The Modern Elder Mindset - Chip Conley (S2:E21)

Midlife isn’t just a number, it’s the moment your life asks for a new operating system. We sit down with Chip Conley, founder of Modern Elder Academy, boutique hotel pioneer, and early Airbnb mentor, to talk about what happens when success stops feeling satisfying and the future suddenly feels urgent. Chip shares the chain of events that pushed him into reinvention, including loss, burnout, and a near-death flatline experience that delivered one blunt message: slow down.

ArtStorming is thrilled to announce our official partnership with Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works! Like us, they believe in pushing creative boundaries and amplifying vibrant artistic voices. Zeitgeist Dance Theatre and Francisco Gella Dance Works are dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and dance education in New Mexico and beyond. Together, we create a powerful, shared space where art thrives and audiences can connect deeply.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Big Questions About Creative Lives

Lili 0:00

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host Lili Pierpont, and this is Art Storming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, art Storming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing. Dream bigger, charter, new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're gonna take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject.

Season Two Focus On Legacy

Lili 1:15

Welcome to Art Storming, the Art of Remembrance.

Speaker 3 1:20

This episode of Art Storming is underwritten in part by Zeitgeist Dance Theater and Francisco Gella Dance Works, organizations dedicated to advancing contemporary dance and

Speaker 5 1:30

dance education

Speaker 3 1:31

in New Mexico and beyond

Lili 1:35

What happens when the life you spend decades building suddenly stalls out? When you hit a wall in midlife and the old tricks just don't work anymore? How can you even think about building a legacy when your own life doesn't even inspire you anymore? Well, there's a school for that, and it's called Modern Elder Academy, and it was founded by my next guest, Chip Conley. Boutique hotel pioneer and legendary Airbnb mentor, Chip joins us to share the exact moment he found his answers to those same questions above. A radical perspective-shifting brush with death that changed his relationship with time forever. In this hour, Chip shares the profound personal wake-up call that inspired him to create the Modern Elder Academy, giving birth to a global movement centered on a beautiful concept known as generativity, which is about learning how to harvest the wisdom you've acquired and pour it into the next generation. And how MEA programs can guide you to your own holy urgency, unlocking untold potentials for the next chapters of your life and inspired legacies to leave in your wake. Get ready to enter the creative field of Chip Conley you are a busy guy, we are gonna jump right in. So

Why Chip Conley Built MEA

Lili 2:56

I am art storming with Chip Conley, and, you almost need no introduction. I think you're, you've become so well known. But, uh, we're gonna jump right in with you telling me a little bit about Modern Elder Academy, since that is, the central focus, other than maintaining your health, of your life right now. And, uh, we'll get into all of it. I almost don't know where to start because between MEA and the books that you've written and your legacy projects and your near-death experience and everything else that you've got going on your plate, you're such the perfect guest for us because your life intersects with us in absolutely every single way. So I'm expecting that we'll just roll into all those topics and hit them eventually. But Yeah uh, uh, yeah, you are, and that's what I love about you. So tell us a little bit, just to give our audience a little bit of an, a background about Modern Elder Academy, where the location, you know, like the, the really top-tier stuff, and then we'll get into

From Boutique Hotels To Airbnb Elder

Lili 3:51

it.

Chip 3:51

Yeah. the story for that was that I, for 24 years, started and ran a boutique hotel company called Joie de Vivre based in San Francisco. created 52 boutique hotels. In my late 40s, I really struggled, with the company, with life. it was you might have called it a midlife crisis, but it was-- it didn't fit the midlife crisis of Hollywood, where you buy a car, a sports car to have an affair. It was more like I felt stuck and a little bit dark. And, um, I had a flatline experience. I died, and from an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, and that woke me up to saying "I don't wanna do this anymore." And so by 50, I had sold the business at the bottom of the Great Recession, and I lost, I'd lost five s- male friends to suicide, all of them in midlife. And, so I took two years to be curious and then was asked by the founders of Airbnb to join them 14, 13, years ago when nobody had ever heard of the company, small tech startup, didn't know anything about... They didn't know anything about hospitality or travel or anything like that. So spent seven and a half years there. They called me the modern elder. I didn't like that at first because I didn't think of myself as elderly. They said, no. Elder's a re- relative term, like Tom Brady in the NFL is a, an elder, as a quarterback i- in his early 40s." And long story short is I embraced the title modern elder of Airbnb when they said a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. And that's the long way of saying that, when I moved from full-time to part-time, I started working on a book called "Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder." And I was writing that book down in Baja. We're at a home on the beach and, an hour north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific Ocean. And one day I went for a run on the beach, had a Baja aha. I had this weird epiphany of like, why did I struggle so much in my late 40s when my 50s have been so good? Why did most of the friends of mine who took their own lives did so in their late 40s?" and I decided to create the world's first midlife wisdom school, and that was, eight and a half years ago. And when COVID came along, that, so that opened and got a lot of press and got a lot of attention and, then when COVID came along, I said, we need to have a campus in the US." and I desperately wanted to do it in Santa Fe or in New Mexico. and that's really how the MEA campus in, Galisteo Basin, just outside of Santa Fe near Eldorado and Lamy came about. It's on a 2,566 acre, regenerative horse ranch. And, yeah, we now have, almost 10,000 alumni from 60 countries, f- who have come to either one of our two campuses for, multi-day programs. Usually the d- the average length of the program is four days And, we have 56 regional chapters around the world

Lili 6:32

and at the risk of sounding like this is just a plug for MEA, I got a chance to tour the campus, thanks to you, a couple weeks ago, and man, oh man, if anybody wants to come to Santa Fe... No, really, I can't imagine, and I'm a total snob 'cause I come from the interior design industry. I've traveled a lot. I consider myself very fortunate that way. But if somebody wants to have a deluxe but low-key and beaut- I mean, like, everything that Santa Fe has to offer is offered on that campus. And to add to that, this immersive experience that you are offering for, I think it should be required education for almost everybody in midlife. And it's true, I mean, we in midlife, and I am s- squarely in that category with you, it's, we're living so much longer now that midlife a- as a really large bracket. And I've, I read your most recent book, Learning to Love Midlife. I don't usually do a deep dive into people I talk to, but I did that first and then I decided to have you as a guest. So did it a little bit differently. and it was just because everything that I read there. But one of the things that I wanted to, focus on is that in that book, and this may have come from your experience with the Airbnb people, that you define midlife as it could start anywhere from, 30s to, or maybe it's 40s and then on. And that's a Big chunk of time, so speak to that a little bit.

Chip 7:57

Yeah.

Redefining Midlife And Longevity

Chip 7:58

midlife, first of all, we don't like to think about midlife. It's like a club we don't wanna join.

Lili 8:02

Like the AARP.

Chip 8:04

yeah, exactly. which they send you the card at, before you're 50. the thing about midlife is that it is a relatively new life stage, because, the average longevity in the year 1900 hundred was only 47 years old. So by the end of the century, by 2000, it was 77. So as a result, midlife became a life stage, and, it became a life stage between early adulthood and later adulthood. And depending upon how you define early adulthood and later adulthood, midlife would be the bridge in between. And the longer we live, in many cases, the longer we live, all of the additional years of longevity are in midlife. So as I was doing my research for creating the world's first midlife wisdom school, MEA, but also for the, for that book, I talked with a lot of sociologists and even some philosophers, and the n- the thing I kept hearing from them was, we're moving into a direction in which midlife may start at 35," which is a little earlier than how it's historically been thought to start, and it actually lasts till 75. But I think those are permeable boundaries because we've had people as young as 22 and as old as 95 come to MEA. 25% of the people who come to MEA are millennials or Gen Z. So it then... People are not coming exclusively for the age component. That's an important part of it. It's an important part of our curriculum, is how do we reframe aging and longevity because Becca Levy at Yale, who's worked with us on our c- curriculum, has shown that when you shift your mindset on aging in midlife from a negative to a positive, which is hard to do in an ageist culture, but if you can shift your midli- your p- point of view on aging as being a positive, not negative, you gain seven and a half years of additional longevity. So I think part of what we're trying to do is help people with that. But also, the reason we have both younger and older people is because we help people to understand what we call TQ, transitional intelligence. And frankly, we're always going through transitions. There's a Harvard, professor named Dan Gilbert, who's a friend, and he says, "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." And that's really true. When, when you're an adolescent in teen years, you know you're going through change. But somehow when we get into adulthood, we think somehow if we're going through a bunch of changes in our life, is that we got the game of life wrong. But transitions are critical at any age, as is purpose, as is wisdom. And so those are three of our pillars of our program. and frankly, the younger a person is who's learning wisdom management practices, how to become wiser, the longer they have to use that wisdom

Lili 10:41

and it's so desperately needed. I mean, one of the things we do in our program is we talk a lot about legacy. And the way we are talking about legacy is not the name on a building that you leave behind, it's what you leave in people. And it's never too soon to start that as a practice because it's about being present. It's about all of the things that you teach in, your wisdom academy. And, there, there's no, age bracket really on that. To live a more conscious, more awake, more alert, more contributive lifestyle should be something that everybody would like to do. And unfortunately, sometimes, as with you, as with me, it takes a wake-up call to kind of be a catalyst for that.

Grief As A Wake-Up Call

Lili 11:22

So speaking of catalyst for that

Chip 11:24

the people know about your wake-up call?

Lili 11:26

I think, some people who have been listeners know, that my wake-up call started having lost both of my parents at early ages, my father, when I was in my early 20s, and, he died in the AIDS epidemic in 1985.. And so that was a wake up call because he was not expecting to die. We weren't expecting to lose hundreds of people that we knew and cared about. So that whole thing in and of itself was a wake up call. When he died, there were lot of superstitions around the death, how you dispose of a body, et cetera. I mean, it was, like the pandemic, it was really freaky. It was so early that they still, made me burn all of his, personal effects in his apartment. I went as a young person to his apartment to dispose of everything. Anyway, it was a miserable, horrible thing. And then, of course, they had, at that time, they believed that anybody who had contact with him needed to be tested every seven years because he was believed to be that highly contagious. it turns out that we were all, He-- It was much more worrisome that he be infected by people who came in off the street, like... A- anyway, he ultimately ended up in reverse isolation. Ultimately, he died. But that was my first wake up call because it was my first really intimate brush with death and what do you do with that life? Like, how do we properly tribute that? And he didn't have a, a, a religious institution, so finding, a church in New York that I could f- place to do the memorial service, et cetera, et cetera. So that was, tier one, and then tier two happened with nine years later when my mother was killed here in Santa Fe in a skydiving accident, and she was 53 and daddy had been 50. So in both cases, these were people in midlife, squarely in midlife, who did not plan to die. They did not have their ducks in a row in terms of all of that, and it fell on me to figure that out. And as a 20-something-year-old, early 30-something-year-old, I did not have a peer group that was prepared to support me through that passage of life. And so for me, the wake up call was, how do you live your life with this awareness that it could happen at any time? and then just-- and with, with- without any listening in the community for supporting that idea. So I wasn't yet in, quite in midlife, so there-- and there weren't any sort of books or thinking about that yet. So my situation's a, a little bit different, um, than... but the, but that's the beauty of it, is that there are so many entry points into this conversation, and we all have, the thing that sparks us. Y- I never would've believed that 30 years later I would be involved in a project that is completely focused on this and finding so much community and finding so many close associations with people who not only get what I'm trying to do now, but are joining into the concert. And it was such a delight to meet you because in reading your book, I feel like I know more about you than you know about me

Chip 14:23

Which is why I wanted Our listeners to know more about you too, and I appreciate your vulnerability

Lili 14:28

Well, well thank you. I mean, you know, and it's funny because I have to be careful because I can speak so candidly about it in a way that, you know, it's deep in my past and I've done so much work around it that I can be very cavalier about it and to-- and I don't know that I'm being cavalier about it until I see that sort of shock in the eyes of the person that I'm sharing with. And then I realize I kinda have to reel it back a little bit or just be, be present with the shock that they're experiencing. But it is for 30 years given me an, an access to be there for people in my life who have gone through everything from terminal illnesses to tragic losses. In the moment, I was for 10 years the person who was putting together the memorial service because I was the only one who could keep my shit together, deeply understand what they were going through, and help metabolize the whole situation. And so as I was reading your book, there were just like, there were so many moments when I was like, "Oh yeah, that's my brother, that's my brother, that's my brother." So again, another reason I'm so thrilled to be having this. But say a little bit more about you and the experience, the NDE, which you-- I heard a s- little snippet about, when we were touring your campus and I got to hear you share with some of your very, appreciative, whatever you call them, participants.

Chip 15:40

Yeah.

The Flatline Story And Slow Down

Chip 15:41

yeah, so I was going through a really hard time in my late 40s and, losing friends. The Great Recession was quite punishing to my hotel indus- hotel business. I had a African American foster son who was going to prison wrongfully. long-term relationship potentially ending. It was just... A- and running out of cash. my first mentee in my life when I was 35 and he was 28 was a guy named Gavin Newsom. and so

Lili 16:05

Never heard of him.

Chip 16:07

yeah, Ga- Gavin was starting a hospitality business. His sister felt like he was clueless. She knew me. She introduced him to me because I was a hospitality guy and seven years his sen- senior, and so next thing I knew, I'm, I'm, mentoring him. many years later, for his second wedding, he threw a bachelor party, and we were playing baseball, and, I broke my ankle playing baseball at his bachelor party, and I got a septic leg because I had got some fertilizer in my leg. So I was on a l... Yeah, it was a bad thing. I'm still clo- very close with Gavin. I still mentor him a little bit. but bottom line is, that w- it was not good, and I, and it really became clear at his wedding, in Montana where he got quite sick. but I didn't die then. It was only a couple weeks later after I was put on one antibiotic that didn't work, and then I was put on a stronger antibiotic, and I had an allergic reaction to that an- antibiotic. And, I was giving a speech in St. Louis, and I was on stage on crutches and tha- thankfully I sat down to s- sign books, and then I went unconscious. My experience over the course of the next 90 minutes going flatline nine times was that I was in this big living room on the second floor of a chalet or something in the Swiss Alps or s- some place that was just quite bucolic and, it was like a, the woods in the forest. And all this light was coming in, and I was flying around this, the, the living room, 40-foot tall ceilings with 40 birds. There were 40 birds just flying with me. They were speaking to me, and I understood bird talk, and I was speaking back, and they understood me. And the thing they kept saying to me was, "Slow down. You just have to slow down because you will not see beauty or awe unless you slow down." And I was wearing slow down, slippers, one that said slow, the other one said down. Weirdly, three years earlier, one of my hotels I'd created was the co- Hotel Vitale in San Francisco, across the street from the Ferry Building, and we literally had slow down slippers i- in that hotel. So everything... I could go into much more detail, but I'll leave it at that. it was very sensuous. It was very peaceful. It was very full of light. everything was slow motion, and I took away from it th- this deep sense that I needed to learn how to slow down and, and each time I would come back to life at the point where the birds flew out the window, of the living room and I was trying to fly out the window, but the moment I would try to fly out the window, I would come back to life. yeah, provocative and for me, it... my life has two, two chapters really, and there was 47 years old and earlier when I had not had the experience, and then there was experience, and then it was after that, in which there was a sort of a holy urgency to my life. and it's weird to me. holy urgency and, and slow down. How do you do both of those? Sort of a weird combination. The slow down I've, I have h- struggled with, to be honest with you. I know how to have, take Sunday as my saba- sabbatical, which I do. and I've learned how to just love spaciousness. so I'm not... I'm, I have workaholic tendencies, but I also am pursuing my calling, which is the holy urgency piece, which it means that I'm not doing it to distract myself from, you know, emotions. I'm, I love the work I do because I have a calling, and that's where the holy urgency comes because there's a deep sense of I have no idea how many years I'm gonna live.

Holy Urgency Meets Real Mortality

Chip 19:26

I now have metastatic stage III prostate cancer that has spread to my lymph system,

19:30

and I've

Chip 19:30

known I've had cancer for eight years, and I've been in stage III status for three and a half years. almost all of that three and a half years in some form of treatment or surgery or, yeah, radiation and, right now I'm on hormone depletion therapy, which means I have no testosterone. but I've had this holy urgency, this sense of I'm here for a reason, and so I need to figure out how do I have spaciousness while also feeling like I'm being true to the calling, whatever that calling is. And that calling has varied over the course of my time since age 47, but right now the calling is MEA

Lili 20:13

Wow. I can so relate to that because I'm in the, ag- again, I don't- I'm not battling a terminal illness right now, but in terms of the balance between the slow down and holy urgency, so my initiatives are all... You know, and it takes a Type A personality to get them done. And so it's this thing, but... And I don't feel, I almost never rest because it's my joy. And so to take myself out of my joy of pursuing these projects is unthinkable, and I don't think I'm using them to avoid emotional stuff. But I think, that would be such an incredible program for you to offer to those of us who are kindred souls out there, a program for holy urgency balanced with slow down. Because a lot of the programs that you offer, I think w- and they're all so magnificent, I looked at them t- as a possibility of, taking one, and a lot of them are about, finding that holy urgency, And, but if you're already there and you're on it like a freight train, it's a slightly different thing. And one of the things that I'm trying to foster, that we're trying to foster in people, is finding that legacy project that so lights you up, that it carries you through, and it's bigger than oneself. It is that thing that pu- plugs us into our community and that resonates so widely that it starts to take on a life of its own. And then that has to be managed also, that life of its own, which can be very,

Chip 21:44

You

Silence Retreats And Nature As Teacher

Chip 21:45

might, you, you know what would be probably helpful for you is our s- one of our silent retreats. And I know it's hard for you to imagine that. maybe you've done a silent retreat before. But our silent retreats are, an opportunity to press the button on pause and the constant monkey mind and how do you get in touch with some of the deeper longings, yearnings, and feelings you have. but, and find mindfulness practices that are really life-sustaining. So yeah, I, I, and they're really we have 2,566 acres. It's four square miles. That's- So the idea of being able to have a silent retreat in a, an environment where you can go for long, wisdom walks on your own or with another, a partner and be silent, but just notice nature. And of course, that's part of the reason we're in New Mexico is because nature is a teacher. and especially in a place where you are not gonna run into somebody, you're, because you're on private land

Lili 23:14

Yeah. I mean, that would be such a delightful treat. And, one, one, when we live here, those of us who have the, um, benefit of living in Santa Fe, we hope... I take advantage every day of walking in the mountains and in the foothills, and not a-- And I, just looking out my windows at night, I get these incredible sunsets and rainbows. And so I have little mini moments of those. But who couldn't benefit from, a, a more deeply immersive experience of that in a big way?

Chip 23:46

Yeah. No, it's, it's great. I lo- I love New Mexico. I-- my story with New Mexico in terms of how, why even choosing Santa Fe or

Why Santa Fe And Baja Work

Chip 23:53

New Mexico, it was when I was a kid, my f- my, uncle used to work for the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona, which was the capital of the Navajo Nation, which is on the border of Arizona and New Mexico. And so we would go and drive and visit him during the summertime and then drive into New Mexico, and I used to say to my parents, "Do I have to have a passport to be in New Mexico?" And they would say, "No, this is part of the US." But then we'd get to Santa Fe and I was like, "This is not like any city I've ever seen before." Santa Fe just struck me as this place, caught in time with a patina, the patina that you go to Havana, Cuba or to Bhutan and there's places that have a patina of time. And, it was that patina of Santa Fe that really struck me. and then, y- when I was starting my boutique hotel company, I used to come to Santa Fe and buy furniture and, work w- and work with some people there, or in Santa Fe who could help get-- source interesting kinds of, fabrics. I bought stuff for, from Surrette and Sons. this is 35 years ago, that I was doing this. so there's a history there, and, overall, I would say I'm, I'm really 90% certain it was the right place. The, the, the ha- the challenge with Santa Fe for some people, or for New Mexico is it's dry. Not, not dry in terms of no alcohol, but just it's a dry place, and so for some people that's an issue. that's a little bit of an issue for me. altitude is not an issue for me, but for some people it is. But I think the biggest issue, frankly, i- in terms of the ease of doing business and ease of getting things done is not so much that it's hard to get things done in New Mexico. That can be true sometimes with contracting pro- construction projects. But the, the harder thing is this: I chose Santa Fe and I chose, or we, it was a, a group of four of us, we chose Santa Fe, we chose-- I chose Baja because I love the idea of a pilgrimage. I love the idea that in order for someone to come and do a retreat with us, they-- it wasn't like they're gonna commute. It's not like in Sonoma where you live in San Francisco or Ojai for LA or Hudson Valley for New York. you have to really actually make an effort and In times like these where a- airline prices are, have spiked by 40%, 50%, it works against us because, of the fact that it, it's not as easy to get to. And we know that, direct flights to Santa Fe are limited. There's only four cities. and even direct flights to Albuquerque c- are limited, in s- certain parts of the US and the world because we've had, again, people from 60 countries come. So there are times when I wish Santa Fe was a little more accessible. At the same time, here's the thing. When you are doing-- When you're going to a, a transformational retreat program in your own backyard, it's hard to change your habits when you don't change your habitat. And so the, the premise of people coming and feeling a little liminal, a little awkward, "I don't know this place. This is not my normal habitat," is good because people are a little bit more open to shifting as a result

Lili 27:10

That's a really interesting insight. I comp- I would completely agree with that o- on every level. and the intentionality that one has to bring to it. And then also when they leave and they go back home, it's different enough that when they get home... When I used to have, before I did this, I had a, a company called Urban Art Tripping, and I used to do immersive art experiences for people in Santa Fe, bringing them in when I moved here, but also all around the world. And a lot of that was based on a program that I did when I was in high school that was c- called Intercultural Action Learning Program, INTEROP, and the idea was to sub- you know, we would be immersed into a culture different from our own, and I was on a Greek island and the head of my program said, "Yeah, well, you think that the three or four months that you're having here are an eye-opening experience. This whole program is designed so that when you get home, you bring all those questions that you brought to this culture and you apply them to your own culture." And I realized when I left that program, and I left this little tiny island in Greece where I'd been for four months, I had so many questions about my own culture that had never occurred to me. I'd never been plucked out of my country and my language and my everything, and I'd been to other countries before, but not in such an immersive experience. And so I think in the same way, your programs or anything that we embark on where we are getting curious and wanting to learn and wanting to grow by completely immersing ourselves in something that's completely different and then going home. Now, you've experienced something really profound, and I would imagine that one of the things that MEA offers is a way to stay connected to the people with whom you went through that experience. Because that is so much of, you know, the learning starts when you get home and you have to integrate

Chip 28:53

Yeah. I was on the board of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur for 10 years, and one of the things I learned there was, people loved the place because it was just exquisite

Staying Connected After The Retreat

Chip 29:01

location and has hot springs, on the cliffs above the ocean. It's a dramatic environment. But as an institution, the institution did a p- very poor job of keeping people connected if you're in a workshop. So, um, reality was that, you know, left Esalen after two days or five days there, and and it off really quickly. So our cohorts are, intentionally small-ish. They can be as small as eight to 10 people or as large as 40 to 50 people, depending upon the workshop. We just had Richard Rohr, the Catholic mystic, and spiritual teacher and, we had fully sold-out campus. We have 43 bedrooms on the whole campus, of the ranch. And, so when you're in a cohort, at the end of the cohort, you get to know everybody, and at the end of the cohort has Zoom calls. We have groups from eight years ago that still have monthly Zoom calls. and then you go back home, and depending upon where you live, if you're in Chicago, there's a Chicago MEA, you know, alumni chapter, and you do programs with them for free, And you have potlucks, and you have guest faculty of ours who g- come and gives talks, and y- you have service projects where you're going out into the community and doing something as a group. So it's a, it, it's a bit of a movement. It's a community and a movement as much as it is a school. but the... We call it long life learning, not lifelong learning. The idea that y- long life learning is learning how to live d- how to curate a life that's as deep and meaningful as it is long. because lifelong learning, you could learn how to do photography at 30 or 70. You may have a different perspective on it, but learning the mechanics of, medieval war strategy or photography is maybe the same as for a 30-year-old or a 70-year-old. But long life learning is learning the life stages and understanding what midlife is meant for and what your point of view is a- at, say, 45 or after, with respect to purpose and transitions and wisdom and aging and a bunch of things that frankly are almost less the kind of thing you can learn, by studying AI and more the things you learn based upon conversations with others. And that's why, we call ourselves a wisdom school because there's a lot of wisdom to be shared, amongst those people who are coming to the program. Average age of the person who comes is about 54, 55 years old, about 65% to 70% women. and people of all different, financial backgrounds because about half the people who come to MEA are either on a full or partial scholarship

Lili 31:28

Wow. and where does that endowment come from? Is that just built into the f-

Chip 31:33

it is a combination of me funding it and the other is we raise a million and a half dollars a year from our alumni to help fund that in order to enhance our diversity.

Lili 31:42

That's just incredible. And I think that having that intergenerational conversation, you know, it's funny, I was just having this conversation this morning that the way we define generation has shifted. It seems to now be, like, decade chunks instead of 30-year chunks, which it was when we were coming through. But just having these, these conversations that span those stages of life that you're talking about, because one of the things that we're discovering in our Art of Legacy toolkit and the work we do around that is that the model for so long was that, I go through life, I figure out what's important to me, I c- make, I collect or I start a project that's important to me, and I develop it until it's time for me to pass it off, and then I bequeath it to my family who has not had a single conversation with me about it, but they just, it lands on their lap, right? And so what I think there, and I'm as passionate about educating people about that intergenerational conver- conversation around legacy as you are about midlife, and th- to me they go hand in hand, is how do we ignite that interest around a particular project, but then share it, and if not with our family, at least with people in younger generations so that a legacy project doesn't reach to a certain point and then just pshew, it disappears because there's no interest, and there has been no cross-conversation with the people coming through the ranks

Chip 33:05

Yeah. I mean, I think in an era where we're all distracted, I mean, the opposite of presence is distraction. and we live in a distracted

Deep Conversation And Moral Beauty

Chip 33:13

era partly because of our phones. We live in a polarized era partly because of social media. And so the idea of curating deep, rich conversations, whether that's with family members or best friends or your spouse, or whether that's with workmates, because we do a lot of B2B enterprise-level programs with companies and peer-to-peer networks of, leadership. We have leadership in New Mexico coming in the, in late summer for, their annual program. so how do you help people go a little deeper in their conversations? People are thirsty for it. They really are. they're thirsty for something that's less superficial. and the thing that's I, I've loved, Lily, is that, while MEA tends to attract a more educated and slightly more liberal or progressive, clientele, the truth is people come from all walks of life, and all parts of the world. And it's so fascinating to have a group of people getting to know each other. They don't know each other's last names. They have not seen each other's LinkedIn profiles. They're just getting to know each other from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. So you're gonna judge people the first night. Like, okay, that's what we do. but when you get to know people, and then three days into it, four days into it, you realize, oh my God, my best friend in this co- in this cohort is someone who has a totally different political point of view than I have. And what it does is it wakes you up to saying, "I wanna listen a little bit more, and, and I wanna judge a little bit less. I wanna be curious." you know, there's moral beauty. Dacher Keltner, who's a UC Berkeley professor and, he studied awe. He's a, an MEA, uh, faculty member who teaches every December in our Baja campus. moral beauty is this idea. It's the number one pathway for experiencing awe in the world, which is really interesting. it's even more prevalent than, someone being in nature. And he found that the number one pathway to awe is not nature, but it's actually moral beauty. To be able to witness the compassion and kindness, the equanimity, the tenacity, the grace, the courage of someone else, and it elevates you such that you feel like you can do the same. And so that's really what I think is the, one of the, the keys to our program

Lili 35:28

That's incredible. and I did not know that when I, started my Art of Conversation dinners, which were just originally designed to be supporting the podcast series because we were talking about death as muse and, artful exit and art of remembrance, things that are topics that are not the things you usually talk about at a dinner party or in life in general. We wanted to create a context where people could dive a little more deeply into those topics. And so we started having these din- monthly dinners where I invite seven strangers to come to my table, and we have prompt cards underneath each plate, and at a certain st- part of the dinner, we start to read our quotes and our questions, and we go around the table. and so it's been an incredible experience for those, I mean, on a tiny scale compared to what you're doing at MEA. But finding that having the anticipation of people coming to a dinner where they know they're gonna go deep into something, they don't know exactly how it's gonna be orchestrated or what the adventure's going to be. But in just one evening, you take seven strangers and introduce them to a topic that they've likely never discussed over a meal and to people that they've never met before, and the synergy or the, the combination of that is nothing short of delicious, just to use a food term. But it's, it is so yummy, and it's so nourishing, and so many food analogies that one could use. and I noticed that when I went on a tour of your campus that you had some, in the dining room I think it was, or maybe it was in the library, but you had a list of, questions for people to just sort of consider. And that idea of, and I've always loved the spiritual, of inquiry or the spiritual traditions of inquiry. That's always been closest, entry point. Because when you're in a question, you don't have time for the mind chatter, the, the answers. It's really more in, an entry point into that awe and wonder. And I love the book that, teacher wrote called awe. Yeah, i, love that book

Chip 37:27

that's, Drucker's book. Yeah. Jimi Hendrix said long ago, "Knowledge speaks and wisdom listens." And, Pablo Picasso said, "Computers are useless, they only give you answers." So learning how to craft a beautifully composed question is a gift. it really is

Lili 37:47

it is, such a gift, and I love that sharing a question and having that forum. So, so I wanna know a little bit more about the, the after, the post-MEA cohorts that you have organized to help people stay in community with each other, and if you know of any particular initiatives that have come out of people coming through the experience and then continuing the conversation later and what has happened in the world as a result of that

Chip 38:17

Well, businesses have been started, marriages have happened. nonprofits have been started together, collaborated on.

What Alumni Build Together

Chip 38:24

vac- annual vacation trips have been planned with-- There's a group of 16 people who go to Europe every year as a, as an MEA collective. there's so much. actually a couple scientific discoveries, in the AI space. So there's just been a lot, and I think part of it is creating the conditions for p- people to let their guard down and to feel that collaborative spirit as opposed to... the, the thing that, Ri- Richard Rohr has said is that the first half of our life, our primary operating system is our ego, and then we overuse it. and then the, around midlife, there's a new operating system, but nobody gave us any operating instructions, and it's called the soul. And when we move from the ego to the soul, we move from a place of I to we, and we move fr- into this place where collaboration is more accessible to us, partly because we are less focused on comparison and trying to please people, and we are more focused on just, looking at what are, where is the common connection? How do we fit together? it's beautiful

Lili 39:38

Yeah, that m- makes me wonder, with people aging, with longevity being so front and center and people able to stay in their work life and their career compartments longer, I feel it almost makes me wish that there was like a, a required retirement date for people so that they could graduate to this newer, more important stage, I call it more important stage of life. Because there's nothing wrong with being part of the economy and part of the engine that keeps things going, although there are a lot of, unintended consequences as a result of that. I just feel like there was an era, maybe I'm romanticizing, but there was an era when philanthropy and the things that we did after we finished working took up a lot more of our life and our contribution, and I feel like there has been a loss of a sense of contribution back into the whole. And I feel like, programs like yours and inquiries like mine are sort of designed to help interrupt that and bring us back into the fold, because there's so much juice in that. Not because, Not to do good, and not a do-goodery kind of, Pollyanna reason, but because of the, all the possibilities that can merge from that.

Chip 40:53

Well, I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I think for a lot of people, they are staying in their work longer by both choice because they love the work and maybe they're a workaholic, and by necessity. And a lot of it's be- because of necessity, because they can't afford to retire. It's hard to finance a 30-year retirement with a 40-year career. And, so some of it's that. some of it is the fact that we have created some age segregation in our culture such that the idea of passing on wisdom, which w- happened often in our family in the past, especially if a multi-generational family situation, is less likely and therefore there's a sense of you don't wanna be irrelevant as you get older. And so there's a sense of like, "Okay, I gotta keep working because I wanna stay relevant because there's not anybody for me to pass my wisdom onto." So we've done a really poor job as a com- as a country in creating, fostering that kind of intergenerational collaboration and wisdom sharing. Erik Erikson's a developmental psychologist who in the 20th century popularized the term generativity.

Generativity And Legacy In People

Chip 42:02

It was the idea of there's a stage in your life where something's supposed to come through you. You're supposed to be a conduit generating things for future generations. And he had a, a five-word sen- sentence: I am what survives me. And that he wasn't t- talking about, as you mentioned earlier, the library building that has your name on it. It was the impact you'd had on that person who was not even a formal mentee, but it's the kind of person who would go to your eulogy and say something about you. And f- I think for a lot of us, we overemphasize the resume way too long in our life. We underemphasize the importance of building the character that will lead to your eulogy, and in many ways, that's what I try to do with MEA. I, I don't get paid. I don't have any investors. I made a lot of money, especially in my Airbnb era. and I wanted to do something that was giving back, that gave me a sense like, Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey, he was gonna throw himself off the bridge until Clarence the angel came down and said "Hey, George, this is what this town would look like if you'd never lived." I want us all to have that kind of experience, this weird sense that, I wish the Silicon Valley tech bros would come up with a product that could show us the-- what would the world would look like if we had n- not existed. Because feeling... As we get older, it's not about feeling youthful, although that's nice. It's about feeling useful, and it's that sense of utility and having, some reason, some raison d'être for some reason for being, that is so essential to having a person feel like they're having a longer, healthier, happier life

Lili 43:52

Absolutely. So can you say a little bit more? I'm very curious about the business-to-business programs that you make available through MEA so that a, a

Bringing Midlife Wisdom Into Work

Lili 44:00

corporation can come on campus and develop... Is it a program that you deliver to them? Because the idea of creating a conversation like this inside a company so that people who are maybe don't have family nearby, who don't have family period, have a way to have that intergenerational conversation and that wisdom passing,

Chip 44:19

Yeah. The, The, kinds of organizations that come to us and at both campuses, both Baja and Santa Fe, are everything from YPO, Young Presidents Organization, which has older people above 50 as well, to, Leadership New Mexico, which is leaders around the state doing a year-long program, to a program called Togethering, which is, mixed, couples, marriages between Jewish, a Jewish person in the couple and a non-Jewish person. and they go through our program. They do about 10 of them a year, 10 different workshops a year. to family, like families who wanna go through the program to build better intergenerational rapport and wisdom sharing. So they have one of... There are three options. One is they come and do the MEA program, and we tell them, "Okay, it could be transitions, purpose, wisdom, aging," and we do leadership programs as well. S- The op- opposite alternative is they come and they do all-- they have all of the MEA benefits, horseback riding, hiking, yoga classes, hot tubs, three gourmet meals a day, but in the classroom, it's just their content. And then we have groups that are actually sort of the hybrid of both. It's like we're coming for four days. We'd like two days of MEA content and two days of our own content. Sara Blakely, who started Spanx, she, she did her 54th birthday party at MEA. She's an MEA alum, and she brought a bunch of her friends, and they just did a private, retreat experience with us. And so there's a, a deep sense that, I think a lot of people are looking at this and saying, "We do a lot of education of people young in life. Where's the education in the middle of your life other than the school of hard knocks?" and so, yeah, so that's our B2B programs.

Lili 46:06

Yeah. Well, I, I c- I can't let go of the visual of a bunch of ladies in Spanx in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's such a, such a juxtaposition. I think this is the least Spanxy place there might be on planet Earth

Chip 46:19

Except for Sarah's really interesting. Yeah, she's not a Spanx-y kind... she started Spanx, but like reality, and she's a billionaire now. But she's one of the few female billionaires who started her own company, in the United States. and yet she's also f- she became a billionaire before she was 50, and so she's in a stage of her life where she's really curious about these questions. the U-curve of happiness research shows that the low point of life satisfaction is between about 45 and 50. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and we've done so much research at MEA on this. and, and so it's not surprising that Sarah would have come to MEA at right around 50. she had a mindset which is "Is that all there is?" and it doesn't mean that she wasn't happy in her life. She was. But there was an element that she'd succeeded, and yet there was a deep sense that there was something more to life. So

Lili 47:08

I just heard for this weekend for the first time, it had never occurred to me, but apparently, the time that we are living in now,

Post Menopause Power And Creativity

Lili 47:15

there are more post-menopausal women there have ever been. And in the world, there are only three species that live post-reproductive stage, and that would be whales, humans, and now chimpanzees. They're learning that there are some post-reproductive chimpanzees out there. But considering that we comprise such a huge amount of the population, again, this urgency for there to be new rituals, new initiations, new ways to take advantage of these humans that we become in that stage of life, which, you know, that what the studies that they've done show that they're-- in that earlier stage of life, you're really focused on caring for the immediate people in your family, and then as you become post-menopausal, your focus is really much more on the community. And what an incredible resource for the world to take advantage of men and women who both kind of graduate from that me, and is that all there is, Alfie? what's it all about? And then go into that... I mean, I just, I-- for me, my motivation for doing this whole project and what the, why I love what you're doing so, so much is that I have this-- We talk about, in my program, this idea of creating, one million, if not more, sovereign creatives, and that giving people access to their creativity is about the most important thing we can do on the planet right now, given all of the challenges that we face and the unintended consequences from the problems that we thought we solved, you know, that, that turn up other problems. We really need to be nimble. We really need to be on our game in terms of how we address these problems, especially with the advent of AI, who can do a lot of the, fix the hard problems. But the soft problems and the more problems that need empathy and things that, that the machines can't do for us, it, it's on us to come up with that. And so I just, I find it so important. And not creativity, not again, not as you don't have to be an artist. That creativity can come through in a myriad of ways. And again, my just absolute hats off to you for what you're doing, and I hope it continues for a long, long, long time. Do you feel like there are people within your organization who, own it enough that this whole project continues even when the

Succession Plans And Moving Aside

Lili 49:34

force of Chip is not there?

Chip 49:36

Yeah, you know, it's a great question because, know, when I was 47 and I m- had my flatline experience, I was running a company with 3,500 employees, and I had never created a succession plan. I didn't expect I was gonna have a flatline experience. and I think my ego was too invested in being the center of the universe. And this time, having started this business at 57, I will say that I created another version of being the center of the universe, and it has taken me over the course of a few years to realize a few things. Number one is I started it and it-- I'm the founder, but I did have two people from the start. I call them my co-founders, but it was, my idea and my money and, e- my content. But the reality is they had a huge impact, Christine and Jeff, and so I had to learn collaboration skills with the co-founders. That was a, that was something I didn't have to do in my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre. and then y- I have had to learn that I don't have the energy in my 60s, w- forgetting about my whole cancer thing. I don't have the energy that I used to have. and I'm, I'm now the elder in the company. When I was started, Joie de Vivre, I was 26, so when I was in my late 40s, like I still didn't feel like the elder. But now I am definitely the elder in the organization, and so there's that. And how do you help groom and, mentor others to be better and, and what kind of joyous experience that is. But also the cancer. The cancer puts me in a place where We don't know if I have three years left or 30 years left. Just don't know. And so it's prudent, to have a succession plan. a year and a half ago, I elevated our CMO to become a CEO, which was, great. And I'm trying to learn how to be not the hero but the coach. I'm used to being the hero. H- heroes want us to come in and save the day, ego gratification. The coach is really asking great questions and helping, people maybe younger than them to find their own answers. And so that's one piece. I literally just got off a call with seven people in my organization looking at our 2027 workshop calendar, and while I have been the primary brains and contacts around who we-- what workshops we have and who we invite to the campus, for the first nine... eight years, nine years of what we've been doing, next year I'm not doing that. And this was a brainstorm opportunity. I will be teaching less next year. I actually teach more than anybody else on the whole team, which is grueling and lovely. I love it. I love it deeply, otherwise I wouldn't do it. But at the same time, I don't wanna teach 60 workshops a year. that's a lot of workshops. And, and it may not be 60, but it was-- in the first four months of this year, it was 22 public workshops or private retreats that I was either primarily leading, co-leading, or did at least a couple drop-ins to. So that's a lot of different intimacy groups. so next year will be less. And, and the good news is we have so many really smart and wise and f- facilitators and teachers and in-house faculty and guest faculty, and the, everybody from Elizabeth Gilbert to Arthur Brooks to Martha Beck to, oh, Richard Rohr, Michael Franti, lots and lo- David White, so many interesting people who have fallen in love with the MEA ethos that I feel if I were to die, in the next three years, we're set up to have a long-term organization in place

Lili 53:10

So thrilled to hear that. And you, you... And it's more than just an organization. I will say because you've started a movement, and it's much harder to create a succession plan for a movement than it is for an organization. And I am sympathetic to that because, the whole New Age movement that we all grew up in, it's been going, but, it's a little different when you start to really fine-tune it and you wanna make sure that your people are in alignment with what you've created, with your baby. You know, it's, it's like a whole, it's a thing. So I'm deeply appreciative of what you have in front of you

Chip 53:49

if you're gonna be part of a movement, you gotta move out of the way at some point.

Lili 53:52

That's a, that's a great place to end it. We gotta move, move out of the way. Chip, this

Closing Thoughts And What’s Next

Lili 53:59

has been so amazing. Thank you so much. I, I trust you'll be back in Santa Fe. Oh, I think I'll see you this weekend. You're coming in for the Santa Fe, Magazine Festival?

Chip 54:08

am interviewing, Andrew Weil. In fact, I need to reach out to him again. I'll be doing that, and we also have our every two year, our biannual, MEA alumni homecoming over the same weekend. So lots and lots, hundreds of MEA alums from all over the world flying in for that

Lili 54:24

I wish we knew. It's kind of like a full moon effect. I mean, you've got all these people with all this awareness.

Chip 54:29

it a full moon happening this Weekend? I don't know

Lili 54:32

I don't know, but it feels like the energy of all of these people being in Santa Fe at the same time creates the same kind of concept. it's gonna shift something. I don't know. But thank you for everything that you do in this corner of the universe, and, and I look forward to having you on my Art of Conversation dinners in September. I think we already have that scheduled. And so I will look forward to this conversation continuing. I appreciate you so

Chip 54:55

Thank you so much, Lily

Lili 54:56

Okay, take good care. Thanks again, honey. Bye. See you soon

Speaker 4 55:01

So thanks for joining us today.

55:03

Support for ArtStorming comes from Zeitgeist Dance Theater and Francisco Gella

How To Support Art Storming

55:08

Dance Works. You can find them at franciscogelladance.com and zeitgeistdancetheater.org

Speaker 4 55:15

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