Turning A Midlife Crisis Into A Midlife Calling with Chip Conley

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's the place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever wondered about what is going to be the second half of your life, what it looks like, how we might reimagine aging and midlife, then this conversation is going to matter to you. And it's something that's particularly interesting to me now because I'm almost 62. So I'm like, wait a minute, how did I get here? What am I doing? Where am I going? And what's next to have a meaningful, deep, fulfilling life?

And what's your birthday? What's your birthday, Mark?

My birthday is 11-22-59 and 20.

So you're a Scorpio.

I'm a Scorpio, yes.

So am I.

All right, well, let me that man is our guest. His name is Chip Conley. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's a hospitality maverick and he helped Airbnb's founders turn their fast-growing tech startup into a global hospitality brand. In his book, Wisdom at Work: the Making of a Modern Elder, he shares his unexpected life journey in midlife from CEO to intern and learning about technology as Airbnb's head of global hospitality and strategy while also mentoring CEO Brian Chesky Chip is the founder, and this is what we're going to talk about today. He's the founder of Modern Elder Academy. What a great idea, which is really a new roadmap for midlife. He offers programs in a beautiful oceanfront campus in Baja, California, which I've been to. It's beautiful. And also in New Mexico, and he serves on the Board of Encore and.

The Advisory Board for Stanford Center for Longevity.

So welcome, Chip. Thank you, Mark. Good to be with you. All right. So we met in Mexico a few months ago, and I was so intrigued because All of our norms and beliefs and attitudes about aging and what happens to us and the meaning of life, all this in this culture is just, we've kind of so screwed up. And I just got back, I've got back from Sardinia, which is where they had the longest lived men in the world. And of course, women too. One couple combined age was 110. No, sorry, 210.

210, yeah.

210. She was 109, he was 101 when he died. and there, there, there's a, it brought up the question of, you know, how do we live in a way that honors and values the elderly and, and includes them in our society in a way that we haven't. They end up being discarded. You know, if they retire, get their gold watch, end up a nursing home. But there, I mean, nobody's in a nursing home. It's just fascinating. So we're gonna get into all this, and I sort of want to Let's move back to a time in your life when you died. It was in 2008 and you had a divine intervention of the heart where your heart literally stopped after giving a speech on a book tour, basically flatlined nine times. So tell us about that experience and being so close to death and what that did to you, how to change you, how to make you rethink your life.

Wow, what a hello here. I'll get into it.

We just don't have any time to waste.

First of all, it's an honor to be with you, Mark. And yeah, so I was 47 years old, which I have only later found out that if you look at the studies of the U-curve of happiness, the lowest point in adult happiness or life satisfaction tends to be around 47. Well, I didn't know that in 2008, and I was going through a very dark time. And weirdly, everything that could go wrong, that could go wrong did go wrong, including the fact that I was allergic to an antibiotic and I had a septic leg. And after my speech, I was signing books and I went unconscious. And then when the paramedics showed up, I went flatline the first of multiple times. Went to the other side, had an NDE experience. And what I will say is that the divine intervention on this was the fact it was sort of like I was a hotelier. It was my wake up call for the hotelier. Because I'd been running this company that I'd started when I was 26 years old, I was now 47. And I had 3,500 employees and I no longer had any creativity or freedom and didn't like it. I was in the great recession, running out of cash. So long story short is it woke me up to two things. Number one is I shouldn't be doing this anymore. And so it accelerated my process of figuring out, I'll sell this company for virtually nothing just to get out of it. And it also woke me up to something that was a seed I planted for later, which is, why is it that we don't have schools, tools, rites of passage or rituals for people in midlife to understand the stages of life and the transitions of life that tend to be happening in midlife so that we can do something about this midlife unraveling, as Brené Brown calls it. It's not a crisis, it's just sort of an unraveling that's going on. But none of us have been trained on this.

Yeah. I think you sort of reframe it from crisis, right? Midlife crisis to midlife calling. What do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is, for some, often change doesn't happen in our lives until something f*cked up happens. And, you know, it's that health diagnosis. It's your, it's getting divorced. It's losing a job, it's having your parents pass away, it's becoming an empty nester, and all of a sudden you and your spouse are looking at each other saying, we don't really know each other.

Who are you?

Yeah, exactly.

So.

The crisis is often what actually creates the desire and need for change. But wouldn't it be interesting if we could go into this era prepared for the transitions and instead of it looking at like we have to have the crisis to actually create the change, we say, I'm at a crossroads. What is it I want to do? And so often when you do that, you can actually find that there's a calling you had that might have been something from childhood or from early adulthood, something that you've been missing that you've wanted to do, and now you just need to give yourself the hall pass to go out and do it. So we see this over again. We've had about 1500 alumni now from 28 countries come to our M.E.A.

Programs in Baja and- Modern Elder Academy.

The Modern Elder Academy, exactly. And what we've found consistently is that people vastly underestimate how much life they have ahead of them. So the average age of the people who come is 54. And if you're gonna live till 90, and if you're 54, the chances of you living till 90, especially if you're a woman, pretty good. At least maybe 50/50, almost 50/50. So if you're gonna live till 90 and you're 54, you have as much adulthood ahead of you as you have behind you if you start counting adulthood at age 18. And it's that kind of math where a 54 year old says, you know, I wanna actually, I wanna start doing some things that I wasn't gonna do. And how do you move people out of a fixed to a growth mindset? so that they start learning Spanish or they, you know, learn how to do yoga or they say, man, I'm a lawyer, but I want to be a pastry chef. And truly, truly, it's happened. We've seen it multiple times. So, yeah, helping people to get comfortable being a beginner again.

Yeah.

And realizing that you can start something new at 45, 55, 65, 75, 85. And it's that starting something new that actually creates almost a dynamic of that fresh beginner's mind that has huge both psychological and physiological effects.

Yeah, it's really true. I think most of us stay fixed in our lives. We sort of have the expectations, the norms, the beliefs, the notions that our culture gives us about what we should do, how we should live, where we should be, how we should be in relationship, the things that matter. And honestly, they're all constructs. And if you travel to different countries, they're very different. And so we, if you go in America, you gotta think this is how things are, but it's arbitrary and it's an artifact of our culture. And it may not even be something that is really that fulfilling for most people. And yet it's like the Truman Show. We don't know we're in it.

Well, or the Matrix or- yeah, and.

Your work is really important because it, It calls out and it calls into question the beliefs and attitudes we have about how we should be and live at any stage of our life and brings the notion of like, how do we create the structures and rituals and the initiations to actually live an authentic life that's an authentic connection to who we are and what we want and what matters to us, what we care about and what we love and life's too friggin short to not do that. And yet, you know, most of us don't. And I'm actually at this point right now where I'm like, wait a minute, what's next? I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm believing I'm going to be 120, so I'm about halfway there. When I had my 60th birthday party, I found a big sign. So my first 60, my first 60 years birthday here, my first 60 years birthday party.

Yeah. Well, actually having that mindset is important. And, and, you know, Phil Pizzo, Dr. Phil Pizzo at Stanford, who ran the medical school, has shown that there's three key things that we need after about age 50. and these are the three building blocks. And you also see this in the Blue Zones studies and research. And I know you've been in Sardinia and one of those Blue Zones out there. So the three things we tend to need, and this is particularly true if you actually retire, which I don't recommend, purpose, wellness, and community. So the purpose piece is understandable, especially if you retire, like, okay, what's your purpose in life? Purpose has this, this effect on us about, it helps us to understand why we got up this morning and who are we and what's important in our lives and how do we invest our time. Wellness is obvious and, you know, kudos to you for helping people to understand the topic of wellness. And we're definitely going to lure you to our M.E.A. guest faculty. Okay, that was easy. That was easy.

Is it on the beach?

Okay, fine.

It's on the beach. It may even be walking distance for you. I don't want to walk to that.

Can I surf?

Yes, well the surfing, surfing and, you know, and, you know, gut health week.

Yeah.

So, and then the third one, so purpose, wellness, and then community. Yes. And this idea of community, Blue Zones very clearly shows this.

Yeah.

But it's, I think, probably been my greatest lesson in the four years since we started M.E.A., Modern Elder Academy. and that is that there's a, we're thirsty for community. Now that was true pre-COVID, even more so during COVID but it's not just being in community with a collection of other folks. It's actually having deeper conversations in community because you can be in community by going to an NFL football game. You know, community can be many things to many people, but what people are thirsting for more than anything else is the deep an intimate connection with other people. And that's what we curate at M.E.A. is helping people with a cohort of 20 people for normal workshops to do that. And then we also have something called sabbatical sessions, which is people coming for extended stays and doing, going through some lighter programming. And it's more of a DIY experience as well.

All right. I like that. I like that extended stay sabbatical idea. So, so for you, Chip, you know, this was very personal and your work now is really outgrow. of your own shift when you were 47 or whatever it was. Tell us more about what changed for you besides selling your company. What was the reinvention and the insights that you had and what happened after that?

You know, in the movie, the intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, De Niro early in the film says, Musicians don't retire. They quit when there's no more music left inside of them. And I had music. It was there. I just wasn't sure who to share it with. And I got a call from this guy named Brian Chesky. I didn't know who the hell he was. He was co-founder of a company called Airbnb. I didn't know much about Airbnb, even though I was in the hotel business. This was nine years ago. And he said, I'm looking for an in-house mentor to help us democratize hospitality. and I didn't know much about what they were doing. And so I started spending time with them and I came to realize that I was going to become a mentor. A mentor to someone who's a mentor and an intern at the same time. And that's what I was. I joined the company almost nine years ago and I was the head of Global Hospitality and Strategy and Brian's mentor, but I had never worked in a tech company and I was 52 years old. And so I had to learn the tech business and all the wingo and all the, and it was, it was wonderful. So a few months into it, Joe Gebbia, one of the other co-founders said to me, Chip, you're our modern elder. And I said, Joe, I'm not a modern elder. Because I thought he meant modern elder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What he meant was, what he said is, Chip, wait, wait, wait.

What I mean is, you're, everybody is a bad word.

An elder is actually a word of honor. That's right. That's right. So he said, A modern elderchip is as curious as they are wise because the curiosity opens up possibilities and the wisdom distills down what's essential. And he said, that's what you do for us. I was like, okay, I'll sign up for that. And that's how the term modern elder came about. But yeah, I was 52 in a company full of average age is 26. So yeah, elder is a relative term. It doesn't speak to an exact age. Elderly is more like an exact age. It's the last the last five or 10 years of their life. But elder is a relative term. You could be a 35 year old, you know, playing baseball for the LA Dodgers, and you're probably an elder as the 35 year old, you know, amongst a bunch of pro athletes or in the software development business, same thing. So long story short is I, I embraced that, and I spent four years full-time helping the three founders and the leadership team. steer the rocket ship because it was a rocket ship. We were growing really quickly. And then I spent the last five years as a strategic advisor during which time I started writing my book. And I had a Baha Aha on the beach, going for a run on the beach. My epiphany was, why don't we have midlife wisdom schools where people can just sort of cultivate and harvest their wisdom and repurpose it? And so I call that same seed. different soil, same seed, different soil, which means you have to get clear on the seed of what you have to offer the world. And then you might start looking for a different soil. And that's, you know, Airbnb was different soil for a hotelier.

For you. Yeah.

So it worked well. And yeah.

Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out.

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So, you know, how do you define a modern elder? Someone who's basically curious and open and has a beginner's mind, but also is wise. So it's sort of this almost interesting marriage of, you know, it's the alchemy. Opposite. I mean, right?

Mark, yeah, Mark, it's the perfect, it's like learning to have the perfect alchemy of when do you dose up? the curiosity. And the curiosity we teach at M.E.A. Appreciative Inquiry, which is an empathetic form of curiosity of how to ask questions. And then when do you dose up the wisdom and be in a position to actually offer some advice or some lesson, teachable moment? So it's that right alchemy of both. And so a modern elder is somebody who has an unvarnished insight and is open to sharing it, but often leads with questions and leads with empathetic curiosity and has an insatiable desire to learn. And that's, to me, that's what defines a modern elder. And, you know, the beauty of it was we're living in an era where we're living longer, but power in a digital society is moving younger. as evidenced by companies like Airbnb. And the world is changing faster. And those three variables, living longer, power moving younger in the digital world, and world changing faster, means there's a lot of people between age 35 and 75, which is what's now considered midlife, there's a lot of people who are confused and bewildered and often feeling a bit irrelevant. And so that's that's where, what we're there for.

How do you address this sort of cultural phenomena of the, the idolization of Youth and the culture of Youth, where becoming older is seen as something not desirable and not welcome and owner, ownerless in a way, and, and where you become irrelevant?

Yeah, I think it's a great question, Mark, and, and it's a hard question to answer, and I, I'll give you my thought on it, but it's, There's a lot of nuance in this. I like to think of it this way. How do we help people in midlife and later realize they need to be useful, not youthful? And it's not that they shouldn't be youthful. You're in great shape. And it's not like we shouldn't try to keep our bodies and our minds and our spirits in a constantly regenerating state. We talk about creating regenerative communities. Regeneration's a big deal. And so I'm not diminishing that. But what I will say is that in a culture, you know, or there's a culture, a cult of youth in, let's say, the United States specifically, where your standing in society, especially for women, has a lot to do with how you look and, and especially how you take care of yourself as you get older. There becomes a pie chart and the percentage of your pie chart is dedicated to just your looks. and your healthful appearance becomes larger and larger and larger. And what that does is it crowds out the opportunity for the unexpected pleasures of aging. Which, what are those? Well, guess what?

Yeah, what are they? Tell me.

Okay, I'll tell you.

Give me the good news.

So here's some good news. So, you know, on the other side of every bad piece of news around aging, there's often a good piece of news. So let's start with the brain. So very clear that our brain gets less good at memory especially short-term memory as we get older. The evidence is pretty conclusive and our brain even shrinks a little bit. But what's beautiful is actually our brain starts to learn all-wheel drive as Dr. Gene Cohen who wrote the book, The Mature Mind. All-wheel drive means we can actually move from left to right brain, from logical to lyrical. We have crystallized intelligence that is growing. We have the ability to think systemically, holistically, and connect the dots. So one of the unexpected pleasures of aging is you have a greater sense of intuition and a great and pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is a form of wisdom. And so something gets better. What else gets better with age? Actually EQ, your emotional intelligence and emotional moderation.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm such a much smarter guy than I was when I was 25.

Well, You know, we're like, excuse me, but we're like these pinballs in the pinball machine. We are just like, I love Viktor Frankl, you know, man searches for meaning. And he said quite famously these three sentences, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is your power to choose your response. And in your response lies your growth and your freedom. When you're younger, you don't have a lot of growth and freedom because there's It's not between stimulus and response, it's a reaction. And what does that do for you? I mean, there's some beauty in that. And yet, what it does, frankly, for the people around you is it creates a reactive environment. In the workplace, it means that often it's not a psychologically safe team that you're on if you're surrounded by a bunch of people who don't know how to emotionally moderate themselves. So, and psychological safety is the number one variable for effective teams in the US or in the world, according to Google, in the study they did called Project Aristotle. So long story short is our emotional moderation, our EQ, our ability to be wise and think systemically, and the U-curve of happiness, which I started with at the start of this conversation, U-curve of happiness research shows that from about age 23 to about age 47, Our level of life satisfaction declines. And then we hit bottom between 45 and 50. Your mileage may vary. And then it gets better. And people- your people in their 50s are happier than 40s, 60s happier than 50s, 70s happier than 60s.

So that- so- I found that true for me.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And why, why, Mark, why do you think you've been happier?

Just think I've figured more out about how to live in a way that is more in integrity in alignment with who I am and what I want and what matters, rather than living according to beliefs or ideas of what I should be doing or my responsibilities, obligations and, you know, to-dos and it's like inviting in the questions of, you know, how to show up more in integrity in alignment with what matters, as opposed to filling on other ideas of society or that I had or Beliefs that I had about what I should do or shouldn't do or what's okay or not okay. I'm sort of really challenging some of those underlying assumptions and beliefs.

So you reevaluate, all of that is true and we get to reevaluate our script for success. What at M.E.A. We call our success script and how we define it, what it means, you know, whose script is it? Did we write it the script for ourselves or did someone else write it for us? We do something called the Great Midlife Edit. You learn how to discern what no longer serves you. One of the things that Carl Jung and Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr, the Christian mystic, who lives not too far from where I am right here in Santa Fe. He's become a good friend. In fact, I get to see him tomorrow. What they both have talked about is.

That- oh yeah, I just read his book, Falling Upward.

Oh, that's a great book, Falling Upward.

Falling Upward. It's about the same thing really.

It really is. It's an anthem for what we do. And that's why he's become a good friend because it's about actually realizing that the first half your life, the operating system that we work with is our ego and that's fine and it serves a purpose. And then it's around midlife that we have an operating system change and we move from the ego to the soul and we do not that we do not have language or rituals or any kind of education to help people to understand this. And it is when you move, make this shift that you start to realize that the kinds of things that motivated you in the past may not motivate you as much anymore. And it's a, but you've got to get conscious about this and intentional about it. Otherwise, you're just sort of like living in a new world.

Yeah.

You have you're not even aware of what's going on. As one of my friends said, she said, just when I got comfortable in my own skin in my 50s, it started to sag.

And.

What I said to her is, you know what? If you had to choose, you can work on the sagging. There's things you can do. But the process of actually getting comfortable in your own skin is so much more valuable. And because it really does lead to that kind of life satisfaction we talked.

What you said Chip was so like hit me like a laser, which was we're changing our operating system from our ego to our soul. And within that, like there's a lot to unpack. How do you do that? What does that mean? What does it look like? How do we rethink what we want? I know for myself, like I don't care about getting another New York Times bestseller. What I care about is how well am I loving the people in my life? How many sunsets have I watched? How many times have I just been still and just been in nature and let it enter me? How much can I be kind to people? And just simple things that are way more important to me than any kind of material or success or public recognition. , those are really less important to me. It's really more now about just service and love and being present and, and not missing anything, like not missing life. I feel like I missed a lot of life in the service of my ego. I think my soul is calling me to reinhabit that landscape of soul. And yeah, and that's, that's my entire focus right now. It just really, and I, it doesn't mean I don't do my normal work. It just means I do it differently.

And I feel- I mean, it's also.

Questioning what's next, you know?

It's part of the reason that you're enjoying both working and playing, you know, on the road. You're in Europe right now, and it's part of the reason that, you know, I think we'll be seeing more of you in the next year. There's an element of learning how to become untethered. In fact, there's a Michael Singer's book, the Untethered Soul. so how do you untether yourself from what has been the, the scaffolding for your life? And so what we help people to see is we help them to take down the scaffolding in con in, you know, in a safe Crucible with 20 other people and to recognize that they can re-architect their life. There's a, there's a famous, there's a Mary Catherine Bateson wrote a book called composing A life. And then further.

It's a beautiful book. Beautiful.

Yeah, it is. And she talks about the, the, the, the midlife atrium. And so I want to give you this quick metaphor because I think it's actually an appropriate one for people to understand. So she says, what we've thought of in society is that our extra longevity that we are earning, which, you know, it's, you know, obviously covid. And let's recognize that, that longevity in the United States is very much a socio-economic demographic issue as well because very big differences between different demographics. But overall, the longevity trend has been quite clear. She says that the way we look at it is as if we've added an extra bedroom or two to the back of our house. So in other words, if we have an extra 10 or 20 years compared to our grandparents, it means that we just have more years being older. And her premise is that that's just not true. It's not, you're not getting an extra bedroom or two on the back of the house. You're actually getting a midlife atrium. And her premise is the midlife atrium is this era between often between about 45 and 65, where you have more space to actually go out and be different and to have time to reflect and to, as is true for any atrium, to actually feel some spaciousness so that you can actually re-architect the blueprint of your life. And, and so I like to think that I like help. It's one of the, the metaphors we use at M.E.A. To help people to understand, hey, you're an architect of your life here for this week. They may, we may need to do some reconstruction, but the process of doing it.

We're falling in over here.

Yeah. Yeah.

Bathroom needs a renovation.

Is that right? Well, you know, once you recognize that you have the ability to see it and then make changes to it, and then be part of a supportive community moving forward around it, you know, it's miraculous what kind of transformation you can architect in your life.

How do you take people from a midlife crisis to a, to becoming a modern elder. Well, what's the curriculum? What's the process? How do you help people sort of reclaim?

So there are four key tenets that define the program. Number one is mindset. So Carol Dweck's work on fixed versus growth mindset, how do you help a person? Because frankly, if you have a fixed mindset, man, your life does not get any better after age 50. Because what you do is you just, your life gets smaller and smaller because you're not willing to try new things. So we help with mindset and a lot of that is helping people to get comfortable being liminal and to be liminal is to be in between two things. And so we have, whether it's learning how to serve, baking bread with a group of people and serving it to the rest of your cohort, learning improv, learning to juggle, I mean, people come there thinking, I'm going to this professional transitions workshop. and then the next thing they know, they know they're actually writing poetry and like, what the hell is going on here? But it is, it is go, it's basically taking them in the back door to helping them realize they can become a beginner again. So number one is mindset. Number two is transition. How many people, how many of us have actually been taught what the three stages of transition are? Not many. But the three stages of transition have been around ever since Rites of Passage days. you know, hero's journey with Joseph Campbell, et cetera. And so we help people to understand the anatomy of a transition, whether that transition is getting divorced, changing your career, moving, et cetera. What are the three stages and how do you actually accelerate your TQ, your transitional intelligence? Thirdly, is we teach a lot about regeneration. including the fact that the regeneration of the soil and the soul are both about the biome. It's the biome in the soil, the biome in the gut. And actually, how do you help people to understand what is regeneration? And so this is something I'm definitely looking forward to spending more time talking to you about in person. And then the last thing, and I'll throw it back to you is we help people to reframe what it means, what elderhood means. Because there's three stages of life. There's the childhood era, there's the adulthood era, and then there's the elderhood era. But we tend to think of the elderhood era as being just like elderly, but it's actually, you could be an elder for 30 or 40 years. And we have prep schools, we have, you know, the word adolescence didn't exist in the US until, or in the world until 1904. Prior to that, we just said, okay, you're, once you hit puberty, you're an adult. and then when adolescence became a thing, we made a bunch of changes, child labor laws, public junior high schools and high schools, et cetera. So there's this thing called middle essence, and it's a new thing. And adolescence is your time of going through emotional, hormonal, physical changes in your teens. Middle essence is when you're going through menopause or men going through andropause. You're going through a lot of changes often in your 50s or 40s, late 40s or sometimes early 60s. Why don't we have prep schools for elderhood? We have prep schools in high school to prep people for college, but also for adulthood. Why don't we have prep schools that help people? So that's what we really are. The four things, mindset, transitions, regeneration, and reframing elderhood.

And you said something, maybe I misheard you, but you say regeneration of the soul.

That too, yes. Soil and soul.

Soil, okay.

Soil and soul. And the biome, yeah, the biome has something to do with both.

I think one of the challenges with aging is that we have in this culture an environment that perpetuates abnormal aging. and the frailty, the disability, the disease, the dysfunction, the loss of ability to be part of things is what we see in aging. And so it's a little bit scary for a lot of us. And when I was in Sardinia, it was amazing. Like this guy was like 96 years old and he literally like, straight up, you know, jumped up from his chair, fully functional, and he literally just given up doing his Shepherd work, like, a year before. You know, he was walking, you know, five miles a day, you know, curting his sheep for, I don't know, 75 years or something, or maybe more, since he was a kid, maybe 85 years. And he was so in his body and he was so robust. And this other guy, he met him and he. he took us down to his, you know, sheep. He's like, he was like 87. And I'm like, could barely keep up with the guy. He's like, you know, and I'm like, he's doing what he loves. I'm like, what are you doing? Well, I'm, you know, have my orchard, I have my sheep, I have my farm, I plant everything. I said, are you, it's just you? It's like, he's like, yeah, just me. I can, I give it to my family and this one, that one. And it was like, you know, serious physical well-being that they had. And they ate an incredible diet, and they we had this longevity. And I think that, you know, one of the, one of the things that I've noticed is that our beliefs about aging are, are pretty cultural here. And, and for me, I, you know, what is it? What is that Dylan Thomas saying? The rage against the dying of the light? You know, I think, I think maybe there's a little bit of that in me, but I, I'm also, you know, trying to experiment with how can I kind of get younger? biologically, how do I get healthier, fitter, stronger, have more energy? And I think mentally, yeah, what I've noticed is that people can really reclaim their lives and come back from the brink of death and get really robustly healthy if they have the right ideas about how to regenerate health. And really, functional medicine is regenerative medicine. It's about regeneration. of all the biological systems and networks. It's like you said, it's an ecosystem like the soil. And I think that's such a key part because if you spent your whole life developing yourself to have wisdom and compassion and, you know, learn how to create that space between, you know, stimulus and response and actually can be authentically engaged and curious and wise, if your body's falling apart, it's really, it's kind of a problem. I mean, you can still do that even if your body's falling apart. But I think it's just, it's an invitation to think about, you know, how do we reimagine aging? Not just from a psychological point of.

View, but from a physical point of view as well. We talk about not just, not growing old, but growing whole. And growing whole speaks to what you're just saying. If, if you're compassionate and wise and all this, but you are not focusing in your body. then you're not integrated. And to be able to be integrated is about growing whole. And I think one of the biggest travesties that we had, and I understand why it happened and there was logic and it made sense, is that retirement became so pervasive. And it happened in the 30s. It happened because we had a depression. It happened because people were working 40 years backbreaking work and in their 60s couldn't do it anymore. And there's no Social Security or pensions. All of that's good. But studies have shown that when you retire, you accelerate your mortality by two years, which is shocking because you'd think the opposite. You know, you have more space, wouldn't you? No, but actually because you lose your purpose, your wellness in your community, you actually accelerate your process toward death. So I think what you heard and what you've seen in Sardinia is exactly that. When people have this sense, that they can, they do something they love, they can do it as long as they want. And they actually, one of the things that I've, you know, Socrates supposedly said this long ago, and someone else said it to me as a mentor. The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of your life is to give it away.

Yeah.

And for many people who are older and are doing things they love, they want to give it away. What I mean by that is they really want to share that learning, share that wisdom with others. And it's that, that's another key part of our program is to help people to understand what is the gift? What is the gift that they have actually, and if they don't know it yet, here's some steps that you can take to help understand what it is. And then once you know what it is, how can you give it away?

So that's so beautiful.

Yeah.

When I was in Sardinia, I interviewed all these centenarians and near centenarians, you know, I'm like, you know, ask them, you know, what would they advise people to live a happy life? And it was interesting to hear all the answers and the wisdom. And it was really beautiful. Like, it was just like, wow, there's so much there. And, and we, we just sort of, we've lost that. And, you know, just, what, what are all the Treasures that are locked away in nursing homes?

You know, yeah, well, we created our own version of apartheid age apartheid. We had, we created Sunny City. and Rossmore Leisure World. And you have these people, you had, you basically let's Stockhouse all of our old people in these, you know, age segregated places. And, yeah, I don't think that's the future of, we're creating regenerative communities now, not retirement communities. That's what, that's one of mea's things. I love that. And it's all about intergenerational as well.

So I love that. I love that. Well, before we go, I wanna, I wanna ask you about your vision for the future because, you know, MEA, the midlife, I mean, the modern Elder Academy is maybe the first, like, wisdom school for midlife. And I think you're thinking of it much bigger than that. So can you, can you talk a little bit about what your vision is for what you're creating?

Well, two things. Number one is we're dedicated to long life learning, not just lifelong learning. So long life learning is how do you create a life that is as deep and meaningful as it is long? and how do you understand the stages of life in midlife and beyond? Our goal is to be a catalyst so that we are helping to disrupt the retirement community world and create regenerative communities. How do we disrupt the higher education world, which Clay Christensen, who coined the term Disruptive Innovation, said five years ago before he passed away, he said that 50% of the colleges and universities in the US will be closed in the next 10 to 15 years. So why don't we take some of those campuses, those gorgeous liberal arts campuses that are closing and turn them into midlife wisdom schools? So a person goes for a one-year program in their 40s or 50s or 60s, and they're there to basically do a gap year. So I guess overall we want to be a catalyst for new thinking. I have been a I was one of the first boutique hoteliers in the US. I was an early person at Airbnb, so I like disrupting things. In this case, I want to disrupt education and where you live in community after, you know, the latter half of your adulthood.

I love the idea of like, you know, where people don't go just to play golf, but to actually grow and learn and develop and, you know, live.

Up, you know, fate, you know, your living room faces a farm, not a fairway. I mean, come on.

That's great. Well, I'm gonna see you in Mexico. We're gonna make that. I'm gonna come creating that regenerative community farm. I, I just love that vision. I think it's really what we're all longing for. And I think, you know, being in community was, was a lot of what the elderly talked about was the importance of family and friends. And anarita, who is this 91 year old woman I talked to there, I said, well, you know, we just lost our our time to just be with each other and to talk and to have conversations and tell stories and just share life together. And, and it was, she was right. I mean, it was really, it's really one of the modern scourges. And, and if you look at the data, that the number one killer isn't obesity or cigarettes or lack of exercise. It's loneliness.

Loneliness. Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know what you're talking about is really the antidote to loneliness is actually learning how to become part of a regenerative world where you're included in.

Your- Isn't it interesting that the word illness starts with the letter I and the word wellness starts with we? And so we believe in social wellness. Wellness is not just about your own, what you do personally, physically, it's the social wellness in what, in terms of who you surround yourself with.

Right.

There's a tremendous amount of science, by the way, around this. There's even a whole field called sociogenomics, which is how our social connections and networks influence our biology in real time. Literally, if we have an authentic, deep, intimate conversation chip, I will change your genes. You will change my genes. Wow. If, if. And we will turn on all the anti-inflammatory genes, all the pair of genes, if we're fighting and having this conflict, we're going to turn on all the genes that cause inflammation and degrade our health.

Wow.

It's not just like an abstract philosophical thing. It's like the Tao of biology. You know, I call it the Taoist.

That's great.

Wow. I didn't know that. Thank you.

Well, Chip, thank you so much for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy. It's been such a great conversation. I think this is just the beginning for you. you've got probably another 60 years to go, right? So, I'll see you in Mexico on the farm. And for those of you listening and love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Check out the Modern Elder Academy at modernelderacademy.com, there's workshops or sabbatical sessions, there's online programs, there's can be an activist in residence, you can join one of their communities, check it out. It is pretty awesome. Hopefully, if you are learning about your midlife calling, maybe you should share with us. Leave a comment. We would love to hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We will see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey, everybody, it is Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you are loving this podcast. It is one of my favorite things to do. and introducing you all the experts that.

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