Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Surwer. And welcome to our guest, John Mackie,

co-founder of Whole Foods, author, entrepreneur. John, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for

joining us. Thanks for inviting me here today, Andy. So you have a new book out. We're going to talk about

that.

But I want to ask you a little bit about Whole Foods.

You sold the company to Amazon in 2017.

What have you been doing since then?

Well, the first five years, I stayed with the company as the CEO and worked on the transition,

you know, because you have two pretty large companies, you have to fit them together culturally.

If the founder and longtime CEO is there telling everybody, reassuring everybody that it's a good idea, things go better.

And that's what I did.

And the last year, though, of the five, I had already announced that I was going to

retire and we gave sort of like I gave a year's notice so that my successor, Jason Beackel,

would have a year of kind of running the ship with me there kind of watching him run the ship

and also toured the whole company.

And basically thanked everybody, said said goodbye I said goodbye to

thousands and thousands of team members it was very very heartfelt I felt really loved and appreciated

I had a really good long goodbye and now over the last couple of years I've co-founded another company called Love Life with several

people from Whole Foods that were my longtime executives like Walter Rob and Betsy Foster

that had worked with me for Whole Foods for decades.

And it's kind of a one-stop holistic health wellness club.

That's the best way I can put it, because it has a combination of

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