How To Stay Engaged - a Thoughtful Process

This episode Dave speaks to Kari Cardinale, Senior Vice President Digital & Alumni Strategy at Modern Elder Academy.  They explore the evolving landscape of aging, inspired by the academy's founder, Chip Conley, and his journey as a "modern elder" at Airbnb. Kari delves into the academy's mission to support those in midlife, focusing on the importance of community and embracing transitions as opportunities for growth and redefinition. They reflect on the pandemic's role in accelerating change and the resulting societal shifts, such as the "great resignation."

The conversation also touches on the significance of milestone birthdays and the potential to create new, positive rituals around aging. Dave and Kari’s discussion is a testament to the power of resilience and the pursuit of purpose at any age.

A great conversation not to miss, on understanding how to try new activities during and after different chapters of life. 


Top Takeaways:

• Industry of aging and longevity
• Programs and workshops for midlife transitions
• Difference between change and transition
• Three stages of a transition
• Creating a purpose portfolio
• Embracing a growth mindset
• Impact of the pandemic on transitions
• Societal and cultural shifts
• Milestone birthdays and aging
• Value of authentic connections and exchange of experiences

Ponder and Share:

“Folks may recognize they're feeling stuck. They're feeling stuck somehow in their life that maybe they've had a routine that sort of ended now... Those are often what we would consider transitions…” –Kari Cardinale

“Daily we have changes that are happening, but a transition is something that's internal.” –Kari Cardinale

“The antidote to a midlife crisis is to look at it as a midlife chrysalis.” –Kari Cardinale


Check these out!
Kari Cardinale on LinkedIn
Kari Carinale’s website
Modern Elder Academy website
Episode 5: How to Live Young By Retiring Slow with Vanessa Liu
Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder by Chip Conley


About Kari Cardinale
Kari is a master host with a knack of creating deep connections both live and virtually, with 25 years experience as a driven social entrepreneur in creative strategy, instructional design for live or virtual events, professional hosting, facilitating and training, and private consulting to bring out the best in thought leaders. She has worked with hundreds of experts around the world.

Kari has a Masters degree in psychology, masters work in organizational leadership, and is passionate in leading the new frontier of global community engagement. Kari served as a weekly contributor to the Huffington Post and several pieces were re-published in professional periodicals. She has appeared on local TV, Dateline NBC, PBS “This Emotional Life,” and contributed to the A

Read my Blog called Rules For Being Stubbornly Young and let me know what you think!

Email your thoughts at dave@stubbornlyyoung.com

Check out where it’s all happening on the Stubbornly Young website

Thanks and looking forward to hearing how you’re remaining stubbornly young!

Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

Kari Cardinale (00:00:00) - In the past 100 years, we've actually gained 30 extra years of life. So, you know, the average lifespan is now somewhere around 78 years old and even older as we are healthier. But that was not the case 100 years ago. And the lifespan that we have gained is in the middle of our life. It's not that we're being elderly for 30 years. We're being young and vibrant and in our 50s and our 60s and our 70s and our 80s were still running around and working and doing all sorts of interesting things.

[INTERVIEW]

Dave Tabor (00:00:31) - Welcome to the Stubbornly Young podcast, where people in their 50s, 60s and beyond, remaining engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. I'm Dave Tabor. In this episode, I'll be joined by Kari Cardinale. She's senior vice president of digital at Modern Elder Academy, the world's first ever midlife wisdom school. We're going to unpack that a little bit. The school is dedicated to reframing the concept of aging. Modern Elder Academy supports students to navigate midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. Its purpose is to build a community of inspired and empowered middle lifers. 

So I've got to let you know a bit of background. I learned about Modern Elder Academy and its founder, Chip Conley, in the previous episode of Stubbornly Young with Vanessa Liu, a great episode titled Live Young by Retiring Slow. Now Kari, who we’re going to be speaking with soon, has an amazing background, including as a weekly contributor to The Huffington Post, and she's appeared on Dateline, NBC and PBS’ Is This Emotional Life? We're going to be talking about how the themes of Stubbornly Young and the Modern Elder Academy intersect, and what Kari sees for trends that can be useful and interesting to the stubbornly young. So, Kari, glad you could join me on the Stubbornly Young podcast.

Kari Cardinale (00:01:45) - Oh dear. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dave Tabor (00:01:50) - I'm glad we could connect. This whole theme, I think, is going to tie together nicely. And I'm wondering first though, for background, what was the inspiration of the Modern Elder Academy?

Kari Cardinale (00:01:59) - You know it's a great story. The inspiration came from our founder, Chip Conley, who was known as a rebel hospitality entrepreneur. So at 25 to 50, he had the largest group of boutique hotels in the United States. And he loved that until he didn't. He sold that company in around 50. Kind of hit what you might say that midlife area wasn't so great for him. Didn't love that era, and he wasn't sure what he was going to do next. And he's on a lot of boards, they’re all connected. He was approached to see if you could advise these two young kids in hoodies who are starting a company called Airbnb. They didn't really know what they were up to, and they needed someone to help guide them, not only in hospitality but in running a company. And so Chip ended up coming in as the VP of Global hospitality at Airbnb and as a mentor to Brian Chesky in particular. And for him, it was quite an experience to be the oldest guy there and talking about stuff he'd never really heard about before.

Kari Cardinale (00:02:56) - And at one point he wasn't even sure he was going to take the job because he was nervous if he could learn such new skills or what could he offer? And they are the ones who called him a modern elder, and his first reaction was expletives. He was not happy at that name at all. He took it as a, as an insult and they said, no. 

Dave Tabor (00:03:15) - Well, I'm going to interrupt your story because that was you know, that was something I really wanted to explore with you because, and we are going to come back and finish the story, but elder is a funny word. It has kind of two connotations. The first is like this mythical tribal leader who is like worthy of respect, adulation and so forth. The other, the second, is more of a connotation of elderly, you know, which we don't want, right?

Kari Cardinale (00:03:35) - Isn't that so interesting? I think that's why we ended up taking a complicated word, because it's a challenge that if you see that word and you go right to elderly what does that say about our perspective? And, you know, developing countries had reverence for the term elder, was an aspirational word, something to to look up to and look forward to. So we called it the modern elder. That was a, Chip was called the Modern Elder and in their wise perspective, at 25, it said they had said that a modern elder is someone who is as curious as they are wise. 

Dave Tabor (00:04:13) - Brilliant. That's brilliant.

Kari Cardinale (00:04:14) - And I said, well, I'll take that if I am. If I'm known as being curious and wise, great. I'm in. I'm a modern elder. And that's how it began.

Dave Tabor (00:04:22) - I love that. I think curiosity is absolutely one of the most important traits, especially as we age. So that's a great story. Now, your bio says that you're an expert in the longevity industry. So what's that mean? I know that also could be twisted with the weird word of elder, right?

Kari Cardinale (00:04:40) - It absolutely can. Who knew there was a whole industry on aging and longevity that actually has really nothing to do with cosmetic products. But, and so here's the crazy thing is that in the past 100 years, we've actually gained 30 extra years of life. So, you know, the average lifespan is now somewhere around 78 years old and even older as we are healthier. But that was not the case 100 years ago, and the lifespan that we have gained is in the middle of our life. It's not that we're being elderly for 30 years. We're being young and vibrant and in our 50s and our 60s and our 70s and our 80s were still running around and working and doing all sorts of interesting things. But our language hasn't caught up and our mindset hasn't caught up to that. So hence this idea that aging is scary or aging is becoming irrelevant has hung around. And yet people don't feel that way fundamentally.

Dave Tabor (00:05:38) - I think for sure that's true. Why though, this notion of longevity industry, what's the industry piece mean?

Kari Cardinale (00:05:44) - So the industry itself, longevity industry is taking a look at what are these older adults doing with their money? What are they doing with their time? How is this impacting the nature of work or housing or caregiving? All the things that we are facing as our, this baby boomer generation, 100 plus million are getting older. That's, this generation is revamping every stage of life. They absolutely changed what adolescence was about early adulthood and they're not stopping now. They are completely revamping what it means to get older. So I was fascinated with this industry. I am by nature a teacher and a facilitator, and started working to learn as much as I could. I realized when I was 49 I was kind of freaking out, Dave, I gotta tell you, I was like, really? Not sites to turn 50. It was this milestone birthday that hit me like a brick over my head, and I couldn't quite figure out why I was so crabby about it, and why I was bitching about it all the time. And it forced me to take a look at this term I never heard of, which was ageism. I didn't know ageism existed, but I was ageist just about myself. And then I became incredibly curious about why am I so worried? And as I spent more time getting to know really bright and driven older adults that I still aspire to and admire as they are in their 70s and their 80s and their 90s, it helped well that little voice inside of me that was afraid. And when we're afraid to get older, then that impacts the decisions that we make. We might say to ourselves, oh, I'm in my mid-50s now. I'm too old to learn a new sport or learn to speak Portuguese or move to a new place. We shut down our life for absolutely no reason that this construct, this mindset that we've bought into.

Dave Tabor (00:07:33) - You know that comment about ageist against yourself? I think I've had some of those feelings too. In fact, my intro video about Stubbornly Young talks about this fear that accumulated within me, about similar to what you just expressed, you did it better. But thank you for that. And your job now is to facilitate online programs for the Modern Elder Academy. And I saw a couple titles that were interesting living and working on purpose and navigating midlife transitions. So what kinds of people are taking these classes?

Kari Cardinale (00:08:03) - The Modern Elder Academy has grown. We're five years old now, so back to Chip having this idea about being a modern elder, he decided to write a book called Wisdom at Work.

Kari Cardinale (00:08:12) - He was living in Baja, Mexico at the time, and he had what he called a Baja Aha. He had an aha moment in Baja where he said, we need a midlife wisdom school. He had kind of a similar insight that I had. We need to reframe aging and we need to and I know about hospitality and I love thought leadership. And so he put together this beautiful, insanely gorgeous retreat space on the beach in Baja, Mexico, to bring people together. Some people identify with midlife in their mid 30s. Maybe they worked in Silicon Valley and they sold their company, or maybe they were professional athletes. So they're experiencing that major shift in their life. But our average guests are around 54. So we have guests all the way up to 87 years old, and they can come to our workshops on the beach in Baja or soon to our campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Or they can come with me and do some programs as a retreat work online. So we do a retreat at home.

We have a navigating midlife transitions course at six weeks long, and it gives us a chance to look at all the things that we have going on. On average, most of us may have 20 transitions happening at the same time. We may be caregiving and empty nesting. We may be thinking about moving or quitting our job and they really impact our mindset.

Dave Tabor (00:09:30) - Yeah, now Baja sounds more fun than home, but I could see why doing it at home can be pretty effective. When people sign up for these courses, and they're not particularly expensive, but they're not free. What problem, what pain point are they trying to solve?

Kari Cardinale (00:09:44) - You know, I find that folks may recognize they're feeling stuck. They're feeling stuck somehow in their life that maybe they've had a routine that sort of ended now, whether because they're empty nesting or changed their career, feeling stuck or they have a big decision that they want to make, and they're not sure feeling ready to make it. Those are often what we would consider transitions or reflecting on, ‘What is meaningful to me now?’ And we might translate that into a big purpose or a little purpose. Maybe my purpose is simpler now. It's gardening and being with my grandchildren.

Dave Tabor (00:10:18) - So is that what's different? I mean, people in their 20s, I mean, I've got grown sons and they've got big questions that they're trying to answer. I mean, would you, your program is a different twist than what would appeal to a 30 year old, right? So is the problem that they're trying to solve when they come to your programs it really is specific to the point in life, right, or not?

Kari Cardinale (00:10:36) - It's interesting when you're at this mid-life stage, we are all about community engagement and learning together because it's really hard to meet other people. When you're growing up and you're in high school and you're in college, you're just surrounded by other people. So you have this whole social element that's much more difficult to achieve as we get to these older stages of our life. So we were very conscious to make our programs be an exploratory inner process and outer conversations.

Kari Cardinale (00:11:05) - And it's not to woowoo. It's not to health and wellness. We, you know, we have scientific and social science that we use, but we try to make it fun. We have conversations, but we also make margaritas.

Dave Tabor (00:11:17) - Well, that's, your website just talks about having a close knit community of over 3000 people, 40 countries. So at some point I can imagine, though, when you're going through a session seminar class and you're talking about similar points in life, you've got that naturally in common, almost like you're in fourth grade together. Yeah, I mean, you've got your natural commonalities.

Kari Cardinale (00:11:34) - That's the one thing that I hear more than anything is that people say, I feel like I'm not alone. And I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only one struggling with some of these ideas. And so to me, that's one of the greatest results of going through one of our programs.

Dave Tabor (00:11:51) - Well, that's cool. And that's kind of my mission too with Stubbornly Young is to just talk about these kinds of things. And in your video, you even talk about a second adulthood, and you talk about transition versus change involving things like pace of life, feelings of purpose. Obviously, you're talking about those. Maybe you can share what is the difference in your mind between transition and change?

Kari Cardinale (00:12:11) - Wow, it's a great one. Change is happening all the time in our life. Daily we have changes that are happening, but a transition is something that's internal. The transition is more psychological. So if someone is going through a divorce after 30 years of marriage, you are transitioning your identity to a very different place. If you are retiring from a career again, there's a big transition into who am I now? What am I doing now? It could be even subtler it just I'm not sure what matters to me at this point anymore. And so that's an internal, some people say, almost a spiritual journey of exploring that. Now Carl Jung and his wisdom identified that we go through midlife. We shift from what he calls the ego to the soul. So the stage of life that's about earning power, influence, getting the house, getting established. And then there's a shift where we start thinking about what matters now and how do we want to reshape the next stage of our life.

Dave Tabor (00:13:09) - Your definition of the beginning sounded quite sticky to me. The idea that transition is really about one's identity, and that soulful shift of who you are, who you're going to be going forward. You hear about that, like what Chip did when he decided to get out of what he was doing, sell out of the hotels and get into something different. Right? That's an identity thing. Yes. Did you do that when you hit 50? Did you?

Kari Cardinale (00:13:30) - 100%. You know, we sometimes, we may face a transition and it's so scary that we don't make it or we regress back to the same job or the same person that we're in a relationship because it's just too much. But with support and with an opportunity to really reflect, we hope to help create more regenerative transitions. And that certainly happened for me.

Dave Tabor (00:13:51) - You can do that without the woo-woo stuff?

Kari Cardinale (00:13:52) - You can. You know, for me it was just breaking down and transitions. I didn't know really that I was going through transitions in my own life and that there are stages of a transition. I didn't know that either. There's three stages. There's an ending, what we call the messy middle and a new beginning. And just knowing that there's going to be a somewhat predictable flow when we're going through these big shifts and there are certain emotions that go with it. We call it building a sense of transitional intelligence, like your EQ or IQ. You can build your TQ muscle so that as these transitions of life start happening, we get better at them.

Dave Tabor (00:14:28) - And I suppose just understanding that this is natural if you're trying to do it now, if you're not trying, then you don't have to worry about it. But if you really want to make these transitions understanding what it feels like along the way, I could see where that would be quite supporting.

Kari Cardinale (00:14:39) - And to know that many times we were going through these types of transitions, it could take four, five years. And so maybe we don't need to beat ourselves up so much if we're not feeling like we've figured out the next thing yet.

Dave Tabor (00:14:53) - You must have a couple of examples of people who, whether they've gone through Modern Elder Academy or not, but were entering into it went through the messy middle, came out the other end and now have a really different life they might not have had they not consciously tackled this?

Kari Cardinale (00:15:06) - All the time. Yeah.

Dave Tabor (00:15:07) - So what's an example? Paint a picture of 1 or 2 people that you watched.

Kari Cardinale (00:15:12) - You know, I'm thinking about one of our alumni. She had moved away from her, the town that she had raised her children, and she loved it. She was having this whole different life and the independence and the freedom. And yet she reached a certain stage when that wasn't so fulfilling anymore. Her kids now were actually getting closer to having grandkids, and she wanted to move back from Florida, back to Ohio.

And her friends were like, are you crazy? Why would you want to move back to Ohio? But she had a chance through a program to review, like what matters to her and her values, and to think about this next stage of her life is something to look forward to. And she did. And she moved back and was so happy. She came back and told us, you know, with tears in her eyes, just the time that she's been spending with her adult children that she didn't have before, and that gave her exactly what she was hoping she would find in making such a big scary move.

Dave Tabor (00:16:03) - Yeah. That's cool. We often hear and you even talk about it on your website, the phrase midlife crisis, and that generally, I think, implies something painful or sometimes maybe foolhardy decisions like buying a sports car to make you feel young or having an affair. Instead you talk about midlife antidote and those are different. So talk about that.

Kari Cardinale (00:16:21) - Yeah. We you know, we really liked the antidote to a midlife crisis is to look at it as a midlife chrysalis. Now, what's a chrysalis? Right. It's when a caterpillar spins a cocoon for itself before it becomes a butterfly. And we really feel like that is midlife. That's a messy middle where you're transitioning from all those roles and stages of the first adulthood, and really in this soupy place of what is next for retirement, or empty nesting or divorce or moving or managing health, all those things.

Dave Tabor (00:16:51) - Yeah, but a caterpillar gets to sleep through it. 

Kari Cardinale (00:16:54) - Right. And a very active process. Right? You're not really sleeping when you're in that process. You're evolving, you're transforming. You're turning, you're becoming something new.

Dave Tabor (00:17:04) - Got it. Yes, I know, and it is a nice metaphor. I just, I thought to myself, boy, it would be nice to sleep through my problems and wake up coming out the other end. 

Kari Cardinale (00:17:12) - Oh man, I know. I wish I could have slept through menopause, but no, nothing, no such luck.

Dave Tabor (00:17:18) - Now you also talk about defining the next chapter, and next chapter sometimes is like a euphemism for being older or getting old, right? But you don't see it that way at all.

Kari Cardinale (00:17:28) - Oh, it's really how can we become more present in the moment and think about what matters to us right now? In our course on purpose we talked about the big P purpose and the little P purpose. And so maybe someone had a big P purpose in their life to own a company, to write the book. But everybody has one of those. And people feel sort of anxiety around, I'm supposed to have this big purpose. I just want to go to work and then watch Netflix at night. So we try to like, take down the anxiety around this is about the next stage of life is what would it be like to have a purpose portfolio, to create a portfolio of meaning in our life? And that might mean attending to our body, tending to a garden, to tending to our friendships, to tending to a hobby project. 

Dave Tabor (00:18:13) - Yeah. So it doesn't have to be a big, life changing or world changing kind of a thing. Now, when you think about how the Stubbornly Young audience makes decisions about their lives going forward, and you think about all the people you've seen through Modern Elder Academy, what's a common pattern that should be explored? Sort of like people are moving through and you see people doing it well and you see people doing it less well. What do you think is the big upside to do better?

Kari Cardinale (00:18:41) - Well, you know, I have this metaphor that my husband and I share about sometimes in life. It's a metaphor about Winnie the Pooh, which is one of my favorite childhood stories. But sometimes in, you know, when we were younger, we were like Tigger and jumping out and trying new things and being adventurous. And then as we get older, we get a bit more like Eeyore. I, 100%, have turned into that person. Like, ask me to be out past 9:30, you'd think you're asking me to go to the moon. And so what I found is that there's something about saying yes more often to shifting into that Tigger adventurous side of us that we also call it a growth mindset, that Carol Dweck’s work out of Stanford, that when we were younger we had a growth mindset. Put on roller skates. Yes, let's go figure it out. Put on roller skates now. No way I'm going to break a hip.

Dave Tabor (00:19:32) - . Yeah, yeah. You know it reminds me of the movie with Jim Carrey, ‘Yes Man.’

Kari Cardinale (00:19:38) - He's had to say yes to everything.

Dave Tabor (00:19:40) - Yes, he has to say yes to everything. And of course, he has lots of bad experiences, but ultimately, they all end up being good. This notion of like, to your point, being a taker, I think that it is easier, I think, to not be so inclined as we get older, to say yes. So a great reminder. Now, Chip Conley in his video, and reminding listeners that Chip is the co-founder of Modern Elder Academy, said that said transitions are rampant right now. That change and transition are different though. So when he talks about transitions being rampant, what does that mean?

Kari Cardinale (00:20:10) - Yeah, you think about the world has been so full of change, and the pandemic was a strange phenomenon that everybody on the planet had to transition at the same time into something different than what everything we had been doing came to an end. It was a dramatic end. And then we were all in this messy middle together of being afraid and locked down and having to change our life. And it took longer than we thought to come out of that. And even now, as we're kind of in this new beginning, there's still some trepidation with the new beginning. So it's actually a great collective metaphor of how do we approach those types of transitions, and what stages are we the most reticent towards. And so we have the pandemic, there's sort of a polarization in society, there's climate change, there's economies that are going up and down and people feel, you know, more out of sorts than they have in the past. And we find that as humans, loneliness has become rampant for almost every age, and particularly for those that are older men experiencing loneliness and being in a big house because the kids are gone and you're by yourself and you don't really even know the neighbors, and what happens if you fall down at night, that's scary. And that actually can impact your lifespan to experience loneliness.

Kari Cardinale (00:21:38) - And so part of our directive is to take a look at all these changes and transitions of how we're supposed to be in the world are so much easier if we can do it together with like-minded friends, and to find ways to make friends, even online. I have seen so many people become lifelong friends through these authentic conversations, and from that, they're traveling. They're staying with each other. They're going on vacation together. They're building a network that they didn't have before.

Dave Tabor (00:22:10) - That's super cool. And now you're living in a role, right? You see that every day. You're seeing life transitions by people that are in the Stubbornly Young audience all the time. And I think that this group, clearly the mindset is growing. That group is growing. The population is growing. The mindset is growing. Modern Elder Academy participants are self-selecting as well. Right? But as you watch that evolution over the last five years, what trends are you seeing as how that growth is shifting, how people are behaving differently, how they're thinking differently, even what they want differently?

Kari Cardinale (00:22:41) - That's a really good question, Dave.

Kari Cardinale (00:22:42) - It's been like a rapid change. I and I think everyone would say that's true, that, you know, right before the pandemic, it's like we had a certain life. We were all busy and doing our things. And then the pandemic happened. And then no one can remember what year was or what day it was or anything. We were in our sweatpants for like two years and Zoom, of course, became the default. And what's interesting is even though people say they hate Zoom, people did a lot of interesting things with technology during that time. They could babysit their grandchildren. They talked to old friends, they had holiday parties together. Some people said that counted. I talked to more people when pandemic than I do now. That we're back in this new stage of normal or whatever that is. And so we're seeing these reactions. People were having the great resignation. People were quiet quitting. People were thinking about purpose. People seek about purpose that people have collectively still I think in a process that we see is very much part of a transition.

Kari Cardinale (00:23:39) - We are transitioning as a culture. AI is coming, people are absolutely terrified or totally excited. It's again, it's a transition. And how are we interacting with each other and as a society. So if we can take a bigger picture and just zoom up a little bit, I find it makes it a little easier to not get caught up in the hysteria, just like I was so caught up in the hysteria of turning 50 until I had a better understanding. Okay, I'm shifting my mindset from a certain adulthood that was this first stage to a new stage, and I can do anything I want with it.

Dave Tabor (00:24:17) - Isn't it weird? I mean, 50 is just a number. You woke up 50 and you weren't really any different than before you went to sleep, right? But we have these constructs that, I mean, you know a lot more about psychology than I do. You're engaged in this all the time. But are those constructs sort of counterproductive, especially now?

Kari Cardinale (00:24:32) - Yeah. We, you know, we're exploring how to create new milestone birthday rituals because we build all this angst around turning 60 and turning 70 and turning 80, and the birthday cards are just the worst at the grocery stores.

Dave Tabor (00:24:48) - Oh, aren't they miserable? Yeah, yeah, there is going to be one day a set of Stubbornly Young cards and gifts and…

Kari Cardinale (00:24:55) - I can't wait for that. I think that's what that is. Our goal here is to just reframe that narrative.

Dave Tabor (00:24:59) - Yeah, well, I think that's a good note to end on. I'm your host, Dave Tabor, today on Stubbornly Young you've been listening to my conversation with Kari Cardinale of the Modern Elder Academy. Kari, so glad we could talk today.

Kari Cardinale (00:25:10) - My pleasure. Dave. Thank you so much again for having me.

Dave Tabor (00:25:12) - Yeah, we'll have to do it again. Listeners, this has been episode six of the Stubbornly Young Podcast for those in their 50s, 60s and beyond, remaining engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. Please do me a favor. Help the podcast spread by submitting a review and by sharing with your friends. Thanks to my friends at VEA Technologies for all their web and tech support. Catch you next time on Stubbornly Young.

Dave Tabor (00:25:34) - Boy, you are, you know this space so well.

Kari Cardinale (00:25:37) - Oh well, I do love it. I just find it endlessly interesting and I feel very lucky to be able to do the job that I do and meet so many interesting people.

Dave Tabor (00:25:46) - Oh yeah, I bet you, I bet there are people who are like, people you would think you would never struggle as you, like, you are so accomplished. You are so brilliant. You are so amazing. You should never struggle. And yet here they are struggling.

Kari Cardinale (00:26:00) - Yeah, I was teaching in Baja a couple of weeks ago, and we had a billionaire there. Billionaire with a B who is just a human who was, you know, thinking about what is their life going to be like without that identity. That was such a big part of it. And we had a stay at home mom who was there too. And there was, it didn't matter, which is what I do love. 

Dave Tabor (00:26:26) - Were the two of them relating.

Kari Cardinale (00:26:27) - Completely, completely like, nobody cares. You know, our whole vibe is we don't care what you do, we don't carry a resume. We're like, we're at a new stage of life right now, and we share, like what's going on in our lives. What are the things we're thinking about which are universal. And so everyone has something to give and to receive from each other.

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