Brian Chesky's secret mentor who died 9 times, started the Burning Man board, and built the world's first midlife wisdom school | Chip Conley (founder of MEA)

27:09So let me just ask you this, how, how real is ageism in tech and ask because a lot of people that are hiring are probably thinking, no, no, I'm not biased. I'm going to hire the best person. If they're someone in their 50s, I'll hire them. No problem. It doesn't feel like it actually works out that way often. Just how real of a problem is this? What do you see? Yeah, it's clearly a problem. I'd say it's maybe a little bit less of a problem than it was a dozen years ago. Because I think a dozen years ago was almost a blind spot. You know, in Airbnb, we had a group called Wisdom at Airbnb. It was an employee resource group for people 40 and older.

27:47And so there are lots of these kinds of groups that didn't exist a dozen years ago in all kinds of tech companies, which is good because it means that there's a voice and a way to congregate with a bunch of people who are older. Ultimately, we had these senior nomads come in and be like the voice of the customer for 10 weeks at Airbnb. me. And it was the wisdom at Airbnb older employee group that really actually pushed for this with Brian. But the challenge is in a world in which the smartest new people, especially when it comes to technical skills and engineering, are coming in with a whole new, you know, set of skills that an older person doesn't have.

28:30The older person is both expensive and maybe perceived as slow. So In the era of AI, it's a whole new ball game. And the question I think will be, if what AI cannot do is the human wisdom piece, artificial intelligence and human wisdom might be the balance beams here. Is it possible that older managers who have a little more emotional intelligence, a little more pattern recognition, a little bit more wisdom. can be a value to a company. And so it's still, the jury's still out. There's a New York Times article that just came out about the question of, is AI gonna wipe out older people's jobs or younger people's jobs?

29:19And I think the answer is both. I don't know. But the question is, how bad is it for both of them? And I think what I would say to an older person, and when I say older, I mean, like 45 or older, if you've done well financially and you're doing okay, the question you might ask yourself is, are you open as I ultimately was with Brian in my fourth year at Airbnb? I took a substantial pay cut, like I think I went down to 40%, or 50 % time, and my stock, my options were dropped to that level by salaries dropped to that level, because I didn't want to work full time anymore. And there are a lot of people who can be valuable in a company who have some institutional wisdom, some process knowledge of how to get things done in this organization, and in tech companies that's really important.

30:10Airbnb one of the biggest challenges that Airbnb has always been, how do I get shit done around here? And process knowledge allows you to understand how do you deal with an org chart and get things done partly because you understand the motivations of different groups, and that is something you build over time. So, I just think that older people might look at their workload and say, I'm willing to take a 20 % or a 40 % pay cut to go to 80 % or 60 % time. The company is going to get their monies worth in that. That's a really interesting point that if you're older and you're maybe less connected to the most cutting edge, ways of building and coding, AI makes that a lot easier in many ways where you start to just talk to it.

31:00You don't even understand what's happening underneath. Yeah. So there's a lot of listeners who are older in tech. There's a lot of listeners who are approaching midlife, let's say, worried about what happens to their career. When you look at people you've worked with and had at your academy, which we'll talk about who continue to thrive and continue to have a really healthy career in tech, what do they do differently? What do they do? What do they have in common that other folks you think should work on? Focus on. I think this idea being a mentor and a mentor at an intern, there's just the voracious appetite for curiosity.

31:35When I talk to someone who's in midlife and wants to be in the tech world or already is, the thing I say is show up with curiosity and a passionate engagement for what you do. And people won't necessarily notice your wrinkles as much as they'll notice your energy. energy. And energy has two parts to it. Energy is, they notice that you are not just sort of resting on your laurels. You are, you have like physical, you know, energy in how you do your job. And when people are like that, they are sort of timeless. They are, they're age fluid, as I say. We talk about gender fluidity, well, it could be age fluidity.

32:12They don't, they're not defined by their age. But the other part of energy that's important being positive. You know, that's sort of more energetic, like a little bit more California energetic. There's a sense of like when someone's got good energy, you're drawn to them. So it's about showing up with the kind of energy of someone 10 or 20 years younger than you, and then showing up with positive energy. And I think one of the things that I would say I did well it,

32:44I mean, there's And over the course of time, the number of mentees I had, the number of people who just wanted to have coffee with me or tea, the number of people who just said, thank you for being in that meeting. You just sort of gave it a positive feeling. Was really important. And so my energy, both the positive energy part, and then also the fact that I could work 16, 70 hours a week. And I could travel around the world as the Secretary of State of the Company, which is what Brian called me a couple times on stage. The fact that I could do that meant that no one was looking at me and saying, let's get rid of the old foggy.

33:27Well, maybe some people would work, but I wasn't aware of them. So I just think show up with that passionate engagement, that curiosity, that energy, the ability to be both the learner and the teacher with respect for people that younger than you. And you're going to probably do pretty well. That is really great advice. Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. So I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. So I put my community resources. It's how I manage my workflows.

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34:40If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda .io slashlennie today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's coda .io slashlennie to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. coda .io slashlennie. Interestingly, Curiosity comes up a lot when I ask AI forward people, what are they focusing on helping their kids learn most? Curiosity is the most common way to describe. So at every stage of life curiosity is some to cultivate. I want to go to the flip side of companies looking to hire.

35:20It feels like there's this untapped supply of awesome people that companies with ageism and tech aren't finding and hiring. So to help hiring managers and companies take advantage of this, what's something you suggest they do? How do they shift their mindset or maybe shift the way they hire that might help them find these people? I think we're moving into there's a book that David Epstein wrote called range and the whole premise of range is that we're moving out of the era of the specialist and into the era of the generalist and I think AI is just accelerating this. As we are more reliant upon AI and AI can be exceptional at technical skills and solutions really expeditiously.

36:05judiciously. I think generalists, people who can think broadly become all the more important. And I think that what I would say to someone in HR, or recruiting, is beyond what I already said before, is the person passionate? Are they curious? Are they a learner? Do they have good energy? But I would also say, are they a generalist when they're a problem -solver? because I actually think that's going to be an increasingly important part of how effective companies think broadly. So I think that's a key one. I think also this idea of how do you create intergenerational collaboration in the form of mutual mentorships.

36:53One of the things I loved at Airbnb, there were a few people I did this with, where I had something to teach them, and they had something to teach me. So, good example, my iPhone. So, there's 97 % of the utility of my iPhone that I probably don't use and don't know how to use. This is, you know, back in, let's say 2013, 2014. And so, there are people who knew iPhone or Google sweets back then. I never used a Google doc back then when I joined Airbnb. So there were people who could teach me something technical. And then they wanted to learn something from me, which would be like, how do you want a great meeting?

37:36Or how do you give a great employee review? You know, there are a lot of managers who've never been a manager before. And so how do you disperse people like me and the organization so that there's usually not enough time for these young managers to come to some training session on how to do a good employee review. So you sort of have to do it out there in the field. It's like apprenticeship. Back in the trades, you're an electrician apprentice. Not because you're watching some video on it, you're out there in the field doing it. And that's a huge value in a younger company when you have some older people who have not invested with their responsibility of managing those younger people because they may be actually reporting to someone younger than them.

38:26But they're there to actually be support. And in some ways, I think that was part of the unexpected value that I was able to offer to Airbnb and to Brian specifically because there are a ton of people in Airbnb who were not even in my departments who would come to me and say, I'm having a problem. How do I solve this? Can we spend lunch together? And, you know, I almost always said yes. I think the reason people did that in many ways is you just have a very unique aura of wisdom and it's hard to replicate that ship. Yeah, I mean, yes, and it all comes back to curiosity. If I was just the older, elder dispensing wisdom, people would have gotten bored very quickly.

39:15And I think the fact, yeah, yeah, I mean, I was on the board of Burning Man. Ooh, that's cool. And so there was a, I show up as someone who feels younger than I am. I mean, I'm 25 this year. So the bottom line is, I think, people lost track of my age, partly because I lost track of my age. This is such a good advice on the front end to be successful as a person kind of getting older in tech is curiosity, positive energy, the way you talk about it, passionate engagement. Is that the term? Yep. And then on the other side is a higher generalist. This actually comes up a lot in the AI conversations, just exactly as you said, the power of generalists reminds me I'm going to this gym now.

40:04And the lady there is just like, I love AI so much because I'm just such a big picture person and I get so bad at just getting, think you bet the details. And AI solves all of that for me. It's like, here, here's what I'm gonna do. I'll do this with my house to here here. And it's like, here's what you need to do. Step one, two, three, four, five. It is remarkable. I mean, you know, since the time I've known you, how fast it has become dominant in our lives. But yeah, I think I would have last thing I'd say is I'm privileged. So for those of you who were listening or watching this and you're saying, well, you know, Chip, you were 52 years old and they came to you Like that doesn't happen to me.

40:41I'm not in that position. The thing I would say is you're right. So So, but I could have been plucked and brought in and partly as Brian's boy, people would have rejected me because if I didn't show up the right way, it wouldn't have worked well. And there are lots of people who brought into the company who didn't work well. So I think the key is how do you get the foot in the door? And at the end of the day, you know, the second and third order of, you know, degrees of separation in terms of networking are still essential. But the most important thing is to be able to articulate what you have accomplished in a new way that a recruiter says, wow.

41:34And so I really tell people like I would love to see a resume. First of all, the question that I think it was, who was someone asked it, I don't remember if it's Cheryl Stamberg or someone else asked her, who said like, what's the biggest problem you're dealing with here and how can I help you? That's a great line. Number two is, what I love to see is not so much, what roles you've had, what bullet points do you have of your things you've learned. And give me in a paragraph, a thorny problem you faced, what was the problem and how you got, how you, what skills you used to actually accomplish it and what was the result of that?

42:21I would love to see a resume like that. And the older you are, the more you can actually have a resume like that. And then you can use that as the conversation piece when you're doing interviews. So I love that we're getting to interview advice and resume advice. Yes. Speaking of thorny problems and also why Brian decided to reach out to you. I want to go back to the beginning of your career. Yes. So you're good at this by the way. You're good at this. Looks thinking ahead. Okay, so you're in business school. You love business school. You just said you're like maybe I should start a hotel. Something that rarely works out.

43:00usually probably leads to a lot of money lost, a lot of frustration and just like, okay, what have I done with my life? Worked out for you. Indeed, a building the second largest Boutique Hotel chain in the world is Rodovie beloved. I loved every single experience I've had as Rodovie when you sold it as like, that is so sad. Talk about just that story. I know this could go on for hours, but what's the - Yeah, I'll be brief. Yeah. 26 years old, a couple years out of Stanford Business School, working for commercial real estate developer. I was bored, silly. I wanted to do something more creative, Bill Graham, famous concert promoter said to me, you know, I got it in a known, what Samson's really needs is a rock and roll hotel.

43:39So I decided to start looking to find a broken down motel hotel that I could turn into a rock and roll hotel and I found something in the tenderloin and turned it into the Phoenix, which became a famous rock and roll hotel that I have owned for 39 years now. So long story short is that was how I started Zhrada the Eve in the company. And we grew to 52 hotels around California, became the second largest, as you said, in the world in terms of the number of hotels, boutique hotels that we operated. And I loved it till I hated it. In my late 40s, I hated it. I didn't want to do it anymore. I was, you know, the great recession came along and it was just kick in my ass.

44:22And I really went through a bit of a, what I now call a midlife chrysalis, but a midlife crisis where I just wanted to change everything. And I got through it, and NDE and your death experience where I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I died. And from that point forward, I realized every day is a gift and a bonus. And you know, I decided to sell my company at the bottom of the Great Recession. So that's really how I created this space in my life to be able to join Airbnb. Well, let's back up a little bit this near -death experience. Share more there. What happened there? Yeah, I was, so I write books, I've written seven or eight books and I had written a book called Peak, How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, and it was a book that Brian really liked and probably the reason he wanted to reach out to me.

45:16I was on a book tour. I had a broken ankle, a broke man call at a bachelor party playing baseball. And I ended up with a cut on my leg and the cut on my leg had fertilizer in it and went septic. And so I was on a very strong antibiotic and I died. I went flatline from the allergic reaction to the antibiotic. And so I saw, you know, it happened nine times over 90 minutes. I kept dying, kept flatlining. And yeah, I ended up in the hospital for a couple of three days. And they finally said, listen, it's an allergic reaction, we believe it. They thought it was, I thought it was a heart attack, kind of bunch of stuff, stroke, etc.

46:01No, it was the allergic reaction. So, but, you know, I saw birds, I mean, I saw all this beautiful stuff. I don't have time to go into it. What? You want to hear this? Yeah, I know it's all this beautiful stuff. The best, I think there's a hotel in the San Francisco called the Vitale that I built. A restaurant from the ferry building. And it's still there, but it's no longer called the Vitale. In that hotel, there were these slippers in every guest room. One slipper said slow. The other slipper said down. And so I was wearing these slippers in my flatline thing, flying in the air in a 40 -foot tall living room in the Alps surrounded by birds that were tweeting and chirping at me and I understood bird talk.

46:53I understand exactly what they were saying and they kept telling me If you slow down, you will see beauty and you will see awe. And there was a bunch of other things, but let me just limit it to that and just say, and then the birds would like say, it's time to go and the birds would go out the big window, you know, into the mountains. And I would try to follow them and raise I would get to the window all the sudden I'd come back to life. Holy shit. I love that this was like there was a message inside of this experience. I don't know how many people experience that. Clearly, this led to a big life change.

47:32And it's interesting that a lot of times you need something or you've been doing this for how many years at that point, running Xero2V. At that point, I've been running Xero2V for 22 years. And 20 years. And it's interesting that you need something like that a lot of times. Otherwise, it's just moments and just keeps carrying you forward. Yeah, within two years, I'd sold it. And I had a chance to move on. So with building Xero2V, something you've written about a number of times is just the way you built it is a really unique approach to building a business. Specifically, there's a huge focus on culture, which also came out at Airbnb.

48:05Talk about just why you see culture as such an important part of how you build a business, like tangibly, because a lot of people talk about culture or fuzzy stuff, but you think about it very tangibly. Culture is what happens around here when the boss is not around. And the more distributed a company, the more cultures important, because the bosses around in a traditional bricks and mortar workplace where everybody shows up at eight and leaves at six, and we all see each other. But in my company in Jorada the, we had 52 hotels and 25 restaurants and four spas and it was distributed. So I couldn't be in all those places all the time.

48:52And same with some of the Airbnb. I mean, Airbnb had offices around the world and was a global company. So the more distributed you are, of course, in the remote work world we live in, the more culture is important and more difficult because when you're remote, you know, there's these few cues you have about how we do things around here and usually in a digital virtual format, which is why it's all the more important for you to have in -person gatherings of a team more often if you are virtual. So at the end of the day, the reason the culture is important is because it actually helps guide people in terms of making decisions.

49:34But it's also a magnet for the right kind of people. So Oracle has a different culture than Apple, which has a different culture than Facebook. And so you can choose the place you're going to work based upon the culture. And there are people who can be very good at what they do. But if they're in the wrong culture, they're in the wrong kind of environment and they're not willing to shift to fit that culture. And we saw how to Airbnb over and over again. In fact, Airbnb saw it, I think, when with Amazon on people. Apple people have resonated pretty well at at at a BV. Amazon people less so and those are two different cultures.

50:17Amazon and and Apple and that therefore understanding a culture before you even actually take the job is one of the more important decisions you need to make is like, is this culture a culture that I can live with? And maybe influence. There's language about culture fit. I like to say culture ad. Because culture fit to me means, can actually be quite negative toward somebody who is the aberration. You have to fit in. And especially if this is like a demographic thing, a person of color, a gay person, a person in a wheelchair. So you have to fit in. But a culture ad suggests that actually having some diversity on the team is helpful because it actually adds to the culture.

51:06But you still have to be able to get along with that culture. So culture is an intangible, that's the problem with it. Is it's hard to measure, but you see its value and you understand whether it's working based upon employee pulse reports and things like that. You talk about having to understand a culture is such a key part of having success at a company. Do you have any advice for just how to understand the culture for someone in the interview? I am no. You know, you came in, you worked part -time. It's easier to experience at all. Any tips there for, okay, this is for me. It's not for me. When you're interviewing, you're also interviewing them.

51:43When you're interviewing, it's not about you having to prove yourself. It's also for them to actually prove themselves as a company and also try to understand if there is some alignment in the company. And so the kind of questions I would ask as someone who's being interviewed would be what are three to five adjectives that define this culture? What's the biggest problem in this culture in terms of something that's just endemic or so like baked in across the organization? And is it ever going to get fixed? And how could I come in and maybe help that, which frankly at a very junior level, you're not going to be able to help it?

52:24except for in very minor ways. If you're a senior person, you might be able to help it. So those are the kind of questions I'd wanna know. And frankly, if I'm asking that same question about what are the adjectives to multiple people, am I hearing the same thing over and over again? And if I'm not, is that because there's not alignment, is that because different departments have different flavors, because you can have a culture within a department that's very different than the overall corporate culture. The corporate culture certainly has an enormous oppressive influence, but you know you can you can you can be in a culture a really great culture of a team or a department in an overall company culture that's not good.

53:12In a long run that oppressive company culture is either going to have to evolve or Your department maybe you made lose people when I reflect back on one of the and on the impact you had it There being be one of the funny Things I think about is Triangle showing up a lot on DEX and specifically rooted in mazlo's hierarchy just like everything's this mazlo hierarchy metaphor true and And this one, I don't know, specific piece of this, is you have this kind of model you think about for how to help employees be successful at a company, you kind of rooted in your peak book, philosophy, maybe just talk about that.

53:56And then if there's anything else you want to expand on with this power of thinking through the Maslow hierarchy. So you're a Maslow's hierarchy, basically five levels, later in life, you had a seven and an eight level model. But you know, at the base is physical, the kind of physical water, food, air, and you move up to self -actualization at the top. So to use this model as a hierarchy of needs for employees, customers, and investors is what the peak model is about, the peak, my book. The employee model is really simple. It's money or compensation at the base, recognition in the middle, and meaning at the top.

54:39Now, there are some industries and some kinds of jobs in which money is 90 % of the pyramid. So just because of the base doesn't mean it's not the dominant part of the pyramid. But the differentiation often is in recognition and meaning. In nonprofits usually the money piece of it's rather thin and the recognition is there's a meaning huge. So understanding how do you create an organization? And I gave a TED talk in 2010 about this topic as well. How do you create a, how do you measure the intangibles of meaning and how do you create an environment where people feel a sense of meaning? The customer pyramid briefly, I'll just say that one is meeting expectations of the base, meeting desires is in the middle, and then meeting unrecognized needs.

55:28And I think one of the things that we did at Airbnb about a year after I joined and when Jonathan Goldenhall was joining is we really tried to ask ourselves, are we in the home sharing business or are we in some kind of business that is even bigger and broader than that? And ultimately we came up with the idea that we were in the belong anywhere business. Airbnb was not in home sharing. We were in belonging anywhere. So once you have that down, that was sort of the unrecognized need at the top of the pyramid. Then that becomes an organizing principle for how do you teach your hosts to create that's a belonging?

56:06How does our marketing and advertising play up the belonging piece, especially in the everywhere piece because hotels are not everywhere, but homes are. And so I would just say that this model, the idea of hierarchies, is I think very helpful. And my book peak has been out for 18 years, but I still of asked to give 20 or 30 speeches a year on it. Oh man. This pyramid of comp recognition, meaning is really interesting, especially these days because with all this AI researcher poaching, there's all this talk of just like, well people just go work wherever they get the most money, or is there a mission and meaning to the work they're doing that will keep them not taking $100 million offer and seems to be happening in a lot of cases, which shows you the power of meaning.

56:54Yeah, I mean, if you know you're working for a toxic company at some point your conscience kicks in Whether it's toxic in terms of the purpose of the company toxic in terms of the leadership or the culture Yeah, life is too short Okay, so you have two major shifts in your career you Started the hotel chain you went to then you went to Airbnb Most recently the Airbnb experience. I imagine led you to starting something in a called the modern elder academy me, talk about what is the modern elder academy? Yeah, what is going on with that modern elder academy, the modern elder academy. So there was a couple of times where I was called the modern elder at Airbnb.

57:36And then I was told that a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. So Jonathan Mildenhall, who was the chief marketing officer at Airbnb, used to call me the modern elder as well. And when he, and he said, like, if you ever create a school, you know, Modern, modern elder would be a good name. And so we talked about it. And next thing I knew I was like saying, okay, this is called the Modern Elder Academy. We now call it MEA because elder is a fraught word on some level, makes you sound elderly. But what I really wanted to create was a place where people could come and do a workshop, you know, their five day workshops in Baja on the beach or in Santa Fe on a big four square mile horse ranch.

58:23And we imagine and repurpose yourself and navigate transitions. We go through so many transitions in the middle of our life. Let's say I define midlife as 35 to 75 guys. So I like, this is a very, it's a very long life stage. So we go through a lot of transitions. We are constantly evolving our purpose. We're building our wisdom. You know, we have knowledge management tools out there, but where are the wisdom management tools? Where are the tools that help us to get wiser over time? And then we need to reframe our relationship with getting older, because Debeck -Alevi has shown at Yale that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, you get seven and a half years of additional life, which is more life than any other biohack that's being done right now.

59:08So that's what we do. And we have 7 ,000 grads from 60 countries and 56 regional chapters around the world. So it's a bit of a movement. And I teach, I teach some of the workshops and we have all kinds of famous people who come and teach and for me creating the world's first midlife wisdom school just feels like the natural next thing for me to do. I love hospitality so it's a very upscale kind of experience but we have scholarships. I love retreat centers. I was on the board of the Estonian Institute in Big Surfer 10 years. I love wellness. I've owned the Kabuki Springs in Spa for 28 years, which is the largest spa in San Francisco.

59:53And I love education. And my book wisdom at work to make you a modern elder gave me a curriculum in which we've expanded quite a bit with Harvard, Yale, Stanford and UC Berkeley professors helping us. A great curriculum around midlife. And so that's how MEA came about. To your point, I forget you said, I think you said Jonathan said this was a natural next effort. I completely agree. It's like looking back. This is the obvious thing you should be doing right now. Yeah. Also learning more things about yet. And now you're involved with the Kabuki Spa. I think Esteline I knew just keep getting more interested.

1:00:31Thank you. There's a couple of threads here I want to actually follow. So this point you made about shifting your mindset to aging is a positive thing. makes you, helps you live longer. That's such a powerful point. You can just speak more to that. Just what does that look like? Yeah, there's a couple, there's lots of data points. I'll talk about two. One is this Beka -Levy study, which has been going on for 15 to 20 years. If you sort of take it, buy into the ageism of American society, or hallmark cards when you get a card at age 40, 50, or beyond, there's a belief that life gets worse as you get older.

1:01:08And if you can survive your midlife crisis, all you have to look forward to is disease, decrepitude, and death. And the bottom line is, you know, there's a lot of things that get better with age. I wrote a book called Learning to Love Midlife. The subtitle says it all, 12 reasons why life gets better with age. And what I really wanted to do with that book, which is really, it summarizes the MEA curriculum. I wanted to write a book that sort of helped people to see the upside of aging, the unexpected collected pleasures of aging. So they had a pro aging, not just an anti -aging point of view. Because when you actually have a pro aging point of view and you see the upside of aging, you take better care of yourselves, both your mind and your body.

1:01:47You actually are willing to learn and try new things. One of my favorite MEA questions is, 10 years from now, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now? It's a powerful question. Really important question is we get older. When you're young, you've got all of your life left to have you. But when I moved to Baja part -time in Mexico at age 56, I had a mindset which was, I'm too old to learn Spanish, I'm too old to learn to surf. But when I said, 10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it or do it now? And I said, well, 10 years from now, I might still be living in Baja.

1:02:23Like, I should learn this, I should learn Spanish. I should learn how to surf because we're right extra surf break. And so I did. So what I believe is that anticipated regret is a form of wisdom. And so, and it's a catalyst for taking action. So, that's one data point. The other data point is something called the Euchar of Happiness. And it's been around for 20 years, and it shows the following. It has changed in the last couple of years because young adults are unhappy like never before. So a 20 or a 22 -year -old really unhappy, 24 -year -old really unhappy. But historically, the way it was is you were happy from 18 to 23 three or 24.

1:03:03And then around 23 or 24, you start to see a long slow decline in life satisfaction that actually bottoms out between 45 and 50. I'm sorry to tell you that Lenny since you're 44. But your mileage may vary. So you're saying I'm the least happy I'll ever be. That's only upside. Well, here's the part that's weird is that before this research was done, and its global research across all demographics. What they found was starting around age 50 or 52, you get happier so that you're happier in your 50s than your 40s, 60s, 50s, 70s, happier than 60s, and the women in their 80s happier than 70s. So wow, and that's partly because we are in around 45 to 50 doing this thing called the midlife unraveling.

1:03:52What Brenne Brown calls the midlife unraveling, You're unraveling your expectations, what you define as success, your definition of what a beautiful body looks like, and you get some, you're liberated into freedom in your 50s and beyond. And I can say that yeah, I'm happier today at 64 than I was at 47 when I was going through my flatline experience and not wanting to run my company anymore. Use this term earlier, the midlife chrysalis, was that what it was? or crystal is crystal is what is that is that kind of along the same lines so if you think about the caterpillar to butterfly journey midlife is the crystal is it's that cocoon in which all of the change is happening at the time you know when you're going through it it's like oh shit my life my life is liquefying in front of myself but you know on the other side of it there's a metamorphosis that happens and so I like to use the language in fact I have a podcast called the midlife crystals because I want to help you know change the dialogue around midlife so that the number one word attached to midlife is not crisis but in fact it's maybe crystals and the idea that life is meant to be transformative during that era.

1:05:08That is actually very empowering. I am sort of going through that not necessarily in this intense way yet but that might be coming. You said there's a bunch of upsides to being getting older. It might be helpful just to share a couple of those things for folks that are like, oh wow, I didn't realize that. Emotional intelligence grows with age. Our wisdom can grow with age, although we know 70 year olds who are not as wise as 30 year olds. So it's a matter of what you do with your life experience. I define wisdom as metabolized experience, mindfully shared for the common good. What else gets better with age?

1:05:39You learn how to edit. You have no more F's left to give, no more F's left to give. That is absolutely true, especially for women as they age. you are more spiritually curious. Your, I mean, the list is long. And so there are a lot of things that, actually another one that I love is you're not compartmentalized. When you're younger, you're compartmentalized. As you grow older, you are growing whole. And that means you're alchemyizing curiosity and wisdom, introvert, extrovert, masculine, feminine, gravitas, depth and levity, lightness. And the people who I really admire who are 85 years old, they're so present and they're so whole, they are like they are just who they are.

1:06:25There's a quote I found from you along these lines, the societal narrative on aging is just don't do it. Yeah, they're just, I mean, we sort of say like we want, we don't want to age, but we do want to live. And quite frankly, aging and living are the same thing as our aging and growing. Coming back to MEA, just for folks that are interested curious about this, who's this four would you say? Who should seriously look into this program? MEA is really the people who tend to come to MEA are in a midst of a transition. It could be selling their company, leaving a job, getting divorced, having kids, becoming an empty nester, taking care of parents till they're passing away, having a health diagnosis that's scary.

1:07:11So, average age is 54 and it's people of all walks of life. So, it's not just the tech industry, but a lot, you know, it's very popular in the tech industry. It's people who are looking to maybe do a reframe of their purpose, and maybe even a reinvention of their career. And so, yeah, and the two campuses are just gorgeous. It's been called the Four Seasons, Meets Blue Zones, Meets the Asylum Institute, which I like. And we don't, we have online programs too. And so you don't have to come to either of our campuses in Mexico or on the beach or in New Mexico. You can actually do it online. Those three.

1:07:54Yeah, that's the tagline. That's your tagline right there. Estolin meets blue zones meets. What was the first one? Four seasons. The four seasons. Yeah. I'm going to zoom out and take us to a recurring segment on this podcast. I want to see if this goes anywhere. AI corner and with AI corner, ask us just what's a way that you've found AI useful in your work or in your life and he kind of tricky learned any workflow, anything you found useful. Yeah, you know, I have a daily blog and it's called wisdom well and it's on the MIA website. And when I'm looking for inspiration, you know, AI does it for me.

1:08:35And ultimately it gives me a first draft. And that's good enough for me then to say, okay, because there's times when I'm like missing the inspiration, I tend to write really well in the morning. If it's any other time of the day, I do not like writing creatively. So if I have a death line for tomorrow and it's five o 'clock in the afternoon, it's like, okay, I eat chat GBT, I'm on my way to you. And I tend to use chat GBT the most because I don't know. I mean, I like cloud as well, but yeah. OK, awesome. I was going to ask which tool you use. And what's your workflow there? Is it you? You use voice mode.

1:09:08Do you just kind of type out here? Is what I'm thinking about? Write me a little draft blog post. The good news is that at this point, it knows me well enough in my blogs. And I've actually, you know, it knows my sort of weird sense of humor. So it's able to ape me pretty well. So I'll just say I need a 250 word post on like today, you know, today's post was a post that chat. She would be helping with it. I said, I believe that there's a re -friend needs to happen with the soul. We tend to say like, I have a soul or I don't have a soul. But what if this, my soul has me? What it's in fact, my job is just to be this vehicle for my soul to go to the next lifetime.

1:09:54And my so my job is to be the steward of the soul and I said write me something around that and so it was just a weird idea And of course not all my blog posts are so new age and and like that I read a lot on leadership But that was one that you know within you know 30 seconds. I had a 250 word, you know blog post that I then adapted and there you go amazing Everything. Chip, we've covered a lot of ground. We've gone through your entire life. Maybe actually just the tip of the iceberg. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Yes.

1:10:32Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? My favorite book of all time, Mansearch, Remaining, Victor Frankel in the concentration camp in World War II. When someone's going through a hard time in their life, I say read that book. You'll realize it's not so bad. what you're going to. But it also really speaks to this idea of despair equals suffering minus meaning. I wrote a book called emotional equations that was in many times best seller that spoke to this idea that what if you could take all your emotions and turn them into equations.

1:11:04very engineering minded of me. So that's one. I, you know, I love any book by Liz Gilbert, sort of the opposite. So Elizabeth Gilbert wrote E. Prey Love, her book, she's on faculty at MEA as she teaches here. Big magic is just a beautiful book about sort of like, how do you get in the flow to allow the genie to come through you? So, her TED Talk in 2009 was about the fact that genius is not about being the genius yourself. It's about being the receptacle for the genius that come through you. I want to come back to this equation. You shared I was going to get to it, but I didn't, so this is a good opportunity to.

1:11:49So there's a couple of better really interesting to me. This is your own about these in a book. A bunch of these equations about living a happier life. So the one you shared is despair equals suffering minus meaning. Yes. Yes. And so the implication there is if you want less despair, increase the meaning. That's right. So suffering, suffering, this is a Buddhist philosophy number. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that suffering is ever present. And so if suffering is a constant and you have two variables, using some algebra, I guess, you know that if you have more meaning, you have less suffering.

1:12:23And so that's that one. The other one that I love is anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. Maybe talk about that one briefly. 98 % of anxiety comes from two sources. One is what you don't know and number two is what you can't control or influence. And based upon social science. And so you can create an anxiety balance sheet and create four columns. First column is what is it you do know about the thing that's making you anxious. The second column is what is it you don't know. the third column is what is it you can control or influence and the fourth column is what is it you can't control or influence and when you take free -floating anxiety and put it into a an equation it actually makes it more tangible and you often are less anxious as a result Boom, okay, so if you're feeling anxious right now This is an exercise you can do and you'll feel less anxious in like five minutes.

1:13:17That's what I'm gonna. Yes Okay, excellent very very good negative advice Okay, let's keep going with the lightning round, come back from our tangent. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? I mean, Ted Lasso is like a sucker for that show. You know, when it comes to movies, I'm a total movie boss. We have an annual MEA Film Festival at our Santa Fe campus. And I would say that the film that I'm most excited about is coming out, most people have never heard of it, it's called All Push You. And it's the story of two guys, one of whom is in a generative health condition and in a wheelchair, and his best friend pushes him the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago.

1:14:06And it's the relationship they build along that way. Amazing, very deep cut. Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered? They really love. Yes, hair growing material. You know, the Ori shorts, I, you know, I sound like Scott Galilee because he advertises this. But the Ori shorts are like, I just love them. They're just breath and they're comfortable. I'm wearing the Ori joggers right now. The one downside of the Ori and not to make anyone mad is they're not like very, they're kind of plasticky. If you look at the material, so I'm trying not like I don't know. Yeah, but I do love there's nothing better That's the problem.

1:14:47I haven't anything else like this that is all cotton. Yeah, yes, but I'm a fan I have many Viori. I don't know if they're called chargers Just I don't know weekend weekend or is there something anyway? Love you Viori Okay, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find really useful in work or in life? I imagine you have many but is there one that comes to mind? I mean, my favorite one right now is your painful life lessons are the raw material for your future wisdom. And the premise of that is that wisdom often comes to the school of hard knocks. So when you're in the midst of a really, you know, challenging time, you're developing your future wisdom.

1:15:25It's going to be valuable to you. Okay. Final question. Would you were on the board of boarding man? Are you still are? It was. It was. I helped found the board of boarding man. Yeah. Okay, no big deal. So I don't know if you know this. I got married a burning man. We had an unofficial wedding there on bicycles. So it's really meaningful to us. I've been there four or five times. What's something about burning man that maybe people don't know some insight story or a really unexpected piece of the journey? I imagine there's a lot, but what comes to? I would say the best, not well known thing about burning man is that burning man owns a place is called Fly Ranch.

1:16:03And Fly Ranch is about 10 miles from Burning Man. Now, when you go to the burn, the event in, you know, around Labor Day, you cannot go over there. It's locked off. It's 3 ,400 acres. But if you do, if you look at Fly Ranch, flyranch .org, I think it might even be, or it's on the Burning Man site, Fly Ranch is like the opposite of Burning Man. Burning Man is this alkaline desert, There's no living life there at all. It's very masterful. Fly Ranch is like Horace and like lots of like desert grasses and hot springs and hot pools and birds and wild horses and it's one of my favorite hot springs places in the world.

1:16:50So just check it out and you can go there when it's not during the event and it's quite beautiful. It feels like you might have inspired MIA in many ways. It did, yes. Chip, two final questions. We're going to be able to explain online and how can listeners be useful to you? So online MIA wisdom .com is the website for MIA, my website is chipconley .com, C -O -N -L -E -Y. And I'm on LinkedIn. That's really from a social media perspective, the thing that I do the most. I actually take my daily blogs and put them on LinkedIn. them. So, and then what the, what the, your community can do, just, yeah, come say hi, come, uh, check me out.

1:17:33And if wisdom is interesting to you, and I think wisdom should be interesting, every to everybody here, um, on the MEA website, at the very bottom footer, you will see a bunch of free resources. One of them is called Why Successful Leaders Value Wisdom. It is a free resource, um, and there's also a free resource down there called the Anatomy of a Transition. Those two free resources, understanding how to build your TQ, your transitional intelligence, and understanding how to develop wisdom are two, to my mind, two of the most important modern skills that we can have. It's funny when you say you're on LinkedIn.

1:18:06It feels, doesn't resonate with me. You can chip calmly on LinkedIn, hosting on LinkedIn. So, think about it. Why? Because I'm a little too burning in. You're just, yeah, exactly. It feels like it's not your vibe. But I love that you do it because that's where the people are. Oh, I put wild weird stuff up on LinkedIn and you know, thank God somebody's doing that. I got for service that I've seen it. I need to fix that. Chip, this was incredible. Everything I was hoping to be. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing. Thank you, Lenny, your wisdom. I am so proud as I go back like I'm your proud pop who just loves to see you in your element.

1:18:42And I just want to say make sure everybody knows the following. Lenny was so good to work with. I really, whenever you were assigned to a project as a PM, I appreciated it because I just knew that we were gonna have great conversations and you're just an interesting dude. Well, I appreciate that chip. That's gonna be the beginning of this whole episode or just gonna put that up front, just joking. That was awesome chip, really appreciate it. And thanks everyone for listening. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

1:19:19Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode.