Chip Conley on the MenoLounge: Learning to Love Midlife Transcript
From the Instagram Live interview Friday, February 23rd
Julie Gordon White: Well, hi, everyone. It's Julie Gordon White, CEO of MenoWell, I was gonna say of the Meno Lounge, but that too. Happy Friday. I'm so glad to be here with you. It's a special day. I know we normally do this on Tuesday. I'm gonna say hi to our guest and bring him right up. So excited. You know, you're gonna find out in one second and be surprised. Here he comes. Oh, I cheated. Did I say he? Here he comes! Chip, are you there?
Chip Conley: I'm here. Can you hear me?
Julie Gordon White: Gotcha! Hello! Hi. Happy Friday. I'm so glad you're here.
Chip Conley: Where are you?
Julie Gordon White: I am in Berkeley, California. How about you? Are you in Baja someplace fun?
Chip Conley: No, I'm in Santa Fe because we're going to be opening our new campus here in Santa Fe this spring, our M. E. A. campus. I do love Baja too, though. We have a campus there, which I love. We'll get you down there one of these days.
Julie Gordon White: That's for certain right there. Well we have so many crossovers, but before I kind of share how we weave together, hint, I was in the hotel business back when you were all joie de vivre all the time. So what were you doing? Um, I was director of marketing for Sheraton Hotels. So I was there and hanging out with the Kimpton crew also.
So lots of fun things. We're going to talk about all that, but first. I just wanna welcome you to the MenoLounge. You are the first man on the MenoLounge, so no pressure, but I know you can handle it. I heard you were at the Swell event and you just crinkled up your talk after you heard all those menopausal women talking about how, how sex on, on, on challenging and midlife and you're, I gotta start from scratch, right?
Chip Conley: You know, no rule is gonna, I'm gonna say whatever I wanna say now. I don't have to have a script. Yeah, that was fun. I, I appreciate this. Well, as a, an organization has a lot in common with. What we do at MEA and, um, and as does Menowell. Thank you for being, for letting me join you.
Julie Gordon White: So exciting. We have to give a shout out to Candra Canning, who connected us, who is an incredible woman, uh, with Live Bright Now, who said, “Hey, you two midlife leaders need to connect.”
So Chip, let me just share, you know, for people who don't know you, which I'm not sure who doesn't know you, but you know, you're incredible in the background. Um, hotelier from your own Joie De Vie hotels to Airbnb and then New York Times bestselling author, you've written seven books. Yeah. And by the way, peak, I am pretty sure I read that book four times.
So thank you Maslow. Yes. Thank you for the translation. Um, and then of course your Modern Elders Academy. So, so exciting with workshops and courses and more and more and more. You're doing so many cool things. And I love, that's why we're so aligned. You know, as we're in midlife, I know you, I think you're 62, I'm 58.
Chip Conley: I just turned 63.
Julie Gordon White: Oh, 63. Woo. Woo. You know, great. You went to the next, um… But you know how we believe both of our organizations in the empowerment, the, the inspiration, the best is yet to come in midlife when most people have a completely different story about it, or for sure the media. So we're going to talk about your new book. Yes. Oh my gosh. Learning to Love Midlife. 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age. I have four that are my favorites. So we're going to, I'm going to pick. Yeah,
Chip Conley: I want to hear your favorites. I also want to hear what are your least favorites too.
Julie Gordon White: I don't have any least favorites. That's just not how I read. So there's nothing bad at all, you know? But you know, there's some that rise to the top. Your volume is a little low, and I wanna make sure we don't miss anybody.
Chip Conley: Can you hear me better now?
Julie Gordon White: Much better. Okay. There we go. There we go. Because I want everyone, I know they're gonna be listening, but we don't want their ear completely to the phone the whole time. No, no, no, no. So. Perfect. Candra's here. I see she's saying, Chip is making it sexy to be in midlife.
Chip Conley: Candra. So are you. So are you.
Julie Gordon White: I love it. Okay. So we're going to talk about all the things midlife, but first I have to ask you, when we reached out and said, Hey, you want to be on the MenoLounge? You said yes like in two seconds, what was your thinking behind wanting to show up on a menopause show?
Chip Conley: You know, I really think men and women have a lot to learn from each other. And 63% of the people who come to MEA, 4,200 people have now come to MEA from 47 countries. But% are women.
So, you know, as the CEO, founder, and, you know, one of the primary teachers, I love hearing women's stories. I also think a lot of women think of men like a Ouija board. It's sort of like, like, what the heck? How do I understand a man's psyche and their emotions and, you know, all the psychology of a man? So I appreciate that I can be out there, you know, representing, you know, the other gender.
And I, you know, long story short is, I think you actually reached out to me right as I was launching the book. And I was on Good Morning America that week, as well as the Today Show. And I have a point of view, which is I just want to say yes to things. And anybody that Candra introduces me to is going to be a new friend.
Julie Gordon White: Yes everybody should know Candra. She is a powerhouse midlifer. So yes, I agree with that. She's, you know, she and I actually met, um, when I turned 50 and I was in my year of yes. And, you know, Candra's a woman who says yes to everything. She takes you on adventures. She just has that spirit and that's something that we're talking about here in midlife is taking on new challenges and being open to exciting things.
So one of the things you do talk about is reframing aging, which I love and how in our forties, fifties, sixties, you know, it changes. It's used to feel like a crisis, but then it evolves. Do you want to talk about that? And also how that kind of connects with the U curve of happiness.
Chip Conley: Um, I, you know, there's, I will probably bring this up later when you ask me some final facts, but, um, Becca Levy at Yale has shown that when people shift their mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, they gain seven and a half years of additional life.
Julie Gordon White: Actually put a pin in that! So seven years just by reframing our belief.
Chip Conley: Seven and a half years just by shifting your mindset on aging being a good thing. So part of the reason I wanted to write the book was to help help give a pro aging message because the anti-aging message, which is generally an anti-women message. Anti-aging products are usually made to make women feel badly about their bodies and their natural aging process. I like your hair, by the way. Thank you.
Julie Gordon White: Oh, thanks. I see you have silver hair, too. A little bit.
Chip Conley: Right? Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Um, so natural aging is a natural thing. It's not something for us to feel shameful about. Um, so, Becca Levy, you know, has shown that, you know, midlife is the opportunity for us to actually start owning our age. And starting to feel better about aging. The U Curve of Happiness, which you cited, um, is a social science research study that's been done for 10 years now, globally. And it shows that our life satisfaction declines from about age 22 to mid 40s, uh, to late 50s.
Between 45 and 50 we sort of, you know, bottom out, although your mileage may vary. And then after 50, we get happier with every decade, so 50s happier than 40s, 60s happier than 50s, 70s happier than 60s, and women in their 80s happier than 70s.
Julie Gordon White: We are happier though before we get to 80s, right?
Chip Conley: Yes, it keeps getting better and and yet the societal narrative on aging is, you know, aging is terrible and as you get older you get more unhappy and more cranky and actually, people's personal experiences don't show that. So, that's another reason I really wanted to get the message out, is like, wow!
Maybe midlife is not a crisis. Maybe it's a chrysalis. And what do I mean by that? The caterpillar to butterfly journey, um, had in the middle, the midlife for the butterfly is the chrysalis. It's a cocoon. It's dark and gooey and solitary, but it's actually where the transformation happens. And I think the fact that after age 50 we get happier, maybe it is that once we come out of that cocoon, around 45 to 50, we actually get into the part of our life that feels the most blossoming, the most colorful, the most free.
And so that's what I wanted to get the point there. I wanted to make that point in the book.
Julie Gordon White: I loved it so much. So, so much, um, especially for women in the stages of menopause because our bodies are going through a physical transition. Oh, and I can't not talk about Andropause. So I don't know if you're familiar with Andropause.
Chip Conley: I’m very familiar with Andropause, I've gone through it and I'm maybe still going through it. Okay, good.
Julie Gordon White: Don't say anything. I want to talk about it. I want to really talk about it. All right. You know our bodies are going through this whole shift as our estrogen declines, everything is changing, and then those of us who have given birth or adopted or had children that we're sending out into the world or loved ones that we've raised, we, in our 50s, late 40s, 50s, we start to get called back to ourselves because of this physical transition. And now we have time, so that U curve makes sense because it's kind of… You know, in my 40s, raising three kids, there was no time other than, you know, with my husband, who's going where, who's picking up, who did their homework, does somebody have food, you know, dinner, like all that logistics, forget like, oh, how does mom feel?
Like, no one cares. Right. So, um, out of love, but they didn't care. In my fifties, get those people out of here, you know, and so it makes sense.
Chip Conley: There's an anthropologist named Margaret Mead and Margaret Mead said that there's something called a post-menopausal zest, post-menopausal zest. And she was speaking to the idea that for some women going through menopause gives them the relief that they're not going to be childbearing anymore. Gives them the relief that they're ready for what's next. And especially if the children have left the home. It gives you some freedom and some time affluence, something that I talk about in the book.
Julie Gordon White: Beautiful. That's exactly it. And you know, those of us who have done it have loved investing all that and it never stops. But you get time back for yourself, you get space back for yourself, you know, economically people get off the payroll. So there's a lot of good things happening. And sometimes we forget because our bodies may not feel good. Do you know, there's over 34 symptoms of menopause and there's actually probably double that now we think, but it's the 34 core that we know?
Chip Conley: Can I talk about that? So some people know this, but I'll just make for those that don't. I have stage three prostate cancer. So I had my prostate taken last year and I had 36 sessions of radiation. But the other thing that's really, that's relevant to menopause, is that a year ago I started taking what's called androgen deprivation therapy, ADT.
It's basically starving my body of testosterone. because testosterone is what actually fuels prostate cancer. So the number one side effect of actually taking ADT as a man is to go through all the menopausal symptoms. So I am having night sweats. Like, right now it's cold outside and I'm wearing a short sleeve shirt because I am, oh my gosh I'm having hot flashes. Wow. Uh, I'm having brain fog. I less energy. Um, so the list is long. So I know about some of the symptoms, the side effects just because I'm going through them.
Julie Gordon White: Well, thank you for sharing that's super vulnerable. And I just really appreciate that, because it kind of brings you a little closer in the club, I would say, you know, because that's, that's the Andropause extreme, right?
That you are actually experiencing because Andropause. You know decline of testosterone, so you don't feel good all those things. But then you're at the extreme of that and many women go into menopause surgically or you know after having breast cancer or hysterectomy So it can, it's a very similar experience where they go, they may be in their 30s and may have a situation that's medically induced menopause and it’s hard because it happens overnight.
Chip Conley: It's hard because it happens overnight. So, you have, you know, normally you have perimenopause, and you start getting prepared for this. And, you know, when you're taking pills, whether it's a woman who's had a hysterectomy, or it's me who's had prostate taken out and is on this testosterone blocker, it happens like that. All of a sudden, like, whoa! After three days of taking these pills, like Oh, it's hot in here.
Julie Gordon White: Did they prepare you for that, Chip? Did they say, oh, by the way, this is gonna happen, because a lot of women don't, it's the same thing, and they're not well prepared, so.
Chip Conley: They did not prepare me. Once it started happening, I started saying, Hey, this doesn't feel good. I was also feeling this, like, weird thing up my neck. Like, like this heat, like this, just this heat bolt up my neck. You know, and so they finally said, oh yeah, well that's one of the side effects.
Julie Gordon White: Side effects. Okay, thanks. Well, you are officially MOT member of the tribe now, so I hope you find that as a badge of honor.
Chip Conley: Thank you.
Julie Gordon White: Oh, well, thank you for sharing those on a serious note. And of course, we will collectively send all the good vibes, good love your way for continued healing and support. So, your Meno sisters gotcha. Okay, Chip, let's go into the book. 12 Reasons. Why 12? And then I'm going to, I'm going to pull out my four favorite here out of the book.
Chip Conley: Well, you know, I wanted to use both my experience with over 4,000 alumni and what I've seen from people going through midlife. I wanted to use my own personal experience and then I wanted to use social science research. And so I put it into five different categories, the physical, the emotional, the mental, the vocational or professional, and then the spiritual.
And as I started to look at it, there were 12 that just sort of came to the forefront. Then the social science really helped me to feel like these are real. These are not just my personal experience. Uh, and so let's see what your four favorites are.
Julie Gordon White: I kind of want to ask you if you have a favorite, but you want to go first?
Chip Conley: Yours first.
Julie Gordon White: Okay and then you tell me. You have to be honest. You can't say, I don't have a favorite. Like I said, I don't have one that's not. Okay. Here's my four. Number one, "I'm Relieved My Body No Longer Defines Me." I'll say all of them and then we'll come back. Number two, "I Have No More Fs to Give" and we can say the F I think on Instagram. Okay. I'm going to say it. I have no more fucks to give, right? We're gonna come that might be number one. I'm not sure. It's tight. Number three, "I've Learned How to Edit My Life." It's huge. And number four, "I Feel As If I'm Growing Whole."
Chip Conley: I love those. So I love all four of those.
Julie Gordon White: Don't you love all of them?
Chip Conley: I do. I do. My fave is I understand my story or my narrative much better. That's the one where you understand, you know, in your life, as you get older, you have pattern recognition of when you're younger, you see how you lived your life and you get clearer that, okay.
Well, I've learned some lessons along the way that will help me be wiser in the future. But tell me, tell us more about why, um, "I Have No More Fucks Left To Give" was your favorite.
Julie Gordon White: Well, it tied with the one about the body one though, right? Because that's what brought me to the menopause conversation was, I wasn't happy with my body, which is why I started MenoWell because I needed to have a healthier, a better choice when my sugar cravings were going to make me, were actually making me eat every brownie, cookies, and chips. So that's why that rose to the top for me. But we can start there, having no more fucks to give because it, you know, finally in my fifties, and my perimenopause started at about 46. I thought I was losing my mind with brain fog, but I would say fifties where I felt really in it.
And it's because not caring about what other people think, being a woman, you know, I had, after the hotel industry, I had a boutique M& A firm. So I was the only one of me in every single room, you know, whether it was a woman, woman of color. I was always the only one. So I had a certain persona that I developed, you know, that I probably learned from my, not probably, I learned from my parents, you know, for coping, for surviving, for excelling, all those things.
And I got to my 50s and I'm like, this is me. And if you don't like it, I'm cool with that, you know, love you over there, I'm fine. And so that's why that rose to the top. How about you? What's your thoughts on that?
Chip Conley: Well, I think, yeah, I think one of the things about I have no more fucks left to give speaks to, some people hear that and think, oh man, you don't care about things.
No, you get clear about what matters to you. One of the things that matters less is what other people think about you and huge especially for women. Yeah you can get to a place where you can say that, because frankly earlier in life, you sweat about like oh my god. No, that person doesn't like me. They didn't look at me the right way. And of course they were going on their own path doing something else that had nothing to do with you, but you spend the day thinking about it and so, it's to be able to get to a place where you are less concerned about how you're showing up in the world and more concerned about what matters to you in the world.
So it's an important one and I do think that it's a natural for people in midlife and beyond because quite frankly, when we get to midlife, we are carrying a lot of baggage. And midlife is a marathon and so I gotta let go of some of that baggage.
Julie Gordon White: Right. I love it. Especially, and I keep saying especially women, but we do carry, and maybe please push back on this, we carry a way of being that we are given by the media, you know, that we're no longer valid.
We look, we're just old, right? We're not cute anymore. We're certainly not sexy and we don't get the jobs. We get passed up. Right, and that's hard. So if we can hold on to not really focusing on what matters to us versus really caring what other people think, and it gets harder and harder in the day of social media and all in comparison, but I think that's it's so freeing.
Chip Conley: It’s so freeing. Beautiful. Well talk about for a moment about "I'm Relieved My Body No Longer Defines Me." Is that one, I mean, you talked about it a moment ago, but do you feel at this point? I mean, let me let you talk. Okay.
Julie Gordon White: Okay. Let me just tell you after my M& A firm, I coached women entrepreneurs for 10 years on all that stuff.
I feel like you just started coaching me right there. Like I got, I felt that coaching hat switch on. I'm gonna send it back to you.
Chip Conley: Well I think that our body is like a rental vehicle that we were issued at birth. So each of us got our rental vehicle, and then the longer you are on the road living your life, the more dents you have in your rental vehicle, and the paint isn't quite as good as it used to be.
But there's a point in your life where you start to realize that it matters less what it looks like on the outside and more like how it feels on the inside. That is, to me, the crossroads of when midlife is kicking into its positive gears for you. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't take care of ourselves. Long term maintenance of our rental vehicle is essential because we want to live.
Julie Gordon White: That’s how we get to longevity, right? So That's right.
Chip Conley: So long term maintenance is important, but short-term vanity becomes less important as you get older.
Now, I'm not saying that somebody shouldn't be going out and running a marathon at 85 or doing yoga on YouTube at 75. Beautiful. But as you get older, a six pack becomes more expensive. Let me tell you about that. Six pack abs at 60 are harder and take a lot more time and energy than a six pack ab at 30.
Um, so if you want to have six pack abs, great, go do it. But just, there's no, there's an opportunity cost. Um, meaning there's a bunch of other things you won't be able to invest your time in. And that's right okay.
Julie Gordon White: Or eat. Or eat. But that’s okay it's important to focus on what matters.
Because that may, especially a woman, you know, because it can, it's very unsettling to all of a sudden have a meno middle, as we say. You know, we don't focus on getting skinny you know, you want to feel good. But you want to feel good in your clothes. You want to feel confident. And that's why, not being worried about our body doesn't matter.
I mean, it's good not to worry about our body, but it's important to be healthy. Also, heart disease. Huge, huge, huge. So, we need to make that little side disclaimer. Heart disease, the number one killer of men and women. So, waist size matters, but we don't need to be obsessed about it anymore, right? There we go.
Okay. "I Learned to Edit My Life."
Chip Conley: Well, I think that the beautiful one about that is that once you learn, once you get clear on what matters to you, the, you know, you know, about the F, you know, you don't care about, you know, certain things anymore, then you're ready for that edit. We call it the Great Midlife Edit at the Modern Elder Academy, MEA.
So, at MEA, it's like learning, helping people learn how to edit their mindset. Their identities, their roles, their, who's in their life, um, these are really important things to do because quite frankly we spend the first half of our life accumulating, and we spend the second half of our life discerning so that we can edit the things that aren't serving us anymore.
And so long story short is I like that one a lot because it's really very affiliated with why I started MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, um, and with the two campuses we have and our online programs as well. So, why did you like that one?
Julie Gordon White: Katie says, I'm here for an edit. Yeah, because learning how to say no. Women really struggle saying no, and especially when we're trying to do all the things, be the best mom, the best partner, the best entrepreneur, the best boss. We say yes to everything, but we forget to say yes to the things that really matter to us, and we end up saying yes to things that just drain us.
So edit for me really rises to feeling comfortable, having boundaries, and saying no or saying not now or maybe later or just no, you know. Hey, you want to do this thing? Actually, I don't, you know, I love what you do, but not me.
Chip Conley: (Laughs) No is a complete sentence.
Julie Gordon White: It’s complete sentence, but man, it takes like 50 something years to make it complete. You know, it's like a long sentence and it gets shorter, shorter, shorter. Now, so I love that. And I think from my own experience, wanting to make people happy, you know, as a mom and I love people, I love doing the things and I love adventure expansion, but it can just drain the life out of you if you, if you don't have boundaries.
Chip Conley: One of your favorites was about growing whole.
Julie Gordon White: I feel, right in the book, if you don't have it, get it on Amazon or your favorite place. "I Feel As If I'm Growing Whole." That was just, that spoke to my soul. Boom. Well, explain it because it’s beautiful.
Chip Conley: It's the 12th of the 12 and I put it last because I think it's the one that really speaks to, this is the goal over the course of a whole lifetime.
Um, so long story short is. We do grow old, that is natural, but we also grow whole, and what that means is you get better at being able to alchemize the polarities in your life. The extrovert and the introvert, the masculine and the feminine, the curious and the wise, the gravitas and the levity, and the yin, the yang.
And once you start to realize, as you get older, that you can integrate all of these different disparate parts of yourselves, you feel less compartmentalized. You find that, oh my god, the beauty of someone who's both curious and wise. Well, that's what they called me at Airbnb. They called me the modern elder because they said a modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise.
The beautiful thing about this is to grow whole, means that you also feel not just whole inside yourself. You feel part of a bigger whole. You feel connected, you know, and you're beyond the ghetto of your ego and more focused on why you exist on this planet and the mysteries of what we have here on this planet.
So I love the idea of growing whole and I think it is the PR, when you meet a 75 year old who is exceptionally present and they are all the ages they've ever been. They are a 13 year old and they're a 65 year old and they're an 85 year old, even though they're not 70, they're not even 85 yet.
That's when we have age fluidity. The one who's age fluid is someone who is not defined by their age or their gender. They are all of the ages they've ever been, and I think we all aspire to be age fluid instead of ageless. Yeah, because Ageless suggests that age is a bad thing. And so if you're ageless, you don't have age.
So age fluid means you could be older or younger than yourself based upon how you wanna show up. You know, your age is like a costume you can wear.
Julie Gordon White: I love that, age fluid. I haven't heard that before. That's a new one. And I love it because you can be an age that you haven't experienced yet. We can go forward and look back and inform our experience today.
That is, that is amazing. And we don't need somebody else to complete us. That's the other thing, right?
Chip Conley: Well that’s a good point about the whole, when you're whole yourself, this is not about, you know, two puzzle pieces coming back together. You know, it's about being whole.
Julie Gordon White: Love it. Beautiful, beautiful.
Okay. I know you have some tips, some ways that we can apply learning how to love midlife. You want to share this?
Chip Conley: Yes. Well, the first one I mentioned earlier, I mean, I'm just going to say learning how to feel good about aging is so important. Pro aging products, things that make you feel better about getting older.
Because again, Becca Levy has shown that when you actually shift from a negative to a positive perspective on aging, you gain seven and a half years of life. So how might you do that? Well, number one is ask yourself, what are you better at today than you were 10 years ago? Oh my God, that list could be long.
We don't think that way. All right. So that's one. Number two is learn to become a beginner again. What do I mean by that? A question I love to ask is the following. What do I know now or have I done now that I wish I'd learned or done 10 years ago? Okay. Now, let's take that 10 years forward. 10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn it or do it now?
Yes. Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom. And so, imagine how I learned to surf at age 57, and I started learning Spanish at age 57, even though there was something in my mind that said, oh, I'm too old to do this. I don't need to know. So now I’ve passed the time.
Julie Gordon White: Anticipated wisdom. Is that what you said?
Chip Conley: Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom.
Julie Gordon White: Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom. Beautiful. Write that down, everyone.
Chip Conley: Number three is taking into account Arthur Brooke's book, uh, From Strength to Strength. Yeah. He's a faculty member of ours and a big fan of MEA. He wrote about MEA in his book. And this gets to the idea that as we get older, yes, our short-term memory is not as good.
But our crystallized intelligence gets better. What is that? Crystallized Intelligence is when we are able to connect the dots and think holistically and systemically and it very much has to do with our intuition. So trusting our intuition, getting used to the idea that actually we have a lot of history in our minds and in our guts and we should trust it. That's my third one.
Number four is Dacher Keltner. Dacher's on our faculty at MEA. He's a professor at UC Berkeley. You probably know who he is.
Julie Gordon White: Yeah, he's a friend of Candra's also.
Chip Conley: Yeah. Oh, gosh. Well, he started the Greater Good Science Center there. He has said that, he has a book, great book called Awe, and he's the world's leading expert on awe.
And he says that the top two ways of feeling awe are to seek out moral beauty in the world. This is something we do at MEA. Moral beauty. Moral beauty.
Julie Gordon White: Not more beauty. Moral. M-O-R-A-L beauty.
Chip Conley: Kindness. Compassion. Equanimity. Resilience. Courage. When we can see someone else's moral beauty, we actually feel like we can be that as well.
Yes. So, the number two way that people feel awe in the world is collective effervescence. To be with a group of people where your sense of ego separation dissolves and your sense of, uh, communal joy arises. So that's another thing. My final one, um, is, here's my last one. We do not have very good longevity literacy.
What do I mean by that? I mean, we underestimate how much life we still have ahead of us. The average age of the people who come to MEA is 54. The average age they think they're going to live till is 90. But if you told people that at age 54, you are halfway through your adult life because 54 is halfway between 18 and 90, they would say, Oh, really?
Wow. I have as many years ahead of me as I have behind me having started counting at age 18. What it does is it helps you to say like, wow, if I have that many years ahead of me, how am I going to use those years and curate my life more consciously?
Julie Gordon White: I love that. I had a whole conversation with my parents last night about committing (they live one hour away) to see each other in person once a month. Not just time, but let's prioritize. And when you think about how much time we have with each other, which is always unknown, making sure that we prioritize what matters to us, that connects right with what you're saying. That's beautiful.
Chip Conley: Yeah, 100%.
Julie Gordon White: I cannot wait and plus I know Michael Franti teaches workshops too and, you know, we grew up together. So I don't know our lives are like…
Chip Conley: Well, Michael has been a close friend of mine for 35 years. He's teaching here in Santa Fe in July. In May, if people love Michael Franti, come to MEA and do a week long workshop with him and me.
Julie Gordon White: I love it, I love it, for sure. Okay, I have to ask you one more question. So I always ask this to the guests, I have to think about it in a different way, and so I'm going to say, Chip, what does the term Meno, or I can say Androwell. Okay, what does the term MenoWell mean to you?
Chip Conley: It means learning how to be well during Menopause. And it means, learning how to create a pause so you can be well.
Julie Gordon White: Wow. Drop the mic. Nothing else said. Okay. Beautiful. Oh my God. How does everyone find you? How do they find the MEA? All the good stuff. Tell us where.
Chip Conley: M-E-A is meawisdom.com, you can see there that I have a blog, a daily blog, and check it out. If you get a subscription, it's free, and I send, we send you an email every morning, a little micro-dose of wisdom.
You can also find me at ChipConley.com and my LinkedIn profile is pretty active, so that's a good place to find me as well.
Julie Gordon White: Minimum get the book. You're going to love it. Give it as a gift. You will inspire if there's 12 because there's 12 reasons why life gets better with age, you should give this to at least 11 more people.
Then that's 12 people that's spreading the message. Thank you. What an impact, right? Yep. Thank you so much. Happy Friday. That's Friday. All you know, I've had in a long time. Be well. And I guess I will see you, uh, in Santa Fe or Baja.
Chip Conley: Perfect!
Julie Gordon White: All right. Thank you. Bye. Thanks for being here. Bye, everyone. Bye bye.