John Mackey, Whole Foods co-founder and author of Conscious Leadership, defends capitalism’s role in lifting 94% out of poverty and extending lifespans from 30 to 72.6 years, dismissing socialism’s failures while critiquing progressive backlash against modernist values. He contrasts COVID-19 lockdowns with historical pandemics like 1918 flu, warning of unintended harms—business collapses, mental health crises—and advocates for balanced, science-backed wellness over rigid dietary dogma. Mackey’s egalitarian Whole Foods culture, from employee gym access to ultralight backpacking, underscores his belief in value-driven leadership, though Rogan highlights lingering debates on animal foods and processed toxins. Ultimately, Mackey urges integrating diverse perspectives to foster progress without sacrificing health or prosperity. [Automatically generated summary]
The problem that a lot of people have with capitalism is they attribute capitalism to greed.
They attribute greed and the problems of the world, environmental destruction, and ignoring climate change.
They attribute that to capitalism.
And they think that the way out of this is socialism, some type of socialism.
In my opinion, the people that are saying that, I don't think there's anything wrong with contributing and contributing to a better community in terms of making healthcare more affordable or free, making education more affordable or free.
But human beings need incentives in order to perform.
And 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.
Just the human animal strives to achieve for whatever reason.
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 everybody to do.
He tells everybody to put a mask on in between your bites of food, and he's not doing it himself.
You're like, okay.
This is exactly like his aunt Nancy Pelosi when she got busted going to a beauty parlor with no mask on while they were all closed down.
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, wear your mask, social distance, take care of your health, take your fight, do all these things.
But we can't fucking tank 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 aligned with how America might have handled it in the previous decades.
As a general rule, to want to do that, to want to humiliate yourself, get on stage, and the failure, the bombing, is some of the most intense emotional pain a person can ever subject themselves to, or be subjected to.
Well, I think public speaking, like what you're doing when you're standing up and talking about a very particular subject...
It's 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.
They're like, I've come here to have fun and laugh.
I hope these comedians are funny.
You go there with a little bit of a smile on your face when you sit down.
Austin's a particularly good place to do comedy because there's a great history of stand-up comedy in Texas.
Like, Kinison, 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, like, when I first started doing stand-up, I was selling out in Houston before I was selling out anywhere.
Because for whatever reason, they had this longing for that kind of raw comedy that you really, it's hard to get in a lot of places that are maybe a little bit too politically correct.
Like there's certain places where they're so woke.
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.
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 publicly discussed than any time that I can remember in my life.
I think because 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.
And the people that end up teaching in the universities were always the smartest kids in the school generally.
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 PhD, and then that's all they've known is school.
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 they make a lot of friends and relationships, and they make more money than the intellectuals do.
And that seems like that's completely unfair.
It's an unjust world that the less smart people are making more money than the smart people do, and they have more status in the society.
And I think underlying it is a resentment or an envy of a society that doesn't judge them to be as important as they judge themselves.
But if you think about it, 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 Ricardo and Malthus wrote in the early 19th century.
For the most part, business people have been seeing – they're disruptive.
They upset the status quo.
They innovate.
Well, a lot of people don't like innovations.
It's threatening.
It changes social status.
It changes wealth relationships.
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.
I self-identify that way.
Students love when I talk about conscious capitalism.
Their primary argument is that business is greedy and selfish and it's about motivations.
That business people have the wrong motivations.
In a lot of ways, Conscious Capitalism is an answer to that.
It's a complete answer to that because in the book and in 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 have this upwards spiral.
So that's – business has its 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.
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 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.
So this is where I think a lot of people have a valid argument against capitalism.
Capitalism has kind of fucked over 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.
And the attempt to create the perfect system, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Capitalism is not perfect.
Because human choices and what people want varies.
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 giving people what they want.
It's the same thing in any type of Right.
But what you strive for is to take those externalities or those negative consequences and try to, through good government, to minimize them or lessen them.
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 LA's decision or the governor of California rather's decision to eliminate all sales of combustion engine cars after 2035?
My first thought 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 that 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.
So I... I think that's well-intentioned in terms of lessening environmental externalities from the internal combustion engine or from carbon production.
You know, humanity, ever since humanity's been around, Joe, it's had a negative impact on the environment.
Right.
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 mow down the jungles and if you're going to graze cattle, that's going to have a negative impact on the environment.
There's no escaping human humanity's impact on the environment.
It's always going to be there.
Because guess what?
We're part of the environment.
The question is, you can create the win-win-win.
You just can't create perfection.
We solve some problems, and when new problems come up, every generation has to begin to solve 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 having innovation And having these incentives creates better alternatives for people in terms of how to live their life.
It gives them, in terms of medicine, and in terms of what's going on in the medical industry, saving far more lives, fixing far more people that have been injured.
I agree with all those things.
I just think that sometimes we tend to want to put things in these very simplistic packages, like win-win-win.
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.
Amazon allowed Whole Foods 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% because you're not selling any more of it.
Over the long term, People will realize, man, I can get a good deal for 90 cents.
I used 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 Whole Foods do that.
This is something that I find very frustrating in 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?
But 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.
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 talk to business people and they say that is the exact wrong approach because that's actually going to stifle business and business is 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.
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, where you have $150 billion, 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 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.
But I know that when Whole Foods was—we were a public company for 25 years, and we had the government go after us a few times.
They tried to stop our—we tried to make an acquisition of a company called Wild Oats back in 2007. We actually made the acquisition, but the FTC tried to stop it.
We ended up going into court with them.
We actually won in court, and very interesting, the FTC has their own court— And after we won in the federal courts, they said, well, now we want to take you into our court, the administrative court.
When someone is involved in that kind of a fucked up scenario where you bring them to FTC court where no one wins, if you do win, like ultimately in Supreme Court, they should take it out of the salary of the people that forced you into doing that.
Which is exactly what they were talking about in The Social Dilemma.
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 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 particularly polarizing subjects?
Of course, I think The Social Dilemma is a good movie and a lot to learn from, and I do think it overstates it.
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 are three major types of worldviews that exist in the United States that are clashing with each other.
The first one is more of a traditional worldview of heritage values that It might be traditional Christianity or traditional Judaism combined with belief in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, sort of very traditional values.
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 a third major worldview.
And I think statistically, we think about 30% of the population is in the traditional worldview, about 50% is in the modernist worldview, and about 20% is in the progressive worldview.
And 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 we think that's the essence of this cultural struggle going on.
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 dignities and disasters.
And if we're going to get through it, we need conscious leaders who will be able to take the best things about each one of these worldviews and integrate them together so that we can give each of the worldviews 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's not going to stand for it.
And something you were talking about with capitalism, because you were saying, hey, John, it's not perfect.
And capitalism is a sort of part of the modernistic worldview, and it's not perfect.
There are 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.
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?
You might say that you can see each of these worldviews comes out of the previous worldview.
So if you go back...
200 years ago, 250 years ago, the modernist worldview was just being born.
The founding fathers of our country were early modernists, people like Franklin and Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton.
These were early modernists, but almost everybody else was a traditionalist.
But 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 we have to solve those problems.
And so progressivism is partly solving that problem.
Things like racism and sexism and homophobia or whatever, these are also aspects that progressivism is reacting to, to say that this is not fair, this is not just.
So the really beautiful thing about progressivism is that it's striving to give dignity to all these different sort of marginalized people that were 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, 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.
Yeah, that – if you take away that, once that gets – starts getting implemented on a wide scale, then a lot of the arguments against capitalism will start to fade.
When we get stuck in an echo chamber, 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 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 thing about challenging ideas and looking at your own ideas 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.
They're not mine, they're an idea.
And even though I've 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...
A very conscious, positive effort to abandon those ideas.
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.
When they don't fit any longer, I set them aside and I get new clothes that fit better.
And 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 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 one of the things I try to do as CEO of Whole Foods Market is I always try to admit my mistakes in a very public way because I feel like that helps everybody else admit their own mistakes.
And I'll just say, you know, I was wrong about that.
I made a mistake.
I'm sorry about that.
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.
Hey, if John is going to admit his mistakes, then I can admit my mistakes too.
And you have a much more open dialogue with people.
Nobody's seen as infallible, as all-knowing, as always right, never wrong.
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.
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'd be one of the first questions I ask.
I don't want to go to a party where there's 500 people and I don't know anybody.
They would have his own testimony publicly that he made a mistake.
You would not be able to argue against that.
I think we both agree.
Clearly he made a mistake.
That's a giant mistake and it's responsible for thousands of deaths.
I mean, it's hard to argue that.
You take people that are COVID positive, you send them 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, like more than 20%.
Can you imagine being in that situation where 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?
When you're in a situation like that where there's not much you can do, when you are stuck...
I was talking to a nurse and she was explaining to me, she's a nurse in a COVID ward, and she was explaining to me the decisions that they have to make.
She's like, during the peak when 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 new people to come in, so we literally have to take people that are terminal.
Yeah, 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 was 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 he probably never thought, well, there might be a thing that kills all these old people if I send them back to nursing homes.
It's probably like one butcher is thinking this motherfucker.
No, I'm just kidding.
Your time doing this, your time spent as a leader, do you understand better the pitfalls of these leaders because of the fact that you've been a leader of a corporation for a long time?
Now, when you do have these very strong ethics and morals that you operate your company by, but you're also 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 working with you?
Our quality standards, our core values, our higher purpose, these are all...
We actually have a program in 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, I mean, we have 100,000 people working for Whole Foods, and every year we're hiring 10,000 to 20,000 new people.
Exactly.
And so they're not going to know the purpose.
They're not going to know the core values.
They're not going to know...
What the company's 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.
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 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 It's actually contributing.
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 they're cared for.
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.
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?
This is a concept, this concept that 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.
So this is, if 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 when they apply them to business, they don't really understand business.
And we 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 the result was a terrible idea because they didn't have the incentives that were there any longer to try to optimize their production.
And as a result, mass starvation occurred until China wised up.
Finally, some communists 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 and agriculture in China.
But there's a lot of people that 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.
Someone said something ridiculous, and I'm like, oh my god, I need to check this person out.
And they were talking about, hey, I am ready to lock everything down for five weeks.
I don't go outside.
I stay away from everybody.
I order 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.
Everyone should do what you're capable of doing.
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.
And that was the killer that didn't just take people with comorbidities.
It took children.
It took healthy adults.
It was nondiscriminatory disease.
And we took precautions.
People, you know, social distanced.
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 very interesting, the time that we live in, 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.
Two 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.
Well, hopefully these vaccinations are going to be as effective as they're reporting and will not have side effects, and that a year from now, this will be in the rearview mirror.
Not an anti-vaxxer 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 we don't have polio.
When I hear about measles cases rising, I get angry because these 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.
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, some neurological thing.
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 unfound fear.
Because of what this is, a messenger RNA vaccine, that this is not the type of vaccine that you...
It's just essentially delivering your body this sort of message that encoded with a common cold virus, that what it does is it makes your body develop the proteins to fight off the disease.
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 survive, 99 point whatever percent of people survive, you're gonna be fine.
There's people that are these, this is what gets me, these long haulers.
COVID long haulers who have serious...
There's a guy named Cody Garbrandt.
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 a top flight mixed martial arts fighter.
And he has had blood clots.
He's had some serious problems and fatigue.
And still bothering him to this day.
He was supposed to compete last weekend.
Just this past weekend.
He's supposed to fight for the flyweight title, and 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.
Those mass people wear those viruses, you know, unless you got the N95s and plexiglass, chances are that little piece of cloth is not really keeping the virus out.
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 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.
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 as we know it.
As far as we know, plants respond to stimulation, but we don't have any evidence they experience pain.
So mollusks might be consistent with ethical veganism.
I've heard that argument said very well, and that not only that, but they're sustainable, you can harvest them and grow them, and that their 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.
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 ability to camouflage themselves and hide.
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 their the methods that they use to hunt and He studied octopus and he like he's like they're aliens They are.
He's showing me what they're doing.
He's like, there's nothing like this.
There's no other animal like this.
And during the course of his show, he developed this profound respect and appreciation for octopus.
Did you ever see that video that they put a camera in a tank at the aquarium because they were losing sharks and they were trying to figure out what the hell's going on so they put a camera in there to watch and it turns out the octopus were killing the sharks.
Each male wants to mate and pass on his genes to a new generation.
Trouble is, the female is often larger and hungrier than he is, so there's a constant risk that, instead of mating, the female will strangle him and eat him.
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 they'll just grow a claw.
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.
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 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 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.
I'm not the guy, but I will eat them and I will kill them.
Pigs, the wild pigs, when they're six months old, they're viable.
So they start having sex and breeding at six months old, and 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.
So if they'll have a crop of food that these folks need for their livelihood, and then a pack of wild pigs come in and just destroys it.
The very first store I opened up before Whole Foods was called Safer Way.
It's a vegetarian store.
It was not only vegetarian, it was very pure.
We didn't really sell sugar or refined sugars or white flour.
We didn't even sell coffee.
We also did very little business.
We were so narrow in the marketplace, we weren't successful.
And it wasn't until 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, all natural and organic foods, but a full spectrum, 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 is the most profitable?
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 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 SaferWave was going to fail because 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.
But I never thought that coffee would be a thing that would be on every corner.
Like there's a place in Houston, and Louis Black used to have a 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 took me, when I got off of 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.
Let me withdraw that statement because that wasn't the real point of it.
The point of it was that once I got my own vitality back, I was no longer a 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.
Well, I've had too many people explain things to me here, or, 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 give you a couple of facts that you might find interesting.
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 and processed foods.
This is like the great example of the Seventh-day Adventist.
They don't drink any alcohol.
They exercise every day.
They have many more positive habits.
And you apply those positive habits and the fact that you eat a vegetarian diet, you could assume that the reason why they're healthy is because of the vegetarian diet.
Studies that have been done on people who are eating a lot of animal food and are also very active and healthy and making healthy choices outside of that.
The problem with alcohol and cigarettes and all these other things that people tend to take in and consume when they're also consuming animal foods is that all those things get lumped in together.
I think what we can all agree on is that eating toxic food, eating processed food, not healthy, not exercising, living a sedentary lifestyle, consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, all these things are detrimental to your health.
Well, epidemiology studies, it's my point of view.
What do you mean?
If you wanted 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 comparing to people that do and find out what the variables are.
Right?
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?
No, I want you to tell me right now because you're saying it like you know it for a fact.
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?
So when you're getting this standard American diet and they're applying it to an epidemiology 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.
And I can tell you that the studies contradict what you're saying.
And that the epidemiology, because it's not as good as a randomized, controlled study, which are hard to do in nutrition, does not make them worthless.
So whenever they got a chance to eat plants, they probably had to be real careful with what they could eat and what they couldn't eat because most of it was inedible and much of it even toxic.
Whereas if they can catch an animal and eat it, they're almost all edible.
Those blue zones are also people that are very active.
There's a direct correlation between physical activity.
I think the people that 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 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 benefits.
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 22 people that did plant-based and four of them had some reversal.
This article here though currently goes into deeper studies and It says that there isn't really a good study about it.
A study published in 2014 looked at 198 patients to further investigate whether eating a strict 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% 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 is 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's reverse heart disease.
Also, change their diet and eat healthier.
But not just eat plants and a plant-based diet, but also remove processed foods and sugars.
So I guess what I'm saying is show me a study that people eat, cut out all the processed foods, This is showing that the people are cutting out toxic things that we know are toxic.
I think people have been eating animal foods from the beginning of time.
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 adding to their diets fairly recently that coincides with a direct uptick in heart disease.
Okay, so what you believe from the shit you've read is that you could eat a high animal food diet, cut out all the processed stuff, and you'd reverse heart disease.
I'd like to sit you down with a doctor who disagrees with you and have you 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 you can do that as much as I don't think that you can lean on meat as being a cause of cancer when you look at epidemiology studies with people that eat meat five days a week but also consume a bunch of bullshit.
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, 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.
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 that the studies that we know that have actually reversed heart disease cut out all the shit and 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% 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 study has 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.
But you said that plant-based diets have been shown to reverse heart disease.
I don't think that's what we can say.
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 you because they're whole foods.
You can say that 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.
Now 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 kept the meat in, they still would reverse heart disease.
I think the idea that meat is not 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, right?
No, 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.
The 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.
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're very healthy.
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.
The problem is everybody eliminates that part, including you.
You left that out.
When you said it, you said whole foods, plant-based diet.
You didn't say eliminating all these things that have been shown to cause heart disease.
So, no one has proven that a whole foods, plant-based diet, along with those toxic things...
Like, if you had all of the good foods that we know, whether it's animal foods, mollusks, all those different things, if we could just...
We all come to an agreement.
There's things that people eat, that we've been eating particularly over the last few decades in this country, that are just bad for you.
The problem is we get into 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 aspects of this conversation.
What we're talking about here with eliminating sugar, 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 vegetables.
So what we need to do, what you need to do, or you need to come up with some evidence, or somebody needs to that you can throw in my face, is a whole foods, meat-based diet What eliminates all these toxins will also reverse heart disease.
If you can do that, then I'll...
Remember how we talked about beliefs earlier that they're just a pseudoclose?
You produce that evidence and I'll take off the pseudoclose because I'm actually about being intellectually, having 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.
A magnetic healer who came up with it in a seance In the 1800s, 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...
But my point is that there's no evidence that that is doing anything to you physically.
If you go to a doctor, okay, and you have a serious issue like you've got a broken arm and you have to put, you know, plates in it and screw it in place and put it in a cast, there's real evidence that that works.
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, I think it's in Israel, They've figured out a way to have genes that actively go after, like surgically go after cancer.
There was an article in, 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 figured out a way to actively target the way they described it was surgical.
Revolutionary 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 breakthroughs like this all the time.
Researchers have demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas9 system is very effective in treating metastatic cancers, 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.
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 in these fancy restaurants and pay for everything.
And they weren't bribing you, but they kind of were.
Probably, the doctor thought, I played competitive basketball in high school, college, and City League for years.
And he thinks that I was really small 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 from 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'm pain-free doctors.
So just to make it clear, surgeons.
I mean, if you need surgery, you need first aid, like a broken bone...
What you're saying is that doctors over-prescribe medication and under-prescribed healthy living and diet and doing all the things that we know to be positive for the human body.
I'm like, what's a good diet where you're going to get vitamin D3? A business model that I'm kicking around investing in would be a business model where You have doctors and you have a whole team.
So Joe Rogan goes in there.
We do the complete workup of everything about your blood, your total health, and then we begin 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 well-being?
And 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 Viagra or whatever from the doctor.
It'd be about them optimizing your long-term health and well-being.
I think that is going to be a big future business model.
We have executive coaches that corporate leaders frequently get.
Why not have a wellness coach with a team of a doctor and wellness coaches who are helping you to optimize your absolute peak performance that you can get?
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 I love hiking and I love long-distance backpacking and I do it ultra light 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 wilderness the whole deal yeah absolutely now there's not a lot of CEOs that are willing to do that I don't know but remember the other second time I hiked it I did it and over four years because I couldn't take that much time off when I retire sometime the next few years You're just gonna go hiking?
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 like, oh, when I retire, I'm gonna go walking.
So when we were out foraging, which we did for tens of thousands, 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.
But we just couldn't get it in nature.
Maybe you could occasionally get You could pull down a wild game occasionally.
You could hunt it, eat it, gorge on it because you'd 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 being fattened up on corn like the pork and chickens and beef that we eat today.
Or we'd get honey, for example.
We might get a couple 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.
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.
It's such a catch-22 for folks, too, 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 appetite.
When I'm tired, I have to stay the fuck out of the kitchen.
That's with me.
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!
And 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 just can't stop myself.
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.
It's the satiety, whatever it is.
Whatever causes you to be satisfied by consuming it, I'm good.
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 5,000 calories and I've got to get more calories in me.
My wife says, John, You should admit to the world that really the only reason you like to go backpacking is because it gives you the excuse that you crave to eat crappy food.
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 if I come home, 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 in large, just large quantities like that, I know it's bad for me.
But I'm telling this story because, to me, the real pleasure of something like red wine is when it's convivial.
When you're doing it with friends...
And you're going to have a long conversation and you're going to laugh and you're going to joke and 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.
The honest answer is I stopped eating eggs for a very bizarre reason, which was that when I first became plant-based, the media got really interested in it.
And I said, well, 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 wanted to ask me about the chickens and the eggs.
And I always had to explain it.
And I got so sick of explaining it.
I said, you know what?
I'm just going to stop eating these damn eggs so I don't ever have to answer this question again.
One of those things where you can find a hundred articles that say eggs are the greatest food in the world and a hundred articles that say eggs are going to kill you.
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 versus now carnivore, which has been – I had a very compelling conversation with Paul Saladino for three hours where he was talking about the benefits of a nose-to-tail carnivore diet, eating organs, organ meats, and the importance of organ meat.
It's pretty interesting.
A lot of people that eat that way are very healthy, and then a lot of people that eat vegan are healthy.
You could get lost in these conversations and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
In a lot of ways, you have to find out what's right for you.
But you have to be kind of...
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 eggs good for you and you get such contradictory information so you know i'm just gonna eat what i want yeah then you're doomed then you're just gonna eat calorie dense foods that taste good for you and you're gonna 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 I sit down with a bag of cookies.
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.
DNA made a deal a long, long time ago, or it was a decision that 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. And the DNA, we send that on.
The DNA is immortal.
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 the DNA is 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.
I mean, that's just what DNA did.
It's like, it's hard to keep these life forms alive, but I can keep the sex part of me alive, and through sex I can spread it, and I, DNA, will continue to live.
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 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 the whole black market for them.
And so they called it the thirds.
The thirds 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 wiser.
I'm a lot wiser today at 67 than I was when I was 40. And a lot wiser at 40 than 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 at 100 than I am at 67. 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.
I can't have half my customers, half my team members boycotting Whole Foods.
Do you know, Joe, back in 2007, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on Whole Foods as sort of what we were doing for healthcare.
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 Whole Foods was doing, and the Wall Street Journal put an unfortunate title on that, which is Whole Foods' Answer to Healthcare, or to Obamacare, something like that.
Hundreds of boycotts around the country of Whole Foods Market.
Facebook, there was a signature page and 350,000 people signed it so they were going to boycott Whole Foods Market.
My board of directors got thousands of letters, emails, texts demanding that I be fired.
And then it set this whole...
I was when the Tea Party was going on, so the Tea Party then was doing boycotts.
And it was like, hello everybody, I just wrote an op-ed piece.
It was just an opinion piece.
It's just my opinion.
I didn't even...
But they attacked Whole Foods.
So what I learned in the lesson, my scar on that one is...
opinion chances are now it's cancel culture back then they were just they were trying to cancel me back then actually yeah it just wasn't a culture thing it wasn't a cultural thing 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 Mackie unplugged.
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.
Those are the people that I want to hear from.
Like, why is someone so upset about a person, just a public person, your opinion?
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 situation we have now, where Trump is claiming that the election has been stolen, and there's a large percentage of people that think that's the truth.
And then there's other people that are like, you know, they voted for Biden just because they hate Trump.
There's not a lot of people that are really excited about Biden.
Yeah, as we were talking about earlier, it's this situation that they talked about in The Social Dilemma, this same polarizing moment, but it's more accelerated now than I've ever felt it.
I just think you're a man that has strong passions.
And those passions carry you into life.
And when you're full of passion for whatever it is, I think you're probably prodigious in terms of 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.