EvolutionFM Transcript: Chip Conley - How To Reinvent Yourself In Midlife (Modern Elder Academy, Airbnb, Joie de Vivre)

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Chip Conley is the founder behind the Modern Elder Academy, redefining what it means to grow older with wisdom and purpose. After joining Airbnb at 52, he was named the “modern elder” for pairing curiosity with deep experience. A near-death experience at 47 pushed him to shift from ego-driven success to soul-led living.

Through his academy he guides others through midlife transitions, helping them embrace change, and authentic purpose. He believes midlife isn’t a crisis but a chrysalis. And just when it feels like you’ve grasped his message he reveals a deeper layer that changes everything you thought you knew about aging

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.766)

Chip, it's great to see you.

Chip Conley (00:02.222)

Thank you, Scott. It's good to be here.

Scott Britton (00:04.392)

Well, you know, the word elder has been thrown around a lot in my circles over the years. And it's funny, you're the first person that I've seen and encountered that's like, hey, this is a big deal and the world needs this. And I'm really excited to learn more about modern elder, elder, elder Academy and the journey that you've been on, but maybe we could just kick this off. What is modern? What does a modern elder mean to you?

Chip Conley (00:31.788)

Yeah, you know, many years ago, 13 years ago, I was asked by the founders of Airbnb to come into their little tech startup and help them. within a month after I joined, they started calling me the modern elder. And I said, well, hell to hell with you, you know, you're making fun of my age. I'm yes, I'm 52 and you're 26, but like, okay. Do you have to make fun of me? And they said, no, modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. And when I heard that.

the alchemy of curiosity and wisdom, I immediately said, yes, you know, sign me up for that, put it on my business card. and, long story short is that is really where this concept came from. So the word elder is a, doesn't mean elderly, elderly is maybe the last 10 years of your life. Elders, a relative term. so Tom Brady was an elder in the NFL when he was playing and, you know, a software engineer could be an elder at 35 in Silicon Valley.

So long story short is, a modern elder is somebody who's both a teacher and a learner. And, and I guess that's what I am.

Scott Britton (01:38.45)

And I've seen you talk about some other distinctions that can happen at this juncture in our and it kind of the midlife time period. And one of the ones that excited me is about this move from ego to soul. And I really loved your recent blog posts on that as well, by the

Chip Conley (01:51.65)

Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Conley (01:56.622)

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. You know, we often tend to think of having a soul and being in a body, but I like to think of we are a soul and we have a body, which is sort of the opposite. Our soul incarnates in this lifetime with us. And yet in the first half of our life, we are really individuating. We're letting our ego sort of hope to define who we are in the world.

Ego is not all a bad thing. It's just that we overuse it. And it's around midlife that our primary operating system moves from the ego to the soul, but nobody gave us any operating instructions. And there's no real roadmap. And it's very intangible. how do you know that this operating system shift is happening? Well, you know that potentially you're asking bigger, deeper, more meaningful questions.

The kind of things that you used that really got you jazzed in the past are not getting you jazzed anymore. And the things that are getting you jazzed, maybe are more internal. Maybe you're becoming a little bit more of an introvert. So, you know, maybe you're reconnecting with a spirituality or religion that you grew up with or something new.

So maybe you're, you know, enjoying meditating or doing yoga. These are all the kinds of signs that, that suggests that someone is maybe moving into that place where the soul is leading the dance instead of the ego.

Scott Britton (03:31.148)

Was there an inflection point in your personal journey that started to make this come to the forefront?

Chip Conley (03:37.194)

I

Scott Britton (03:39.316)

Well, that's a pretty big one. It's about as big as it can get. me more.

Chip Conley (03:42.83)

I died at 47. Yeah, I was going through a really hard time and, you know, everything that could go wrong was going wrong in my life. then I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic and I literally died nine times over 90 minutes after giving a speech in St. Louis. yeah, you know, when you go to the other side and you see that experience and then you come back, it does...

create a bit of a seize the day mentality, is, this the way I want to my life? And at 47, I had a lot of life still ahead of me. And yet I felt really constrained by my identity that I was presenting to the world. And that was, was the founder and CEO of the second largest boutique hotel company in the US. this was during the Great Recession. It was also during a time where I lost five male friends to suicide.

ages 42 to 52. There's something called the U curve of happiness, which shows that around 45 to 52 is the low point of life satisfaction in adulthood. So for all these reasons, I got acquainted with my soul because in many ways what I had been doing, the way I had been living my life, which had worked pretty well in my 20s, 30s, and maybe even early 40s, by my later 40s was not working anymore. And Carl Jung, the famous psychologist said,

You cannot live the afternoon of your life based upon the rules of the morning. And I think that's what he was really speaking about by the time you go from early adulthood into midlife, something is shifting inside of you. And yet we as a culture have very little in the way of a roadmap or tools or schools to help people through the rite of passage of turning 50 and beyond.

Scott Britton (05:34.068)

Can we talk zoom into that that you curve of happiness right now because that that's 42 to 52 trough of sorrow, if you will, is pretty fascinating. What do you I'm 37.

Chip Conley (05:44.066)

How old are you, good. Look what you have to look forward to.

Scott Britton (05:48.516)

I know. Well, I'm like, shit, man, I feel like I've been a dark knight for the past five years. So, you know.

Chip Conley (05:54.318)

You're just precocious. You're getting it over and early.

Scott Britton (05:58.284)

I maybe, maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed. But what do you make of that? What would be your hypothesis for why that is, why those numbers are the way they are?

Chip Conley (06:08.109)

Well, that's, I created a school based upon this called the Modern Elder Academy, MEA. There are a lot of reasons for it. By the time you get to your forties, especially your later forties, you can start seeing the future and that scares people because they can see mortality. They start having some, maybe some health issues. Their body's not what it used to be. They can see when you're in your twenties or thirties, you can have hopes and dreams. By the time you get to around 45.

You're not going to, you know, you're not going to present the United States. You know, you're not going to climb Mount Everest. You know, you're, didn't marry your soulmate, whatever it is, you're sort of like facing face to face reality and disappointment equals expectations and minus reality. So there could be a lot of disappointment during this period. Brené Brown, who's a good friend of MEA, our school calls it the midlife unraveling. And it's what she means by that is we start to unravel our expectations and what we think matters to us.

and get clear on what does actually matter. What else is going on during that time? It's often a really busy time. If you have kids and they may be at home, you may have sandwich generation taking care of parents while taking care of kids. For women, they start perimenopause and menopause. For men, there's something called andropause and it's not nearly as tragic as menopause, but it's problematic in many levels. You start to get a gut, your libido starts to shrink.

you know, 1 % drop in testosterone every year. and you start to actually have less energy. And so there's a lot, but the, here's the part that's weird is that after 50 or 52 ish, we get happier and happier. And the reason for that is partly because we do that unraveling that Brené Brown talks about. We get more clear on what's important to us. our emotional intelligence is growing. So

We are less reactive about the circumstances in our life. We have a little more wisdom. And we get clearer what we care about. And for a lot of women and men, but particularly women, they have no more Fs left to give, no more Fx left to give. And I'm talking about sex life. I'm talking about, there's no more, you don't care as much about all of the trivialities of life or what people think about you. You're more clear on what.

Chip Conley (08:30.86)

what does matter. And so I wrote a book on this called Learning to Love Midlife, 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age. And the subtitle says it all. After 50, there are a bunch of things that get better with age, but we don't do a very good job in society helping people to see these things.

Scott Britton (08:45.598)

Definitely not. And that's one of the reasons why I think what you're creating is so awesome. And it seems like there's this pivotal moment and I have a lot of friends going through this, you know, don't whether they're that you curve that you talked about, right. And it seems like the most intense part is after the recognition of like, OK, I got to reauthor some things. And and and and like, know a lot of what you guys do is actually help people like, well, how the heck do you do that?

because blowing up your life can feel pretty existential.

Chip Conley (09:20.334)

Well, we used to call it the midlife crisis. I now call it the midlife chrysalis, because the chrysalis is the in-between stage between caterpillar and butterfly. so a chrysalis means it's a transformative time, a time where there's a metamorphosis that's going to happen, which is encouraging, because it means that in the middle of that dark, gooey time, on the other side of it, there may be a butterfly that emerges. And yet, We don't have in society, we really have very little to help people through this time. If you think about adolescence and middle-essence, let's talk about that for a minute. Adolescence is a word didn't exist until 1904. So as a concept, when someone actually hit puberty, they were an adult. And that's why people were working in the mines at age 14, getting married at 16, having babies before they're 18 on purpose. Long story short is once adolescence became a life stage as of 1904,

we really rethought adolescence. We realized it was a liminal period in between childhood and adulthood. It's a time where a lot of our transitions are physical. we're going through things in peer groups. The difference between one and another person in, in school and in ninth grade is in terms of when they start puberty is maybe only two years. they're going through a lot of things together for the first time. And there's a whole social infrastructure, schools, scouts, sporting teams.

parents to support people. Now there's a word called middle-essence that is starting to get some traction out there in academia. Middle-essence is the adult corollary to adolescence. It's when we're going through all kinds of transitions in midlife. But the kind of transitions we tend to go through in midlife are less physically obvious to other people. They're much more internal. So when someone's going through a transition, you're not exactly clear that they are.

In adolescence, it's obvious you're tripping over tables because you're growing so quickly. But in, in, you're, you know, you're growing breasts as a, as a young, young woman or a girl. And, in, in middle essence, the transitions are much more subtle. There is, they are way spaced out. I mean, two women could enter perimenopause 15 years apart and be the same age. There's no synchronization. You're not going through first dates, first loves.

Chip Conley (11:42.574)

first driving in a car at age 16, first time to go to college. You know, we're doing this on our own. And then finally, there's no social infrastructure. There's really zero in the way of rights of passage or any kind of social infrastructure to help people through the middle of their life, which is why antidepressant use and suicide and a variety of other things are at their peak in midlife. So long story short is,

I've become a midlife activist. And that means my real role here is to help society understand this life stage so that it's not just this midlife crisis of buying a red sports car and having an affair with your secretary, which quite frankly almost never happens, but Hollywood loves it. know, American beauty, think of American beauty, the movie. But the reality is we now live in an era in which

a lot of people are going through a lot of transitions in midlife and thinking there's something wrong with them. When in fact, so many of these transitions are natural and normal.

Scott Britton (12:47.668)

Well, you know, it's interesting is when you study a lot of the ancient scriptures, they talk about these things, like, in terms of key mark key around, like, for example, like, I'm just turned 37. And some of the advisors I work with, like, Oh, yeah, like 3837. That's typically a very pinnacle year for people to kind of move into a new body or new being or a new career and things like that. And you're right, nobody tells us this. We have we're left to go figure it out and think we're weird on our own.

And it doesn't have to be like that.

Chip Conley (13:20.398)

And let's take you for a minute, Scott. So I believe that midlife stretches 40 years from 35 to 75. And I'm not alone in that. A lot of academics now say that too. In a world in which more and more of us are going to live to 100, midlife is this bridge between early adulthood, which is perceived to go to last till 30 or 35, let's say 35.

It's the bridge between early adulthood and later adulthood, the end toward the end of your life. And so the longer we're living, the more we're stretching out that bridge. So if you're going to work till you're 75 and a lot of people do, that's the average age of when millennials say that they're going to work till. And if you're going to be active and healthy into your mid 70s.

So midlife is really a life stage that we need to understand because if it's a life space that lasts 40 years, we need to understand the dynamics of it. And I think there's really three stages of midlife. There's 35 to 50, which is early midlife. It's the toughest time of midlife as evidenced by what I talked about earlier. You tend to be really busy. You're reading from someone else's success script, maybe your parents, maybe.

your spouse, maybe your community, your friends, but you're like, you're not owning your own voice. There's 50 to 60, which is the core of midlife. It's often when people are in the process of moving out of the midlife chrysalis and feeling more freedom. If you're a parent, it's when empty nest starts to happen. Your parents may have passed away. You may go from being sandwich generation, taking care of parents and kids at home to actually having your parents pass and having your kids.

no longer at home and all of a sudden you've got space time affluence. And then there's later life, is 60 to 75, which is when people are often thinking about how, what kind of purpose do they want in their life? Once their career ends. It's also when they, you you tend to be interesting. There's fascinating stat. The time when we're most comfortable in our body, most comfortable in our body is age 70. Very interesting. Who would have guessed that?

Scott Britton (15:35.572)

Whoa.

Chip Conley (15:36.974)

And it's partly because we are no longer trying to live up to someone else's for us. We're still hopefully moderately healthy and we are less judgmental, less self-critical. So who would have guessed that?

Scott Britton (15:55.016)

You know, it totally tracks. I was at a body worker the other day and I've just had so much chronic pain and tension and she's like, well, it's because you've been bracing your whole life, you know, kind of bracing and pushing through things. And so much of that was because of what you described about, you know, trying to meet other people's expectations, caring about appearances, all those types of things. So

Chip Conley (16:19.662)

Did that come from Sky?

Scott Britton (16:21.752)

you know, I think it came from a sense of low self esteem. I think there was an idea in my head when I was a child that I was that I wasn't worthy. And I think that made me, you know, constantly try to be the overachiever type person that you probably deal with a lot in the modern elder academy.

Chip Conley (16:45.144)

I deal with it in myself. Were you a first born? What were you? What was your story?

Scott Britton (16:47.226)

Yeah, man.

I was I was a firstborn. Yeah, pretty middle class, upper middle class family. But, you know, always just had this, like insatiable desire to try to be the best at everything.

Chip Conley (17:06.658)

Were you trying to prove yourself to your dad or your mom or both?

Scott Britton (17:11.944)

think I was trying to prove myself to mostly my dad. Mostly my dad.

Chip Conley (17:17.166)

Have you proved yourself? Have you proven yourself?

Scott Britton (17:21.992)

Well, unfortunately my dad's not here anymore, but I've learned to love myself and that I don't need to prove myself if I love myself. And that's still a big work in progress. Like there's plenty of opportunities I see on a daily basis where the mirrors turn back to me and I'm realizing, well, that's not exactly loving yourself.

Chip Conley (17:32.152)

Yeah.

Chip Conley (17:42.594)

Yeah, you know, it's we spend a lot of our early life trying to prove ourselves and we hope we spend the later part of our life improving ourselves. And that's the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. having a growth mindset means that you are less self-judgmental. You're more apt to see that life is a learning journey. You don't have to be perfect and you can be a beginner at something and really be really bad at it. You can have a sense of humor, be self-deprecating.

Scott Britton (18:03.454)

Mm.

Chip Conley (18:12.748)

And all of a sudden, all that bracing that you've been doing and I used to do, and I still do occasionally, starts to slip away. And that body worker, I interrupted you, that body worker who she or he had their hands on you, they can see like, wow, you're a little bit more open here. So what were you gonna say on that? I interrupted you.

Scott Britton (18:40.028)

I don't really remember. think it was just this, I'm not surprised to hear that people that are at that tail end of their life when they don't care as much, when they're more secure in themselves, they don't care as much about what other people think. They're more secure in themselves and all those things, feel a sense of spaciousness and ease in their bodies.

Chip Conley (18:58.956)

Yeah, of course.

Scott Britton (19:00.692)

And so, and I think, you one of the things I've heard you talk about that I think aligns with this is this shift from shifted to attunement, and that you have a kind of a distinction here, right? And a lot of that attunement to me is about being in the body, you know.

Chip Conley (19:18.754)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, again, there's so many of these words really speak to the two eras of one's adult life, the first half of the second half. From a lot of people in the first half of life, it's all about attaining. I'm going to go attain it. I'm going to attain, attain, attain.

When you're attaining, so selfishly focused on attaining, you often have to atone later because you're like, have sharp elbows, you're getting to the front of the line. But when you actually shift into attunement, go from attained to attune, you're at one. There's a harmony with attunement. There's a harmony with everything in nature. There's some sports that are really good at tuning sports, yoga, surfing, anything that requires you to sort of exhaling.

Scott Britton (19:48.872)

Big time, dude.

Chip Conley (20:10.616)

There's an attuning and sailing for sure. And then there's other things that are attaining sports, like, you know, running a hundred yard dash is, you know, that's like, there's a, there's a, there's a combustible catalyst, you know, going off, off, know, ATV off road. mean, that, that's sort of a, let's go, let's go conquer. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I am saying that the kinds of things that people start to get more curious about.

as we get older, are the things that actually attune us. you know, attuning when you're attuned to the world and to music or dance or breathing in the form of meditation or other humans. Wow, you feel much less alone. You feel, you know, sort of a.

Chip Conley (21:07.234)

like almost a divine harmony in how you are connecting with the world.

Scott Britton (21:15.986)

I feel that there's a very cosmic joke the universe likes to play on me, which is I'll catch myself in attainment mode and I'll be frustrated banging my head against the wall without much success, lots of friction. But then when I start to move into that attunement, right, and I start to align with myself and what's happening in my body and what life is presenting, shit starts to go well. You know, it's kind of this, and to your point around the learning, right, I think,

at a certain different points of our different junctions of our journey, seems like life tries to show us that way.

Chip Conley (21:52.332)

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, think there's that, that is true. And I think also, there's also some sort of almost physiology and

Chip Conley (22:02.528)

psychology around this because when we're when we are

When we're trying to be gritty and resilient, we're white-knuckling it. And you can run a hundred yard dash, but you can't run a marathon like you run a hundred yard dash. And life is a marathon. And so this idea that I like to say, resilience will buy you time. Adaptability will buy you a future. And what I mean by that is that sometimes in the short term, you do have to brace.

and get NB, you know, and.

and sort of go into the fight or flight syndrome. But living a life that way will completely burn you out. And so from a health and wellness perspective, but even from a performance perspective, the data on this is very conclusive. If you are stressed out, there's a certain level of stress, the upside of stress is a certain level of stress will help you perform well.

Beyond that certain level, you actually go to diminishing returns and it gets worse. And so the question is, do you use stress to your advantage? And then how do you do things like you did with your massage? And I had a massage this weekend myself. To help the refractory period, the ability to recover from the stress period.

Scott Britton (23:37.832)

question that I think a lot of high achievers have who are kind of, you know, starting to get on some type of spiritual path or consciousness journey or inner work journey is, is, it even possible to attain at a similar level when you're more living a life of attunement or you're more kind of less white knuckling it all the time?

And I'd be curious for you as someone who, you you've built a prolific hotel chain, you worked with directly with the founders of Airbnb. Have you seen people that are operating from that place and still getting a ton of amazing things done in the world?

Chip Conley (24:16.428)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. mean,

Chip Conley (24:22.958)

I think when we're younger in life, well, let's talk about the human brain. Arthur Brooks, his book, From Strength to Strength, very popular. talks about Modern Elder Academy, MEA, the book, and he's on our faculty. He's done a study of the human brain, which shows that when we're young, our brain tends to be fast and focused. So that's why we're reactive.

that's why we can take an SAT test and ace it quickly. that's why we are, our, ability to, see things and respond to them, you know, physically is better, you know, as we're older, we're not as good at that. But the problem with having that kind of focused and reactive brain and being very fast is we don't have much peripheral vision.

And as we get older, we move from fluid intelligence, which is what that is called, intense problem solving, to crystallized intelligence, which is connecting the dots, thinking systemically and holistically. And so what I would say is that to answer your question, I think when we're younger, we are naturally going to be fast focused, problem solving, and focus on what's right in front of your face.

For certain kinds of careers in decision making, that's really important. But as we get older, we think a little bit more in a form of wisdom. We're using what Dr. Gene Cohen, a brain scientist, called the four wheel drive of the brain. And what that means is we can be both logical and lyrical in the same sentence, and we go left brain to right brain much more adeptly than a younger person can. So to answer the question, I would just say, yes, I think

When I see a younger person, I think what I like is when I see a younger person who's wise or an older person who's just engaged and really like intense, think playing against type, playing against your brain type is really helpful. So I think that's what I would propose to younger people is how do you become more discerning? How do you take a little bit extra time to make a decision? How do you look at the big picture?

Chip Conley (26:45.998)

a little bit more effectively. And I think at Airbnb, was part of the reason they liked me a lot was because I really did look at the big picture for a company that was going to grow into the world's most valuable hospitality company in the world. But for an older person, I'd want them to be not so laid back, not sort of just thinking holistically. I want them to fucking go out and seize the day and get shit done and go out and don't just sort of sit back. So I think playing against type is what I would

proposed to someone who's looking at how do they show up in the world in a way that's effective.

Scott Britton (27:23.592)

Hmm, I love that. I love that. And I guess a part of that starts with self awareness. A question that I had for you is, you know, you did this, this stint, I think, how old were you when you joined Airbnb? And the I know the main founder was Brian Chesky was 31 at that time. Is that right? What were the main big things that you learned from them? I know you were brought in as this as the sage on the sideline, but I'm

Chip Conley (27:35.534)

52.

Chip Conley (27:40.993)

Exactly. Yep.

Chip Conley (27:50.2)

Sage on the stage, actually, yeah. Sage on the stage. I was the sage on stage, and then I became the guide on the side. So yeah. Well, what Brian originally was looking for, Brian, you know, I have a ton of respect for Brian, would not have joined the company if I didn't really think that I was gonna learn as much from him as he would from me.

Scott Britton (27:56.265)

There you go.

Chip Conley (28:11.234)

But I think what was going on was he really felt like, my God, we're a tech company that's disrupting an industry hospitality and travel that we don't even understand. No one in the company had a background in that industry. so I think initially he thought that's what I came, would come in with my knowledge of the industry, the landscape, you know, how do we build a, you know, a great, hospitality company through our independent hosts around the world. but.

What he saw within the first couple of months was like, wow. This is not just about, you your knowledge about hospitality. This is about your wisdom, about leadership and strategy and building relationships and emotional intelligence. and that's when he said to me, like, you know, you're a modern elder and

So I think that it was, what I had to really get used to was like, wow, I had been CEO of my own startup boutique hotel company for 24 years before I sold it to Hyatt or sold to Pritzker who sold it to Hyatt. And, um, so all of a sudden at 52, I was reporting to Brian who was 21 years younger than me and I was mentoring him. So I was reporting to my mentee, which is a really weird situation, but it worked because Brian and I got along well. Um,

And it worked because we were learning from each other, but it did mean there were times when I had to right size my ego and realized that I was no longer the sage on the stage as I had been in my own company. was like the little mini Richard Branson in my company. You know, everybody saw the company as the me being the face of it. And so all of a sudden I was the guy in the back. And, but my job was not to make myself famous. My job was not even to make the founders famous. My job was to.

help make the founders great leaders and create an enduring successful company. And that's really what I did, mostly with Brian. And I'm really proud of that. I'm proud that when, you know, Brian is one of the Fortune 500 CEOs in the world, in the, you know, U S he's the only one who comes from a creative background. He has a design background from the Rhode Island school of design. He started the company when he was 26, had no business background, no leadership background.

Chip Conley (30:30.444)

And yet here he is, you know, leading a company that at its peak was worth $120 billion and is still the most valuable hospitality company in the world. So, really, you know, I, I had to get, I get to get curious and clear on a new definition of success.

Scott Britton (30:53.352)

What is your current definition of success?

Chip Conley (30:55.95)

It's all ripples of impact. So I was a ROI guy, return on investment, and I'm a ROI guy, ripples of impact. And how am I with MEA, with the world's first midlife wisdom school, creating an environment where we have 7,500 alumni from 60 countries, we have 56 regional chapters all over the world. How am I in my own way by creating this school with two campuses and online programs and even a residential community?

that we call a regenerative community. How am I helping to make a difference in people's lives? Especially in ways where they're then influencing other people. I know, I mean, I feel really good about that. So I asked you earlier, you know, are, you know, are you still, my dad is still living actually, interestingly enough, he's turning 88 next month or two months from now. And

You know, my dad was hard on me when I was growing up and he, he wanted, I was a first born. I, I'm, I'm Steven Townsend Conley Jr. Chip off the old block. and I could recite all of the things where I was in the footsteps of my dad, but you know, at some point I had to deviate from the footsteps of my dad. And that was really hard for my dad. My dad is also a Marine captain in the reserves, pretty much of a hard ass, very politically conservative, very, and I ended up really

taking a different path than him. And what's been beautiful is back in my 20s when I when I did that, he didn't know who the hell I was. And he felt betrayed by me on some level. And then as he started to see the Chip Conley that was starting to read from his own script, not from my dad's script, he started to see how successful I was. And he started to see that

I had a bunch of talents and qualities that he had never seen in me because his standard for looking at me was, is Chip a better version of me? Dad. As opposed to, is Chip a really fucking great version of himself? And you know, I got an email.

Chip Conley (33:10.126)

did a podcast, I my own podcast, the Midlife Chrysalis. I had a podcast last week with Scott Eastwood, Clint Eastwood's son, who's been in 40 films and he's sort of in his dad's footsteps. He's 39 years old and he's a friend of mine and lives down the beach from us in Baja. And long story short is, I talked about my dad in this podcast and I don't know my dad listens to all my podcasts and I didn't warn my dad. And I said some stuff in the podcast because we were comparing notes about

Scott with his dad Clint Eastwood and me with my dad and my dad wrote me an email yesterday and it was just so sweet because he just said, listen, I love who you are. I love who you've become. I know I was hard on you as a kid and my definition of success was that you were supposed to be a better version of me. You became both a better version of me but a different version of me. And so I love my dad.

Scott Britton (34:07.028)

That's awesome, man. Yeah, I think, you know, big part of the human experience is stepping into that authenticity of that soul expression. And I know in that post that I read recently about like who's holding who, I think was the name of the post. You talked about some of the things that you do to kind of attune to that on a daily basis. And so at a practical level, like how do you remain in alignment with that?

Chip Conley (34:22.253)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (34:36.02)

that soul and what it wants to express.

Chip Conley (34:39.874)

Well, first test out the space, you know, when we're living our lives as busy as we are, especially at your age and our forties and sometimes in our fifties, and I'm turning 65 later this year. There's no room for the soul to have an expression. The soul's a bit of an introvert. It's, and it's certainly in it's.

The way I, you know, yeah, that that that particular blog post went pretty viral. The way I articulated it in the blog post is I said, like, what, you know, again, what if our soul has us? And it's our body and personality that is is entrusted with the soul, our job is to steward the soul.

over the course of a lifetime because at the end of our lifetime, the soul will incarnate, move on and be incarnate in someone else. what if our role in life is to allow the soul to lead the dance? I went to ballroom dancing class in sixth grade.

which is just so funny. And the boys lead the girls in the dance and the girls have to learn how to go backwards and heels. But, you know, think of this as the ego leading the dance for the first half of our lives and the soul is going backwards and heels. But after age 50 ish or 45, 50, somewhere around there, what if the ego is actually going backwards and heels like the girl or the woman and the soul is leading the dance? And what would it mean?

to live a life in which your soul was being represented by how you show up every day. And again, the soul feels very abstract. The concept feels very abstract to people. But so if that feels too abstract, what if it's your intuition? What if it's your gut? What if it's your wisdom? What if it is something that you can actually feel in your body?

Chip Conley (36:53.582)

And a lot of us can feel wisdom and intuition, trusting your gut. So it can have a physical presence. So for me, the question of the soul is an important one. But it's also one that the sort of new age world sometimes gets just way too distracted with. if you're spending too much time

chasing your soul, you're sort of not looking inside yourself. And this is why, of course, meditation is so valuable, because meditation quiets all the distractions. And in the quiet of the distractions, the soul, in its introverted voice, starts to actually raise its voice. And we hear it.

Scott Britton (37:45.758)

That's been my experience too. I also feel like for certain things, if we're not attuning to it, like the sign gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it hits you over the head.

Chip Conley (37:57.798)

yeah, for sure.

Scott Britton (37:59.598)

you know, and so I think, I think a lot of times, at least for me, there was a period of time in my journey where I was really, I would say, really concerned about making sure I saw the signs and was following the best soul journey follower ever, you know, just applying that kind of type A mindset to spirituality. And there was eventually a recognition that

hey, if I'm really supposed to know something, will either enter my awareness or life will show it to me. And there was a deep rest in that realization. And it allowed me to just much more fully engage life and without so much worry about it.

Chip Conley (38:41.474)

Yeah, you know, it's.

Chip Conley (38:45.878)

The soul is going to emerge.

It exists in there. Everybody has one. It could be very buried. You might have to do an extreme archaeological dig to find it. But it doesn't require the pursuit of something. It requires the enablement or the unfolding.

Scott Britton (39:15.454)

Hmm.

I love that. A question that I have for you is I feel like a lot of people, like I run this community of entrepreneurs into spirituality and I was.

Chip Conley (39:30.104)

When are we going to do an MEA retreat with all your people? Let's do it.

Scott Britton (39:33.464)

I let's do it, Let's do it. But you know, I would say the average the average age group in there is probably 30 to 50. And there's an end. But there's this sense that like, where are the elders, you know, there's there's there's there's an earnest desire and understanding that there's a lot of people that know a lot more than than we know. And we want to be around those people. But

Chip Conley (39:43.98)

No, that's fine.

Scott Britton (40:01.788)

It's almost like there's a disconnect in our society with that elder wisdom and these young people who earnestly want it. And I'm curious how you think about solving that and how you think about like on an individual level, but even also a collective level, like how we can start to have a more open communication line here.

Chip Conley (40:06.83)

For sure.

Chip Conley (40:26.018)

Yeah, it's called age apartheid. We've separated people by age. you know, one of my favorite questions to ask when I'm giving a big speech is I asked the audience, make a list of the five people you feel closest to and made maybe who know you best and not no family members, no blood family, no married family members. Okay. What let's look at your list. Now put the age next to each of those people. How many of those?

five people are at least 10 years older or 10 years younger. And that exercise usually shows that 80 % of the people who we consider close are within 10 years of our age. And so the first step is just like in Alcoholics Anonymous or any kind of program is you gotta like, you know, realize you got a problem and a lot of people don't realize it, but that exercise helps. Secondly, you got to figure out how do you create

social containers that allow for more of a mixing. I wrote a book called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder, which is my story of intergenerational collaboration at Airbnb. And it became a bit of a noted book in the tech community because in many ways I was just sort of calling out, hey, we have really done a bad job in the tech community of mixing ages and realizing that young and old can learn from each other. So, you know, how do we create that?

Um, and, how we create role models. Brian and I were a role model in the tech industry because, know, we were, you know, two generations apart. He's a millennial. I'm a boomer and, it worked really well. Um, and then how do we, you know, start to integrate a little bit more throughout society? Um, retirement communities, I hope are a thing of the past, uh, in the future. hope they're more intergenerational. Uh, how do we, how do we have, you know, there's, there are universities now.

that are actually building senior living communities on the campus, which makes a ton of sense because there's older people who want to still learn and older and younger people can actually get to know each other. some of this is, know, this is in a hundred years ago, this was not a problem because you had three generations of the same family living in the same work, same home, but we live in a very dislocated society, especially in the U S and so therefore we are, we tend to segregate based upon our age.

Scott Britton (42:53.554)

Yeah, I think I think one of the things I liked, the suggestions I liked in your rich roll podcast was this idea of like as as a person listening, hey, if you know someone that's you admire in some capacity, like, ask them to get a couple ask like some low investment risk thing like, hey, can I get a cup of coffee to just learn x, y, about you?

Chip Conley (43:15.67)

Yeah, and the question I love to try to interject with there is, ask an older person or even a younger person, can go in both directions. And in fact, you could share it with someone else. You each could come to the meeting with this. What are three wisdom bumper stickers? Three pieces of wisdom that can, like a phrase, that have your wisdom fingerprints on them. And what's the origin story? Because

Our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom. And what I mean by that is that it's often in the most challenging of times and circumstances that we are most open to learning. frankly, learning the lesson is more painful, but it's also more indelibly etched on our heart and soul. so I have a practice where every weekend I sit down and write

a list of the lessons I learned of the week and then how they would serve me in the future or how they will serve me in the future. And that I've been doing since age 28. The longer you start to metabolize your life experience into wisdom, the earlier you do that, the longer you have to use it. So wisdom is not just an old person's game. Wisdom is a young person's game. And we live in a society that has been exceptionally focused on accumulating knowledge.

But part of the reason I created MEA was to create the first institution dedicated to distilling wisdom in the modern age. You know, back in the days of the Greeks, and there were mystery schools and wisdom schools back then. But we, in the last couple hundred years, have been so focused on colleges and universities and about filling our heads with knowledge. And it's all good. That's nothing wrong with that. Except in the era of AI, all of that fucking knowledge is on my little phone in my pocket.

So knowledge is commodity and wisdom is a scarcity and what's scarce is usually valuable.

Scott Britton (45:15.848)

How do you differentiate wisdom specifically in your definition from that other type of kind of intellectual?

Chip Conley (45:22.85)

Knowledge. Yeah, not, you know, knowledge. Well, I define wisdom as metabolized experience, life lessons, mindfully shared, because if you, you know, if you shared the right way for the common good. So knowledge is the classic is knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. And so the idea is that wisdom is the practical application of knowledge and global across the globe. 

Scott Britton (00:12.398)

I love so many of the things we discussed today and I know that this is just scratching the surface of all the amazing stuff that you're putting out into the world for people who are excited about learning about Modern Elder Academy, as well as the books and programs you do,  Awesome. We'll link all those out and thanks again, Chip. Love the work that you're doing and super grateful for this conversation.