it sounds like you're very disciplined in the social media. You it hasn't taken you over.

I'm relatively disciplined with my diet relative. That's why I'm not a fatso. But I could be. I think you're just working your ass off.

I do that, too. But I'm I'm I have a real weakness. I just don't let it get me most of the time.

But when it gets me. Oh, my God, it's embarrassing.

I'm going to go a little deeper on that with you and ask you a question. So is it something that you consciously decide, OK, tonight I'm going to eat pasta, or is it like you get a craving and you just do it?

Usually it's a craving and usually it's when I'm tired. When I'm tired. I have, like you said after stand up.

Yeah, I have it late at night. And if I'm writing, even if I'm home writing late at night and I'm done at one o'clock in the morning, usually I'm like, just go to bed stupid.

But sometimes when I come on, let's eat and go to the camera. Catch that glint in your eyes. It's a real good. That's but again, I don't do it enough where I get fat, but I do understand people that do, I really do. This is like, you know, people think I'm disciplined. I guess I'm kind of disciplined, kinda. But more than that, I'm scared of not being disciplined. So I work. I work.

There's a weird like the work gets done, but it's not like there's this, like, unflappable work ethic that never gets breached.

No. So I have to try to play tricks on myself to get the work done.

I actually, I mean I. I just think you're a man that has strong passions and those passions carry you into life, and when you're when you're when you're full of passion for whatever it is, I think you're probably prodigious in terms of your what you do.

But then you have these other periods of time where you're sort of, you know, you're not caught up in the passions and you're just sort of treading water, so to speak.

I mean, it's you know, it's the problem is that when I decide that I'm going to do something I know I'm not supposed to do, like eat too much.

I don't decide it very often. But when I do, it's like it fucks with your self-esteem because you're like, God, I let myself do that. Like, why did I do that?

So you know how what you could do that wouldn't mess with your self-esteem is if you just make a conscious decision. I'm going to do this today.

That's what the rock does. You ever go to the rocks Instagram? I know his cheat days are legendary. So he he just he conscious about it.

He oh yeah. He lets the world not sneaking dude.

He'll eat stacks of pancakes like he's an enormous man. He's a big guy. I ever met him. I have not. He's huge.

He's so big. It doesn't seem like a real person. It's like a cartoon character.

How tall. Ozzy. Oh my God. He's at least six. Five. Wow. He wrote imagine how tall is he? Like, officially six, five ish. But he's enormous.

Like 300 pounds. All muscle giant, just giant human on year round. I mean, like, that's not a real person. That's a that's a superhero.

Actually, I like I like I like I like the rock and movies and stuff. I like his personality. He's very inspirational. I like Schwarzenegger.

When he was doing his Terminator stuff in those movies, I thought he was I thought he was a great comedic actor.

Yeah, that's really funny. I don't think he intended to be comedic.

I just think that kind of became his shtick because he was naturally sort of kind of funny.

Well, the rock's Instagram, at least once a week or so, he'll they'll post like what he's doing. He'll have like a tray of sushi that's as big as this table.

And I'm not kidding. It's just ridiculous amounts of food. He consumes sushi.

You know, you can eat a lot of sushi, doesn't have that many calories in it.

Well, there you go.

Let people know you can't eat 100 pounds of it. I mean, he he'll eat a plate as big as this table, but I mean, stacks of pancakes, cookies.

Well, those are calorie counts. He goes off. But you go to that guy's social media and he's in the gym every single day.

I mean, he's these go off days probably help fuel his motivation and his discipline because he gives himself a little mental break.

Wow. That you know, also that's fascinating. It may be that he's doing that. And that helps because he feels a little bit guilty about it. Perhaps he says now I have to double my workout to make up for it. So it's actually using it to push him. I don't know.

You know, that guy is so disciplined. I doubt that's the case. I think he really has a healthy attitude.

What I'm going to take a day and just go fucking crazy and then after that's over, it's back to the grind. I just think he's on the grind literally every day. Yeah. All right. Did we just talk for, like, four hours? No way. Yeah, we did. It's for there. It's four thirty five. Good. We got a lot of shit you can edit.

We're not anything. Nothing conscious capitalism. John Mackey and conscious leadership leadership is also available. The Whole Foods diet. Get yourself some books. Thank you brother. I really appreciate it. Was it was fun talking to you. And when you retire and you ready to talk some shit, come back. I will have you go off. All right. Thank you, John. They shared by everybody. Thank you, friends, for tuning into the show.

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Brent, thank you so much. Much love to you all. All right. In a big.