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The Rich Roll Podcast

John Mackey On Conscious Capitalism, Building An Empire & The Power of Plants To Heal and Thrive

The Rich Roll Podcast

Rich Roll

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement

4.7 • 13.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2017

⏱️ 80 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Creating a huge business is one thing. Building it on principles of conscious awareness? Another thing altogether. This week I sit down with John Mackey, the father of conscious capitalism and the unlikely entrepreneur behind a $16 billion grocery behemoth that ushered in a global organic food movement and permanently changed the way we eat, live and think about business. The Bill Gates of organic food, John is the original, current and sole CEO of Whole Foods Markets, which he founded in 1980 and has parented to Fortune 500 status, employing over 90,000 people across 450+ stores in the United States, Canada and the UK. A strong believer in free market principles, Mackey is the co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller Conscious Capitalism, which encourages business grounded in principles of ethical consciousness. Consistent with this ethos, John has birthed a myriad of philanthropic efforts, including the Whole Planet Foundation to help end poverty in developing nations, the Local Producer Loan Program to help local food producers expand their businesses, The Global Animal Partnership’s rating scale for humane farm animal treatment, and the Health Starts Here initiative to promote health and wellness. Mackey has been recognized as Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Overall Winner for the United States, Institutional Investor’s Best CEO in America, Barron’s World’s Best CEO, MarketWatch’s CEO of the Year, FORTUNE’s Businessperson of the Year, and Esquire’s Most Inspiring CEO. Aligning his actions with his values, John embraces an extremely grounded lifestyle in stark contrast to his means. This is a guy who in 2006 cut his annual pay to $1, donates all his stock options to charity, walks to work, cooks his own meals and meditates daily. A vegan for many years, John recently released The Whole Foods Diet*. Co-authored by Alona Pulde and Matthew Lederman of Forks Over Knives, it's a powerful primer that unequivocally establishes a whole foods, plant-based diet as the optimum protocol for health, disease prevention and longevity based on the huge body of science, research, and advice that is available today. Enjoy! Rich

Transcript

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0:00.0

If you look at the pie chart of what American Z, it's very disturbing.

0:04.4

Standard American diet is 54% highly processed for fine foods.

0:09.2

A lot of sugar, a lot of white flour, a lot of oil.

0:13.8

That makes up 54% of our calories.

0:15.8

Then you've got 32% or animal foods.

0:18.2

And again, most of those animal foods are also coming out of a highly industrialized system

0:22.4

where the fat has been exaggerated where the animals grow artificially quicker than they would

0:28.4

in more natural conditions.

0:30.4

And then that leaves only 14% for whole plant foods.

0:35.2

And if you were going to design a diet to kill people, well, there you go.

0:39.4

You couldn't design a better system than that.

0:41.6

That's John Mackie and this, well this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

0:46.6

The Rich Roll Podcast.

0:58.3

Hey everybody, how you guys doing?

1:00.8

What's going on?

1:01.8

My name is Rich Roll.

1:02.8

I am your host.

1:03.8

Welcome to the podcast, the show where each week I bring you the best and the brightest.

1:07.9

The most paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, fitness, diet, nutrition,

1:12.6

entertainment, athletics, business, entrepreneurship.

1:16.0

And I bring you all of these amazing people and personalities with one goal in mind,

1:21.0

to help you self-actualize, to help you manifest your best, most authentic self.

...

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