Episode
The Identity You Build Can Become the Cage You Live In | Chip Conley
- Published
- Aug 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3089
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Summary
Chip Conley bought a broken-down pay-by-the-hour motel in the Tenderloin of San Francisco in his mid-twenties, on the strength of an offhand suggestion from concert promoter Bill Graham, and spent 24 years building Joie de Vivre Hospitality into the second largest operator of boutique hotels in the country. Then the thing he built stopped fitting. He launched fifteen new hotels into a collapsing economy and found himself running a company he no longer recognized as his. What came next was a break, a second act at Airbnb as Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, and co-founding MEA, the world's first midlife wisdom school, now on a regenerative horse ranch in Santa Fe. Chip calls the whole arc the crescendo effect. Nothing wasted. Every skill and every detour feeding the next one. You only see the shape of it looking back. As he puts it, he is all the ages he has ever been. His latest book, The Midlife Manifesto, is out now. Brett and Chip get into what it costs to hold on to an identity past its usefulness, what it means to be a mentor and an intern at the same time, the father who talked him out of writing and the books that came anyway, and the tension he is living inside now between what he calls holy urgency and the instruction he keeps receiving to slow down. Connect with Chip: Instagram: @chipconley MEA: meawisdom.com Podcast: The Midlife Chrysalis, meawisdom.com/podcast Book: The Midlife Manifesto, meawisdom.com/product/the-midlife-manifesto-book