Chip Conley

Modern Elder Academy

Conversation at the Center for Purposeful Leadership (CPL)

This video is used with gracious approval from the Center for Purposeful Leadership. I am grateful for both their permission and their terrific programming. I urge you to check them out. This video is from an online “Essential Conversation” series, from October 31, 2022. Below is an unedited transcript of this video. Since I have just returned from Soularize, I will review this again. It might provide ideas for our upcoming On Becoming Elders Passion Circle council.

Speaker: Chip Conley

Well, first of all, I'm honored to be here. And, and it's great to see Richard Leider here as well, because Richard's gonna be here in Baja at the Modern Elder Academy co-leading with me in less than two weeks. So beautiful to just reconnect with Craig and Patricia and, and yeah, just, I guess I'll give you a little bit of background on, on my, my journey, and then we can dive into some questions q and you conversation. So I decided in my mid twenties that I would start a boutique hotel company, which it was in the, back in the, in mid 1980s. Now, there were very few boutique hotels in the United States. It was sort of a, a movement of the, of the hotel business that was just starting. And I was someone who had been always very quite type a, like, very aggressive.

Speaker 1 (00:59):

I went to inner City high school Snoop Dogs' High School, who is 10 years younger than me, but a pretty famous, the number one feeder high school for at the NFL on nba. And I loved it. And then I went to Stanford and Stanford Business School, and I was very type, I was very motivated and driven. And I think it was partly because I, it was my way to balance out the fact that I was, you know, I had girlfriends, but I was definitely gay. And I came out at age 22. At age 26, I started a boutique hotel company called Juad Eve. And over the next 24 years, I ran that company and grew it from one broken down, no Motel, motel in the tender Linein of San Francisco to 52 boutique hotels in the second largest boutique tellier in the us Each, with each hotel had its own name, and all of them were in California.

Speaker 1 (01:50):

What happened along the way? I loved it until I hated it. I loved creating like, almost like a, I dunno, laboratory for trying things before the word, the phrase conscious capitalism come along, trying approaches to leadership, conscious leadership, trying approaches to how do you create an employee driven culture? How, you know, I, I loved Herb Keleher, who was a mentor of mine, that for 37 years, the found the founding CEO of Southwest Airlines. He said, The customer comes second and it's the employee who comes first. And I really believe that as well. All that was fine until, gosh, around 2007, 2008. And my third book had came out in 2007 called Peak How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. And it became a big hit. And I really loved writing that book. I loved writing a book at the, at the intersection of psychology and business.

Speaker 1 (02:46):

And so I was giving a lot of speeches for that book, and I was just sort of like, I'd been running this company for 22 years, and now it had 3,500 employees. And I was like, Ah, I don't know if I wanna be running an organization this big. I like the creativity and the freedom. Long story short is over the course of the next couple years, everything that could go wrong went wrong. My long term relationship was ending. My African American foster son, who was an adult at that point, was going to prison wrongfully. I was running outta cash going into the great recession. I didn't really wanna run this company anymore, but I also was running outta money. I didn't know if the company was Go Bank gonna go bankrupt. I lost five friends to suicide all men age, 42 to 52 three of the entrepreneurs during the Great Recession.

Speaker 1 (03:31):

I had my own suicide ideation during that time. And then I had a flat line experience. I died due to an allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I had a broken ankle and a, and a septic leg. And so all that was happening at the same time. And you know, when you die, and I, I, I had Victor Frankel's book, Man, Search for Meaning in my day, day bag when I was gave a speech on stage. And, and that's where I died. I died on stage, <laugh>, they say, break a leg and when you go on stage, well, but yeah, but don't stop your heart. And I, my heart stopped and it stopped nine times in 90 minutes. And so I had to be brought back to life by paramedics multiple times. But that was a beautiful wake up call for the hotelier of like, I don't really wanna do this anymore.

Speaker 1 (04:14):

And I felt like I didn't have any options. I felt like I, my identity and my ego was so identified with being the founder and CEO of UA Avive that I didn't know that I had other options. Long story short is I got to the other side of that. I sold the company two years later. It's a Hyatt brand now. And I didn't know what was next. What I knew was like, man, midlife is a crisis. And on the other side of that, I had the positive experience of midlife. So midlife really was awful from 45 to 49. But my fifties were beautiful. And it was partly because I was approached by the three founders of Airbnb 10 years ago. They had this little tiny tech startup in San Francisco that was starting to grow very quickly, but they had no background in hospitality or travel, or frankly, entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 (05:05):

So I was brought in as their in-house mentor full time to help them steer their rocket ship. And I did that for four years, full time, three and a half years as a strategic advisor. And it was during that time, they started to call me the modern elder. And I said, I don't really wanna be a modern elder that sounds like a A R P'S magazine and <laugh>. And they said, Well, Chip, a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. And when I heard that, I was like, I just really was struck by this alchemy. I'd always thought of myself as a bit of an alchemist as I've gotten older, extroversion and introversion, gravitas, levity, you know, and maybe curiosity and wisdom, and knowing when to dose up one versus the other. So that's what, when I decided I would own the term and when I say own the term, I mean be the term, be be the modern elder.

Speaker 1 (05:56):

And I had over a hundred mentees at Airbnb. And I then came down here to Southern Baja to write my fifth book, which is called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder. And while down here at a beach home, I had a Baha aha, an epiphany, which was, Why don't we have midlife wisdom schools? Why don't we have a prep school for elderhood, in essence? We have prep schools. Last thought, and then I'm going to pass this back to you so you can ask questions, but, but we, the word adolescence didn't exist in 1903. The whole concept of adolescence is a 1904 concept didn't exist before that. So if you had, if you, if you went through puberty, you were an adult, and then adolescents came along as a concept, and we saw that adolescents was a liminal period, a transitional threshold period between childhood and adulthood.

Speaker 1 (06:51):

But we have not sufficiently respected that there is a threshold liminal period between adulthood and elderhood. And elder, let's just define elder for a second. Elder means you are relatively speaking older than the people around you. It isn't necessarily tied to a particular age. If you're a software engineer in Silicon Valley at 35, you could be an elder. If you're a pro athlete, you're an elder in your late twenties, maybe. So elder is a relative term. And so long story short is, I, I thought about this and said, Well, there's no prep school for Elderhood. There's no place to help people understand how to make sense of the second half of their adult life. And that's really how MEA came about that story.

Speaker 2 (07:41):

<Laugh>. Hmm. I have a a go ahead. An observation and perhaps a, a question for you, Chip. Yeah. You were also one of the founders and on the I guess the board of Burning Men, along with a number of other kind of cutting edge cultural expressions of our time. What is the connection between different cultures and how we look at modernism? What is what, what are the expressions that you're seeing right now in the culture?

Speaker 1 (08:24):

So there's two thoughts about that. One is, let's, let's look at the, you know, history of elders. So generally speaking, you know, when, when we were, I didn't put my thoughts in the chat, but for for many people, including myself to some degree, when the, when I hear the word elder, I think of patriarchy and power, and I, and that sometimes has me taking a step back and saying, I'm not sure I wanna be part of that. Because in some ways that is a, that is, that was the dark side of maybe elderhood, is that it was predominantly men. It's power rested with older people. But there was a lot of rationale to that. I mean, to the truth is that, you know, when we were a hunter and gatherer society, often it was the men who would go out and, and get the food.

Speaker 1 (09:12):

But, but the women actually sort of ke kept the society together, the tribe together. And, and the grandmother phenomena of the value of grandmothers is, is social science research brought to the fore saying how important grandmothers have been. So I think that what I, when I look at this idea of the history of elders in, in American society, a lot of it had to do with the a the agrarian life that we had pre-industrial revolution. And the longer you'd been on earth as a farmer, the better you understood the seasons and the land. You had, what we might call land wisdom. And that land wisdom you passed on to your, you know, descendants to your, your relatives, and, and they learned from you. Then we went into the industrial era, and it was more about brawn. It was more about, you know, who can be on an assembly line, who can build things.

Speaker 1 (10:05):

And, and it, you know, the, the idea of the elder and the value of land wisdom started to diminish. And then we moved into the technology revolution and like, okay, let's put the elders out to pasture <laugh>. They're, they're, they're not digital natives, although, let's remember that it was boomers who actually created the, the internet. So long story short is I think the, what we've seen is the idea that elders of the past were, we're, were appreciated with reverence. But I think a modern elder is not about reverence. It's about relevance. And relevance basically means how can I be as curious as I am wise? Meaning I can be a wisdom keeper, but I can also be a wisdom seeker. And what I learned at Airbnb quite phenomenally, I loved it, was I was a, a mentor. I was a mentor and an intern at the same time.

Speaker 1 (10:59):

And because I was learning from younger people, they had something to teach me. And so I, I just love the intergenerational collaboration that is a it that is essential for today. I think, again, I think wisdom now, the physics of wisdom used to be like a waterfall. It went from high to low, from old to young, and I think it now moves in both directions. And then in terms of the festival thing and the, the convening and community, I just think, yeah, I think the idea of how we create collective effervescence a term that came from a male di crime studying religious pilgrimage is 110 years ago, that is essential in the era we live in. And we can do it through Zoom, but also we can do it in person. And I think the in-person gathering piece of it is, is often underestimated in terms of the transformative effect of it. And whether that's, you know, at the excellent institute where I've taught for many, many years and been on the board or at Burning Man or in a church you know being in a church is, and, and, and listening to gospel music and being part of a participative experience is very different than doing it on Zoom as people, as many people learn during,

Speaker 3 (12:18):

What's really at your edge right now?

Speaker 1 (12:22):

Well, I'll, I'll give you a couple thoughts. One is what's the edge? The what's the painful edge or what's the painful slash frustrating edge? And then I'll do the second one, which will be the more like, what's the, the edge of ingenuity that, or, or what, what's channeling through me in that way? The hard one, you know, there it is. It's amazing how ageist of a society we are. I mean, ageism is the last socially acceptable bias in American society and, and in many western societies. And so, oh man, do I get beaten up all the time, figuratively, for calling myself a modern elder? Not because of any disrespect to in indigenous communities, because we are very respectful and we integrate shaman and people from various indigenous communities into our programs. But no more just that people say, Why would you ever call yourself a modern elder? Or Why would you call your program the Modern Elder Academy, which has an acronym Call of MEA for those who don't like Modern Elder Academy, But

Speaker 3 (13:25):

The meaning you're kind of pre you're pre aging yourself.

Speaker 1 (13:28):

Well, exactly. Why would you, why would you make try to make aging aspirational? I mean, I like, and, and, and I, of course, I think that, so the bleeding edge there is like, man, yeah, I am, I am cous trying to take that rock up the hill in terms of, you know, we are in a society. We don't, we don't have aging gay, we don't have anti-gay creams or anti women, women creams, although yes, we do. They're called anti-aging creams. And, but we so anti, we have anti-aging products. So of course we have, we a just because there's a whole, there's a whole industry that that has as its basic premise, the idea that old is bad. But you know what, when you, when we talk about old growth forests, you know, and I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area full of redwoods.

Speaker 1 (14:17):

We, we admire the redwoods. And the ones that were most in, in awe are the ones that are the tallest. But why is it that when we come to humans, the idea of old and growth cannot be in the same sentence? And so I am, I'm just a, I, so part of my bleeding and painful edge at times is to be a bit of the pinata out there as an advocate for, along with people like Ashton Apple Light, who's, you know, who's an MEA faculty member and a Ted Ted speaker on the subject of ageism. So yeah, sometimes I feel a bit like a pinata because the, our internal ageism e even gets in, in the way on the other side of like, what's the bleeding edge? That's beautiful. Like where is the, I I think the part that's been really fascinating is that we have 3000, almost 3000 alumni now in mea, and almost 15% of them are millennials.

Speaker 1 (15:15):

Now. That's the part that's sort of the, the flip side of it, the weird part, Wow. We have people in their twenties and thirties who come to a place called the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first Midlife Wisdom school. Why? And the answer is, they are deeply interested in learning how to cultivate and harvest wisdom, which is something you can do at any age. I, I, I define wisdom as metabolized experience that leads to distilled compassion. Let me say that again, because it's, it's, it's a, you know, I wrote a book on wisdom that came out four years ago, and I did not have this, I did not have this definition. This definition for me is about a year or two old now. But I love the definition, metabolized experience that leads to distilled compassion. That is something you can do at any age. So the idea that somehow you can only become wise when you're 60 years old or 50 years old, it's like, no, you could actually start developing wisdom. Quick story on that is when I was 28 and a completely clueless young CEO of a company with one hotel after one particularly difficult week, I made a decision one weekend that I would take a, a, a journal off the wall that I'd never written in. And I wrote on the cover of it, Oh my God, do I have it right here?

Speaker 1 (16:43):

I know I have like 10 of them. And what I decided to do every weekend is I would make a list of bullet set of bullet points of what I had learned that week. And, you know, I started doing that at age 28, and I did it, I've done it for 34 years. Now I do it in Google Docs, not, not in in journals, but the idea of metabolizing your experience, even if it's in your twenties, to try to make sense of what you've learned and what meaning you can take from that, that is a, that is a skill you can apply at any time in your life. And, you know, these millennials who've come and, you know, almost 500 of them now just the millennials alone, they are in the process of becoming wiser faster as a result of the kinds of skills and practices that we ntroduce to them.

Speaker 1 (17:38):

So I find that really encouraging because I do think that we're moving from an era of the rise and the emergence rise and power of the knowledge worker which Peter Drucker introduced that phrase knowledge worker in 1959 when nobody knew anything about like computers. But today, all the world's knowledge is on this little machine in my pocket, and we are a wash in knowledge, But we, what was, what is often scarce is wisdom. So I think there's a new era dawning where we will maybe even call people wisdom workers as the folks in an organization at any age who have developed a real knack for that metabolized experience that leads to distilled compassion

Speaker 1 (18:49):

Yeah. let, let me start by I think Glen had the question asked the question about practices that could allow someone to embody wisdom. And again, if wisdom is defined as metabolized experience, that leads to distilled compassion. The first piece of that I think I, I did articulate by the, in the form of this, the wisdom book, the idea that how do you create a practice of making a, a regular, doing regular inventory of what you've recently learned? I, I did it every weekend. I spent 20 minutes doing it. It was usually four to eight different bullet points about what I learned that week, that you could do it monthly, quarterly, you could even just do it annually. I mean, what if you were, what if your New Year's resolutions were, were not just a resolution, but it was actually a reflection of what were my top, what's my top 10 list for my learning of the last year?

Speaker 1 (19:45):

That is a form of metabolizing experience. The second part, distilled compassion, Let me define that for a second. So compassion, we're pretty clear on, I think and it's definitely different in empathy. Compassion is and from a, in terms of the endurance of compassion, it has more endurance. Empathy can actually, is more likely to have a, a potential burnout if you don't have practice practices associated with it. But I think the distilled compassion for me is how do you take your compassionate nature and your wisdom of metabolized experience and offer it in ways that are perfectly suited for the person directly in front of you? So that's why I think it's distilled. So how do you prac, how do you develop that practice of distilled compassion? I think the way you do that is you learn what does it mean to be a mentor in the world?

Speaker 1 (20:40):

And I think there's two kinds of mentors. The first kind is the librarian. The librarian is someone who has know how and know who, And your job is to that your mentee asks you questions and you answer them, you know? But often you're answering them by directing them towards someone else. So might be even you that is in your Rolodex. And you may have to explain to them what a Rolodex is. And then you help them to understand that here's a book you should read. Here's a white paper you should read. Here's a person you should meet. The second kind of mentor that I think is where the distilled compassion is even more relevant is the li is not the librarian. It's, it's the confidant. And when I was a at Airbnb and I had a director report from France, she went she, she was young.

Speaker 1 (21:28):

She was 26 years old. And she said to me, Chip, I, you are my confidant. And I said, Well, you haven't told me anything juicy yet. <Laugh>, what's the gossip on you that makes me your confidant? And she said, No, no, no. I mean, she said, That's a form of confidant. But she says, in my part of France, a confidant is the one who gives you confidence. It's your pre, it's the commissionary person helps you to find the permission and the roadmap. And so I would just say, if you show up as a confidant, the person who helps give a younger person confidence, what you're doing is you are distilling compassion. You are helping that person find their path, and you're using some of your experience to guide them in a way that that is perfectly suited for them. That's why it's distilled. It's not just sort of universal compassion for everybody.

Speaker 1 (22:24):

It's really quite specific is what is what can I do to serve this particular person? So the practice I would have, there is a practice, it's a mental mantra practice, which is, how can I serve this person standing in front of me? How do I serve this person? And, and, and, and my my point of view on that is if it's not customized, if, if how I'm answering is across all people, that's beautiful and it's universal, but I am particularly attracted to the idea of customizing for that particular person. So that's one, one question with a long answer.

Speaker -- Jim Burns question

Can you speak to the particular challenges of working with men to become elders?

Speaker 1 (23:27):

Well, it's a, it's such a important topic, and one that I only have a couple minutes to answer. So I, let me start by saying that I, I have a daily blog called Wisdom Well, and I wrote a, a Wisdom well post about a week ago called What's Up with Modern Masculinity. And it was citing a number of statistics just how dire the situation is not for, for men at all ages, including boys. You know, the, my feeling on that particular topic is having been, you know, about 63% of the, actually about 37% of the people who come to mea are, are men. So it's predominantly women. The men who come are a bit of a revelation in the sense that like they're not used to being, a lot of them are not used to being in, in experience with 20 people in a room, getting that vulnerable, being that open to getting to know each other from the inside and out.

Speaker 1 (24:29):

If we could help men at a younger age start to socialize that and feel better about that, it would make a big difference. Because as has been written about before, you know, men tend to relate to each other, shoulder to shoulder, and women tend to relate to each other face to face. And what that means is, you know, so men actually like to go out and do the collegial thing, go to a sporting event together, sitting next to each other, going out and camping together, sitting at the campfire together. But there, there's, there's miss. What's missing is this intimacy, and it's partly for a lot of reasons but the into MEC element for men is incredibly important because what a lot of men are feeling are, is this deep sense of, to use a throw quote, quiet desperation. And like, they are the only ones who are getting it, right? They are, they're the abnormal one. And the fact is, especially in midlife, so much of what we're going through, transitionally is normal. And yet, if you think that you are the one not getting it right, you do get to a place where you get into this, you know, learned helplessness, depression, and then sometimes death by despair. So it, it's an incredibly important topic. I wish I could say more, but you might check out my w all blog. And look for the, the, the, the the post last week on modern masculinity.

Speaker 6 (26:09):

Go ahead, Kathleen. Go ahead.

Speaker 6 (26:14):

I I just, yeah. Thanks again, Chip. And you may guess I'm the one with always a question, but curiosity is a key to this whole process, I believe. Right? So the one I have is it's wonderful, the work. It's, and, and I love the idea that all these consciousness raising is coming together in so many thousands and thousands of ways in our, in the world. My question is kind of just your stuff is, is labeled as a midlife. I feel like I went through midlife a long time ago, <laugh>, and I know we're trying to get outside of the age grouping but I, I think in my life more in the last stages or latter stages at 65 plus. And I'm wondering how you see that as a different place, or not

Speaker 1 (27:07):

A great question. Yeah. So sociologists historically actually def 50 years ago defined midlife as 40 to 60. Then they expanded it to 40 to 65, and then 45 to 65. In the last 10 years, many sociologists now stay midlife is 35 to 75 <laugh>. So I would say midlife is the life stage, not an age. Because when you, when you have a life stage that's 40 years long, it may not be a life stage anymore. It may be a, a way of thinking and a way of being. So I, we've had people as young as 28 come to me an mea workshop and as old as 88 the last two weeks in a row, we've had people in their eighties in a workshop. And last week when I, I led a workshop last week on Love, death, and Human Connection. And we had a woman who was 82 and we had a, we had four people in their thirties in that same workshop. So yeah, I, I would just say the reason that we focus on midlife is because we think it's, it is the, it's the Rodney danger field of life stages, <laugh>. It don't get no respect. And that's why we tend to focus on it. Cause we think it's actually, if you don't get midlife right, you will not get Elderhood right, in our opinion.

Speaker 7 (28:30):

Thank you, Chip Kathleen, would you like to share? I think we have time for one more.

Speaker 8 (28:35):

Yeah. Chip, I'm from Long Beach, so I heard you speak when you were much younger at Rotary, but I've also spent many years in San Francisco and I back in Long Beach, but I as some of you know, I'm really passionate about reproductive rights and health and recognize being in this group that we need to include men in this conversation if we're going to turn this around collectively. And so I'm somewhat baffled or really don't know how to engage men with women in a convening where we address this issue from a human perspective so that women have freedom and choice, and men are there as allies and partners.

Speaker 1 (29:24):

I, I can, I, I, I totally agree with you. And I'm not sure I can add much other than to say this is a great group to start with and, and to maybe have a, a conversation specifically on that topic that is intended to be you know everybody's voice. So, but I, yeah, I mean, I'm crossing my fingers for next week. In terms of the elections, I wish we, I wish the elections had happened in June or July. But I do think that, you know, there's, it's really interesting to see how, how quickly we forget, you know, the path that the Supreme Court has us on in a whole variety of areas, including reproductive rights.

Speaker 3 (30:16):

Thank you.