#374: Chip Conley — Building Empires, Tackling Cancer, and Surfing the Liminal

"The question would be: 'What mastery can you offer?' So have a friend of yours ask that question of you five times, and you'll be sort of surprised at, by the fifth time you get asked that question, and you've had to come up with four other answers before that, what kind of revelation you may have in this archaeological dig." — Chip Conley At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley (@chipconley https://twitter.com/ChipConley) was looking for a new chapter in life. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He became their head of global hospitality and strategy. Chip is a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. He is a New York Times bestselling author, and his latest, Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/0525572902/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1560959666&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=cf6f08133a4a42ad1597a14ec7ee7e1e&language=en_US, inspired him to build the world's first midlife wisdom school. Located in Baja California Sur, the Modern Elder Academy https://www.modernelderacademy.com/ provides the place and the tools to start reframing a lifetime of experience for what comes next. Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/06/20/chip-conley/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first

• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. You sexy little kittens, you clever makers, and everyone in between. My guest this episode is Chip Conley. So who is Chip? Chip and I have known each other for a very long time. At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, Rebel Boutique Hotelier, that's Chip, Chip Conley was looking for a new chapter in his life. Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, you may have heard of it, asking him to help grow their disruptive startup into a global giant. He became their head of global hospitality and strategy. Chip is a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. He has some fantastic

• 2:05Tim Ferriss?

  stories. He has a lot of battle scars and a lot of life lessons to share. When we dig into a lot of all of that in this episode, he is a New York Times bestselling author and his latest Wisdom at Work, subtitle, The Making of a Modern Elder, inspired him to build the world's first midlife wisdom school. Located in Baja California, Sura, the Modern Elder Academy provides the place and the tools to start reframing a lifetime of experience for what comes next. You can learn more about that at modernelderacademy.com and you can learn all about Chip and say hi to him on social media, @ChipConley on Twitter, Chip Conley Author on Facebook and Chip Conley SF on LinkedIn.

• 2:49Tim Ferriss?

  So without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Chip Conley.

• 2:58Tim Ferriss?

  My friend Chip, welcome to the Tim Ferriss Show.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  I'm so happy to be here!

• 3:04Tim Ferriss?

  So we've known each other a long time and it's so nice to see you again and I'm thrilled that we were able to coordinate uniforms with our respective tailors. We will be busking downtown Austin later today for change, where you are a new citizen.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love it.

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful town.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really is.

• 3:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we would start, and this may seem somber, but since this is something we were just catching up with, maybe an hour ago over lunch, can you talk about your current medical state of affairs, if you wouldn't mind? Because I think it's a wedge that leads us into discussions that can be pretty far ranging.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:49Tim Ferriss?

  If you wouldn't mind.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  No, no problem at all. On the second day of a book tour five months ago, the day before, I was at a Ted speakers dinner, it's the day before giving a Ted Talk, I found out I have intermediate-stage prostate cancer.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  And it came as a complete surprise. My urologist had said, after doing a biopsy, probably a 20% chance you've got a problem here. But as it turns out, I had a problem. And so since then, I've had a few different tests. And the good news is I'm right on the cusp of serious versus sort of not, not serious. And so so far, we've just looked at the alternative health approach. But I'm all about Western medicine. When I need to bring the cavalry across the plantation to to sort of say, yes, you know, probably, I'm young enough, I'm 58, probably going to live another 30 to 40 years, probably will have my prostate taken out in the next couple of years.

• 4:46Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what does that feel like to you to realize or to say? And what is that, for people who may not know, like, what does that mean? I mean, is prostate like an appendix? You don't really need it?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Well, it does have certain functions, which we can get graphic and get into if you want to. But let me say, the first of all, the big C, that, you know, the cancer word is like, what, what? I have cancer. And that, good news is prostate cancer, as cancers go, is actually a relatively tame cancer. But that was hard. And then prostate, you know, the prostate, women don't have a prostate, men do. And it's a part of, it's, it has a little bit to do with sexual functioning. Actually, it's more to do with actually the secretion that happens in semen. So if you have your prostate taken out, you're no longer going to ejaculate. It does mean you still could potentially have an orgasm.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  But you, you just will have a dry orgasm. This is really crazy to be talking about this in the first five minutes. Feel like, this is like, this is like the mirror, you know, it's like the Friends cover, you know, naked nanny or something like that.

• 5:52Tim Ferriss?

  We're skipping the foreplay.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  This is how we, you know, keep you on the podcast for an hour and a half. So all I can say is,

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Cancer can be a teacher.

• 6:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  And for me, it's been a reminder of the vulnerability that we can have, as well as what level of control you do have over your body. And so the fact that I've been sort of focusing on making myself healthier, and so far, until a couple of days ago, the test results had looked really good. Now, there's a test result, that PSA score that shows that it spiked a little bit. So we'll have to sort of see with an ultrasound this next week. But I think more than anything, it just forces us to ask ourselves, or forces me to ask myself, what am I here on this earth to accomplish and to experience? And it creates a certain level of urgency in life. I had a flatline experience where I went to the other side 10 and a half years ago, and that did the same thing for me. So.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  That was in St. Louis.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  That was in St. Louis. Thank you for the memory on that one. Yes, it was in St. Louis, and I had been going through a difficult time. I had a broken ankle from a bachelor party with Gavin Newsom. And I had a cut on my leg, which had a bacterial infection in it, because Gavin had his bachelor party at 18D Ballpark, where the San Francisco Giants play. And I hit a triple out to the outfield and slid into third base and broke my ankle, but got fertilizer in my leg on the cut. I didn't know. And so, so I've had a couple of experiences of just being a wake-up call, which is an interesting term for a hotelier. To have a wake-up call and sort of say, you know what? You are still alive, but are you living your life the way you want to live your life?

• 7:34Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I thought this could be as good a place as any to start is that in all my interaction with you from the very beginning, which goes back at least 10 years, probably more, I've been struck by how aware you strive to be of your thinking, and how many times you have changed chapters very deliberately. And so I thought this could be a segue into conversations about some of those chapter changes and how you thought through them, and also just impactful periods in your life.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought maybe if you're willing to, I think it was a quote. I could be getting this wrong, so feel free to fact check, but the Shakespeare quote?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:20Tim Ferriss?

  That you shared when we were having lunch, which I think

• 8:22Speaker 03

  It's beautiful.

• 8:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's appropriate.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away. Uh, now it's been actually sometimes been called Shakespeare, sometimes called Picasso. Picasso has a great quote too that relates to Modern Elder, which is, "Computers are useless. They only give you answers." We'll come back to that one.

• 8:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  But, but yeah, the idea of finding your gift, the meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. And that I think that's been very much embedded in my heart and the soul and my mind over my 35, 37 years of being in the business world.

• 9:01Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who, who aren't familiar with, with Chip, uh, what is, what is the introduction, the context you'd like to give? Or if it's easier, how would someone introduce you at a speaking engagement?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Well, the way they introduced me, the speaking engagements often is this is the guy who's disrupted his favorite industry twice. And that, that industry happens to be hospitality. I was one of the first boutique hoteliers along with Ian Schreger and Bill Kimpton. I started a company called Joie de Vivre. Joie de Vivre is based in San Francisco, created 52 boutique hotels, second largest boutique hotelier in the US. And then after 24 years of running that, soon after I had my Flatline experience, which was a, a wake up call to say, I didn't want to be running that company anymore. I was asked, uh, six years ago by the three young founders of Airbnb to come join them and take their little tech startup and turn it into a global hospitality brand.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  So I have been a disruptor twice and, um, yeah, so I, that's my, I've also written five books. And I most recently have created this, the world's first midlife wisdom school called the Modern Elder Academy.

• 10:08Tim Ferriss?

  And we're going to talk about all of this.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  So many places to go. I thought we would start with one of your more glamorous periods. Could you tell us how you got into commercial real estate?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  You know, I, I grew up in California. Everybody in California has sort of like the real estate bug and um, I went to work for my summer, my, my uncle the summer. And then almost most of my junior year at Stanford, he was a commercial real estate developer in Silicon Valley. This was 1980, it was full of orange groves, Silicon Valley was nothing like it is today. And I just saw everybody making money and sort of having a good time in commercial real estate. What I was fascinated by was the creative side of it. How do you, how do you design environments? And ultimately, I went to Stanford Business School, straight out of undergrad and focused on real estate there. And then went to work for a real estate developer in San Francisco for a couple of years.

• 11:00Tim Ferriss?

  That was after Stanford.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  That was after Stanford Business School. And then that's when I said, you know what? The thing, the part of real estate that's really interesting is hotels.

• 11:07Tim Ferriss?

  What did you think you were going to do as an undergrad? Did you know real estate was the answer? Let's say freshman sophomore year. What, what did, what, what did you envision adulthood doing in the world?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I thought I was going to be a philosopher. You and I could have hung out together.

• 11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, you are, you are kind of.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Do a little Seneca, you know, Marcus Aurelius debate. You know.

• 11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Before it was cool.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. No, I, yeah, I took a class called God's, God's self and the body or something like that in freshman year. I just loved it. I, so I thought for a lot, but you know, everybody said like, what are you going to do with a philosophy major? So I thought I might go into politics, like helping in a governmental role. And I did a summer in DC as an intern and didn't love it. And so business became sort of the next thing. And I guess I have been sort of a philosopher in business. I certainly, that's part of the reason I like writing books about it.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  But I, no, I had no idea I was going to get into commercial real estate. And, and then at 26, 20, at my 26th birthday, I finished a business plan to create this boutique hotel company called Joie de Vivre, which is a really impractical name for a company, especially in the US. Because it's hard to pronounce, hard to spell. Most people don't know what it means. It means joy of life. But very few companies in the world have a mission statement that's also the name of the company. And that's what really resonated with me. And yeah, bought a broken down motel, pay by the hour motel in the Tenderloin, called it, called it the Phoenix. And it became a rock and roll hotel and a big sensation. And that's how I got started.

• 12:37Tim Ferriss?

  So if we back up a little bit and revisit Stanford Business School, in the course of preparing for this, read about brainstorming sessions that you did. I think they were a few hours in length.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:52Tim Ferriss?

  I hesitate to say four hours because of course I'm the four hour guy, but I think that in the article, it was four hours.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:59Tim Ferriss?

  And there were some, there were some other characters involved.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  You've done your research.

• 13:03Tim Ferriss?

  Whose names may be recognizable. I think Seth Godin was also.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Seth and I wrote our first, we both wrote our first books together. That when we were in our second year of business school. Yeah, this group of, it was five guys. We were the five youngest guys in the class. Two of us went straight into business school. The other three had had one year off and we were sort of not well liked generally within the business school class because we were just the innocent naive, you know.

• 13:26Tim Ferriss?

  Fresh off the boat.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so we sort of created our own little club and we were brainstorming business ideas and.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Was there, was there a format to it? Did you guys meet on a regular basis?

• 13:38Speaker 03

  We met on a regular basis and it was really the best way to describe it. It was each one of us would bring an idea to the table and then we'd critique it. And Seth is a, you know, a good critic.

• 13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very good critic.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And so that was partly how we, how we, I got to know Seth. And ultimately Seth and I didn't love business school. And so our second year of business school, we said, why don't we write a book? Get credits for writing the book. Use that experience to go out and interview a bunch of famous people who will talk to us because we're business school students, but once we graduate, they won't talk to us because they'll think we're looking for a job.

• 14:11Tim Ferriss?

  Use that Stanford while you can.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  And we did, and we created a book called Business Rules of Thumb. And it came out a long, long, long time ago. And yeah, Seth at that point had caught the bug. He knew he was going to write books. I hadn't caught the bug. It wasn't until about, gosh, 16, 18 years later that I wrote my, what I consider my first book. I don't actually count that book as one of my five books, unfortunately. I don't think Seth counts it as well.

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  It's if people are listening and they like the idea of forming a group like this.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Because I think that at least in the piece that I take a look at, the consensus of some of the people in the group was that you learned more through those sessions than you did through the coursework.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  So if if people out there listening and they think they want to create their own group, whether they call it a mastermind or brainstorm group or whatever it might be, where they have the opportunity to put people, say, in the hot seat.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:09Tim Ferriss?

  And to have their ideas critiqued and to offer the same. Do you have any guidelines or recommendations on how to do that well? Or what the necessary ingredients are?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think the most important thing is to have clarity about what the purpose is. Like, that's sort of true in life and true with any business, but it's actually true with a group. And so the fact that we knew this was a brainstorm around business ideas, mostly entrepreneurial ideas, was absolutely clear. If you don't have that clear, then people are using it for different purposes. And it's fine to have different purposes as long as people know each other's agenda. So I think that's key. I think another thing that's key is while it can be like intellectual jousting, and so it can be hardcore, there has to be at least an underlying respect. If the purpose of it is to just skewer each other, you know, people start to shut down or stop showing up.

• 15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  And so that's that's critical. And at the end of the time, we also had a good time. I think that was a big piece of it as well.

• 16:06Tim Ferriss?

  How long did they last?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  They could, I mean, well, we did it for the two years.

• 16:09Tim Ferriss?

  And what was the purpose? What was what was?

• 16:11Speaker 03

  The big the big purpose really was, I think, all five of us wanted to graduate and become entrepreneurs straight out of business school. I don't think any of the five of us did that. Some of us went to work for very entrepreneurial ventures. But I think what we really wanted to do was incubate some interesting ideas, such that in that second year of business school, we might determine if we were going to actually create a business plan. I think probably it did incubate an idea. I had an idea in one of those sessions where I talked about creating sort of an urban retreat resort where people would go and go to workshops and classes and.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  It would be a place where you could sort of get away from the city, but in the city. There's a place called the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and I've been on the board for basically a decade, and I've been teaching there for a long time. It was like, take that place.

• 17:03Tim Ferriss?

  The bookstore is dedicated to you.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  The bookstore is dedicated to me, thank you. It is, because I gave some money.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  It's the only reason, not because I'm a great author or anything like that, but you know. So the bottom line is, I said, why isn't there an Esalen in the city? And that was an idea that percolated. Ultimately, it led me to buying a motel motel in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, which is not exactly that idea, but I think it was.

• 17:27Tim Ferriss?

  What year was this roughly?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  So eighty-four is when I graduated, so when I think probably came up with that idea. And it was eighty-six that I came up with the idea of Joie de Vivre and buying this motel in the Tenderloin. So sometimes, you know, you're planting a seed. I mean, what's great about life is, you know, your brain, your soul, your spirit, your ability to channel something deeper than you from far off in the cosmos. These are things that actually sometimes take time. And so planting seeds early is wise.

• 17:57Tim Ferriss?

  This is part of the reason I wanted to ask you what you thought you might be, or what grabbed you as an undergrad, because if I'm, maybe I'm forcing a narrative, but I don't think so, because I've seen this before in that you have philosophy. It grabs you, it has great appeal, but you don't know what to do with it at the time. So you bookmark it.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Don't expect to ever come back to it.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:19Tim Ferriss?

  And then you plan on X, but you can't do it right away. And it seems to me, at least for myself, I try to do this. If something really excites me, I assume that there's probably a place for it or a role for it, it just might have to incubate for a while.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. The question is timing.

• 18:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  And what form it'll take. So, yeah, I think for me, the thing that was really interesting is that writing that book with Seth, second year, incubated sixteen or eighteen years later in my first official book, which was called The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business. And Richard Branson wrote the foreword. And I think that for me, the thing that became clear to me was. And has been a practice my whole business career is making a weekly inventory of what I learned that week has been essential. And I think that every Friday afternoon, I started doing it when I was in my mid twenties. And I would almost do a half hour to an hour, usually on Friday afternoon, sometimes over the weekend, and said, here are some of my

• 19:20Speaker 03

  key lessons of the week. And I created a wisdom book, and it was called The Wisdom Book. And that wisdom book was the collection of lessons that I was learning along the way. And I, it wasn't like I went to the wisdom book all that often to look at it. I did do it. In dark times, I would go there. But generally, it was just the act of putting it down that was planting a seed in my consciousness to take notice.

• 19:44Tim Ferriss?

  When did you stop doing that? Or did you stop?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  I still do it.

• 19:49Tim Ferriss?

  You still do it?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  I still do it.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  So if I may.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And today's Saturday.

• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Today's Saturday.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  So Friday, on the flight to Austin, which I lost the flight, missed the flight. I had to fly to Houston and then take a lift from Houston here. I took, I did my list. And this list was a really interesting list, because this was a weird week. Now, obviously, this is going to be on, on, out in the public in a few weeks. But this week was the week that a New York Times article came out about my, our new Modern Elder Academy. And it, as people have said, people say, it's a great article, but it's not really very accurate. And to my mind, a great article is very accurate. So I don't love this article. And I've, it's forced me to reacquaint myself with one of Viktor Frankl's famous three liner, three

• 20:39Speaker 03

  lines from Man's Search for Meaning. And so that went into my lessons this week, which was, between stimulus and 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. And I had to really watch that, I would look at that, those three sentences over and over, because I was just getting more and more indignant and almost feeling betrayed by the journalist, because You know, she just didn't, she didn't, she wasn't, she didn't give a factual story. So, long story short is, I, I, this week, my list of lessons were very much about emotional regulation, and, which is really something that we learn as we get older.

• 21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Um, you know, there's a lot of things that, as we get older, we are very aware of the things that actually get worse with time, but we're actually not as aware of the things that get better with time.

• 21:31Tim Ferriss?

  How long is, say, the total set of bullets for this week? Is it a page? Is it two pages?

• 21:39Speaker 03

  It depends on the week. Um, the, the bloodier the week, the more, the more bullet points there are. Um, the average week is about five.

• 21:47Tim Ferriss?

  Five bullets.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Five bullets of, yo.

• 21:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, look at that.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  On Fridays.

• 21:51Tim Ferriss?

  Five of Fridays.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Oh, wow, that's interesting. But my, your bullets and my bullets are different. Um, my bullets are really actually lessons, yours are.

• 21:59Tim Ferriss?

  You're not like, here's my, here's the, my favorite spatula I found this week and your lessons learned, no?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Nothing like that, no. Um, they're actually, yeah, they're, they're, they're deep and sometimes painful. Um, this week, there were probably 12 bullets and, and some of, you know, some of them are like tactical.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Are you willing to share any of them?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, one of them was, you know, I, I said to my PR person, I got this article on my own, you know, I know the off, the, the journalist, um, I wouldn't say we're friends, but we know each other moderately well. And I think she'd probably prefer just the one-on-one. And, and she did. But I didn't necessarily have someone there to sort of say, hey, yeah, Chip said these things and, um, why are those not in the article? And you put something else in there that he didn't say. And so, it, it, I think part of it for me was, okay, you know, yes, it's, it's normal to have someone there as a PR specialist, especially for an article as important as, say, the New York Times would be. Um, that's another example.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  The, I gave the Frankl example. You know, another one is, when things are troubled, it's the most important time for who, the higher you are in org, in an organization, to be calm. Because, um, our mirror neurons mean that our emotions are contagious. And so, and everybody tends to look at the most senior person to see how they're reacting to something. And so, when something goes askew...

• 23:30Speaker 03

  People look to the leadership to see, you know, are they sweating?

• 23:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be authentic and transparent. And, um, but you can be both, uh, vulnerable and a visionary at the same time.

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  You can also be very serious and calm at the same time.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:46Tim Ferriss?

  If need be.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  So I think that I've, I've tried to, to be that way and not, you know, get like so wrapped up in a reaction. You know, Frankl's quote is really about reaction.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Response versus react. And the, the longer we're on this earth, often the better we get at being responsive as opposed to reactive.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  What, what other practices or books or resources, anything at all, has helped you in developing your, what was the phrase you used, uh, not emotional resilience, regulation?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I think, uh, I've been lucky enough, I'm not, I'm like awful at, at yoga. Um, I, people say, oh, you got the yoga body, you sort of seem like, you're like a yoga guy. And I think, ah, I'm, I'm really tight, I have a hard time with that. And, uh, but I'm really good at meditation and I, I took to it 35 years ago. Um, and I've integrated into my life ever since then. And I would say a morning practice of just meditating as well as sometimes an afternoon practice, or a practice when I'm most stirred up, is to just close my eyes, give myself 10 minutes to just absolutely get into a mantra of just breathing. And, uh, you know, that actually is a way of, you know, regulating myself.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Clearly exercise, you know, and just getting it out of your system and getting out of your brain. I mean, so much of emotional regulation is learning to get out of your brain. And, and so that's, I've done that too. But I will say back to yoga for a second. I, I think there's two ways that I look at life. Um, and that's to be in, in attainment mode, trying to attain something, and in an attunement mode. And what I've found is that I'm, my natural tendency is very attain oriented.

• 25:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  And when I'm in the attain mode, I often have to atone afterwards. Um, I have sharp elbows and I'm just going for what I want.

• 25:38Tim Ferriss?

  Attain and attune or atone.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Well, it's attain, yeah, it leads to atonement, attune leads to at one. Uh, and there's, so for me, that's been something for about a year now. I've been able to sort of see myself and so ask myself. Am I stirred up because I'm in the attain mode? Attain is perfectly fine, yet yoga is not an attained sport. Surfing, which I, at age fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-seven, I'm fifty-eight now, I started learning to surf. This is not an attained sport. The key is to attune yourself to the wave. And so recognizing when you're supposed to be in the attain mode and when you're supposed to be in the attune mode is something that I think I've learned over time.

• 26:21Tim Ferriss?

  And is your meditation practice mostly focusing on the breath and letting arise whatever arises without trying to modify it? Or what is your, what is your internal practice like when you sit for those ten minutes?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  I have a lot, you know, so the, so I've done TM and that's a twenty-minute practice and that's the, that's sort of my core.

• 26:39Tim Ferriss?

  The mantra based.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  That I do, yeah, mantra based. Try to do it morning and afternoon. At minimum, I do it the morning. The, I do a lot of other ones as well. There's a loving kindness meditation that I, you know, sometimes will do, which is sort of, frankly, when I'm most stirred up about someone in particular, I could sort of go that, that, that direction. I love Vipassana, but that's more of an extended silent meditation practice. And I, like, right now, two years ago, I was in Loretto Bay in Baja, kayaking with a guy named Mark Coleman, who wrote a book called Awake in the Wild, beautiful book. Kayaking with him and twelve of us from island to island amongst whales with a silent kayaking meditation retreat for a week.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Didn't talk for a week. That was beautiful. So I think, but, but the simplest thing to do, I, I think of two things. It's just, it's breathing, learning how to breathe. The thing that I do, that's the Chip Conley little trademark, is I think of louvered windows in my forehead.

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on a sec. What windows?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Louvered, like, you know, you know, like, sort of glass louvered windows, so you sort of open them and they just sort of like, they turn. And so, actually, the reason I like them is we have them at the Phoenix Hotel.

• 27:51Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say, they're sort of like the, they make me think of really old Volkswagen.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:56Tim Ferriss?

  Camper buses that have that type of rotational window.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Exactly, so you have a rotational.

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  Like the vents in an air conditioning duct in a car.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Exactly. Imagine that on your forehead.

• 28:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  And so what I do is I breathe through my forehead and then I breathe out my forehead. And this is how I turn down the heat on my brain. I mean, truly, this is like my, the Chip Conley approach.

• 28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever works.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's, you know, but I, yes, I, there's the, the core thing I tend to do is the TM.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who are interested in the second you mentioned, which is loving kindness meditation, also known or called Metta, M E T T A. There are some fantastic guided meditations that you can listen to out there, like Jack Kornfield has some fantastic versions of that. There's also a really fascinating guy named Chade Mangat Tan, who wrote a book called Joy on Demand that gets into this.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And Search Inside Yourself, too.

• 28:52Tim Ferriss?

  And Search Inside Yourself, which became the most popular employee class at Google at one point, running a waiting list of like six to 12 months or something like that. So let's, let's go back to something you mentioned. Your first book, the first book you count. How old were you when you wrote that roughly?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  I was 38 when I wrote it. And, um, yeah, and I, so I'd been running my company for a dozen years, Joad Aviv, and...

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get Richard Branson to write the fore?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Great question. You know, um, so Gavin Newsom, at that point, he was the mayor of San Francisco, and I, he was my first mentee. I was, I mentored him and menteeed. So we went together to see him and give a talk at the Virgin Records Store in San Francisco.

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  I remember that.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Which used to exist. So it was actually around the launch of that record store, you know, it's hard to imagine.

• 29:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right on Market Street.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember like a record store, really. It wasn't that long ago, though. But, um, so we went there and we were there with like the head of protocol for the city. And actually, this was before Gavin was mayor. He was just on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. And we, I don't know, he just took a liking to both of us. And so he said, you know, can we hang out?

• 30:07Tim Ferriss?

  How did you meet him in person?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  We were literally in line to actually have him sign our book. And it was me and Gavin. And so when we came up, he just ended up spending a bunch of time with us. And he, we waited a little bit later and he talked with us, just the two of us. And we went out and had a meal.

• 30:22Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna keep chipping away at this, no pun intended. So you walk up, you're good with words. Gavin's also good with words. So you guys walk up, there's a long line of people. What do you say or ask?

• 30:36Tim Ferriss?

  That gets the attention of someone, or what is the presence that you put forth that gets the attention of someone like Richard Branson, who in that environment is, he's the king.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  I can't remember the names right now, but I learned his parents' names, his mother and his father. And so I went in the front line.

• 30:53Tim Ferriss?

  I knew there was something.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  I went in the front line and I said, so what influence did so and so and so and so have on who you are today? And he looked at me like, how do you know them? And so that led to the conversation, that led to a longer conversation.

• 31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Now, did you propose hanging out after the signing, or did he?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Well, it was the next day. So, and we just had lunch the next day. And, and the truth is that his company, Virg, it was just in the early stages, I think, of thinking about doing Virgin America, the airline. And I was at that point, the largest hotel year in San Francisco, in terms of the number of hotels we had. So it was, there was some, there was some benefit to him as well.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  How did you make the jump from him being impressed that you knew his parents' names to meeting the next day?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Um, you know what, he had an assistant there. And so, and, and his assistant actually did know me and knew Gavin. So she was like wise enough to know, these are two, and she said, so he said, can you go talk to April over there? And so we went over and talked to April. And April said, you know what, he's got some time to schedule tomorrow. And so.

• 31:59Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  And then flash forward, and you have a forward from Richard Branson.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  So, yeah, he, so ultimately, ultimately, he said, you know, I'll write it, but you're gonna write the first, first draft. And, you know, and, and then he, he edited it and it went in it.

• 32:13Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So we're gonna get, continue this, this forward and backwards chronology, if, if I can even call it such. Who's Brenda Lee? And this may go somewhere, it may not go anywhere, but.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Brenda Lee is this four foot 10 inch, although she's five foot six with her beehive hairstyle, Nashville gal, famous country western singer.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And out of the blue, her bus, her pink bus was driving through the Tenderloin in San Francisco, looking for a place to stay. And this was about a month after we opened my first hotel, The Phoenix.

• 32:51Tim Ferriss?

  Paint a picture of the Tenderloin at this point.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Well, it's the same as it is now.

• 32:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it hasn't changed that much.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of drugs on the street and it's a relatively poor neighborhood, pretty desolate, but it's right in the middle of the city. It's right, and it's right near Union Square and the, and the hotel district. So, we, we were sort of, we were the gateway to the Tenderloin, but we were on the opposite side of the Tenderloin from where the, the nicer part of the Tenderloin and Union Square was. So, she's driving through there and they're looking for a place to stay and she wanted a motel and we were a motel. She comes in, she had no idea that our aspiration was to be a rock and roll hotel. And so she comes in and we had, weirdly enough, a guy named Arlo Guthrie staying at the hotel at the same time.

• 33:32Tim Ferriss?

  My mom listened to Arlo Guthrie when I grew up, so I know Arlo Guthrie very well.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  This land is your land, this is, is that, that's like, yeah.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, amazing, yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  So, Arlo Guthrie's in the hotel, because the Great American Music Hall's two blocks away. Brenda Lee comes in with her bus, and we have bus parking. So, one of the beautiful things about The Phoenix is it had free bus parking, which a, a band's gonna appreciate. And she checks in, and all of a sudden, we'd become a rock and roll hotel. We had Arlo Guthrie and Brenda Lee, and that led to, you know, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, you know, David Bowie, Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know, everybody you can imagine staying there over the years.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  So, the way you tell the story, it's like, they show up and then all of a sudden we're a rock and roll hotel. I know there's more to the story.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  There is more to the story.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. So, how, how, okay, so they, you, you have manifested or chanced upon this luck of having these two guests at the same time?

• 34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:25Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how does that then get converted into a reputation? Do they just recommend to other people? Do you seize upon that, hey, can we take some photos? How does it, how does it happen?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  So, there was some logic. So, my, my business school brain was saying, okay, well, who's the person who books all of the hotel rooms for bands coming through town? And, and I'd gotten to know Bill Graham, who's a music impresario, a concert promoter, and he had said, well, it's usually the concert, you know, whoever's booking the concert, they're doing it. So, I tried to, we tried to market to them. Then we tried to market to the venues, like Slims or the Great American Music Hall or the Fillmore, that made sense. And then we found out, oh, there's these travel agents who specialize in entertainment travel. So, let's go to market to them. To be honest with you, none of those worked all that well. They worked okay. The number one thing that worked, this is so funny, was the person who typically made the decision of where the band was gonna stay was the tour manager.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  So the tour manager was usually a guy, almost always a guy, about three to five years older than the band. His job was to make sure there was no overdoses and no groupies. And because a groupie might mean the guy like doesn't show up at the show, and of course an overdose could do that as well. And he was, by the time he got to San Francisco, he was so stressed out because usually the tour started on the east coast. And by the time he got to San Francisco... So here's what we did. We had one room of our 44 rooms that was a massage treatment room. Now, back in the old days when it was a pay-by-the-hour place, you can imagine what happened in there. But we cleaned it up and we made it into a legitimate massage studio. And so, we offered to tour managers, when you bring your band here, if you give us 10

• 35:57Speaker 03

  room nights, five rooms times two nights, you get a free massage for yourself. And so, back in the day when we started doing that, now, remember, this is pre-cell phones, pre-internet, pre-frankly laptop computers, people had satellite phones. But mainly what they were doing was going on the house phone, the tour manager's calling his friends, and then sometimes writing a letter and sending it out to them in old-school US mail, and saying, "There's this place in San Francisco that actually gives you a free massage." And that's when I realized that really, great entrepreneurs don't deliver on your expectations. Well, they'd hopefully do. They deliver on your expectations, they deliver on your desires, but the thing they get right

• 36:41Speaker 03

  is this thing at the peak of the pyramid. I wrote a book called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. It's meeting the unrecognized needs of whomever your customer is. And in my case, figuring out that the customer was not all those other people, it's actually the tour manager. And what does that unrecognized need? It's basically to chill and to relax and to get a free massage.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. And because it also acts as a contrast, in my mind, to...

• 37:12Tim Ferriss?

  A maxim that is often, often used, but I think often inaccurate, which is you, granted, you had a, you had this motel slash hotel, but you need money to make money. But if you look at what you did in that particular case, I mean, you identified who your actual customer was, it's like the, the unspoken customer.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And then-

• 37:35Speaker 03

  No one told me. No one ever said that was the term manager.

• 37:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And then the un, the unspoken need and the, I mean, the cost to offer that service is just a rounding error.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  I love, I, you know, it's a great, it's a great entrepreneurial story to sort of suggest that sometimes it's not the thing that's most obvious and it's not the thing that's the most expensive.

• 37:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Um, but this idea of the unrecognized need, how do you mind read your customer well enough to know what it is that they would love? We have a hotel later that we created, which you and I've been to, the Hotel Vitale.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Which is on the waterfront in San Francisco.

• 38:08Tim Ferriss?

  I wrote a bunch of, two of my books there.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 38:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Um, well, so long as we're sure the Hotel Vitale, like the Phoenix is in like the worst neighborhood in San Francisco and the Vitale is sort of like the best neighborhood. It's right on the bay, on the, on the Embarket Arrow, right across from the ferry building and the, and the, um, the farmer's market. So the unrecognized need for the customer we wanted there. So the Vitale means vitality in Latin or in Italian. And we wanted to create a hotel that was sort of what we called for the person who was post W and pre Four Seasons. We call, you know, David Brooks would call him the bourgeois bohemian. So the Bobo.

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  The, the hospitality tweeners.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Yes. The hospitality tweener who, who, who sort of was looking for that. And so our point of view was, we said, this is a person who reads real simple and dwell. So it's actually probably more female oriented and it's a female business traveler. And if there are five adjectives to define those two magazines, modern, urbane, fresh, natural and nurturing, that describes this person. And so we ended up creating on the top floor of the Hotel Vitale when we launched, uh, 15 years ago. A yoga studio on the penthouse level that had free yoga classes every morning. Now, my investors looked at me like, and they're all guys, looked at me like, what are you doing? Now, today, this might make sense. Twenty years ago, when we were concepting this, they're saying like, there is no financial district hotel

• 39:28Speaker 03

  in the world that has a yoga studio on the penthouse level. Like, why would we ever do that? And I said, well, because we're going to be the first ones doing it. And so then they said, well, look at all of the customer satisfaction forms you've gotten from people in financial district hotels. And have they asked for a yoga studio? And the answer was, no, 10,000 of them. We looked through 10,000. Not one person ever said, why don't you have a yoga studio in your hotel?

• 39:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  But if you're good, and if you really understand your customer, it goes beyond the expectations, beyond the desires, beyond focus groups. It's the thing you know that they want next that they don't even know they don't want.

• 40:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  They don't even know they want. Well. So, long story short, is the yoga studio had a line out the door. And within a month, we were in, you know, New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal had stories about this new sort of hotel that's oriented toward business travelers who want to stay healthy. And the Hotel Vitali ended up becoming the most successful upscale hotel in San Francisco.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's reminiscent to me of, and this could be apocryphal, I don't know if this is a real anecdote, it's kind of like every quote is attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Oscar Wilde on the internet, but.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Did you know they had a thing, the two of them?

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  I'm kidding.

• 40:38Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 40:41Tim Ferriss?

  A quote off, Henry Ford, I think, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  That's Henry Ford.

• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  I always attribute it to, I can't ask him at this point.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  And to look under the hood on that decision a little bit. So, the first is, and this is something that I'm constantly, maybe constantly is too strong a word, but I always consider when I'm looking at launches, or books, or television shows, or documentaries, whatever it is, is being first. I think the, like, the doing something the first time is really, can be really undervalued. Like, the. Being second, different story, right? Being first can be very, very newsworthy in and of itself. Also, what would you have done if it hadn't worked?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  We would have turned it into a suite.

• 41:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I mean, so the key, the key there, and it's that you just said it exactly right, which is my point to my investors was, give me six months. Let me try this. We can ratchet and make it into a suite. And that, in fact, after we sold the hotel a bunch of years later, that's what they did. But I said, give me that time because this was not going to be insurmountable if it didn't work out. But it turned out to be, it turned out to package and position the brand of the hotel really well, and be something that people valued. And I think the point on that is to sort of say, okay, so how do you try things and do something small enough, but that could have a big impact? That is easily solvable if it doesn't work?

• 42:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And which is also something that can be tied into Richard Branson, right? Because people think of Richard Branson as this throw caution to the wind maverick, who risks it all despite the odds. And he's been on the podcast, but you've spent time with him. And if you look at, I believe it was Virgin Atlantic, where he did, he took so many in-between steps to cap the downside on something that could be unmitigated, a complete disaster, right? Airlines. It's like magazines, restaurants, like you can really lose your shirt.

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  And among other things, you know, tested with, I want to say like a poster board in an airport when a flight was canceled, something like Virgin Airlines, and it was a chartered flight that he was going to book if he got enough people to sign up for, you know, the eight or 10 seats that it would take, did that successfully. And then negotiated with, I want to say it was Boeing at the time, in order to be able to give them back the plan if it didn't work.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So behind the scenes, he's actually making very, very calculated bets.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  He's a shrewd guy.

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  Super shrewd.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, you know, that one of the things I learned from my dad a long time ago is build the business plan as if it's not going to succeed. I mean, imagine it succeeding and you're going to attract people for that, investors, employees, but what's plan B, you know, and how do you, how do you have a solution for plan B? And so that's why I don't build bowling alleys. You know, bowling alleys sort of like in terms of the shape of them is, you know, you could, you could set in the past churches, but churches have become sort of popular for all kinds of uses, post church era. But yeah, I think it's really critical to sort of understand what is plan B, C and D.

• 44:14Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's talk about another chapter shift and I'm going to take this opportunity to pull up a screenshot of a text exchange that I had with an usual friend of ours, Liz Lambert.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 44:25Tim Ferriss?

  So could you explain for, for people who don't know who, who Liz is, just for a second?

• 44:29Speaker 03

  So Liz Lambert hates me because she even said on your podcast, she hates me because I, I did for her what now I hope and expect she does for other people, which is she reached out to me almost 20 years ago. I had become a successful entrepreneur hotelier, boutique hotelier, and she was creating this funky little motel here in, in Austin called the Hotel San Jose and similar to my Phoenix. And she liked what we did with the Phoenix, although she was going to do something that was a little more upscale and she wanted my help. And so I came here and, and gave her some suggestions and then I actually sent my general manager from the Phoenix, Monica Bernstein, down here to Austin, basically to help her get launched.

• 45:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why, why did you do that?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  I, she wasn't here for that long, but she was here for, I don't, you know, I can't remember, but like weeks at a time, I did it partly because I loved Liz. You know, I love, you know, she's an attorney who should never have been an attorney who's completely amazing as a designer. So she's one of those hoteliers who designs her own hotels, which I love. That's sort of like, you know, like a restaurateur where the chef is the restaurateur. So I think it's really beautiful. And so I just loved her passion and her sense of the, you know, her joie de vie, frankly, they shed, took such a joy in what she was doing. And I wanted her to succeed. And so, you know, I am a big believer in karmic capitalism,

• 45:54Speaker 03

  which means sort of what goes around comes around. And so me giving to Liz was going to pay back to me some, in some way over time. And frankly, it's been me doing that with a lot of different people and then having it come back reputationally. You know, your reputation is one of the few things in your life that's portable. And frankly, it arrives FedEx before you arrive somewhere because that's what happens with the reputation. People know you before you arrive. And I think that whether it's Liz or a variety of other people who I have tried to help in business, it's just helped my reputation in terms of how people see me. And instead of people standing on the sidelines, sort of like jeering, they're cheering. They want, you know,

• 46:35Speaker 03

  when the New York Times article came out this weekend, I didn't love it. I had such a support network of people who just said, you know what, we're going to write letters to the editor because it's not a bad article, Chip, but you know what? It's not accurate. And they wanted to help. And I think, you know, I once had a restaurateur co-founded a restaurant with someone and no one really liked her. She was actually very shrewd, really tough negotiator. But when she launched a restaurant, if she got a bad review, people were sort of silently happy. And I don't, I'm not that way. And I'm not saying that to say I'm the most likable person in the world, but I will absolutely say that I do a lot of things to make that karmic capitalism work for me in the world. And as such, Liz was just an example of that. And the reason she hates me

• 47:19Speaker 03

  is because now she feels the obligation to pass it on, pay it forward to someone else because she gets, you know, hit up all the time because she's just an amazing hotelier.

• 47:28Tim Ferriss?

  She's really incredible. And she's

• 47:30Speaker 03

  The company's called Bunkhouse.

• 47:31Tim Ferriss?

  Bunkhouse. And she has a number of just incredible, not just incredible properties, but incredibly different properties.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're soulful. You know, at the end of one of her pools, you know, the Saint Cecilia Pool here in Austin, it just has, you know, neon soul. And there's something soulful to her places. And so I want to bet on people like that.

• 47:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there are a lot of parallels that I can see. Looking at the two of you side by side in some ways. And it just struck me that I did a number of staycations at Hotel Vitale to work on books. Because I think I had read that Maya Angelou had done that. And I thought, that's a great idea. Because at home, I have all the usual distractions and ways to procrastinate. Let me treat this.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Moby would do that when he's.

• 48:20Tim Ferriss?

  Moby.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Moby would do that. You'd go to a hotel room and just shut himself off for a week and to actually figure out music.

• 48:26Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding. So I have friends here. I won't mention their names, but they're well known filmmakers because they told me this just in a private conversation. Who use Hotel St. Cecilia for their sort of staycation creative work as well. So I'm going to jump to this text from Liz. She had a number of questions. I asked her, are there in particular questions or topics that you think could be interesting or fun to explore? So one of them, she gave me quite a few, but one of them was, he, meaning you, began building Joie de Vivre as a young man. It was the work of the first half of his life, a big sprawling family. What made him decide to sell it when he did?

• 49:04Speaker 03

  So, great question. You know, the one thing, you know, to you aspiring entrepreneurs and people who are younger than me, just know that when you. One of the natural tendencies is we hook our sense of self esteem and self worth to our businesses. I remember in the early days of the Phoenix, I had one hotel before I had 52. And that one hotel, when people come to me and say, how are you doing, Chip? I said, well, the Phoenix is doing fine. And finally, somebody called me on it. It's like, you know, it's like, I didn't say how I'm doing. So my sense of worth and esteem had a lot to do with basically the roller coaster of my business. Well, fortunately, over time, I realized that didn't have to be the case.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  And it was that flatline experience I had 22 years into running my company. That helped me to see that, is this what I want to do the rest of my life? Actually, it's not. And I thought it was going to be, but it wasn't. And more than anything, I just realized that I started the company for creativity and freedom. That's, those are the things I said to myself on one Friday afternoon. And I said, you know, what did I learn this week about why I'm starting this business? And 22 years later, I said, do I have any creativity and freedom in this business anymore? No, I'm like running a company with 3,500 people. So that's what led me, it was hard though, it was very hard to sell a business that for a, you know, ultimately when I sold it was 24 years, that has been your identity for most of your adult

• 50:26Speaker 03

  life. But it was actually harder for other people than for me. And that's a fascinating piece of it, is I realized my identity had moved on. I was ready for what's next, which was to become the world's leading expert on festivals. And I didn't really want to be doing it anymore. But I had to deal with other people's challenge in me changing my identity. And there's lots of ways people change their identity. You can get divorced, you can, you know, change your career completely, you can literally change your gender. But in my case, it was just changing the actual fact that I was the founder and CEO of what was the largest boutique hotel company, second largest in the, in the US, but the largest hotel company frankly, in the San Francisco Bay area. And for some people who liked having

• 51:11Speaker 03

  their friend have that role, and got a lot of free hotel rooms out of it, from me, or restaurant reservations, or massages in my spas, they didn't like it. And, but at the end of the day, it was the right decision.

• 51:22Tim Ferriss?

  So that, as you just said, it sounds like a difficult decision, or a maybe emotionally intense decision to work through. And I mean, I remember when this was kind of happening. And, and you, you mentioned, just in passing here, you know, I decided what I want to do next, just become the worldwide expert on festivals. Did you need to find that before you were comfortable on some level with making the decision to move on? Or did you make the decision to move on, pull the trigger, and then find that next thing?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. I, I, I made the decision I had, this was going to kill me if I kept doing it. And so I knew I needed to move on. I didn't know where, and, and frankly, then you get into the freaky, it was in the great recession, the freaky thought of like, how am I going to sell this company in the bottom of the recession? So I hadn't yet found the new thing I was moving toward. I knew what I was moving away from, but moving towards something is really important because otherwise, when you do leave it, you actually, it's like when people retire and they end up on a golf course depressed.

• 52:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Because they actually didn't move towards something. They just moved away from something and they just sort of like, almost, you know, just wasting their time.

• 52:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're just in a void. They stepped into a void.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  They stepped into a void. And so the fact that I got to a place where ultimately I said, you know what? I'm fascinated with festivals. I'm on the board of Burning Man and there's no great website for all the world's best festivals. Maybe I'll just go around and become the world's most interesting person and go around to festivals all over the world. And I did that. Thirty-six festivals in 20 countries in one year. And that helped me.

• 53:03Tim Ferriss?

  You have a great blog post on tim.blog about some of your experiences at these festivals.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  That's true. I do. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. So I loved, loved that process and it did help me move to what's next. Plus, I wrote another book. I wrote a book called Emotional Equations that did well. It became a New York Times bestseller. And it was another thing that just said, listen, like, this is my new identity. I'm, you know, at that point, that was my fourth book. And I was like, okay, yeah, I write, I speak, I go to festivals, I live a good life. You know, stop, you know, giving me shit for the fact that I'm no longer a boutique hotelier.

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned the emotional equation. So I remember this. And could you explain despair equals suffering minus meaning?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. When I had that flatline experience and to just give, I was in St. Louis giving a talk. I basically probably had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic for my septic leg and my broken ankle. And I went to the other side nine times over the course of ninety minutes.

• 53:59Tim Ferriss?

  Where were you when this happened?

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I was in.

• 54:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, did you make it to the hospital before you flatlined?

• 54:03Speaker 03

  No. No. So I was, I, so I was, I was giving a speech on crutches, which is what first, first sign that Chip should have been staying in bed and not been on this book tour trip was like, yeah, why was I on crutches on stage giving a speech? So I didn't, fortunately, I did not fall over at the speaker as I was standing up at the, at the mic. But I sat down signing books and that's when I slumped in my chair.

• 54:27Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  And then they put me, I probably didn't have a flatline experience there. I just went unconscious for three minutes. Fortunately, the paramedics showed up a couple of minutes later, really quickly, and they put me on a gurney, and they had put heart monitors on me, and that's the first time of nine times that I went flatline. And they had to get the paddles out. The first time, they didn't have to use them. About five seconds later, my heart came again. But over the course of the next 90 minutes, in the ambulance, in the ER, etc. And I kept saying, "Okay, this is what I saw on the other side." And whoever was there would take a note of it. And it turns out it was the same thing over and over again. But, long story short-

• 55:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hold on. Let's not do long story short. You can't do a long story short on near-death experiences. What did you see on the other side?

• 55:10Speaker 03

  There is, by the way, a festival of the near- a pilgrimage of the near-death experience in Spain. Spain has the weirdest festivals in the world. What I saw was this, and the fact it happened over and again means it's pretty remarkable and worthy to just talk about it. So, I don't love the mountains. I love the beach. Mountains are okay. I do like it. I love being in nature. So, it's interesting, this is a mountain setting. So, it's a mountain setting, a chalet with a huge sunroof or skylight, and light is pouring in the skylight, beautiful light. And it's pouring in in such a way that there's

• 55:51Speaker 03

  actually this viscuous oil, very heavy oil, on the ground, on the most beautiful wood-grained floor you've ever seen. And it's because of the way the light's coming in, and it's hitting the floor, this oil that's sort of slightly moving, or it's like going down these stairs, these beautiful wood stairs, it's casting this beautiful kaleidoscope of colors on the wall. And so, what I see is light, I see colors, and I see this weird, this frangipani-scented oil going down these stairs.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  And that's what I kept seeing and I never saw anybody else, didn't see anybody on the other side. I, what I saw myself as observing, almost floating above this, I felt incredibly peaceful and everything was moving very, very, very slow motion. So, um, and I, you know, I kept coming back to that. And I don't really, I've never actually sat down with like a dream analysis or anyone to sort of say, what does it mean? The fact it's stairs going downstairs means I may be going to hell. Um, but actually it was up, it was up in a mountain chalet way up toward heaven. I don't, I don't know. All I know is, you know, forget about heaven and hell. What I know is in that moment, I felt beauty and calmness like I'd never felt before. So, yeah, that, so the, I was in the-

• 57:11Tim Ferriss?

  What, what did you make of that? Like, I mean, and I'm not saying it, there, there is no, whether, if you had a Freudian, Freudian dream analyst here and they said, you know what that means? Let me tell you. I'd be like, bullshit. Come on. Like, you can give us your opinion. But-

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's humbling, but-

• 57:24Tim Ferriss?

  What would you, what, what did you-

• 57:26Speaker 03

  What do I take from it?

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  What do I, what do I take from it? First of all, I take, I take from it that I, um, how I, I want to honor and experience beauty in my whole life, you know, I, um, the gods of efficiency, which I tend to, it tends to be my religion. Um, these gods of efficiency have a tendency to force me or, or have its way with me in terms of just getting, uh, very clipped in how I do things because I have to like get all these things done. And, you know, being clipped and doing things doesn't allow for the time to sort of, you know, have the immediacy of seeing in that moment, that beautiful thing. So I think what it's helped me to see is like, how do I create beautiful moments in my life? Um, and how do I take time, you know, to do, you know, fasting day, three, three or four days fasting

• 58:13Speaker 03

  in a row and things like that, that allow me to just be in the moment. That's one thing. Number two is, uh, the calmness I felt. So no, no fear of like, okay, you know, I'm dying and it's just gonna be terrible. There was that. But I think the thing that was most interesting was just the fact that the oil was moving so slowly. It's like, there's a, there's a ketchup commercial anticipation a long time ago, maybe Heinz 57 ketchup. It was like, it took so much work to get that damn ketchup out of the bottle. That's how it felt. And so what it felt for me was like- I'm slowly moving to my death, but it's a long time from now.

• 58:48Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  And so that's what I take from it, which is a positive, you know, overall perspective. That night, after having all those experiences, I'm by myself in a, in a, uh, in a room at the hospital in St. Louis. And weirdly enough, in my backpack, um, that I'd brought with me on this trip, was Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's book. And the reason it was there is because I'd gone through a few really rough months. And one of my closest friends, who was my insurance agent, whose name is Chip, had committed suicide four months earlier. Um, and so I was trying to make sense of my life. And so here I had this book. And as I'm reading this book, I had a hard time sleeping that night.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  I'm reading this book and I was just distilling, if I were to take the, the meaning of that book, Man's Search for Meaning, and turn it into a, an equation, it would be despair equals suffering minus meaning. And the way I thought of it is suffering is sort of a constant, if you're a Buddhist, and I sort of slightly am. Um, uh, if you're, you believe that suffering is always ever-present. It's the first noble truth of Buddhism. And yet, meaning or suffering and meaning are actually inner, uh, they're sort of inversely proportional to each other. So if you do the math of like, okay, suffering, uh, despair equals suffering minus meaning, eight equals 10 minus two. If you take two and turn it to four, then eight becomes a six.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  And so despair goes down when meaning goes up. And this is when I realized that that practice I've had since, you know, being a 23-year-old of writing my, what my lessons were for the week, was a practice that actually was giving me meaning. And that's, that equation, which I came up with that night, was, I ended up teaching it to all of our leaders in the company as we went into the Great Recession. Um, and ultimately I said, darn, I went to, to Bhutan to study the Gross National Happiness Index because I wanted to see what, what's the happiness, you know, equation in life. And I ended up giving a TED Talk about that. And then I ended up deciding to write this book, which was a series of 18 equations

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  that sort of help you make sense of your emotions, whether it's, um, happiness or, or disappointment, um, or wisdom.

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other equations that you find yourself?

• 1:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  Referring to or thinking of more often than others?

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say a couple. The anxiety one's very relevant in the business world and that's anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. So it's not a plus, it's a times. So the uncertainty and the powerlessness together are combustible. So what I help people to see if they're in that space is what is it that you can try to find some certainty about? And what is it where you can, what, how, what ways can you actually create some influence and some sense of power? And by doing that, you actually help people get to a place where they have a little bit less anxiety.

• 1:01:40Tim Ferriss?

  Makes it very tangible, right?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  It makes it tangible. Or disappointment equals expectations minus reality. That's a classic one for any business. Like, okay, what's your customer expectation? And then what is it that you're giving as reality? And if the disappointment is more predominant than the reality, then, you know, they're gonna, there's gonna be, I'm sorry, if the expectations are high and reality is low, disappointment is what will come from that. So, um, and those both are negative. The happiness one that I learned in Bhutan was happiness equals wanting what you have divided by having what you want. Wanting what you have speaks to gratitude. Having what you want is the process of gratification. So it's not

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  to say, this is not the, so it says gratitude is better than gratification. Well, that's fine if you're a Buddhist. That's fine if you don't want to go out and attain, attain, attain. I want to go attain and I want to go gratify. But gratification doesn't necessarily bring happiness. It may bring success. And for a lot of people who think that success will bring happiness, you know, they go on the hedonic treadmill and end up realizing just when they get the thing that they thought they wanted, there's some new shiny object that becomes the new thing.

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  The rabbit leading the greyhound around the track just sped up a little bit.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  We know that one. Tim, okay. We occasionally, occasionally we go there.

• 1:03:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, it's, it's you, me, Liz, and a few million people who might be listening to this. And speaking of this, so this ties in very, very nicely.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  See, both you and Liz are very thoughtful and make a point of trying to be aware of your own thought processes, reasons for doing things, the drivers sort of behind the superficial answers that we're all inclined to give, that are fast and easy and expedient. So one of her Questions was, I noticed the chip has made a few life changes, selling joie de vivre, Airbnb, now doing what you're doing. For what looks from the outside like a conscious choice to simplify his life, slow down a bit, but does he always jump into something else big and sprawling?

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  [laughing]

• 1:03:52Tim Ferriss?

  I know a lot of people, in parentheses, like me, I suspect, just can't help themselves. How do we learn to just be still? Should we? Is that the goal?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:04:02Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you, how do you begin to think about that?

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Um, I want to wring her fucking neck. No, I'm kidding.

• 1:04:11Tim Ferriss?

  But this is, I think, something that a lot of people who have become good at achieving struggle with.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. Um, you know, I, Peter Guber, I got to interview him on stage. He's one of the, actually, you know, Peter Guber.

• 1:04:28Tim Ferriss?

  Fascinating guy.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  We actually have both been in his box at the Warriors games. I interviewed him on stage, and this guy's 20 years older than me, and he's been successful in so many different ways. And I was interviewing him on stage at the Airbnb Open, which is our big host open that I was in charge of. We had 20,000 people in LA at this one. And so I'm on stage with this guy, and listening to him and thinking, oh, my God, that could be me someday. And he's an amazing guy, but he's constantly so driven to succeed, to succeed at the next thing. And, um, so what I took from that, and what I take from Liz's question, is I think the, the real question here is not whether you're going to just be still. I love being still. The fact that I'm a meditator, the fact that I have chosen

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  to live in Baja California, an hour north of, of Cabo San Lucas, on the beach, learning how to surf, and having a very simple life there, it means there's been a lot of conscious choice of how I'm curating my life, not living in San Francisco anymore.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  And, um, yeah, I, I have these ideas that I feel like I want to go out and try in the world. But the question is, how am I executing on them? And what is my intent? Or what's the sort of the silent intent for why I'm doing it? And I think for so many of the things I've done in the past, certainly Joie de Vivre was at times an exercise in seeing how big Chip's ego could get. Now, I say that not to beat myself up, but I do say that from the perspective of, I was this guy who was getting a lot of my sense of self-worth from the fact that this hotel company was successful. And so my ego was on display.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  And, um, then I joined Airbnb because the founders asked me to. And all of a sudden, I'm not, you know, I was the tiny version of Richard Branson in my company. But now I'm like, instead of being the sage on the stage, I'm the guide on the side. And I'm helping these three, uh, co-founders take their little tech company and turn it into a global hospitality brand. And I realized in that process that I'm still driven. I'm still totally in it, although I actually was learning how to not do the 70 hour a week kind of thing. Not four hours a week or whatever. Whatever, whatever that book was. Yeah. So I, uh, what I was realizing is that actually I'm not doing this for ego purposes. I actually feel like I'm doing this more for legacy purposes.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  I'm doing this to actually help them and I believe in their mission. The Airbnb mission to belong anywhere, help people belong anywhere and turn strangers into friends. All of that was good. And now this Modern Elder Academy that I'm doing in Baja that she's reciting there. You know, the reality is, yeah, it's, it is me being driven again. But I've put guard posts on it. I'm doing it in Baja. I'm doing one location. I'm not doing multiple locations. And

• 1:07:21Tim Ferriss?

  You feel comfortable with that commitment?

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  I feel com- yeah, no, I am. Actually, and frankly, the cancer, you know, for those who didn't hear earlier on the thing, I've got cancer. The cancer sort of was another educator of saying, yeah, I think midlife wisdom schools are a thing for the future in a huge way. I think the idea of lifelong learning and how do we go to a retreat that helps us to repurpose ourselves, reframe our mindset, to have a growth mindset about, you know, our aspirational aging ahead of us. I think all that's important. No one's done that yet. There's all, there's been all kinds of retreat centers, but not a place that has a curriculum for people in midlife.

• 1:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  When you say midlife, let's put an age rage on that.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Ha, well.

• 1:08:00Tim Ferriss?

  Or it doesn't have to be age, but how would you, how does someone know if they're in midlife as, as, as?

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  They're in crisis.

• 1:08:08Tim Ferriss?

  Is it a plot?

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  No, no, you know, midlife has historically been defined as either 40 to 60 or 45 to 65. The truth is, the, the, the phrase midlife crisis was coined in 1965. And the reason it didn't exist before then was because longevity in the US was 47 years old in the year 1900, and it became 77 by the year 2000. We, we get, we added 30 years of longevity in one, one century. So what happened is this new era of life sort of got emerged.

• 1:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's not, it's not yet fade to black. It's like, no, you have another half the movie to go.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Well, you do. And the, the thing that happens in midlife and how you know you're in midlife, whatever the age is, is you feel the weight of the accumulation of what you have acquired in your life. And I don't mean just the physical things. I mean, the friends, the responsibilities, the identities, like the, you know, sort of invisible name tags that define who you are in the world. And you actually frankly are sort of feeling overwhelmed by all of that accumulation.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  There's this reset that happens in midlife and and you could say frankly with the millennial generation, it might happen actually earlier in life. It might happen at thirty five. Frankly, in Silicon Valley, it absolutely happens in the mid thirties when especially if you're an engineer, where you feel like, wow, I am no longer, you know, I'm no longer perceived as, you know, an up and comer and in an industry that, you know, is like the entertainment industry or fashion.

• 1:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or professional sports.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So you so I think personally, midlife is from thirty five to seventy five. And part of the reason I think and I think it used to be just forty five to sixty five, it's it's happening younger because of the fact that people feel irrelevant earlier. And, you know, the digital intelligence that we desire in companies mean that there's a greater and greater desire to hire the new digital natives. And and I think it's going to last longer midlife because if we're going to live to a hundred, which is sort of the the future, you know, as a longevity, we're in the right around eighty right now. But by the by the time we get to the end of the century, I think we'll be about at a hundred for longevity in the US. That means at age seventy five, you're probably still working.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  And at least, you know, by choice or by necessity.

• 1:10:26Tim Ferriss?

  You're creating, I mean, doing something.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  So I think that that period of time, so midlife used to be a crisis. Now it's a marathon. And that's ultimately what led me to saying, you know what, we need to figure out this wisdom school. How do people go into midlife and not think of it life as being just a one tank journey? Like you fuel up with all of your, you know, education and support up to age twenty or twenty five, and then you drive this vehicle that we call our bodies for the rest of our life. And at midlife, you're starting to run on fumes and you need a you need a pit stop. And so the Modern Elder Academy is the idea of that pit stop. And I think it's going to help to create a new category of academia or even

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  hospitality real estate, which is the midlife wisdom school, just like Canyon Ranch forty years ago, Mel Zickerman, overweight accountant from LA, wanted to go to a place to be get healthy and all the places that he saw forty years ago. Mostly like fat farms and mostly for women. And he ended up creating Canyon Ranch in Tucson. And it really sort of, it basically created a new hospitality real estate category called the Destination Spa Resort. Spas had existed for thousands of years, but not a category of real estate called Destination Spa Resort. So I think that's what I'm trying to do. So to, to answer in the long-winded way, Liz's question. When I see something like that and I can see that I can be a social entrepreneur that's

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  actually trying to fix a societal ill, which is ageism and people getting stuck in midlife. I'm gonna do that. And in this case, I'm doing it, you know, as a social entrepreneur with a social enterprise where 60% of the people are on scholarship. So I'm funding a million dollars a year in scholarships. That, that is something I wanna bet on, but I wanna bet on it as a catalyst for others to do their thing.

• 1:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I was gonna ask.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like Burning Man created a bunch, Burning Man created a great idea. And so there's a bunch of 10 principles festivals around the world. Esalen, great idea, 1962, led to, you know, 100 personal growth retreat centers.

• 1:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So the academy is a proof of concept.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  It's a proof of concept and a catalyst for other social entrepreneurs around the world to say, let's create one in the Sacred Valley of Peru, or in Kyoto, Japan, or in the Catskills of New York.

• 1:12:40Tim Ferriss?

  Or do you think, when you say, cause I could see a bunch of workarounds to the one-location limitation. So when you say one-location, does that mean that you will be only hands-on in one location? Or do you envision some type of, for lack of a better descriptor, like a franchise model, or an association, or a loosely organized affiliate, uh, collection of dozens or hundreds of properties that Chip is somehow involved with?

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  I love your enterprising mind, and I have thought of all of those.

• 1:13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I just wanted to know, when you say, like, I'm limiting it to one location, does that, is there, is there a footnote to that?

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  Thank God for cancer.

• 1:13:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Honestly, I, um...

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  The path that you're talking about, I was in contract negotiations on a second location and in discussions on a third location when I found out about my cancer on the second day of the book tour, right before, you know, the TED Talk and six weeks before the Modern Elder Academy was opening to the public after a six-month beta period. So at that moment, I said no. I said, and I keep saying no. The thing I will do is create sort of like the startup kit. Here's how you can create one. Not a Modern Elder Academy. We may only have one location in the world, but a midlife wisdom school. You call it what you want it to be. Here's, here's how we can do it. You know, I don't want to make, you know, it could be a consulting

• 1:14:10Speaker 03

  opportunity, but I don't really care about the money on it. I'm lucky enough. Thank God for the Airbnb last six years of being there because I don't have to worry about money, that's for sure. I just like the idea that a legacy I can look to in my life is to create a way for people to aspire to aging. You know, aging is not something that we aspire to. And, and yet, there are a lot of real unexpected pleasures of aging. The U-curve of happiness is, do you know that? Do you know?

• 1:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Oh, God, let's talk about this. So U-curve of happiness is so fascinating. It's so at odds with the societal narrative.

• 1:14:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think I can see where this is going.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  So the U-curve of happiness has been proven in every country but Russia. Russia, Russia people get happiest after they die. It's a statistical error, clearly, but there's something to that. Every other country in the world that has been studied, that what they show is the following, from about age 25 to about age 45, between 45 and 50, depending on the country, is a slow decline in happiness because of that accumulation, because of that collection of things that we start to do that prepare us for midlife. And then, between 45 and 50, there's this, what Brené Brown would call the unraveling, another Texan, she's in Houston.

• 1:15:31Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. She might even be here in Austin now because her daughter's here.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So the great unraveling that happens in midlife, where people actually start to discard things and they move from the accumulating mode to the editing mode. So that editing mode, the idea that people are moving into that mode is, leads people to get to a place where they get happier with each successive decade. So people are happier in their 50s than their 40s. They're actually happier in their 60s than their 50s. And they're happier in their 70s than their 60s. Men start to flatten out in their happiness in the second half of their 70s. Women, it starts happening in their early 80s. So in essence, what it's saying, because women live longer than men, is there's a

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  point at which, five to 10 years before you die, you actually start to maybe get a little bit less happy. Because there can be acute health issues going on. But that's fascinating. The fact that we actually get happier as we get older, that is not what you see on the TV. Yeah. And so I think the idea that, or the aging brain, we know the aging brain, we have less recall, what's your name again? Oh, that's right, Tim. The aging brain doesn't have recall, or is not as quick as it used to be. But a lot of people don't know about the aging brain, is it gets more adept at doing left brain, right brain tango. Which means, basically, the brain shrinks a little bit as it ages.

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  It actually gets, you're able to, as you get older, move from the linear left brain to the creative right brain much more easily, more adeptly. And what does that lead to in terms of a positive? It leads to being able to think more synthetically, holistically, get the gist of something. So if you want somebody on your team to actually sort of like hear it all and then distill it down to the wisdom of like what they just heard, an older person can do that better than a younger person. Younger person's much better at doing focused. So why is that relevant? Well, let's talk about Airbnb for a moment. At Airbnb, when I joined six years ago, we had, I love the founders and they were doing an amazing job and the company would have been successful without me.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  But when I joined six years ago, and it was, you know, maybe one twentieth of the company decides today, we had 30 strategic initiatives in the year 2013 when I started.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  And nobody in the company, including the founders, could actually recite all of them. So later that year, we did an offsite retreat in New York. And I said to the leadership team, of which I was now a part, I was Brian's mentor, but I was also reporting to him as the head of global hospitality and strategy. I said, we gotta get down to four. So for 2014, we're only going to have four strategic initiatives. And so we spent three days arm wrestling over that one, 23 different potential initiatives that we were going to do. And it was that kind of distilling down, I think that-

• 1:18:27Tim Ferriss?

  How did you do that? Because I think a lot of people listening, maybe even one person sitting here talking, i.e. myself, struggle with long lists of prospective or current projects.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:18:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So here you have a fast-growing, very, very fast, I mean understatement, growing startup. And they have a list of how many? Twenty-something? Who knows?

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, 23 initiatives that the 12 members of the leadership team thought should be our potential four for next year.

• 1:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you facilitate a process by which you get that down to four?

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Well, it's the intellectual joust.

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're also kind of the new guy on the job, right?

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  I was the new guy on the job and I was the old guy on the job. I was twice the age of the average person in the company. You know, 20 years older than, I was 21 to 23 years older than all three founders. But I think what they appreciated was there was an element of, I think a modern elder versus a traditional elder is the difference is the modern elder is as curious as they are wise. And it's that curiosity that opens up possibility and the wisdom is what distills down the essence of what's important. And it's that essence of what's important that I think we got to in those three days in New York where we sort of said, okay, so what is it that we want to be when we grow up? We want to be a place where people can belong anywhere. We had not said that out to the public yet, but that was the direction we were going in terms of our internal mantra of the two words that defined us.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  We also looked at, could we take the idea of the Airbnb sharing economy to office space or conference facilities or anything that had excess supply? There are a lot of natural sharing economy businesses that could be created. But we also had to ask ourselves, what's the dream of what we want this to look like five years from now? Or maybe even 10 years from now, because Brian really wanted us to look very far into the future. And maybe that dream could help become an editing function. So for me, that reminded me of something I did back in the joie de vivre era when I was running my boutique hotel company.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  When we were trying to figure out what's our differentiator versus Marriott or even Kimpton, another boutique hotel company, we actually imagined the idea that we could ask the question, what business are we in? Because the number one Harvard Business Review reprint of all time came from an article from 1960 called Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt. And then management theorist and author Peter Drucker took that idea one step further. He said, the most important question any business leader could ever ask themselves is what business are we in? Well, back in the joie de vivre era, we took that idea of what business are we in?

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  And we turned it into a little bit of a game. The idea was we would be asking executives or senior leaders to ask themselves that question in the following manner. So one person would sit facing the other. The person asking the question would say, what business are we in? And the the second person, the person answering would say, okay, we're in the boutique hotel business. The first person would say, thank you. What business are we in? And this time, the second person, the person answering could not answer the same way twice. And if you do that five times, it really almost is like an archaeological dig to figure out the essence of your company. What's your soulful differentiator as an organization?

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  This is how we found out that we were in the identity refreshment business at Joie de Vivre. And it was the same idea that we applied to Airbnb when it came to an offsite retreat we did relatively soon after I joined the company. We sat our executives in pods of two, so they couldn't hear each other. Any company could do this. And we had them go through this exercise of asking the question five times, what business are you in? You can't answer the same way twice. And the beauty of this is we ultimately got us to a place over the course of that day where we came to the conclusion that belonging anywhere was really the mantra, the definition of what differentiated us versus the Marriott's of the world.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  And it was that idea of belonging anywhere that helped us to then imagine, how could we edit all of the possibilities of the things we could go into? Similarly, any executive or frankly, any person could actually ask this question in a slightly different way for themselves. The question would be, what mastery do you offer or what mastery can you offer? So have a friend of yours ask that question of you five times. And you'll be sort of surprised at, by the fifth time you get to ask that question and you've had to come up with four other answers before that, what kind of revelation you may have in this archaeological dig that helps you to mine your own personal mastery.

• 1:23:28Tim Ferriss?

  And to go back to the academy, whether that's a book on the reading list, or an exercise, or a practice that attendees have found particularly valuable, is there anything that comes to mind that people at home might try or think on?

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, the basic premise of the academy is that in midlife, you need to sort of reframe your mindset for what's moving forward. There's a famous Carl Jung quote about, you can't live the afternoon of your life the same way you did the morning. And so speaking to that, we have an exercise around evolution evolving because the first lesson in my book Wisdom at Work: Making of a Modern Elder is to evolve. And it's the hardest one.

• 1:24:04Tim Ferriss?

  So evolve is the first step.

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  Evolve is the first step. The second step is to learn. The third is to collaborate, and the fourth is to counsel. And we can come back to that if we want in a moment. But evolve, wow, what does that mean? It really means learning to edit what is no longer serving you. So we do a lot of different exercises around the idea of liminality, which is being in between two things.

• 1:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  For people who might recognize liminal, subliminal.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Subliminal messages.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  So a liminal is sort of right there, and it's sort of in between two things. It's the transition. Frankly, a caterpillar to a butterfly, the cocoon, is the liminal state. People don't like to be in a liminal state. When you're a kid, you're used to it because everything's in between.

• 1:24:50Tim Ferriss?

  Everything's in between.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  You know, going from crawling to walking, you know, going from pre-purity to an adolescent and teenager. But when you're an adult, you don't like to be liminal. And yet, we have all these transitions in midlife that actually make us feel liminal. So we do this exercise where there's a whole counter full of name tags, empty name tags. Forty of them actually are empty. One hundred and twenty, we've written different kinds of mindsets, ways of perspective, or ways of identifying yourself that aren't serving you anymore. Now, if you were to do this on your own, you, no one's gonna write those for you. You'll have to write these yourself. But the process of this was, the process of what you can do

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  is, you actually write down anything from, you know, my body is falling apart, or I'm never gonna meet the, you know, love of my life.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  So there, in part, beliefs that are no longer serving you.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  That's great. Millennials rule the world. There's a variety of different things we have there. And then people, a lot of times, use their own name tags. And what we do is, the crescendo of this experience that afternoon is, people slap like up to six different name tags on their chest. We go around a room.

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  The name tags that are already filled out.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  Often, as well as the ones they fill out themselves.

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  And if they have one that they can't find, then they fill out the empty tag.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so then you go around a room, and you could do this with like four friends. And you go around the room and look at each other's name tags. And then you ultimately have a conversation one on one or in a small group about why these aren't serving you anymore and how you're going to be willing to get liminal and try transitioning into something new. And so as a result of that, we end the afternoon with a little fire pit. We don't walk on, you know, any coals or anything like that. We just have people write down what's the thing that they're ready to evolve out of that's no longer serving them. And it could be, some of the examples of things are like, you know what? My sense of my success in my career

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  will no longer be my sense of success in life. That's an example of something saying, okay, I'm going to put that in the fire and then let it burn. So that's an example of a specific kind of exercise we do. We do a lot of mindfulness exercises as well in terms of helping people to calm their nervous system.

• 1:27:13Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause for one second?

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  So the up to six tags on the chest, do you participate in this exercise?

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:27:21Tim Ferriss?

  Would you be willing to share some that you've burned?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Well, one of the ones I, yeah, I mean, I, you know, since you've heard my health diagnosis, I said like, I've recently been given a scary health diagnosis. And I feel a little lost. So that would be an example of a name tag. Another name tag would be, um, yeah, I, you know, I, I think I might never meet the soulmate that I met six years ago and no longer in that relationship. Uh, I am in the relationship, but it's, it's turned into a different kind of relationship. Um, another one could be, um, another one that I've written and, and then ultimately burned is, um, it's time to take down the scaffolding of my ego. So what does that mean? It means like, over the course of my teen years and growing up, you build an ego.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  We sort of create this container and our ego can be a very healthy thing. It can actually create the separation. It's the thing that actually helps us to know who we are. But it is a bit of a scaffolding. And like what I mean by taking down the scaffolding of the ego is really sort of saying behind that is something that's really amazing. It's a soul, it's a heart, it's and I'm no longer going to let my ego sort of be the thing that I lead with. Uh, and how, and then I, you know, come up with a list of things, how that showed, how, what are the practices or ways of being that actually have to change in order for that to be the case? So those are some examples, just off the cuff. I wish I had a list.

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have, do you have people prepare for the time at Modern Elder Academy in any way? Or do they show up and that's sort of time zero when things begin?

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  They've got to read the book, Wisdom at Work, the Making of Modern Elder. And they do two exercises, one, which is an identity cleanse, where they actually talk to their friends about what parts, what parts of their identity work, what parts of their identity don't work so well? So they actually get some feedback and then, and this is before they arrive. And then they do a values inventory of like, what are the values that are most important? And stack ranking them. So they try to get clear going into it, what are the values? Now later in the week, they often go back to that list and say, oh my God, now that I've had some time to think about this, my values list is a little different. Um, and so they ask themselves then, how can they, how, or we ask them and we, we work with them. Cause, because after people leave, that group of 12 to 18 people in the cohort,

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  they literally, for some of the groups, have a weekly Zoom call every single week. So they're sort of accountability partners and, and people who can sort of help them say, okay, yeah, you said your values, you know, number one value was this and you know, now it looks like it's not there anymore. What's going on? Um, so that's part of what happens too.

• 1:30:10Tim Ferriss?

  What's, uh, what would be example values that people might then put in order?

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Um, an example could, I mean, some of the most obvious ones are family, uh, religious beliefs, um, making a difference in the local community or, or, you know, trying to change the perspective on climate change. So these are, there, there, those are some of them. Uh, the, there's other ones, which are like ways of being, which are. Being, feeling free. So that, that's not, some people would say that's not a value, but that's sort of a way of being.

• 1:30:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it could be a way of being a priority.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is, that's what they are. So it's a mixture of, I would say, values and ways of being. And we have like a list of 60 of them and they come up with their top five and then stack rank those top five. And, and then over the course of the week, we, we don't force them to go back to it, but there's some exercises we do that allow them to, on their own, sort of look at, see, and see how those have changed.

• 1:31:06Tim Ferriss?

  Would you be open to talking about family for a few minutes?

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So I would, I would love to hear your, uh, some backstory that I don't know, and then have some questions about current, current day.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:17Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so you are openly gay.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:20Tim Ferriss?

  When, have you been openly gay kind of from the get-go? Or when, when did that?

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  So I was.

• 1:31:25Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, become something that was sort of publicly, that you felt comfortable publicly disclosing?

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  I was 22 when I came up. So I was, I was, and dated women, girls, you know, I, I was very actively sexually in my high school. Um, and so, but I knew behind the scenes, like there was something there. Uh, I grew up with a father who, who I love, he, both my parents are still living there, 81. But my dad was Steven senior, I was Steven junior, the chip off the old block. And my dad was a captain in the Marine Reserve, hardcore, you know, dude. And I was the oldest and the only boy. And so I was meant to be like the, the mini version of dad. So the, my process of being Eagle Scout like my dad, All-American water polo player at, you know, in high school, and then playing water polo

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  at Stanford, um, student body president, all this stuff was like, I was on the path to be just, actually, my dad and I talked about this recently. Um, he said, Chip, all I wanted you to do is be a better version of me. And that was so interesting to hear that. I always knew that was the case, but I never heard him.

• 1:32:31Tim Ferriss?

  That explicit.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  81 years, it's like, Dad, I know. And that like fucked with my mind. So I did everything I could to sort of just be this better version of dad. And then in, I was in a fraternity in, at Stanford. And that's where it started like messing with my mind, being in a fraternity with a bunch of guys who I had some attraction to, but I wasn't doing anything about it. And I was dating a couple of different women and it was in between my first and second year of business school. I was 22 years old, living in New York, working for Morgan Stanley, you know, investment banker by day and at night, walking into my first gay bar. And that's when there's like, you know, like Wizard of Oz, Munchkin Land, you know, it went from black and white to Technicolor. I was like, oh, wow.

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  Well, this feels a little more.

• 1:33:18Tim Ferriss?

  This may be a thing.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, this may be a thing. And, and so, um, but you know, back then, wow. I mean, I came out the summer that Newsweek had, you know, the, the, the cover story about, you know, the gay, the gay cancer, they called AIDS. And so it was a really, really not an easy time to come out. Certainly not an easy time to come out in terms of the world that we live in today compared to then in terms of, um, especially someone who's like, you know, hardcore business guy. And, uh, so when I started my company at 26, you know, people knew I was gay and that was sort of an unusual thing to have sort of a founder, CEO of Gallo. I was, I was living in San Francisco and it was a boutique hotel company. So that, like, that made it a little easier.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Um, and yeah, so I've, uh, ever since age 22, pretty much just, uh, you know, been, uh, you know, an out, out early gay man and have had two, two long relationships and, uh, now have a couple of sons with a lesbian couple.

• 1:34:16Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanted to ask you about that next. So how did, how did that come about?

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  So the women live in Houston. Laura's been a longtime friend of mine and, um, She asked me, it was, her timing was perfect. She asked me, three weeks before I was selling my company, Joie de Vivre, and I was like the mama and the papa of Joie de Vivre. So I didn't have a co-founder, ran it for 24 years, knew almost everybody in the company, 3,500 employees. I had a lot of parent energy that had gone into my company. And I was wondering, like, wow, what's gonna happen when I like step away from that? And three weeks before, I, we made it public that I was actually selling.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  She approached me, and I'd been approached before by lesbians who wanted my sperm.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  That, you know, but I'd always said no. And so this time I said yes, and I, and so the idea was frankly, they're gonna be in Houston, I'll be the sperm donor. I don't have any legal rights, financial obligations. And we'll see how it goes in terms of whether the boys, or the kids, boys or girls, will know who their dad is. So it was that, that sort of like, okay, I mean, it's pretty transactional, although, you know, probably a little bit more like, okay, maybe it'll be more than that, but let's see it as we go. Well, they ended up, the two women ended up having two boys. And more than anything, I think they, the women who, you know, they live in the state of Texas, and so the rules around this were tough.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Texas is a little bit more of a conservative state. And so there was some worry that, okay, well, I'm the, I'm the real biological dad, and so can the non-biological mom be a mom? And long story short is we got to a place where it was beautiful. They, they're, they knew that my intentions were not to, to like be the full-time dad, or to even be in a co-parenting role. I was there to be the boy's dad when I'm there, and I'm there, you know, a moderate amount, and they come down to Baja a lot. And it's been beautiful. It's, and you know, it's been a great way to give these boys a lot of love and in essence, three parents instead of two.

• 1:36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Number of different follow-up questions. So the, the first is, is reflecting on Something you said, which is, I'd been asked before and I'd said no. So I had been asked a few years ago by a very close friend of mine, if I would be a sperm donor for his sister, who had just gotten out of a very long relationship, who'd been kind of strung along by a guy until she was in her late 30s. And I thought very, very seriously about it. And I'd never considered it before, thought very seriously, was going to do it. And then had a friend of mine who had at that time, one young child, now has two. And he said, Tim, if you do that, you are going to need and want to be involved

• 1:37:12Tim Ferriss?

  in some fashion. Like, it's not, I know you well enough. It's not going to sit well with you. Like, you're not going to be able to go hands free. And so I decided not to do it.

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you change your mind? Like, why did you say yes in this case and no in previous cases?

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Well, I think this idea that literally I had, I psychologically analyzed myself and I thought, I really have had a lot of parent energy, being the mentor and, you know, almost father figure for so many people in the company. And that was going to change. And I didn't necessarily understand what kind of gap that would create in my life. So the timing was perfect. So I understand what your point of view. And yet I was in a place where there was a part of me that was thirsty for it.

• 1:37:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  And because the women were so self-sufficient about how they wanted to do this, I figured, okay, you know, let's see it. And I didn't, I didn't know whether it was going to turn out as it's turned out, which is I'm much more integrated in the boy's life.

• 1:38:12Tim Ferriss?

  How did that come to be?

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  I think it was partly because they ended up having two boys. And I think, you know, and if they'd had the two girls, two girls that say, I'm not sure if it would have been different. And my thinking is, it might have been different. I think the fact that they're boys, like, they want their dad and they want to go pal around with dad on the beach and things like that, you know. I think that had some influence, maybe, although we've never talked about that. But more than anything, I just, you know, you just start loving, you know, these kids. Now, I had had a foster son. When I was 28, I became a foster parent to a 13-year-old from the Tenderline, that district where my first hotel is, whose father's black, mom's white, and, you know, basically, and he ended up homeless because his parents were

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  just not very responsible. And so I had had an experience of being a parent, but it was a really unusual experience. It was me and my partner, my Israeli partner, who I was with at that time and is one of my best friends now. And here's this kid who's darker-skinned, who's straight, at age 13, moving in with two white gay men. And it's like, it was perfect for a sitcom. It taught me a little bit about parenting in the early days. Very different experience, though. But I do think that this idea of having younger people who need your tutelage and love helps us get out of our ego. It is absolutely, you know, there's no doubt

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  that, you know, it's a Zen practice to actually be with a little child, and they take all of your attention. So, but I, you know, I think it's been, certainly the process of how we define and create family has certainly evolved a lot in the last three or four decades.

• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

  How are you thinking about parenting in the sense that are you, are you going instinctive? Have you been, have you read books on the subject?

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  You know, there's some blogs that I've seen in the past, and at the end of the day, the instinctive to me is best, but that, you know, between stimulus and response, I think is important because it's really easy to be reactive with a kid who's just acting out.

• 1:40:22Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  It's a little more complicated in my case because I'm not with the boys every day, whereas the moms are. And so I also don't want to pull rank and sort of do anything that suggests their approach to parenting is not my approach. So I'm pretty much instinctively trying to work with their approach as well. You know, there's a beautiful Dan Gilbert TED Talk about the fact that we all underestimate how much change is ahead of us at every, frankly, at every different era of our life. So I think the idea of embracing liminality and sort of saying, yes, I'm moving to Austin. Yes, a couple of years ago, I'm moving to Baja. And so...

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  When you embrace it and you sort of see it as just the nature of life, it allows for it to allows you for you to see some of the secret beauty in some of the things you're you're you might be resisting. So I would say I'm still liminal. I would say the chapter wise, I do think my process of moving from being in the trenches, helping to run Airbnb for four years, and then two years now as a strategic advisor, huge change in terms of my day to day living, when I was day to day there versus just sort of advising Brian and the founders on on things now. So I'd say that was a a healthy change.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  But I don't know, more than anything, I'm just curious. I Peter Drucker taught me that curiosity is the elixir of life. And I really believe that. And I think that the the thing that makes a modern elder different than a traditional elder is the traditional elder was about being revered. It was about reverence. You revered your elder, you respected your elder. It's not about reverence anymore. It's about relevance. And relevance requires understanding the modern day world.

• 1:42:17Speaker 03

  Not just spouting wisdom that sometimes is timeless and age old, but it's actually knowing how to fit that age old wisdom into the context of modern day problems. And so I think if I can spend the rest of my life being both curious and wise, almost simultaneously, that is the potent alchemy that will make me hopefully a very happy person, but also someone who can actually influence other people in positive ways as well.

• 1:42:45Tim Ferriss?

  Curious and wise and maybe also unrushed. So you can watch that oil in slow motion.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  Watch that oil.

• 1:42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Going down the stairs.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Or watch the whales. You know, nature is such a teacher. I gotta say, I mean, being here in Austin, there's some really beautiful natural parts of Austin. And I think anybody who doesn't get romance by nature on a regular basis, is missing that lyrical sense of what life is meant to be.

• 1:43:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, definitely. So I've just a few rapid fire questions. They don't require rapid fire answers, but I always like to ask at least a handful of these. So the first one, outside of your own books, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people and why?

• 1:43:33Speaker 03

  Well, other than Man's Search for Meaning, which is probably my number one gift. Uh, recently, the last couple of years, um, there's a book called The Hundred Year Life. Hundred Year Life, written by a couple of Brits, and it, it sort of says, imagine the future where the average person lives to a hundred. How is that going to change on a personal and societal basis? It's a really interesting observational book. The Happiness Curve, which we talked about earlier, um, it's a, the, the U curve of happiness is what we call it, but the name of the book is by Jonathan Rausch, is called The Happiness Curve. That's become a favorite, uh, to gift. Um, I also love Danny Meyer, the restaurateur.

• 1:44:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  And he's got, and he's got one of the best books on hospitality ever written, which is called, um, Setting the Table.

• 1:44:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so Danny Meyer, what's, what's the list? I might be getting, I guess we will certainly have Shake Shack for that.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  Union Square Hospitality Company.

• 1:44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Union Square Hospitality.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  So he's got everything from Gramercy.

• 1:44:33Tim Ferriss?

  Gramercy, that's what I was looking for, because a friend of mine used to work on the line there, actually, Gramercy Park. Fascinating, fascinating guy.

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, also, uh, some good, uh, sort of philosophical food to chew on, right? I mean, it's practical and philosophical in terms of, let's say, eliminating tipping.

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  Well, speaking of philosophical, thank you. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I have given that away to, to a number of people. There we go.

• 1:44:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Maybe Seneca, there's a Seneca book about, um, about the short life.

• 1:45:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, on the shortness of life.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  On the shortness of life. Um, you know, one of the things he says in that book is, he says, uh, it says something about the fact that it's not so much the shortness of life, it's how we waste it.

• 1:45:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  And I think there's something to that in terms of like, what, um, what percentage of your life is being spent wasted? Also, a longevity thing that I've been thinking about lately is like, imagine what age you're going to live to, and, uh, on the online longevity sites say, I'm going to live till I'm 98. And then ask yourself, how much of your adult life, if you start counting at age 18, is still ahead of you? Uh, in fact, for me, at age 58, I'm at halftime if I live to 98. And when you start realizing you're only 50% of your way through your adult life, you take up surfing at 56 or 57.

• 1:45:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  You take up Spanish, which I'm doing now because I live in Mexico part of the time, better learn Spanish, mi español es muy malo. So, uh, yeah.

• 1:46:00Tim Ferriss?

  Or you write two thirds of the books that you are going to write in your life as Peter Drucker after 65?

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Tim Ferriss?

  If you could put a word, a message, a quote, a question, anything non-commercial on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of billions of people. Is there anything that comes to mind that you might put on that billboard?

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  Well, you mentioned Oscar Wilde earlier. I think one of my favorite quotes of all time is, "Be yourself, everyone else is taken."

• 1:46:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's a great one.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  So that would be my Oscar Wilde quote I would probably slap up there. Um, you know, I don't know. I think the thing I probably would, yeah, I'd probably stick with that.

• 1:46:40Tim Ferriss?

  Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

• 1:46:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  Chip, this is so much fun.

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Tim Ferriss?

  It's really nice to see you again.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  It's great to be here. It's gonna be the first of many times, not necessarily on the show, but just hanging out.

• 1:46:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, we're neighbors.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Tim Ferriss?

  At this point, and people can say hello on Twitter at Chip Conley, Facebook, Chip Conley Author, LinkedIn, Chip Conley SF, and we'll link to all this in the show notes. So for people who are watching or listening to this, it's tim.blog/podcast. You can find links to all of this if you just search for Chip. Also, you have modernelderacademy.org that people can check out. Anything else, parting comments, thoughts, suggestions, anything you'd like to mention before we wrap up?

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  I think I would just finish by just saying that the more we fear aging, the more we're playing on the playing field of the youth. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you, if your intent is to just stay looking young the rest of your life, you're playing on the wrong playing field. It's a losing battle at some point. And some of us are embarrassed to see people who are continuing to play on that playing field. What I think people need to recognize is whether it's the depth of our emotions, the depth of our spiritual connection with ourselves and something bigger than ourselves, these are the things that actually start to grow as we age. And it's part of the reason why we get happier as we get older.

• 1:48:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And you mentioned the anxiety equals, let me get this right, don't stop, don't, don't, don't tell me, it's anxiety equals uncertainty times hopelessness.

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  Powerlessness.

• 1:48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Powerlessness. And that ties into Marcus Aurelius really nicely as well, because it's in a sense, you know, this Stoic philosophical system certainly as practiced by Marcus Aurelius entailed a lot of separating what you can control from what you can.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Tim Ferriss?

  And the possible from the inevitable. And certainly, it's hard to think of someone offhand who thought of death and mortality more than Marcus Aurelius. But, but learn to befriend it in a way.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:46Tim Ferriss?

  And not to, to fight something that sort of left to become this amorphous source of anxiety can really be paralyzing when, as you're doing right now, learning to embrace it and live in liminal.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Embrace the elder. There you go. Own the word. I'm trying to like bring back, bring, bring back the word.

• 1:49:09Tim Ferriss?

  Elder.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  And, and separate from elderly, which is, to me, that's the last 10 years of your life.

• 1:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, for now, modern elder. Chip, thank you so much for the time.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim. It's great to be here.

• 1:49:21Tim Ferriss?

  Really fun. And to everyone listening and anybody watching, thank you for joining us. And until next time, be well, be safe, experiment often, and learn to live in liminal. Pick up surfing or Spanish or something else that you've been putting off because it's not too late. Thanks, everybody. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.

• 1:50:06Tim Ferriss?

  It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.