They say that life gets greater later. There's so much joy, so much wisdom, and so much beauty that comes later in life. My guest today is on a mission to share this perspective. Chip Conley is a best-selling author and co-founder of the Modern Elder Academy. It's the world's first midlife wisdom school. After an impressive career in hospitality, first as a founder of joie de vivre hospitality, and then as Airbnb's head of global hospitality and strategy, Chip is now leading a worldwide revolution to reframe midlife. In his latest book, Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life gets Better with Age, Chipp is changing the narrative around midlife, helping people navigate this often misunderstood life stage with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. He's urging all of us to make aging aspirational and to embrace the transformative opportunity that midlife presents us with. This conversation will totally shift your perspective and inspire you to find joy, purpose, and success in the years that lie ahead to make these years our best ones yet. I'm Hoda Cotv. Welcome to my podcast, Making Space. Okay, Chipp, I'm going to start off by saying I loved you before I met you.

I was so eager to meet you. And just to tell people a little bit about our history, I had heard about you through multiple friends. All roads led to Chip Conley. Literally, I went to a friend, a friend of mine, Joanne. Have you heard about this, Chip Conley? I went to this other person, Maria Shriver. You heard about Chip Conley? I'm like, Who's this, Chip Conley? And then I got to sit opposite from you, and I realized that you were saying things that I hadn't heard people say before. Anyway, it's great to be sitting with you here today.

I feel like we were separated at birth. If I wasn't a gay man, I'd want to marry you. Oh, my God. I may want to marry you anyways.

I did say to Maria, Is there a chance there with him? She said, I don't think so. So, Chipp, let's talk about this because midlife is a time in life that I think people dread. They call it the midlife. Midlife is like, yuck, you're over the hill, you're counting down your summers, how many summers do I have left? All that terrible stuff. That is not how you see it.

Well, let's also start by saying midlife is a new phenomena. I don't think we have actually... It's like the gag gift. People don't know what to do with it. And the reason I say it's new is because in the year 1900, longevity in the United States was 47. By the year 2000, it was 77. So we added 30 years, three decades of life in one century. And the One of the biggest phenomena that came out of that was the fact that midlife became a thing. And yet the only meme that came out of this was the idea that midlife is a crisis based upon a Canadian psychologist who coined the term midlife crisis. Now, he studied a few, mostly men. And what he studied was like, okay, they were going through something where they wanted to go back to adolescents. So we know the trope of Kevin in American Beauty. Oh, yeah. The red car.

Shiny car.

Dating his daughter's best friend in high school. And long story short is midlife is so much more complex than that. It is a time of life where we are learning how to let go of the things that we're losing, often physical ones. But we're actually learning how to gain things, too. And that's why I wrote this book, Learning to Love Midlife, 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age. Because the 12 reasons that I cite in the book are not things that we talk about a lot in terms of what gets better with age. So, yeah, midlife is the Rodney danger field of life stages. It don't get no respect. I just wanted to say, hey, it does deserve some respect because, quite frankly, the U Curve of Happiness shows that people get happier after age 50.

Wait, say that again.

There's something called the U Curve of Happiness. It's a social science research project globally, and it shows that people's level of life satisfaction declines from their early 20s till around 45 to 50. 47.2 is the low point. Okay. And then, although your mileage may vary. Yeah, of course. After 50, you get happier with each decade. And so the societal narrative on aging is it sucks. The personal narrative is, no, actually it doesn't. We do have a low point in midlife, and then things get better. And so what I really wanted to do was take that social science and make it mainstream.

I think people compare themselves to their old self. I used to be a runner or who ran in Central Park every day, and now I can only do one lap, or I used to be able to do this, and now I can't. They see it as what they're losing as they're going through life. But how do you turn the narrative around?

Well, for women, the number one thing that they actually feel like they're losing is visibility. So invisibility is what they start to feel. And for men, it's irrelevance. It's the feeling like you're no longer relevant. And so maybe we have to learn how to be visible in new ways. And maybe there's new kinds of... For women, there's new kinds habitats where people are going to appreciate the fact. How? What? Well, one thing means not having to worry as much about what you look like. Now, if you're on air like you, you have to worry about it. And you look hot. I mean, you look great. But the bottom line is for a lot of women, it doesn't mean... So I like to think of our body as being a rental vehicle that we were issued at birth. And so we got this rental vehicle and we want to maintain it, make sure it looks good. And for a lot of us, as we get in the middle In our life, we get so obsessed by how does it look like on the outside. We don't really think about how does it feel on the inside.

And what's really important as we get older is to focus on what does it feel like on the inside. It doesn't mean you let go of your body. It doesn't mean you say, okay, I'm going to just become fat and never exercise. You want to maintain the vehicle still. But what you really want to focus on is what the vehicle feels like on the inside. As we get older, our emotional intelligence gets better. As we get older, our wisdom grows. As we get older, we're more compassionate. As we're older, we have more spiritual curiosity. These are all things that get better with age. But if we tend to focus on what isn't doing well, then we lose track of what is getting better.

I think a lot of people have spent a lot of their life thinking, If I just get that house, I'll be happy. If I just get that car. Once my last kid gets off to college, I've done And the line keeps moving. But I think people are finding that happiness is not at the end of all that.

So there's almost like an American perspective, which is the pursuit of happiness. If I create success, I will get happiness. But in fact, it's quite the opposite. If I pursue happiness, maybe I'll actually create success. And so for me, I think one of the things that I learned in my midlife is my definition of success changed. I like to call the cultural imprint of success, successism. And successism is this thing like, says, oh, you got to keep up with the Joneses. But what if you don't want to do what the Joneses are doing? What if your definition of success is not having a better BMW than your neighbor's? What if your definition of success relates to how it makes you feel about doing things that actually make the world a better place or make you a more interesting human? So for many people, it's around midlife that they start to unravel the expectations they've had. Brené Brown calls it the midlife unraveling. They start to really get clearer on what is important to them in their lives.

I think people get scared to get off the train because Because you know what? It's been working. I have bills to pay. I have things to do. Of course, this may not be the thing that's bringing me joy, but you know what? Sometimes in life, you just got to ride the train.

That's true. When When you have a lot of obligations, so often someone in midlife is, we talk about the sandwich generation. You're taking care of aging parents while taking care of kids in your family, whether they're teenagers or younger or maybe millennial kids who are frankly struggling in their 20s or 30s. So yes, when you're in that stage, there's not a lot of me time available. But the reality is that's part of what happens in midlife and later midlife, especially, is you start to realize, I need some me time because I have lost myself I've been tending to everybody else with caregiving, and I don't have- I'm empty. I don't have anything for me. So that's why one of the things I would recommend people do, and I talk about this in the book, is to look at what are the small things you could do that's caregiving. I talked about this earlier. I went last night, knowing I was coming here today, I went last night to Air, A-W-R in New York City, and I just took the baths and I hung out the baths. Like a cold plunge? Cold plunge, warm plunge. But I just needed two hours of just- Just for you.

Chip time. We need more of that. I do meditation that helps me provide that. Going for a walk with your dog in nature provides that. Hanging out with young ones, but maybe not your young ones, because when it comes to your own kids, you have a tendency to like, oh, you're protective and you're like trying to- Hovering. Yeah, you're hovering. But if it's someone else's kids or as you get older, your grandkids, there's much more of a sense of joy in hanging out with the kids and picking up on their sense of being in the moment. And so for kids, their emotions, they don't have mixed emotions. They have full on 100% happiness, 100% sadness. And so to be in that state when in midlife, we're often full of mixed emotions, to actually be with those who are having pure unfiltered emotions can actually be very good for us.

What if you feel like you might be ready for this shift? I like how you break it down, the three stages of life. What is it? Learning and then earning.

From The traditional way we thought of life was there's three stages of life, the tyranny of the three phases. The first phase is learning till you're 20 or 25. The second phase is earning until you're 60 or 65. And then the third phase is retiring or ajourning and go living on a golf course. And that three-stage tyranny of life is changing. First of all, millennials and Gen Z look at that like, no way. No way. They want to take a sabbatical at 35. They want to go back to get a master's at 40, et cetera. And so I think today we're learning how to have a more episodic life. I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to go do that, and then I'm going to do that. Both of my grandfathers had one career their whole life. Never had anything but that. The average person in the year 1960 had only three jobs in a lifetime. Today, it's 12 to 13. We got to get better at what I call TQ, transitional intelligence. Learning how to master and navigate transitions in your life, whether they're professional or personal or societal.

Well, how do you... So let's pretend you might be ready for a change. You're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, whatever it is, and you're thinking to yourself, I've been doing this job. It's not for me. I actually want to find more. I want the wisdom. I want the spiritual connection. I want the purpose. I want all that stuff. So how do you go about finding out what that might be for you?

Well, let's start with just doing the deep dive. So a lot of times people procrastinate because they feel like, I don't even know what it would be. So there's There's lots of tools for doing that. My book, Learning to Love Midlife is helpful for that. The Modern Elder Academy, MEA, the Midlife Wisdom School I created as part of that. But start with this question, what is it that makes you passionate? And often there's one of four paths that leads to your passion. Something that excites you, that gets you turned on, something that agitates you, that makes you pissed off. Something that actually makes you curious. Then fourthly, and actually often the one that's most interesting, is something from childhood that feels like it needs some attention again. At the MEA recently, we had a woman, a litigation attorney. She was 60 years old. She was very hardened because being a litigation attorney means you're arguing and you're pretty much having to put on armor every day to negotiate. The thing that she learned in the course of a workshop is she learned that in childhood, she loved cooking pies with her grandmother. When ever she'd go into a bakery, she loves the smell of baking rise.

And so at the end of the week, she said, in the next year, I am going to put down my career and my career as a litigation attorney, and I'm going to go to pastry, become a pastry chef, go to pastry school, and then I'm going to create a bakery in my neighborhood. And she's doing that now. And so the starting point is the passion. What's the passion? What gets you turned on? And that's not easy. So sometimes you have to have someone to help coach you with that. It could be a spouse, it could be literally a coach, it could be a friend. And then you go into the process of saying, Okay, how can I try that? You don't have to quit your job. So for her, she says, I'm not going to actually quit my litigation career until I actually sign up as a pastry chef and do it for three months and see in my learning in a pastry school if I like it. And she does, and she did. And so now she's in her final process of leaving the career that she's had for 35 years. So long story short is taking baby steps in the right direction, making sure you have enough money in the bank, making sure that you know that, frankly, some people are going to say you're an idiot.

Because often when we're in the midst of transition in our life, other people don't like it because it almost puts them in a systemic role where they have to change to. I don't know if that's ever happened with you in a marriage or in a business partnership or with a friend where you're all of a sudden starting to flourish in a new way, and they're resenting it because in some ways it makes them feel like Okay, God, I got to change as well. For a lot of people, change is frightening, and we get comfortable in our discomfort.

When I was talking to Maria a few weeks ago, and we're talking about change, and she said, I call it repotting. She said, It's not moving or changing, it's repotting. You're giving your roots more room to grow. That's right. You need to pull it up by the roots, but you need to put it in a new place, and it gives you more breathing room.

There's social science research on this. They call it environmental mastery. As we get older, what we are able to do is we get better at knowing what habitats we flourish in, so where we repot ourselves. Whether that's the community we live in or the career we're in, the culture of the company we're with, the friends we have, we get We get better at understanding how that habitat will allow us to flourish. And so the reason we know that is probably because we've been in environments that didn't make us flourish. We've been in relationships that weren't working. And so we get better at that. And so learning how to repot is a very important part of it. When I joined Airbnb as a 52-year-old former hotelier, I was joining a tech company, and I was like, oh, my God, I don't understand tech at all. But I started to call this same seed, different soil. Oh, that's interesting. And so the different soil was like, I'm in a tech company, but it's a tech company focused on hospitality. And it's fertile soil for me with my learning and my wisdom that I've generated in my life to come and plant it there in this fertile soil.

So understanding what's your seed, what's the gift? I love this phrase, The purpose of your life is to find your gift. The work of life is to develop it. And the meaning of life is to give it away. That's good. It is good. That's good. That's David Viscott. Give him credit.

And Chills. Okay.

Yeah. So understanding your gift. And one of the things we do at MEI, at the Modernology Company, is to help people to own their wisdom and understand what their gift is.

People must have thought you were crazy. I mean, you were a hotelier. You were doing well. You, joie de vivre was your hotel chain. You sold it at the worst possible time. I did. And you talk about people's reaction to your change is going to be jarring. Did they say to you, what is Chip?

You just threw everything away. Oh, my God. So I was 26 when I started that company. I was about 50 when I sold it, and it was at the bottom of the Great Recession. So I was selling it at the worst time in the market. But I just knew that this wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. At age 47, I had an NDE, a near-death experience, where I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And it was partly because I went to Gavin Newsman's bachelor party. My first mentee in life was Gavin Newsom. Oh, wow. Yes. I was 35. He was 28. His sister, he wasn't a politician yet. He was running a hospitality company, didn't know what he was doing. And so his sister said, I want you to meet Chip, and I want Chip to become your mentor. And so for the next few... Oh, you mentored him? I'm still his mentor. I'm still I'm a mentor in some ways. Bottom line is I learned a lot from him. He learned from me. He was having a second marriage. He was having a bachelor party. I broke my ankle at the bachelor party playing baseball with him, and I got a bacterial I had a injection in my leg.

So I was put on an antibiotic, and it was way too strong for some reason. And I died after giving a speech on stage. And I was signing books. And next thing I knew, I was unconscious. And then I had a flatline experience. They brought back to life. I had nine flat lines in 90 minutes. This was in St. Louis. What do you remember about that? I went to the other side.

Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, I want to know.

The reason I know this is partly because I had on the paramedic drive there, There was a woman next to me, and I kept telling her what was happening. When I was in intensive care or actually in the emergency room, I said to the nurse, and it was the same vision. What was happening was I was in this mountain chalet on the second floor with a high ceiling and a skylight. The light was beautiful. It was blue skies, and I could hear birds everywhere. There are birds flying indoor in the home. There was light coming in, and there was a kaleidoscope like a rainbow on the wall. Everything was moving very slowly. The wood floor, there was a viscuus, very heavy oil that had a frangipani tropical scented smell. And it was going along the floor and starting to go down the stairs, but very slowly. And so what I took from that, there was no other people there. Was there light? There was a lot of light. But more than anything, what I took from that was to slow down and to actually just appreciate the beauty of life and the esthetics and to be in a state of awe.

In that state of awe, I came out of it and I kept thinking like, okay, well, I don't feel a of awe very much in my normal life at 47. And so when I left the hospital two days later, I just said, I've got to change everything. My relationship wasn't working. So I did. I had to do what I call the great midlife edit. And I do feel like that's part of what midlife is about. The first half of life you're accumulating, the second half of life with your discernment of what's important to you, you start to edit.

Coming up, Chip shares practices to help navigate midlife and why he believes we are not only growing older, but we're also growing wiser. Stay with us. People love to pretend that there are simple formulas for living your best life now. Eat this and you won't get sick. Manifest it and everything will work out. But there are some things you can choose and some things you can't. It's okay that life isn't always getting better. I'm Kate Bowler, and on Everything Happens, I speak with kind, smart, funny people about life as it really is. Beautiful, terrible, and everything in between. Let's be human together. Everything Happens is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Wow, this person is trapped in the wrong story, and we got to get them out of that story. My name is Kevin Miller. I'm the host of the Self-Helful podcast.

So many of the books that we read about family relationships, it's based on a theory.

Join me as I curate and translate the most effective self-help wisdom to help you elevate your personal experience and improve the way you show up for others.

You mentioned the word awe, and that strikes me always. I remember a conversation with you and Maria at the time. You talk about there are different, I guess, levels of awe.

Yeah. There's a guy named Dacher Keltner. I love this man. He's a UC Berkeley professor. He started the Greater Good Science Center. And he studies awe, and he wrote a book in early 2023 that was a best seller called Awe Awe. And he studied the eight most common pathways to feeling awe in life. Because frankly, feeling awe is life-inspiring. It gives you a sense of vitality. And they talk about in midlife, it's great to take awe walks when you're actually in nature. You'd think that the number one item of what creates awe is nature. But it's number three on the list. Number two on the list is something that we feel with other people, and that is collective effervescence. It's when you're You're at a gospel choir on a Sunday, or you're at an artistic event or a sports event, or you're with a group of friends at dinner, and everybody just feels goosebumps because their sense of ego separation is dissolving and their sense of communal joy is emerging. And so you know what that feels like. I was on the board of... I was a founding board member of Burning Man. Oh, you were?

Yeah, the arts festival. Of course. And so collective effervescence is what we feel it at Burning Man. Number one on the list, and this is the clincher with Maria, was moral beauty. Moral beauty is when you actually are witnessing someone or a situation in which you're seeing courage and compassion and kindness and equanimity in such a way that you say, Oh, my gosh, humanity is beautiful. And so what I said to Maria then, because I love her, I love both of you so much, What I saw from her was this single woman later in life who's so beautiful. She is a moral beauty. And so it was the first time I'd ever said that to anybody in my life was like, Hey, Maria, as I was leaving and saying goodbye to you guys, I was like, You're a moral beauty. I appreciated saying that, and I appreciated how she responded and how you responded, because that may be one of the best things somebody could ever say to someone else.

I mean, and she has that in spades, and you're so right. And when you do witness something, I started after you talked about those levels of awe. It's so funny how often I saw them. All of a sudden you look, and sometimes it's even someone across the way doing a kindness for somebody and you're like, and not you doing it. It's like you witnessing somebody else and you're just an electron circling and you go, wow. It's like small things, big things, all things.

It's contagious. Our emotions are contagious. And when you see someone doing that and showing up as an enlightened mirror for you. It gives you the courage to say, oh, I can do that, too. Unfortunately, we live in an era that is not full of moral beauty. And yet I think part of my role in life today is to help elevate that again. Frankly, if you can get to know people from the inside out, it usually means you get to see all that good stuff.

Part of the reason people go, again, you mentioned this a couple of times But the Modern Elder Academy is a place that people go who are in this stage of life and wondering what's next. Sarah Blakely is a graduate, the founder of Spanks. Spanks. Yeah. Your list is long, but there must be a way without giving away what goes on there that you help people find their purpose because some people are going there to say, Am I on the right road?

Yeah, there's really four reasons why people come. One is typically they're navigating midlife transitions. We have a lot of transitions in midlife, menopause and divorce and changing careers and parents passing away and health diagnosis, et cetera. So that's the one. Second one is cultivating purpose. How do we help people cultivate purpose? And in some ways, that goes back to that idea of passion. How do we get them back to passion? The third piece is, how do we help people to own their wisdom, to see their gift, to understand what it is that they're supposed to be doing with this one wild precious life, to quote Mary Oliver. And then fourthly is, how do you help people reframe their relationship with aging? That's good. Becker-levy from Yale has shown that when people actually shift their mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, they gain seven and a half years of additional life. Wait, is that... Wow. It's true. Seven and a half years. So if you stop smoking at 50, you get four years. If you start exercising at 50, you get three years. If you shift your mindset on aging from negative to positive, you get more life than those two combined.

And so we see all these tech pros out there trying to buy They'll hack their way to never dying. And yet dying is an amazing organizing principle for life, and scarcity breeds value. So knowing that you only have so much life left actually means these moments matter. I'm a big believer that the longevity is having its moment. People are very focused on how do I live longer. But knowing Becka Levy's work from Yale shows that the number one way you do that is to actually shift your mindset is critical. And at Harvard, a Bob Wauwinger, who started the Harvard... Or it didn't start. He's been running the Harvard Adult Development Study that's been going on for 85 years. He's shown that the people who are healthy in their 80s and 90s, the number one variable is not how did they eat or how did they sleep or anything related to that. It had everything to do with how did they invest in their social relationships in midlife.

Let's talk about that. That's important because I think a lot of people are like, This is my childhood friend. We've been friends since second grade. I see her three times a year because she moved to North Carolina. Here's this one, here's that one. How do you, in your '40s, '50s, and '60s, cultivate, find new friends? How is that possible?

I'm a big fan of social wellness. The word illness starts with the letter I, and the word wellness starts with the letters we. It doesn't mean that being I-focused is a bad thing. When it comes to your wellness, yeah, sleep well and eat well, and exercise well. These are good things. But what really matters for a longer, healthier, happier life. The Blue Zones research, and Dan Butner is on our faculty, MEA, and his research on the centenarians of the world have shown the same thing.

For people who don't know, real quick, Blue Zones are the spots around the world where people live the longest. That's correct. They factor in what they eat, what they do, who they hang around with, all that stuff.

If you think of friendship as a practice, meaning it's something you got to do and get better at over time. Often it in our 20s, 30s, and 40s because we're so busy, and 50s, especially if you're having kids late. There's only so much time of friend time because I'm working hard and then I've got my kids. If you think of it like a practice like meditation, if you say, Okay, well, I'm going to give a certain amount of time to it. Then the practice of what makes a friendship deeper is life-changing conversations. So, yeah, we can talk about the weather, but maybe you should talk about the internal weather, not the external weather. What's going on for you? And women are so much better at this. I mean, women are so much better to go to the vulnerability place. We didn't grow up as boys learning how to talk about our vulnerabilities. For men, it's actually a tougher path. But this is one of the things we help teach at MEA. There's lots of great books on friendship. There's a guy named Mark Nippo, and he's one of our family members. Love him. He's teaching a class on the power of friendship.

There are lots of tools for people to understand this. But the best thing to know is you have some friends who've known you a long time, and some of them, those friendships may have atrophied. The key is to just say, You know what? Reach out to a friend. I reached out to a friend from high school the other day, and I said, I haven't really talked with you in 30 or 40 years. I loved you in high school. I really enjoyed our conversations. I'm coming back to Long Beach, California for a few days. Can we have lunch? And take the risk. Take the Take the risk. And then go have that conversation. And don't keep it all in the past. And talk about what your life's like. Midlife is a time where we start to shed the identities and the showing off. Just show up. Don't worry about showing off. Show up. That's so good. Because showing up is what other people want to do as well. Yes. But you've got to sometimes be the first one to do it.

There's so much going on right now. Okay, wait. I love this because this book is a great, great book. It's called Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life gets Better with Age. Twelve Reasons, and you hit them. I'm just going to read a couple of them from the front. Hang on. Okay. Hang on. We got the physical life. We talked about the emotional life and the mental life. What about the spiritual life? Let's talk a little bit about that. Sure. So discovering... A lot of people in this stage of life is when they are deciding or discovering what they believe, because Maria and I had this conversation. She said, Try to think about in your life what you believe for yourself, not what was taught to you, not what was drummed into you, not what you were taught. This is what we do in our family, but what you truly and sincerely believe independently. Sometimes you discover that late.

What if you turned your 10 Commandments into your 10 Commitments? What if you actually looked at your 10 Commitments for how you're going to show up in life as a person who has sacredness, like a divine intoxication of how you live your life so that It's not necessarily defined by your parents or even by a dogma or religion. Although if a new religion, especially, is singing to you, go for it. Richard Roar, who's on our faculty at MEA. Richard Roar is a Christian mystic, famous, famous Catholic priest who's really got a universal belief in Christianity. He's beliefs in all religions, and that all these religions have the same themes. And so he's not somebody who says, Oh, our religion is better than your religion. And he's a remarkable author. He's written 50 books. So long story short is Richard says that the first half of our life, our primary operating system is our ego. It defines how we operate. And then it's around midlife that without telling us the greater sources in the world change our operating system from our ego to our soul. But no one gave us operating instructions. I like the thing of it.

My metaphor for it is that I learned to ballroom dance in sixth grade, and I learned, okay, the boy leads the girls, backwards in heels. I learned that that's how it worked. I think that for the first half for our life. The ego is the male leading the dance. But it's around midlife that the female, the soul, starts to lead the dance. And then the ego has to learn how to go backwards in heels, which is not easy for the ego. That's good. So you better have a sense of humor for your ego because it's not used to that. So how does this show up in people's lives? Sometimes it shows up with a sense of meaning, a search for meaning. So meaning and purpose, and sometimes even a curiosity around mystery, like the mysteries of life. And so these are some things that come up for people in midlife. Sometimes they come up because they're going through very difficult circumstances in their life. And this is the wake up call for something deeper inside themselves. The other thing that I think that's happening that's in the spiritual realm is, yes, we're getting older, but we're also not only growing old, but also growing wiser and also growing whole.

And as we're younger, we're compartmentalized. That with that group of friends, we act this way. With this group of friends, we act this way. In this work setting, we do that. In that work setting, we do this. And it's around midlife that we don't care so much about what everybody else thinks of us. And we just show up with unvarnished insight and love. And that's who we are. And by showing up that way, what happens? Well, my God, we feel so integrated. And the word integrity speaks to integration. To integrate all of those various parts of yourself into a whole gives you a sense of relief and liberation that you don't feel so scattered.

I think people early in life and late in life, there's a bunch of people-pleasers. I was just thinking I had Jamie Lee Curtis on yesterday, and she said, I've been a people-pleaser for years. She said, I just decide that I don't give a rip anymore. She said, When you stop being a people-pleaser, people will not be pleased. Be ready for it because it comes like that. But finding that... It took a lot of bravery for her. We just saw Jody Foster not too long ago, and she was saying she might still be one, even when you get older.

Well, especially for those who are in the limelight, to be an admiration addict. I mean, it's like that's what I call myself sometimes. It's like, I want to be admired. I want people to feel like, Okay, Chip, you're just so admirable. At some point, great. I love that. At my eulogy, come talk about me. But at some point, you have to get to a place of realizing the most important person, as cliché as it sounds, that I need to satisfy as myself. If I feel like I am embodying who I'm supposed to be on this wild, precious journey I'm on, man, that's the best thing I can do. Other people can tap into that. As we get older, people get fearful like, oh, everybody's going to be ages, especially in the workplace and trying to get a job. If you show up with curiosity and a passionate engagement for life, people don't notice your wrinkles. They notice your energy. When you see someone's energy at any age, you notice their It's that presence that people want to tap into. I feel that with you right now.

I feel like crying right now for just no apparent reason because you know why? When something's real, what you just said was so just landed for me in a beautiful way. Still ahead, Chip shares the daily rituals he holds sacred and what he believes we should all be making space for in midlife when we come back. Let's face it, money is the one subject we all need to deal with, but no one actually wants to talk about. The good news is there's a podcast helping you learn everything about money no one taught you. Meet Everyone's Talking Money, hosted by me, Shanna Game. Everyone's Talking Money focuses on relevant, inclusive, and forward-thinking conversations around money, and just helps you get in a better relationship with your money no matter what your goals are. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to Everyone's Talking Money podcast podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Jenna Bush-Haker from Today with Hoda and Jenna and the Read with Jenna Book Club. There's nothing I love more than sharing my favorite reads with all of you, except maybe talking to the exceptional authors behind these stories.

And that's what I'll be doing on my podcast, Read with Jenna. I'll be introducing you to some of my favorite writers. These conversations will leave you feeling inspired and entertained. To start listening, just search Read with Jenna wherever you get your podcast. So you have a practice that you do every day. I think whenever people listen to this show, they like to know. I want what he's having. How do you start and how do you end your days, Jip?

I love that because I'm pretty rigid about this. I start my day, I get up, I meditate. It could be five minutes, it could be 20 minutes. It's usually not a long time. It's enough time to just center myself to the day.

Are you listening to music? Are you doing something?

No, I'm usually just sitting and just quiet. Then I go for a walk with my dog Jamie in nature, and I exercise. Soon after that, I do an inversion machine. I turn myself upside down for about eight minutes. It's really remarkable. It's actually quite good for your spinal column, but it's actually, I don't know, it's like a rush of blood to my head. Then I write. I sometimes do the writing even before that. If I wake up really early and it's dark still. But I have a practice of writing every morning. What are you writing? I have a daily blog. It's called Wisdom Well. Now, the blog you see each day from me was written maybe two weeks earlier. I'm not writing, and it comes out at 5:15 Pacific Time. Yeah, you've written them. There's a little cue. But I write. I do that. I write for books. I sometimes write in a personal journal. On weekends, what I do, my practice is I will write in my wisdom journal. It's the things I've learned that week. What did I learn? Often it's painful lessons. Oftentimes it's painful lessons. So what did I learn? How it will serve me moving forward?

I have 35 years now of journals and now Google Docs of this information.

So you don't do gratitude, you do wisdom.

I do wisdom instead of gratitude. I've done gratitude as well. The key thing with a gratitude journal or practice is to make it specific. So the problem with sometimes gratitude practices is it's very generalized.

The more specific is, the better.

At the end of the day, what I do, and I'm pretty rigid about what time I go to bed, probably you are too. What time do you go to? I go to bed between 8:00 and 9:00 every night, including weekends. When I'm with and stuff like that. Sometimes I'll go later, but I don't like it going later because I know when I'm going to wake up. Weekdays, do you wake up? What time do you wake up in the morning?

Three.

I wake up about 3:30. Sometimes 4:00, 4:30. Average for me probably is about 4:00 to 4:30. I love it. It's a very sacred time. For you, you're getting your- But I actually do that.

I actually have something like you. I usually get up at 3:00, and I do it so that I can have... I try to get an hour. I do 20 minutes of meditation, and I do some writing in my journal, and I do a check. I do a mind... I do a spirit check. Like, what does my spirit need today? I do, what does my body need today? Sometimes I need a manicure. Sometimes I need to walk in nature. Sometimes I need a break. Sometimes I need a hot bath. I'll write down whatever in that moment, and my intellect will ask, what do you need? And I said, yesterday, I wrote, I need another chapter of Chips' book because I've been reading your book. So it made me feel So I wrote, that's what my brain needs. And what is my emotional self need? And I said, I need to cuddle up with my kids when I get home from work. But I write down specifics, and the next day I'll realize, because they're very easy things to do. It's not so lofty. And then I scribble, and then I get into. But I don't check my phone or the news of the day or who won what, even sports, nothing until I'm done because I just feel like you can open a gateway and the world comes rushing, it's like, I'm not ready yet.

I need a minute.

I think that practices, things that we think of as rituals in our life are really important. Sometimes people would call them routines. But the difference between a routine and a ritual is a routine is something you're maybe doing, maybe unconsciously. I do it. But a practice is is something that actually feels sacred. It feels like if you don't do it, it's noticeable, and it is something that is actually fueling you. I think that that's another thing that is a midlife quality is learning how to find rituals and even rites of passage, things that actually... In adolescents, we have all kinds of rites of passage. We have bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, kintinieras, communions, graduation ceremonies, commencement ceremonies. Your first date. There's all these things, these rites of passage. In midlife, which is also called middle essence, adolescence and middle essence. I like that. Middle essence has no rites of passage, no rituals. And it has... There's nothing. There's nada. And so learning how to create rituals, whether it's a 50th birthday party with friends or an empty nest party. If you're an empty nester, when your kids go away, throw a party with your friends who are also empty nesters.

When you're going into menopause or perimenopause with your friends, have that experience. Talk about it.

I love it. I like how you... I mean, also college and gap years or something of that age. But why can't you have a gap year when you're a grown up?

Listen, Mary Katherine Bateson, who is the daughter of Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, famous psychologist, called it a midlife atrium. She said, and she's a Harvard professor, she's passed away now. But she says, We're living longer. And somehow in society, we think that means we're old longer. But she said, No, we're in midlife longer. And she said, What we need to do in midlife is to create a midlife atrium, a time where we have spaciousness, where we can actually maybe have a gap year or a sabbatical that allows us to ask ourselves, how do I want to consciously curate the second half of my adult life?

Brilliant. Well, Chip, you're a dream. Learning to love midlife, 12 reasons why life gets better with age. You're amazing. And guys, don't forget, check out his book, The Modern elder Academy is a great place to go. It's a lot of people go as a rite of passage. You got one in Santa Fe, one in Baja.

That's right. Santa Fe, New Mexico, a 2,600 acre regenerative horse wrench, and then a beachfront campus in Baja. It's amazing. And my daily blog. I mean, if you want to know more about this and don't even want to buy the book yet, just check out Wisdomwell. You can find it on chipconnolly. Com or meawisdom. Com. Chip, thank you. This is great. Thank you. Love you. Love you.

Making Space with Hoda Khatbi is produced by Allison Berger and Alexa Kaseveckia, along with Kate Saunders and Abigail Russ. Our associate audio engineer is Giuliana Mastrilli. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katherine Anderson. Original music by John Estes. Bryson Barnes is our head of audio production. Missy Dunlop-Parsons is our executive producer. Libby Leekst is the executive vice president of Today and Lifestyle. You can't judge a book by its cover. If you're looking for another podcast that uncovers stories, then check out Missing Pages, the award-winning series praised as a Must Listen by the Washington Post. In the brand new season, hosted by me, NPR Book Critic, Beth Ann Patrick, we unravel the biggest and sometimes messiest tales from the book world with the help of special guests like best-selling author Jody Picault. Hear about the surprise empire of Colleen Hoover, the rise of book bands, and so much more. Don't miss it. Listen to Missing Pages wherever you get podcasts.