Carol Fishman Cohen: Welcome to 3 2, 1 iRelaunch, the podcast where we discuss return to work strategies, advice, and success stories. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host. Before we get started, I want to remind our listeners who are actively relaunching to make sure to sign up on the iRelaunch Job Board, because that's where employers go when they're looking to hire people who are returning from career break.

So let's go on to our podcast conversation for today. Today, we welcome Chip Conley. After disrupting the hospitality industry twice, first, as the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the second largest operator of boutique hotels in the world. And then as Airbnb's head of Global Hospitality and Strategy leading a worldwide revolution in travel, Chip co-founded Modern Elder Academy in January, 2018. Dedicated to reframing the concept of aging, Modern Elder Academy or MEA supports students to navigate midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. Chip has an upcoming book, Learning to Love Midlife, 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age, which is about rebranding midlife to help people understand a life stage that is misunderstood, and that book will be released in January, 2024. In today's episode, we're going to talk to Chip about what it means to be a modern elder and the evolving perception of aging.

Chip, welcome to 3, 2, 1, iRelaunch.

Chip Conley: Carol, it's great to be with you. We both come from the same hometown, so I appreciate the fact that all these years later we meet for the, we're meeting for the first time.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yes, and I didn't put that as part of the introduction, but Chip and I are both from Long Beach, California and we don't often meet other people who are from our hometown.

So that's been a real treat to, to talk about that. But Chip, let's begin by talking about your career path, including more about how you ended up with that role at Airbnb, but maybe take us through it from the early stages.

Chip Conley: Yep. So I went to college and graduate school in the San Francisco Bay area, and got my MBA and a couple years after getting an MBA at Stanford, I was in San Francisco and I was working for a commercial real estate developer, but I was seeing this idea of boutique hotels starting to pop up on the landscape.

This was the mid 1980s. and I decided I wanted, my, our company had become a boutique hotel company, and my, my, the CEO of the company said, No way. So at age 26, I decided to call, I come create a hotel company called Joie de Vivre, means joy of life in French, and for the next 24 years I ran that business and grew quite large 52 boutique hotels around California, each with their own name.

And the thing that was interesting, Carol, is I had a dark night of the soul. Sometimes people take a time off from work because they're having kids or they, or because they have to work with an ailing parent or because they just need a sabbatical. I was one of those people who just needed a sabbatical.

I was burnt out in my mid to late forties, and I had a flat line experience. I had, I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic and I died nine times over 90 minutes. And fortunately, I was brought back to life, or I wouldn't be here right now. And, but that was my wake up call to saying this isn't working.

And so in my, in what I had to do then it was like say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to remake my whole life. And I had a lot of things that were not working well in my life at that point, personally, professionally, et cetera. Over the next two years, I remade my life. And, by age 50, at the bottom of the great recession, I'd sold, Joie de Vivre my boutique hotel company.

And I was sort of, I didn't know what was next. I had a couple of years then when I just had spaciousness and I was a little, it was awkward for me in some ways because if you're used to having your self worth defined by, how busy is your calendar, like I wasn't feeling much self worth. On the other hand, I was really exploring and curious about some things that I've always, I'd always wanted to learn about.

And long story short is I had two beautiful years of spaciousness and trying out a few things. And then out of the blue, I got a call from the three young founders of Airbnb. This was 10 and a half years ago. Yeah. And nobody had ever heard of the company. They were a small tech startup that had, was growing globally, but like it wasn't well known outside of the millennial world.

And they said, we want you to help us democratize hospitality. And, I said, okay, let's talk. And I spent the next few months helping them, almost like an advisor, consultant. And then they sat me down one day and I thought they were gonna tell me like, Chip, you're an imbecile. You don't understand tech.

Which was true. I was in a tech company and I was 52 years old and I did not understand tech. But I understood a bunch of other things. And they said, Chip, we brought you on because of your knowledge, but what we really got was your wisdom. You. You are our modern elder, and I said, I don't wanna be a modern elder.

You're making fun of my age. And they said, Chip, a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. And when I heard that, oh, the nice alchemy of curiosity and wisdom, I said, that is what I hope you see me as because that's how I'd like to show up in the world. And that led to me being there for four years full-time as the in-house mentor to the founders, and especially the CEO, and then three and a half years part-time. And I wrote a book called Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder as a result of that, and as I was writing that book, I had this weird epiphany one day of, why are there no midlife wisdom schools? Why are there no places for people in midlife? When I say midlife broadly, sociologists now say it's 35 to 75, but I'm talking more like 40 to 60 or so, 40, 65. Yeah. Where are the schools and tools and rights of passage and rituals for people to reimagine and repurpose themselves during the middle of our adult life? And that's how MEA, the Modern Elder Academy came about.

Carol Fishman Cohen: What an incredible story that is. I've been taking some notes because I have a few questions I wanted to ask you about things that you said along the way.

So you called those two years when you had sold the business, and before you went to join Airbnb as at your time of spaciousness, but also made this remark about what relaunchers often feel when we're on career break, when we don't really have an elevator pitch and so much of society attaches who we are as a person to what we do for work.

And you take that away and it's so you, you feel a little bit like you don't know exactly who you are, what you wanna say. So I was feeling a little bit of that. Is that, did you have that as an element of what was going on at the time?

Chip Conley: The thing that's interesting, Carol, is, in retrospect I can look back at it and say I was clueless.

I had never studied midlife. I had never, I didn't know much about how do you take a break and, I'd read a little bit about sabbaticals, but, what I ultimately came upon, I just, I found was a term from a woman named Mary Catherine Bateson, who, her mother was Margaret Mead, her father was Greg Gregory Bateson, the famous psychologist.

And she said What the world needs is more midlife atriums. And let me explain the metaphor for you. What she said is that we in the 20th century, we added 30 years to longevity, average age, life expectancy in 1900 was 47, and it became 77 by the year of 2000. And what she said is like, what we've looked at as a society is that we have allowed people to be old longer.

It's like you add two additional bedrooms to the backyard of a home. You have more time in the backyard metaphorically, like more time at the end of your life. But she said, what we really have is we have more space in the middle of our life. And what we need is not two bedrooms in the backyard, we need a midlife atrium. Because your midlife atrium is the time when you can have space to reflect air and light, to imagine, and have the space to imagine, how you want to live the second half of your adult life. If you're 54 years old and you're gonna live till 90, you are exactly halfway through your adult life if you start counting at age 18. Most of us do not think that way. We don't think, like at 54, somehow, we're only halfway through our adult life, but we are. And that's a really important perspective to have because it allows you to say, gosh, I've got as many years ahead of me of adulthood as I have behind me.

Maybe it's time for me to retrain or reskill or reimagine or do the thing I wanted to do when I was 18, but my parents talked me out of it. Now it's time to do it.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yeah. You know, one of the things we talk about in relaunching and that we hear a lot from people who are on career break and want to get back is they wanna do something totally different because either they fell into something career-wise that, by accident almost, or they were fulfilling their parents or someone else's expectations. And then this time, now they wanna do this for themselves, but, we're gonna talk about this in a minute what's now the hundred year life, that and the 60 year career. And, it's interesting to hear you talk about that with the 77 year life.

So I wanna. park that as a reference point. One thing that I thought was interesting about the Airbnb story is it sounds like, did they actually come up with that term? Did they actually call you the modern elder and define it?

Chip Conley: It was one of the people, it was actually not one of the founders who came up with it. It was somebody on their senior team, or on our senior team who came up with it. They said they, they ultimately told me that, but I didn't, it wasn't, it was someone else who actually came up with it.

Carol Fishman Cohen: I see. Wow. It's pretty profound to come up with that and the definition, and also then for you to think there's all this reframing going on.

I'm thinking about you're reframing now when you look at your adult life and you're only halfway through it. That's a complete reframing, and now I'm thinking about, you hear that term and the definition and there's a shift and then you just ran with this. So what happened like from that moment when you left Airbnb and you began to formulate what became the Modern Elder Academy?

What were some of the steps you took at the beginning?

Chip Conley: Let me start by saying when it came to being at Airbnb, I realized that I was a mentern, a mentor and an intern at the same time. And I like that term. It's a term I came up with and I wrote about in Wisdom at Work, because I really think that is, that's the future.

We live in a world in which intergenerational collaboration is more necessary than ever. And we have five generations in the workplace. And by the year 2025, Carol, the majority of Americans will have a younger boss. So we better get used to the idea of sometimes being the mentor, sometimes being the intern.

In my case, I was mentoring Brian Chesky, the founder and ceo, but I actually reported to him too as the head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. So that was an interesting experience. So what I can say is that let's all get used to the idea that we gotta be careful about generational stereotypes.

Some of them are accurate, in certain ways, but they're generalizations and not necessarily appropriate and for everybody. And as is true of most stereotypes, that they are base. They don't really quite get the full nuance of a person. When I was leaving, part of the reason I decided I needed to, like I needed a break and moved to part-time was I was just like, Hey, I was flying around the world, I was like the secretary of state for the company. And for a company growing that fast all over the world. it was tiring. And, so I decided I wanted to write this book, Wisdom or the Making of a Modern Elder, and I wanted another midlife atrium. I wanted some space to write the book, and so I had a home in, we're in Baja, down here in Southern Baja, an hour north of Cabo San Lucas, and I started writing the book. And as I was writing the book, I had no plans to do anything other than write the book and work part-time for Airbnb. But one day when I was going for a run on the beach, I had a Baja "aha." I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was, why is it that we have no midlife wisdom schools, a place where a person can cultivate and harvest their wisdom. One of the things that we know is that as we age, if we're intentional about it, we can become wiser, because we can make sense of our life experiences and metabolize that experience. So that is how MEA got off the ground and, with a campus down here in Baja, and now we have a campus here in Baja.

We have a campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico that'll open early next year on 2,600 acres, a regenerative horse ranch. And we have online programs and we have a program that's like wellness vacations with a little bit of content called Refresh. And then we even have regenerative residential communities, places where people can actually buy a home around a regenerative farm.

So it's a sort of like disrupting the idea of retirement communities. So yeah, that's where MEA is, and we have scholarships and as well as full tuition options. But, more than anything, I was at a place in my life where I wasn't learning. I wasn't looking to make any money. I had done well with my Airbnb experience and I really wanted to give back and do something.

I actually lost five friends to suicide, all of them midlife midlifers, some of them, most of actually all five were men, age 42 to 52, during the great recession. And so what I was really, I'd say the mission I had was to feel like, I hope that I can create something that helps give more options to someone in midlife who is looking at aging as being a negative.

And the reality is if you can shift your mindset on aging from negative to positive, you gained seven and a half years of additional life according to Yale's Becca Levy. So helping people to see the upside of those years in your life is part of what we do and we do it with social science, and in the very experiential kind of workshop format.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That was actually one of my questions about, if you can give an example of what happens at one of, there's so many different things that are going on at Modern Elder Academy. I'm thinking about our relauncher population, which is right in the middle of the forties to sixties age range.

And also, we're all trying to figure out how do we go back to work, that age piece about the younger boss. So I myself went back to work at Bain Capital after an 11 year career break, and I was 42 years old and I was working for a 37 year old. And so that was, that's the reality for many of us who relaunch our careers. And I guess I wanted to know if you could talk about people who might attend the Modern Elder Academy that are thinking about this change in their career one way or the other.

Chip Conley: Yeah. We get a lot of people, the number one reason people come to MEA is because they're navigating a midlife transition.

So that could be empty nest, start going back to work after having taken a break, it could be a divorce, it could be they wanna start a new business, could be their parents passing away, could be a health diagnosis. There's a lot of things that bring people to MEA.

And then we have, our core curriculum has really five pieces to it, how to cultivate your wisdom, how to reframe your relationship with aging, how to move from a fixed to a growth mindset, fourthly how to understand transitions and navigate them, and then how to empower a new perspective, a regenerative perspective on purpose.

And so within that frame of those five elements, then we have themes for our workshops. And so some of our workshops are like relaunching, we don't have a workshop that says relaunch, although maybe we should do an iRelaunch workshop together with iRelaunch community. But, We have workshops that are like changing careers, coming back into the workforce.

As Diane Johnson's a good friend of ours and she's on faculty, so she teaches workshops here. So yeah, so I would say some of the core things that a person gets out of this is number one, it's an opportunity to break with some of your habits, some of the habits you've had and some of the mindsets, because one of the things that's true is that the first half of our life is about accumulating.

We accumulate knowledge, we accumulate friends, we accumulate relationships and obligations and children and stuff. Then around 45 or 50 at what's called the bottom of the U curve of happiness, for those who don't know it, it's global research that has shown that the low point on average, globally, for life satisfaction is 45 to 50.

And what happens is that sometimes people are just like overwhelmed with the accumulation. And so one of the key things that we help people with, especially in the first 24 hours after they've arrived and they're in a workshop with 20 to 24 other people, is what am I ready to let go of?

And we call it the great midlife edit. And what is it that's no longer serving me? Is it a mindset? Is it like a, I'm too old to learn technology or work in a tech company, which would've been one of mine before Airbnb called me, right? Or, it could be I always have to be the caregiver or I always have to be the hero.

Or it could be, I make a bad first impression with people. And that's the, so these are mindsets, they're habits, they're archetypes, they're, and we go through a process that helps people to identify these and to start to let go of them and replace them with something else. So that's, so there's an element of emotional and psychological support that people get in the first 24 hours that allows them to be more vulnerable.

Because if you can get vulnerable, and, then you start to open up to possibilities. Just a few weeks ago we had a litigation attorney who has just been hardcore in her life. And so her whole life has been like she's negotiating everything with anybody, and she doesn't like who she's become.

But when she was a teenager, she used to help her grandmother cook pies, and she always loved baking. And so she came here and she would never have come here expecting that this was what would come out of being with us for a week. And she came here and just, by the end of the week, she says, I'm gonna, in the next six months, close down my legal practice, I'm gonna go to cooking school and I'm gonna open a bakery in my neighborhood, because a lot of things closed after covid. And she's done that. So that's a good example of someone who had to get vulnerable because without that, she might have been just way too much in her brain. It's okay, what could I, how could I take my legal career and apply it over here and not, without doing, having to do litigation?

Carol Fishman Cohen:

Wow. So it sounds like people have these transformative experiences there. And you create the environment for them to be able to do that.

Chip Conley: Yeah, that's the key is to create the crucible for life-changing conversations. Because so much of our life is, we're so regimented and terms of all the things we have to do and yes, we get the occasional conver like deeper conversation with a close friend or maybe a family member, but, to do this actually with people you don't know is very liberating. It's weird. That's one of the weird things, oh, are you gonna talk to, yeah, I'm gonna talk to people I don't know. Because actually, one of the challenges we have in our lives in midlife is we also have, we're, we have a lot of different costumes of our identities.

So I, with that group of people, I am a sibling, with that group of people I'm a boss, with that group of people I am, a Republican or a Democrat, with that, and you have a com compartmentalization of yourself. And, so to actually come to a workshop where you are not having to show up with any of those identities, no one knows each other's LinkedIn. No one's, we don't send out LinkedIn links and we don't tell people's last names. And by the end of the week, you maybe got someone to know someone's last name, but that's not part of it. So there's a liberation in being able to say, ah, I can think more broadly about what my options are.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Chip, tell us about your books, especially the the one that you were talking about as you were finishing up the Airbnb experience or right along with that. And then this book that you have, that's gonna be coming out in January of 2024.

Chip Conley: Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm lucky enough to have, I love writing.

So I've been writing for more than 25 years and, the book that will be coming out in January, January will be my seventh book, Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder was the book I wrote at the end of my time at Airbnb, and that came out about five years ago. The new book is really based upon, gosh, having spent time with 3,500 alumni from 42 countries.

All of the midlifers who've come here to our campus to understand this life stage midlife that don't get no respect. It's the Rodney Dangerfield of life stages, because it's a life stage that people don't really understand. And I was lucky enough a couple of months ago to be asked to give a speech at the big TED conference.

And I think that the video will come out this fall. And they asked me to give a speech on the midlife chrysalis. Not the midlife crisis, but the midlife chrysalis. Because midlife is, can be a transformative time if you know how to make it through that period of time, and iRelaunchch and MEA are two of the resources out there that can help people to see that this era of your life can allow you to go through the liminality or the transition from what you were to what you're gonna become. And that is a very beautiful thing. Yes. It can be dark and gooey and solitary in the process, which is like a, what a chrysalis is between the caterpillar in the butterfly. But it really gives an opportunity for people if they're open to it, to transform. And, so the new book is, a book that focuses on midlife and the 12 reasons why life gets better with age. So everything from my emotional intelligence is growing and I am less emotionally reactive, and it has some social science around that, but also some storytelling around that, to the idea that often after the kids are gone and things like that, you have some time affluence, you have some space in your life, and what do you do with that space? And how do you create your own midlife atrium?

So there's 12 different reasons and yeah, I'm excited. It's available on pre-order and so people can order it in advance. My last book actually sold out so quickly that it took three weeks for them to have new books, so I would recommend pre-order. I've also recommended the publisher, just like, print more books this time.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Right, exactly. And it's called Learning to Love Midlife, 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age.

Chip Conley: Exactly.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Okay. But one thing I wanted to ask you about, as I was thinking as you were speaking, is, there's a lot of discussion now, there's a whole, conference called the Century Summit around the a hundred year life and the 60 year career. And, we're starting to think a lot about that at iRelaunch, but I'm just thinking how relevant your book is gonna be even more relevant for the youngest professionals now who could realistically expect to live a hundred years and have that six year career, and what is that six year career going to look like?

Chip Conley: Yeah. Back 30 or 40 years ago, the average worker had three jobs in their career, and their career lasted 40 years maybe, and just three changes. And so they didn't really have to get used to the idea of re-skilling or, and the world wasn't changing as fast as it is now. And today the average worker later in life has had 13 different careers or 13 different jobs.

And that's a 40 year career. If you're gonna have 60 year career, you're gonna have even more. I think the big shift that we're already seeing and we're gonna see even more, is the portfolio career. The idea that someone doesn't have a singular job that actually pays the bills.

They have 2, 3, 4 different things. They might be an Airbnb host while they're also consulting for companies that in the field that they used to work in, they also make a little bit of money as a, I don't know, a substitute teacher or a, whatever it is, a piano teacher. Now, at the higher levels, it could be that they're on a board.

A lot of times when you're talking about the professionals in the world, their portfolio life is a combination of, I've made some investments in these businesses and I'm on the boards of those businesses, some, not some startups, and then I'm actually on a public board and they fill their life with that.

I'm a not a big believer in filling your life. I think you need to have some space to see what emerges, but I also think the idea as people are gonna stay in the workplace longer, I think what we'll see is that they will start to piece together a career that has an entrepreneurial flare to it.

Because, it's hard to go out and find a job at 72. But if you wanna be working in your seventies, I'm not saying it's impossible, it's definitely not impossible, a lot of people do. But if you wanna be working in your seventies, It's probably gonna be on your terms. And so the earlier in your career you can get used to the idea of saying, I'm gonna have two or three different sources of income, and therefore I'm gonna have two or three specialties of what I can do.

Yeah. it's, like a smorgasbord.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yep. Yep. I think, was it Marcy Alboher that coined that term?

Chip Conley: The portfolio, I don't think she did, although Marcy's, she teaches at MEA and I love her, she might have though. I remember something encore career. She, I think she and Mark came up with encore career, but I don't know, I dunno if the portfolio career is, was her...

Carol Fishman Cohen: Anyway, I was just thinking about her when, because I remember when a book came out that had a reference to that kind of arrangement,

Chip Conley: Is the Encore Career Handbook and I think it was that focus as opposed to portfolio, but there's some similarities.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yes, for sure. And it's interesting because just today I saw that the FDIC is looking to call back out of retirement experienced bank examiners because they need people to hit the ground running to be able to avoid the next banking crisis.

And they are seeking out the people who have these decades of institutional knowledge.

Chip Conley: Yeah, let's, we, as older we have what I like to call invisible productivity. And that invisible productivity is because we're there and we are often not perceived as a competitive threat career wise, and because we have a wealth of knowledge and, hopefully emotional moderation, we are well suited to not just to be productive in our own right, but to actually help all those around us. So we make the younger people around us better by being there. And it's, there's examples of this sort of in the wilds, the grand, the grandmother phenomena where, you know, the grandmothers taking care of the kids and, without grandmothers, with Wales, younger whales don't live as long.

And so there's an element. I'm not saying we're grandmothers. I'm not a grandmother, that's for sure. But I, what I am saying is being the modern elder or being that sage worker who is able to do their job, but they also have a sort of intangible. role of being the mentor to others, it's something that I think social scientists are starting to research a little bit more. Because we're gonna see more of that.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yeah. And it's certainly, that's a reality for relaunchers who come back into organizations and, it's after their career break, but they have all this life experience and, a lot of that, what you're saying really resonates and is consistent with what we see. The other thing with the 60 year career is we're thinking there are gonna be more career breaks, and so the employers that have thought ahead that have career reentry programs conceivably could bring back people repeatedly if, and I don't know how things like that are gonna evolve, but it's just one possibility that we've spent some time thinking about.

So anyway, so much to talk about. Chip, I just want, before we go any further, before I ask you the final question that we ask all of our podcast guests, I wanted to know if you can give our audience little bit more information about two things, Modern Elder Academy, is there a website, like how do they find out about it?

And also is there a direct website or something where people can, pre-order your book?

Chip Conley: Yeah, modernelderacademy.com. You can find it there. I also have a daily blog called Wisdom Well, and you can find that on the Modern Elder Academy website. And, if you like it, you, it's a little microdose of wisdom, we send it to you, email it to you daily. It's free. Learning to Love Midlife is on my chipconley.com website, so you can find the book there and pre-order it there, as well as all my other books and as, as well as, speeches and articles I've written. I was lucky enough to write for Oprah recently, there's an Oprah article there.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yeah. And also, I'm guessing your TED Talk will be on there. What an amazing, experience and how validating about your expertise and your experience that they asked you to speak on the big TED stage.

Chip Conley: So thank Carol.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Congratulations, that's really awesome. So is it Chip Conley? C H I P C O N L E Y?

Chip Conley: Exactly.

Carol Fishman Cohen: chipconley.Com.

Chip Conley: Exactly.

Carol Fishman Cohen: I always like to spell it.

Chip Conley: Yeah, good idea.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Okay. Alright, perfect. And then, let me just ask you this question that we ask all of our podcast guests and that is, what is your best piece of advice for our relauncher audience, even if it's something that we've already talked about today?

Chip Conley: So I would ask the following question, what is it you know now or have done now that you wish you'd known or done 10 years ago? So think about that for a moment. That's not the end of my answer here, but think about that. What's the, what's the thing you wish you'd learned 10 years ago? And now ask moving forward, what is something you'll regret if you don't learn it or do it now? Because anticipated regret is a form of wisdom.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That's a great question and a great concept. Thank you.

Chip Conley: Yes. Thank you, Carol.

Carol Fishman Cohen: All right, what a way to end our conversation, at least for now. I hope we have many more opportunities to speak. Chip, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chip Conley: Oh, Carol, thank you. It's a joy.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And thanks for listening to 3, 2, 1 iRelaunch, the podcast where we talk about return to work strategies, advice and success stories. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host, and please, Be sure to refer to iRelaunch.Com for resources that will help you in every stage of your relaunch.

Thank you for joining us.