Finding Midlife Purpose with Chip Conley

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Dan Buettner Podcast

Episode: Finding Midlife Purpose with Chip Conley
Date: October 30, 2025
Host: Dan Buettner
Guest: Chip Conley

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the fundamental importance of purpose, especially in midlife, with renowned hospitality entrepreneur and Modern Elder Academy founder, Chip Conley. Host Dan Buettner and Conley challenge the stereotype of the “midlife crisis,” reframing it as an opportunity for growth, transformation, and even a "chrysalis" phase. Together, they discuss actionable strategies to find and apply purpose, navigate major life transitions, and the relationship between wisdom, longevity, vulnerability, and deep fulfillment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Modern Meaning of Purpose in Midlife

• Purpose as a Missing Commodity:
  • Dan highlights that in today's hyperconnected, convenience-focused world, purpose is what many are truly missing ([00:22]).
  • "As our lives get more comfortable...this idea of life meaning has gone by the wayside.” — Dan Buettner [02:27]
• Church and Community Decline:
  • Traditional faith communities historically provided purpose, but participation has plummeted ([03:16]).
  • “Her faith was often a proxy for purpose.” — Dan Buettner [03:17]

2. Purpose Is a Verb, Not a Possession

• Debunking Performance Anxiety Around Purpose:

  • Chip notes people often compare or “perform” their purpose, seeing it as a thing to have rather than a way to act ([05:17]).
  • “You can’t have the noun if you don’t do the verb...learning how to be purposeful is the step.” — Chip Conley [05:48]

• Pathways to Purpose:

  • Four shortcut routes:
    1. What excites you
    2. What agitates you
    3. What makes you curious
    4. What you neglected earlier in life ([06:41])

• Illustrative Story:

  • A 60-year-old litigator at MEA discovered her real purpose was baking—something she abandoned for law ([07:18]).

3. Midlife: From Crisis to Chrysalis

• Challenging the “Midlife Crisis” Narrative:

  • Chip labels the old crisis framework as outdated: “That is such a ancient 50 year old, 60 year old point of view that really needs to be rethought.” — Chip Conley [12:52]

• Midlife’s Expanded Timeline:

  • Today, Chip considers midlife as ages 35–75 — a much larger and richer phase ([11:44]).

• U-Curve of Happiness:

  • Life satisfaction dips in the late 40s, but then rises again after 50 ([13:12]), contrary to common fears.

• A New Metaphor:

  • “Midlife is a transformative time...it’s not a crisis, it’s a chrysalis.” — Chip Conley [12:52]

4. Transitions: The “Messy Middle” and Creating Rituals

• Transitional Intelligence (TQ):

  • The MEA TQ framework: every transition has an ending, a ‘messy middle’ (or chrysalis), and a beginning ([21:24]).
  • Ritualizing endings (with friends and symbolic acts) helps move forward ([26:09]).

• Dan’s Personal Story:

  • Fired at 40, Dan found himself adrift, but by leaning into the “messy middle” and following curiosity, he developed the “Blue Zones” concept ([27:49]).

• Learning from Regret:

  • “Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom.” — Chip Conley [31:11]
  • The question: “10 years from now, what will I regret if I don’t do it now?” can drive transformational action ([14:30], [44:40]).

5. Wisdom: From Suffering to Self-Reflection

• Wisdom from Experience:

  • Wisdom is not about age alone, but how you “cook” your experiences ([31:29]).
  • Chip’s “Wisdom Book”: a decades-long journaling habit to codify weekly life lessons ([32:39]).
  • “Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” — Chip Conley [33:30]

• Dan’s Take on Meditation:

  • Vipassana meditation teaches visceral self-awareness—wisdom is what you realize “from the inside, not the Ten Commandments” ([34:30]).

6. Vulnerability and Life’s Hardest Lessons

• Cancer and Mortality:

  • Chip candidly shares his prostate cancer journey, the humbling realization that he can’t always be the hero anymore, and the ways illness has clarified his priorities ([38:10]).
  • Key lesson: “I don’t have to do this by myself; I don’t have to be the hero in my company anymore.” — Chip Conley [39:17]

• Death as a Lens:

  • “If you didn’t have death as an organizing principle for life, how might life change?” — Chip Conley [41:55]
  • Proximity to death inspired him to focus on relationships, especially with his children ([44:40]).
  • The question “What am I likely to regret in 10 years if I don’t do it now?” is underscored by mortality ([44:50]).

• Men, Vulnerability, and Crying:

  • Chip shares how he suppressed tears for over a decade due to upbringing and coming out struggles ([60:51]), eventually learning the value of emotional openness as part of transformation and leadership ([63:09]).

7. Longevity Myths, Wellness Fads, and the Depth/Length Dichotomy

• Dan on Longevity Hacks:

  • “There is no pill, no supplement, no longevity hack that has been shown to add years of life expectancy to humans.” — Dan Buettner [52:55]
  • Healthy, meaningful living in Blue Zones comes from connection and purpose, not products ([54:13],[56:53]).

• Men and the “Don’t Die” Movement:

  • Chip critiques the male-dominated obsession with living longer versus deeper, noting women prioritize wellness and meaning over sheer longevity ([48:45]).

8. The Social Alchemist’s Roadmap

• Chip’s Mission:

  • “If you were to distill down who I am and what my gift is in the world...it's to be a social alchemist, a mixologist of people, creating a potent cocktail of people coming together in a vulnerable way to discover a little bit more about who they are.” — Chip Conley [67:43]

• Demystifying and Operationalizing Midlife:

  • Chip frames himself as a “cartographer” for midlife—mapping uncharted territory so others can confidently navigate it ([69:26]).

• Practical Guidance:

  • Routinely reflect on what will matter in the long run.
  • Use rituals to mark transitions.
  • Seek and invest in social connections.
  • Embrace vulnerability and mentorship.
  • Frame midlife as a bridge rather than a decline.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Purpose:

  • “You can’t have the noun if you don’t do the verb.” — Chip Conley [05:48]
  • “People who have a sense of purpose...live about eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life.” — Dan Buettner [03:21]

• On Transitions:

  • “Our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom.” — Chip Conley [23:03]
  • “Midlife is not a crisis, it's a chrysalis.” — Chip Conley [12:52]

• On Regret & Wisdom:

  • “Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom.” — Chip Conley [31:11]
  • “What will I regret in 10 years if I don’t do it now?” — [44:50]

• On Aging & Fulfillment:

  • “100-year-olds are actually happier than 20-year-olds as a cohort.” — Dan Buettner [13:50]
  • “Social connection is the most important variable for living a longer, healthier, happier life.” — Chip Conley [47:55]

• On Longevity Fads:

  • “All these longevity bros, they're selling you a pipe dream.” — Dan Buettner [53:05]
  • “Depth is what's really important...and men get focused on longevity, women get focused on wellness.” — Chip Conley [50:08]

• On Vulnerability & Leadership:

  • “I don’t have to be the hero in my company anymore.” — Chip Conley [39:17]
  • “The most important thing to know in life is a humiliation a day, hopefully mild.” — (quoting Richard Rohr) [66:08]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Purpose & Longevity Connection: [03:16]–[05:17]
• Pathways to Purpose (MEA Framework): [06:41]–[07:18]
• Transition Stages (“TQ Method”): [21:24]–[26:09]
• Ritualizing Endings: [26:09]–[27:49]
• Dan’s “Messy Middle” Story: [27:49]–[29:59]
• Chip on Cancer’s Lessons: [38:10]–[45:31]
• Anticipated Regret as Wisdom: [31:11] & [44:40]
• Blue Zone Myths & Longevity Fads: [52:03]–[57:23]
• Chip on Vulnerability and Crying: [60:51]–[65:09]
• Closing Reflections (Cartographer’s Roadmap): [68:16]–[69:56]

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Where to Learn More

• MEA and Chip Conley:
  • meawisdom.com
  • ChipConley.com
• Chip’s Podcast:
  • “Midlife Chrysalis” – available wherever you listen
• Books:
  • The Midlife Manifesto (2024)

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Tone & Takeaway

Warm, candid, and brimming with actionable wisdom, this conversation flips the conventional wisdom on midlife—urging listeners to see these years not as a decline but as a laboratory for purpose, possibility, and joy. Chip Conley’s practical, vulnerable insights make the path to fulfillment in midlife accessible to all.

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End summary.

Transcript

[Chip Conley]

Lemonade. We have a very confusing relationship with purpose. The real question we all need to ask ourselves is, what's the number one word associated with midlife? The first thing that comes out is crisis. That is such a ancient point of view that really needs to be rethought.

[Dan Buettner]

I'd sold blue Zones. I was trying to figure out, what do I do next? Or maybe I just want to enjoy life. And he said something that changed my life. I have a huge treat for today. Arguably the commodity most missing in our lives today of network conveniences and cars and busyness is purpose. I'm going to bring you the greatest purpose expert in the world. This is a guy where people spend $5,000 a week to spend a little bit of time with Chip. You're going to get him for the next hour, and he's going to unleash a tsunami of wisdom and, and most importantly, useful information. What can you do right now if you're a little bit lost or you're trying to figure out your life? What can you do right now to plan to make sure the next part of your life is the best it can possibly be? Chip started a line of boutique hotels called Joy de Viv. He was the modern elder for Airbnb, helped build that company, and. And now he's got these great retreats called MEA or Modern Elder Academy. People from all over the world come to spend five days with the Chip to have him take them on a hero's journey to clarity. He's going to do it for us right here and right now. I sort of think Universe puts people together who are supposed to know each other.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. Because we. And love each other.

[Dan Buettner]

And love each other.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. Yeah. We sort of love at first sight in the sense that. Yeah. We met in Miami at a YPO Young President's Organization conference. We were both speaking there, and I think I might have reached out to you and just said, like, let's chat. And it was immediate. Like, okay, we are. We're sort of. We're about the same age, and we're both curious about this and this idea of longevity. But I tend to focus a little bit more on the midlife piece of it, and you're focused on the, like, longevity piece of it. And all. All the time you spent getting to know people who live to 100. And, you know, the fact is, this is a new roadmap that we didn't have 50 years ago.

[Dan Buettner]

Well, I. I think it's an incredibly important roadmap. You know, before. Before I knew we were Going to sit down and talk. I thought about purpose and you're, you're, you're sort of a prince of purpose or the master of midlife. I'll read like to. But it is arguably the most important commodity that we're missing. You know, as, as our lives get more comfortable and more convenient and we're hyper network through electronics and we drive everywhere and we're never more than 10 steps away from food. You know, we don't have to work for it anymore. This idea of life meaning has gone by the wayside. Yeah, I, I read a statistic that, you know, when you and I were little kids, about 50% of people went to church or temple every single week. We're now down to 5%.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Her faith was often a proxy for purpose.

[Chip Conley]

Purpose, yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And one of the things I found in the blue zones, you know, in 2005 when vitamin E, running marathons and carbo loading were the secrets to longevity. I come back from Okinawa with ikigai and people are like rolling their eye. What do you, what is this purpose thing? Well, it turns out that people who have a sense of purpose, who know why they wake up in the morning and put it to work, live about eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life. For me, that's like, you know, there's no pill, there's no supplement, there's no stem cell snake oil that's going to give you eight years of life expectancy. But we know it works from a ton of data from the National Institutes on Aging. And here you come along with this story pass. Which we're going to get into.

[Chip Conley]

Yep.

[Dan Buettner]

And when people ask me who knows how to help me find purpose, I say, Chip Conway. Oh, you're, you're, you are, you've, you're a guy who've been focusing on it for years. You've created institutes around purpose, the Modern Elder Academy, or MEA as it's been rebranded. You write books on it. You have a compassionate heart. I know you as an individual. You're not just one of these, you know, chunky pinky ring kind of sales guys who's, you know, selling a bunch of facile crap. You've really tapped into the best experts in the world and you've metabol.

[Chip Conley]

Including you.

[Dan Buettner]

Very low grade, but you've tapped into it and, and you've put it together in a way where people can actually understand their values, understand their roadmap, using sort of a hero's journey, understanding what's, what they're good at. And A place to. For an outlet for that. So, well, let's launch with that.

[Chip Conley]

You could just say thank you and we can leave. You know, I. I think we have a very confusing relationship with purpose. So I completely agree with you that purpose is a. It's a means of longevity that doesn't require any, you know, cold plunges or biohacking. But I think one of the things I wanna start with is to say that we have almost performance anxiety when it comes to purpose, because sometimes we feel like it's a possession. We focus on the noun part of it, which is, I have one or I don't have one, as if it's a BMW in the driveway. And so people compare purpose, like, all my friends have a purpose, and I don't have one. Now, in some ways, that can help a person get focused on finding theirs, which is. There's not a bad thing there. But I think the negative side of that mentality is people want to show off their purpose. And really, to me, you can't have the noun if you don't do the verb. And learning how to be purposeful is the step or maybe the breadcrumbs that take you to purpose. And so the real question we all need to ask ourselves is at, what things in my life do I feel purposeful? Because that action, as opposed to the possession, helps you. And, you know, at mea, the Modern Elder Academy, we have this shortcut for pathways to purpose. And it's either something that excites you, something that agitates you. I love that one. In fact, that's why Reed Hastings created Netflix, because of that. Because he hated the late fees at Blockbuster Video. Thirdly, something that makes you curious. And then fourthly, something that is neglected from earlier in your life. We had a litigator, a woman who's 60 who said, I'm not going to retire till I'm 70, but I hate being a litigator. I have no purpose in being a litigator anymore.

[Dan Buettner]

Interesting.

[Chip Conley]

And she said, I think I should become a litigation consultant. And everybody at the start of this workshop, this is at our Baja campus, a cultivating purpose workshop. Everybody said to her, a litigation consultant, Isn't that like being a litigator? She says, well, it's different. I don't have to be in the courtroom. It's not as stressful like, okay, but by the end of the week, she had these dreams. And you've been to our Baja campus. You've taught there. She was going on walks on the beach, and she had these dreams. And sort of almost visions from her childhood where she was cooking pies with her grandmother. And she realized over the course of the week that being a pastry chef is something she wanted to do in high school, but her father, who was a lawyer, had convinced her to go to law school. And then, you know, she was off to the races. Being a litigator, by the end of the week, she realized, my purpose today, my sense of purposefulness is having friends over for a meal and having them stay for dessert. And I'm going to go and learn how to become a pastry chef, make them happy. So, yeah. So I think. Long story short is I think number one is we have to be careful about having purpose be a possession and have it be an action. Number two is there are shortcut ways to understand purpose, and you can have multiple purposes in your life and multiple purposes at one time. There's a guy named Richard Leiter who has written a lot. Yep. A fellow Minnesotan who's written a lot about purpose, and he talks about big P and small P purpose. And he's also an MBA faculty member. And big P, purpose tends to be the thing that you have on a resume. And small P, purpose is the thing they say at your eulogy, and it often has to do with. It's the purposefulness around being a human.

[Dan Buettner]

I love that.

[Chip Conley]

And so. Yeah, so I think that's a lot.

[Dan Buettner]

Well, you know, I think you're part of a very small cabal who. Who's actually putting a finger on it, because purpose, to your point, people kind of vaguely understand it, but they don't exactly know how to find it and how to make that noun into a verb. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna ride you hard today because, please, people. People are listening right now and watching us.

[Chip Conley]

I.

[Dan Buettner]

This is a promise I'm going to make to you. You're gonna. After we're done talking to Chip, you're gonna know how to find your purpose, and you're gonna know how to put it to work.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

So we're gonna get to that. I think this modern Elder Academy, you invited me there. You know, I was kind of. I kind of rolled my eyes at it. You know, first of all, I don't think of myself as an elder. And secondly, I, you know, just. I. I couldn't really. You know, it's on the beach. But then I got there, I was blown away.

[Chip Conley]

Thank you.

[Dan Buettner]

30 people. Disparate, smart, soulful people, all of whom. And this is important. We're going through some sort of transition. And we all go through transition. I think this is really an important point in midlife and the point you make in the Midlife Manifesto that midlife is when most of the divorces happen. You know, we've been married forever and we've just been on autopilot and boom, we hit a road bump and all of a sudden we're sad and alone.

[Chip Conley]

It's the only form of divorce in the US Age wise, where we're seeing a growth in divorce. Every other other age group other than midlife steady is, you know, is going down. But actually midlifers grade, what's called gray divorces are going up.

[Dan Buettner]

Boom. That good example. We lose our jobs, we retire, we age out. There's still ageism. So all of a sudden you've than putting your purpose to work every single day at work and boom, all of a sudden you get a pink slip. What, what do you do? Or you quit. You just get to an age you have a health issue and you can't do what you used to do.

[Chip Conley]

Well, you're going through menopause and men going through andropause. So there's a physical side of the transition as well.

[Dan Buettner]

And your big effort right now is rebranding midlife, which I love. And you know, life expectancy's gone up and since, since 1900. You know, life expectancy for men in 1900 was at 40 and now we're up to 73 or 74, almost double. So naturally, you know, middle age, when you're supposed to live to 40 is, you know, 25 and you know, now we can expect. And by the way, if you've made it to 60, your life expectancy is more like 80 or something or 90. So. So really middle age is, is probably. Well, what would you say middle age? What years is middle age?

[Chip Conley]

Middle age to my mind is 35 to 75. Okay, so it's, it's a big one. It's a big one. So but it's sort of proactively thinking about the future if we're going to have more and more people living to 100. And midlife is the life stage between early adulthood and later adulthood. So it's a, it's a bridge. Think early adulthood ends at 30, 35 and later adulthood, depending upon, you know, your health, could start around 75. And a lot of people actually are not planning on retiring until about 75. So midlife is a bridge that used to be a relatively short bridge and now it's a really long marathon bridge. And so because of that it's also a stage of life that we don't understand. The way we think of midlife goes back to Elliot Jakes, a psychotherapist from Canada who in 1965 said that he did a study on the midlife crisis. And so if I give a speech to a thousand people and I say what, what's the number one word associated with midlife? The first thing that comes out is crisis.

[Dan Buettner]

That's so interesting.

[Chip Conley]

And so the, the way we think of midlife is as if it's a crisis. And if you can survive the crisis, on the other side of that, you have disease, you die, you have disease, decrepitude and death. And so that is such a ancient 50 year old, 60 year old point of view that really needs to be rethought. And so, yeah, I'm a midlife activist whose basic premise is to help people see that it's not a crisis, it's a chrysalis. Midlife is a transformative time. And the U curve of happiness research is very clear on this, that yes, there's a dip in life satisfaction around 45 to 52, but after 50, we get happier with each decade.

[Dan Buettner]

As long as we keep our health.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, as long as we keep our health, which most people do after 50, you know, in the 70s, you can start to see for some people a little bit of a plateauing and a dropping off of happiness, but on average it's still going up.

[Dan Buettner]

100 year olds are actually happier than 20 year olds as a cohort.

[Chip Conley]

Is that interesting? Wow. Wow.

[Dan Buettner]

Yeah, They've made peace. It was less about getting what they want, but being satisfied with what they have. That's what older people become masters at. Yeah, being satisfied with what they have. I think, you know, you said a midlife crisis and what jumped into my mind was midlife opportunity.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And I think the mea in your work, you help show people it's a, it's an opportunity. But in order to kind of transform your, your life on autopilot to the life you want to have, it takes some work, doesn't it?

[Chip Conley]

Oh, yeah. I mean, if you live sort of in the normal default kind of way, the ageist societal point of view, Hallmark cards point of view will wear off on you. I mean, meaning you will actually feel like, oh, my best years are behind me or I'm too old to fill in the blank. When I first moved to Mexico part time, I was 56 years old. So this is about eight years ago. And I had a mindset which was I'm too old to learn Spanish. I'm too old to learn to surf. But the shift that I made in my own thinking was I asked the question, 10 years from now, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now? Because anticipated regret of something you might regret, like me at 66, regretting I didn't learn Spanish and I'm still living in Mexico. I didn't learn how to surf, and I'm still living in Mexico next to a surf break. If I'm doing that, then by thinking about what I'm going to regret. Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom. And so it's my way of actually having a catalyst to say I need to take action. And so for me, I started learning Spanish. My mi espanol es muy malo. Pero estoy mejorando un po con poco, un ponco. But I've gotten a little bit better in surfing. I've gotten a little bit better. Our friend Jim Flaherty, at 87, he was in your work in our workshop. The average age of the person who comes to an MBA workshops about 54. So Jim was way older, but he went surfing down in Baja. I saw it when we were there. So long story short is a lot of this is breaking out of the default, the default way of thinking about aging and really moving from chasing to embracing. And the chasing is what we've done in our often in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and maybe 50s, chasing on that treadmill of success and learning after age 50 that maybe it's time to start embracing some things and having some gratitude and appreciation around it.

[Dan Buettner]

One of my favorite things about being home, especially up at my house in Wisconsin, is gathering friends around the kitchen. We'll chop vegetables, pour a glass of something good, and let dinner take its time. In every blue zone I visited, from Okinawa to Sardinia, food isn't just fuel, it's community. People cook together, eat slowly, and laugh a lot. That shared meal is the heartbeat of a long and happy life. When I'm home, I try to recreate that rhythm. Simple plant forward meals, good conversations, maybe a game of cards after dinner. But the reality is I'm often not at home. So leaving my space open for someone else to experience, that magic really works for me. That's why I host my home on Airbnb. That way, my kitchen, my table, my fireplace. All those moments of connection keep doing what they're meant to do, bring people together. So think about it. If you've got a space in your home that you love. Maybe other people would also love to experience its magic. If you hosted on Airbnb, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host.

[Chip Conley]

You know.

[Dan Buettner]

The best trip I took in recent memory was a divine trip. I gathered up 10 of my best friends and we took a trip to the Blue Zone with Duvine. They took of, of everything. And as a cyclist who likes to have a bike that's working, who likes to eat good meals, and who likes to know what I'm seeing as I go, I could not have asked for a better experience than with Duvine. And not only that, it turns out that cycling is one of the best activities for longevity. It's one of the top three.

[Chip Conley]

Why?

[Dan Buettner]

It's easy on the joints. You get regular low intensity physical activity and it's not boring. It requires some balance, something you can do for the long run, you know, Duvine believes cycling is for everyone. So they design trips for all levels of experience. And they'll take you anywhere from easygoing bike paths and how into epic climbs in France. Plus they offer E bikes to make the trip accessible to everybody and this. And the support van is always with you for not only emergency repairs or water or snacks or to carry your extra gear. So whether you're a seasoned cyclist or a total beginner, if you're ready to give it a try, our listeners get $150 off per person. When you book your first Divine tour, head to divine.comlive betterlonger to book now. In service of getting towards how do our listeners find purpose? I want to tell the story of Jim Flaherty. I went to Mea and you know, I was a teacher and I thought, well, I'm not gonna learn anything here. And I actually started university and actually the, the, the curriculum you have is phenomenal. It takes you on a sort of hero's journey and helps you find that anticipated regret, you know, before you're too old to, to realize it. But my case, the singular most powerful moment, I was paired off with Jim, 88 year old, kind of dapper ball guy. You know, we're on the beach and he's wearing sort of a suit and a bow tie and round glasses. And he started talking about his life and he's writing a, a, a TV show and a novel and a feature film. At 88, you know, he's obviously got money. I go, jim, why don't you just enjoy your life? And he said something that changed my life. And it was at a certain Point I realized that work is more fun than fun. And it was like the diamond bullet through the forehead because I was trying, you know, I'd sold blue zones and I was trying to figure out what I do next or maybe I just want to enjoy life. And I realized, fuck, I like to work. I love going far away parts of the world and discovering things and bringing them back and making them meaningful. And I went out and did the Netflix Living to 100 documentary, which I might not have done if I hadn't gone to MEA and yeah, met. Met Jim. But let me ask you just a few concrete. So this is going to be hard. Yeah, concrete.

[Chip Conley]

I like it.

[Dan Buettner]

Okay, first example, I am a 60 year old woman and my husband just left me. Yeah, told me about it last week. I'm not working, my children are out of the house. What do I do this week that gets me on a road? So I'm going to enjoy my midlife.

[Chip Conley]

Well, let's start by helping this woman and anyone increase their tq. What a trademark term from MEA which speaks to transitional intelligence. So if you look at the history of time, whether it's Joseph Campbell or it's the wisdom traditions or, or it's William Bridges in his book Transitions, they all have the same mentality around and the framework for thinking about transitions. There's three stages to any transition. The ending of something, the messy middle and the beginning of something. And so what I would say to this 60 year old woman is you are coming to the end of something. And the most important thing to do when you're ending anything is to ritualize it and mark it so that you can say, okay, that was the past. Now if this just happened a week ago and she's still in trauma around that, the last thing she wants to do is do a ritual. But the first thing I would do for her is to say, like, who can you talk to? Who are the friends you can talk to? Who can be supportive? But at some point you want to do something that says like, that's over. Because then you move into the messy middle. The chrysalis in essence between caterpillar and butterfly is chrysalis. And it's in that stage that you start to actually see what's next. Yes, messy middle means it's a little hard.

[Dan Buettner]

What goes around in the messy middle?

[Chip Conley]

Messy middle. A person often is in an awkward space. You've lost your job, you've retired, you've just gotten a cancer diagnosis, your husband's just left you, you're in this place that's not familiar. So there's a word called you just.

[Dan Buettner]

Have to sit through it or no, you're liminal.

[Chip Conley]

You're liminal, which means you're in between two things. But you need to, number one is start to actually get some social support. That helps because a lot of times when you're in that liminal state in transition, you feel scared and you feel awkward and maybe you feel like somehow shameful or guilty because something wrong happened. The other thing you need to do is look for the through line. Look at what are you supposed to learn from this? Because our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom. And so what does that mean? It means that the experience you've had in this case this woman who she's been with her husband for many years but she probably wasn't all that surprised that he was leaving or she wasn't all that happy. In fact, 70% of the gray divorces, people getting divorced after 50 are being initiated by women. Bottom line is she is going to have a new pair of glasses when she goes into the marketplace again to actually meet a new partner. And so the reality is she's gonna be a better judge of character and than she was when she met her husband. And so that's part of what she has to start thinking through is like what are the filters? Assuming that she wants to be in a relationship again. The thing I would say to her if she was a friend of mine is like what are the things that you've always wanted to do you didn't have time to do or your husband dissuaded you from doing that you can do now that you have some freedom. Because the first thing for her is not to go find another man. The first thing for her or a woman, I mean, like, who knows? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first thing to do is literally to go and say I have some freedom and space. How do I want to spend?

[Dan Buettner]

I like that.

[Chip Conley]

And then I'd go to the third stage which is the beginning of something new ending messy middle beginning. And the beginning of something new is frankly when she's going to potentially go out and start dating again. And the most important thing you can do in that stage is to have a growth mindset and a sense of humor. Because if you are going to be self critical and tough on yourself as you go out and make your that's no fun. Your Match.com profile or, or you have your first date that you've had in 30 years with somebody or the first time you're actually Getting naked with a man in all of these years, you better have a sense of humor, otherwise you're going to pretty much be critical. And the more critical we are, the more self defeating it is because we end up tending to have a fixed mindset, which means we aren't. Fixed mindset means you're trying to prove yourself and you want to win a growth. Mindset means you want to improve yourself and you want to learn. And so that's, that's what I would do. That's the technical way we look at it in the TQ method of transitions. But I would of course try to at least spend more time with her and understand her specific situation. Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Well, very few people are going to have the privilege of doing a one on one with, with Chip Conley. But just to bottom line it a little bit.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Because you said a lot. There's a lot to remember.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

But what I heard was the first thing you want to do is to take stock of your friends.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And probably identify the ones who will listen to you. Second thing was a sort of a process of self assessment. Is there a book?

[Chip Conley]

Actually, the second thing I do with the friend is to somehow ritualize this. So what I would do, I would do is I would say, how could you go through some kind of process? Maybe you write down all of the things on a piece of paper that pissed you off about your husband.

[Dan Buettner]

I like this.

[Chip Conley]

I hate my husband because. And you write all of this down and what you do is then you with your friend say, I'm going to write all those things down. I'm going to recite what those are to my friend, I'm going to throw them in the fire. And then I'm going to say, I'm replacing it with the following. These are the things I am going to get as a result of actually being out of this marriage. And that ritualization of it is really powerful because you remember the day and the time when you did this thing. We do that at MEA. If you recall, the very first 24 hours into it, we are throwing something on a piece of paper and ultimately throwing it in the fire collectively. So that is important because what it helps a person do is to move on. And one other thing, you know, transitions. Bruce Filer, who wrote a book called Life is in the Transitions at New York Times bestseller, has shown in his research that people can spend five years in that chrysalis. On average, they're going through a transition and it can take a long time. Yeah, yeah. The value of a program like Mea. Or any kind of coaching or therapy or whatever it is, is. It can accelerate your time in that messy middle. So you're. You're not spending as much time there. You're not feeling stuck or bewildered as much as you would otherwise.

[Dan Buettner]

I want to tell you a messy middle story of my own.

[Chip Conley]

Oh, please.

[Dan Buettner]

It requires a little vulnerability on my part. In earlier career, I invented a way of exploration that harnessed the intuitive power of a huge online audience. Had a million followers. And we discovered why the Maya civilization disappeared and did another expedition across China and proved that Marco Polo didn't go to China. We did 15 of them. I sold this company, and the company I sold it to fired me. Fired me.

[Chip Conley]

I got fired. It was the most.

[Dan Buettner]

What.

[Chip Conley]

I invented this at what age? What age?

[Dan Buettner]

I was 40, you know, right in the sort of midlife area.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And it was humiliating. And, you know, I went in kind of a depression and. And, you know, was there for a while. But then I started. I used to go to the library in the afternoons. I started studying up on other things and. And stumbled upon all these articles about longevity. And I got really interested in it. And two years later, two years, I found myself at National Geographic with a great idea. The idea I had was I had profiled all these young kids doing my expeditions. I want to go back now, 10 years later, try to find them and see what happened to them. And I pitched this. National Geographic's headquarter. I'm pitching this with great exuberance, and my editor is looking at his watch, and I go, oh, my God. So in a. In an act of desperation, hail Mary pass. I said to him, and I also have this other idea. I found these areas in the world where people live the longest. And I'll. I'll bet you they could give you us some secrets how he'll live longer. And he was tapping his pencil at the time, and he quit tapping his pencil. He thought about it for a while, and he said, that idea's got hair on it. But I would have never gotten there if I didn't have the messy middle. If I didn't just endure that time and use it to explore, to get out of what I was doing all the time, which was, you know, this basically interactive education, and think about something else. And if I hadn't had the messy middle, there'd be new. No blue zones.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And I wouldn't be sitting across from Chip Conley right now. So there.

[Chip Conley]

That led to your butterfly. I mean, the truth is a chrysalis. You Know if our, if it is true that, you know, we're talking a lot about AI these days and about, you know, the value of AI. But you know, I said, I heard someone say last week, well, AI will never be wise because it doesn't know how to suffer. Because there's a certain amount of wisdom that comes from suffering. There's a certain amount of wisdom that comes from that chrysalis. And in the chrysalis it can feel dark and gooey and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. And so, you know, I'm not saying that we should seek suffering. I am. What I'm saying is that we should turn suffering into something. Because suffering, you know, classic Buddhist first tenet of Buddhism is that suffering is ever present. So the key thing to understand is how do you turn suffering? Because life circumstances are always going to be not what we want them to be. How do you turn that into something that has long term value? And that's what wisdom is.

[Dan Buettner]

Wisdom is also, you pointed out this, this anticipatory suffering. You had a better word for it.

[Chip Conley]

What was, well, what I said was our anticipated regret is a form of wisdom. And what I mean by that is, first of all, wisdom is something, it's a raw material. So the more life experience you have, the more potential wisdom you have.

[Dan Buettner]

I like that.

[Chip Conley]

But the truth is we all know people who are 70 years old who are not as wise as a 30 year old. And the way I like to think of that is the following is you put two people in a kitchen, one's 70, one's 30. The 70 year old has 70 ingredients to potentially cook a meal. The 30 year old has 30 ingredients to cook a meal. So less raw material, but the 30 year old might be a better cook. And if you're a better cook when it comes to wisdom, you know what to do with the raw material you learn from your life experience. What's something I've done ever since I was 28 years old because I was just an idiot at a CEO of a boutique hotel company that I'd started when I was 26. Joie de vivre. Exactly at 28, I was lost. And so I started a practice where every weekend I would sit down with a journal and, and I called it my wisdom book. And I would write down what did I learn that week? Relationship wise, physically, spiritually, but especially professionally, what was I learning along the way? I would say, what did I learn this week? And the lessons were usually painful and how will it serve me in the future?

[Dan Buettner]

That's a wise 28 year old, by the way. Well, it was.

[Chip Conley]

I mean, I mean, to be honest with you, I gotta say I stumbled upon it, that idea and I've been doing it now for 36 years. But the bottom line, and I do it in Google Docs as opposed to in journals. But I have nine journals of these wisdom books, but in Google Docs. The nice thing is that if I'm looking at, I wanna look at the history of my relationship with betrayal or anxiety, I can just do a keyword search and like, okay, yes, seven years ago I had an experience of betrayal. And here's the lesson I got from it. So long story short is being able to back to the metaphor of the kitchen. But being able to know what to do with the ingredients of your life is maybe one of the most important skills that we can learn. And frankly, the faster we learn wisdom, the earlier we learn wisdom, the longer we have to use it.

[Dan Buettner]

How does one learn wisdom?

[Chip Conley]

Well, I just. This example, I just gave it the journal. The journal. That's one way to learn wisdom. So one of the best ways to learn wisdom is to be able to look at your life and to say, when did my intuition work or what happened? And how did I learn something from that? So wisdom is different than knowledge. So knowledge, I love the quote. Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. And wisdom is knowing to not put it in a fruit salad. So the reality is a fruit salad, you don't put a tomato in a fruit salad, even though tomatoes are fruit. And that's something you know from life experience. But the fact that tomato is a fruit is something you learn on Google. But all of the world's knowledge today is in your pocket. It's on your phone. And so that's why in an era in which artificial intelligence has commodified knowledge, we need more wisdom. Wisdom is personal. It's based upon your personal experience.

[Dan Buettner]

I want to sort of riff on this just a second. Wisdom based on personal experience. So I do these ten day silent meditations. Vipassanas.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, I love them.

[Dan Buettner]

And essentially you're told the Buddhist adage is that all pain comes from aversion or desire.

[Chip Conley]

Attachment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who knows?

[Dan Buettner]

Desire. Hell, I love desire. But no, when you're getting good at.

[Chip Conley]

That desire thing, when you give into.

[Dan Buettner]

It, you get in trouble. And it turns out, you know, Christianity says there's 10 commandments, you follow the 10 commandments, but Vipassana says, no, just sit quietly for 10 days. And it sounds like an Absurdly long amount of time, but it's actually beautiful and wonderful. But that most of the things that you've done in your past that you're trying to run away from or you're trying to get to, you can feel. When you close your eyes, you can feel that lie you told because it. It creates sort of a disharmony within you. You can. You can feel that I'm going after that lust too much. And when you sit with that feeling, you realize it. It's not a great feeling. And the. You know, another way to put it, they define wisdom is it's the experience plus knowledge. So you experience this dukkha, this. This disharmony. When you're going after desire or getting away from aversion, you know what it feels like enough that in the real world, when that comes up again, you're able to say, oh, that's. That's that thing I shouldn't do. I don't have to read the Ten Commandments. I know it within me. And for me, that. That's a type of visceral wisdom accessible to anybody who will sit down on a mat, close their eyes, and quiet their mind.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, well, there's a lot to consider there, I think The. The idea of being able to be with yourself and your thoughts. I mean, we. We live in an era of the age of distraction. We are doing everything we can with our phones and with our entertainment and with all kinds of things that we do. We have sort of an addiction economy, which is really a distraction economy. And so I think it's part of the reason why a silent meditation retreat can be so valuable and harder than people think it might be. It's sort of like going on a fast. The first day or two of a fast is particularly hard. And then once you get past the first two or three days, somehow you get into a rhythm and you really feel free from the need to eat as much. And similarly, on a meditation retreat, that first day or two, and frankly, for a person who's not meditating much, the first hour, maybe even the first 10 minutes, are hard because you're actually breaking a habit. But the beauty is when you can actually feel the liberation from that habit.

[Dan Buettner]

I want to move on to vulnerability. On this show, you get extra credit for vulnerability.

[Chip Conley]

Okay.

[Dan Buettner]

And there's two. Two topics. The first one's cancer.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

You've battled with it. I don't know how deep you want to get into the details of what your journey has been, but what I'm most interested in are what are the lessons that life threatening cancer diagnosis teach us. And how do you get to those lessons?

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, so background is at age 57, I'm 64 now. I found out that I had stage one prostate cancer. Not a big worry. Prostate cancer moves slowly. A lot of men have it and it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, it was right as we were launching MEA and I had a book coming out called Wisdom at the Making of a Modern Elder, based upon my experience of being the modern elder at Airbnb. Okay. I changed my diet a little bit, but I didn't really think about it much. Three years later it had gone to stage two. And then I had a sort of specialized surgery to see if they could actually basically burn those parts of the prostate where the cancer was the most prevalent. But by a year and a half after that, I went to stage three. And that means the cancer had actually spread beyond the prostate. And it was now in my pelvic lymphs and, and my lymph system. And so that's when I went through two years of what now I've been told is pharmaceutical castration. That's a terrible term. But what it is is it's taking your Testosterone down to zero. And so I did that in 2023 and 2024. I also had my prostate taken out, the full on surgery called a radical prostatectomy. And then I had 36 radiation sessions. So that's the background. And so I still am at stage three. Um, because after all of that, I still have a small amount of cancer in my system and it's, but it's dormant right now. So lessons, first lesson is I like to sort of get, if I'm going through a hard time, I tend to, I tend to retreat and go to, you know, be myself. Even though I'm in a relationship and I have family and I have two sons and I, you know, have a hard time taking, you know, other people's help. But one of my lessons was I need to look for support. I don't have to do this by myself. And so that was certainly a good lesson for anybody in life, especially when I'm giving that advice to other people as they're going through transition. Secondly was I don't have to be the hero in my company anymore. So I've been sort of a hero a lot. That's an archetype. I like, strap on the cape and I'll solve everything. And it's very egocentric as well. But I, you know, ran a, I ran the second largest boutique hotel company in the US for had 52 hotels, ran that for 24 years. I helped the founders of the Airbnb take their tiny little startup and turn it into the world's largest and most valuable hospitality company. And then I've started this MEA thing that's a community with 59 regional chapters around the world. So, long story short is I'm used to being the hero. But this time I had to say, like, you know, when you don't have any testosterone and you're going through all this stuff? At a time when we were launching our Santa Fe campus, at a time when I was having a book coming out called Learning to Love Midlife, at a time when I was reorganizing the company, I really needed to say, I don't have to be the hero. I don't have to do this by myself. I really need other people to step up. So that was another lesson. A third lesson was what matters in my life? For me, death has been something that's been an organizing principle for life. And when I say that, what I mean is that I'm not seeking death, but when you know you have a limited amount of time. That's why the whole don't die movement is sort of weird to me, Brian Johnson here in Venice Beach. And it's weird in the sense, like, if you didn't have death as an organizing principle for life, how might life change? You know, how might the meaning of life change? And so I death, for me, it's.

[Dan Buettner]

Like a marathon with no, no ending. No ending. Keep running.

[Chip Conley]

What's the point? Yeah, so, so, so when I was during the Great Recession, when I was in my late 40s going through a really hard time, I lost five male friends to suicide. And that was ages 42 to 52. That was in two and a half years. And they're all unrelated to each other. So for me, that was my first time of like, I was dealing with death. And then I had a, an NDE myself, allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And I went to the other side and I was brought back to life. And long story short is death was right there again, and this is right at the same time. And then thirdly, I had the death of a dream. And the dream was I thought I'd be running this joie de vivre boutique hotel company into my 80s, like Sam Walton or something. And I realized with this death experience, at 47, when I had my near death experience, I didn't want to do this anymore. And the revelation that I had to Let that go and maybe disrobe of the identity of being this founder and CEO of a very successful San Francisco based hospitality company was hard. But that all was a precursor to then ten years later, having my experience of learning I had cancer. So I, in some ways was lucky that I could sort of see that I had foreshadowed the idea of death and now I was facing it. It's such an uncanny, weird experience because you never expect it's going to happen to you. So for me, the third lesson is I know what's important to me. That question 10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it or do it now relates to that. I mean, so for me, that is about my sons now. In fact, you know, right after this episode, I jumped to the airport on my way to Houston to see my sons who are 10 and 13. And because I asked myself the question, what will I regret 10 years from now in my life? Even though there's lots of things in my professional life I could put at the top of the list, number one on the list is I want to spend the teenage years with my sons. And I happen to have two sons. I was the sperm donor to a lesbian couple who are friends. And so I don't live with the boys, but I'm with them. I try to be with them at least every other month for a few days. And we do long vacations as well. And that's the most important thing in my life. But death has helped me to see that because, you know, I might die. And if I don't die and I'm not with them, I won't get their teenage years over again.

[Dan Buettner]

I. I just, just have to underscore that question because I think it's so incredibly powerful. What am I likely to regret in 10 years if I don't do it now?

[Chip Conley]

That's right, yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Anybody listen should write that question down.

[Chip Conley]

It's a great conversational question with some friends. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And it keeps you doing this. It keeps you from doing the stupid right now.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And. And making sure you're doing the things that are really important to you. And getting clear. Most of us, I don't think are clear on the things that are really important to our soul. I think, you know, a lot of us are just trying to pay the bills or trying to climb the status ladder or, you know, want a new thing and don't realize that if you don't pay attention to certain things, they're going to be gone, they're going to be gone forever. And that's a powerful lesson that I guess all this proximity to death has taught you.

[Chip Conley]

All that helped. And then the fourth lesson I'd say would be, how do I improve my relationship with my body? You know, one of the things that's interesting about, you know, as we get.

[Dan Buettner]

Older, you can't dump. You can't dump your body.

[Chip Conley]

No, you can't dump your body. And it's like this rental vehicle we were issued at birth and. And then the question is, what do you do with it and put it away. That's what people do. You know, you spend the first half of your life riding it really hard and. But also of polishing it and making it look good. And sometimes people take that look good.

[Dan Buettner]

Piece and where you polish it matters.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Wait, that didn't.

[Chip Conley]

We're not going there. The reality is that the first half of your life you care about the externals on your body. In the second half of your life, this rental vehicle is more important what it feels like on the inside. And so feeling that, like, I'm less focused on the short term vanity of my body and the long term maintenance instead of means that I want to invest in my relationship with my body as if it's my best friend. And so that was a revelation. And how did it affect me meant I changed my diet a little bit. I drink a little bit less, in fact, a lot less actually. But I still drink. I still drink. I know my blue zones, the most controversial of the nine.

[Dan Buettner]

I'm sticking to it.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, I, I still do drink. What people sometimes miss on that one. Now, if you have an addiction around alcohol, guess what? You should stop. But what they miss sometimes is that drinking enhances social connection, just like religion. I mean, I think, in fact, I think both the drinking and the religion and the one about your mindfulness practices, especially in a religious context, they both have a social element to them. And if we, you know, take the, your lessons as well as Bob Waldinger at Harvard and Phil Pizzo at Stanford, I mean, basically, you know, social connection is the most important variable for living a longer, healthier, happier life. And often social connection in the context of drinking, in the context of being in a religious community enhances that. And so I want to be, you know, when people start to say like, oh yeah, no alcohol, no alcohol. If someone wants to have no alcohol. Frankly, when we do our vipassana or our silent meditation retreats at iba, there's no alcohol. But we do have alcohol in many of our workshops because in many ways, it's a lubricant. It's a social lubricant that helps people to get to a place where they can feel more connected with other people.

[Dan Buettner]

Well, the National Academies of Science will tell you that actually a little bit of wine a day, one or two glasses, actually lower mortality. In other words, increase your life expectancy. But even if a little bit of wine at five, a happy hour, nice glass of wine with a meal shaves a year or two off your life expectancy, so what? The point is not just getting to 100. The bigger point is enjoying the journey and.

[Chip Conley]

Well, let's talk about that for a minute. So. Yes, and why is it. And I don't include you in this because I don't think of you this way. Why is it that the. A lot of the tech bros who are sort of like the, you know, the leaders in the Don't Die movement and leaders on longevity podcasts and leaders on. In those kinds of programs that are meant to help people live forever, why is it. It's mostly men. Why is it that men are so obsessed with length? As in length?

[Dan Buettner]

I wasn't touching that one.

[Chip Conley]

Length in life.

[Dan Buettner]

No, I think that's a very good point. I think, you know, women tend to be the people in charge of health, the health of my family. And you're right, men, this sort of longevity, bro, they're focused on this fiction really, right now of lengthening the capacity of the human machine or lengthening life. Yeah, it's a very different thing. You know, one is maintaining what I have, and the bros are getting more, getting more, and it's. It's.

[Chip Conley]

What do you think of that, though? I mean, I. I'd love to get. I mean, if you're open to talking about. You don't have to mention specific people. But what do you. What is your point of view on that? Because it's actually gotten to a place in. In the MEA community where there's sort of factions and. And there's sort of the faction of people, like, who are like, yeah, this is great. To lengthen our life and to extend it as much as possible. That's more the men in our program, whereas the women in the program are like, you know what? Length is not important if you don't have depth. And so depth is what's really important. And, you know, and. And men get focused on longevity. Women get focused on wellness. And if we want to do an MBA program and we want to attract men, we put longevity in the title. If we want to attract women, we put wellness in the title.

[Julia Louis-Dreyfus]

Well, hi everybody. It's Julia Louis Dreyfus from the Wiser Than Me podcast. And I'm not going to talk about food waste this time. I'm going to talk about food resources. All that uneaten food rotting in the landfill, it could be enriching our soil or feeding our chickens because it's still food. And the easiest and frankly, way coolest way to put all its nutrients to work is with the mill food recycler. It looks like an art house garbage can. You can just toss your scraps in it like a garbage can. But it is definitely not a garbage can. I mean, it's true. I'm pretty obsessed with this thing. I even invested in this thing. But I'm not alone. Any mill owner just might corner you at a party and rhapsodize about how it's completely odorless and it's fully automated and how you can keep filling it for weeks. But the clincher is that you can depend on it for years. Mill is a serious machine. Think about a dishwasher, not a toaster. It's built by hand in North America and it's engineered by the guy who did your iPhone. But you have to kind of live with mill to understand all the love. That's why they offer a risk free, free trial. Go to mill.com wiser for an exclusive offer.

[Dan Buettner]

You know, there's two kinds of longevity. One is avoiding the diseases that foreshorten our lives. So the average American is losing about 14 years due to avoidable diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, most of which is avoidable. Or about 60% of cancer, 55% of cancers are avoidable. That's something we can all do. And by avoiding them, we're going to live longer. That is longevity. The irresponsible arm of longevity is the one that tells you, take this rapamycin or this metformin or run down to Central America and get stem cells. Yeah, there is, this is scientific fact. There is no pill, no supplement, no longevity hack that has been shown to add years of life expectancy to humans.

[Chip Conley]

It's amazing.

[Dan Buettner]

None. None. There's all kinds of theoretical underpinnings. And will we get to something that intervenes that could actually change the biology of aging?

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

But we're not there yet. And all these longevity bros, they're selling you a pipe dream. And most of the time they have some. Yeah, supplement or some program or olive oil or whatever to. To make money off of you. And they make money off of hyperbole and this sort of circus snake oil salesman of take this right now and you're going to live longer. And it just does not exist. And I'm standing by those words.

[Chip Conley]

And I, I was sort of worried about that you might not go there and tell us your real thoughts on this. But you did, and I appreciate that because I think there's a lot of people who are feeling that there's a bit of a pushback, I think, toward the messaging, which is like, you know, this is, you know, death can maybe be extinct. We can, like, get rid of death as if it's not part of the human condition. I love Becca Levy's work from Yale, and she has shown that over 20 years of, of studies that when people shift their mindset on aging in midlife.

[Dan Buettner]

To look forward to it from a.

[Chip Conley]

Negative to a positive, such that you don't see aging as a overall negative, but overall, there's an unexpected upside of aging. You gain seven and a half years of additional life. So shifting your mindset on aging is better than actually even stopping smoking at 50 or starting exercising at 50. So that's the part that's interesting to me, the idea. And of course, the Power 9 from Blue Zones, these guys in Sardinia are not going to 24 Hour Fitness, nor are they taking supplements. And so there's a history that we can look at to say many of the things that people do to live a longer, healthier life relate to purpose. They relate to social connection. They are not about, you know, being a lab rat. And I think so much of what's going on right now is like the lab rat mentality of, like, if I do these things, it's all metrics based when, you know, when I hear Brian Johnson in his interviews, you know, I think we should cut him some slack because the guy's doing something good for humanity. At the same time, I get depressed when I hear him on his interviews, usually because he seems like a pretty lonely guy. And when you hear how much he's doing and how structured and regimented his life is and how possessed. There's a point at which purpose becomes a possession. The possession of you're possessed by what you're doing. I worry that this is a. This is someone who has maybe lost track of the balance and what's really important in life.

[Dan Buettner]

You know, I, I was ready to hate Brian Johnson. Then I watched his Netflix series, and I became oddly endeared with him. It's here was like, to your point, he was a Guy who was kind of lost but found his purpose. And he not only found his purpose, he attracted a lot of other people were looking for purpose. And I even agree with several of his modalities. You know, I, I think generally speaking he eats diet of longevity. Generally speaking, physical activity is good.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

He's got a number of people to surround himself with. And I think those three things are going to do more to lengthen his life than any of this other snake oil or, you know, young people's plasma or whatever. But it's his purpose. And you know, it's, it's, it's no more unhealthy than being, having a, you know, obsession with the, the Miami Dolphins. You know, it's a, it's, it's because.

[Chip Conley]

He has money and he's spending his own money to do this. I think that's why he gets beaten up a lot.

[Dan Buettner]

There's money, for crying out.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah, but I think at the same time there's a sense that you said it actually and that is that all of these different kinds of modalities that are being introduced, some of which have been around a long time, but most of which are like pill based kind of or medicine based or medical intervention based. There's not much evidence yet that they're having an impact.

[Dan Buettner]

But think about it. The, it's very hard to make money on purpose. You're kind of doing it.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

Yet we both know if you could put purpose in a capsule, it'd be a blockbuster drug for sure. There is billions of dollars of revenue to be made in pharmaceuticals. Put something in pill and market the hell out of it and, and create all this sort of promise that it's going to make you better or more vital or have better sex. And there's, they do have a pill for that. All the marketing, the, the hundreds of marketing messages that rinse over our psyche every single day are telling us to buy something that is going to make us look better, feel better, live longer. Turn on 60 Minutes. I love that show 60 Minutes. It's all bizarre pharmaceut ads. You know, most of these longevity bros, they're going to get right, they're going to get on, try to sell us some, some pill or supplement that is going to make us live longer. None of them are going to. But that's where the money is. There's no money in make three Friends. Yeah, like, like Walter, Robert Waldinger will tell us who care about us on a bad day. Where's the money in that? Where's the money in sitting down, doing a self assessment, understanding what are the things they're going to regret in 10 days, 10 years, and start doing something about today. There is a mountain of academic literature under that supports the efficacies of social connection and purpose. There's nothing under the other ones. But you can't. But you make money over here with, with the quick fix. You don't make it out of the.

[Chip Conley]

With the real thing. You're not gonna have Blue Zone supplements.

[Dan Buettner]

Over my dead body.

[Chip Conley]

Okay, I know, I know you're no longer running the business, but like, you know, like.

[Dan Buettner]

No, but the minute that happens, I'll be gone.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

And the people I work with know that. Okay. When it comes to supplements, first of all, there's only three factories in America that make supplements, whether you're buying them in a fancy jar.

[Chip Conley]

Really?

[Dan Buettner]

Yeah, three major. But you know, most of them source. You know, if you're, if you have this, this bougie boutique supplement that grow your hair or whatever.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

You're going to one of these.

[Chip Conley]

I could use that. I like your hair.

[Dan Buettner]

But the, the only supplements that seem to work with over. When you follow cohorts of people over time are number one, cheap multivitamins, that type you buy for 9.99. For a thousand of them at Costco, that seemed to work, or at least they don't seem to do any harm. Second one, vitamin B12. For vegans, you need vitamin B12. And then vitamin D. For some people. I mean, we're talking general papa. If. If your doctor, a real doctor, tells you you need it. But the. When you take the population of people who take supplements every day and then compare it to the population who don't take supplements, the people who aren't taking supplements have higher life expectancy. So as a group.

[Chip Conley]

Really?

[Dan Buettner]

Yes. So supplement takers have higher mortality. In other words, they're more likely to die than those who aren't. So there's really no argument. Except expensive pee. For taking. For taking supplements.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. Wow.

[Dan Buettner]

Better to find your purpose. Okay, one more vulnerability question. Tell me about a time when you cried.

[Chip Conley]

Oh, you know, cry. So crying. Yeah. No, crying is a funny thing for me because. So there was a time when I was. I was on the seventh grade basketball team and I was a starter and I was pretty good. And I did not make the eighth grade basketball team. And I ran out to the car after I found that out, and I buried my head in my mom's lap and I cried and I was really crushed. But that was at age what? 13, maybe 13. So I was sort of early puberty, and I didn't cry again for about 12 years. And there was a lot of reason for that. I was at that time doing everything I could to live up to my dad's idea of a man. My dad was a Marine captain in the reserves. And I'm Steven Townsend Conley Jr. Chip off the old block. That's where Chip came from. And I, you know, my dad was my baseball coach. I was the star pitcher. My dad was an Eagle Scout and, you know, ran the Boy Scout troop, and I was an Eagle Scout, went to the same college at high school as my dad. I mean, like, I was really on the path there, and I was dating women, you know, girls in high school, women in college. But I knew I was gay, and I knew there was a part of me that felt like I needed to do what I could to hide this. And so crying was not something I was going to do. So from age 12 or 13, let's say 13, until age 24, I didn't cry. Then at 24, I was seeing a therapist. I came out when I was 22, and at 24, I was seeing a therapist, and she fired me. Now, when I say fired me, that's over dramatizing it, but she basically said she'd done everything she could to help. And so I remember walking from the therapy appointment to my car, and I just broke down and cried. And so it was. And it was a lot. I was a lot of changes.

[Dan Buettner]

What were you trying to fix?

[Chip Conley]

I was trying to. Trying to fix and trying to actually be straight. I was trying.

[Dan Buettner]

Oh, my God.

[Chip Conley]

I know, I know, I know. And so there was this sense of like, okay, I can now just surrender to this. And so. But as I've gotten, you know, older, I mean, being. I've been the hero, being the tough guy, being the. Always trying to sort of. There's. I. It's not like I'm not vulnerable. You. You. You see me in the classroom. I mean, I don't mind being candid and vulnerable and all that, but I think tears for me has always been tough because of my dad. So long story short is the times I am most apt to cry are watching a film on a plane. And it could be a schmaltzy film I'll never forget. I was watching, oh, Finding Forrester. I was watching that movie on a plane, and I just lost it. And the woman sitting next to me just started holding my hand.

[Dan Buettner]

Oh, my.

[Chip Conley]

It was so beautiful. I hadn't met her at all. We hadn't talked, but she just started holding my hand. So a film that really touches me will take me there. When it comes to my relational life, when someone's going through a really hard time, you know, you know, maybe suicidal thoughts, emotionally in a really difficult place, I will shed tears. Where I have a really hard time. I don't think I've cried. In fact, I haven't cried around my cancer. I have not had that cathartic experience. So maybe because it's been a gift, maybe because it's been a gift, maybe because there's a part of me on some levels that says, like, you have to be strong, you know? You know, big boys don't cry. So. So I cry.

[Dan Buettner]

Except on airplanes with dorky movies.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. With strangers. So I would just say at mea in a. In a typical workshop, there's a lot of crying going on. And so there are times when I. When. When someone will say something and, you know, I get. I get teary.

[Dan Buettner]

I will say, chip the. The mea. A lot of people from around the world, and they're. They have their own problems, and they. Sometimes they've done extraordinary things in life, and sometimes they're just normal people. And you're kind of the God. I mean, you're the. You're famous from these books, and you've been financially successful and you've built these amazing retreats, spaces, and you come in there like everybody's friend. And. And I wouldn't be. Again, I wouldn't be saying this. I haven't experienced. Yeah, you're. You're empathetic. You come off as thinking to yourself, I'm no better than you. I am going on this journey with you.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

I'm here to metaphorically hold your hand and take you on the journey. And you don't throw off this air of superiority at all. And. And I think that is, whatever you've done to overcome that hubris, I. I just kind of high five you here.

[Chip Conley]

Listen, I. There's a guy named Richard Rohr, famous Christian mystic and written 50 books. And he says the most important thing to know in life is a humiliation a day, hopefully mild. And he's a new app. Yeah.

[Dan Buettner]

You're not as good as you think.

[Chip Conley]

Yes. Having the humility.

[Dan Buettner]

Live in Minnesota is easy.

[Chip Conley]

Yeah. Yeah. No, having humility is. Is. I actually think reinforces life as well. And for me, the last thing I want to be is a guru. You know, there's lots of. There's lots of retreat centers or programs. I don't want to be Tony Robbins. I'm not looking to.

[Dan Buettner]

Not enough hair anyway.

[Chip Conley]

No, I just, I don't. I don't really want to be that person who is put up on a pedestal. So I think one of the surprises for a lot of people when they're coming to a workshop where I'm co leading it, like I did with you, is that I will be vulnerable and I'll actually, I'll go there. I'm not there to be the genius nor the guru. I'm there to be the human. One of the things I say is I'm in the business of making love. And that is not, you know, when you lose all your testosterone, you're definitely not in the business of making love. But when you create the conditions for people to fall in love with each other as quickly as we do at mea, you're doing something the world needs more of. And so my. If you were to distill down who I am and what my gift is in the world, because I love the quote from David Viscott, who says, the purpose of your life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it and the meaning of life is to give it away. My gift is to be a social alchemist, a mixologist of people, creating a potent cocktail of people coming together in a vulnerable way to discover a little bit more about who they are.

[Dan Buettner]

I love that. That was like the end of an epic novel. There's been no focus on optimizing midl life. All this talk about retirement and end of life and old age. But here you're bringing the best voices in the world to this topic we've completely overlooked, but it's arguably the most important period of our lives. You're bringing purpose to it.

[Chip Conley]

Well, the truth is we do focus on the end of life a lot and we focus on that health system. Certainly does. The investment you make in your midlife helps your end of life, there's no doubt about that. I mean, both extends it, it deepens, it makes it more happy. So, yes, I wanted, really wanted to demystify, elevate and operationalize midlife in a way where people could say, I now have a roadmap. The reality is, 500 years ago, cartographers became very important because there was a whole part of the world that nobody had ever seen. And so the cartographers would go out with Christopher Columbus and map things, because there was no map of the world.

[Dan Buettner]

Otherwise you fell off. And there was dragons.

[Chip Conley]

That's right. So there was like the flat flat earth society. So I'm sort of a cartographer in the sense that with the extension of longevity as we've had it, midlife has become a longer life stage and yet we have no roadmap for it. We have roadmaps for early in life. We have roadmaps for the end of life. We have social infrastructure to help support adolescents. Where is the social infrastructure to support middlescents, people in the middle of their life?

[Dan Buettner]

Where do we find your podcast? Where do we find out about mea? Where do we follow you on Instagram?

[Chip Conley]

You'll find Midlife Chrysalis wherever you listen to podcasts, chipconley.com is how people find me. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I have a daily blog which you'll find on the Chip Conley website or on the MEA website. The MEA website's meawisdom.com so those are all the ways. And yes, I'm on Instagram and my newest book is the Midlife Manifesto, a book that is really a distillation of everything I know about midlife in a format that is you can read it in an hour.

[Dan Buettner]

So the original modern elder, Chip Conway, thank you very much.