service. >> weeknights this month for petri book tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight congressional biographies and memoirs, senator john mccain former speechwriter and aid market shares his thoughts on the life of the late senator. then time magazine national political correspondent molly discusses the career of house speaker nancy pelosi and later florida republican representative matt gaetz on how to move the populist movement forward in america, that start to 8:30 p.m. eastern. enjoy book tv this week and every weekend on c-span2. >> good afternoon i am president of the american enterprise institute and it's my great pleasure to welcome to this afternoon's conversation with john maggie, he is the cofounder

and ceo of whole foods market in the cofounder of the nonprofit conscious capitalism and were here today to talk about new books conscious leadership elevating humanity through business. john i cannot think of a better guess to have on thanksgiving week then you and it's a pleasure to have you, welcome to our discussion this afternoon. >> thank you robert, thank you for robbing me on the show. i loved your book and i recommend the book because i'm almost 18 months into my term as ceo of a.i. and as a been a ceo in my previous businesses, it is was good to be reminded of what makes effective leadership work in any institution of any size, you have a lot of great lessons about how to be a good leader and what it has to do with having a purpose and lead with love and another has innovation and integrity but i want to ask you all of these lessons that

are important what do you think is the most important, what do you think you rely on as your go to attribute that made you so successful? >> the first chapter in the book is called put it first, i guess i better put it first. >> the purpose part is important because you seem to address, i want you to address to her listeners why you think it's true that the profit firms that are out to make money and develop a profit and pay shareholders, they are most successful when they see a higher purpose, give us a sense of that. >> this is a single biggest misunderstanding of business and capitalism and until we get this corrected capitalism is always going to be sustained and criticized and attacked, it will be attacked for his motivations

because his motivations are seen in purity, and of course business has to make money, business says that money or to fail. that does not mean it's it's purpose to make money, metaphor, good way to explain it, my body has to produce red blood cells and if it's not producing red blood cells, i'm going to die, just because i have to make red blood cells does not mean the purpose of my life is to produce red blood cells, is a necessary condition but it does not define who i am, business has to make money or it'll fail, business is really about creating value for other people, that's why it exists to create value for other people and it does a good job creating good value and products and services that his customers want and it will make money for its investors.

but i think because business gets put in this narrow box it's all about money and making money, that is so odd if you think about it if you ask what the purpose of a doctor, doctors make a lot of money but i don't think they say i'm a doctor to make as much money as possible, even if that is true that's not the ethics that stand behind medicine, the ethics behind medicine is to heal people, teachers educate, architects design buildings, engineers conduct things, everyone goes back to some value creation to serve other people. business is the greatest value created in the world by far. we should be talking about in terms of its value creation for its customers in the job it creates for its employees and the residual or effects that

happen when it trades with suppliers who trade for voluntary reasons they are benefiting and prospering as a result and for investors in the larger communities, it creates value for all these constituents and the stakeholders, we do not do ourselves service by trying to explain business purpose is making as much money as possible i think we lose the argument as soon as we say that. liz: in your business, when you start whole foods market, you had a straightforward purpose is what i think i understand to bring better quality, wholesome natural foods to people so they can purchase them, that's a great purpose and you accomplish that and you feel as if you led to more people eating better, more healthy more wholesome food, isn't that something to be a proud of. >> absolutely our state today, let me expand a couple things

first when i started the business with my girlfriend i was 24 and she was 20 we were just a couple of kids really and we didn't have a state of higher purpose we were just passionate about natural organic foods and selling healthy food to people. if you asked me the higher food of whole foods in 1978 and what is that higher purpose, sure, we just want to sell healthy food to people and earn a living and have some fun doing it. guess what those things still also exist of whole foods the fun part 2020 of covid, in general that's who we are but our purpose has deepened in the last 42 years, artificial state of purpose is to nourish people on the planet and that has a lot of different debt to that by how you define, nourish and how you

define people and how they define the planet, they have different layers to them, i do think every business that you admire the most has a higher purpose and unknown hundreds of entrepreneurs in my life, hundreds, very few start their business to get rich. sure they would like to get rich and mostly they are passionate about something. if you read biographies like steve jobs, bill gaetz, elon musk, jeff bezos, they were passionate about something, something they wanted to create, so excited they had to get going on it. they made a lot of money because they created value for other people. >> when you're telling the story of purpose in getting the message of the purpose of a company or an institution or an organization down throughout every member, you tell us story i've never heard of and i think it has a little bit of a story

about president kennedy's administration when he was touring the space center he ran a custodian somebody mopping the floor and cleaning up the place and he said what are you doing in the custodian said i'm helping to get the man on the moon hand i wanted to ask you i struggled with this that a.i., hiding everyone in the building to be united to one purpose, how do you get that message out and you refer to your people who work at whole foods as team members, how do you do that? >> that's a good question and it's not easy, i think the first thing is the leadership, the purpose of themselves if you're not living -- people pay so much more attention to what you do and how you show up in the world than what do you say. in fact we have a very well attuned hypocrisy witnessed the governor's in california or nancy pelosi, when we see

hypocrisy, people are always looking to call me a hypocrite to see, it's very important that i personally and other leaders embody the higher purpose of whole foods you have to walk the talk or just talk. that being said in a company like whole foods we have about 100,000 people that work for the company so were getting the turnover in continued growth and were getting adding on 10 - 20000 new team members every year, how do you keep the purpose, how do you institutionalize and the only way you can do it it has to be part of the orientation, has to be something that you talk about all the time, it's important that the leaders reference what they're doing back to what the higher purpose of the organization, you show up all the time and talk about all the time because you have new people coming in you can never take it

for granted, when you have a very resilient powerful culture, the culture does a lot of the work for you because other people that are there that have internalized the value and purpose of the organization they act like an immune system for the organization, the organization is been around for a long time, they have a culture based on their value and purpose and if it's a good strong culture then you can expect organization to do its work and getting people converted over, if you don't have a good culture one with hypocrisy and people don't think you're living up to it then it will be very effective, the purpose is something, i gave an analogy right now, i have no doubt in my mind that the united states has a higher purpose, it has been and is there in the declaration, independent and is there in our bill of rights and yet it's not

being taught it's been forgot. a lot of the country no longer resonates with what the founding purpose of america is. i love a.i. and one reason i contribute to a.i. is with love. >> i want to ask about leaning would love, you have a way in

which you encourage a positive collaboration and feedback from one worker to another can you tell us a little bit about that, yet meeting, tell us about that. >> first i'll say love is often times not associated with corporations which in fact are seen as heartless it's part of the image problem we have in the world is due to the metaphors that we have about businesses in hypercompetitive and to explain business and we use competitive sports metaphors to explain business. and where you're at war there's no place for love so we checked it at the door, we said we have a thanksgiving, you can expect love, christmas time, but check it out the door when you come to work because we are at war,

we've got to win. that's very unfortunate because love is not weak which many people associated with is not just a feminine virtue is a masculine virtue and love is a route that holds the organization together, if you give two things to people than the love your organization in the state with a decade after decade after decade, and has very low turnover one of the first things amazon noticed, a lot of people that worked there for more than 20 years and the reason why if you give people purpose and you give people a sense that they are cared about and loved then that's what people want they want purposely in love if you can be both of those desires and needs you will have a great organization. so appreciation is one way you can release love in an organization so this is something whole foods does, if

you have nothing else out of my talk today remember this one thing, if you just injure meetings with appreciation your release love in your organization. every time we have a meeting we wrap it up by doing voluntary appreciations, they are not mandatory, nobody has to do it but what happens needs you and authentic appreciation to someone else he cannot do an authentic appreciation without opening your heart, people know the difference when somebody is saying something then when they're actually feeling that and expressing it from their heart, we need you and authentic appreciation love will flow from your heart and others will pick up on it, in addition it's hard to stay in judgment of someone who is just given ashley click appreciation, if tom is sort of a jerk and tom is there saying how much he appreciates the things i do and he's doing

inauthentic and wish not to sort of sucking up to me then i'm probably going to rethink who tom is and i'm going to look at them with fresh eyes, all tell you stories of whole foods, appreciation has become a big deal with whole foods, with my leadership, i've seen a leadership group, a couple of years ago we were spending so much time doing appreciation at the end of the meetings we had to limit the number of appreciations and we said we can appreciate everybody on the team, were gonna limit you to three appreciations and that still took too long, we said young one appreciation make it count and if you have other appreciations, good but do them outside of this meeting so we can get our appreciation with one to about 30 minutes which i would probably run out of time

but try it is very powerful and i had other organizations of other entrepreneurs in co telling me we started doing appreciations everything changed after that. >> you mentioned in our conversation already the fact that you guys have merged with amazon, quite remarkable coming together to iconic american companies and i wanted you to tell us a little about that and whether it's intention and i also wanted to point out another story in the book how jeff bezos, i didn't tell this eith either, when he had meetings he always hundred 52 for customer and the customer is always represented, do i have that right? and tell us about the amazon whole foods market merger. >> the anti-chai and teacher pae amazon story whether they still actively do that, i'm not sure but as part of the amazon story. it is probably based on real

time stuff that happens. one way to think about a merger between two large companies and whole foods was part of a company when amazon bought us, it's a little bit like a marriage and i say that because you're coming together voluntarily through mutual gain and benefits and hopefully because you admire the other person, i use the metaphor like a whirlwind romance, i told that story and at the same time i won't retell the story, when you get married in most the people

visit me, you, us, we all have to be healthy in bothell are core values, we have to be whole foods, unique special culture amazon has respected that our culture is evolving but not because amazon is cramming things down our throat it's because were adopting amazonian processes that are influencing us, i'll give you one example whole foods previously a merger we were more intuitive in our decision-making and amazon is very data-driven in their decision-making process, so a lot of times would talk to amazon and give our opinions and

theories and they would say show with the data, were not going to make this decision unless you show us the data. and then they write up a six pager to submit your arguments with data supported it, if you do a good job at that, then you will get the decision that you want and if you don't do a good job you will be sent back to a drawing board and told no, whole foods has began to think more that way, more data-driven in our decision-making and that's a positive thing, still have intuition in our entrepreneurial take on things that were more data-driven. , how is the merger going, it's going pretty well because whole foods is evolving, amazon thinks long-term and were able to make three in our fourth price reduction something that our company badly needed to do. amazon has added a lot of cool

technologies and i go through the book and talk about how it's been a win for everyone of our stakeholders, our customers through lower prices, our team members, amazon after the merger increased $15 an hour which basically, yet increase everybody else's pay seattle level everybody up, that was very expensive, we counted the cost amazon, the first years would cost $215 million, are you sure you want to do that and they did and that was great for team members, that's about 90000 people, 85000 got a raise in pay. they were pretty excited about that. one of our team members went to our suppliers, a lot of suppliers started selling to amazon they were doing that before, greater distribution, for our investors from the time we began to talk in amazon to win the deal closed they got a 4 billion-dollar increase in evaluation, that was a win for

them and a win for all the community aspects as well, filling after pete and all the things were doing in our community amazon has supported that not tried to clamp that at all and added additional donations in some cases, win, win, win. >> 's is generally not only your situation but about the potential thing the impact of size, large-size, is a harder to lead the way that you want to lead? >> the biggest challenge as a result of the merger -- amazon is probably one or two or three, one of the top three companies in the world that gets scrutinized, everything that they do is under a microscope, whole foods we were big but now everything that we do is under the microscope, that is pretty bizarre and we also have to think about anything we say or

do we don't want that to negatively impact amazon, of course amazon -- what is interesting i was talking to the guy every portrait amazon and he said -- he's using my metaphor of marriage, when you married into this family, you have a bunch of in-laws and some of them -- some people don't like the in-laws too much and you have to live without because you're part of the family and i thought that was a very clever way of putting it that when people are mad at amazon they're mad whole foods and vice versa. that is different being under the microscope so closely over time, to be guarded to a little bit about what i say an interview because somebody will hear somewhere in the media could do a headline out of it so i have to be careful i don't want any headline showing up. >> speak freely with us. but i understand.

in the book you have an appendix that you call cultural intelligence, now were going to shift from your company and leadership of companies in a minute but i want to ask about this in the effort to get what your view of where we are as a country and you talk about three kinds of cultural intelligence in traditional, the modern and the progressive and traditional is the old rule-based focused on faith and church in modern is the liberals, liberal america and open society believes in science and change in progressive has a little step further but the mild authoritarian bend and post progressive culture, can you tell us a little bit about what that is because it looked like

the divide and something that gets us past the division that is plaguing america. maybe i am wrong. >> you are right this is a good framework and those of you interestininterested we have anx in the book that goes into detail about this and chances are the authors might write a book about this. >> it looked like you were laying the seed for something bigger later. >> we have a book called conscious america and we could dive into this deeper but to understand the united states if you think about in terms of worldviews and there's three dominant worldviews in america, the first is a more traditional worldview which is based on faith, family and the country in its traditional values about religion, family, it all comes

back to the constitution, the declaration of independence. >> very a.i., were comfortable and that we hope. >> and the heroes you might get in traditional would be like ronald reagan and weston churchill and william buckley, people like that. so the modernist worldview, a traditional worldview would have a lot more belief in truth through revelation through faith, the modernist is much more scientific, the enlightenment of progress through science, through reason, through capitalism and if you think about we estimate about 30% of the population of the united states is traditional and

that's their anchor and 50% is anchored in modernism, some examples are not under modernist, thomas jefferson, ben franklin in madison, john f. kennedy, einstein, edison, and freedman is a type of modernist. and guys like bill gaetz is another strong modernist, the progressives which make up 20% of the population that we estimate, each of these comes out and as the world evolves, they partly reject the worldview that became before them, modernism rejected faith, a rejected religion largely to many atheists they believe in science, they do not believe in scripture or the revelation or things like that, part of them there is a rejection of what comes before, but you have this

for alignment between traditionalist ethics and modernist science that drove america for many, many decades. and then it comes about because there's flaws are failures in the previous worldviews, modernism did not completely realize, someone that takes progress and gives them is the limitations of identity and the environmental movement has come out of that because modernism producing economic progress, externalities that come out of that that can negatively affect the environment so people that are aggressive tend of strong environmental views, we know -- potentially this year in the last few years we had antiracism movement which is very progressive, the whole ideology

is a progressive nine set and arguing america is inconsistent with its founding value of the quality and we have not done enough job in overcoming racism, having lucidity in diversity, that is obviously a media loss, i see we made a lot of progress in america but we still have some problems, that helps motivate it, i would say the progressive view is also pretty global list in the sense is very concerned about inequality, suffering by any place in the world, there is a strong anti-modernist streak to progressivism as well, distrust

of science excepted and serves ideology and the mistrust of progress. >> they don't like capitalism. >> that's right, there's a rejection of capitalism and there is an element of socialism, and antimodern streak to it. those are the three we got 30% traditionalist, 30% modernist and 20% progressives, because they dominate academia, hollywood and the media, punched way above their weight class in terms of actual numbers, that is a cultural war, we have the three worldviews struggling with each other, how are they going to move past this and the authors argue we have to go post progressive in the essence of post-progressivism is to recognize all three of the worldviews have dignities and

disasters, there is good things about things and what we have to do is honor the good things in each of the worldviews. for example we have to recognize it a lot of the progressives insights are important and they should not go away but we can't throughout capitalism and replace it with socialism, it is been tried 42 times in the last 100 years and 42 failures, does not work the wrong way, we have key capitalism and conscious capitalism, we need leadership which is capitalism but done in a much more conscious way take into account the higher purpose stakeholders, human foraging and done in a very conscious way. we need to take the best of all these worldviews and make sure the very bad things that we can recognize bad things, bad things might be the disasters in a

traditional worldview are racism, the bigotry, sexism, homophobia, accusation sometimes of traditional values, modernist we can recognize that sometimes can be captured by special interest that it can be in different and elitist, it can be uncaring so to speak. >> materialistic. >> overly materialistic and we look at the disasters and progressivism, anti-modernism, reversed patriotism were no longer patriotic about america is the worst country that's ever existed. >> very authoritarian. >> it can be self-righteous, telling everybody, criticizing and canceling people out with different views, we clearly see a lot of disasters for progressivism because there on display. but also the beauty of

progressivism that we need to integrate to go forward in a healthy way so if america is going to get to the next place we need to integrate the best of these worldviews and minimize the worst of these worldviews, we would call that post-progressivism and call it the integral worldview. >> i think it's fascinating and i'm encouraged for you to keep that going bc that divide all the time and i wanted to ask you where you see it in your store, if you look at the map of america in the election and the red blue thing, rural urban divide in the elites versus the non-elites, you have stores in both kinds of america and you have workers and customers in both kinds of america and i just wondered from your perspective after all these years of being right in the middle of that, is that divide pronounced as difficult and painful as it

looks or do we exaggerate because of the media attention and get. >> i think there's a big divide, 2020 has been a terrible year because of covid and never bn locked up and people getting lonely and angry and frustrated and people losing their jobs and their business is failing, it's people on edge, you saw the riots and the number of stores and a been damaged we were damaged as a couple of nights ago in portland a couple of her stores were damaged and that's happened 15 or 20 of her stores have suffered damage during the peaceful protest. so we have our team members, we had a big controversial this summer about dress code, whole foods has always had we don't want you -- we want you to wea

wear -- we don't want you to promote what your political causes are weatherby black lives matter or make america great again or whatever it is, check it out the door we want you to be serving our customers and offering politics in the stores, that has been controversial we had a blowup last week because we did not want our canadian team members to wear poppies and we actually had the congress or the legislature canada condemn whole foods market for telling people they wanted to wear official company dress, whole foods when you get the government threatening to shut you down you will change your dress code that's what we did for canada, i wonder if that would happen if amazon was not the owner of whole foods i'm not sure it would've, everything magnified because of the amazon

connection. >> that is so unfortunate and really troubling in news about the services of your stores, it seems to me, are you eager to be more active in portland, i'm from new york and we know protest and disturbances, under the period of time that i worked there we did believe in a certain kind of order in respect of property, is not lost? in that community? >> is being challenged to put it that way, here's the thing we are grocers, we have to do that, our team members have to be safe, we've had stores broken into and we get quick construction, chicago and new york and seattle and portland and oakland and several other

cities as well we had disturbances and protocols in place, protector team members that is far more important than property we have team members run out the back door, some of these people break into the stores in common with baseball bats and they start bringing the cash registers and going into the wine department and getting wine bottles and being destructive, we need peace, commerce is based on peace, rule of law, i think the rule of law has been challenged a little bit and being challenged, were in a rocky place in america right now and were defunding the police and a lot of communities so it's harder to do business, we have to hire a lot more security guards.

>> speaking of harder to do business, innovation and startup culture in america this is a question were getting from her audience, do you think you can do what you did all those years ago as easily or is a restriction on her ability to start a business, grow a business, be free to establish a really successful enterprise, do you feel that is lost? >> it's a good question i don't really know because i've been doing much reporting to the heirs and is pretty easy to start a business in 1978, i just opened the door for business one day and guess what the government bureaucrats came around and said where's your help department certificate and i said do we need one of those, where is your building permit, they came around but did not shut us down they just said you have to get that, we had to pay a fee.

>> you've always focused on your purpose, you tell a lot of stories about business people who kept focusing on what they wanted to achieve and they ran into roadblocks and they kept their eye on that and they ultimately got through them. >> business people have to constantly intimate around bureaucracy and stupid rules and figure out ways so they can stay in business, the whole history of business and one way. you need rules and regulations in law sewer stores are not broken into and looted all the time you need police, on the other hand you could overly regulate business so it's hard to do business in the whole society becomes a less wealthy and less prosperous. >> i want to go back to the book i really like the book it's great lessons for leaders, one of the things that i love about it you don't always tell through

your story you tell the story of 100 other business people who started businesses and led with these values, i guess i wanted to ask what your sense, is it your sense that these kinds of leadership values are on the rise or their more prevalent then you realize or do you think you're fighting a pill against the culture that needs to be changed dramatically. >> is evolving and needs to evolve otherwise the socialist are going to take over is how i see it, that is the path of poverty they talk about trickle-down wealth but socialism is trickled up property, that is my fear that the marxist -- the academic community is generally the hospital of the business.

it always has been this is not new, you will see that all the minority groups that are business people in a been persecuted, the jews in the west and the chinese in the east are the two best examples. , for declares state of the intellectuals and the clergy, the boys despise business as what tradesmen do, they're making a profit, their terrible people and they're not gentlem gentlemen, you study european history and even if you weren't jewish and be called a jew, that was an attack of a business culture in a way. >> now the universities and we go through that there's so

progressive and anticapitalism and when i go to university for example sometimes i get hecklers and sometimes they disinvited me but more often i watch the students for tickly they love the message, you can do well and you could be prosperous and you can fulfill a higher purpose, that is music to their ears. the professors are very skeptical, their arms are crossed and they want to argue with me about it. , one of the interesting things about business schools, who teaches the medical schools, who are the teachers, the doctors. who teaches in law schools. >> former lawyers. >> who teaches a business schools. >> businessmen. >> nonbusiness people, intellectuals teach, intellectuals who have never been in business at all. it is very interesting and you

don't understand business and don't critically understand entrepreneurship and can often times be hostile towards everything they are teaching. that is a particular challenge. >> -- >> 100,000. >> 100,000 people with jobs, that is valuable, those are livelihoods and the well-being and pathways up that's a greater contribution to human portioning then universities in some ways, it is tremendous i am a former welfare administrator as a mentioned earlier and i've lived up people providing jobs, that so they counted on when the economy was strong with retail and groceries and industries in low skilled workers that were hiring and that the best thing we can have, let me be clear about it, capitalism i prefer

the word innovation is a, it is the greatest thing in humanity has ever created, if you go back 200 years ago when it was really beginning to pick up steam, 94% of anybody alive on the planet earth will have less than $2 a day, more than 6% earning $2 a day that's in today's dollars, today that's under 10%, the average lifespan 200 years ago is 30 now is 72.6 the advanced country closer to 80 the illiteracy rate 200 years ago or 88%, another 12% and if you read steven pinker's book, you will see documentation of documentation after documentation about how much the world was progressed. it is been scientist and technology with innovation is him as entrepreneurs took a

scientific discovery and operationalize them to make our lives better. it is the greatest thing humanity has ever done, business people are not the drilling of the story there the heroes of the story the entrepreneurs are the ones that create great progress and are universally nullified for the most part if you look at the studies and the polls, people don't trust business, because the motivations are wrong, businesses greedy and selfish and explicated and they only care about making money so it cannot be trusted to corrupt the political culture and fundamentally a bad thing. that's why we see this move toward socialism because capitalism may see it corrupt, that is wrong capitalism is a greatest thing humanity has ever gone, we are told and we welcome enemies of capitalism the put out a narrative about us that is wrong, inaccurate and doing tremendous damage to the minds

of young people, we have to counter that, conscious leadership is to countered. >> i think you're right and i think we have to counter, a victim of our success when things go bad if socialist policies take over and not the market bun employment goes down to where it's been in the past and people are long-term unemployed people were realize the benefit of the growing and prosperous economy. >> they may not realize it. the reality is what we done the last 200 years has never happened before, humanity for the most part has very slow progress that is because business people basically soul regulated that the genie never got out of the bottle until the enlightenment in a brief period of time and they went neutral on business. maybe there is some good in th

this, they exploited another trying to stop the genie back in the bottle and if they stuff in the bottle we will begin to regress and not the whole technological civilization collapsed but it will not progress and it will begin to stagnant and decline gradually and if we put in the green new deal policies you will start to see us go backwards. >> you're looking at the longer-term trend, you are not caught up in the selection or crisis but you mention covid a couple of times and i wanted to get your sense of where we are in the communities that your stores serve in your sense of a large employer in a business person in america, and your observation of the pharmaceutical industry and others that have moved so quickly to develop the vaccine, are you feeling we're getting

equalized at the end of the tunnel and things will get better, i hate to ask you a montaigne business question but i thought some people in the grocery business there were some upticks during covid because people were eating at home or, did that not happen in your business? >> our sales were way up, the media reports things wrong for two reason, the first one are transaction count in the stores was down, traffic count is down with her down for two reason, the first whole foods does a lot of business and prepared foods office workers coming in for lunch and with offices closed down during covid we did not get that traffic so the average traffic was down. secondly the online business has tripled. it has gone up 300%. actual sales are way up that is

inaccurately reported, it is done well and i think all supermarket chains have done well because they have made a transition temporarily i believe to not eating out as much and a lot more at home and that's been good for supermarkets, all of them hopefully as walmart, kroger, publix. >> you been able to adjust whatever covid restrictions have been in place and interventions, what is your view on that? >> first of all whole foods has a duty and responsibility to keep our customers and team members safe i am proud of the fact that our company was out in front of a lot of this and partly because amazon pushes hard to be out in front and we've been recognized in a couple of different publications as the safest supermarket in america during covid, most people have copied when whole

foods went out first doing from masks to disinfecting to cleaning the temperature testing, to things like that. and i think we've been very successful. with infections of the number of people that have died their relatively small and with the headlines they are pretty low. but let's make no mistake about it it's been a very difficult year even with our sales. everybody's wearing a mask, everybody social distancing, whole foods is a hugging culture, nobody's hugging, you touch feet with each other, that's not quite the same and people aren't socializing as much, i whole foods made a lot of cultural deposits for a number of years, 2020 has been making withdrawals on those deposits.

>> tumor questions, and your book you say you like to hire within but you don't like to overdo that, the percentage you like, 80%, maybe 75% because you saw bringing people from outside invigorates a culture, tell us a little bit about your hiring and choosing our team members. >> it is a balance between if you only hire from within, if you only promote from within then that enhances the culture in a sense that people know if they work hard they can rise up and get ahead, whole foods has been growing is a great place of opportunity for people since the founding of the company. i have watched people start out and all the way up it does not require college education to make a lot of money at whole foods. you can rise to the rank so to speak. if you're only promote from within you will stagnate because

you're not getting enough new ideas and from outside that helps ferment on the other hand if you promote too many people from the outside then people begin to think you can't get ahead in this company, the way to get ahead is to work somewhere else that you will be more appreciated. , approximately in our leadership about 25% get promoted from outside the company and about 75% were promoted within, whole foods has the right number but that can vary with other companies i think. >> i told you before i wanted to ask you a thanksgiving question related to the underlying business and your passion for wholesome foods, we had a tough year, no doubt about it but we are going to have think giving

we may have gatherings that are smaller than usual but we will still have gatherings with family. but what is a food of a mainstay at your table and you would recommend those putting us together with our menus for thursday. >> i maybe a bad person to ask, i am plant-based, i am begin. >> i knew that, i would not think you would say turkey but we all eat vegetables, what is your go to fish questioning. >> my go to dish generally is a being stew with a ton of vegetables in it, that is my favorite dish. >> that will be at table on thanksgiving with your family. >> absolutely a lot of beings but a ton of vegetables from sweet potatoes to broccoli, cauliflower to okra, whatever

veggies are in season. >> i hope you have a great thanksgiving and thank you for all that you have done and thank you for your book and your guidance in your leadership and for participating in this conversation. do you have any final words or anything also we missed that you want to say? i like to give people that chance if they feel there is a message they want to convey. >> i just want to convey a message of hope that america has gone through a difficult time and were not nearly through it and i can't give you short-term hope but i'm a student of american history and we have faced bigger challenges than this one and we stumbled our way through it and we have gotten through it and i think we will get through this one to, maybe it's going to take a few years,

maybe longer, i do think america has a great capacity to renew itself and sometimes we have our backs against the walls and were forced to make changes, were forced to make reformations. and there is a great underlying love of the country by americans, i think we seen in this election cycle, and very helpful about the teacher even if none not for tickly hopeful of the short-term future. i think a year from now we will be past it and a lot of our normal behaviors will be returning which is going to be a good thing, stop being so scared. >> that is important you gotta live, go forward and we are going to get through covid. thank you for doing this, we really appreciate. >> thank you to a.i., your great institution and i'm proud to support it. >> thank you very much. >> you are watching c-span2 your unfiltered view of government,

c-span2 is created by america's television company and brought to you by the television companies who provide c-span2 to viewers as a public service. >> weeknight this month were featuring book tv programs is a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight will look at congressional biographies and memoirs. senator john mccain former spieth grider and aid shares his thought on the life of the late senator prete time magazine national political correspondent discusses the career of house speaker nancy pelosi. later florida a republican representative matt gaetz on how to remove the populist movement forward in america. that starts at 8:30 p.m. eastern. enjoy the tv this week and every weekend on c-span2.