John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, is one of the most consequential American entrepreneurs of our time.
Whole Foods began in 1980 as a small hippie health food store in Austin, Texas. Under Mackey’s leadership, it grew into the largest organic foods supermarket chain in the United States, selling to Amazon in 2017 for nearly $14 billion. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the company revolutionized the food industry, mainstreaming health-consciousness for a mass market.
Despite the company’s crunchy progressive brand, Mackey is a staunch capitalist and a steadfast defender of free markets. He popularized the term “conscious capitalism,” which marries capitalism and social responsibility, and and emphasizesinges the role of businesses in creating a sustainable and ethical impact on society at large.
Today, a conversation about what it takes to build a company like Whole Foods, what it is like to have enormous wealth, the role of unions in the American economy, and why he kicked his own father off the board of the company.
And to read Mackey’s full story, check out his new book, The Whole Story.
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During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?
Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion.
Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?
Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion.
Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is on a roll this week. On Monday, he asked an Atlanta-based appeals court to revive his federal classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. A day later, he filed a revised indictment against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The revisions were in response to the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year giving Trump and all future presidents broad immunity from prosecution for their official acts as president. But much of the indictment is the same as the original. Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic majority during Trump's two impeachment proceedings, helps break down where things now stand with Trump's criminal cases.
And in headlines: The Supreme Court dealt another blow to President Joe Biden's efforts to ease the burden of federal student loan debt, Israel carried out its largest raids in the occupied West Bank in at least two decades, and the 2024 Paralympics are underway in Paris!
Show Notes:
Check out Norm's piece for Just Security – https://tinyurl.com/yc5xbzk3
We're telling you about a new surgeon general advisory calling the silent struggles of American parents a public health concern.
Also, we'll explain the controversy surrounding former President Trump's visit to Arlington National Cemetery.
Plus, why the online review platform Yelp is suing Google, where new laws aim to crack down on smartphone use, and a preview of the tournament with the largest prize in professional golf.
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Natwest, 23, is about to finally leave for university. But a package he's waiting for has gone missing and – fearing humiliation if its contents are found out – he spends 24 hours looking for it all over town. That's the premise of Nathan Newman's comic novel, How to Leave the House. In today's episode, Newman speaks with NPR's David Folkenflik about some of the odd neighborhood characters Natwest bumps into along the way, and how their own concerns and their perceptions of Natwest completely challenge the notion of who he thinks he is as the protagonist of his own story.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it.
Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.
The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
Gabi refers to JWCC, with is a reference to the Department of Defense Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle.
Google fired 50 workers earlier this year for organizing over its ties to Israel.
In 1970, Polaroid workers under the banner of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement began the first anti-apartheid boycott of a US company by organizing against their employer’s complicity in South African apartheid.
