Wind Down with Janet Kramer and I'm Heeart Radio podcast.
Okay, this week's Thursday Therapy. We've got Chip conleyon. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He's got his seventh book out now, Learning to Love Midlife, Twelve Reasons Why Life gets Better with age. It's about rebranding midlife to help people understand the upside of this often misunderstood life stage.
Let's get them month. Hi, how are you.
I'm good. How are you doing?
You know I'm good. I I'm really happy to talk to you because with your book Learning to Love Midlife? What is what are you clarifying them? Age from midlife thirty five to seventy five? Yeah, because I'm in it, so I definitely feel it. I just turned forty this year, and you know you said that twelve reasons why life gets better with age, And honestly, I'm like, I could list you at least six of them why I love
them right, Why I've liked getting older. But the flip side of that, right, the positive Z I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I don't take shit anymore, I have better boundaries, you know, I know more things.
It's the part about getting old that still it goes, well, well, crap in like ten ten years, I'm going to be fifty and then god, fifty is like you know, and then and then and then I'm gonna be sixty and then and then so then I you know, had that small fear of like dying, and then I'm like my kid. So it's just like I start to feel a little lumpy in my chest and in my throat like okay, so it's like I'm embracing forty and I'm embracing what
that is for me. But then also that the fear side of the getting older and and then and then my time lessening freaks me out.
Yeah, mid life is the doorway to later life.
Midlife. Midlife is the door to later life.
The doorway to later life. So midlife is a bridge, and there is a bridge between early adulthood and later adulthood, and the longer we're living it becomes a longer bridge. And that's why some sociologists say midlife is thirty five to seventy five now, which is you know, a very
long bridge. So yes, for some people, for a lot of people, the idea of midlife freaks them out because they're no longer young and they don't want to be old, and so like, how do you sort like I want to just stay where I am right now or I
want to be ten years younger. And what I really wanted to do with the book, you know, given that I've had six years now of having over four thousand people from forty seven countries go through our Modern Melder Academy MEA program at in Baja on our beachfront campus, is I wanted to really amplify the fact that we live in an era where anti aging products, which are often anti women products, are rampant, and everybody wants to
stay young. And what I really wanted to do is have a pro aging message, not just an anti a message. I think, yes, I want to stay young too. I want my body to look like it to you know, I'm sixty three when I was forty three, But it doesn't. And if I wanted to put more time and energy into it, maybe I could keep it there. But as I say in the book Learning to Love Midlife, a six pack gets more expensive as you get older. And I don't mean I'm not talking about beer here, I'm
talking about those abs. It takes more time more energy to keep them and so perfectly fine if you want to do that. It's just that there's an opportunity cost in terms of how much time that takes. So long story short is, there are things that get better with age. And Becca Levy from Yale has shown that when you shift your mindset from the negative to the positive on aging, you gain seven and a half years of additional life.
So this is like a number one way to increase your longevity better than you know, improving sleep better than diet, but exercise better than stopping smoking. And so you know, MEA and my book are sort of a laboratory for a public service announcement saying, hey, there are some things that get better with age, which we'll talk about today.
So and I love that.
So take take me for example, Right, So how do I, because I do know that there are things better with age, how do I bridge that gap essentially to get to the other side of it, to not worry about the other half of the fear?
You know, first of all, talking to other people. You know, people your own age, but also people older. So you're forty, are almost forty, and I'm sixty.
I just turned forty.
Yeah, yeah, you just turned forty and I'm sixty three, so you know, and also especially talking to women, you know, in our society, you know, when you get older as a man, you become the silver fox, you become Richard Gear or George Clooney. While things are improving, there's still a challenge for a woman getting older because they're the silver vixen, and no one talks about a silver vixen.
And the women have a lot of things that sort of work against them in terms of age, especially if you have been somebody who's been visible and appreciated for your good looks and you're you know, you're being swelt
and and your fashion and all that. Well, you know, iris aphl just died at one o two, and I got to tell you that woman had fashion all the way to the end, and she was admired for things that you normally in the past say, oh wow, you know, sexy, fashionable, et cetera, all the way to one hundred and two. So you can still have a style to you and
you can still stay in shape. I mean, you know, Jane Fonda was doing aerobics, selling aerobics videos in her sixties, so and she's now eighty five years old, So I would say that, you know, life has a death sentence attached. So far, you know, the tech bros and Silton Value are trying to figure out how to solve that and you know, defeat death. But right now we all you know, we're all going to die someday. The question is what
do we do with the life we have? And and I just a big believer in the idea that, you know, learning how to become age fluid, so that we are not you're not defined exclusively by your chronological age, your generation, but you're all the ages you've ever been. And sometimes you're a foolish fifteen year old, sometimes you're a sixty five year old who has some wisdom, and you're everything in between. And becoming age fluid allows you to not
constrain yourself based upon your age. And so you know that's something I talk about in the book as well.
So okay, so what are some tips and or what are some things that you say, all right, this is embrace this in your mid life?
Yeah in your book.
Well let me, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to say all twelve.
Oh you're going to give us all of them.
I'm gonna give you all twelve and then I'm going to focus just.
Like leave one out so that way that you know, the readers can have a I mean, the listeners can have a little Okay, you know you're missing the twelfth one.
Okay, So then what I'm gonna do is, I mean, I'm going to actually give you there's five categories. I'll do one category. So the five categories or your physical life, your emotional life, your mental life, your vocational life, and your spiritual life. On the physical life, what gets better with age. So I'm going to say, I'm relieved my body no longer defines me. Now this is a hard one for a lot of people because like, oh my god,
my body does define me. But think of your body like a rental vehicle that you were issued at birth, and your job in life is to maintain this rental vehicle. But the longer you've been on the road with the mental vehicle, the more dings you have and the exterior, the more paint chipping you have, the.
More tattoos you wish you didn't have stuff like that too.
Yes, yeah, yeah, that bumper sticker. You can't take off that back bumper. So no, but instead like, Okay, what's more important as you get older and as you have a car longer, is not like what does it look like on the outside, is what does it feel like on the inside. And so one of the key things, you know, just as we got comfortable in our own skin, it starts to sag. Learn how to have a sense of humor about that. Learn also how to maintain the body.
I mean, one of the things I've learned in midlife is that when I was younger, I would maintain my body. I'd go to the gym and swim. I was a good athlete, and I did it more for short term vanity than for long term maintenance. And I think as we get older we realize that the long term maintenance piece of this is really important and the short term vanity. You know, listen, if you want to be the hot thing at fool side at age seventy five, do it. But as I said before, that six pack is more
expensive as you get older. So the thing that's nice and for a lot of women they feel this is like to see that your body doesn't have to define you, and that it's just one quality about you. You realize that there are many playing fields in life. There's the there's the playing field of the body, there's the playing field of your heart, and there's the relational playing field
and this soul and spiritual playfield. So when you realize, like, okay, I'm getting older, you know, playing on the playing field of the body exclusively, since that's that's the only way I see myself in the world and my only way of self esteem is sort of silly. So that's one one of the twelve reasons. Let's go to the emotional life. I'm making friends with my emotions. It's one of the three in this category. Emotional intelligence grows with age. Yeah,
and it's this is irrefutable. Now you may have an uncle who's seventy five and a pain in the ass and and it doesn't have any EQ and no emotional intelligence. That's true, but on average IQ doesn't grow with age, but EQ does. And so learning how to have, you know, a friendship relationship. I think of my emotions as my best my best friends. And so when I when I have my best friend that sort of pissed off, like an angry best friend, you know, I was like, what's
going on with that best you know? How do I how do I learn how to be less reactive with my anger and just sort of like tap into like, okay, anger, you've got a voice. You know what's the Pixar movie Inside Out.
Oh, that's a good one about.
All those emotions. That's sort of true. All these emotions exist in the eyes. And I wrote a book called Emotional Equations that was sort of based upon that movie in my own life. So learning how to become less emotionally reactive is a beautiful thing because not only are you more fun to be around with other people, but you're less reactive with yourself. Right, So that's something that gets better.
With age, and you know how to you can control it better too, Like my stuff still comes out that but I don't. I don't give it as much power anymore that I used to give in my twenties and thirties.
There's a gain in Victor Frankel, who wrote a book called Man Search for Meaning about his experience living as a psychotherapist in a concentration camp in World War Two. I mean terrible, terrible experience, and he came out of it and wrote a book, Man Search for Meaning. And if you there's a three sentences in the book that I think define life. He said, between stimulus and a response, there is a space. In that space is your power to choose your response, and in your response lies your
growth and your freedom. So this is what he's saying, is like, no matter what circumstances you're going through, you have the ability to determine how you want to respond or react, and how you choose to respond is what gives you growth and freedom. So I think that I love that quote because I think that's a quote that speaks to emotional maturity, and so it's something that we get better at as we get older.
Yeah, I agree, all right.
Third, you were talking about the mental life. I like all twelve of these. It's hard for me to pick one in each category. But let's talk about wisdom. I'm marveling at my wisdom now. I know people who are seventy five years old who are not wise, and thirty year olds who are. So wisdom is not necessarily always correlated with age. But the best way for me to describe how you become wise is you realize that your painful life lessons are the raw material for your future wisdom.
Let me say again, your painful life lessons are the raw material for your future wisdom. So the more lessons you've had, and the longer you've been on the planet, the more lessons you've had, probably the more rawial you have. It's like it's like you're a chef and you're in the kitchen and you got all these ingredients. As you get older, you get better at cheffing. These are these experiences of your life and knowing how to turn them
into you know, a beautiful buffet. And so as you get older, if you learn how to metabolize your experiences, make sense of them, and then in the future those those that will help you. So let me talk about an exercise or a wisdom practice I've been doing now
for thirty five years, since age twenty eight. At age twenty eight, I had been running a boutique hotel company for a couple of years that I ran for twenty four years, became the second largest in the US, based in San Francisco, Collegue you want to be, I wan fifty two hotels around California. So, long story short is I at age twenty eight, two years after starting the company, I was clueless, and of course I was. I was twenty eight years old running a you know, boutigotel company
at that point with just one hotel. So one day I went home at the end of a week. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was like, oh my god, I'm getting just bullied by my job as the CEO. And so I just took a journal off the wall, off the bookshelf, and I wrote on the cover of my wisdom book. And I started a practice where every weekend I would make a list of what I'd learned that week personally or professionally, and then I went ahead and would just say, Okay, I learned this, and here's
how it's going to serve me in the future. So in essence, what I was doing is I was turning my painful life lessons into that raw material, metabolizing the experience so that it would serve me in the future as my future wisdom. So the process of becoming wise is not something it's something you earn. It's something you learn over time, right, and so wisdom is something that gets better with age.
So it's almost like, because that's kind of how I feel right now in this moment, I'm like, all right, I love forty because as I've learned so much, and I would take this wisdom now over what I have when I was twenties and thirties, right, So I hope I'm excited to know even more in ten years, in twenty years. So I think that is the piece where I look forward to.
One of the questions I like to ask people sometimes if they feel like, oh, they're in their midlife, they're fifty years old, and they feel like I'm stupid now or something like that, like do you make better decisions today at age fifty than you did at age twenty five? And almost always they say yeah. Almost always they say yes.
And I said, guess what, you make better decisions because you've built some wisdom along the way, and yes, you made some mistakes, and yes, at age fifty you're disappointed. One of the reasons that people in their late forties often hit the bottom point of the U curve of happiness and the bottom point of life satisfaction is because often it's around mid forties that people's like, I had all these expectations and then and they're not coming true.
I had these hopes and dreams, and and you know, whether it's in our career or in our romantic life, or you know, financially, et cetera. And and it just hasn't happened my body. And so, you know, Brende Brown, who's a friend of mine, said, Chip, Chip, you know you understand there's a midlife unraveling that goes on. And I said, Brene, midlife unraveling. What are you talking about. That sounds terrible. Unraveling sounds like something that happens when
someone loses their mind. And she says, no, look at the word ravel in the dictionary. And she said, to something that's raveled or is a ravel is so tightly wound you can't get it undone. So think of like a you know, uh, spring, a yarn exactly. So to unravel the midlife unraveling is learning how to unravel all your expectations and all of your obligations. And part of the way you do this is you edit. What we at MAA at the Modern Aldy Academy call the Great
midlife Edit. We help people learn how to edit their lives. And that is beautiful because what it does the first half of our life is about accumulating, and the second half of our life is about editing. And if we're really discerning and good edit we get rid of the stuff that's not serving us and we instead focus on what is serving. In clean mindsets, it makes sense. Fourth category, which I'll pick is the vocational life for the professional life.
I'm joyously stepping off the treadmill. So in midlife we come face to face with the fact that our parents, or our community, or our family broadly may have defined success for us. And we got on that damn treadmill in our twenties and we started running, or maybe in our teens, and we started running based upon what bas upon this sort of definition of successism, success ism being hey,
you know what defines success in society. And then there's around midlife sometimes we sa like, you know what, that doesn't matter to me. That's like my parents' definition of success, not mine. And so there is the opportunity for people in midlife to take stock and to look at their life and say, like, I don't want to be a litigator anymore. I want to be a pastry chef. We had a sixty year old woman come to the MAA
in our Baja campus. We have a campus in Mexico on the beach in Baja and then also in the Santa Fe New Mexico on a regenerative horse rips twenty six hundred acres beautiful. So long story short, as she came to Baja and she said, I hate being a litigation attorney. I feel like I have armor on all the time. I don't want to do this anymore. I mean, midlife and I feel like I don't know what to do next. So one of the exercises we did with
her cohort was the question about purpose. How do you find your purpose when we feel like you're not on the right path. And usually your purpose comes from one of four paths. Something that excites you, something that agitates you, something that you're curious about, or something from earlier in your life that you really loved and had a passion for but you feel like you've sort of neglected it
or it just didn't have time for it anymore. In her case, she had a dream one night while she was at Maa at the Modern Old Academy, and she had a dream that came up about around the idea that she loved cooking pies with her grandmother and being
in her grandmother's kitchen. And she also then realized when she got conscious in the morning, whenever she goes to a new place, like on vacation, she always looks in the map in her digital map for bakeries, and she walks into bakeries, she smells it, and then she just looks at what they've got, especially if it's in a different part of the world from where she's normally living. And so by the end of the week, she realized she was going to get off the litigator treadmill and
instead she was going to become a pastry chef. And she's now going to go out and create a bakery in her neighborhood. So learning how to get off the treadmill and learning how to do the thing that you really want to do, this is the time in midlife where you come face to face.
With that and it's almost like just letting go then too, of the expectations that yeah, not only parents, but also that you put on yourself too, Like what you expected would happen, Okay, well it didn't. Now let's reroute in a way and not get in a funk about it.
Right exactly exactly. And the good news is if you found something in your twenties, thirties or forties that you just love doing and you took a different path than what was expected of you. Good for you. And you may want to still stay on that treadmill. But there's something about the treadmill but I don't want to talk about for a second. A treadmill is something you know, you can speed it up, you can slow it down,
you know, but you're not moving anywhere. You're actually getting to work out, which is great, But the landscape's not changing time. Even if you're doing the thing you love doing. You got to get off that damn treadmill, and you've got to be able to see other things because the landscape doesn't change than that little screen on the treadmill that sort of shows you that you're running in the desert. Now you're running there on the beach and like, but
that's just that's a screen that's not life. And so getting off the treadmill is also important. And then the last category of you know, these of twelve, there's five categories, is the spiritual life. And you know, I've just what I'm going to use is I've discovered my soul. And there are people who are lucky enough in their you know, teen years or their twenties or thirties or forties to really feel like I'm I've got a connection to my soul.
It's something I understand, like who I am and why I am here on earth, or maybe even if you're bullieant in past lives, that I understand my past lives that have led me to being here in this life. But a lot of us don't have that experience. A lot of us. Actually, the primary bring system that has really defined us for the first half of our life has been our ego. For all kinds of good reasons, ego is the thing that individuates us. It's the one thing that defines us and helps us to be who
we are. It's the thing that propels us forward. But often in midlife it's like our ego has gotten the best of us. It's like the ego's taken over. And so there's a guy in Richard whar he's a Christianistic who fame, has written lots of books, and he's an maa alum and teacher. And what he said is like the first half of your life, your primary opering system
that sort of defines you is your ego. And it's around midlife, you know, forties, fifties, sixties, that something starts to stir inside of you, and it may have been dormant, and it's it's something that speaks to like your interest in meaning and the meaning of life and something bigger than yourself. And maybe it's something religious or spiritual that has a curiosity there. And what he says is that you move from the primary opering system being the ego,
to the primary operating system being the soul. But nobody gave you any operating instructions for this new thing you're you know, that's that's defining your life, the soul, and so you sort of have to make sense of it.
And I see, and sometimes it's it's external circumstances of people, you know, the divorce that happens, that comes out of left field, getting you know, fired from your job, having a health diagnosis, having your parents pass away, struggling with being an empty nester, which you will be someday, Janna, you will be that.
Don't like I don't.
I mean, I just had a baby, so I'm an old mama now. So it's going to be a while, yeah till that, But I hope and pray obviously, But yeah, so I mean, where do you where do you find yourself struggling the most in your midlife.
So well, that's a great question.
Because obviously, I mean, you've written, you're you know, you're very successful. You've got a bunch of successful books, You've lived a successful life. You know, you're you're you're on here now talking about your new book. And it's like, I have to think that. You know, again, we're all human, we all have there's that one thing that's like that it's our tough point. So it's like, what do you think yours is?
I think I have multiple, but I'll tell you one that's pretty that's really clear to me, and that is I can see the narrative of my life. As you get older, you're much better able to see the narrative of your life, the pattern recognition of like, oh I'm doing that again, or like and one of my patterns is to be the hero. That's the archetype that defines me. And there's there's lots of archetypes out there. There's like the hero, there's the caregiver, there's the explorer. You know,
there's the court jester. But I have a tendency to fall into wanting to be the hero, and it gives me self esteem. And so one of the challenges I have in midlife is whether it's in my family life, or it's in my friends, or it's in my career. I want to be the hero and I want to come in and save the day. And you can say, like, well, that sounds great. You know, if you're good at this, like keep doing it. But the problem, there's problems with that.
Number One is if you if this is the archetype that defines you and you get self esteem from it, you will find situations where there's no hero needed, Like things are getting solved. Let the people who are in it, they're like solving, they're being heroes. Why do you have to be the hero? Why DoD be the ego fed person who's like, oh, Chips save the day. So there's that. Secondly, it's tiring being a hero. And so for me, one of my challenges in my life is how do I
put some boundaries up? And I've gotten better at this, but I have a long way to go such that you know, I know I can see there's an opportunity for me to be a hero there, but how do I help become a hero coach for other people to become a hero, so I don't have to always be the hero. So I'm working on that, and in fact,
you know, the program is really helping that. It's help It helps me teach people how to not be just be heroes, but how to help, you know, solve their life problems and navigate your transitions.
I so get that because I also think people need to learn their mistakes too, without the rescuing. Like there's a lot of people come to me now to be like, Okay, you know, what do I do now this? You know, my husband cheated on me and you know, something comes up, and so I've been there was one instance where I was helping someone close to me that you know, their
husband cheated on them, because obviously I love helping. I want to help like that's but then it becomes this thing where when they go back or we see them, I'm like, now it's like it's now affecting. I'm like, you know, probably what's going to happen again because you've been in that situation where the person and we'll most likely cheat again. But I don't want to say that, so it's just I'm like I've kind of I'm like,
all right, people have to learn the lessons there. I learned my lessons and people told me kind of not what to do, but when I tried to be the hero and to help into whatever. So now I'm like, I've kind of stepped back and be like here's my advice, and you know, but I can't. I can't put the cake on try to rescue this situation or try. Like I'm like, it's because then it becomes too heavy and on my side too, because it brings up old things as well.
So yeah, you get you know, you got to teach someone to fish. You can't just bring them to the fish. Right. What do you love about the show?
Like?
And how has it for you made you wiser about yourself and about wind up? Yeah?
Well I love first, I love growing right, So something that you said to is the mistakes, right, Like, there's I I love to not that I don't regret anything in my life. There's things that I've gone through that
I to this day am so grateful for. They were very hard memories, but I've how I deal with them now or something comes up, or if I get retriggered for something or something from childhood, like the way that I respond now is so different, and I owe that to a lot of the people that I've you know, obviously worked with privately in therapy sessions, but also every day, like I'm challenged to be a.
Better version of myself.
And so when I walked in today, you know, to have this interview with you, I'm like, all right, where where can I kind of look in the mirror and go all right, this is where I'm struggling with my midlife, right, so I'm afraid of you know, dying or I'm afraid of you know, getting older, And here's why. And so it's it's an opportunity for me to keep growing and to keep learning and too because now I walk out of this going, oh, I'm I feel more positive.
I feel lighter about it.
I feel more excited to tackle things and not put expectations on what I thought would be where I'm at now. And so it's just like for me, like I love this show because I get to talk to people like you, and I get to continue to grow and learn and embed you know, all the other knowledge that you've received from other people like Brene and all your other you know, close friends.
You know. Let's do a little exercise here that any of us can do but I'm going to do it with you. You're forty years old. Now, how long do you think you're going to live? Like if you've had to guess, I mean based upon you know, longevity trends, based on your family, based upon your own personal health habits. Actually you know.
What, So this chip, I've had this thing where I always said I was going to die young and I don't know why, and I honestly didn't.
Think i'd make it to forty.
I don't know what I think it was like, I.
I just I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know why I always had that. So now I go the first first number that popped in my mind?
Did you have a sense of urgency? Like okay, like if you're going to die young, there do it all? Now?
Maybe I don't know, but now I'm like, I made it past the number that I thought I was going to not make a past. So now I the first number that popped in my mind was eighty.
That's just where which.
Would be young you would if you if you passed away at eighty, that would be younger than what's average for a Caucasian woman in the United States.
I mean, my grandma's ninety five. She's turning ninety five, Okay, okay.
And she's like healthy as a but she also came on like then, you know she she Back in the day, they weren't eaten process, you know, and had stuff sprayed all over there.
That's true, but they also weren't as aware of things that were healthy. You know, you probably drank more, they.
Probably eat it exactly. Okay, all right, all.
Right, all right, So here's here's the math. I'm gonna say. Let's say you're gonna little ninety. Let's let's let's say that as just a thought, okay, or we can even do eighty. But I'm gonna do ninety because if you got grandma's ninety five, that's actually good.
I've got a grandma that's seventy five, and I got another grandma that's turning ninety.
Okay, there we go, So ninety. So what percentage of your adult life starting counting at age eighteen do you think you have ahead of you if you live till ninety I'm.
Going to do the mast say that again, I'm confused, say that. I'm okay, So well, I'll talk real slow with math of me.
Here Okay, that's fine. What percentage, what percentage of your adult life do you still have ahead of you? Oh, I mean because you from your forty forty adult adult it started at eighteen, so you have twenty two years behind you, and so if you live till ninety, they have fifty years ahead of you. I mean, I'll do the math for you.
Thank you.
Seventy percent of your adult life is still ahead of you. Oh so that so for the person who's thinking like, oh, I have forty like I'm in client, I'm dying, I'm like, oh my god, there's not much time left. I'm going out to pasture. No. Not really. The average age of the person who comes to MAA is fifty four, and the average they think they're gonna live till is ninety, and fifty four is exactly halfway between eighteen and ninety.
And when you tell a fifty four year old you still have you still have as much adulthood ahead of you as you do from now un till age eighteen, they're like, really, so we don't have very good longevity literacy.
Yeah no, that just totally changed everything for me my brain. Thank you, Jeff, you just gave me years of my life back.
Well, and here's and then let me give you another thing because this is in the book, but it's also something we do it at, you know, in our workshops. What is it you know now or have done now that you wish you'd known or done ten years ago? Jenna? What is it you know now or have done now that you wish you'd learned or done ten years ago?
Okay, So that one's a hard one for me because if I would have done it, I wouldn't have had my two beautiful kids.
Okay, you had twins.
No, I had.
I have an eight and a five year old with my ex husband, and I've got one with my new fiance, So okay, got it. Looking back, obviously I would have not have gone through seven years of just a really hard, you know, abusive relationship with you know, affairs and all of it. So having said that, I have two beautiful children, right, So if I would have been stronger and had known my worth more, I would have gotten out of that a lot sooner. Now that I wouldn't. I wouldn't have
continued the relationship. But how could I say that when I have two beautiful kids?
Yeah? No, I mean, listen, but you might have you might have left after the first kid. Who knows I mean? Or you know? So now I'm going to ask you do the following. This is this is this is the more important part of the question. Ten years from now, when you're fifty, what will you regret if you don't learn it or do it now?
That's a good question.
What would I regret if I don't learn it or do it now?
While you thinking about it, let me tell you my story, if that's okay. So when I was fifty seven I'm fifty six actually, but fifty seven mostly. I moved from San Francisco to Baja to Mexico and to live on a beach. And I was writing a book about my experience of helping to run Airbnb with the founders, and they called me the modern elder. That's why it's called
the Modern Alder Academy. They said, Chip, you're twice the age of the average person here, and we love you because you're a modern elder who's as curious as they are wise. It's like, okay, So I went down to Baja to live on the beach, and I was fifty seven when I started thinking about this, and I said, like, wow, ten years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it? Or do it now? And in Baja, I was like, okay, well I regret if I didn't learn Spanish. But I had a mindset as like I'm
too old to learn a foreign language. But the fact that I imagine the regret ten years from now and thinking like oh, at sixty seven will be harder than att seven, that anticipated regret is a form of wisdom, and it like catalyzed me. It gave me the incentive like I'm going to learn this now. Similarly, I started learning how to surf at age fifty seven, and I started learning how to surf because at sixty seven it was going to be harder to learn to serf than at fifty seven.
So I learned to surf because of right near a there's a surf break just down the beach from me. So as we know longevity to literacy and we know we're going to live longer, the thing that we have to get clear on is that we need to become a beginner over and over again. We need to be open to learning something new. We need to be you know,
not focused. The problem for some people as they go into midlife, is they only want to play the games that they can win or that they do well, and their sandboxes get smaller and smaller, and so instead, what we really need to do is be open to like say, I'm going to be a beginner again. I'm going to try something new again and have with it, because if we're going to live a long life, it's really important that we don't just start to calcify and just like
our life gets smaller and smaller. So having said all of that, to have any thoughts about what you would.
I mean, yeah, now it just opened up my because at first I had one that was a little bit more open where it was just like I need to give myself more time because I give time to my kids, to my fiance. It's like I don't do the things I really want to do because at the end of the night, I'm exhausted. The time has run out, Right, So the only time that I really give myself is forty five minutes to at least work out, Like that's my thing, that's my that's my time that I've put
into a schedule. But to think about it more like sure, like you know me and my fans I've been talking about learning Spanish. I'd love Spanish. But for me, I'm like thinking about myself and what would I want to do. I've always wanted to learn how to play the pans know, always, and it's just something that I'm like, well, I don't have time or you know again, yeah, I'm forty years old, but think about when I'm fifty. If I started now, how good I could be playing then.
So that's kind of cool.
That's cool. And there's certain things where like, you know, it's gonna be harder to do it, and learning language, surfing piano may be harder over time, maybe not be, but you know, for me, the one that I have today, I'm sixty three and I have I have two sons who are twelve and seven, twelve and nine, Eli and Ethan, and I had I had them. I'm a gay man, and I had them with a lesbian couple of her
friends and they asked me. Originally it was gonna be like, Okay, I'm going to be the sperm donner, and okay, that's my thing, but because because they had two boys, they're like, oh no, we really want you to be in their lives and so you know, The thing I would regret at seventy three if I didn't do it at sixty three is to invest more time into my son's lives. And it's really easy for me to not do that because I have a full life and I've got all
this stuff going on. And but man, twelve and nine, you know, this is the.
One informative years too, This is.
The these are the years. Yeah, and I don't I don't live in the same city as them. So the fact that I don't live in the same city means I have to make an effort, and it means that we have to do vacations together and et cetera, et cetera. And it's just but it's but it's lovely. I was just with them, you know, for the weekend, and I
just it was so great. And So if there's a if there's a point on all this is midlife or starting to get toward midlife, is when you start to value your time more and you start to realize, yes, the thing that you're fearful about, Jenna about, okay, out there in the future, I'm going to die someday or I'm going to get old, and I'm going to get decrepit and or I'm not going to look good. I mean the invisible. For women, the biggest fear is invisibility
for minutes, irrelevance. You know, that is an opportunity to actually say, Okay, what can I do? You know, time is precious, what are the things I can do? And so long story short is I mean, I just love this because it helps people at a time in their life where they might have normally put on blinders and been bored to actually say no, I am, I am gonna fully do something new.
I love it. Well, Chip, thank you so much.
You've been so enlightening so I so appreciate it, and everyone please go grab his book Learning to Love mid Life Twelve reasons why life gets better with age.
Chip, thank you so much.
Great to be with you.
Thank You're a sweetheart. Appreciate you here too. Goodbye,