Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It was great. John was on a podcast recently and I think it was NPR’s How I Built This. He said that he called it that and they were sort of hoping that Safeway would sue them because then it would be like free publicity, but they were so small and insignificant that Safeway didn’t even notice. I think I had heard in the past that Whole Foods is this Texas owned company and it’s just shocking. Growing up, we got one in Ohio, I remember thinking like “Oh, this is probably something like San Francisco.” Like, where are they eating like this and where would there be like a hippie commune that would inspire this and keep Austin weird, but shocking that it was in Texas to me. Well, I mean, as we all know Austin, stereotypes about it are not always true but Austin is definitely a hippie mecca and was in the 70’s even more so. So Mackey kind of basically goes on. He’s still the CEO of Whole Foods many years later, will continue to be under Amazon, it was announced. But he’s basically like the Steve Jobs of grocery stores. So he dropped out of UT to start the company and he talks about kind of when he was at UT, he sort of had this very Jobs-like experience, you know, like Jobs had at Reed in Portland when he was there for a semester. Mackey kind of didn’t like the structure of college and having to have a major and so he just decided he was going to bum around and take whatever classes interested him, and he ended up...…

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