The Superpowers of Longevity

Chip Conley, welcome back to Flow Radio. Part 2 of our discussion. And this time we're going to focus on the second half of your career, your midlife left turn into midlife. Let's start at the beginning. What led you to found a midlife wisdom school?

So when I went to Airbnb and they called me the modern elder, I took offense to it, but I realized, yes, I was twice the age of the average person there. And what I really needed to look at is like, what's my relationship with aging? What do I think about age? And of course, most of us adopt the company line, which is if there was a bumper sticker that said, you know, that defined aging, it's just don't do it. The Nike idea of just don't do it. But I got really interested in the idea of, like, okay, what gets better with age? Because I actually felt in some ways I was getting better with age. I had wisdom. I had the pattern recognition, which is associated with wisdom, and this crystallized intelligence of, like, being able to connect the dots. And what Dr. Gene Cohen talks about, the four-wheel drive of the brain, being able to see things and have peripheral vision. My cohort at Airbnb, who are almost all millennials, and I'm a boomer, were extremely fast and focused. But if you're fast and focused, you're missing something out here. And so I started getting really curious about that. So I also lost 5 male friends to suicide during the Great Recession between 2008 and 2010. So I was also curious about that. Why do we call it the midlife crisis? What is it about midlife that actually seems to be such an obstacle to people's life satisfaction? And then I got really curious about the U-curve of happiness, which shows like, wait a minute, people are saying like midlife is awful, and yet then after 50, the U-curve of happiness research shows that people get happier after 50.

Yeah, if you're not familiar with the U-curve of happiness, for anybody listening, it's the idea that we're happiest early portion of our life. And then the worst part of your life from a happiness perspective is what, 40s and 50s?

45 to 50.

45 to 50. And then each decade afterwards, we're happier and happier. One question I've always— how— what was the cutoff age? Did they stop measuring at 90?

You know what? I think the last 2 years of your life, it goes down again. It's like a smile, but the end of the smile is like— well, that's like it turns down because, you know, you're struggling with the challenges of your body falling apart. But what's interesting is Laura Carstensen at Stanford, the Stanford Center on Longevity, her research has shown that actually when you know you have a shorter lifespan ahead of you, your happiness grows. And why? It grows because instead of focusing on the past or the future, you focus on the present.

You focus on the fact that this shit is gonna end.

It is, but you sort of focus on the moment. And when you're focusing on the moment, you get to a place place of actually, you know, less anxious, less regret, and more like, how do I feel in this moment? So, um, so to answer your question, I got more and more curious about this. I was writing a book called Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, and down in Baja, we're at a home, and I went out for a run one day on the beach, and I came back with a Baja aha, an epiphany, which was Why don't we have midlife wisdom schools? And the real framework was this. We sort of feel like in our teens and our 20s we're learning a lot and then we're supposed to use all of that education like a refueling stop and that fuel is supposed to carry us the rest of our life. Right. Which doesn't make any sense, not only because we're living longer, but also because our knowledge, knowledge gets obsolescent faster these days. So the things you learned at 18 may be not as relevant, especially if it's coding and computers. But the bottom line is we need a midlife pit stop. And we need an opportunity to actually say, like, how do I refuel myself in midlife and maybe even change the trajectory of how I'm living my life? And that's how MEA came about. And what was surprising to me, having been—

MEA, Modern Elder Academy.

The Modern Elder Academy. I doubled down on modern elder after the Airbnb experience of having them say a modern elder is as curious as they are wise. What I really got to the place on was I was like, okay, what happens if we give people the opportunity to realize maybe their best years are ahead of them? Again, this idea of reframing the idea of aging from an anti-aging perspective to a pro-aging perspective. Now, let's be clear, when I talk about pro-aging, there are people out there in the world, and especially the science world, saying like, Chip, aging creates dying. Someday. And I hear you. And yet, there's all these things that get better with age. And that's why I wrote this book, Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, because I really wanted to amplify the things that do get better with age, whether it's emotional intelligence or wisdom, the ability to edit our lives, spiritual curiosity, relational, you know, how much we care about relationships. These all get better with age. So long story short is MEA came about as a result of that. and with a campus in Baja because that's where my home was. Um, and the Baja campus is spectacular, right on the beach. But during COVID uh, we realized, God, it's time for us to have a US campus. And the 4 of us, uh, partners, including Christine, who's here in the room with me, one of my co-founders, we all had a few votes of where we could do it. And the only place that was on all of our lists, the 4 of us partners' list, was Santa Fe. And so that's how our search started here, gosh, almost 4 years ago. And we bought this campus 3 and a half years ago and have been building it since then, designing it and building it, and recently opened. And to have 4 square miles and all these hiking and biking and horseback riding trails and equine-assisted learning, this group is going to— this cohort is going to go through some equine-assisted learning tomorrow morning, which is remarkable because horses are wise. And if you can actually be open to learning from a horse, there's such— it opens up such an opportunity to have your brain, the brain synapses firing on a different level.

So I know what I think— I know what you mean by horses are wise. They're very great readers of human emotion, right? And they just project it back.

So you, right.

Is that what you're talking about when you say they're smart?

That's what I'm talking about. And also they've been on the planet for 56 million years. So they've been on the planet a lot longer than humans have. And therefore— I didn't know that. They have, they've owned their wisdom and they've learned that. But yes, I think from an EQ perspective, there's a lot to be learned. To learn about how we carry ourselves with a horse. So, yeah, the idea, you know, I think one of the most important things, so back to sort of the topic of the day in this podcast, is like how you help people learn how to become a beginner again is exceptionally important at any age, but particularly in midlife. Because if we are open to becoming a beginner, We amp up our curiosity and our openness to new experiences, and we also make ourselves have a more interesting life. The data that shows that as we get older, it feels like our life is accelerating and time is going faster has a lot to do with the fact that the endless summer as a teenager is having a lot of firsts. And when you have a consistent collection— not consistent, but an inconsistent collection of firsts, it expands the sense of time. And so that's something we need to add back in our life in midlife. And we have, we start to have some time affluence often in our 50s when maybe, or 60s, when our parents don't, you know, have passed away, and our kids are no longer at home, if you have that sandwich generation issue. And so how do you make sense of having that time affluence. And to my mind, one of the most important things people need to do is to be open to being a beginner again. And that's our MEA program. You know, this week we're not doing bread baking, but that's something we do. Equine-assisted learning will be a new thing. We've done a little bit of improv. On Friday morning, I'm not going to say what we're going to do, but it'll be a new experience that Christine, our chief experience officer, will be leading. In Baja, people learn how to surf. The idea of becoming a beginner again in the company of other people who are becoming beginners as well is sort of what we did in adolescence. But it's something that we need to do in middle-essence, the era we are in middle—

Middle-essence is this word you've invented.

I didn't invent it. It's been around for a little while, but I'm popularizing it. Actually, Barbara Waxman, who's one of our guest faculty members, wrote a book called The Middle-essence Manifesto.

It's a great term.

It's a great term because it's like, oh, you know, you go through the same things in middle essence as you do in adolescence— hormonal, emotional, physical, and identity transitions. So, um, but help— yeah, helping people to become a beginner again is a crucial part of helping people to see that their life is not on the downslide as they get older.

Well, it's also successful aging, definitely. Like, you have to reboot the seeking system, right? You have curiosity, passion. All those things. Um, that's— so that was the central— this curiosity and rebooting curiosity was, was the central focus when you built this. It's also, you know, openness to experience. We were talking about this yesterday, declines massively right before we die, right? So it's a really good sort of predictor of mortality is when you lose your openness to experience. It's within 24 months you're usually usually dead. So—

Because you're in preservation mode at that point, you know, when you're in your last couple of years, you— I mean, there are the unusual people who are saying, like, I got to do this before I die. But more people are more like, okay, they're in this— first of all, they may be in an infirmed state, so it's hard to do new things. But also, they may be in a state where I'm just in preservation mode.

How many, uh, well, first of all, how many wisdom schools are there going to be?

Well, here's what I'd like.

I asked the guys who had 50 hotels.

Well, for 6 and a half years now I've been doing this. I've not paid myself a dime, and I don't expect to ever pay myself a dime. I'm the only investor in it, and I've invested a lot of money. There are others who have invested time and, you know, and love and care, like Christine and Jeff and Skylar, my partners, and now Carrie, who's another partner. So I'm doing this because, not because I want world domination and want a lot of dots on the map and make a lot of money. I really want to be a catalyst for midlife wisdom schools to become a thing. I think the world needs them. You know, the the— from my own personal experience, having 5 friends take their own lives in 2.5 years, and one of them named Chip, of all things, you know, I'm really of the mindset, like, we really need to help people to see that, especially as we're living longer, that midlife is this chrysalis. It's this opportunity to be in a transformative mode to really rethink the second half of your life. So I don't know how many MEAs there will be. What I hope is that there's dozens or maybe someday hundreds of midlife wisdom schools around the world. One of the things I'm very proud of is we have been on the earliest stages of this idea of midlife wisdom or transition schools. And now there are— when we started, there were only 3 colleges or universities that had created a year-long program of a midlife transition school where people come back to the campus, have a year-long program with 20 to 40 other people. Very elite thing, very expensive, and you have to spend a year doing it. But now there are 20 schools doing that. And we have helped—

I had no idea.

We have helped Yale. We're helping Yale right now. We've heard University of Chicago. We've helped— we've collaborated with Stanford. We have helped Claremont Schools. Look at it. So, you know, what's weird is we are the non— you know, we're not accredited, we're not a university, and the universities are coming to us to learn from us. So it's— that feels really good. I like disrupting things too. And so the idea, the idea of disrupting education such that we're saying it's not all for 18 to 24 year olds in terms of higher education, there's another way to actually help another demographic age-wise? And then also, something we've talked a little bit about is the idea of how do we disrupt retirement communities?

Right.

Oh my God.

Right.

You know, my parents live in one, and they love it, actually. But when you talk to most people my age— I'm turning 64 later this year— I don't have any idea that I would ever want to live in a traditional retirement community. And most people my age, your age, et cetera, don't feel that way. And so the idea of, like, what if we could actually remake retirement communities into regenerative communities, where, you know, we have one that Jeff Hamouy, one of my co-founders, had sort of concepted and created as the developer of it. And it's MEA affiliated, with 26 homes, almost all of them alumni, around a regenerative farm, with regenerative living principles, you know, within walking distance of our MEA campus. So we'll do the same here in Santa Fe. We will have a series of regenerative communities so that people can sort of live with other people who want to live not playing bingo and golfing every day, but they actually want to learn and be curious and do a morning mindfulness session and do a potluck once a week and have an intergenerational component to it so that, you know, people from St. John's College here in Santa Fe can come on campus to the regenerative community and learn from each other.

So it's also, I mean, you know this as well, the foundation of successful aging are cross-generational friendships. Oh yeah. One of the core, first of all, you get replacement friends, which are so critical. They're gonna have a life and nobody likes to talk about that idea.

Yeah.

Because it's harsh, but it's real.

What, explain it. So replacement friends.

Replacement friends, your friends, if you're a certain age and all your friends are your age, they're going to die. If you're the long-lived one, they're going to die. And if you don't have replacement friends— complex social relationships are about as important as a positive mindset towards aging in terms of extending life. I think it's 7 years compared to 7.5 years for a positive mindset towards aging. There are different studies and they measure it different ways. But replacement friends and all like the most successful societies where you really— all the blue zones, you see intergenerational friendships, part relationship, part that curiosity gets ignited again.

Yeah. You know, when I give speeches, especially on intergenerational collaboration, one of the favorite questions I like to ask the audience is, okay, think about the 5 people in your life who you're most intimate with. They're not family members, not a spouse, not blood family. Who are the 5 people who know you best, you know them really well, and if you're going through a hard time, you might actually reach out to them? So list those 5 people, okay? People will do that. And then I'll ask them, okay, how many of those 5 people are at least 10 years older than you, are at least 10 years younger than you? And on average, when I ask this in these speeches, it's 1 out of 5 is outside of the 10-year range.

Oh, interesting.

And so only 1 out of 5. So in essence, only 20% of our intimate friendships are with people who are significantly moderately different in age. And that's something we've got to actually look at. And part of the reason that's true is because we have age apartheid. Age apartheid is the following, and thank you to Marc Friedman who actually created that term. Age apartheid means you learn when you're early in life along with people who are the same age. You earn in the middle of your life with people who are roughly the same age. And then you return or burn or adjourn in the later part of your life with people who are all around the same age. So we've stratified our society by age, and that is not how we used to live as a society. You would often have 2 or 3 generations living in the same home, and you still do in the US, in non-Caucasian cultures, much more so than in Caucasian cultures. And so the reality is, I think learning how to actually create a more intergenerational potluck is not only good for families and friends and things like that, it's good for society.

Well, I don't know if you remember this. So back in the '90s in San Francisco, the bars were very intergenerational. Like I was, when I was a bartender at Cafe Babar, it was like my regulars went from like 21 to 75. And that was the mix. Went to all the North Beach, all the beatnik, all the Lawrence Fergetli bars, things like that. Very intergenerational. And so—

Not so true anymore.

Not true anymore, right? Not after— I mean, once the internet came in and dot-com money flooded into San Francisco, it became very ageist and bars. But it was one of like the great delights of San Francisco is like, you would go out and you'd be 20 years old and you're hanging out with like 70-year-old famous beatnik poets.

Especially in North Beach. I mean, North Beach was so famous for that in terms of that intergenerational collaboration. What's interesting is I would— I was reading this week about some restaurants now that have created an age floor. And there are restaurants that actually, you can't come into the restaurant unless you're 30 years old. Actually, it's 30-year-old for women, 35 for men. Like, really?

In San Francisco?

No, no, it's all over. Do a Google search for restaurants that actually have a minimum age to be able to come into the restaurant or bar. It's a trend. They're like, in this series of articles I've written, I've read 2 or 3 articles.

So what's the impetus?

The impetus is that we want people who are mature and who are going to be able to be— so there's a Caribbean restaurant, African-American couple who started it in St. Louis, in the St. Louis area. Can't remember the name of it right now. And they sort of started the trend. And now there's a bunch of other restaurants doing that. And it's really interesting. It's like, OK. I don't necessarily want to go to a restaurant where it's just older people. Now, 30 to 35 is not that old, but obviously what I think started that was this sense of like, okay, the young people are coming in here and being too noisy in the, in the bar or whatever it was. But again, just another example of age stratification.

That's interesting. That's funny. I did not— I had no idea. It's a new trend. And I don't go out to eat much. Yeah, I live in the woods. Talk to me. We've spent a lot of this week talking about this, but you and I haven't talked about it. How do you think about flow in the second half of your life? And how is it different from, right, you've done more with like positive psychology and flow in the first half of your life than most people ever get near. How's it different in the second half?

Well, I think a couple thoughts. Number one is something that you and I talked about privately without the group here, and I just want to bring it up to the group because You're not going to tell them that story, right? No, no, no. I'm sort of fascinated by someone doing some research on the idea that when you're in a state of flow, because being in a state of flow makes it such that it's a timeless awareness, so you sort of slow down time or maybe time stops. Is it possible that physically your body doesn't age as much during a time when you're in flow. I don't know. There's no research on this. You and I sort of talked about it, and I don't know that you know any research on it.

So one weird comment, and this is— I was talking to Ellen Langer, actually. I think she brought this up on our podcast. I love her. She's amazing. Yeah. But there's, you know, and she's the queen of sort of dissolving the mind-body barrier. Like, there's no— there's no separation. And the craziest new research, I don't know if you saw this, and it's a little bit like this, is on wound healing. And they found that they wounded a bunch of study subjects and how you perceive time passing. People who thought time passed faster, their wound healed faster. People who thought time was dragging and going really, really slow and they were bored, their wound took longer for their wounds to heal. So there's a, now there's, and it really well done study, direct correlation between time perception and like wound healing, which is a really, you know, that's not a thing. So your question coming, you know, on the back of that kind of research isn't too weird. And we were talking about our mutual friend, John Coyle, who has an idea that because sort of the inverse question, but it's—

[Speaker:JAMES] There's Kairos and Chronos time.

[Speaker:CHRIS] Kairos and Chronos time.

So Kairos time is chronological time. And I think Kronos time is a time where you lose track of time or you do not have a very good sense of time because of doing something in the flow of timeless awareness.

And his idea was the more time we spend in when we have experiences of timelessness, that's actually the foundation of memory. So as you age, if you have more of those experiences, your years, even though it's only 365 days, they actually in your mind and your memory seem much longer. And he's not wrong, right?

Well, again, and that's sort of like the idea of what kids, why they have an endless summer. So I guess what I would just say to summarize on this one is I think that there's probably, we're going to see research coming out in the next couple of years that'll show that being in a state of flow actually stops time physically in your body to some degree. I believe that's true. Secondly, and this is not research-based, but it just makes sense logically, the less time you have in the rest of your life, the more valuable and scarce it is, and the more you want to be spending that time doing something that feels ecstatic and awe-filled. And it's why we should be seeking awe, cultivating awe, taking awe walks as we get older. And Dacher Keltner's work on this, who's an MEA faculty member, UC Berkeley professor, created the Greater Good Science Center, very clear. Awe incorporating awe in your life as you get older is good for your, not just your health and your happiness, but your longevity. So I would just say finding flow is not just something you want to do because the less time you have on this planet, the more you want to be in flow, but also I think it's good for your health.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think in our country, because of all the neuroimmunology research on how flow boosts the immune system and whatever. Flow doesn't just make a life worth living, it makes a whole lot more life worth living, which is not surprising if you think about optimal performance would also probably mean longevity, right? Optimal performance over the course of the lifetime of an organism. And I don't think when Mike was originally thinking about the concept of flow, he was thinking about it over the life of an organism, but he certainly went there when he, you know, flow is the engine for adult development. And, you know, his very, his final study was on flow late in life, and he found out the same thing you did, right? Where our desire for flow stays roughly the same until the last year when our body falls off a cliff. That's right. Kind of thing. And then it, and then it seems to diminish.

Yeah. And I think, you know, we talk at MEA not about lifelong learning, but about long-life learning. So lifelong learning— so yeah, the difference is lifelong learning is the idea that I can learn Spanish at 70, or I can learn to, you know, yoga at 80, or I can, you know, learn to code at 60. So it's about learning something, and it's about accumulating knowledge. And that's good. It's really good. It's, you know, that kind of curiosity, and as an elector, is an important thing. But long-life learning is a subset of lifelong learning. And long-life learning means curating your life such that your life is as deep and meaningful as it is long. So we have a lot of people, and this might be controversial a little bit here, sometimes they're friends like Peter and others, who are, Peter Diamandis, who are exceptionally focused on the quantity of life, how many years they're going to have. Brian Johnson in Venice Beach is spending $2 million a year to actually prolong his life. And, you know, in some ways it's a beautiful thing for society, but when you hear Brian Johnson on a podcast talk about how regimented his life is, and frankly, I think how lonely his life is based upon how he talks, I get to a place of saying like, what is quantity if you don't have quality? And what I mean by that is long life learning speaks to this idea of how do I live a life that's as deep and meaningful as it is long? And therefore, it's not obsessive about the length as much as it is balanced by how do I find flow and the things I love to do, not because I want to extend my life, but because I want to deepen it.

Well, you know, I'm in total agreement on it. Yes.

But you know what I'm talking about with some of this.

Peter and I talk about this. We're talking about Peter Diamandis for anybody who's listening. Peter and I have had this argument for years. The other thing I have to say to Peter, and I'm not joking, I'm really curious to figure out what happens next. And I don't necessarily know if I want to live to 150. That's a a lot of years. It's complicated here. It's hard here a lot of the time, and I love it, but I don't necessarily know if I want 150 years. I may feel differently about that as I'm lay dying, but I've, you know, I've said that for a while to Peter, and he doesn't understand it at all.

Stephen, explain this to me. Why is it that 98% of the people who are exceptionally obsessed with living forever are men?

I got nothing. You got nothing?

I don't even have anything funny.

I don't— Wow. Okay, I got a question for you.

Do you agree, though? Do you agree that it's predominantly a male-dominated hobby?

Yes. And the only time— so the only women I've met are women who have crossed in through space. So they're space geeks, and in the space community, there's a lot of longevity.

That makes sense because they want to live, they want to go to Mars, they want to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's the only time I've seen crossover that way. But you're right. So you're saying you think it's a male ego, kind of like it's a syndrome, a syndrome, a condition. I mean, I think you get male pattern baldness and longevity.

I mean, I think there's an element of it's It's the new frontier. Oh, that's interesting. OK. So the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who have made their fortune when they were young, they're now in midlife. Midlife crisis used to be buying a red car and pretending that you're like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and having an affair with your high school daughter's best friend. Today, midlife crisis is, how can I live forever? And that midlife crisis thing is a male— predominantly male-dominated thing. Don't you think? But it's also sort of like, you know, how long is yours? Excuse me, but I mean, like, it's like an alternative form of how long is yours? And there's an element of, oh yeah, now you got me going, but I'm going to cut myself off here because I don't want to get too political on this. But I really think that for so many, it has less to do with how Can I use my body as a specimen so that society can be better off? And has a lot more to do with—

Well, that's always one of the fun— your last point is— I always point this out to people because you'll hear a lot about, oh, longevity is just for rich people. And I'm like, first of all, you know, if you look at how long it takes to go from something's cutting edge now to mainstream, like 7 years ago, PRP therapy was totally cutting edge. You could get it.

What is PRP therapy?

Uh, platelet, uh, plasma. Thank you, Fred. All these people know this, like, um, and a lot of it was— we're in New Mexico, so this is one of the places, uh, it, it really got far because you could do it here without being a doctor. You could do it here being an acupuncturist. The only state— every place else it was like $10,000, $20,000.

Yes.

Here it was $500. Okay. But that was cutting-edge, you know, like sports medicine insider stuff 10 years ago. And now most insurances pay for it. So this stuff moves really— it's moving really fast. But what I always say about like the billionaires and all this is it's one of the wildest like experiments in longevity anybody's ever conducted in that Like what, what we've learned about longevity science, you know, or regenerative medicine since it's been around, let's say '70s or '80s, is like it's got a 10 to 20% accuracy rate. Like that's the hit rate. So 80% of it is nonsense and 20% of it has turned out to be real. So let's say we've gotten a little better at the biology and the science and the over the past 10 years, cuz things are advancing, the hit rate is still like 30%. So you can look at Bryan Johnson, you can look at Peter and you can go, well, Maybe they're right, but historically, 70-80% of what they're doing is nonsense and possibly really bad.

Well, but listen, noble failures and noble experiments are part of how we innovate and get better. Totally. The truth, though, is, I mean, the good news is globally, longevity is showing there's a shrinking of the socioeconomic gap. For longevity, so globally. So Africa is way catching up. Asia has surpassed the US. Latin America has surpassed the US. Um, the US, not so much. The US has a growing gap of socioeconomic, uh, uh, status around longevity. And so you can have a county, two counties that are within a 30-minute drive from each other and have a 15-year difference in longevity between those two counties based upon the socioeconomics. And that's what I am concerned about when it comes to longevity is, you know, longevity on the personal level and on the cellular scientific level, you know, great, let's do it. But those same billionaires who are spending the time on that should be spending as much time on the sociopolitical side of how are we creating a culture.

So how's it not happening in Latin America, in Africa?

Well, within those cultures. So I'm talking macro right now. So Africa as a region, Latin America as a region has shown that much growth, partly because of what the US showed 100 years ago, which is public health advances. But in some ways, especially in Asia, it's, it's, it's the Blue Zones kind of culture in terms of how people are living that actually has, you know, in terms of what they're eating and the amount they're eating and things like that. So probably within those countries, there's still a big— there could still be a big age disparity. Um, but yeah, so I, I don't know that— I don't know enough about that to be able to say. What I do know is that within the US, The US's longevity in the year 2023 was the same as what it was in 1996, and it was the only country I know of that had not grown. It grew for a while, and then death by despair started taking it down. COVID took it down further, and the recovery from COVID has not been very good for longevity in the United States. It's shocking to me that we as a country do not take seriously the public health opportunity here around how do we help people to improve their length of longevity. We have a very much individualist culture on this in terms of, like, you're on it, you're in it for yourself. So, you know, again, I don't want to get too far into that, but I find it sad. And it's part of the reason why I think the US will continue to actually trail, you know, The US is behind China, Croatia, Uruguay, a bunch of other, you know, Poland in terms of our longevity. Like, we spend twice as much per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, and our longevity is behind the developing world. Thailand. Yeah. I mean, it's just—

I think it's a mental health issue. I mean, there's obviously so much—

There's mental health, there's public health. I think some of it is the fact that we don't spend as much on public health and health accessibility. And frankly, we're just a junk food culture. We're a generally obese culture. And maybe that's going to improve with Ozempic and stuff like that, although I think that's sad that we have to rely upon, you know, that to actually change our habits. So I don't know. Longevity is a really important issue. But again, longevity for the sake— I actually have a blog post that I just wrote this morning that's coming out. You know, this is going out later. So if you want to look at it later, you can look at it and look for zest span. So the zest span. Yeah. So the, so the, the another chip is actually for those of us in this room, it's coming out this Friday. It's on a Wednesday. So it says lifespan, healthspan, zestspan. And zestspan being— so lifespan being how long you live chronologically, healthspan being how long you're healthy, and zestspan being how long you have zest. And it's hard, obviously very hard to measure that. But I think it's an interesting thing to measure because when you have a sense of zest for life, a genuine enthusiasm, a curiosity, and a sense of newness. I do believe that actually that is what creates the reason to get up in the morning. And so zest span is my newest coining of something.

That's awesome. I'm tempted. I think I will. I think we're going to end the podcast on zest span. I don't think I can beat Zest fan. I was going to ask if there was any final comments, but I think zest fan is great. What's, for everybody listening, what's the MEA website? Is MEA.com?

MEA Wisdom.com.

Wisdom.com.

You can find my blog there, and it's actually MEA Blog. Yeah, and come, you know, MEA has two campuses, but we also do online programs. So if people want to check out our online programs, Um, there you can do that.

And for anybody listening, the campus is unbelievably beautiful. Yeah. Um, and it's been, it's been a great week out here.

Thank you.

Thank you for playing host to me and host to our podcast. And, uh, thank you for your time today.

Yeah. Thank you.

Awesome.