Chip Conley || Wisdom, Midlife, and Peak Experience

It's great to have Chip Conley on the podcast. Chip is a New York Times bestselling author who helped Airbnb's founders turn their fast growing tech startup into a global hospitality brand. In his book Wisdom at Work The Making of a Modern Elder, he shares his unexpected journey at midlife from CEO to intern, learning about technology as Arabnb's head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, well also mentoring CEO

Brian Chesky. This experience inspired the creation of the Modern Elder Academy, where a new roadmap for midlife is offered to help students unlock their wisdom and expand their potential at a beautiful ocean front campus in Baja California. Sir Mexico, his other books include Emotional Equations, Peak, Marketing That Matters, and The Rebel Rules Daring to be Yourself in Business. Chip, it's awesome chatting with you today. Yes, Scott, thank you. It's an honor to be with you. I love your

new book. And I feel like it's shocking that we haven't met until now. Yeah, it is shocking. And a lot of people have recommended that I talked to you, so I'm so glad to finally get a chance to talk to you. And I'm glad I got Selfishly, I'm glad I got the opportunity to read so much of your work because it's so interesting. You're such a fascinating guy. You're just it's not just like the work you do. I mean, you are a fascinating human. Do you know that?

I don't know. You know, I'm fascinating. Could be another way for saying bizarre or no, it's my style. My style. Helen Keller, you know, who basically was blind and deaf, and she said life is an adventure or nothing at all. And I do believe that. I believe that we're not here on earth to just get comfortable and apathetic. You know, I completely agree, and I know different people have different visions of the good life and what that means to them. But I've tried to embrace that the good life is

the full life and being fully human. And my gosh, you're you're still working towards being fully human and you're not even halfway done, so work in progress. You know. One of the things that is interesting about the word integrity, or just even the whole, anything that's whole, and our integrity sort of speaks. It's always interesting to me because

it's learning how to integrate the holes. You know, you have all of these holes in your life, all these different elements of your life, and when you are able to integrate them, you are in the form of integrity. You're actually sort of integrating all of the components of you into the you that shows up wherever you are.

It's interesting that the subtitle in my first book, more than twenty years ago is called Daring to be Yourself in Business because in many ways, twenty years ago, people felt like they had to leave their personality, their soul, their politics at the door when they walked in to

the office. And I'm a big believer in the idea that you know, just showing up with who you are, you know pretty consistently and whatever habitat you're in, it serves you well and frankly builds a reputation of consistency. I love that. And you know, some people might have different thoughts about authenticity and the importance of showing up. Some of people argue that, you know, there's some people that are so strategic about their authenticity all the time.

I think it called high self monitor. I've never been a real high self monitor, and I don't know. I've always wonder sometimes, you know, is that good or bad? Yeah, well, that's a very good question. It depends on whether you're a politician. If you're running for office, you probably should have a high self minitor. Yeah. Probably. I'm watching The House of Cards right now because that's what we do in a pandemic as we watch a lot of TV, and it's been like, there's not a lot of high

self monitors among some of those people. But yeah, I think the challenge with you know, being selective about how you communicate and what level of candor you have is it. You know, especially as you get older, you sort of forget how much have I told these people about all of the components of my life, and it's a lot simpler to just be pretty, pretty candid throughout. Yeah, it's simpler. It's the path of least resistance for sure, of the self. But I want to jump into let's start with twenty

thirteen and your work with Airbnb in mid age. What was that experience? Like, My background was, I started a boutikotel company called Juada Viv at age twenty six and ran it for twenty four years, created fifty two Boutiko hotels, became the second roundest Boutiko Tell You're in the US, and then in the Great Recession, we just crashed. I mean, it was just a very big downturn and I didn't want to do it anymore, and so after two dozen years I sold it. That company, Juadaviv is now part

of Hyatt. But I wasn't really sure what was next to me. To be honest with you. There's a great movie, The Intern. It's you know, not going to win an Academy Award, but people do actually get a Chucklin love it and about Robert de Niro being the intern to Anne Hathaway, the CEO, and as he was joining her, he said, musicians don't retire. They quit where there's no more music left inside of them. So I actually knew

that I didn't want to quit. I was a musician in my own way, and I had music left inside of me, but I didn't know who to share it with. And I was approached by Brian Chesky, the co founder and CEO. He asked if I wanted to help him democratize hospitality and be his in house mentor. And I

didn't know much about Airbnb. I was. I'd gone from being the rebel Boutiko Tellier to being the establishment, and at age fifty two, I joined, but quickly learned that I was twice the age of the average employee, and I didn't know a darn thing about technology, And so I realized I was not just the mentor, but I was also the intern. I love that they could probably make a movie over your experience right there, you know.

I think it was what was really interesting about it, Scott was I. There weren't a lot of models for me. The movie The Intern came out about three years after after I started there, and it wasn't even exactly the right model, but it was I had to learn along the way. I had to learn like, how can I be as curious as I am? Wise? Because when it came to leadership skills and hospitality and emotional intelligence, I

definitely had some wisdom to offer. But when it came to understanding millennial travel habits or Silicon Valley or just tech design and engineering and that lingo, man, I was out of my element. So I had to be comfortable that in some meetings I would be the dumbest person in the meeting, and other meetings I'd be the wisest and I ultimately that's what led the founders to calling me the modern elder at Airbnb who was as curious

as these wives. I love that curious as wise. That's similar to this mindset that you've proposed, think younger and older at the same time. It makes me think of Maslow. I know he's a mutual mutual friend of ours, so to speak, a friend we've never met, but you know, he used to write about this kind of mind where you're a child, but you're also have that wisdom, but you don't get rid of the child part of it. And so I love that you wrote about that mindset.

I think more people should have that mindset as they grow older. Well, I think there's a lot of great examples of that. Walt Disney was a really great example of that of somebody who got wiser with time, but he never lost that sort of childlike innocence and sense of wonder. Peter Drucker, the management theorist, sort of had

that as well. He had a practice in his last twenty five years on the planet of every two years coming up with a new subject that had nothing to do with being a business professor that was intriguing to him, and he wanted to become the world's leading expert on that. So what it did is it was like that curiosity almost lubricates the mind, the heart, the spirit, and it turns out with Peter Drucker, he wrote USh two thirds of his forty books after the age of sixty five.

Is that right? I didn't even know that. Wow, go Drugger. How many more books do you think you have in you? Good question? I don't know. I have no idea, Scott. I mean, it's a funny thing. I think being a writer and writing books is about being pregnant. It's impregnated with some idea and it's just growing inside of you and you sort of can't ignore it. It's actually keeping you up at night, it's kicking you. And of course you and I will never have that experience with a

real child. But then there's the sense that you really need to nurture it and then birth it. And for me, other than the last book, Wisdom at Work, my prior for books all took approximately nine months from the time I really started to build the concept of the book to when I finished the first draft, so it's the Actually, even the time of the pregnancy was comparable. The last one was a fast one. I just I was so accelerated in my thinking that that happened pretty quickly. So

I don't know, I'm right now. What I'm doing is that writing energy I have is satisfied by writing a daily blog called Wisdom. Well, uh, that's out there in the world, and it's you know, that's a blog about how do you actually cultivate and harvest your wisdom? And I love that. I love the idea of writing a short blog post each morning, although I actually usually do a lot of them, you know, in advance. Uh as just a way for people to have to have a

little microdose or snack of wisdom to start their day. Yeah, I love your blog and I know so every now and then you have some guest posts as well. Love to have one from you. Uh, that wasn't That wasn't like my way of of I'd be honored, but that wasn't my I was just yea, I hope you know that wasn't my way of Listen. I love, as I told you, your Scientific American article, just like blew me Away. It's like Arthur article from the Atlantic from last June, blew me Away, And so Arthur and I just did

a Q and A on ours. So I'd love to have you write something, or we can do a Q and A or whatever. What I know is that the thing that's interesting, Scott is we don't really have a culture in the work world or otherwise that is invested in the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom. And what I mean by it's not that we don't have a culture of knowledge. In fact, Peer Drucker is the one

who came up with the phrase knowledge worker. In nineteen fifty nine, he said the future of business will actually be ruled by knowledge workers. And here we are sixty one years later, and seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world today are in fact tech companies. But what I really believe is that we've moved from a time where we need to retire the concept of the knowledge worker, because everybody has an iPhone in their pocket and an increasing percentage of the population is what

we might call knowledge workers. But I think what when we're a wash in knowledge, what we really have scarcity for is wisdom. And I think it's time for us to actually think about what would a wisdom worker be. And I know that sounds bizarre, but it's an interesting idea because wisdom literally speaks to a lot of what you've written about in your new book. A lot of it really speaks to this idea of wisdom is about

pattern recognition. It's being able to assimilate and cultivate some of the patterns you've seen in your life and then almost develop the intuition such that you can see the future even before it happens. And I don't think that

there's necessarily a direct correlation between wisdom and age. I think someone can cultivate their wisdom at a very young age, or be seventy five years old and have cultivated no wisdom, but what's interesting to me is how do we create a world where the future is partially defined by wisdom workers who are able to also understand emotional intelligence and

understand people. Because one of the things that computers artificial intelligent will get better and better and better at data and knowledge and maybe even providing some insight, but understanding humans. Our official intelligence will get there, but you know, trying to understand creativity or intuition, or you know, Google's great at serving up all the answers in the world, but not so great at serving up questions. And a wise

person like Socrates. We should have a Socratic CEO out there in the world who is the embodiment of catalytic questions. And I think that that will more and more be how we see business in the future. Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce that for the first time ever, I'm taking my Columbia University course online starting September fifth. My eight week online course will help you live a more fulfilling, meaningful, creative,

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It's going to be really exciting, and I'm really looking forward to getting to know folks and helping them realize their full potential. Okay, now back to the show. Wow, there's a lot of rich stuff in what you just said. Especially I've been interested in inmplicit learning, and it's amazing. We have these build in systems to learn lots of patterns underneath the level of awareness. And I found in my doctor dissertation that in plicit learning, that conscious kind

of knowledge or ability is uncorrelated with IQ. So you can be like the smartest person in the world based on an IQ test and not have that pattern detection ability just as high. So I found that really interesting. Is that another way of saying intuition or is that different implicit? I think it's a part of the intuitive system. It's like we call it like one part of the system. It's really good at learning probabilities of things in our environment.

Like you know, in our social environment, we're constantly we have this feeling like I don't think I like this person, or I really like this person. It's you know, interesting to see what goes into that feeling. You know, what is that based on? And our unconscious system takes this whole holistic view based on lots and lots of different probabilities. What do you think is the correlation between, say, wisdom

and intuition. This is one of the things I want to write a blog post on and it's been really hard to actually look at academic white papers on the subject. I haven't seen a lot. You know, it's a really good question, and you know, people in the psychological literature may disagree on that. Some people may think wisdom is actually transcending your intuition in a sense that you can rationally and consciously move beyond how you feel about something

to really see it as objectively as possible. You know, there's some people who might see the emotion or the intuitive part of it as clouding your perception of reality. And then there's others who you know, surprisingly enough, they're intuition researchers like Gary Klein others who probably would would say, there's a lot of wisdom to our intuition, you know, there's in some ways it's better to listen to your intuition under a certain context. So Gigorrenzer probably would would

argue that as well. Maybe it depends on the context, depends on how much expertise you have for something. So if I want to be wise about something that I know nothing about, maybe I don't want to rely on my intuition. But if I want to be wise about something that I've thought an awful lot about and I've experienced a lot, maybe it's actually would be wiser to listen to my intuition. Interesting, Wow, okay, let's talk about let's go let you you're in charge of this, but

let's talk about Maslow at some point. Oh well, are you kidding? Like that's definitely got to talk about that as let's before we jump into Maza. That's a big topic. I want to talk about phil Piso's research and how it's influenced you. Because when you were talking about wisdom, you know, while we're still on the topic of wisdom, I wondered how his three pillars of purpose, community, and wellness,

and the intersection of them relate to wisdom in midlife. Yes, so, I huge fan of doctor Phil Pizzo, former formerly ran the Stanford Medical Center and then as sort of an encore career for himself late in his career, had chose to create the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, and in his research there over the last almost a decade, has come to realize that the three pillars that define later life, that a healthy later life, are purpose, community, and wellness.

And if you see, frankly, the research that's been done on retirement, what you often see is that when someone retires, one of the challenges they have in retirement is they lose a sense of purpose, They lose a sense of community because work was their community, and often they lose a sense of wellness, not sort of. That was the

one that was confusing to me. The reason there's the wellness is partly because they lose the structure and the discipline of work, and therefore everything in their life gets a little bit less disciplined than including their health. So those are the three pillars that define the Stanford DCI program. Well as we created as I wrote my book and then decided to create this Modern Elder Academy as the

first real life wisdom school. We looked at almost like a then diagram of Phill's work and thought about what happens in the spaces between, for example, between community and community and purpose, or actually may think about it between community and wellness. So community and wellness. If you take those two and sort of creative ven diagram, it's social wellness. And so social wellness is a pretty important subject. It's gotten a lot of attention in the last five or

ten years. The subject of loneliness, the subject of people feeling dislocated, you know, bowling alone, et cetera, et ceterric, et cetera. There's been a lot written on this. And one of the things that's interesting, especially for late people later in life, is how do we move the idea of wellness to something that you do personally to something you do collectively. You know, it's interesting the word wellness, I'm sorry, the world illness starts with an eye. The

word wellness starts with a we. And so social yeah, social wellness is a very important part of later life. If you look at the blue zones, look at the kinds of studies that have shown why do people live longer? You know, the George Dalliance study from Harvard really does speak to this idea of community, but it's the wellness component to that community, and you mix it with purpose

and you get generativity. The Eric Erickson premise, who said as a developmental psychologist that I am what survives me, and the later stages of life is a question between generativity and stagnation. So generativity is about giving back, and it's about actually connecting your purpose something for the community and often giving to younger people. And then the interstitial

space between purpose and wellness is flourishing. To highlight Marty Seligman's work, is your purpose and wellness that interstitial intersecting space. There isn't just about flourishing as a physical being. It's flourishing in your sense of being on this planet and why you're here and your sense of purpose. You know, to use a Maslow perspective, it's about being self actualized. And so what we tend to look at Loving Fills work and DC work is those three interstitial spaces again,

social wellness, generativity and flourishing. Oh boy, I love that, and you really you bake that into your mission of the Modern Elder Academy. I'm going to read this. It's the world's first midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people navigate midlife transitions, practice mindfulness, reframe their mindset on aging, and re enter the workforce. Dedicated to enhancing intergenerational collaboration in an erarow. And for the first time, we have

five generations in the workplace. So the lot going on over there in the Modern Elder Academy. Yeah, you know, the origin of it was, I had my four years of full time work at Airbnb and then for three and a half years now have been a strategic advisor. Back in twenty seventeen when I started to write the book, I had a home here on the beach in Baja, about an hour north of Cabos on Lucas on the Pacific Ocean, and I came back from a run on the beach one day and I just asked myself, why

is it. I've been talking to so many interviewing so many people in midlife, and I hear people feeling irrelevant and bewildered. And we know that the suicide rate for people forty five to sixty five has actually increased by fifty percent in the last twenty years. So what is it? What is it? What's missing here? And a friend of mine who's a gerontologist said, you know what's missing is we haven't as a society excepted that there's a there's an era of life, and it's not just midlife, but

it's middle essence. So middle lessence is sort of like the adult corollary to adolescence and adolescence when you're in your teen years, you are in a transition, liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and you're going through emotional and hormonal and physical changes. Similarly, if you're in your late forties or in your fifties, you're going through emotional, hormonal

and physical changes. And Frankie, I think that, as Carl Jung would say, you're going through a primary operating system change from your ego to your soul. And in that process, we have absolutely nothing in the way of public policy, government spending, or even sort of social understanding or schools or tools for that matter that help people in that

era of the core of midlife. And so knowing that we don't have rights of passage, rituals or anything like that for people in this era and people going through all kinds of transitions during this era. We decided to create a beta version of modern Elger Academy down here, and that was early twenty eighteen, and then we opened to the public and followed twenty eighteen, and we've now had almost eight hundred people from twenty four countries come

through the program. It's a social enterprise, so over sixty percent of the people have been on some form of scholarship we've given them because we believe that wisdom isn't taught, it's shared. And it's been a fascinating experience. I mean, I really appreciate that, after being a for profit entrepreneur as a Routiko tel ear with Drata Vive and then in home sharing with Airbnb, that I'm a social entrepreneur.

I don't make any money from this. I built the campus, but I just love the fact that we're helping people find their sense of self actualization and transformation at an era in people's lives where a lot of people feel stuck. And the U Curve of happiness data does show that people tend to bottom out with their happiness life satisfaction around forty five to fifty or fifty two but actually it shows that people get happier with each passing decade

after that. And yet and Becca Leivi's work from Yale has shown that you help people to re shift their mind or create a mind shift on aging, and you add seven and a half years to their life. But we have very little in the way of mainstream programs, schools and tools to help people with this. And that's really my mission in life today. It's a beautiful mission, I guess more selfishly, I have a question about how long do I have to wait to come to this

beautiful beachfront property in Mexico. I love to have you come teach with me down here. But let's say, of course, with the pandemic, we're closed intil October, but we have our October through July calendar academic calendar in place. We have all kinds of really interesting people and very interesting subjects. So our average workshop has about eighteen people in it. It's a week usually a week long, although we have some five day programs as well, and it's really easy

to get through. Los Cabos Airport is just an hour from us. There's something called NPS net Promoter Score. It's a way of evaluating customer satisfaction, and about ninety seven or ninety eight percent of our seven hundred and fifty people who fifty to eight hundred people have gone to the program have given us the highest scores of nine or ten on a one to ten scale. So it's really clear we've tapped into something we like to call

it long life learning. We've heard of life long learning, but long life learning is a slight shift on that. It says, yes, you're going to lifelong learn, but the kind of learning that you need to do in midlife and later is to understand how to live a life as deep as it is long and understand the stages of life you're going through. And so in many ways, that's what we help people to do, is to shift their mindset on aging and really, you know, tap into

that Carol Dweck concept of a growth mindset. It sounds really, really awesome, And I'm so glad you're shining a spotlight on this because you don't see this. This spotlight shined much these days, especially in this time of COVID, and you're probably seeing a lot of older people or even more lonely than even they were before. Right, So, because we had to close mid March. We have yet to sort of we've not had a cohort here in two

and a half months. But what we do have is we have you know, hundreds of a lot and so what we have heard from them is they absolutely want to stay connected and so when I when a cohort leaves on a Sunday, they stay connected by Zoom for you know, weeks, months and sometimes years to come. But what we've seen more so is a desire for a weekly speaker. So we have a mastery hour every week with speakers coming in to talk to our alums about

various subjects that relate to midlife and aging. And frankly, it's not it's not only about midlife. It's it's aging. It's sometimes it relates to you know, your relationship with money. We had lind Twist last week talk about the soul of money and that's that's relevant to anybody at any age. Well, that's interesting, the soul of money. Wow, here's a good question. Yeah,

here's a question for you, Scott. If you if you and money were to go to therapy together and you know, you could say something about money and money could say something about you because you have a long term relationship with money, what would you say about each other? And this really gets to the question of, you know, what is our relationship with money, what's the money script that we were born with or brought up with, and how

does it influence how we operate in the world. Does money give you freedom or does it take it away? And this is one of the questions we asked later in the week during our core curriculum programs because in many ways money, you know, money is a subject that's relevant at any age, but it's particularly relevant in midlife and beyond because for some people, one of the things that really hit has them hit bottom in midlife is

the sense that they've not been successful. And the question then becomes, so what are the metrics you're using for defining success? And for so many people it relates to money, and especially in times like these where you know, in a Maslovian way, we're all moving to the bottom of the pyramid in our survival, it needs when we're in fear,

especially around financial fear. So part of what we help people to do and what what Lynn definitely helps people to do with a Soul of Money is to see money as a currency and a currency is like an electric current. It's something that is a something that's an energy, and something that actually can be a translator for what you're looking for in your life. So it you know, to use it purely as a notch on your belt or on the wall of meeting some goal is such

a limiting way to think of money. But instead, you know, money can actually be something that actually buys you freedom. But for so many people, because of the hedonic treadmill and our natural tendency to once you've gotten one thing, you want something bigger or better, we actually end up using money as a gauge for self worth. And you know, it's a it's a big subject, and it's a big subject in midlife because frankly, in midlife it's a really

important time for a lot of people. So let's say forty five, fifty to fifty five, or average age of people in the in the program's fifty four, but we've had people as young as thirty eight and as old as eighty eight in the program. But in your early fifties, you're at a stage where you're sort of like, Okay,

what is it that I want in my life? And in many cases that you sort of warn through all of the expectations that you're trying to build for other people, and it's now time to sort of ask some bigger questions about what it is that you want in your life. And for a lot of people, they end up pivoting back to their historical money script and they find that that money script isn't serving them, or that a lot of other scripts are probably not serving them. Oh there's yeah,

there's that. We have a mindset exercise. We call it the Great Midlife Edit, and in the first twenty four hours it's all about, Okay, if the first half of your life is about accumulating and the second half of your life is about editing, what are you going to edit this week? What is it that is no longer serving you? What is it that you need to evolve out of? I love that, and people can start doing that even before midlife. For sure. Can I get a

head start? I think the idea of cultivating and harvesting wisdom is something you can do. I started at age twenty six when I started my hotel company. I created a wisdom book and every weekend, at the end of a week, having gotten beaten up as a young entrepreneur who didn't know what the heck he was doing. I would go to my wisdom book and it wasn't a personal journal like writing in pros. I would just write three, four or five six bullet points of what I learned

that week. And I did that every weekend. And I now have like nine wisdom books over the course of thirty four years. And these are just personal for me, and I go back to look at them when I'm going through a comparable time. So when we went through the Great Recession, I went back and looked at my dot com Bus nine to eleven period wisdom book to say, but there's some things I learned back then that might

be helpful to me now. So yes, you don't have to be someone later in life to start looking at, cultivating and harvesting your wisdom. You can do it throughout a lifetime. So let's pivot to your book Peak for second, or for more than one second for the rest of this podcast episode. You talk about how Peak is the most meaningful book to you personally, and you think it's very relevant at this particular time in our challenging economy. Can you maybe outline, first of all, what inspired you

to write this book. Thank you, I mean, I love I can't wait to spend more time in person with you to talk about all this stuff. So, Mas that was always interesting to me. I only took one psychology class in college, and yet the one class I took with Phil Lombardo at Stanford was you know, psychology want, and I just remembered Maslow. Maslow is the good guy. All the other psychologists seemed to be focused on worst practices and human behavior, and made was focused on best practices.

And that's what ultimately to his hierarchy of needs, with the basic premise being that you have these basic needs, and then as you move up from these survival needs to your success needs, which wore be your social belonging needs and your esteem needs, and then you get these

transformational needs at the top, which is self actualization. Well, when my company hit the skids in the dot com Best nine to eleven, my Boutik Hotel company, I went to a local library looking for a business book that was going to help me get through a difficult time as the CEO, and quickly I ended up moving over to the self help section of the bookstore because I

realized my problems were more than just business. And that's when I saw some of Maslow's books, and I decided that I wanted to read some of his books, and so I did. And then I asked the question of my senior leaders about a month into reading these books, well, if Maslow was really about how to create self actualization for individuals, how could we create a self actualized company?

Because our company is just full of individuals. And what I started to learn about Maslow is later in his life, in his last eight to ten years, he was really studying how his hierarchy of needs could be applied to the collective or towards organizations. He was working in companies, and not many people knew that. What this led me to is like saying, Okay, well, what if we were to translate the five levels of Maslow's pyramid into a simple three level pyramid survival at the base, success in

the middle, and transformation or transform at the top. And then we applied that three level transformation pyramid to employees, customers, and investors. And long story short is, you know, one of the beautiful things about being both a writer and an operator as a business person is I can actually

have a living laboratory to see if it works. And so between two thousand and one and two thousand and five we studied whether this peak model, where we helped people address their survival needs, whether their employees, customers, are invest just moved them up to their success needs and then moved them up to transformation needs, did it work.

And what we found is that in the downturn when we were using this peak model, that eighty percent of our hotels gained the market share in the dot com Best nine to eleven downturn, which is really unusual because usually it's just the chain hotels that succeed in a downturn. So we ultimately taught everybody in our company, thirty five hundred employees, the model, and then I was starting to give speeches about it, and that's what led me to write the book Peak, How Great Companies Get their Mojo

from Maslow? And I love that. Yeah, well Mojo and Maslow, I mean there really is. What I started to find was that there are a lot of companies that had used Maslow's hierarchy of needs in their employer customer thinking, whether it was Southwest Airlines or Whole Foods Markets or Harley Davidson or later after my book came out Zappo's Tony, So it was really fascinating to see that Maslow had a bigger impact in the business world than most people knew.

But no one had actually written a book on Maslow Applied to Business before Pete came out. Yeah, besides Maslow himself, that was a long time ago. Psyche and Management, which you know, sold three thousand copies, and then Debra Stevens really popularized it with the Maslow Business Reader and Maslow Management. But to be honest with you, they were quite academic in terms of their focus. They were not They were not really written for the business audience so much. Yeah, no,

you didn incredible service to the world. So I want to zoom in because you have pyramids upon pyramids here. So you have an employee pyramid, you have a customer pyramid, and then you have an investor pyramid. And would you mind if we walked our listeners through each one of those three pyramids so they can see, like, what is the highest aspiration the free to these concepts. So again with the transformation pyramid as the model, survival at the base,

success in the middle, and transform at the top. The employee pyramid is money or the compensation package at the base, the middle is recognition and the top is meaning, so money recognition meaning, and interestingly enough, it lines up with job career calling. So when someone has a calling, they often feel like they have a straight meaning in their work.

When someone has a job, that tend to be focused on their compensation package, and when they're focused on their career, they're focused on being recognized in what they're doing and having a career path. So what this helped us to see is that in fact, stats on this are very, very very conclusive. The fourth most likely reason a person leaves their job in the United States is because of money.

It's not the predominant reason, and so it's a base money and compensation package is a really important thing you need to stabilize, especially in a downturn, and job security and perks and things like that, but it's not the reason most people leave their job. The reason most people leave their job goes to the second level of recognition. The number one reason people ere their job is because they're boss, and so recognition starts with your boss, but

it goes beyond that. It goes to how do people in the organization recognize you and appreciate you. Is there a career path that gives you the sense that you're recognized for your growing value to the business. Is there a learning and development program around that? And so that also, But those first two things are sort of like bartering things there. You know, if the company gives you money and recognition, you will give you know, a lot in return.

What happens at the third level, of which is meaning, is you move from strinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. And when a company can do that and help create an environment where people feel a deep sense of meaning in what the company does, you know, at the organization, and in what they do to support that noble purpose, it's huge. And that is what great companies do, is they help people move up that pyramid to that state of being

inspired by the meaning and also feeling a sense of calling. Yeah, and you also talk about loyalty. Feeling a sense of loyalty to the company. I sure love that also. I just love inspiration as a goal among your employees. You don't often see that in every company where that's like their bottom line is not always inspiration you right. Unfortunately, in a serious downturn, most companies get fixated at the bottom of the pyramid and don't look at the ways

they can create recognition or meaning for the companies. Do you think within the context of COVID this is even more relevant. I mean it seems so. You know, when we hit bad times, people moved to anxiety and then to survival. And so even if you're a company that has developed a peak model, a lot of people get nervous. And when people get nervous, they move down to the survival needs. What that tends to do in their brain in terms of their operating philosophy is it means that

they're less creative. It means that they're less focused on being curious. They tend to get more focused on how do we survive this. That's fine in the short run. I think it's an absolutely smart thing to do. The problem is they get stuck there. And the reality is that if you get stuck at the bottom of any of these to be pyramids money, the employee, the customer, of the investor one, you over time just become a commodity.

You have not differentiated yourself, your created loyalty and great business and great organizations that are models do not do that because they're at the commodity survival level of the pyramid. So the key is for us USA. Back in the day in the dot com best, we had to secure what we wanted to say to our employees and this We were the only hotel company in the Bay Area that did this. We are not going to lay you

off due to economic reasons. If you're not doing your job while we promise you we'll give you warning and you'll get performance reviews along the way. And progressive discipline of needs. I hate to hate that that term for just a discipline sounds like you're talking to children. But the idea is you will not lose your job in this economic downturn now. In order for us to do that, we had to number one, be open, having a slightly

lower profit margin than our competitors. And number two is all of our senior leaders took ten and twenty percent pay cuts. I did a pay a salary sabbatical for three and a half years. We moved all of our employees over the Kaiser, which was a much more affordable health insurance plan. If people wanted to do a PPO incident of at HMO, they could pay extra for that, But we wanted to actually make a major cut in our expenses. So we did a bunch of things in

order to create people's sense of safety. And if you have a sense of safety in your work and you're not going to walk into work one day and realize you've lost your job, people then can move up to the next level of the pyramid. But when people are in turmoil and anxiety, they tend to get stuck at the bottom of the pyramid. So true and Maso definitely pointed that out a lot. The deficiency motivation the d

realm of existence. Okay, so let's talk about the customer pyramid. Now, what are the needs that you differentiate within the customer pyramid? So the customer pyramid is it's relevant across whether you're a defense contractor or a dry cleaner. There are three levels. The survival level is meet my expectations, that's what customers want. The success level is meet my desires to one high level higher. And the peak of this pyramid is to

meet the unrecognized needs of the customer. So any company in a downturn is going to try to do its best to benchmark itselfs versus its competitors. What's your level of customer satisfaction. But often what's at the base of the pyramid is the commodity. It's what a person as a customer expects from you, and if you don't even deliver on that, you don't even count to this pyramid

at all. There's very little loyalty there unless you're in like some kind of governmental regulated industry, or you know, you're in some kind of business where you can't have new competitors. But in the era of the Internet, which is we're about twenty five years into it now, the customers become more promiscuous, which means the customer has more choices.

And if the customer has more choices than all you're doing is meeting expectations, the customer will start looking for other options that actually take them to the next level of the pyramid their desires. And it's a very subtle change from expectations to desires, and it requires you to be really close to your customers. And this is where focus groups and things like that can be very helpful. But the third level of this pyramid is altogether different.

Steve Jobs was quite famous at Apple for saying focus groups tell us nothing, because customers need to see what it is we're creating in order to understand it. And so at the top of the pyramid, it really means you're going to be creating something that your customers hadn't even thought of. This is why we call it meeting the unrecognized needs, and that's what creates the transformation. So Apple was spectacular at creating products that were not created

by the customer. You know, if you think about the iPod long ago, it was a Sony Walkman but made digitally, and the idea of being able to have mobile music, but there was a whole different product. No customer was ever going to create that. But Apple could feel like, Okay, this is what customers wanted. When I created one of my hotels in San Francisco called the Hotel Vatali, this is twenty years ago, I could see that yoga was a growing part of the business traveler's life. But you

didn't have a yoga studio in your hotel. And if you're staying in a financial district, of course you didn't. Maybe if you're in a Spa hotel, you did, but not in a business class hotel. So we put a yoga studio on the penthouse level of a first class business hotel, and everybody looked at me, like, what the

heck are you doing. That's like you put your best real estate for a yoga class with great views of the Bay and an outdoor area, And I said, yeah, because I want the theme of this hotel to be all about helping people to feel like they can be healthy while they're on the road. Now today that makes a ton of sense, But twenty years ago, that was an unfathomable idea and it was an unrecognized need of our customer. No customer ever had ever asked for it.

But the moment we actually launched that hotel with that three yoga class every morning in the penthouse, it became a huge hit, and the Wall Street Journal and La Times and other newspapers wrote about it, and it became, in many ways the brand of the hotel. So long story short is I mean, trying to understand the unrecognized needs of your customers requires that you're a bit of

a mind reader. You better understand both your customers really well, but also the aspirations of what they wish you you're delivering to them that they almost didn't feel like was a possibility. I mean, it's like Wi Fi in the air six or seven years ago, like you know, business travel, you wanted Wi Fi in the air, but just it

wasn't even available. But here's the other thing about this pramid is once you give Wi Fi in the air, which is an unrecognized need, with the two years, it goes from unrecognized needs to desire to add it to expectation. And when you don't get your WiFi in the air, I hope you're listening to the United Airlines and you're constantly not getting your wife out in the air, all of a sudden, what was an unrecognized need has become an expectation, and then you get upset as a customer,

that's for sure. Well, since jobs passing, I'm trying to think if there's if Apple has put on anything that we didn't realize we needed. I can't think of anything, and I wonder what the future of Apple will be in that regard. That's a good question. I mean, you know, he had such an intuitive sense of humans. I mean, I think Johnny I've was a beautiful designer of that vision. But it's real question. It's a real being able to out of thin air or imagine what people want is

an exceptional gift. Good news is there are companies companies like Ideo that are design thinkers who help companies like Apple and others to imagine products that don't exist today. So I don't think it requires the heroic CEO entrepreneur of like the See Jobs to do that. I think it can be a collective effort as well. Hey everyone, if you find the themes we cover on the Psychology Podcast interesting and enlightening, you might be interested in my

new book, Transcend, The New Science of Self Actualization. The book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences, and deep fulfillment. I believe we could still manage to have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that make life worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances. We can choose growth. For more. You can visit Transcend

hyphenbook dot com. A's transcend hyphenbook dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and the word book. If you get a chance to read the book, it'd be great if you could leave a review on Amazon, tweet about it, or share the book with friends, I truly hope this book can help people get through these tough times and realize that we all have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within us than we ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. I agree and you see it

all the time on Twitter. Just Steve Martin posted a video of him playing banjo in the woods, and the big headline for everyone who was sharing on Twitter was like, this is the video I didn't even know I needed just to watch. So I think just in the age of social media, just people just on TikTok or all these different ways that everyday people you don't have to

be a Steve Jobs or Steve Martin. You can. You can produce content that is so strange and creative that people are like, wow, I didn't know I needed to see this today to uplift me, you know what I mean exactly. Let's move on to the investor pyramid. How about that You said that one was the most surprising to you, Is that right? It was very surprising primarily because, like you know, we know that employees are humans, we know that customers are humans, so that a hierarchy of

needs of humans made sense. But our investor's human and when they have a hierarchy of needs. And I came to realize yes after interviewing a lot of them, and I had a lot of investors in my company. So the base of this pyramid, the survival need, is a transactional alignment, which just basically means that you have a common definition of what the business is and what it's

trying to accomplish. And quite frankly, in a lot of cases, most companies, not most, but many companies, especially entrepreneurs and investors, don't even have the base of this pyramid, right. The next level of the pyramid, the success level, is like what Warren Buffett does. It's a relationship. It's relationship alignment. Buffett says to his owners or I'm sorry to his CEOs and the companies he invests in or buys, I want you to operate as if you're going to be

here one hundred years from now. So instead of sort of seeing as everything's transactionally based and short term oriented in terms of returns, Buffett has a long term perspective based upon building a relationship. And then finally, the third level, the transformational level, is a legacy investor or a mission aligned investor, and these are people who put their money where their heart is, and they tend to invest in something because they either want to do something socially responsible

for their community or for the world. They want to invest in someone they care about, like their daughter or son who's creating their clothing business, or even someone like Peter Teele, who you know doesn't necessarily give people to warm and fuzzy sometimes. Peter Tweet Peel is a legacy investor because in many ways his intent is to disrupt industries. And that's what you could say, Okay, well that's just a person at the base of the pyramid. No, no, no,

A legacy investor has a very long term perspective. At the base of the pyramid is short term. At the top of the pyramid is long term. At the base of the pyramid is tangible. At the top of the pyramid is intangible. It's true of all three pyramids. And so Peter Keel is in fact interested in investing in a company like Airbnb that's going to disrupt hospitality, not because he necessarily is doing it for a social good in society, although he is a big believer in the

idea that disruption creates. You know, the wildfire is necessary to burn down the things that need to be burned down. But he does it partly because he thinks that the world needs the constant new competition to help, you know, improve. It's sort of like somewhat of a Darwinnian philosophy, which is a survival of the fittest, and it's more of a survival of the most adaptable, which is really what Darwin talked about, and I think it's really what Peter

Teel's all about. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And then in your model of the investor payramid, a self actualized investor is one who focuses on legacy and is mission aligned. Right, there's definitely a sense that the entrepreneur and the company and their investors are all aligned. And if you're not aligned, you end situation where the company and the entrepreneurs have a very long term perspective on things and then all of a sudden they realize

their investors are very short term oriants. And that can happen in a recession. I mean very much can in a recession if a company is bleeding money, has a big burn rate, and their investors say you have to cut your burn rate and become profitable in the next year. And the company is so far from profitability, they might

as well be telling the entrepreneur close up shop. And that's where, frankly, making sure you're aligned with your investors is pretty important because if you don't have that, you may have a great idea, but it's three years out and your investors are going to not give you three years. That makes a lot of sense. I love how you look at this from every possible angle. You also have looked into peak leaders and what are the practices of

peak leaders that you have eate practices? What are some of your favorites That might be a hard question to ask, Well, I think I'll just give you two or three because there's it's interesting, there's eight and they have a certain they're chronological on some level. I mean, I think one example is you better have a positive perspective on human nature.

So this is, you know, peak is very much a mas Loovian perspective of if you give people the incentive and the space to live their best work life, they will show up and be incredibly engaged. Now that's sort of theory why management theory X management has a different perspective, and in fact, it's the industrial model that goes back to Frederick Taylor, and it's all based upon the premise that, you know, what, employees are basically lazy, so you better

have a time clock. Otherwise, you know, you got to you gotta watch when they arrive and when they depart. You better give incentives to them. And you know, sometimes the carrot's not the solution, it's the stick. And so the premise of peak is that if you create the conditions for people to live their callings and to actually be inspired by the purpose of the company, you will

get more engagement out of them. Most of us now believe that, but honestly, when I first started to talk about this stuff fifteen or twenty years ago, there are a lot of people who didn't agree with me, especially in the hospitality business, which is generally a pretty hierarchical industry.

What's another example, Another example I talked about in my TED talk in twenty ten when I went to Bhutan and study their Gross National Happiness IndX, and that is that generally what's at the base of the pyramid is tangible and easily benchmarkable. For example, companies have compensation surveys where they competitively benchmark themselves versus other companies, and therefore they can sort of see how they're doing. But no companies have a benchmark for a meaning and like what's

at the peak of the employee pyramid. But there's lots of ways in a customer satisfaction survey with your employees where you could actually get clarity on what level of meaning your employees have in the organization. You may not be able to benchmarket versus other companies, although today you can.

Five years ago it was harder to do that. So what a peak leader does is they realize that don't get you know, it's very important to manage what you can measure, But don't just assume that the only things you should measure are the simplest things to measure, like you know, profitability or compensation. But instead look at how do you measure evangelists, how many evangelists you have and how do they show up for you? How do you measure reputation, how do you measure loyalty? But employee loyalty

and customer loyalty. So these are all I think very important things, and I could go on and on, but I'm going to leave it at back just to say those are two of the eight peak practices. Thank you you right. Peak leaders believe humans are basically good, and you mentioned that earlier. And that's also similar to this Selight triad scale that we're developing to counteract the dark triad in the scientific literature. And this, and one of the key components of we call them everyday saints, is

that they believe that humans are fundamentally good. Yeah. I love that. That also is a good good for a leader. Did you have you come across in your readings Maslow's Theory Z. Yes? Yes, How does that go beyond theory Why? I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Well, if I'm not mistaken, and you tell me, Scott, I love I love getting schooled. I was lucky enough I have Maslow's diaries for the last ten years of his life.

There are one hundred volumes out there, and his family gave me the two volume set, which is where I saw him write a little bit more about Theory Z, although he did in New Psyche Imagine Management as well. My impression of Theory Z is when it actually is moving towards sort of the transcendence level, of something that's beyond just what's good for the company, what's good for the human it's it has a it has a bigger purpose attached to it. But am I am I correct

in that? Is? Am I off? I think you're right. There's theories he called them the transcenders were motivated consistently motivated by the b values, the values of being itself, things like goodness. So you could just call them higher values, more quoqually, more spiritual values, things that transcend oneself, truth, beauty, meaningfulness, goodness, justice.

And we're also motivated by peak experiences. It was an important part of their their day and at work they want to be in that kind of flow state or be deeply absorbed in what they're doing. But also I feel like a great connection to humanity more generally. So, Yeah, I think when a lot of people don't know about Maslow, you know, it's beaten up a lot, especially in academia.

Not cool. Yeah, Nazlos perceived as like an old school thing, and you know, and it's it's perceived as sort of Western society, and you know, and they very self absorbed, very nineteen seventies, you know, the me generation. But you know, later in life, Maslow added a seventh, sixth, seventh, and I think at eighth level, and I know the two of those three levels are beauty or aesthetics and transcendence

self transcendence at the top. And in many ways, you know Maslow, Maslow is some somehow got a little bit besmirched by the fact that in an era of the nineteen sixties and seventies, when there was a sort of counter revolution against tradition in all forms, including in psychology, that people sort of thought of Maslow as just a hippie.

And he was nothing like a hippie at the institute in Big sur And yes, he was fascinated by a lot of different ways and including Native American ways of building community and what were the hierarchy needs for Native Americans. But he really did believe that at the end of the day, these these transcenders were people who actually transcended their own self actualization. They were doing something that allowed them to almost create social actualization, something higher than a

self actualization. And in his case he could just call it transcendence absolutely, and a lot of people don't know that. And also he even went beyond the peak experience to talk about the plateau experience. I was wondering how much you've did you come across the plateau experience in your life?

Tell us about it. Towards the last couple of years of his life, when he was facing his own mortality, he realized his life was not so full of these peak experiences, these these one off momentous feelings of ecstasy, but something more measured and sustainable throughout the day, where he would see the miraculous in the every day. He said, it's like lounging in heaven, not getting so excited about it.

I call this spying on the divine. That's beautiful. I go out and I actually now have three segments a week, about three hours each time, three to four five hours. You know, living in nature here where you know a lot of people don't know that the Baja Peninsula that starts at San Diego goes all the way down to Combost and Lucas. We have actually more coastline than California plus Florida combined, or actually we have, I'm sorry, we have just under what Florida in California have combined. We

have almost no people on the beaches. So I love going to for a drive in the desert, or go to a beach, or go to a little tropical forest here and then just spend an hour or two or three just observing. Sometimes I'll take a picture, uh, you know, and and post on Instagram, but rarely I'm just doing it for the sake of observing, because that's spying on the divine. That sense of being at one with you know, is is It's like being in cathedral. It's like being

in you know, in church. Absolutely I'm getting I'm getting chills as as you talk about this. And I love that phrase. Spying on the Divine's beautiful and Matt Maslow would would would would love it, I think. So. Think about the pyramids interesting because I never actually found him and draw it. He never drew a pyramid. Yes, and uh and with you if you trace back it is as some researchers have in the business world to how

did how did who created the pyramid? It looks like one of the earliest pictures was of a step ladder with like the man at the top with a flagpole. As self realized, yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's it's part of those for those of us who are like maslow Vians, and we should have like an annual conference. Well, we totally should, almost like UFO people, because people are

like like Maslow is a complete religion to them. I've read a lot of different articles about this, and of course I never met him because he died when I was ten years old. But I what is clear to me is that he did see the way that the pyramid is drawn. Now was is written, it's it looks like it's quite literal that you have to actually finish

a level before you go to the next level. And when he was very clear is that once a person hits fifty sixty seventy percent of that first level, this new need pops up at the next level, and then

another one pops up. But what he hasn't written, he didn't write a lot about the following thing though, that I think is really interesting is you know, if you're a monk and you live in the Himalayas, and and you your life is basically getting your basic needs met, but you're you know, you're just going straight to the top of that pyramid. I think you can absolutely transcend

some of the middle levels. And he didn't talk a ton about that in my from my experience, or didn't he didn't write a lot about that, but I do think the idea that there's some literal you know, you have to meet one hundred percent and then the next level is silly, and I don't he never said anything about that, and you're right that he never even had an actual pyramid. Yeah, I'm glad that we can. We can nerd out at this level of specificity. There's an

unpublished a book of Maso's unpublished essays. I don't know if you came across that in your research, where he has an article in there, an essay that's never been punished called can Monks Ever Self Actualize? Where he writes his thoughts on that, And I think it comes to the conclusion if I remember correctly, and I can, I can try to find it and share it with you.

But I think it comes to the conclusion that they can't be that if you're isolated, if you isolate yourself from the from the world, and you don't have that connection and it's all internal in your head, then you cannot become fully human. I remember reading that. I was like, Damn, you're kind of like hating on monks a bit there, Maslow, But I thought it was a very interesting essay. I

really appreciate your time. I wanted to just end our chat today with a really funny video and an elucidating video at the same time, where you talk about some existential questions to ask yourself during a downturn. I thought this would be a great place to end because it can really help people during this time. And I also love this machine. I want to know where you can get this machine where you can balance yourself. Yeah, well

I don't. I don't remember the exact five questions I asked there, but I think I'll give you two or three. It's an inversion machine that allows you to turn upside down and I do it every morning, and it's not just good for your back, but it's actually everything in your body sort of gets used to the idea of like being on the other side. What I think we need to ask ourselves in a crazy time like this is some profound questions, like Wow, if I were to live just five more years, how do I want to

spend those five years. I'm not a big fan of saying just a month, because they you know, most of us are not going to live just another month. The five years is a provocative number because it allows you to actually be productive and focus some of your time on work. A lot of people it's just a month, they just said I would never work again. But that's not necessarily a solution, but creating a little bit of this same urgency about what is important to you and

getting clear, and that's really important. One of the other questions I like to ask myself, and that we've really taught here at MEA is ask yourself what you know now that you wish you'd known ten years ago. And there's a lot of things like I wish i'd learned Spanish ten years ago, I'm now learning it now. I wish i'd learned to serve ten years ago, I'm now

learning it now. So then ask yourself the question, based upon that sort of foundation, what is it that ten years from now you wish you'd learn now it would serve you ten years from now. And that's a really great way of trying to help you understand what are the paths toward learning things that are going to serve you in the future that you might put off now, but that actually by learning them now, are going to actually accelerate your process. Like I don't want to learn

how to serve at sixty nine years old. I'm fifty nine. I don't want to learn Spanish at sixty nine. I want fifty nine. What else could you how else could you apply that? So people are welcome to actually see my videos and my blog posts at wisdom will and yeah, because I think everybody nurturing yourself with a little piece of wisdom every morning is not a bad way to cultivating and harvesting your own wisdom. I agree. And then I love this one. Can can you write an obituary?

You can live with? What's your legacy? Dude? In two hundred and eighty characters, So it's concise and even tweetable, and I believe that at that point in this video of bird tweets Yes, wow, I'm very impressed. Yeah, that's very weird that it just happened, like you know, serendipity. But yeah, being you know, David Books has written a lot about eulogy and the values of eulogy, the values of resume and virtues, and you know, I think more and more of us need to be asking the question

of what we want said at our eulogy. I love it, well, Chip, I really appreciate talk me today and think what you're putting out there in the world is so beautiful and important, and it's great to have a kindred spirit that we can we can bond over our nerdy love from Maslow Well, Scott, we're gonna we're gonna spend more time together. We're gonna figure that out. How we're gonna get you down here to the academy. Maybe have you write a blog post on Wisdom well or have me do a Q and

A with me. And and I'm excited to read your book. I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet because it's actually sitting for me, sitting in San Francisco for me, so so to be continued. All right, thank you, thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.

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