October 10, 2024 • 31 mins
Sitting down with extraordinary entrepreneur and thought leader Chip Conley was an absolute joy. In his twenties, he founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality. After facing near death, he sold his business and helped mentor the founders of Airbnb to realize their success.
A best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and visionary. Chip now leads an extraordinary movement to redefine how we approach aging through the Modern Elder Academy.
Some of the key takeaways:
A Deep Dive into Curiosity: Chip shares the power of staying curious at every stage of life and how curiosity can fuel personal and professional growth.
Wisdom for Entrepreneurs: Chip reveals vital lessons learned from building and leading successful businesses while staying true to a sense of joy and purpose.
Relevance for Modern Leaders: For anyone in leadership roles or aspiring to be, Chip’s journey from leading by ego to mentoring with soul offers valuable insights on cultivating wisdom and influence across generations.
Emotional Intelligence: Understand how emotional intelligence grows with age and why it matters more than ever in today’s rapidly changing world.
Midlife: Instead of a crisis, we should consider it a chrysalis, awakening our purpose and passion.
Emotions: They are contagious.
Journey: The first part of your life is about building your resume, and the second is about building your eulogy.
To learn more about Chip, the Modern Elder Academy and to purchase his books, https://chipconley.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
If you're a regular listener to my show, you might have noticed something
different. It's still about human journeys,
positivity, and possibility. Chatter Matters still celebrates those
who've overcome circumstances to chase their dreams. And when they do, change
their world and often ours for the better. So what's the difference?
I want more life lessons. I think our world is growing in uncertainty
(00:26):
and insecurity and complexity and comprehension. And I
wanna make sure that wherever I can, I take full advantage of the
guests and draw out those insights and ideas that will
leave me with things that I'm gonna think about, feel about, and even
act upon? And not just for today, but for decades to come, as
most of us will live far longer than we ever thought possible.
(00:49):
Well, what if I told you that 30 minutes from now, you will take away
some ideas that you, in fact, will carry for the rest of your
life? I think the phrase growing old
is really one dimensional. It basically suggests that all we have is the
passage of time and the deterioration of our body. But I
actually think something is much more at play here, much more interesting.
(01:12):
The idea of what's happening in midlife is
we are actually in the process of turning into something else.
I'm that confident my guest today, Chip Conley. He's a visionary entrepreneur, best selling author,
and the founder of Joie De Viva.
Hospitality, which became the 2nd largest boutique hotel company in the
States. And after selling the company, Chip became the mentor or
(01:34):
Yoda at Airbnb, helping guide its young leadership through such rapid
growth and innovation. What percentage of your adult
life is still ahead of you? Society's
outdated model of the 3 stage life, you
learn, then you earn, then you retire,
suggests that the game of life is a one tank journey.
(01:56):
But Chip is also the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, the world's
1st midlife wisdom school, where he focuses on helping people
navigate life's transitions with purpose and with wisdom.
So more and more of us are actually feeling, like we're
running on fumes, and we need a midlife pit stop.
(02:18):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Chip Conley, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Thank you, Tony. It's good
(02:40):
to be here. I love this label that either
your school kids gave you, or it just sort of stuck with you. The curious
white boy growing up in Southern California, but not the 90210
Hollywood that we think of. You're talking of as predominantly non white
inner city school. I went to school in the hood. Snoop
Dogg, who's 10 years younger than me, went to the same high school,
(03:02):
but so did Cameron Diaz. So it was a very unusual high school, and then
it was a mixed race high school, but predominantly non white. And
where did you get the label, curious white boy? I asked questions a
lot. I was very culturally curious. So I think
we had 26 different languages, so
there are a lot of different cultures there. And I was fascinated
(03:24):
by Tagalog, you know, the Filipino language, or,
you know, wanted to learn more about, one of my classmates
who is from Syria. How do you think that is a tactic or strategy
for people to say, you know, if you just stop and listen with some
generosity about who that other person is, it's the easiest
way to erase sort of the the barriers and biases that we're
(03:47):
different people instead of being part of the human race? Pre judging
people, which is, you know, another way of saying prejudice,
is easier because it doesn't require curiosity or
inquiry or empathy. It does take time,
energy, and a little bit of heart to be open
to getting to know people, both based upon their
(04:09):
cultural history that is unique and different than yours,
but also for who they are unrelated to their cultural
history. You know, it just strikes me, everything I read about you and stuff is
this fascination of sort of peeling back and trying to understand sort of
the head, heart, and hands of the human race. Stanford, I'm hearing you're
MBA student, so you're after your undergraduate degree and playing
(04:31):
water polo. And I'm curious sort of the field of play, which they call
the water polo arena. What did you take away from there? And
equally, what did you take away from your MBA? I'd say what I learned from
water polo, which is a pretty grueling sport, there's a lot of
stuff that goes on underwater that that referees can't
see. It might mean that you're trying to get things
(04:54):
done underneath, you know, the surface of
things. Be careful about what happens
in business when there's not ethics
and a culture. They're helping to define how people are
playing. And then in business school, I realized within a few
months, like, I I deserved to be there just like everybody else. I
(05:16):
was on average 3 or 4 years younger than the average person there, but
I had gained a lot of experience. I had taken a year off from college
and worked as an undergrad. I don't judge
someone's lack of wisdom based upon their
experience. If they have a lack of wisdom, they just have a lack of wisdom.
One thing I learned from my water polo days, I was the slowest person on
(05:37):
the team. I had to be that much smarter and resilient.
So the key thing for me is I had to be careful about don't get
too close to the goal because if you're too close to one goal, then you're
gonna have to swim all the way further. So I was really good at
sort of, like, not fully committing to go the full
length of the pool, because I'd have to swim more.
(06:00):
For me, I am someone who somehow channels things
through me. And I'm not a channel of spirits or anything like that, but I'm
a channel of ideas. I will then come up with a new
idea and a passion and a purpose, and I become 1 dimensional. And
all of a sudden I go from the conduit to the conduit. And I'm the
conduit hero. I wanna get 26 years
(06:22):
old. You've found joie de vivre hospitality. First
of all, the name. And you know, it's a French name to me. Is that
like spirit of youth, somebody had got lost in a Balzac novel?
Or or was that really the the sense of joy of life with
how you were at 26 and frankly, how you probably are today?
We should have been in headquartering Montreal. I mean, come on. I know.
(06:43):
But what I really loved was some of the phraseology of of
French. And and Joanne de Vibes didn't really have a
a comparable, English language,
you say joy of life, but people don't say, like, oh, that person has such
a joy of life. They'd say, like, that person does a joie de vivre. And
when you say joie de vivre, it just sounds a little bit more sexy and
(07:06):
a little bit more pretty and beautiful. And, yeah, I I really
believe that the mission of our our company, which was to create joy
for our employees and our customers, could also be the name of our company.
And there are very few companies out there in the world whose mission statement is
also the name of the company. And I liked that. Did it change the
way you looked and hired people? Because an organization that's growing
(07:29):
as quick as yours, it's lovely when you have somebody and and often
by accident, it comes in and just radiates joy, but their their
resume might not tick off everything you're looking for. Did
you find the opposite that you were more interested in joy and then you could
teach people the attributes and the competencies of the job? You know, in some ways,
you're setting yourself up for failure because if you're building an expectation that
(07:49):
everybody in the company is gonna feel a sense of joy in what they do,
That's not gonna be how you feel every day. I mean, it just doesn't work
that way. But it was aspirational in a way
that really elevated our culture. We had even had a joy
party at our 20th anniversary. We had opened this hotel called the
Hotel Vitale in San Francisco, which was became the most successful upscale
(08:11):
hotel in town. So we threw a party to celebrate the name
joy, and we invited 10,000
women around the, state of California who had
the name Joy based upon the US Postal Service. And the first 300
who said yes got to come for free, and the first 50 who said yes
got a free hotel room in this luxury hotel. And to have
(08:33):
300 women and girls with the name
Joy all celebrating with tears of joy,
together was a beautiful experience. One of the my favorite things I ever
did as a a business leader. I'm always interested from entrepreneurs
because just listening to you and talking right now, I could see how you're
engaging, you're persuading, you're lead with your heart. But as you start growing an
(08:56):
organization, which means you have to sort of backfill who you are,
You can't be everywhere anymore. How did you keep that culture
going? What what what advice can you give to people to say if you really
wanna own something, in your case, joy, how do you make sure that
something is intangible as that? How do you make sure that cascades down as you
grow? So we, came to the conclusion that we needed to
(09:16):
democratize culture in a hospitality company. And so we
created something called the Cultural Ambassadors. And each one of our
hotels, restaurants, and spas had a cultural ambassador. Their
job was to come up with, how do we make the culture of joy
real in our in our particular business? Recognize each
other, for what we are doing well. And how do
(09:38):
we think about how our hotel or restaurant or spa
can be philanthropically creating joy in the community? What it did
is it allowed the culture of joy
to spread throughout all of our properties throughout the state of
California, because it wasn't just, like, the head of HR
for the company, you know, sending out a memo. If you talk to some of
(10:01):
the employees in the past that had that title, I have I'm gonna just
go on a limb. They might say that was the best part of my job.
There's a right around the corner from me, there's a bathroom and and there's a
photo of a guy named William Ortiz who went to
prison, between 18 20 or 21. Came out,
couldn't get a job. We gave him a job. He grew in
the in the company, became a manager, and ultimately,
(10:24):
a cultural ambassador for his hotel. Ultimately, he
started his own entrepreneurship business, and then he ended up at the White House. I
mean, cultural ambassadors were really the people who everybody
knew had the best job, but you had to be elected by your fellow,
employees. How easy was it for you to let go of
joy in terms of how my identity is attached to it and
(10:46):
put it out to the organization and let individuals take it on
and almost as a prison, reflect it in terms of how they wanted to see
it or feel it versus maybe what you did? At some point, I realized there
was no other way. I had my perspective on what joie de
vivre meant and what joy was, but the bartenders at
a bar that we owned, they're gonna have a different perspective on it.
(11:09):
We did have to have some parameters. We did have to, you know, every year
when there was a new set of cultural ambassadors, do a training and we would
have them go for a weekend, free weekend away. That
was really a nice perk for them. But we helped train them to help them
to understand what happens in terms of the culture. The
culture of housekeepers in your hotel is very different than the culture of
(11:32):
the night auditors who are doing the the accounting in the middle of the night.
How do you bring them together? I think we did a pretty good job of
training people. And part of the reason that I know this worked was because
our guests, our employee satisfaction scores, in
terms of just how happy they were with their work was off the
charts. Ultimately, you sold this platform to somebody else. How
(11:53):
hard was it for you to let it go? Or was it time to that
it sort of run its course in terms of what Chip Conley wanted to do
with it? To be honest with you, I thought I'd be doing it till age
80. And at 47, I realized I I didn't wanna do it
anymore. But I I needed to because, you know, as the CEO of a
company or the chief emotions officer, and during the dotcom
(12:13):
bust in 911, I was a bit of a gladiator and I was, you know,
I was there and I loved it. But during the great recession, I didn't wanna
be doing it anymore. And I had a flatline experience, so I died because of
an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And I it was, like, sort of a
wake up call for me, a hotelier's wake up call, little divine
intervention to say, like, you don't have to keep living your life this way. And
(12:34):
talk to me about the flatlining experience because I read about it in one of
the articles. And obviously, when it was happening, it's a
sledgehammer that's hitting you. But almost the way you reflect on it now, it was
one of the most important things that that you experienced. I had an
allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I was on stage after
giving a speech. I fortunately, I was sitting down signing books
(12:57):
and, I went unconscious in my chair. I slumped and then I put me on
the ground and paramedics showed up and then I went flatlined.
First time, of 9 times I did in 90 minutes.
When you go into sort of that state of
being in which everything's slow motion and it's
beautiful and and you don't feel any fear, there's a
(13:20):
real sense that why am I feeling so miserable on
earth when I'm in this Bardo zone, this limbo zone feeling so
good? And, you know, it felt like I was out for hours, but I
was literally out for maybe 15 seconds each time.
Life is meant to be joyful. To not be feeling very
joyful when you're the CEO of a company called Joao de Viv
(13:43):
is a strange irony. It was an irony that I needed to correct.
And in this case, I couldn't correct it by feeling better. I needed to correct
it by selling the company and moving on to something else.
As you look back, how did it change you from a spirituality
point of view? How did it change you from a perspective point of view? Because
I have to imagine that, you know, whatever divine intervention it
(14:05):
was, you had 9 times you experienced that. I call it
divine intervention. And so I say that without necessarily
having a religious strong religious belief, but I have, like, a very
deep spiritual belief that sometimes things happen that
maybe there was a reason that happened, but when you're in that
moment, you're gonna feel things. And I think I'd been running away from a lot
(14:27):
of my emotions. And so I had to learn how to process my emotions. I
ultimately wrote a book about after I'd sold the company called emotional equations,
which became a New York times bestseller. You know, it was
based upon feeling like I was a bit of an idiot when it
came to my emotions during that time. You know, when you
go to the other side and you know that at any any moment you could
(14:49):
die, it means you're much more
demanding about how you're living your life today. You can't put off
happiness 10 years. You can't put off gratitude 10 years. You
can't put off recognition and thank yous 10 years. You
can't do it now. David Brooks famously has said, you know, in in a
column in the New York Times, the first half of your life you're building your
(15:11):
resume. The second half of your life you're building your eulogy.
And I I totally believe that. When we
come back, Chip will share some important thoughts on how we can get the most
life from our life, and of course, my 3 takeaways. But
first, I wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth is doing. They've
partnered with the MIT Age Lab, the National Institute on Aging,
(15:34):
Woman's Brain Health Initiative, Elder Caring, and the Woman's Age
Lab. Why? Because RBC Wealth believes that by
integrating the thinking of leading health care organizations, they can
ensure that their clients are well positioned for both financial success
and long term personal health. Health care, well, that matters
to you, to me, and to RBC.
(15:57):
What if we rethought midlife such that it's not a
crisis? It's a chrysalis. The midlife
chrysalis. What if we thought of midlife as the dawning
of a new age? An age where much of what we
accumulated dissolves, just as we're ready to transform,
spread our wings, and pollinate our wisdom to the world in our fifties
(16:21):
and beyond. My guest today is Chip Conley. Yes. He's a successful
entrepreneur and was instrumental in scaling Airbnb, But what I
think he'll be known for, more than anything, is his work with the
Modern Elder Academy, a school that focuses on midlife
learning and helping people repurpose their lives and make sure
that the next part of their life is as magical as they can be.
(16:44):
I'm not asking you to put yourself on a pedestal, but I'm gonna do it
for a moment. Because the when I first heard of you and then
started listening to your TED Talks and reading some of your interviews,
you strike me as a modern day prophet. The experience,
opened up a channel for me to listen and
(17:04):
hear the calling a little bit more clearly. I would definitely never call
myself a modern day prophet, but I would call myself an awakener.
I used to call myself a teacher, but I actually think part of what I
do is I help to awaken myself and others. I
love the idea that if you're fortunate enough to have
a calling knock on your door, you pick up the phone. And,
(17:26):
you know, if it's, or if it's ringing, let me make some more metaphor there,
if it's ringing, the phone is ringing, you pick up the phone and then it,
you know, you find out that you have a calling and you could try to
neglect it, but I have not neglected it. And so
my fifties were an amazing decade working with Airbnb
as their modern elder and creating the modern elder academy
(17:47):
and writing some more books and and really getting curious about
wisdom. You know, I I believe that wisdom is making a comeback
after 2000 years. Let's talk about Airbnb. I I loved your TED
Talk. You mentioned, you know, being called the modern day elder. We're gonna get into
the academy in a moment. But, I mean, you go for having your hand on
the rudder, this is my ship, this is where I'm gonna go, and I can
(18:08):
do this and that, to being their Yoda. Well, you know, Richard Rohr, famous
Christian mystic who, is on our faculty at MEA,
talks about the fact that the first half of your life, maybe up to around
age 50, your primary operating system is your ego.
And we overuse it, but it also serves us well in terms of individuating
us, giving us, propelling us forward, helping us to understand who we
(18:31):
think we are. And then the second half of our life, our operating
system, primary operating system moves to our soul, but nobody gave you any operating
instructions. I believe that part of my role by going to
Airbnb was learning that my identity and role were
changing. I was no longer the sage on the stage, the CEO,
but I was the guide on the side. I was the CEO whisperer.
(18:54):
My job ultimately became, how do I help Brian
Chesky, a guy who has no best business in business
background at all? How do I help him to become the best leader possible
so that he can help take this company to the highest levels
and he can continue to operate the business. And for almost 4
years now, he has been a public company CEO, the only
(19:17):
Fortune 500 CEO who does not have a business background,
and comes from the cultural from the creative world as a
designer. I'm proud of that. I I feel like he's 21 years younger than
me. He's like my son. That was a huge shift I had to make, and
my ego had to get right sized to realize, Chip, your
your photo's not gonna be on the front cover of
(19:39):
Forbes Magazine. Brian's will be. And and Brian's deserved to
be. You take it one step further. Some of your books, Wisdom at Work,
The Concept of the Modern Elder, and then you form
the Modern Elder Academy. And I really want you to unpack that
because as I said to Jill, there's so few people that
will get to go there, but it seems like the people who go there
(20:02):
have their own emotional lining experience versus flat
lining. They come out of it very different. You know, I was writing this book,
Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder, based upon my Airbnb experience, and
I was doing that in, Southern Baja in Mexico,
about an hour north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific Ocean where I had
a home. And I went for a run on the beach one day and I
(20:23):
had a baja I had an epiphany. And the epiphany was,
why don't we have midlife wisdom schools? We don't have schools, tools, rights of passage,
or rituals for people in the middle of their life to consciously curate the second
half of their life. And that's really how it came about. The term modern
elder, the reason they called me that at Airbnb is they said, you're as
curious as you are wise. And it was like the alchemy of curiosity and
(20:46):
wisdom. That's what I wanna be when I grow up. So creating MEA, the
modern elder academy, was meant to create a place where
we can mint modern elders, where we can help people, you know,
often in their forties, fifties, and sixties, go out
and learn how to mine their wisdom and cultivate
their purpose and navigate their transitions and reframe their relationship with
(21:07):
aging. Long story short is we've had 5,500 graduates now
from 50 countries. Average age is 54.
About half of the people are on some level of financial aid.
So it is not exclusive to just people who have money.
And we also have online programs that are very affordable. So what we've tried to
do is make it accessible, and we have a campus in Baja, but we also
(21:30):
have a campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico with 26 100 acres
of regenerative horse ranch. So, yeah, it's become a
bit of a movement. We have 58 regional chapters around the world. And I
love the way you framed it. Instead of being a midlife crisis,
it's a midlife chrysalis. So the chrysalis is the in between stage
between caterpillar and and butterfly. It's dark and gooey
(21:52):
and solitary, but it's where the transformation happens. So
when I started doing my research on midlife and seeing, oh, it's interesting, there's
this thing called the u curve of happiness and people get happier after 50. 45
to 50 tends to be the low point of adult satisfaction.
And starting at age 50 and beyond, people get happier and happier. Well,
that suggests that maybe at when after going through the crisis slash chrysalis,
(22:16):
you know, you you become a butterfly. Similarly, Becca
Levy at Yale University has shown that when people shift their mindset on
aging from an, from a negative to a positive, they gain
7 and a half years of additional life. Why aren't we talking more
about this? How are we helping people shift their mindset on aging? I do believe
that midlife wisdom schools, which is what we are pioneering
(22:38):
in this category, are something that's needed in the
future. Because if we're living longer and people are probably
gonna stay in the workplace longer by choice or necessity,
you know, we gotta help people to figure out what they're gonna do with their
life. If you're 54 4 years old, which is, again, the average
age of the people who come to MEA, and you're gonna live till 90,
(22:59):
you're exactly halfway between 18 90. So you're sort of
halfway through your adulthood. I wanna come back a little bit to your family
because age 50, you learn Spanish, you take up surfing.
And in an interview I read, you also sort of credited it because your dad
decided he wasn't gonna go get old the way Hollywood
defines what old age is. My dad at age 60 decided he wanted to learn
(23:22):
to scuba dive. He did 25 or 26 100
dives over the next 20 years. My dad's
very much an adventurous sort. My mom is the opposite. I've
taken more after my dad than my mom. Yeah. And I think that one of
the most important things we need to learn as we get older is
that curiosity and an openness to new experiences are
(23:43):
core are positively correlated with living a longer,
healthy, healthier, happier life. And what do you what is your takeaway from your
mom? My mom is very
precise. She gets stuff done incredibly
reliable. She cares a lot about what other people think about her,
which in a small dose is a good thing. In many ways, she helped to
(24:05):
humanize me a little bit more. And how do they feel about the son of
theirs having stage 3 cancer? How are they dealing with that? They're fearful
for me because they don't want me to die before they die. They are
deeply woven into my life in a good way. And you talk a lot
about the importance of emotional intelligence. Those are one of those
phrases that sort of just suddenly roared through the vernacular of business.
(24:27):
What do you mean by emotional intelligence and why would it matter to the
people listening to this podcast? Being able to understand your own emotions
as well as others is pretty much what emotional intelligence is about.
Being able to both experience it and then be articulate about
it. So when someone's not very emotionally intelligent, they're sort of lacking
in some of their humanity or their capacity for humanity.
(24:50):
We do improve our emotional intelligence as we get older. Our
IQ doesn't grow, but our EQ does on average. At my
funeral, I want people to be able to come up and say, Hey, this is
the impact that Chip had on me. As Maya Angelou said,
We may not remember what a person says or does, but we do certainly remember
the way that person made me feel. That to me is the ultimate
(25:13):
form of what emotional intelligence can do for us. And
you're taking this modern elder platform to new
communities like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you're choosing
places where it's more than just having the impact on the
individuals, even those they're there and that you're helping subsidize,
but also have an impact on the community. It's really important. I mean, we don't
(25:36):
wanna be this walled off place, you know, and I've never wanted that for
any of my businesses, whether it was Schwabbe with my boutique hotels
or Airbnb or with MEA. So,
we have a whole collection of regenerative principles about
how we give back to the community. It helps the
business. You know, it's good for us. Our team feels great about it.
(25:58):
But when the community feels great about us, there's less
friction. There's more people wanting us to
succeed. Last two questions. One of them really dealing with this sort
of, 70% of the content's negative. AI is gonna
continue to increase the frequency of it because that's what holds eyeballs.
That's how social media monetizes. How do you
(26:19):
counter that? How do people like you who are really as you
said, well, that's pretty common sense. If we just did that, that makes a lot
of sense. I mean, the simplicity of being a human being versus
somebody locked in a like minded castle, liking like minded content, How do you
counter that? Because there's a tsunami coming at us, the negativity. You know, you can
expand as fast as you can, but you're gonna be creating, you know, 5,200
(26:41):
graduates against 10,000 messages a day. There's a guy
named Keltner, UC Berkeley professor, started the Creative Good Science Center. He's
on our faculty at MEA. He wrote a book last year that
called Awe, and it it documented the 8
most common pathways globally for people to feel awe.
And number 1 on the list, surprise, it was a surprise, it was moral beauty.
(27:05):
And when you experience kindness and compassion and
resilience and grit and equanimity, and
you see it in real life, and then you
desire to actually reciprocate that.
That is the ultimate form of, in
my opinion, being a good human. I'm not powerful
(27:27):
enough to go out there and change that tsunami
you're talking about. But what I can do is create some
wedges for that tsunami such that in that
wedge, there's this beautiful little spot where you get some
moral beauty. And I can also make sure everybody who comes
to MEA or listens to our online
(27:48):
fireside chats, for free, knows that
our emotions are contagious. So if you want to
spread fear, be fear. If you want to spread
joy, be joy. Because guess what? That's how
we, as humans, take on other people's
emotions. And if you did it all again with, you know, your
(28:10):
undergraduate degree, your MBA, entrepreneurship, Airbnb, and
stuff, any thoughts would would it might have been a completely different path?
I think if I could do it all again, I probably would have left the
boutique hotel business earlier. Well, first of all, I had an identity that
I was so enamored with, milking that, and just feel like, ah,
that's my identity. That's my ego. That's, like, who I am. I wish
(28:33):
I hadn't gotten so obsessed about that because I
would have seen that the thing that actually led me to creating joie de
vivre, which is creativity and freedom, was something I lost after about
10 or 12 years in the company. You know, what would it have been like
if my forties in my forties, I had had the whole decade of
my forties to maybe explore my writing career more, spend more
(28:54):
time traveling, being a little more of a philosopher than an operator.
You know, I always end my shows with my 3 takeaways, and I'm just I'm
almost I'm struggling because there's so many beautiful parts of you. I think the
word that roared, the, you know, the g chord of this whole song is curiosity
from that kid in elementary school that was, you know, curious
about all these different cultures, to your undergraduate
(29:17):
degree, to just this naming a boutique hotel in
California with a French name. You know, how I mean, every
branding expert in the world say nobody will ever spell it. In those days, it
was probably the yellow pages. You know, curiosity has always been part of it. And
it's really interesting how it changed from who I am
and why I matter to who you are and why you
(29:37):
matter. I think this whole lesson on emotional
intelligence in our brain, and sort of driven by ego at the beginning,
and now looking for enlightenment, Maslow called it self actualization. You know,
if you have the luxury to have that time and invest that
time and meditate and breathe and realize there's a lot around the
world that's beautiful, I think is something wonderful as well. And, you know,
(30:00):
you used the word awakening and I used the word prophet. I think
they're 1 and the same. I think you are awakening
individuals to positivity and possibility and joy,
and maybe profit's too extreme of a brand for you. But I
hope you keep spreading your, this magic and live a
very long life, outlive your parents. And, by
(30:22):
the time there's a eulogy about you, nobody will remember who you were. So because
it's but but up until then, I think it's just it's just been
wonderful to talk with each other. I won't even remember who I am.
Ram Dass says, like, becoming nobody. That's that's what our job is, is
to learn how to become nobody. But thank you so much, Tony. Really
appreciate it. Appreciate the work you're doing in the world as well. Once again,
(30:44):
a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chata That Matters. It's
Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
If you're a regular listener to my show, you might have noticed something
different. It's still about human journeys,
positivity, and possibility. Chatter Matters still celebrates those
who've overcome circumstances to chase their dreams. And when they do, change
their world and often ours for the better. So what's the difference?
I want more life lessons. I think our world is growing in uncertainty
(00:26):
and insecurity and complexity and comprehension. And I
wanna make sure that wherever I can, I take full advantage of the
guests and draw out those insights and ideas that will
leave me with things that I'm gonna think about, feel about, and even
act upon? And not just for today, but for decades to come, as
most of us will live far longer than we ever thought possible.
(00:49):
Well, what if I told you that 30 minutes from now, you will take away
some ideas that you, in fact, will carry for the rest of your
life? I think the phrase growing old
is really one dimensional. It basically suggests that all we have is the
passage of time and the deterioration of our body. But I
actually think something is much more at play here, much more interesting.
(01:12):
The idea of what's happening in midlife is
we are actually in the process of turning into something else.
I'm that confident my guest today, Chip Conley. He's a visionary entrepreneur, best selling author,
and the founder of Joie De Viva.
Hospitality, which became the 2nd largest boutique hotel company in the
States. And after selling the company, Chip became the mentor or
(01:34):
Yoda at Airbnb, helping guide its young leadership through such rapid
growth and innovation. What percentage of your adult
life is still ahead of you? Society's
outdated model of the 3 stage life, you
learn, then you earn, then you retire,
suggests that the game of life is a one tank journey.
(01:56):
But Chip is also the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, the world's
1st midlife wisdom school, where he focuses on helping people
navigate life's transitions with purpose and with wisdom.
So more and more of us are actually feeling, like we're
running on fumes, and we need a midlife pit stop.
(02:18):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Chip Conley, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Thank you, Tony. It's good
(02:40):
to be here. I love this label that either
your school kids gave you, or it just sort of stuck with you. The curious
white boy growing up in Southern California, but not the 90210
Hollywood that we think of. You're talking of as predominantly non white
inner city school. I went to school in the hood. Snoop
Dogg, who's 10 years younger than me, went to the same high school,
(03:02):
but so did Cameron Diaz. So it was a very unusual high school, and then
it was a mixed race high school, but predominantly non white. And
where did you get the label, curious white boy? I asked questions a
lot. I was very culturally curious. So I think
we had 26 different languages, so
there are a lot of different cultures there. And I was fascinated
(03:24):
by Tagalog, you know, the Filipino language, or,
you know, wanted to learn more about, one of my classmates
who is from Syria. How do you think that is a tactic or strategy
for people to say, you know, if you just stop and listen with some
generosity about who that other person is, it's the easiest
way to erase sort of the the barriers and biases that we're
(03:47):
different people instead of being part of the human race? Pre judging
people, which is, you know, another way of saying prejudice,
is easier because it doesn't require curiosity or
inquiry or empathy. It does take time,
energy, and a little bit of heart to be open
to getting to know people, both based upon their
(04:09):
cultural history that is unique and different than yours,
but also for who they are unrelated to their cultural
history. You know, it just strikes me, everything I read about you and stuff is
this fascination of sort of peeling back and trying to understand sort of
the head, heart, and hands of the human race. Stanford, I'm hearing you're
MBA student, so you're after your undergraduate degree and playing
(04:31):
water polo. And I'm curious sort of the field of play, which they call
the water polo arena. What did you take away from there? And
equally, what did you take away from your MBA? I'd say what I learned from
water polo, which is a pretty grueling sport, there's a lot of
stuff that goes on underwater that that referees can't
see. It might mean that you're trying to get things
(04:54):
done underneath, you know, the surface of
things. Be careful about what happens
in business when there's not ethics
and a culture. They're helping to define how people are
playing. And then in business school, I realized within a few
months, like, I I deserved to be there just like everybody else. I
(05:16):
was on average 3 or 4 years younger than the average person there, but
I had gained a lot of experience. I had taken a year off from college
and worked as an undergrad. I don't judge
someone's lack of wisdom based upon their
experience. If they have a lack of wisdom, they just have a lack of wisdom.
One thing I learned from my water polo days, I was the slowest person on
(05:37):
the team. I had to be that much smarter and resilient.
So the key thing for me is I had to be careful about don't get
too close to the goal because if you're too close to one goal, then you're
gonna have to swim all the way further. So I was really good at
sort of, like, not fully committing to go the full
length of the pool, because I'd have to swim more.
(06:00):
For me, I am someone who somehow channels things
through me. And I'm not a channel of spirits or anything like that, but I'm
a channel of ideas. I will then come up with a new
idea and a passion and a purpose, and I become 1 dimensional. And
all of a sudden I go from the conduit to the conduit. And I'm the
conduit hero. I wanna get 26 years
(06:22):
old. You've found joie de vivre hospitality. First
of all, the name. And you know, it's a French name to me. Is that
like spirit of youth, somebody had got lost in a Balzac novel?
Or or was that really the the sense of joy of life with
how you were at 26 and frankly, how you probably are today?
We should have been in headquartering Montreal. I mean, come on. I know.
(06:43):
But what I really loved was some of the phraseology of of
French. And and Joanne de Vibes didn't really have a
a comparable, English language,
you say joy of life, but people don't say, like, oh, that person has such
a joy of life. They'd say, like, that person does a joie de vivre. And
when you say joie de vivre, it just sounds a little bit more sexy and
(07:06):
a little bit more pretty and beautiful. And, yeah, I I really
believe that the mission of our our company, which was to create joy
for our employees and our customers, could also be the name of our company.
And there are very few companies out there in the world whose mission statement is
also the name of the company. And I liked that. Did it change the
way you looked and hired people? Because an organization that's growing
(07:29):
as quick as yours, it's lovely when you have somebody and and often
by accident, it comes in and just radiates joy, but their their
resume might not tick off everything you're looking for. Did
you find the opposite that you were more interested in joy and then you could
teach people the attributes and the competencies of the job? You know, in some ways,
you're setting yourself up for failure because if you're building an expectation that
(07:49):
everybody in the company is gonna feel a sense of joy in what they do,
That's not gonna be how you feel every day. I mean, it just doesn't work
that way. But it was aspirational in a way
that really elevated our culture. We had even had a joy
party at our 20th anniversary. We had opened this hotel called the
Hotel Vitale in San Francisco, which was became the most successful upscale
(08:11):
hotel in town. So we threw a party to celebrate the name
joy, and we invited 10,000
women around the, state of California who had
the name Joy based upon the US Postal Service. And the first 300
who said yes got to come for free, and the first 50 who said yes
got a free hotel room in this luxury hotel. And to have
(08:33):
300 women and girls with the name
Joy all celebrating with tears of joy,
together was a beautiful experience. One of the my favorite things I ever
did as a a business leader. I'm always interested from entrepreneurs
because just listening to you and talking right now, I could see how you're
engaging, you're persuading, you're lead with your heart. But as you start growing an
(08:56):
organization, which means you have to sort of backfill who you are,
You can't be everywhere anymore. How did you keep that culture
going? What what what advice can you give to people to say if you really
wanna own something, in your case, joy, how do you make sure that
something is intangible as that? How do you make sure that cascades down as you
grow? So we, came to the conclusion that we needed to
(09:16):
democratize culture in a hospitality company. And so we
created something called the Cultural Ambassadors. And each one of our
hotels, restaurants, and spas had a cultural ambassador. Their
job was to come up with, how do we make the culture of joy
real in our in our particular business? Recognize each
other, for what we are doing well. And how do
(09:38):
we think about how our hotel or restaurant or spa
can be philanthropically creating joy in the community? What it did
is it allowed the culture of joy
to spread throughout all of our properties throughout the state of
California, because it wasn't just, like, the head of HR
for the company, you know, sending out a memo. If you talk to some of
(10:01):
the employees in the past that had that title, I have I'm gonna just
go on a limb. They might say that was the best part of my job.
There's a right around the corner from me, there's a bathroom and and there's a
photo of a guy named William Ortiz who went to
prison, between 18 20 or 21. Came out,
couldn't get a job. We gave him a job. He grew in
the in the company, became a manager, and ultimately,
(10:24):
a cultural ambassador for his hotel. Ultimately, he
started his own entrepreneurship business, and then he ended up at the White House. I
mean, cultural ambassadors were really the people who everybody
knew had the best job, but you had to be elected by your fellow,
employees. How easy was it for you to let go of
joy in terms of how my identity is attached to it and
(10:46):
put it out to the organization and let individuals take it on
and almost as a prison, reflect it in terms of how they wanted to see
it or feel it versus maybe what you did? At some point, I realized there
was no other way. I had my perspective on what joie de
vivre meant and what joy was, but the bartenders at
a bar that we owned, they're gonna have a different perspective on it.
(11:09):
We did have to have some parameters. We did have to, you know, every year
when there was a new set of cultural ambassadors, do a training and we would
have them go for a weekend, free weekend away. That
was really a nice perk for them. But we helped train them to help them
to understand what happens in terms of the culture. The
culture of housekeepers in your hotel is very different than the culture of
(11:32):
the night auditors who are doing the the accounting in the middle of the night.
How do you bring them together? I think we did a pretty good job of
training people. And part of the reason that I know this worked was because
our guests, our employee satisfaction scores, in
terms of just how happy they were with their work was off the
charts. Ultimately, you sold this platform to somebody else. How
(11:53):
hard was it for you to let it go? Or was it time to that
it sort of run its course in terms of what Chip Conley wanted to do
with it? To be honest with you, I thought I'd be doing it till age
80. And at 47, I realized I I didn't wanna do it
anymore. But I I needed to because, you know, as the CEO of a
company or the chief emotions officer, and during the dotcom
(12:13):
bust in 911, I was a bit of a gladiator and I was, you know,
I was there and I loved it. But during the great recession, I didn't wanna
be doing it anymore. And I had a flatline experience, so I died because of
an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And I it was, like, sort of a
wake up call for me, a hotelier's wake up call, little divine
intervention to say, like, you don't have to keep living your life this way. And
(12:34):
talk to me about the flatlining experience because I read about it in one of
the articles. And obviously, when it was happening, it's a
sledgehammer that's hitting you. But almost the way you reflect on it now, it was
one of the most important things that that you experienced. I had an
allergic reaction to an antibiotic when I was on stage after
giving a speech. I fortunately, I was sitting down signing books
(12:57):
and, I went unconscious in my chair. I slumped and then I put me on
the ground and paramedics showed up and then I went flatlined.
First time, of 9 times I did in 90 minutes.
When you go into sort of that state of
being in which everything's slow motion and it's
beautiful and and you don't feel any fear, there's a
(13:20):
real sense that why am I feeling so miserable on
earth when I'm in this Bardo zone, this limbo zone feeling so
good? And, you know, it felt like I was out for hours, but I
was literally out for maybe 15 seconds each time.
Life is meant to be joyful. To not be feeling very
joyful when you're the CEO of a company called Joao de Viv
(13:43):
is a strange irony. It was an irony that I needed to correct.
And in this case, I couldn't correct it by feeling better. I needed to correct
it by selling the company and moving on to something else.
As you look back, how did it change you from a spirituality
point of view? How did it change you from a perspective point of view? Because
I have to imagine that, you know, whatever divine intervention it
(14:05):
was, you had 9 times you experienced that. I call it
divine intervention. And so I say that without necessarily
having a religious strong religious belief, but I have, like, a very
deep spiritual belief that sometimes things happen that
maybe there was a reason that happened, but when you're in that
moment, you're gonna feel things. And I think I'd been running away from a lot
(14:27):
of my emotions. And so I had to learn how to process my emotions. I
ultimately wrote a book about after I'd sold the company called emotional equations,
which became a New York times bestseller. You know, it was
based upon feeling like I was a bit of an idiot when it
came to my emotions during that time. You know, when you
go to the other side and you know that at any any moment you could
(14:49):
die, it means you're much more
demanding about how you're living your life today. You can't put off
happiness 10 years. You can't put off gratitude 10 years. You
can't put off recognition and thank yous 10 years. You
can't do it now. David Brooks famously has said, you know, in in a
column in the New York Times, the first half of your life you're building your
(15:11):
resume. The second half of your life you're building your eulogy.
And I I totally believe that. When we
come back, Chip will share some important thoughts on how we can get the most
life from our life, and of course, my 3 takeaways. But
first, I wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth is doing. They've
partnered with the MIT Age Lab, the National Institute on Aging,
(15:34):
Woman's Brain Health Initiative, Elder Caring, and the Woman's Age
Lab. Why? Because RBC Wealth believes that by
integrating the thinking of leading health care organizations, they can
ensure that their clients are well positioned for both financial success
and long term personal health. Health care, well, that matters
to you, to me, and to RBC.
(15:57):
What if we rethought midlife such that it's not a
crisis? It's a chrysalis. The midlife
chrysalis. What if we thought of midlife as the dawning
of a new age? An age where much of what we
accumulated dissolves, just as we're ready to transform,
spread our wings, and pollinate our wisdom to the world in our fifties
(16:21):
and beyond. My guest today is Chip Conley. Yes. He's a successful
entrepreneur and was instrumental in scaling Airbnb, But what I
think he'll be known for, more than anything, is his work with the
Modern Elder Academy, a school that focuses on midlife
learning and helping people repurpose their lives and make sure
that the next part of their life is as magical as they can be.
(16:44):
I'm not asking you to put yourself on a pedestal, but I'm gonna do it
for a moment. Because the when I first heard of you and then
started listening to your TED Talks and reading some of your interviews,
you strike me as a modern day prophet. The experience,
opened up a channel for me to listen and
(17:04):
hear the calling a little bit more clearly. I would definitely never call
myself a modern day prophet, but I would call myself an awakener.
I used to call myself a teacher, but I actually think part of what I
do is I help to awaken myself and others. I
love the idea that if you're fortunate enough to have
a calling knock on your door, you pick up the phone. And,
(17:26):
you know, if it's, or if it's ringing, let me make some more metaphor there,
if it's ringing, the phone is ringing, you pick up the phone and then it,
you know, you find out that you have a calling and you could try to
neglect it, but I have not neglected it. And so
my fifties were an amazing decade working with Airbnb
as their modern elder and creating the modern elder academy
(17:47):
and writing some more books and and really getting curious about
wisdom. You know, I I believe that wisdom is making a comeback
after 2000 years. Let's talk about Airbnb. I I loved your TED
Talk. You mentioned, you know, being called the modern day elder. We're gonna get into
the academy in a moment. But, I mean, you go for having your hand on
the rudder, this is my ship, this is where I'm gonna go, and I can
(18:08):
do this and that, to being their Yoda. Well, you know, Richard Rohr, famous
Christian mystic who, is on our faculty at MEA,
talks about the fact that the first half of your life, maybe up to around
age 50, your primary operating system is your ego.
And we overuse it, but it also serves us well in terms of individuating
us, giving us, propelling us forward, helping us to understand who we
(18:31):
think we are. And then the second half of our life, our operating
system, primary operating system moves to our soul, but nobody gave you any operating
instructions. I believe that part of my role by going to
Airbnb was learning that my identity and role were
changing. I was no longer the sage on the stage, the CEO,
but I was the guide on the side. I was the CEO whisperer.
(18:54):
My job ultimately became, how do I help Brian
Chesky, a guy who has no best business in business
background at all? How do I help him to become the best leader possible
so that he can help take this company to the highest levels
and he can continue to operate the business. And for almost 4
years now, he has been a public company CEO, the only
(19:17):
Fortune 500 CEO who does not have a business background,
and comes from the cultural from the creative world as a
designer. I'm proud of that. I I feel like he's 21 years younger than
me. He's like my son. That was a huge shift I had to make, and
my ego had to get right sized to realize, Chip, your
your photo's not gonna be on the front cover of
(19:39):
Forbes Magazine. Brian's will be. And and Brian's deserved to
be. You take it one step further. Some of your books, Wisdom at Work,
The Concept of the Modern Elder, and then you form
the Modern Elder Academy. And I really want you to unpack that
because as I said to Jill, there's so few people that
will get to go there, but it seems like the people who go there
(20:02):
have their own emotional lining experience versus flat
lining. They come out of it very different. You know, I was writing this book,
Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder, based upon my Airbnb experience, and
I was doing that in, Southern Baja in Mexico,
about an hour north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific Ocean where I had
a home. And I went for a run on the beach one day and I
(20:23):
had a baja I had an epiphany. And the epiphany was,
why don't we have midlife wisdom schools? We don't have schools, tools, rights of passage,
or rituals for people in the middle of their life to consciously curate the second
half of their life. And that's really how it came about. The term modern
elder, the reason they called me that at Airbnb is they said, you're as
curious as you are wise. And it was like the alchemy of curiosity and
(20:46):
wisdom. That's what I wanna be when I grow up. So creating MEA, the
modern elder academy, was meant to create a place where
we can mint modern elders, where we can help people, you know,
often in their forties, fifties, and sixties, go out
and learn how to mine their wisdom and cultivate
their purpose and navigate their transitions and reframe their relationship with
(21:07):
aging. Long story short is we've had 5,500 graduates now
from 50 countries. Average age is 54.
About half of the people are on some level of financial aid.
So it is not exclusive to just people who have money.
And we also have online programs that are very affordable. So what we've tried to
do is make it accessible, and we have a campus in Baja, but we also
(21:30):
have a campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico with 26 100 acres
of regenerative horse ranch. So, yeah, it's become a
bit of a movement. We have 58 regional chapters around the world. And I
love the way you framed it. Instead of being a midlife crisis,
it's a midlife chrysalis. So the chrysalis is the in between stage
between caterpillar and and butterfly. It's dark and gooey
(21:52):
and solitary, but it's where the transformation happens. So
when I started doing my research on midlife and seeing, oh, it's interesting, there's
this thing called the u curve of happiness and people get happier after 50. 45
to 50 tends to be the low point of adult satisfaction.
And starting at age 50 and beyond, people get happier and happier. Well,
that suggests that maybe at when after going through the crisis slash chrysalis,
(22:16):
you know, you you become a butterfly. Similarly, Becca
Levy at Yale University has shown that when people shift their mindset on
aging from an, from a negative to a positive, they gain
7 and a half years of additional life. Why aren't we talking more
about this? How are we helping people shift their mindset on aging? I do believe
that midlife wisdom schools, which is what we are pioneering
(22:38):
in this category, are something that's needed in the
future. Because if we're living longer and people are probably
gonna stay in the workplace longer by choice or necessity,
you know, we gotta help people to figure out what they're gonna do with their
life. If you're 54 4 years old, which is, again, the average
age of the people who come to MEA, and you're gonna live till 90,
(22:59):
you're exactly halfway between 18 90. So you're sort of
halfway through your adulthood. I wanna come back a little bit to your family
because age 50, you learn Spanish, you take up surfing.
And in an interview I read, you also sort of credited it because your dad
decided he wasn't gonna go get old the way Hollywood
defines what old age is. My dad at age 60 decided he wanted to learn
(23:22):
to scuba dive. He did 25 or 26 100
dives over the next 20 years. My dad's
very much an adventurous sort. My mom is the opposite. I've
taken more after my dad than my mom. Yeah. And I think that one of
the most important things we need to learn as we get older is
that curiosity and an openness to new experiences are
(23:43):
core are positively correlated with living a longer,
healthy, healthier, happier life. And what do you what is your takeaway from your
mom? My mom is very
precise. She gets stuff done incredibly
reliable. She cares a lot about what other people think about her,
which in a small dose is a good thing. In many ways, she helped to
(24:05):
humanize me a little bit more. And how do they feel about the son of
theirs having stage 3 cancer? How are they dealing with that? They're fearful
for me because they don't want me to die before they die. They are
deeply woven into my life in a good way. And you talk a lot
about the importance of emotional intelligence. Those are one of those
phrases that sort of just suddenly roared through the vernacular of business.
(24:27):
What do you mean by emotional intelligence and why would it matter to the
people listening to this podcast? Being able to understand your own emotions
as well as others is pretty much what emotional intelligence is about.
Being able to both experience it and then be articulate about
it. So when someone's not very emotionally intelligent, they're sort of lacking
in some of their humanity or their capacity for humanity.
(24:50):
We do improve our emotional intelligence as we get older. Our
IQ doesn't grow, but our EQ does on average. At my
funeral, I want people to be able to come up and say, Hey, this is
the impact that Chip had on me. As Maya Angelou said,
We may not remember what a person says or does, but we do certainly remember
the way that person made me feel. That to me is the ultimate
(25:13):
form of what emotional intelligence can do for us. And
you're taking this modern elder platform to new
communities like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you're choosing
places where it's more than just having the impact on the
individuals, even those they're there and that you're helping subsidize,
but also have an impact on the community. It's really important. I mean, we don't
(25:36):
wanna be this walled off place, you know, and I've never wanted that for
any of my businesses, whether it was Schwabbe with my boutique hotels
or Airbnb or with MEA. So,
we have a whole collection of regenerative principles about
how we give back to the community. It helps the
business. You know, it's good for us. Our team feels great about it.
(25:58):
But when the community feels great about us, there's less
friction. There's more people wanting us to
succeed. Last two questions. One of them really dealing with this sort
of, 70% of the content's negative. AI is gonna
continue to increase the frequency of it because that's what holds eyeballs.
That's how social media monetizes. How do you
(26:19):
counter that? How do people like you who are really as you
said, well, that's pretty common sense. If we just did that, that makes a lot
of sense. I mean, the simplicity of being a human being versus
somebody locked in a like minded castle, liking like minded content, How do you
counter that? Because there's a tsunami coming at us, the negativity. You know, you can
expand as fast as you can, but you're gonna be creating, you know, 5,200
(26:41):
graduates against 10,000 messages a day. There's a guy
named Keltner, UC Berkeley professor, started the Creative Good Science Center. He's
on our faculty at MEA. He wrote a book last year that
called Awe, and it it documented the 8
most common pathways globally for people to feel awe.
And number 1 on the list, surprise, it was a surprise, it was moral beauty.
(27:05):
And when you experience kindness and compassion and
resilience and grit and equanimity, and
you see it in real life, and then you
desire to actually reciprocate that.
That is the ultimate form of, in
my opinion, being a good human. I'm not powerful
(27:27):
enough to go out there and change that tsunami
you're talking about. But what I can do is create some
wedges for that tsunami such that in that
wedge, there's this beautiful little spot where you get some
moral beauty. And I can also make sure everybody who comes
to MEA or listens to our online
(27:48):
fireside chats, for free, knows that
our emotions are contagious. So if you want to
spread fear, be fear. If you want to spread
joy, be joy. Because guess what? That's how
we, as humans, take on other people's
emotions. And if you did it all again with, you know, your
(28:10):
undergraduate degree, your MBA, entrepreneurship, Airbnb, and
stuff, any thoughts would would it might have been a completely different path?
I think if I could do it all again, I probably would have left the
boutique hotel business earlier. Well, first of all, I had an identity that
I was so enamored with, milking that, and just feel like, ah,
that's my identity. That's my ego. That's, like, who I am. I wish
(28:33):
I hadn't gotten so obsessed about that because I
would have seen that the thing that actually led me to creating joie de
vivre, which is creativity and freedom, was something I lost after about
10 or 12 years in the company. You know, what would it have been like
if my forties in my forties, I had had the whole decade of
my forties to maybe explore my writing career more, spend more
(28:54):
time traveling, being a little more of a philosopher than an operator.
You know, I always end my shows with my 3 takeaways, and I'm just I'm
almost I'm struggling because there's so many beautiful parts of you. I think the
word that roared, the, you know, the g chord of this whole song is curiosity
from that kid in elementary school that was, you know, curious
about all these different cultures, to your undergraduate
(29:17):
degree, to just this naming a boutique hotel in
California with a French name. You know, how I mean, every
branding expert in the world say nobody will ever spell it. In those days, it
was probably the yellow pages. You know, curiosity has always been part of it. And
it's really interesting how it changed from who I am
and why I matter to who you are and why you
(29:37):
matter. I think this whole lesson on emotional
intelligence in our brain, and sort of driven by ego at the beginning,
and now looking for enlightenment, Maslow called it self actualization. You know,
if you have the luxury to have that time and invest that
time and meditate and breathe and realize there's a lot around the
world that's beautiful, I think is something wonderful as well. And, you know,
(30:00):
you used the word awakening and I used the word prophet. I think
they're 1 and the same. I think you are awakening
individuals to positivity and possibility and joy,
and maybe profit's too extreme of a brand for you. But I
hope you keep spreading your, this magic and live a
very long life, outlive your parents. And, by
(30:22):
the time there's a eulogy about you, nobody will remember who you were. So because
it's but but up until then, I think it's just it's just been
wonderful to talk with each other. I won't even remember who I am.
Ram Dass says, like, becoming nobody. That's that's what our job is, is
to learn how to become nobody. But thank you so much, Tony. Really
appreciate it. Appreciate the work you're doing in the world as well. Once again,
(30:44):
a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chata That Matters. It's
Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
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