0:00

LinkedIn Presents. I'm

0:06

Rufus Griskim, and this is the next

0:08

big idea. Today,

0:10

why aging is a superpower.

0:32

I don't know how old you are. If

0:34

I did, what would that tell me about you? If

0:37

you're under a certain age, would I not take

0:39

you seriously? If you're over

0:42

a certain age, would I assume that

0:44

you're obsolescent, a walking fax

0:46

machine? I am 56 years old.

0:50

To be honest with you, I'm not sure how

0:52

to feel about that. I have

0:54

been for most of my life, unfazed by

0:56

the aging process. Now I'm

0:58

teetering on the brink of 57, which

1:01

in turn is right next to

1:03

58, which is basically 60. That's

1:06

an adjustment for me. 60

1:09

sounds old to me, and I see

1:11

it. I see it in the graying

1:13

hair, wrinkles, sunspots, and in the humility,

1:16

the oddly calm acceptance I seem

1:18

to have of my relative smallness

1:20

in the cosmos. And

1:24

yet, at the same time, I

1:26

feel frisky, revved up, as energetic

1:28

as I've ever felt, like

1:31

I have mountains to move, worlds

1:33

to change, freak flags to fly.

1:36

No matter how old you are, you're probably

1:38

going through some version of this, a

1:41

sense of periodic surprise at the passage

1:43

of time, a recalibration

1:45

and acknowledgement of change, but

1:48

maybe at the same time, a defiance

1:50

of it, a resistance to being pigeonholed.

1:53

Our guest today, Chip Conley, describes this

1:56

experience as age fluidity, the state of

1:58

being all the ages. you've ever

2:00

been and will be at the same

2:02

time. He sees it not

2:05

as a state of confusion, but rather

2:07

as a choice not to be limited

2:09

by a set of outdated associations we

2:11

have with chronological age. Chip

2:13

points out that we are collectively in

2:15

a process of redefining what midlife is.

2:19

Rather than a word immediately followed by crisis,

2:21

as it is in many of our minds,

2:23

Chip sees it as a transition, sometimes

2:26

challenging, to what, for

2:28

many, is the most gratifying phase of

2:30

our lives. Chip knows

2:32

something about life transitions. He started a boutique

2:35

hotel chain in his 20s, sold

2:37

it in his 40s, then joined Airbnb

2:39

in his 50s as their

2:41

in-house modern elder. He

2:43

went on to start the Modern Elder

2:46

Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school.

2:49

Chip is the author of the new book,

2:51

Learning to Love Midlife, 12 Reasons

2:53

Why Life Gets Better with Age, which

2:55

our curator Dan Pink called a

2:58

vital and necessary book, a

3:00

roadmap for the rest of our lives. Such

3:02

a privilege to have Chip Conley with us

3:05

today. The

3:13

LinkedIn Podcast Network is sponsored by TIAA. TIAA

3:17

makes you a retirement promise,

3:19

a promise of a

3:22

guaranteed retirement paycheck for

3:24

life. Learn more at

3:26

tiaa.org backslash promisespayoff. Chip

3:37

Conley, welcome to The Next Big

3:39

Idea. Thank you. Great

3:41

to be here with you, Rufus. I am honored,

3:43

to be honest with you. I love the work

3:45

that you guys are doing. Well,

3:47

thank you. We're so delighted to have you

3:49

here. Chip, I think

3:51

I can say with confidence that

3:54

you are aging right now. I'm

3:56

aging. Everyone listening to us right now

3:59

is aging. I see it

4:01

chip in the nooks and crannies of my

4:03

body. I'm 56 years old. I

4:05

see little bits of my father in these

4:07

corners. I see spider veins

4:09

in my ankles and old person

4:11

freckles on my arms and hands. I

4:15

think most of us have some mixed feelings about

4:17

this aging process. I think a

4:19

lot of us are in denial, but

4:22

you've gone on record as being

4:24

pro-aging. You're in favor of this

4:26

process. Why are you

4:28

pro-aging? The reason

4:30

I suggest that I'm pro-aging and I said

4:32

it on the TED stage last year and

4:34

got quite an applause for it, which is

4:37

interesting amongst all the biohackers at a TED

4:39

conference. Right. The reason

4:41

I think it resonates is because there

4:44

are many playing fields upon which we

4:46

live our lives. The one

4:48

that you've pointed out at the start of the

4:50

show is the physical one.

4:52

And the physical playing field actually does

4:55

get worse with age. Six

4:57

packs gets more expensive as you get older. And

5:00

maintaining one, you know what I mean, with time

5:02

and energy. I don't

5:04

know how to do it actually, if you have ideas about it.

5:07

I never had one. But

5:10

long story short, there's

5:12

not just the physical playing field,

5:15

there's the emotional playing field. Our

5:17

emotional intelligence gets better with age. Spiritually,

5:19

we get more curious. Some

5:22

people say spiritual intelligence grows with age.

5:24

Wisdom can grow with age. How we connect

5:26

with other people can grow with age. And

5:28

actually certain parts of our brain. Now we

5:30

know a lot of things that don't get

5:32

better with age, with the brain. Short

5:35

term memory and we've seen our

5:37

president mess up a few words lately as

5:39

well as leading candidates from the Republicans.

5:41

So as we get older,

5:43

certain parts of our brain get worse. But

5:45

actually other parts get better. So crystallized intelligence,

5:47

as Arthur Brooks quite

5:50

popularized. Yes, yes. And

5:52

I think he was on your show. He was, yes

5:54

he was. So there are a lot of things

5:56

that get better with age. But society

5:58

in general. is going to convince

6:00

you that almost everything gets

6:02

worse with age when in fact,

6:05

the U curve of happiness research shows that actually

6:07

we get happier with age as well after

6:10

a low point between about age 45 and 50 on average. Your

6:14

mileage may vary. I think you say in the book

6:16

that young people on average

6:18

overestimate how happy they'll be in five

6:20

years. Older people on average underestimate how

6:22

happy they'll be in five years. That's

6:24

true. So we have a problem

6:26

with expectation management and I think part of

6:28

why you started the modern elder academy as

6:31

I understand it is that we need to

6:33

get together and help each other

6:35

through these periods, these kind of

6:37

transitions in our lives. Yeah, do you

6:39

mind if I talk a little bit about my story? It

6:41

is, wonderful. I was a boutique hotelier,

6:43

one of the first in the US in my

6:46

mid 20s started a company called Juvada V, based

6:48

in San Francisco, created 52 boutique

6:50

hotels over the next 24 years. I loved

6:52

it till I hated it. In my late 40s,

6:54

pretty much everything that could go wrong was going wrong.

6:57

I did not know about the Euchar of Happiness. I did not

6:59

know, I was right there at the worst time in

7:01

life satisfaction for adults. But

7:05

basically each part of my life

7:07

was sort of crumbling. And I

7:09

got through it, I had an NDE, I died and

7:11

went to the other side and came

7:14

back. Fortunately paramedics brought me back with the paddles

7:16

because I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.

7:18

Oh my gosh. How old were you? I was

7:20

47, 47. During

7:23

that time I lost five male friends

7:25

to suicide. Ages

7:28

42 to 52. This is all during the Great Recession.

7:30

And so I note to self,

7:33

like, okay, this midlife thing, it

7:35

sucks. Now I understand the

7:38

old trope, the midlife crisis. And

7:41

then I went into my 50s, I basically did

7:43

what we at MEA, at the Modern

7:45

Elder Academy, call the great midlife edit. I

7:48

really chose to edit a

7:50

lot of things out of my life that weren't

7:52

serving me very well. And some of

7:54

them were mindsets, some of them were internal mindsets

7:57

and belief systems, but sometimes they're external

7:59

as well. And I got

8:01

into my 50s and like, whoa, I sold my

8:03

boutique hotel company at the bottom of the Great

8:05

Recession. It's now a Hyatt brand. And

8:09

in my early 50s, I had some time and space

8:11

for the first time in a long time. And

8:14

I experienced what Mary Catherine Bates in

8:16

the academic calls a midlife atrium, where

8:19

I had the time and space to

8:22

reflect upon what I

8:24

wanted to do, how I wanted to consciously curate the

8:26

rest of my life. And

8:28

out of the blue at age 52, I got a

8:30

call from Brian Chesky, the co-founder

8:32

and CEO of Airbnb. His

8:35

first line to me on a cell phone

8:38

call was, how would you like to help

8:40

us democratize hospitality? And

8:42

being a longtime hotelier, I was like, okay, well, that's

8:44

a bold first question. Who the

8:46

heck are you? And

8:48

I didn't know much about Airbnb at the time. This was over

8:50

11 years ago. And I joined

8:52

in the rest of his history. I was

8:54

sort of like the person, the modern elder as

8:57

they called me, but I was like the in-house

8:59

mentor to the founders. And

9:02

I learned like, wow, I love my 50s. Didn't

9:05

like my late 40s, if I can ask my

9:07

40s, but I just loved my 50s on many,

9:09

many levels. And

9:11

that's when I started getting curious about midlife. Maybe

9:14

midlife is not a crisis. Maybe it's a chrysalis.

9:17

The magical metamorphosis of

9:19

the caterpillar to the butterfly.

9:22

The midlife for the butterfly is the chrysalis. I

9:24

love this. And so in some ways, the way

9:26

I look at it now, I mean, it's a

9:28

very simplified version, but in our

9:30

20s, 30s and 40s, we're like a caterpillar.

9:32

We're consuming and producing. And then

9:35

in midlife for the caterpillar, it

9:37

goes into this dark and kooey time. Yes, it

9:39

feels like a crisis, but it's

9:41

actually where the magic and transformation happen.

9:44

And this can be a really dark part of the

9:46

journey. If we look at why

9:48

is it that 45 to 50 on

9:51

average is the hardest time of adulthood,

9:54

there are a lot of reasons for it.

9:56

Midlife is when you start to come face

9:58

to face with mortality, maybe be... because of

10:00

your parents, maybe because of friends

10:02

or family members, maybe your own

10:04

health diagnoses. That's one thing. During

10:08

our 20s, 30s, and 40s, we've built

10:10

up a bunch of expectations and hopes

10:12

and dreams. And by

10:14

our mid 40s, we can realize we're

10:16

not going to become mayor of New York City, or

10:18

we're not going to win a Pulitzer

10:20

Prize, or we didn't marry our soulmate. So

10:23

you sort of can see the future, and

10:25

it isn't like you thought it was going

10:27

to be. And so I can keep

10:29

going, but I mean, the list is pretty long. Yeah,

10:32

it's a tough time. And

10:34

can we take a little deeper, Chevita, your

10:36

experience? Because you were an

10:39

overachiever, right? You

10:42

were a very focused, driven, ambitious young

10:44

man. You went to Stanford. You

10:46

start this boutique hotel chain in your

10:48

early 20s. You

10:51

describe yourself as an admiration addict.

10:54

I'm interested to dig a little deeper into what your

10:56

young experience was like. I mean, I'm sure it's a

10:58

time of your life that you really appreciate

11:01

and have a lot of fond

11:03

memories from, but also exhausting, and

11:06

it landed you in this place of just

11:08

being worn out, I guess. We all

11:10

have our personality types and archetypes of how we

11:13

show up in the world. And

11:15

I am the oldest and only

11:17

son of two firstborn. And

11:20

so I'm a firstborn. Me too, yeah. Yeah,

11:23

and so there's a certain amount of responsibility

11:25

that comes with that. And as the only

11:27

son, and I'm Stephen Townsend Connolly Jr., chip

11:29

off the old block. There's

11:32

an element of like, I was supposed to be a better version

11:34

of my father. I

11:37

grew up learning that love

11:40

and affection and attention

11:43

came when I achieved. And

11:46

just as an aside, when I was 22 years

11:48

old, I came out as a gay man. Now

11:50

doing that in 1983, when age was on the

11:53

cover of Newsweek was not an easy thing to

11:55

do. I did it living in

11:57

New York and lots of risks attached. I

12:00

was that kid who had girlfriends

12:02

in high school and college, was

12:04

an all-American water polo player who

12:06

was recruited to play at Stanford,

12:08

was in a fraternity. So

12:11

I didn't fit the normal profile of someone who's going to

12:13

come out at age 22 back in that

12:16

era. And so I think

12:18

in many ways I've wove into my persona

12:20

and who I was and who I am,

12:23

this idea that I

12:25

am only as lovable as my

12:27

last achievement and I

12:29

live for admiration.

12:32

And so I think one of the beauties

12:34

of getting older is you can see your

12:36

pattern recognition. You can see your

12:38

shadow side. And I write a little bit about

12:41

this in the book, that if I'm always trying

12:43

to be admired, I'm just packaging

12:45

myself. And I've got

12:47

to be true to who I am. And of course

12:49

at age 22 when I came out, that was not

12:51

easy for especially my father, who is a Marine captain

12:53

in the reserves. And

12:56

my process though, I still

12:59

have admiration and attic built into me. But

13:01

I have a sense of humor and

13:04

I can see it a mile away

13:06

when I'm doing it. And in the

13:08

past, it was a shadow part of me

13:10

that was showing up without

13:13

me conscious of it. So

13:16

that's a big part of growing up. To

13:18

grow up and see yourself be

13:20

a first class noticer of

13:23

qualities about yourself that you want to

13:25

improve and get better about. Yeah. Yeah.

13:29

And when you say that you lost five

13:31

friends to suicide in their 40s, I mean, that's

13:33

kind of an astonishing number. Did

13:35

they have similar paths to your

13:38

own path? You

13:40

were very successful, right? In

13:43

your 20s and 30s, you were

13:45

kind of a star, right? You

13:47

were building what I think became the second

13:49

biggest boutique hotel chain in the country. So

13:52

your life was on the surface

13:54

close to perfect or

13:56

ideal or enviable. back

14:00

on it, how do you think about that kind

14:02

of disconnect between your outward life and your inner

14:04

life? And did you have... How

14:08

dark was that period for you? It was very

14:10

dark. So when I look at

14:12

the five friends who took their

14:14

own lives, and one of them was

14:16

weirdly named Chip, my

14:19

best friend in the world who had the same name I had.

14:21

He was not my best friend, but he was the best friend

14:23

who had my name. But

14:25

he was still one of my 10 or 15 closest

14:27

friends. The variety

14:29

of reasons why was everything

14:32

from entrepreneurs who had failures during

14:34

the Great Recession and

14:36

their sense of identity was way

14:39

too attached to their business card

14:41

to one person who had

14:43

long-term depression issues, another one who probably

14:45

had some substance issues going on that

14:47

was all under the cover and nobody

14:49

knew about it. So that

14:52

was what was going on with all those. And all the men.

14:54

And men are very four times more

14:56

likely than women to do

14:58

what they call successful suicide, which is

15:00

such a terrible term. A successful suicide

15:02

is actually dying in the process. So

15:05

men do it more often, and it's

15:07

partly because men are so

15:09

much less socialized

15:11

to address vulnerabilities and

15:13

what's going on in their lives. For

15:16

me personally, because my life was just sort

15:18

of crumbling around me, both

15:21

in terms of my relationship, I have an

15:23

African-American foster son who was an adult at

15:25

that point, who was wrongfully going to prison.

15:27

I was running a company I

15:29

didn't want to run anymore and running out

15:31

of cash and long-term

15:34

relationship ending. And

15:36

so for me, I

15:38

definitely had some suicide ideation and literally

15:41

was on my way to the

15:43

bridge to Golden Gate Bridge to jump off and

15:45

had a conversation with my best friend, Vanda. And

15:48

Aretha Franklin came on the radio

15:50

singing Amazing Grace while I was talking

15:52

to her. It's like, okay, I get it.

15:55

Thank you for this, John. I'm not supposed to actually

15:58

be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I

16:00

got to the other side of that through

16:02

social support and love. But

16:06

what I took away from it was like, my God,

16:08

we have no schools or tools or

16:11

rites of passage or rituals in

16:13

midlife. You know, adolescence is something we're very

16:15

familiar with, although the word really only got

16:17

popular as in 1904. We

16:20

know that it's a liminal space

16:22

between childhood and adulthood, and

16:24

you're going through all kinds of transitions emotionally,

16:27

physically, hormonally, identity-wise.

16:32

And so we have all kinds

16:34

of structures to help support people

16:36

during that time. But middle essence,

16:38

which is a word that describes

16:40

the midlife transition that are hormonal,

16:42

emotional, physical, and identity, is

16:45

a life that we aren't familiar with. Middle

16:47

essence is a word that hasn't been popularized,

16:50

and yet it's a time when we're going through a ton of

16:52

transitions. But we do not have the

16:54

pure group support in terms of

16:56

the social infrastructure, nor do

16:58

we even have a roadmap for people to

17:01

understand what the heck they're going through. And

17:03

so part of the reason that I

17:06

created MEA was because I

17:08

really wanted to help create

17:10

the world's first midlife wisdom school,

17:12

a place where people could have

17:14

that midlife atrium, reflect upon what's

17:16

next for themselves, and reframe

17:18

your relationship with aging, as Becca Levy

17:20

has shown at Yale, when a person

17:23

actually shifts their mindset on aging from

17:25

a negative to a positive, they gain

17:27

seven and a half years of additional

17:29

life. And so I wanted to

17:31

be a living laboratory for her work. I

17:33

find it kind of fascinating that we

17:36

have all this structure around children and

17:38

school and counselors and sports

17:40

programs and psychologists and all this, like,

17:42

all this structure. And then you graduate

17:44

from college and it's like, okay, all

17:46

done, you're out of the oven. Now

17:48

off you go. And

17:52

we have some very effective

17:54

institutions like AA for

17:56

people who are recovering from addiction or YPO

17:58

for people who are not. Built in

18:00

a wildly successful start ups. but most

18:02

people don't have these institutions in their

18:05

lives and we used to have them

18:07

a little bit. I mean yes, right,

18:09

Usher we we Rotary. We have a

18:11

search and Rotary clubs and any of

18:13

the Robert Putnam Bob atoms in a

18:15

bowling alone for them now. And that's

18:18

just how these social infrastructure of our

18:20

lives has eroded. and so. And and

18:22

I must be closely clear though, like

18:24

in the nineteen fifties of your and

18:26

Rotary, you weren't necessary talking about. You

18:28

know the things that are problematic. In

18:30

your life either you every was

18:32

served trying to ask look like

18:34

in other. Keeping up with the

18:36

joneses so thrive on some reason

18:38

I think loses that we haven't

18:40

figured this out is because they're

18:42

three life stages that emerged in

18:45

the twentieth century and to the

18:47

three have gotten a ton of

18:49

attention because this has got popularized earlier.

18:51

So it's adolescence we talked about

18:53

retirement was serve and nineteen thirties

18:55

phenomenon with Sosa Security. it's Pensions

18:57

a R P and retirement communities

18:59

and. And no doubt retirement

19:01

and adolescence have gotten a lot to

19:03

love, but we haven't made sense of

19:06

midwives and it was really the second

19:08

half of the twentieth century that middle

19:10

I became a saying. but unfortunately I

19:12

got branded as this crisis And then

19:15

I think also when you think about

19:17

adolescence and retirement and the ages as

19:19

people who are young and people who

19:21

are old, there's a sense that they

19:24

need support and love and cheering and

19:26

be known as air is a little

19:28

bit in need whereas. Someone at

19:30

fifty years old who's crying about the

19:32

fact that they are getting divorced and

19:34

De Haas their job and their kids

19:37

are talking to them and their parents

19:39

are in a nursing home? Yeah, no

19:41

yeah, Want to hear that sixty year

19:43

old Years I get a bucket up

19:45

your it's you're an adult like you

19:47

know didn't put your big pants on

19:49

and so what? We Annapolis's a you

19:51

know, soaring middle ice. Be. Suicide

19:53

rate which is more than twice what it

19:55

was in twice as long as high as

19:58

it was in the year Two thousand. Wow,

20:00

wow. Yeah, yeah, I know that's extraordinary and

20:03

and and it's But

20:05

the the flip side it seems to

20:07

me of this pain that so many

20:09

of us experience In

20:12

this kind of dark periods of

20:14

midlife is that it

20:16

it turns out it's an opportunity for

20:19

connection I I love this, you

20:21

know, Susan Cain has this wonderful

20:23

line from bittersweet Whatever pain you

20:25

can't get rid of make that

20:27

your creative offering and and my

20:29

kind of additional adjustment to that would be Make

20:32

it your pathway to connection The

20:36

pain you can't get rid of right because and

20:38

and I think this is what you've done With

20:40

me a with Modern Elders Academy. Yeah,

20:43

right it is to basically say hey

20:46

Let's come together Let's help

20:48

each other's through this period and this has

20:50

been a powerful experience for you hasn't it?

20:53

I mean this has been it's been it's

20:55

been a form of service but

20:57

also a source of awe And

21:00

connection in many ways I started

21:03

me a because of my

21:05

five things Especially

21:07

chip because I wish that something

21:09

like me a had existed for them.

21:11

So yes It

21:13

started six years ago. We've had over 4,000

21:16

people from 47 countries come

21:18

to our Baja campus Which is an

21:20

hour north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific

21:23

Ocean It's quite beautiful and then

21:25

we have a campus opening in Santa Fe, New Mexico

21:27

and a 2,600 acre regenerative

21:29

horse ranching And we've had

21:31

all these people its average age of the people who've comes

21:33

about 55 It's about

21:35

60% women and about 40% men People

21:38

of all races and backgrounds because about

21:40

half of our people are

21:42

on some kind of financial aid So it's

21:44

not just CEOs of tech companies or

21:47

investment bankers, but it's

21:49

social workers and physical therapists and firemen

21:51

So it's really interesting. You have about

21:53

two dozen people in a cohort for

21:55

a week and the level

21:57

of depth of connection is beautiful So

22:01

it is my form of giving back. I did very,

22:03

very well with my career,

22:05

especially the Airbnb part of it. And

22:08

I really wanted to bring to life

22:11

in my life what Eric Erickson, the developmental

22:13

psychologist said, and he said, I am

22:15

what survives me. And I

22:17

really love that. I said to

22:20

do something that feels like, okay, this is going to

22:22

survive me, my books, my school,

22:24

the things I'm doing, the

22:26

mentoring I do with all these folks, I

22:28

love it. And I'm learning. I'm learning as

22:31

much from them, you know, these, the students

22:33

who could join us as they learn

22:35

from me because I am still

22:37

a work in progress myself. The

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off. which

24:00

I think was such an interesting chapter of

24:02

your life. And I think it was your,

24:04

the young leaders of Airbnb

24:06

who gave you the name modern elder,

24:09

right? Yeah. Which initially

24:11

you didn't love, right? Yeah, no. Yeah. And there's

24:13

a lot of people who say, like, Chip, why

24:15

did you ever name your school the Modern Elder

24:17

Academy? Because a lot of people don't want to

24:19

be elders and because it sounds like elderly. But

24:22

they said to me after I'd been there a

24:24

few weeks, like, wow, Chip, we hired you for

24:26

your knowledge. What you really brought was your

24:28

wisdom. You know, you're not just going

24:30

to be mentoring us now and in charge of all of our

24:32

hosts globally, you're in charge of strategy for

24:35

the company because you are our modern elder.

24:37

And I was like, Oh, what are you talking about?

24:39

Like, why are you making fun of my age? And

24:41

they said, well, I'm

24:43

only 50. You were like 50. I was 52. I

24:46

was 52. Which we know is a spring

24:48

chicken, 52. I could tell you was a 56 year

24:50

old. That's a, that's a spring chicken. Yeah,

24:52

I still felt young enough, but the truth was the average age in

24:54

the company was 26. So I was doubly

24:56

average age. And they said, you know, Chip,

24:59

you are a modern elder, but let me tell you

25:01

what a modern elder is. It's someone who's as curious

25:03

as they are wise. And

25:05

when I heard that, I was like, okay,

25:07

the alchemy of curiosity and wisdom, I

25:10

can own that. And so, so yes,

25:13

my time there was fascinating because what

25:15

I realized pretty quickly was, wow,

25:18

I better be curious because I'd

25:20

never worked in a tech company before I was 52 and

25:24

surrounded by people half my age who knew

25:26

a ton more than I did

25:28

around technology. And so while

25:31

I was, you know, helping to run the

25:33

company with the founders, I also needed to

25:35

be the person in the room who was

25:37

often the dumbest and hopefully

25:39

asking great questions. So

25:42

I often called myself a mentor, a mentor

25:44

and an intern at the same time. I

25:46

like that. Oh, that's great. Yeah, because I

25:48

was, I was an intern

25:50

when it came to DQ digital intelligence.

25:52

Right. But I was a mentor when

25:54

it came to EQ, emotional intelligence and

25:56

a bunch of other things. And

25:58

had having this humility, especially

26:01

after having run my own company for 24 years, all of

26:03

a sudden, I'm now in

26:05

a company where I'm double

26:07

the age of everybody. The founders love

26:10

me and they see me as a mentor,

26:12

but I was also reporting to Brian Chesky,

26:15

my mentee, who was 21 years younger than me.

26:18

So how is that going to feel?

26:20

And how does it feel to not

26:22

be the person having my

26:24

face on the cover of magazines? Because my

26:26

job is to make Brian successful. So I

26:29

had to right size my ego in this process.

26:32

And I also think it used to the idea that humility

26:36

and vulnerability is a powerful character

26:40

qualities if you're showing

26:44

up with some other things as well. If

26:46

you're just vulnerable and you don't have a

26:48

lot else to offer, then maybe it's not

26:50

that helpful. But if you have other things

26:52

to offer and you have a vulnerability to

26:54

you, you're really a role

26:56

model for others, especially know-it-alls in tech

26:59

companies, because quite frankly, it's very competitive,

27:01

everybody trying to be the smartest person

27:03

in the room. Yeah, right, right. And

27:05

that's probably part of what that humility

27:08

is probably a service to

27:10

the culture and to the team dynamic.

27:12

And we've learned

27:14

that intergenerational teams that

27:17

age is a form of cognitive diversity, right? And

27:19

we know the groups that are more cognitively diverse

27:22

outperform groups that are less cognitively

27:24

diverse, right? And there have

27:26

been studies on this, right? A bit like

27:28

a BMW and others and Google, right? I

27:30

mean, this is something that we should all,

27:32

we should be doing more of this. You

27:35

know it. I mean, so I'd say, and BMW,

27:37

Google, and there's a bunch of others, but basically

27:40

describe it in a little bit more detail.

27:43

As Arthur Brooks talked about in Strength of

27:45

Strength, you know, you've got food intelligence when

27:47

you're young, you've got a crystallized intelligence when

27:49

you're older. And maybe we

27:51

should share what that means for those who don't

27:53

know. Fluid intelligence means you're

27:55

fast and focused. You're really good at solving problems.

27:58

You tend to do it pretty quickly. And because

28:00

you're so focused, you can

28:02

actually miss peripheral vision. And

28:05

so when you're older, you

28:08

get the peripheral vision. You have systemic

28:11

and holistic thinking. You're able to connect

28:13

the dots. To use a

28:15

specific phrase from Dr. Gene Cohen in

28:17

his book, The Aging Brain, you get

28:19

four-wheel drive of your brain because your

28:21

brain shrinks a little bit. And

28:24

so you move from left brain to right

28:26

brain more adeptly. You're able to

28:28

see things. And so

28:31

to have a team that is full of

28:33

people who are both fast and focused, as

28:36

well as more methodical

28:38

and systemic and

28:40

holistic, you get the

28:42

best of both worlds on a team.

28:44

And so age diversity is finally, after

28:47

all these years, getting some attention in

28:49

the DPI world as a metric

28:52

that needs to be reviewed in companies

28:54

and on teams is how do we

28:56

look at age diversity? So

28:58

Chip, to what degree is midlife

29:00

changing? We've

29:02

had an extension of the human lifespan. And

29:05

I think you say that historically we thought of midlife as 45

29:07

to 65. Now

29:10

it's probably a broader range. Or even 40

29:12

to 60, yeah. Today

29:16

some sociologists look at midlife as 35 to

29:18

75. So

29:21

that's a long marathon. And

29:25

why both earlier and later? Like the

29:27

later side makes perfect sense because we're

29:29

healthier, we're living longer, we're working longer.

29:32

But why is it getting younger too? The reason

29:34

it's getting younger is because some of the qualities

29:36

that used to feel like things that you felt

29:38

in your 40s, feeling

29:40

a little obsolescent, feeling maybe a

29:42

little irrelevant, maybe getting

29:45

disrupted in the workplace are

29:47

happening in people's 30s now. At

29:49

MEA, while the average age is about 55, we've

29:52

had people as young as 25 and as old

29:54

as 88. And I think what's

29:56

weird about that is like, why would a 25 year old be

29:58

coming into the Modern Elder Academy? Well, the

30:01

reason that one-sixth of the people who come

30:03

to MEA are either Millennials or Gen Z

30:06

is because they're really curious

30:08

about wisdom. So in

30:10

an economy that has been so

30:13

knowledge-focused, and now knowledge is

30:15

commoditized through AI and Google, etc.,

30:18

learning how to cultivate and harvest your wisdom,

30:20

which is one of the things we teach

30:22

and help people with at MEA, is a

30:25

quality that you want at any age. And

30:27

so, yes, I think that people are realizing

30:30

at an earlier age that they

30:33

are in midlife, and also

30:36

realizing that they need to figure

30:38

out the tools to make it through midlife.

30:41

We had a guy named Moro Guillen

30:43

on the show who wrote a book

30:45

called Perennials. Yes, I have the book.

30:47

Right, yeah, which I think could be

30:49

very relevant for you. And it's all

30:51

about building a postgenerational society. And

30:54

he makes the case that partly because of this

30:56

combination of expanding lifespan,

30:58

healthspan, as well as this

31:02

incredibly transformative technological change that we're

31:04

all experiencing, which is sort of

31:06

disorienting and disruptive, and maybe why

31:08

a 35-year-old today can feel like

31:10

they're aging out, that

31:13

really we should all be retooling

31:16

every decade or two, going back

31:18

to school, learning new skills, rather

31:22

than thinking of life as sort of a three-chapter

31:24

affair, that maybe it's four,

31:27

five, six, seven chapters, right?

31:30

That we should have cycles of re-educating

31:33

ourselves and re-examining the

31:35

world, and reassessing how we

31:37

can be most useful and most engaged. Yeah,

31:40

you know, it's a great book, and it

31:42

sort of builds on in the book that

31:44

came out a few years ago called The

31:46

Hundred Year Life. And both these

31:49

books talk about sort of the three-stage life. You

31:52

learn until you're 20 or 25, you earn

31:54

until you're 60 or 65, and

31:56

then you adjourn, you retire until

31:58

you die. And that... model, the

32:00

tyranny of that model has

32:02

been broken apart. So we should have more

32:04

episodic lives. We should feel comfortable going back

32:07

and getting a master's at 40, starting

32:09

a business at 50, falling in love again

32:11

and getting remarried at 60. So

32:14

the idea is that, you know, we sort

32:16

of grew up with the game of life,

32:18

that board game that has one basic pathway

32:20

through life. And you got, you had your

32:22

little plastic car and you got extra plastic

32:24

little points in your car. Once

32:26

you got married and you had kids and you

32:29

had your first home and you got your

32:31

first promotion at work and it was

32:33

like one path through life. And today, not

32:36

only are there multiple paths, but there's

32:38

also episodes so that you can actually,

32:40

yeah, you should be able to go

32:43

back and retrain or reeducate. The challenge

32:45

is we haven't really set up society

32:47

for this very well. And the idea

32:49

of taking a midlife atrium or a

32:51

sabbatical is hard. So I think the

32:53

society has to start getting used to

32:56

the idea that, wow, if

32:58

there's college campuses that are actually going

33:00

to, in the next five years,

33:02

go away because colleges and universities are

33:04

ready to be disrupted. There, you know,

33:07

it's, it's, it's as Clay Christensen a

33:09

few years ago said, like 50% of

33:11

the colleges and universities in the United

33:13

States are going to go away. Wow.

33:16

Wouldn't it be interesting if you saw

33:18

a beautiful liberal arts college in, you

33:20

know, Western Massachusetts that actually

33:23

got converted into a midlife gap

33:25

year academy where people go and

33:27

spend a year to reimagine

33:29

and repurpose themselves. So it's, you know,

33:31

what we do, but for a year and that

33:34

they can actually save their funds to do

33:36

that by taking 529 funds, which

33:38

is tax advantage funds for your

33:41

college, kids' college education, you could

33:43

apply that to yourself. So

33:45

I think we almost need a G

33:48

like a GI bill or middle lifers

33:50

to help them stay in

33:52

the workplace longer. And guess what? If we do

33:54

this the right way, we solve

33:57

social security because we have

33:59

a social security. issue of people

34:01

are living longer, but we haven't really

34:03

changed retirement age all that much, and

34:06

we need to do that. I mean, no politician

34:08

wants to say it because it's the third rail

34:11

and the AARP is going to be all after

34:13

you, but the fact is helping people to have

34:15

a midlife pit stop where

34:17

they get refueled with new

34:19

education, new thinking, new perspectives,

34:22

that's a beautiful thing because it might mean that

34:24

people stay in the workplace into

34:26

their mid-70s instead of their early 60s.

34:30

I want to go back to college, Chip. I don't know about you. I

34:32

definitely do a semester or two. And

34:34

Dan Pink has this great line in

34:36

his book about regret. He talks about

34:38

how the number one regret is not

34:40

having done a foreign exchange program or

34:42

a semester abroad. He

34:44

was pitching somebody should start a semester

34:47

abroad. So we could do this in

34:50

Copenhagen or Florence or... But

34:53

no, I see this in our future. And

34:56

of course, part of the analysis is

34:58

recognizing that most people actually have more

35:00

lifespan in front of them than they think, you

35:02

say in the book. And I think this is

35:05

how you open your MEA

35:08

five-day experiences,

35:10

right? Is to do the math and realize

35:12

that actually most

35:14

people have misread the longevity data,

35:16

which says average American male lives

35:19

to 76, but

35:21

actually we have more time than that, right?

35:23

So if you're a 65-year-old and

35:25

you see that the

35:28

average man in the US lives to 76, you think,

35:30

oh my God, I've got less than a dozen years

35:32

left. But the truth is, just because

35:34

you got to 65 means you probably have

35:37

a pretty good chance of getting to 85. So

35:39

we have a pretty poor longevity

35:41

literacy. And

35:43

meaning if we don't really understand how much

35:46

longer we might live, we don't

35:48

save properly. We don't take care of

35:50

our body properly. And

35:52

we may sort of start just

35:54

hanging out as a couch potato because

35:57

the average American retiree watches four seven

35:59

hours of TV a week. That's such

36:01

an astonishing data point. It's really depressing.

36:04

I mean there's some good programming out there but

36:06

not that much. No,

36:09

definitely not. So I think helping people to understand

36:12

that wow you've got a lot more life ahead

36:14

of you. You know the average

36:16

age of people at MEAs 54 to

36:18

55, if the average age they think

36:20

they're gonna live till is 90, most

36:23

of us don't realize that 54 is exactly halfway

36:25

between 18 and 90. So at 54 you have

36:31

as many adult years ahead of you as you have

36:33

behind you and you can think back

36:35

to being 18. It's like wow that's a

36:37

lot of life but most people

36:39

don't think that way and this is why

36:41

you know I think this question of like

36:44

that we like to ask at MEA around

36:47

speaking of regret what is

36:49

it that you wish you'd learned or done

36:51

10 years ago that you know now or

36:53

have done now and then more importantly 10

36:55

years from now what will you regret if

36:57

you don't learn it or do it now.

37:00

It's a really important question. When I was

37:02

57 I asked

37:05

that question myself on 63 now

37:07

and it's part of the reason why I

37:09

started surfing and I started learning

37:11

Spanish, living on a beach in Mexico

37:14

because it was gonna be harder 10

37:16

years from now at 67 than at

37:18

57. And this lifespan math

37:20

and thank you for sharing that that does put a bounce

37:22

in my step was

37:25

you say that when people underestimate their

37:27

lifespans they're less optimistic about the future

37:29

and less open to trying new things.

37:32

One of my favorite details in your

37:34

book is you described this counterclockwise study

37:36

done by Ellen Langer in 1981 at

37:39

Harvard who created a quote living

37:41

time capsule. Do you want to

37:43

share this? It's so cool. She

37:45

took a bunch of people in

37:47

their 70s and mostly in their

37:49

70s and some 80s I think and

37:52

they retrofitted a home

37:55

out in the country such that everything in

37:57

the home was sort of a time capsule

37:59

to the past. us, whether it

38:01

was Elvis Presley music or it was

38:04

sports memorabilia on the wall from a

38:07

different era, etc. And

38:09

for a week, she had these seniors

38:12

living in this home that had

38:15

all of that nostalgia. And

38:18

what happened was, because they

38:20

sort of went back to an era in which

38:22

they were younger, the study

38:24

basically found that the

38:27

psychology of aging was

38:29

that if you can help people to

38:31

feel youthful again, you

38:33

can actually help them

38:35

to live longer. Yeah, you write

38:37

in the book a week later,

38:40

these participants had dramatic improvements in

38:42

their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and

38:44

well-being. And

38:46

it shows how much of this is psychological. How do

38:49

you think of yourself? This is

38:51

also related to the stories that

38:53

we tell ourselves about ourselves matter

38:56

profoundly, don't they? Yeah, and

38:58

I think one of the things that's really interesting about midlife

39:01

is it's like if you are reading

39:03

a novel a quarter of the way through the

39:05

novel, you're not exactly sure all the characters and where

39:08

it's going, but halfway

39:10

through the novel, you've got it. You

39:12

understand where it's going. And that's sort

39:14

of like halfway through life. By halfway

39:16

through life, you can have enough pattern

39:18

recognition of who you are and how

39:20

you've shown up and you've built some

39:23

recognition and wisdom about yourself. The

39:25

understanding your narrative, understanding who you

39:27

are and how you are, allows

39:30

you to have a better sense of the through line of where

39:32

you're going. That is one of

39:34

the gifts of midlife is to be able

39:36

to have enough years behind you to understand

39:40

what you've learned along the way. I

39:42

like to say that your painful

39:45

life lessons are the raw material for

39:47

your future wisdom. The

39:49

longer you've been on the planet, the more

39:52

raw material you have. Now, that doesn't

39:54

necessarily mean that as a 70-year-old, you're

39:56

wiser than a 30-year-old because you may

39:58

have had those life lessons. But

40:00

you didn't metabolize it or digest it in such a

40:02

way to understand, you know what

40:04

you learned along the way So the key there

40:07

is to say how do we help people metabolize

40:09

their wisdom something? I've been doing since age 28

40:12

So for 35 years, so when

40:14

I was 28, I had been running my boutique hotel

40:16

company for two years I was a complete

40:18

imbecile. I think I was running

40:20

a boutique hotel company, but had no background in hotels

40:24

But the hotel got my first hotel got off

40:26

to a good start We ultimately had 52 hotels

40:29

But this first one got to a good

40:31

start and then we had the Loma Prieta earthquake Which

40:33

happened in the Bay Area and the Bay

40:36

Bridge almost, you know part of it fell down and

40:38

so no one was coming to The Bay Area for

40:40

you know, six months and I had one hotel and

40:42

it was empty And so I

40:44

limped into the weekend one one weekend thinking like oh

40:46

my god what am I gonna

40:48

do and I Ended

40:51

up taking a journal off the wall or off

40:53

the bookshelf And I hadn't written in

40:55

it and I wrote on the cover of it my wisdom book and

40:58

I started a practice that I would recommend

41:00

People consider and it's also valuable

41:02

for leadership teams every

41:04

weekend I would make a list of

41:06

some bullet points of what I'd learned that week

41:09

personally or professionally partly

41:12

with the intention of just

41:14

trying to understand what my Life

41:17

lesson has been because again if if

41:19

your life lessons are raw material for future wisdom

41:23

You know being conscious and intentional about it's

41:25

helpful But what if you were to do

41:27

that with a leadership team and I've done this at Joie de

41:29

Ville at Airbnb and at MEA Where

41:31

once a quarter I sit down

41:34

with the our leadership team in

41:36

a normal weekly Session

41:38

maybe an hour or two hour session and

41:41

every person on the team eight or ten of

41:43

us comes together and says that

41:45

here was my biggest lesson of the quarter and Here's

41:48

how it's gonna serve me in the future You

41:51

know wisdom is not taught it shared and so

41:53

the fact that my director of operations

41:55

is talking about something he learned in

41:58

his career I

42:00

can take advantage of that. I can learn from

42:03

him. So long story short is I am

42:06

a big believer in the

42:08

fact we're moving into the wisdom economy because we've

42:11

been in the knowledge economy for 60 or 70

42:13

years and it was Peter Drucker in 1959

42:16

who said the future of the workplace

42:18

is going to be owned by knowledge workers

42:20

and he was right and knowledge

42:22

management as a practice became a thing and I

42:25

believe that wisdom management practices are gonna become

42:28

a thing and and I just think wisdom

42:30

is such an important and scarce quality

42:32

or you know something that we need

42:34

to be focused on it. So Let's

42:37

talk about age fluidity. I love

42:39

this phrase chip. I think

42:42

this is your phrase Well, what

42:44

does it mean to be age fluid? So to be

42:46

age fluid means that you are not defined

42:49

by a chronological age or generation.

42:51

You're all the ages you've ever

42:53

been or will ever be and

42:56

you see chronological age is almost like a

42:58

custom that you can don or take off

43:00

whenever you want. A 30

43:02

year old could say I'm age fluid. I'm an old soul

43:04

and sometimes I feel like I'm 50 or 60 years old

43:07

and that's perfectly fine. So

43:09

age fluid can be applied to anybody

43:11

and yes I like the

43:13

term and yes when I first actually

43:15

started talking about it I went to

43:17

the Google and googled it and I

43:20

found that oh my gosh to the age fluid means

43:22

you're pedophile. That's

43:27

not what I mean and so

43:29

I'm trying to popularize the term and and

43:31

because most people don't know the fact that

43:34

Let's let's take the term back. Let's take

43:36

the term back for the pedophiles. Sorry guys We're

43:38

gonna take this one. This is and and do

43:40

you do you feel age fluid? Oh, I feel

43:43

so age fluid When I

43:45

was at when I was at Airbnb Rufus, I felt

43:48

very age fluid because yes I was older but

43:50

but also people didn't found out like oh chip

43:52

was a founding member of the Burning Man Nonprofit

43:56

and has been in going to Burning Man for

43:58

25 years or chip started rolling Rock and Roll

44:00

Hotel and knows a lot of musicians. In

44:04

some ways, people had a hard time categorizing

44:06

me. I

44:10

think that's, frankly, if you're

44:12

curious and wise, if you're

44:14

that modern elder quality, that

44:16

is the difference between a modern elder

44:18

and a traditional elder. The traditional elder

44:21

of the past had reverence. The modern

44:23

elder has relevance. To

44:25

be relevant means you actually understand

44:28

the context in which you can

44:30

actually offer your curiosity or your wisdom.

44:33

It's the reverence piece that

44:35

leads to the OK Boomer

44:38

perspective, which is like, OK,

44:40

Boomer, you're telling me how the world works. Your

44:43

war stories are not necessarily our wisdom. Thank

44:47

you, and I don't need to listen to you anymore. Totally.

44:50

This really resonates for me because I

44:52

feel both very

44:55

young and also old in

44:57

different ways. I feel

44:59

young in the sense of being excitable and

45:01

curious and kind of revved up. I

45:06

really don't feel, when I'm 56, I don't

45:08

feel much of a dissipation of energy or

45:10

anything, but I feel old in the sense

45:12

of being humble and

45:15

unafraid and humble before the finiteness

45:17

of time, before the universe. Prudently

45:20

cautious, like I don't need to jump off cliffs, but

45:22

I'm skiing. Respect

45:26

the body. I

45:28

feel sort of uncategorizable in this

45:31

sense of age. I

45:33

think age fluidity to me really resonates.

45:36

I think it's exciting for younger

45:39

people to know and older people

45:42

that we can be at once frisky

45:45

young in our

45:47

behavior and also thoughtful and

45:49

reflective and humble. To

45:52

me, Chip, this notion that I think

45:54

the best discovery for me

45:57

in my second half of my life, I guess, in midlife,

45:59

is... is realizing that

46:01

you can become more confident and

46:03

more humble at the same time.

46:06

And in fact, humility is

46:08

on some level that these

46:10

two things grow together. You know,

46:14

I'm in New Mexico right now in Santa Fe because

46:16

we're opening our campus here. And I

46:19

sometimes say being in New Mexico, which is, you

46:21

know, almost like not being in the United States.

46:23

It's an unusual place. I

46:25

say that I believe in my HP here,

46:27

and I don't necessarily mean just higher power.

46:29

I mean, humility and patience.

46:32

And when you show up, especially if

46:34

you're older, with humility and

46:37

patience, you're more present.

46:39

And it's also sometimes

46:41

a surprise to people, especially

46:44

in a culture where there's

46:46

a reverence for elders. So

46:49

listen, I love, you know, Richard Rohr

46:51

is on our faculty, famous Christian mystic

46:53

based here in New Mexico. He says,

46:55

you know what, what we all

46:58

need is a humiliation a day, just

47:00

not serious. Just

47:02

a serious humiliation. Right.

47:05

Yeah, you know, what one area in which I

47:07

feel somewhat

47:10

conflicted about my aging

47:12

process, like, as much

47:15

as I have been sort of grateful for the

47:17

aging process, I

47:19

will admit, Chip, that the idea of like 56 teetering

47:22

on the brink of 57, I'm staring

47:24

down 60. The idea of being 60

47:27

is an adjustment for me mentally. Like, it's

47:29

right, like, in terms of how I

47:31

think of myself, right? Because that's not like 50 was

47:34

an adjustment. The prior decades didn't really bother

47:36

me at all. But

47:39

it is a reframing of how we think about

47:41

ourselves. And one change I

47:43

notice in myself is, I'm

47:46

less focused on trying to take over

47:48

the world, like, be on the cover

47:50

of magazines. Yeah. I remain really interested

47:52

in building things, right? And building things

47:55

hopefully at scale, but very

47:57

much in a partnership with

47:59

other people helps. helping people build things,

48:02

mission focused. But

48:04

I occasionally catch myself saying in my inside voice,

48:06

well, if this or that doesn't work out, no

48:08

big deal. There's seven other things I'm passionate about.

48:11

And then I think, wait a second, Rufus,

48:13

that's the complacency of age. That's

48:16

not okay. Don't lose the ferocious

48:18

tenacity of youth, right? So

48:20

I'm a little bit kind of torn

48:23

on this topic of how my relationship

48:25

with ambition in

48:28

this phase of my life. How do you think about that?

48:30

Well, as someone who was ambitious when I

48:32

was young and still ambitious when I'm older,

48:35

the ambitious takes on a different flavor. And

48:39

I would say a couple things. Number one is Richard

48:42

Rohr, who I mentioned earlier, as well as Carl

48:44

Jung, both say the same thing, which is the

48:46

primary operating system of our life in

48:48

the first half of our life is our ego.

48:50

And it's what individuates us and propels us forward,

48:52

helps us to understand who we are in the

48:54

world. And then it's around

48:57

midlife that we have a primary operating

48:59

system change. We move from the

49:01

ego to the soul, but nobody gave us

49:03

any operating instructions for this change, nor a

49:06

warning that it was coming. And so

49:08

what's going on for a lot of people,

49:11

they can feel something inside of them, a

49:13

curiosity, a connection to

49:15

something bigger than themselves, and

49:17

maybe a lessening of the ego. I had

49:20

to learn that it, my

49:22

timing with Grendy Arbim was perfect for this because

49:24

I had to right size the ego by the

49:26

fact that I was no longer the sage

49:28

on the stage, I was the guide on the side. I was not

49:30

gonna get nearly the kind of attention I

49:32

was getting when I was the founder and CEO

49:34

of my own company. So the bottom

49:36

line is that is something psychologically that's

49:39

going on and maybe even spiritually. So

49:42

that's one thing. Secondly, if we

49:44

live a beautiful life and we

49:46

have a collection of other things in our

49:49

lives, we start to realize

49:51

that no one thing is gonna sink us

49:54

and we stop swimming the small stuff as much. It

49:57

is, when you're a 14 year old and

49:59

your best friend. breaks up with

50:01

you, you feel like

50:03

your life's gonna end. Or

50:05

you just sort of, you get

50:07

traumatized by it. And you have a lot

50:10

of exclamation points, a lot of exaggeration, hyperbole.

50:13

When you get older, you've seen your life

50:15

and you've seen the ups and the downs.

50:18

And you weather the storm better. It's not, I

50:20

mean, the Euchar of Happiness sometimes feels like, well,

50:22

that doesn't make sense, Chip. Euchar of

50:24

Happiness doesn't make sense because frankly, people go

50:26

through a lot more bad circumstances after 50.

50:30

But you actually learn how to metabolize it and

50:32

that you're gonna get through it and you

50:34

don't like catastrophize everything like you did when

50:36

you were younger. Your

50:54

life needs rebrand. Like whoever the

50:56

publicist is, we gotta

50:58

fire and rehire. I

51:01

mean, basically getting an AARP card in the

51:03

mail at age 50 is

51:06

very few people are delighted to

51:08

receive that card in the mail, right?

51:10

Despite how lovely the duffel bag is

51:13

that you get with your subscription. So

51:16

do we need to, I mean, I

51:18

imagine there's a space for

51:21

a number of different new kinds

51:23

of institutions, new

51:25

kinds of societal organizations, changes

51:28

to how our companies operate. How

51:30

do you see the evolution

51:32

from a society-wide perspective of

51:35

becoming wiser as a

51:37

society and supporting all of

51:40

us through these transitions? Well, we

51:42

need to create more intergenerational collaboration on

51:44

all levels, politically, career-wise

51:46

in the workplace. So

51:49

that's one thing. And I'll

51:52

start with just companies. Companies need to be

51:54

using metrics at looking at age within their

51:56

companies. They look at how do you, stories

52:00

of people across generations who are

52:03

solving really vexing problems for the

52:05

company. How do we create

52:07

mentorship, mutual mentorship programs such that someone

52:09

older who understands how to run a

52:11

great meeting can

52:13

teach a younger person that

52:15

while the younger person can teach the older person

52:17

how to use their iPhone or all

52:20

of the utility opportunities in their iPhone that

52:22

they don't even know exists. So

52:24

how do we create mutual mentorship

52:27

matching in companies or in society?

52:30

How do we help to elevate the idea of

52:33

people saving not for their retirement and

52:35

saving not necessarily ... I mean they

52:37

can do that too and save for

52:39

their kids' education, but save for their

52:42

own midlife education. How do

52:44

we help make that become sort of

52:46

a basic premise? How do

52:48

we help people to see what

52:51

gets better with age? And

52:53

then how do we know if that is

52:56

true, for example, if wisdom is a really

52:58

valuable quality, how do we create wisdom

53:00

management practices like the one I mentioned

53:02

earlier with the Wisdom Journal in such

53:04

a way that people actually are getting

53:07

wiser? Because wisdom is

53:09

different than being savvy or

53:11

smart. Being savvy or smart

53:13

can be metabolizing your life lessons for

53:16

your own selfish benefit, and that's great.

53:18

Nothing wrong with that. But wisdom is

53:20

a social good. And

53:22

so when wisdom ... as someone who's wise is different

53:24

than someone who's smart or savvy, and

53:26

so when we actually elevate wisdom as

53:29

a society and help more people become

53:31

wise, we're actually helping society as

53:33

a whole. And so that's part of

53:35

the reason why I think midlife wisdom schools like MEA

53:37

being the first in the world are

53:40

going to become a bigger deal. We're going to see

53:42

more of these in the next few decades. Yeah,

53:46

yeah, absolutely. How

53:48

do you think, Chip, about the wisdom

53:50

afforded by the death bet perspective? I

53:53

used to force myself to sort of like once

53:56

a year go through an exercise of saying like,

53:58

okay, Rufus, you've got 12 months. 18 months

54:00

to live, 24 months to live, what

54:03

are you gonna do? And when

54:06

I ran that experiment, I found that well, if it

54:08

was only 12 or 18 months, I'd

54:10

quit my job, spend time with my

54:12

favorite people, and do a lot of writing and reading

54:15

and be very focused on sort of people and the

54:18

arts. But I love my work, right?

54:20

So I don't wanna quit my job. So I

54:22

found that if I extended that out to five

54:24

to 10 years, I

54:26

would start getting better answers, right, that

54:29

were more useful about how to integrate

54:32

some of the things that were most important to me in

54:34

my life. How do you

54:37

think about sort of how critical, I

54:39

mean, arguably the deathbed perspective is what

54:41

makes us wiser as we get older,

54:43

that we're conscious of this finiteness. Yeah,

54:46

and it's called memento mori in

54:49

stoic times. And it's the

54:51

idea of understanding mortality

54:53

or death as an organizing

54:55

principle for life, as Steve

54:57

Jobs once said. And

55:01

what I think is valuable from

55:04

a social research perspective, just

55:06

know that Laura Carstensen at Stanford Center

55:08

on Longitude has studied this. And

55:11

she's shown that when people have a shorter

55:13

amount of time left, they get

55:15

less focused on the future, more focused

55:17

on the present moment, what matters, and

55:20

in so doing, by focusing on

55:22

the present moment and what matters, they

55:25

actually are happier. So weirdly,

55:27

having less time ahead of you

55:29

makes you more happy today. So

55:33

much of it comes down to how

55:35

you re-prioritize your life. For

55:37

me, I have stage

55:40

three prostate cancer, and I found out I

55:43

had stage one, five and a half years ago, then

55:45

it went to stage two, three years ago, and

55:47

now it went to stage three. And so in 2023, I was, man,

55:49

I was doing hormone depletion therapy,

55:54

so I only had 1% of my normal testosterone.

55:57

I had my prostate taken out. I

55:59

had 36. radiation sessions. So

56:02

it was a tough year. And so

56:04

coming face to face with my mortality and

56:07

thinking of cancer as a teacher, not

56:10

as a gladiator, not as somebody I'm going to

56:12

get in the ring with and kill, but more

56:14

like, okay, cancer, what are you going to teach

56:16

me? Helps me to see like, what were my

56:18

priorities? And I have sons

56:20

who are 12 and 9 with a lesbian

56:22

couple who are good friends and I

56:26

want to spend more time with the boys.

56:28

And so that became the thing. I want

56:30

to have more time to focus on things

56:33

outside of my career. I want

56:35

to spend more time with my parents. So

56:37

sometimes, you know, as Victor Frankel

56:39

talked about in his book, Man's Search for Meaning of

56:42

Being in a Concentration Camp in World War II, despair

56:45

equals suffering minus meaning. Suffering

56:48

is sort of an ever present. It's always going

56:50

to be there. I love that. But despair and

56:52

meaning are inversely proportional. And I wrote

56:54

about this in my book, Emotional Equations, and the

56:57

idea that like, okay, when you're

56:59

going through a really tough time, you have to look

57:01

for the meaning and the hope, because

57:03

if you can do that, you can get through the worst of times.

57:06

So I just think that's a key lesson

57:09

when it comes to mortality. Yeah,

57:11

yeah. And

57:13

how's your health now? How are you doing? Well,

57:15

I'm back on the hormone depletion after having been

57:17

off it for a month, which was sort of

57:20

a bummer. So I so I here's my story,

57:23

Rufus, I finished on January 12, my

57:25

last radiation session and doing them daily

57:28

for almost two months. And so for five

57:30

days a week. And then I

57:33

got on a plane the next day and I

57:35

was on my way to New York, because two

57:37

days later, I was on the

57:39

Good Morning America show. The next day my

57:41

book came out. The next day I was on the Today

57:43

Show. And two days later, I was with your wife at

57:47

her Swell, the Swell event,

57:50

sex symposium event. Sex symposium. Speaking

57:52

at it. So I mean, I

57:54

luckily, I have the energy.

57:58

But what a complicated time. But

58:00

the good news is I've had a lot of time

58:02

to reflect on, again, cancer

58:04

as a teacher and, you

58:06

know, how do I set myself up such that

58:08

if, yeah, if cancer got worse for me, you

58:11

know, what will survive me? And

58:13

you know, one of the things is my books

58:16

and my MEA and of course the influence I've

58:18

had on others, including my sons. Well,

58:21

Chip Conley, thank you so much for being

58:23

with us today. Such a wonderful conversation. An

58:25

honor. Thank

58:30

you. Chip

58:36

Conley's new book, Learning to Love Midlife, 12

58:39

Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, is

58:41

out now. If you'd like

58:44

to learn more about the modern

58:46

elder academy, go to meawisdom.com. You

58:49

heard Chip reference my wife, Elise's company,

58:51

The Swell. I'd like to

58:53

take this opportunity to give my wife

58:55

a little shout out. The Swell is

58:57

a growing community for women 40 plus

58:59

that is reimagining how we age. They

59:02

host events across the country and soon around

59:04

the world and they're building an online learning

59:06

platform. To learn more,

59:08

go to theswell.com. What

59:11

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59:13

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59:47

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59:49

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59:55

Rufus Grissom, see you next week. Thank

1:00:05

you.