Transcript

Rapid Response: The rise of the “wisdom worker,” w/Modern Elder Academy’s Chip Conley

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I think it's time for us to reimagine education and disrupt it. Research shows that around forty five to fifty we do have our lowest point of happiness in life. But it's not necessarily a crisis as much as it is a midlife calling. If you are a professional athlete and you're thirty five years old, you are an elder. If you're a software engineer in Silicon Valley and you're forty

You're over the hill. If you're an advertising exec on Madison Avenue. We have over three thousand alums now from forty two countries around the world and The big surprise is they are as young as 28 and as old as 88. At any age, we can reframe our relationship with aging.

Older people are starting twenty five percent of the businesses in the US today. And I have twice as high of a success ratio. As compared to some in their twenties. With five generations in the workplace for the first time. It's time for us to create a new generational compact.

Yeah. That's Chip Conley, founder and CEO of Modern Elder Academy. MEA has built a global community of leaders dedicated to unlocking generational talent. I'm Bob Safian. Former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response.

I wanted to talk to Chip because he's redefining how we think about careers and about talent. We all encounter inflection points in our career, and with life expectancy growing worldwide, midlife now comes with both more angst and more opportunity. Chip was head of global hospitality at Airbnb, where he helped mentor CEO Brian Chesky. But he says he learned as much as he taught. Intergenerational interplay, he says, will define the successful organizations of the future.

Chip argues that knowledge workers are destined to be displaced by what he calls wisdom workers. to stay relevant as a business and as an individual, Chip says. Takes both scale. And so F

I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy. Chip, thanks for joining us. Yeah, great to be with you, Bob. You first came up on my radar as the founder of the Joie de Vives Hotels, one of the largest boutique hotel collections in the US. You then became head of hospitality.

at Airbnb helping scale that platform. But I did want to start with your latest adventure. The modern Elder Academy. Our culture is so Focused On youth.

And the new and I'll confess to some challenges. personally defining myself as I've aged, I still like to think of myself as modern. And so this framing of modern elder is appealing. What is a modern elder and where did the idea come from for you? I ran a company Zouadaviv for twenty four years as the founder and CEO.

From age twenty six to fifty. And then a couple years later I got this call from Brian Chesky at the co founder and CEO of Airbnb and he wanted me to be his in house mentor and the head of global hospitality and strategy. Within a few months, people in the company started calling me Airbnb's Modern Elder, and I didn't like it a lot. It sounded like A ARP's magazine.

But then The founders said to me, Chip, the average age here is twenty six and you're fifty two. So you are the elder. But you're a modern elder and a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise. I was very complimented by that. I like, okay, I'll be that modern elder.

And so for the four years full time and then three and a half years as a strategic advisor to the founders. I was a bit of a modern elder and When I was writing my fifth book called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder. I was in southern Baja in Mexico.

One day I was going for a run on the beach. I asked myself, why is it that we don't have any Midlife wisdom schools are places where people can go and repurpose themselves. And that's how Modern Elder Academy came about. And in your time at Airbnb, this r relationship that you had with Brian Chesky, you were like his mentor. Well, I came in to be the mentor and I realized pretty quickly I was also the intern because While I had a lot to offer around hospitality and travel understanding leadership

Building your culture. But Being in a tech company for the first time meant that I had to learn a lot. And so I learned as much from Brian as I think he learned from me. Sometimes we would call it the EQ for DQ trade alliance.

I would give him a little emotional intelligence, which is a a skill that we actually build as we age on average, but I learned DQ from Brian, digital intelligence. And I was learning from someone who was twenty-one years younger than me. You've used this term intergenerational collaboration, that like there are things that we can learn from each other, which sometimes some older people look at as like, oh gosh, I you know, all the young people are telling me what to do all the time. It you don't necessarily react to it that way.

Well, I think it goes both ways. Young people saying, Oh man, that boomer just keeps telling me how the world works. And the intergenerational collaboration idea really was wedded to my perspective of how do I get things done in a company like this. I tried to be a intern publicly and a mentor privately. I would ask a lot of questions. And I think that really

meant a lot of the younger people at Airbnb gravitated to me. As I started spending time with them, I got clear that you can teach me something as well. So that's what how a mentor is a mentor and an intern at the same time. we've created something recently called Generations Over Dinner. You know, we can find it at generationsover dinner dot com. It's a way for generations to come to a meal and have a deep, rich maybe life changing conversation. And we've had as many as seven generations at the dinner table together.

to talk about topics purpose, love and relationships, and how to solve the world's problems. So Especially in the workplace with five generations in the workplace for the first time. It's time for us to create a new generational compact. So what is the difference between a modern elder And the traditional elder.

The traditional elder was regarded with reverence, and that's not so true in most of the world today. But I think the modern elder's about relevance. And relevance means that you take the learning you have. The wisdom you've built over time. And you apply it in new environments.

I define wisdom as metabolized experience. that leads to distilled compassion. And if you look at the history of wisdom Going back to Greek times, uh wisdom has always been seen as a social good. Wisdom you've maybe gained along the way.

І сам you can offer. To others. You've said that wisdom workers will be replacing

Knowledge workers. What are wisdom workers? So knowledge speaks and wisdom listens. I'm now quoting Jimi Hendrix. I think knowledge is an accumulation game. Wisdom is more of a division equation. It's distilling All of that.

Knowledge. to what's really essential. And a knowledge worker, that term was coined by Peter Drecker in nineteen fifty nine. What he was saying is that people who knew how to use computers to bring information and data.

to their decision making. We're going to be the most powerful people on the planet. And you know, today seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world are tech companies. So knowledge workers rule the world. All of our knowledge is on the little phone in our pocket. We're a wash in knowledge, but What we could use more of is a little bit of wisdom.

A wisdom worker in the workplace would be somebody who Isn't just filled with knowledge. They're more about how do you Get to

What's Essential and important. When I joined Airbnb, there were a lot of different strategic priorities in the company. There were like thirty. One of my jobs was to take the senior leadership team. To an off site retreat.

We spent three days to look at all of those strategic priorities and said, Okay, how do we distill it down to just four strategic priorities for next year? And everybody in this company is is gonna know which of those four they are primarily focused on. And I think that helped. Other things that a wisdom worker does is they're really good at with peripheral vision. Being able to see Around the corner.

And to see that the decision you make today could have huge impact on the organization or its reputation. Two years from now. Yeah, there's a lot of organizations that ha are full of brilliant young people.

And yet very few of them have ever Scale the company. the size of of what they're scaling. And having somebody around who has some experience with that and understands how to process things in an organizational context can be very valuable. Mm.

As you were talking initially about wisdom workers, I wondered how much of it was sort of You know, AI is gonna take over doing the knowledge work. And what's really gonna be valuable are the choices we make, which is what you're describing as the wisdom, right? Exactly. A I at least at this stage is not gonna take over.

But the reality is AI and wisdom have something in common. They're both about pattern recognition. Wisdom. has human qualities built into it. For AI, a little bit less so. It's obviously data driven. It's driven less by a hunch.

And more by You know, what the data shows. So I I think that as a result of that I think knowledge workers are at risk a little bit in the next few decades. And I think wisdom workers are gonna become the rage. But the other thing about wisdom workers is they better keep their humility in check. Because that's really what makes them a wisdom worker.

The moment you think that you just know it all is the moment you no longer are a wisdom worker. because you're not being curious enough to realize that you are meant to be not just a lifelong learner. But we at MEA call a long life learner. So We have

A president in the White House who recently turned eighty, we've seen Disney bring back Bob Iger as CEO, even though he's seventy one. It calls into question the whole notion of sixty five as a retirement age. Is there a change underway in how we view experience versus youth? As Arthur Brooks wrote about in his book From Strength to Strength, you know, he talked about the fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence.

Food intelligences were very focused and fast. But as we get older, what we get better is at is crystallized intelligence, holistic and systemic thinking. The ability to connect the dots. So I would love to have someone running Disney who can connect the dots, or you know, a global organization like that needs somebody who can synthesize.

Similar with the government. The problem I would just say is when someone is in the same position for too long. And what that means is they're habitual. They may have lost the openness and willingness to try new things. You've said that the modern elder academy is about helping people.

Reimagine and repurpose the second half of their adult lives. Should we be thinking about starting over at a certain point in our lives. the average age of the people who come to MEA, the Modern Knowledge Academy, is fifty four, and they on average think they're gonna live ninety. Not too many of us think that in our mid-50s or later fifties that we are actually halfway through our adult life. How do we help people to start thinking that way for the first time? Because part of this is about longevity.

Now we added three decades of life in the United States in the twentieth century. What I think we need to start recognizing is that The Historical benchmark of you get to age sixty five. and you retire, now it's really escalating higher.

And Therefore, yes, starting something new. Learning to becoming a beginner again is one of the most important things we can do as humans. As life expectancy has increased, our life stage expectations have in some ways stayed the same, right? I I often think about how like universities, you know, you go to college as a teenager for four years. Well, that system was created when life expectancy was what? 40? Forty or fifty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in four years, you could become an expert in a way that you could stay expert until the end of your days.

That's just not practical in today's world. careers that we tend to have today versus a hundred years ago. quickly than they used to.

In the next five to ten years, we're gonna see liberal arts colleges with beautiful campuses and breast belt places go out of business. Because there's not enough young people and young people are not valuing The cost of what it takes to get a college education. So I think it's time for us to reimagine education and disrupt it.

maybe it's time for higher education to look at Creating a Gap Year Academy at age fifty. So you hit fifty. You save some money through your five twenty nine education programs, which People think it's just for their kids, but actually you could do it safe for yourself as well, in a tax uh beneficial way.

And you Take a campus and you have seven hundred people going through a program that's a year long. It's not just about reskilling. It's about reframing their life, reimagining what's next. It's part of the reason I created MEA with my co-founders, Jeff uh Hamui and and Christine Sperber.

Because I really felt more than anything that Higher education has been way too focused on that young person. We need a midlife pit stop. You know, we used to fuel up. At age twenty.

got all that knowledge in our head and then started driving our car of life and then Around fifty. You know, we were driving on fumes. But that was okay because maybe we would retire at fifty five or at sixty. And maybe we die at sixty five. But the bottom line is today we need a midlife pit stop and a fuel up.

Yeah. You said the average age of the folks who've been through the program is fifty four, but some of them Are coming to this At younger ages, does that surprise you when that starts happening? Yeah, you know, we have over three thousand alums now from forty two countries around the world and The big surprise is they are as young as twenty eight and as old as eighty eight. And

Fifteen percent of our alums are millennials. It's surprising that millennials would come to a school called the Modern Elder Academy, but if you are a professional athlete, and you're thirty five years old, you are an elder. If you're a software engineer in Silicon Valley and you're forty You're over the hill.

If you're an advertising exec on Madison Avenue, you're probably over the hill. in your forties. So We have people coming. Not just because they feel like they need to press the reset button on their career. But also because we're at wisdom school. At any age we can reframe our relationship with aging.

It's interesting that in the Bay Area, you know, you have old growth Redwood. for us and everybody marvels at the tallest ones. But who's marveling at the old growth humans? I think that that's part of our shift that we have to make on our mindset on aging. And Yale's Dr. Becker Levi has shown that When we shift our mindset on aging from negative to positive.

We gain seven and a half years of additional life. which is more additional life than if we stopped smoking at fifty or started exercising at fifty. So where are the public service announcements for Helping. People feel that aging could be aspirational.

I guess that's what we're doing here today. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building.

Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There can be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, we heard Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vive Hotels and the Modern Elder Academy, talk about the rise of wisdom workers and the rising need for a midlife pit stop.

Now he talks about his inner turmoil over the demands of scaling. The importance of community amid challenges. And his own suicide thoughts earlier on in his entrepreneurial journey. Plus he shares leadership insights. About switching from the can do it guy to the conduit.

About feeling a consumer need versus a social need. And about how entrepreneurs can find fulfillment. A note to our listeners. This next segment discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing mental health challenges

Help available. Are we destined to hit a midlife crisis at some point? So view curve of happiness, social science research shows that around forty five to fifty, we do have our lowest point of happiness in life. But it's not necessarily a crisis as much as it is a midlife calling.

to actually reimagine something new for ourselves. And that's what MEA is all about. We're opening two campuses here, one in twenty twenty four, one in twenty twenty five. that we'll actually be taking all of what we've done and growing it by tenfold. You've sort of gone back and forth about having

multiple physical locations for MEA, right? I mean, there's the hub and Baja. You talked about expanding, then you pull back, then it's back on your agenda. What happened in that trajectory? So I've been a for profit entrepreneur, you know, most of my life, but now I'm a social entrepreneur. And so instead of trying to find the Mm. The consumer needed to fill it.

I'm now trying to find a society need and fill it. I wanna scale this thing. I want it to be as big as possible. While not losing its soul. Joe Gebia and I always would talk about this at Airbnb, but scale versus soul.

I live ten minute walk up the beach from the campus. imagine I could be doing that at eighty two, I could be walking down the beach and just teaching and then walking back like That sounds pretty damn good. But As we've had more and more companies come to us and say, We would like to do an MEA Leadership Wisdom Academy, or

United Nations says, Will you help us on what we're doing with this is the decade of healthy aging. Yeah. I I sometimes have to say like Ah do I say no? I might want to say, let's keep it small and

Mighty. Or do we Take it to the next step and say This is gonna impact more people if we if we do this. So

Bob, it's I'm s a little verklemt. I'm a little confused by it. I don't know what to do other than to say I need to surround myself with really amazing people to support me in this process. I have started to re realise I'm no longer the can do it guy, I'm the conduit guy.

Hopefully things channel through me. based upon the wonderful people I have surrounding me. You've also begun launching what you call regenerative communities. How do they fit in? Uh regenerative communities is another disruption. Like

Who the heck wants to go live in a retirement community someday? So we're creating these regenerative communities. Jeff Hamui created the first one in Baja. It's not a commune, it's not a cult, it's nothing like that. But it's people who have a common ethos and they love the idea of a potluck every Saturday night. They love the idea of going into the farm that they're living on and picking things for, you know a meal.

and you know, having meditation sessions each morning and things like that. Whether it's the Blue Zones research that Dan Butner did, or it's the Harvard longitudinal study of adult development. Or it is Dr. Phil Pizzo's work at Stanford. All three of them have shown that Yeah. The most important variable.

for living a good long life is community. It's your social relations. We have property and liability insurance for a rainy day for our home. But where's our emotional insurance? For a rainy day in our own lives.

This community imperative isn't just for people of a certain age, right? The loneliness epidemic is true at virtually every age. But the people who actually feel the most alone Often the most lost. Are people in their forties?

I mean it is in their forties where they realize they have been running on the treadmill, they have a lot of spinning plates, they don't have time for relations, you know, other than they have a spouse. So what the community of MEA is all about is to create Twenty six regional chapters. We've had two hundred and twenty events this year.

within our twenty six regional chapters are global. And so that's an opportunity for people not just to come together and feel nice being with people who have a common ethos. But To actually build businesses together. to find a partner to get married to, often sometimes a second marriage for our demographic.

Mm. So what's at stake for M E A from Modern Elder Academy right now. I'm the sole investor in the business right now, although we are gonna raise some money in twenty twenty three. I am the CEO. I am

Teaching a lot. I am the center of the universe of this thing. And how do we Shift that some. How do we organizationally and culturally.

make that shift. What's at stake more broadly is I want us to help Create a world. where I don't have five friends in midlife. As was true in the Great Recession.

Take their own lives. I uh and I had my own s suicide ideation at that same time. It's probably the reason I decided to sell my company. I ha lost five friends. All men. Age forty two to fifty two. Three of them entrepreneurs.

Because in most cases their net worth was There's self worth. their sense of their business card defined who they were. And when their business fell apart, they didn't have much To fall back on.

So part of what's at stake is truly helping people who are Often feeling like they're Suffering alone. in the middle of their life when in fact

many of the transitions they're going through. are normal transitions. Certainly for women menopause, for men antropause. But you know, parents passing away. Sandwich generations, taking care of parents, taking care of kids at the same time, empty nest, et cetera. There's a lot that happens during that era.

We as a society have done a great job of putting energy into adolescence, a word that didn't exist until 1904. We've spent very little time on middle essence. A word that's been only coined in the last twenty years. This inflection point, as you say, as we head toward this Second half of

Adulthood. Not particularly emotionally or culturally prepared. To deal with. Where's the roadmap? I mean, like, you know, when you're a fourteen year old, there's a roadmap and there's school counselors and there's classes and there's your parents and then there's college applications. You're sort of funneled through a system. But we live in a much more freeform world.

U M E A? And it's roadmap that allows you at whatever age To say I'm gonna try something new.

I'm gonna go back and get a master's in something. Because I want to teach. I'm gonna go start a business. You know, the data from the Kaufman Foundation's pretty conclusive. You know, older people are starting twenty five percent of the businesses in the US today, and they have twice as high of a success ratio. As compared to someone in their twenties.

So there's a lot of opportunities, but We wanna be on the forefront of helping people see that people in midlife have and later have more choices than they think they do. Chip, this has been great. Do you have any final thoughts for our audience?

I think the biggest thing Silicon Valley could be doing right now is to create matchmaking technology of modern elders and brilliant technologists. All over the world. It's a yin and a yang. That this modern elder knows this, but wants to learn that. This young technologist

Knows that. But wants to learn this. And then you put the two of them together and it's a synergistic relationship. So I'm not setting that up, but one of you in the audience, I hope you'll set something like that up. Well, we'll see if anyone picks up the torch.

Thanks again for doing this. Thank you for having me. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original. It's hosted by me, Bob Safe, Masters of Scales editor at large. Our executive producers are June Cohen, Darren Triff, and Jordan McLeod. Our chief content officer is Lori Hoffman.

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