November 21, 2025 • 56 mins
What happens when two New York City professionals lose their jobs, move to a tiny rural town, and accidentally build one of America’s most beloved skincare brands?
Brent and Josh of Beekman 1802 reveal how kindness, community, and old-fashioned wisdom became the backbone of their business and their midlife reinvention. They share how loving your neighbor can be a real strategy, why contentment matters more than achievement, the 51% rule that keeps their partnership strong, and how better aging starts with simple kindness to yourself and others, all delivered with warmth, wisdom, and humor.
👉 If you’re ready for a kinder, clearer way to think about midlife, just press play.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Meet Brent & Josh of Beekman 1802
02:47 How Brent & Josh met
04:18 Brent’s upbringing & coming out journey
06:01 Becoming goat farmers & starting Beekman 1802
07:19 How the brand got its name
09:09 Turning a recession into a business opportunity
10:35 Growing from homemade soap to a global brand
12:54 The idea behind Goat Wisdom book
16:33 Their favorite principles
20:46 Community, kindness & homophobia
25:38 Brent’s family and true Christian acceptance
28:41 Being partners in love and business
29:56 The 51% Rule for decision-making
32:06 Radical transparency as kindness
34:37 Personal midlife philosophies
38:42 What they’d regret in 10 years
40:36 Redefining success as contentment
41:55 “Better aging,” social connection & kindness
45:16 Farm wisdom for life
48:56 Wisdom bumper stickers
52:12 Chip’s closing reflections
Learn more about MEA at https://www.meawisdom.com/
#MidlifeTransformation #GoatWisdom #Beekman1802 #ChipConley #MidlifeChrysalis #BetterAging #KindnessCulture #EntrepreneurJourney #LifeReinvention #ContentmentOverAchievement #LGBTQEntrepreneurs #ModernElders #AgingWisdom #MidlifeReinvention #SmallTownStories
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The reason so many people are scared of dying is because they
have regrets of one or another, either of what they
accomplished, how they spent their life, how they had their
relationships. The biggest pivot you can make,
and I'll say this, for me personally, I think the way I
(00:20):
knew I had gone through the transformation was that I no
longer feared death or feared life being cut short.
Like I could die tomorrow and think I've done everything I
needed to accomplish in this life.
I knew I had reached that midlife transformation because I
had no more regrets. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
(00:44):
Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a
crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that
can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.
Well, hello, this is Chip Conley, and it's the midlife
chrysalis. Today I listened.
(01:06):
I listened to you because many of you have said we want more
normal people. It depends on how you define
normal, but we want people who are just like doing their lives
out there and living midlife andwe want a few more
entrepreneurs. A number of you have said we'd
love to hear more entrepreneurial stories, and so
that's what we're bringing you today.
(01:26):
Now, Brent and Josh are not normal in the sense of
heteronormeral. They happen to be a gay couple.
They're pretty well known because they started something
called Beekman 18-O2. It's a farm.
It has all kinds of amazing farmproducts and beauty products.
They were in the great race, they had ATV series.
(01:47):
They have a book called Goat Wisdom that became a best
seller. So we dive deeply into what it's
like to start a business. How is it as a couple operating
a business now for 16 or 17 years and particularly their
point of view on midlife and aging?
Brent was a doctor and is a doctor and was the head medical
(02:11):
person in the Martha Stewart Media world.
They both have a really interesting perspective on
midlife. So I think you'll enjoy this,
especially because you know, at the core of their business
philosophy and personal philosophy is kindness.
Enjoy. Well, Josh and Brent, thank you
(02:32):
for joining me on the Midlife Chrysalis.
Oh, it's great to. Be here.
Great to be here. Thanks for having us.
You have colors that match the book, your book cover you got.
You got the book cover right there.
Let's let's do a little promo right there.
GOAT wisdom. We're going to talk about that
how to build a truly great business.
How did the two of you meet? Because I mean, let's start by
saying the two of you have been are in a romantic relationship.
(02:53):
Our husband. Are you guys husbands as well?
And you know, and I happen to begay and married as well.
Let's start with that. Let's let's shock some of our of
our listeners and and watchers go straight to the gay issue.
How did you guys meet and how long have you been together?
Well, we always say we met the old fashioned way, the Internet
(03:16):
and we, it was, we've been together for 20, almost 26 years
now. And we met at SO at the very,
very beginning. It was on AOL dial up.
It's yes. Oh.
Really. In a chat room.
Yeah, we were in a chat room andwe, we were chatting for hours.
Now, Brent had never dated a guybefore so and I had been living
(03:38):
in New York for a while. He had just moved to New York to
do his residency and he never dated a guy.
So he wouldn't go out. I kept asking him during in the
chat to go out and eat for coffee and he never would.
So we talked for hours. And so I, I realized he wasn't
going to meet me. So I became the world's first
Internet stalker. And I asked him throughout the
the chat. I say, I'm like, oh, what
hospital? You're doing your residency?
(04:00):
Oh, do you walk to work? Do you take the subway?
What direction do you walk? How long does it take you to get
there? So I figured out where he lived.
And before he disconnected, before we hung up, I said
tomorrow night at 8:00, you're either going to be there at the
subway stop, I'm going to be there, or you're not.
And he shut up. Oh, how romantic.
And how was that for you, Brent?Because you know, you were, you
(04:23):
were in residency to become a doctor and you probably had been
the, the, the best little boy inthe world to, to quote a, a book
that came out a few years, like decades ago.
You were on the path to your, your parents were proud of you.
And, and all of a sudden, well, you're in a chat room.
(04:44):
Let's start by saying, you know,that just means that you were
sort of exploring what it means to be gay.
And you meet Josh and he's he's unrelenting.
How was that? Had you dated at all before that
I? Had only dated girls throughout
college and medical school and high school.
And to add even more intrigue toit, I grew up in the South in
(05:06):
North Carolina, if you can't tell from my accent, and grew up
very evangelical. So there were a whole lot of
issues that I was dealing with, you know, leading up to this
point. And I think part of my reasoning
for wanting to come to New York City to do my residency was so
that I could explore this without the prying eyes of not
(05:28):
only my family, but, you know, you know, everyone else in the
South at that time. So I think that gave me a little
bit more permission, which is why I went into the chat room to
begin with. But even after we got together,
we were together immediately. So we've met at the subway stop.
We went to Chinese food right there at the subway stop and
basically had my first kiss and we've been together ever since.
(05:51):
But I did not come out to my family for years after that.
And and his family. Found out we were gay from our
television show. I I guess that would happen,
right? Well, tell, wait, wait, explain
that one. They explain how was it?
How long ago was that that they that that they found this out?
(06:12):
So that was 2009 and that happened.
So for those of you who who don't know our story, we were
two New York City guys. We bought a farm in upstate New
York. We took in a neighboring farmer
who was losing his farm and he had 80 goats.
So we became overnight goat farmers.
And this was around 2000 and six, 2007.
(06:33):
And then the recession of 2008 hit and we both lost our jobs
within 30 days of each other. So we were trying to start over
and we were, we started. We Googled what can we make with
goat milk in goat milk soap was the first thing that came up.
So we started making goat milk soap and we got a little bit of
press for being these, you know,in the midst of a recession,
being these two professional gayguys trying to start over as
(06:55):
farmers. And we got an offer from a small
television network to follow ourstory.
And so we had a reality show fortwo years called The Fabulous
Speaking Boys, which is really the early days of our company,
how it was being born and the early days of living on the
farm. And the name Beekman.
(07:15):
Explain the Beekman 18-O2 reference.
So the farm was originally builtin the year 18 O2 by a gentleman
named William Beekman. And when we were trying to
create our company, because I had just come from Martha
Stewart, which is where I was working to head up her health
and Wellness division, and we understood how a brand can go
(07:37):
the way of its founder if the founder is having issues.
It's named after the founder. And so we from the very
beginning did not want to call our company a name that
referenced the two of us in either in any way.
And in fact, when we first started selling, you know,
online 16 years ago, we weren't even on our website at all.
It was just Beekman 18-O2. You know, it's about the farm.
(07:58):
And, and we came up with the name Beekman 18-O2 by making a
list of all of the heritage brands that we could think of.
And one of the brands on the list was Chanel #5.
And so we said OK, we need a name and a.
My mother's favorite perfume. OK, there you go.
Model yourself after the best. So a name and a number.
So it's determined as we were not to name the company after
(08:21):
us. It turned out that we basically
were named after our company. So now everybody calls us the
Beekman Boys. Yeah.
Even though we're not. Boys, they kind of Beekman show,
yeah. 4 Beekman, Yeah. If you're enjoying the
conversations we've been having on the midlife chrysalis, I have
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(08:42):
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(09:09):
How did this get off the ground?I mean, you you were quite
benefited by having ATV show andthey and they found out about
you because of some of the articles that were written.
Is that and did you how did you get these articles placed?
How did people know about you? Are you guys PRI don't know
magicians or, or did it all justsort of happen rather
(09:32):
serendipitously? Well, we both, we both come from
a marketing media background. So you know that he was working
for Martha. So he, he knew the benefit of
of, you know, great publicity. And I work in advertising and I
knew branding. And so we, we just started
reaching out to not even friends, but we just knew how
to, we knew how to craft our story.
(09:53):
And it was a compelling story, you know, middle of a huge
recession, 2 unemployed gay guysbecoming goat farmers.
It's a compelling story. And we knew that if we just got
it, sent it out to the right people that they would pick it
up. And actually it was surprising
the television came along because I was going for a job
energy trying to get, you know, get back into the workforce at
(10:13):
the network where the where we eventually wound up.
And it was the president of the network that was interviewing
me. I started telling about the
farm. She said, oh, I think I read
something about that. And then she said, you're not
right for this job, but maybe wecould do a television show.
So it really was serendipity, but it's also knowing where the
(10:35):
germ of an opportunity is and blowing it up.
Speaking of blowing it up, tell us a little bit about in the
last 16 years how Beekman 18-O2 has grown.
And then let's segue into goat wisdom, which has the goat
obviously having two meetings. It's a bit of a double entendre.
So tell us, you know what, you know what it took to get to the
(10:57):
point where you are today, a very successful international
brand. And, and then let's dive into
goat wisdom because you know, MEA, the Modern Elder Academy is
the world's first midlife wisdomschool.
So we like wisdom and and your book, which as a best seller and
I Love Is All about almost like wisdom bumper stickers.
(11:19):
So take it, take it away. Tell us what what how you grew
this company over the last 16 years?
When we first started out, you know, as Josh said, we had
Googled what to make with goat milk and we start first started
making those bars of soap using goat milk from the farm.
And our neighbors would come over and help us wrap the bars
of soap. And that's why we still call all
of our customers neighbors to this very day.
(11:41):
And you know, as people started reporting back to us that it was
really helping their skin, then I just started researching what
could it be about the goat milk that could be influencing
people's skin barrier? Because they knew people would
use it for thousands of years. Millennium people would use it,
but they didn't really know why it was working.
And so then we just started looking at the components of
(12:03):
goat milk, how it was nourishingthe skin microbiome, how it was
prepare, repairing the barrier of the skin.
And that's how the company grew.And so from wrapping that
original bar of soap at our dining room table, we've now
sold over 60 million bars of that original bar of soap and
are now one of the world's leaders in understanding the
(12:23):
skin microbiome. We now extract exosomes from the
goat milk to use as a delivery vehicle for skin care actives.
So we really have grown into quite a biotech company.
We're the number one beauty brand that crosses QVC and HSN
and one of the top beauty brandsat Ulta Beauty as well.
(12:44):
Does that mean you have to go onQVC that you like?
You actually Are you on TV, in Philadelphia or wherever you
have to be. We do, yes.
And HSN for hundreds of hours a year.
All right, well, So what have you learned along the way?
So let's give me, give us some goat wisdom.
And again, for those who don't know GOAT with, with periods
after each one, the greatest of all time is one form of goat.
(13:06):
And of course we've been talkingabout the other form of goat.
Tell us about the book and and and and give us maybe three of
your goat wisdoms. Yeah, well, I, you know, I think
to what Josh was saying earlier about how we got our story
started, you know, there's neverbeen an opportunity that we let
pass us by. So anytime someone would bring
(13:28):
up something to us, maybe in theiteration that they brought it
up to us was not the right solution for us, but we would
figure out how to make it an opportunity for us.
And this book actually came about and, you know, we've
written multiple books. Josh has written, you know, 2
best selling memoirs and betweenus we've written 4 cookbooks.
(13:49):
We've written a book on style and so we didn't really need
another book, but we were on thetrain, the Amtrak train coming
from upstate New York back into the city for a meeting and one
of the Beekman neighbors, again,that's what we call of our
customers, just happened to see us on the train and just started
talking to us. So just trying to make small
(14:10):
talk with them. I say, what do you do?
And he said, oh, I'm the book agent.
Have you guys ever thought about, And he said, have you
guys ever thought about doing a business book?
And we're like, no, not really. We're you know, we're, we're
past our book writing component of our career.
And he said, Oh, no, I, I think you really should.
You've got such an amazing trajectory of your company and a
(14:32):
great entrepreneurial story. Fine, It's we traded cards and
then really thought nothing of it.
And he just was very persistent.Like, no, this story is amazing.
You should write this book. And I tried to deflect his
advances. I said, well, you know, we'll do
this book if you can convince Harvard Business Review to
(14:54):
publish the book. And he said, OK.
And then a month later, he came back and said, I pitch it to
Harvard Business Review. They want to write.
This and the reason we were, we really wanted Harvard do it
because we grew a very traditional Main St. old
fashioned business. We grew it the old fashioned
way. And the reason we wanted to
(15:16):
possibly tell this story was allof the entrepreneurial story and
advice that's out in the world today is all sort of, you know,
go for broke, become a billionaire, you know, the nine
steps between you and having hundreds of dollars, Like, it's
all very temporal. There's a hat for everything.
There's a, you know, they're allcelebrity brands, they're all
(15:36):
brands that get, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars
in of investment and, and we've realized we've been in business
now since 2008. We've seen these come and go.
We've seen all the ones that areheld up, as you know, amazing
examples be gone in two years. So we wanted to write a book
full of wisdom, not just advice,you know, trendy advice or fads.
(15:57):
And so we looked back to the wisdom that our parents gave us,
our grandparents gave us gave uswere were basically pretty
conservative in our in not in our politics, but in our
lifestyle. And we took these old parables
can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.
An empty vessel makes the most noise giving another one.
(16:21):
Love thy neighbor, love thy neighbor.
All these amazing old parables that have been around for
centuries. And we said let's apply them
like we applied them to our business and say how can you
build a business based on old fashioned wisdom, not the latest
information? And do you have, I'm going to
ask both of you, do both of you have a favorite, Each of you
have a favorite of of the ones in the book and how many are
(16:43):
there there? But there's like maybe 20 in the
book or so. We started with 12 because, you
know, you have to, you have to have room for a sequel.
And you know, and as Josh was saying, you know, the idea of
goat wisdom came from the fact that we are bombarded.
And it's even getting worse now with AI bombarded with too much
information in the world and buta severe lack of wisdom.
(17:07):
You're talking about language here.
We had seen, you know, because we work in the beauty industry,
you know, kind of crossing over into biotech.
So it's a very kind of fast-paced, rapid, trend driven
business. And, you know, over the past 10
years, with the rise in Instagram, then the rising
TikTok, you know, the way that businesses have sprung up and
(17:29):
then disappeared has become so rapid.
And, you know, people's have tended in this cycle to start a
business with already in mind how they're going to exit the
business. And you know, fortunately for
us, we started about four years before the Internet really took
(17:51):
off and certainly way before social media really took off.
And that enabled us to really lay down a great foundation for
the business. We really built it this old
fashioned way. And you know what we say is that
the reason so many of these companies that scaled up really
fit fast, maybe took a lot of money in the beginning and then
(18:13):
didn't pan out, was because you really didn't have the
foundation for a good business. And that's one of my favorite.
You asked what our favorite was.One of my favorite sayings that
we explore in the book is an empty vessel makes the most
noise. And we, you know, we may have
heard that through our lives. We don't really understand, you
know, what it means. You're like how to apply.
We know what it means, but we don't know how to apply it.
And that's the lesson we learned.
There are so many businesses that get hundreds of millions of
(18:35):
dollars or they have a celebrityback and we've seen them over
the years and you've suddenly they're everywhere in the media,
right? You know, their ads are popping
up online, They're in your social media feeds.
They're everywhere and Brent andI would we would get jealous and
we'd say, gosh, why are why is this little business getting all
this attention this, you know, the celebrity business and we
(18:56):
can't, you know, we're just growing like this.
And then we started seeing them go and come and go and come and
go. And an empty vessel does make
the nose most noise if there's no there, there, if it's just
paid PR, there's no company there, there's no brand there.
So we, we sort of take, that's one of my favorite sayings, but
we take all those things and apply it to today's world and
(19:18):
today's business world. And Brett, what's one of your
favorites? I think my absolute favorite is
Love Thy Neighbor. It's the one that we close the
book with. Your words would be love thy
customer, but it's also love than ever, yeah.
And I that comes obviously because of my religious
background. Yes.
But what's so interesting about that particular phrase is that
(19:40):
it exists in every religion around the world.
That idea of being a good neighbor and trying to take care
of the person who is right next to you.
It's, you know, it's. Universal and in every religion
the word neighbor in the translations is very specific
it's not love all of mankind or love you know the universe it's
(20:03):
love thy neighbor or the translations thereof and when
we've. Thought about that, when we
think about the word neighbor inthis day and age, we have all
the information of the world around us.
And so we panic about the whole world every day, right?
You know, like we, we, we hear all these stories, but we can't
take care of the whole world. We can impact the person next to
us and if the person that personimpacts the person next to them
(20:26):
and then a person next to them, eventually the whole world is
taken care of, which is why we believe the word neighbor is so
important. You really have to focus close
in and impact what you can closein and we related that to our
business and our customers. Like if we have a great
relationship with our close and customers, the business takes
care of itself. And have your neighbors loved
(20:47):
you back? I mean, what I mean by that is
have you had to deal with homophobia in the press or in
your customer base or neighbors,literally physical neighbors,
you know, the farm. I mean, how have you had to deal
with that? And has that been an issue based
upon the industry you're in? Maybe it would be less of an
(21:08):
issue. You're not, you're not, you're
not a contract, a building contractor.
So, so how have have you had to deal with that?
Well, you know, it's such an interesting question because,
you know, the farm is located inSchoharie County, New York,
which is one of the poorest counties in all of upstate New
York. It's very conservative, you
know. Yeah. 84% maca.
(21:30):
And you know, we when we startedthe company there, obviously it
was obvious that we were a gay cup when we bought this historic
property in the town. We never once had an issue.
And we were very strategic aboutthis because we said, OK,
obviously we're going to be outsiders with there's going to
be this connotation of these city slickers who are coming
(21:52):
here and they're going to tell us what to do.
And so we said, OK, how can we counter that?
And so we made sure that we knocked on every door in this
tiny village of 547 people and asked for their advice on, oh,
how do we start raising chickens?
How do we, you know, do XY and Z?
(22:13):
And we made, not made them. They were they were experts in
their field. They had wisdom.
They. You were tapping into their
wisdom. They had the wisdom, and we
honored and respected the fact that they had the wisdom.
And so that really made us a part of that community early on.
And then with the TV show, you know, the TV show was Planet
(22:34):
Green, which was owned by Discovery, so also at the time
of very conservative, you know, media company.
And I think what really helped us avoid any of the homophobia,
at least blatant homophobia, wasthat, you know, we were set in
this small town. We decided in that TV show that
(22:57):
we could be the butt of every joke, but we would make every
person in the town look like thehero.
And so when people watched it, yes, they saw, even if they were
a straight couple, they would see their own relationship.
In our relationship, you know, we were trying to start over.
We were trying to start this business.
We had this huge mortgage. We were struggling.
(23:17):
People could see their own relationship in our
relationship, and then they could see how we were being
respectful of our community, in the community was being
respectful of us. So there was a lot of modeling.
Yes, it was. It was by example, you know, we,
we just, we just put ourselves out there is that Rep that, you
know, representation is half thebattle.
(23:37):
But we there's also something wehave had, you know, obviously
emails come in over the years. You know some, you know random
rabbit homophobe that writes something and.
But fewer than you might think. Fewer than you might think, but
the, the some of them serve a purpose.
I'm going to use a couple of specific examples.
Some serve a purpose where you just, we can just put a random
(23:58):
rant, homophobic rant on social media and it galvanizes the
neighborhood, you know, because people are kind.
They really are kind. Most people are not homophobic.
So you can use homophobia to power the goodness of, you know,
kindness. But then this is how we handle
it personally. So we got a e-mail just this
past year, very homophobic, so much so that our the head of our
(24:23):
customer services forwarded up and said that the team was
disturbed by it. And then they wanted to put it
on social media like we have done with, you know, other rants
in the past to show what we dealwith.
And then they said, and we looked her up and she is an
amazing customer. She has been, you know, loyal
for years and years and she's bought so much stuff.
(24:44):
He said, gosh, that doesn't jive.
It really doesn't jive. So instead of saying, yes, let's
put this online and, you know, do you know, take advantage of
it? Our CEO, not even us, our CEO
said, I'm going to give her a call and she did.
And it turns out she was having an A mental distress episode and
we were able to help her, you know, like, so it really is just
(25:07):
that empathy and saying that what is the best that can come
out of this situation? Love thy neighbor, love thy
neighbor more. And moral beauty.
You know, it's interesting. There's a guy named Acker
Keltner on her faculty who's theworld's leading expert on awe.
He's AUC Berkeley professor and #1 pathway to most common path
in the world of feeling. Awe is not being in nature.
(25:30):
It's actually witnessing moral beauty and then being elevated
by it. And I what you just described as
a, a form of moral beauty. How about Brent, your family?
How's your family dealing with your evolution and is there a
message there for the rest of usto know that families can also
(25:50):
get over this it? It was interesting because you
know, when I my hesitation with coming out was always centered
around my paternal grandparents.They were the ones that were the
most deeply rooted in the evangelical church and they
started their own church. And it wasn't the fact that I
(26:11):
was frightened that they would disown me or not speak to me or
anything like that. I knew that my grandfather was
such a Christian. He was such a true Christian
that his thought would be if youwere gay, you would go to hell.
(26:33):
And and not that that would makehim hate me, it would eat him
alive for him to think that I was going to go to hell.
Like because he would just constantly think you're going to
suffer for eternity. Because he had lost two of his
sons, including Brent's father when they when they were young.
So Brent was really the last remaining boy, you know, and and
(26:56):
so and so I. Didn't want to put that burden
on him that for him to think I, I, I was going to suffer for the
rest of eternity. And it was, you know, so finally
it became inevitable. But public knowledge?
Public knowledge. And so actually it was one of
the episodes of the television show.
(27:17):
The the show was kind of more ofa docus series rather than like
a scripted reality like we tend to see now.
And they actually caught the conversation on air when my
grandmother, I'll, I'll call my grandmother every, you know,
Sunday religiously. And they caught the conversation
on air where she said, oh, I read Josh's book, which talks
(27:43):
about how our relationship started.
And that was her way of opening up the conversation, of giving
me permission to have the conversation with her, which,
you know, I subsequently did. And then that holiday we went
down to, you know, spend holidays with my family, which
was the first time that most of them had ever seen Joshua really
(28:04):
even knew of Josh. It was so amazing for me to see
my grandfather, who this is, a man so embedded in his religion
that he if you asked him what the weather was, he would quote
a Bible verse like he knew the Bible.
And he was so kind to me. He was like, he was so
attentive. He was so.
(28:24):
Christian like he was so like I am embracing you and I am loving
you even if I don't understand or maybe even don't even.
It was like the best test of hisChristianity.
And. And in my mind, he passed.
Yeah, he may still believe we'regoing to hell, but in my mind,
he passed the Christianity test.Yeah.
How has being partners in business and partners in life,
(28:47):
if you had, if you had some wisdom to offer, what would be
the wisdom you would offer abouthow you make that work?
Don't do both. You've done both.
I know. I would say.
It's not easy. It's it's probably not even
ideal like it, we, we made it work, but it was very, very
difficult in the early years. You know, relationships haven't
(29:11):
have a natural arc to them rightin the in the beginning years
are the hardest because you're you're getting to know each
other and and, you know, grow your shared memories and and to
have to be to have a startup business at that time was
incredibly difficult because we were fighting about everything.
(29:32):
In a weird way, the business is what actually kept us together
through that that first decade. We probably would have split up,
but the fact that we had nothing, you know, we had this
little business that we couldn'tsplit up.
There was nothing to do. So the in the business was us.
That's what did keep us together, but it was a it was
very difficult. I would say, you know, our, our
(29:56):
secret is our 51% rule that that's our secret sauce that
came. We learned that the hard way.
And we write about this in the book as well.
Yeah. You did write about that, talk
about that. Most books on partnership,
romantic or business, they talk about dividing up decisions and
responsibilities based on your skill set, what each each person
is good at. We found that to be really
difficult because we have a lot of overlap and what we like, I
(30:19):
think most partners do. So we struggled with that
because we would fight, fight, fight over who was better at
what. And that's that's not the fight
to hack. We decided on the 51% rule.
Whoever is most passionate abouta challenge or a decision that
needs to be made, whoever's the most passionate gets the extra
1%, not all of it 1%. And that's because the person
(30:45):
with less passion still has to argue they're 49% because they
can sharpen the answer, they cansharpen the result.
And the person with the 1% extra1% because they're more
passionate, they're also more afraid to fail.
So they're going to work harder to make that just, you know, a
success. So it's not letting anybody off
the hook and it's not dividing it up by skill sets.
(31:06):
It's really who is most passionate about something.
And then then there it also takes away the grudging in the
anger when you don't get something away.
You're like, you know what, I did my best.
You really want this to happen, Go for it.
And, and there's no ego involvedat that point.
And. No, no, I, no, I told told you
so later if it didn't work out that oh, there is some of that.
(31:29):
OK. We, we will actually ask, oh,
why did that not work out? You know, if, if you that
someone had the 51%. But it's interesting because
that wasn't just a natural part of our personalities to begin
with. And I think that pivot point for
us was when we were offered to run The Amazing Race.
(31:50):
And we were just, you know, at that point, we were two, these
two middle-aged gay guys. And we're like, we're never, you
know. We're not going to win.
The middle-aged gay guys never win.
They like they they stick through 5 episodes and make a
bunch of campy jokes and then then they get caught, right?
I mean, that's how it always happens in.
Reality but again trying to makethe most of every opportunity we
said OK, what how can we make turn this into a win for us even
(32:13):
if we are not going to win and so we said OK, we just have to
make it halfway through the racebecause you're halfway through
the season no one knew is going to come in and you know watch
that season of The Amazing Race after the.
Half. So you're going to reach your
biggest audience. So we just need to make it
halfway. And we said, OK, what is the
strategy for making it halfway? And so we had never really
watched many episodes of The Amazing Race, but we did.
(32:36):
And we saw, OK, it's usually notthe, it's not what usually makes
the team fall apart or and get some eliminated.
Skill with a stamina. It's the way they communicate
with one another. And so we really work in the
build up to The Amazing Race. Yes, we were running and like
lifting weights and trying to make ourselves as physically
appropriate as possible. But we said, how are we going to
(32:57):
communicate with one another during the race?
How are we going to have absolute transparency, honesty
so that things don't fester and then blow up and and it worked
and it worked. It worked.
Too, well, we actually won. But then that really it was a
valuable lesson to us in our professional and personal life
about absolute communication because I think so many
(33:21):
partners, whether the romantic partner or business partners,
hold too many things in. And our company is based on
kindness. We say that is a key ingredient
in everything that we make. It is our company culture.
It is the ethos of everything that we do.
And we say absolute transparencyis the ultimate kindness because
(33:43):
if you are holding something in invariable, you cannot hold it
in forever. And is I going to leak out in
some sort of toxicity or it's going to come with some sort of
explosion. So we set the expectation up
front for ourselves for all of our team that you're going to
get absolute transparency and kind.
And that's and that is kindness.And that's how we define
(34:04):
kindness. What kind of path are you
carving through midlife? Our free Midlife Pathfinder Quiz
helps you discover which of eight archetypes best describe
your approach to the stage of life, and what that means for
your next chapter. It only takes a few minutes, and
your results may surprise you. Find out your archetype now.
(34:25):
It's quick, it's fun, and it might help you see your journey
in a whole new light. Take the Pathfinder quiz at
meawisdom.com. Forward slash quiz.
So the two of you are in midlife.
MEA is sort of famous now as youknow AI.
Well, someone interviewed and it's introduced me on stage
(34:47):
recently for a big speech and they said, and here coming to
stage now after they said my bio, they said is the world's
leading midlife activist. I don't think that's something I
was imagining at in my teen years, that I would be a midlife
activist. What is your relationship with
midlife? And we call them this the
(35:08):
midlife chrysalis, partly because we believe it.
It's really not a crisis becauseon the other side of that low
point that often happens for many people around mid 40s to
early 50s. There EU curve of happiness
shows that we get happier and happier after that.
What's been your relationship with midlife, individually and
and collectively? Well, I think of midlife.
I love, I love it. This is how you approach it
(35:29):
because I, you know, my specialty in medicine was in
longevity and aging. Oh good, we're going to talk
more about that then. I saw so many people, you know,
when I was practicing at Mount Sinai Hospital, that extreme,
you know, ages and at the end oftheir life as well.
And what I realized is that the reason so many people are scared
(35:54):
of dying is because they have regrets of one or another,
either of what they accomplished, how they spent
their life, how they had the relationships.
And I think that the biggest pivot you can make, and I'll say
this, for me personally, I thinkthe way I knew I had gone
(36:16):
through the transformation was that I no longer feared death or
feared life being cut short. You know, the whole reason I got
into longevity and aging and initially was because I had this
desire to live to 100 like that had always been, even as a
child, my goal, like I'm going to live to 100.
(36:39):
I think once I got to that pointin my life where I no longer
felt like I needed to live to 100, like I could die tomorrow
and think I've done everything Ineeded to accomplish in this
life, I knew I had reached that midlife transformation because I
had no more regrets. I had no more fear of regret and
(37:02):
so that for me personally is howI approached this point in my
life. For, for me, I mean, this, this
is something really big in my mind right now and I'm actually
working on my next book. It will be about this as well.
And I really feel that, you know, when in our generation, as
we were growing up, the the common story was as you aged,
(37:26):
people were becoming invisible and irrelevant.
And that was the story that was out there.
And then I feel like the pendulum swung a little bit too
hard in the opposite direction where it became, don't be
invisible, don't be irrelevant, keep going, keep striving, keep
pushing. I would say at my age, I see my
(37:47):
colleagues retiring on LinkedIn.And the first comment is always,
I can't wait to see what you do next.
I can't wait for the next chapter.
And I feel like we've overcorrected so that yes, you,
you want to keep going, you wantto enjoy your life, you want to
have purpose, you want to do things that have meaning for
you. But you shouldn't feel you have
to, you shouldn't feel that obligation that you felt that 20
(38:07):
at 30, at 48 to make your mark on the world.
I call it the Grandma Moses fallacy.
You know, when somebody says shedidn't sell a painting until she
was 80, That kind of thinking that you're going to be Grandma
Moses stops you from picking up a paintbrush.
Look, you're like just paint because you want to paint, not
because you wanted to have this be your next chapter and your
(38:28):
your sole purpose. So I'm really exploring this
idea of how as a culture do we healthily age without putting
pressure on people to struck, keep striving, but at the same
time, of course, you know, not not becoming irrelevant and
invisible at the same time. Yeah, those those two, it's
interesting to use those two words Josh, because in our
surveys of our 7500 MEA alums from 60 countries, that number
(38:52):
one concern that women tend to have is invisibility and for man
it's irrelevance. It's those 22 I words.
So here's a question that's a popular in the MEA community and
it for Brent, maybe there's as your answer will be there's
nothing but 10 years from now, what would you regret if you
didn't learn it or do it now? Yeah, there's nothing I regret
(39:12):
because if I wanted to do it, I would do it.
I mean, I think that that's the,the purpose of, you know, of
being at midlife and truly knowing yourself.
You know, so many people say, oh, at midlife, I, I, I truly
knew myself. I understood, you know, what I
was all about. So I don't think I will have any
regrets because I'm going to do the things that I want to do.
(39:34):
And, and I think to Josh's point, you can't be defined by
what other people think that youshould do or what you should be
or, you know, writing your next chapter.
And that's one of the things that we try to talk about in the
book as well, about this idea ofsuccess.
And so much of what we see popularized as success in our
(39:56):
world is, oh, you have to be a tech billionaire or you have to
do XYZ, or you have to have X number of followers or whatever.
And those are the only representations of success that
we are given. But there's many, many different
ways to be successful. And every entrepreneur and every
(40:18):
person should really sit down and think what is it going to
take for me to be successful, tofeel successful?
And I think ultimately contentment is the ultimate
success, right? If you are content with your
life, no matter how much or how low you have how much pain.
And that's key because it's not relevancy or visibility that is
(40:40):
success, it's contentment. And, and this might be this
might be heresy in, in the the world that we're talking about,
but if that your fear is irrelevancy and invisibility,
the antidote isn't visibility and relevancy.
Part of the antivote is becomingcomfortable with becoming
irrelevant and invisible. And, and that may be heresy.
(41:03):
As we age, just as we do physically, we do become a
little less relevant to the world.
Our, you know, our capacities dodiminish.
That is a natural part of becoming that an old human.
You don't want to rush it. You don't want to become too
irrelevant or too invisible, butat the same time you have to be
comfortable with your life changing and altering in that
(41:24):
way. So that's what I think.
That's what that's what I would like to challenge us as a
society to say. How can we become content with
the changes in aging, not try tofight them?
Yeah, I think that that's so true.
And and one of the things that social science is trying to say
is that contentment is somethingwe don't necessarily want in our
20s, but it's something we long for in our 60s, and it's a
(41:46):
different form. So there's that pursuit of
happiness in our 20s, and then there's that practice of
contentment in our 60s or, you know, whatever.
Is there a philosophy of aging that Beekman 18-O2 has in terms
of especially, you know, you were, you do skin care, you do
all kinds of things. Sometimes people can sort of
(42:06):
think, Oh, well, it's all about beauty, you know, talk about
that. We banned the word anti aging in
a company. Yay.
So we're it's all about pro aging.
That comes from also being part of the gay community.
Like we had a lot of friends, our generation who did not get
the gift of aging. You know, we lost so many of our
(42:26):
contemporaries. So that's why I hate that word
anti aging. We call it better aging.
And you know, I always believed from the beginning of my career
that aging is something that begins at birth.
So the minute that you come out of the womb is going to
contribute to how well you age and every decision you make
about what you put in your body,on your body, the environment
(42:48):
you surround yourself with, the social connections that you
make, those are the things that are contributing to aging.
It's not something that all of asudden you look in the mirror
and there's a wrinkle and you'relike, oh, I better be concerned
about aging. And so we talk about better
aging and it starts very early on, not just on what you're
putting on your skin. That's the most trivial thing.
It really goes back to the kindness and how you are
(43:11):
treating yourself with kindness,both on a mental and physical
level, and how you're treating other people and making those
connections that are so important in life.
You know, early on in my career,I was working, I was doing a
fellowship, research fellowship at Harvard on the centenarian
study. And you know, we were looking so
(43:32):
aggressively to try to find somegenetic component that would
explain why there are certain families that have multiple
generations of longevity in their family.
And at the end of this like multi multi year study, of
course, nothing was ever found. There was a genetic contribution
to longevity. As we're hearing now, the
(43:55):
biggest contributor to longevityis your social connections,
which all comes back to kindness, how you treat
yourself, how you feel when you walk out, how you're treating
other people and how that ripples forward.
And so that's that's why on every one of our products, we
actually list kindness as an ingredient in the product
(44:15):
because we, we don't want you touse the product unless you can
think how am I being kind to myself and how more kind to the
world. You know, as you talk about
aging and, and I like to talk about this idea of old growth
forest, we have old growth redwoods.
How about old growth? Humans, we're, we are aging our
whole life. We're also growing our whole
life. You know, you see it, you see a
(44:36):
15 year old and you say, Oh my Johnny, you've grown a lot in
the last couple of years. You don't say that to a 60 year
old because they think of their waistline.
But the truth is we're always growing if we're, if we're
living, meaning that the growingis often going internal.
So it, you know, it's not, it's not external necessarily when
we're young, it's it's certainlyexternal through puberty.
(44:57):
But as we get older, yes, we're aging and growing at the same
time. And I, I just love that phrase
old growth humans, just because it suggests that that's part of
our role in life all the way to the end.
It's true, and you can count therings.
Yes, you can count the rings. SO2 Last questions 1 is like,
(45:20):
what's some farm wisdom that we can apply to aging and getting
older? Like is it patience?
Is it humility? Is it what, what, what?
What have you learned having a farm that relates to this idea
of getting older? Make hay while the sun shines.
This is is a true agricultural saying.
(45:41):
You have to make hay when it's not raining because after you
cut the hay, it has to sit for three days.
If it gets rained on, it gets wet and it will ferment and burn
your barn down. So you actually have to make hay
while the sun shines in life. It was a big learning for us in
that when we were starting the company and entrepreneurs, it
(46:03):
was it was 28 eight. Yeah.
I mean, it was just this crazy full time all the time.
And I was always worried a little bit because work life
balance was always something that, you know, comes up as part
of your, your health, you know, health check.
And I, we came to realize that work life balance should be
(46:24):
measured in decades, not in daysand hours.
And at the time we were startingour company, that was the time,
that was our work time. Our lifetime is now and coming
up, that's going to be our work life balance as measured in
decades. But if we didn't make hay while
the sunshine, while we were working with our company, if we
had said like, you know what, weneed to take two weeks off to
(46:45):
regroup, it would have derailed us.
So that idea of making a with the sunshine really hit home to
me. And I would say mine is there's
no use crying. Never spilled milk because guess
what? You have to let it go and go get
some more milk because there's plenty of milk out there.
Don't have to worry about the one that you.
(47:05):
Just milk some more, yeah? Are you going to stay on the
farm? I mean what what is the your
relationship with the farm todayand and into the future?
Well, we're still there for halfthe year.
The half when it's not snowing in upstate New York, Farmer John
is still there with the, you know, the original lineage of
goats. We have an amazing team.
(47:26):
A lot of our employees are stillwith us and the ones that's work
with us on the farm, farmer Johnis still there.
Megan was our second employee. She helps us out.
It's interesting because we are all, to your point, getting to
that middle age. So we're all talking to each
other, you know, like John, how long do you want to farm?
Megan, how long do you want to do this?
So the farm will always be an amazing, special place in our
(47:49):
heart, but what will the farm become will depend on what the
people involved in it become. Did you ever think about making
it into a bed and breakfast as well and having like?
Animal work. I don't need any more work, OK.
OK, well, you tell me. I, I, I'm a hotelier.
I was a boutique hotelier. So, you know, that's going to my
my natural thing. We have the idea of creating the
world's first kindness SPA. Is is is on our list of
(48:14):
contemplation? OK.
All right. Last question, which I ask all
of my guests and it's particularly relevant to you and
you can't repeat yourself. If someone said I want a someone
younger than you said, I would love to tap into your wisdom
based upon the school of Hard Knocks, what would be your
(48:35):
wisdom bumper sticker and what'sthe origin story behind it?
And it doesn't have to be 1 of your goat wisdoms.
It can be something else. It could be something quite
specific. It can be actually something.
It doesn't have to be an aphorism that is familiar out
there in the world. It can be just your own version
of hey I learned this lesson thehard way and I want to share it
with others because wisdom is meant to be shared.
(48:56):
Mine, mine would be, it doesn't matter that much.
It would, you know, as a, as a highly driven person with
anxiety issues, you know, and, and, and depression and all that
in my youth. But then again, I would also say
that's not my thing because that, that's part of what drove
(49:16):
me to become who I am today. But it would have been nice in
the back of my mind to know thatall these things that worried
me, that bothered me, really didn't matter that much.
Beautiful. Brent I think the the first one
would be self kindness starts the ripple because I think that
so many people look themselves in the mirror every morning or
(49:37):
wake up in the morning already with negative self talk.
And I think that that manifests itself in your life and also in
the life of everyone you interact with during the course
of the day. So if you can just figure out
how to treat yourself and talk to yourself more kindly, you'll
put more kindness in the world to make the world a better
place. So self kindness starts to
(49:58):
ripple. I would also say for anybody who
is alive in America, particularly despite all of the
flaws that we might perceive ourselves to have at the moment.
So this is in context, You won the lottery.
(50:21):
You know, you are born, you are alive and you are in America.
And you, in the whole grand scheme of things, you have won
the lottery, regardless of what position you are in life at that
moment. At this moment, so just the
gratitude from just. Just the gratitude from that.
(50:41):
I mean, you only get you. He asked for one.
You're. I know, I think.
You could do another one. I mean, it's fine.
No, that's it. I'll, I'll stop it too.
That's it. Oh, no, one more, one more.
Because we actually did make this bumper sticker at one
point. It was, it said Hi neighbor.
And again, I think that's because, yes, you're driving
down. HIGH or HI?
(51:03):
HI. You're you're driving down the
highway and yes, every car that you pass is probably a quote UN
quote stranger, but think of that person not as a stranger,
but as a neighbor and it will completely change your mindset
on the world. You guys remind me of Mr.
Rogers. We've heard that before.
(51:26):
Big compliment. Yeah, thank you so much for
joining us on the Midlife Chrysalis and, and giving us
some goat wisdom and, and, and really some old fashioned
wisdom. You know what, I think one of
the things that's particularly notable about the two of you is
you could people could say like,oh, it's a gay couple.
And then your philosophy and wayof doing business and doing life
(51:51):
is really old fashioned. It's very much it's not about
being trendy on the dance floor.So thank you for that, that
you're honest and candid wisdom.Obviously never seen me dance,
but thank you so much. It's the the work you're doing
is really important and we appreciate being part of it.
Beautiful. Well, I hope that gave you a
(52:14):
little dose of kindness in your heart.
My first lesson is that you can build a company based upon
kindness. And when I started Jawad Aviv,
my boutique hotel company, basedupon the French phrase for joy
of life, our mantra and mission was to create joy.
I was called a Kermit capitalistand I liked that.
(52:37):
What goes around comes around. It may take a while for it to
come around, but if you're doinggood things in the world,
hopefully that comes back to you.
But you don't do it for that reason.
You do it because it feels good to be kind and, and to have
gratitude about life. So at the core of Brett and
Josh's business is this idea of kindness.
(52:57):
And it's even, you know, on the products, you know, the product
wrapping that they send out to people.
So, so number one is yes, you can be an entrepreneur and kind
at the same time #2 is love thy neighbor.
Now that's one of the one of their favorites aphorisms from
the book Goat Wisdom. But here's the interesting part
of that. You know, here you have two guys
(53:19):
who a gay couple moving to a a county that is 84% Trump voters.
I mean, now they moved there waybefore the Trump era.
And the first thing they did wasto go out and survey their
neighbors around wisdom, around actually learning farm wisdom
(53:39):
because they were the city selectors from, from being in
town. And what a what a, you know, a
brilliant way to build relationships and that love that
neighbor philosophy, it really sort of is embedded in who they
are. They're very old fashioned in
many ways in terms of how they see you running a business and
how they see, you know, living alife, which again, when you hear
(54:03):
a gay couple as entrepreneurs, you might think that they're
like trendy and, you know, jumping on whatever the new
bandwagon is. But these are not two guys who
are when I made the joke about, you know, hi neighbor, I talked
about HIGH in some places in theworld, there's like, Oh yeah,
it's a high neighbor that, that,you know, I don't think they
even got what I was talking about.
(54:25):
So these are two guys who are both kind and old fashioned.
And then thirdly, I, I did love the, the discussion around
success scripts. You know, this is a topic we, we
talk about a lot at MEA because for a lot of people, it's around
midlife that we start to evaluate whose script are we
(54:46):
reading from who, you know, who gave us the success script, who
has our definition of success. And, and I get so many people
who come to MEA who are looking for a new form of purpose that
is different than the old. And for these guys, you know,
their definition of success is really contentment.
Again, a word that you, we don'thear it for people aspiring to
(55:08):
in their 20's, the contentment is something that it is maybe
more important than happiness aswe get older.
It's to really appreciate what you have and have gratitude
around that and to actually maybe get into a place where
you're you're not striving quiteas much.
One of the things I I learned inthe in my earlier life was if
I'm constantly in the attaining mode of doing things, I often
(55:32):
have to atone later because I have sharp elbows.
But if I'm in the attuning mode,trying to be more harmonious
with wherever I am and whatever surroundings I'm in, I feel at
1. So attain leads to a tone,
attune leads to feeling at one that is the chip ISM of the
week. Hope to see you again next week
(55:54):
on the Midlife Chrysalis. Thanks for listening to The
Midlife Chrysalis. This show is produced by Midlife
Media. If you enjoyed this episode,
help us spread the word by subscribing and leaving a review
on your favorite platform.
The reason so many people are scared of dying is because they
have regrets of one or another, either of what they
accomplished, how they spent their life, how they had their
relationships. The biggest pivot you can make,
and I'll say this, for me personally, I think the way I
(00:20):
knew I had gone through the transformation was that I no
longer feared death or feared life being cut short.
Like I could die tomorrow and think I've done everything I
needed to accomplish in this life.
I knew I had reached that midlife transformation because I
had no more regrets. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
(00:44):
Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a
crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that
can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.
Well, hello, this is Chip Conley, and it's the midlife
chrysalis. Today I listened.
(01:06):
I listened to you because many of you have said we want more
normal people. It depends on how you define
normal, but we want people who are just like doing their lives
out there and living midlife andwe want a few more
entrepreneurs. A number of you have said we'd
love to hear more entrepreneurial stories, and so
that's what we're bringing you today.
(01:26):
Now, Brent and Josh are not normal in the sense of
heteronormeral. They happen to be a gay couple.
They're pretty well known because they started something
called Beekman 18-O2. It's a farm.
It has all kinds of amazing farmproducts and beauty products.
They were in the great race, they had ATV series.
(01:47):
They have a book called Goat Wisdom that became a best
seller. So we dive deeply into what it's
like to start a business. How is it as a couple operating
a business now for 16 or 17 years and particularly their
point of view on midlife and aging?
Brent was a doctor and is a doctor and was the head medical
(02:11):
person in the Martha Stewart Media world.
They both have a really interesting perspective on
midlife. So I think you'll enjoy this,
especially because you know, at the core of their business
philosophy and personal philosophy is kindness.
Enjoy. Well, Josh and Brent, thank you
(02:32):
for joining me on the Midlife Chrysalis.
Oh, it's great to. Be here.
Great to be here. Thanks for having us.
You have colors that match the book, your book cover you got.
You got the book cover right there.
Let's let's do a little promo right there.
GOAT wisdom. We're going to talk about that
how to build a truly great business.
How did the two of you meet? Because I mean, let's start by
saying the two of you have been are in a romantic relationship.
(02:53):
Our husband. Are you guys husbands as well?
And you know, and I happen to begay and married as well.
Let's start with that. Let's let's shock some of our of
our listeners and and watchers go straight to the gay issue.
How did you guys meet and how long have you been together?
Well, we always say we met the old fashioned way, the Internet
(03:16):
and we, it was, we've been together for 20, almost 26 years
now. And we met at SO at the very,
very beginning. It was on AOL dial up.
It's yes. Oh.
Really. In a chat room.
Yeah, we were in a chat room andwe, we were chatting for hours.
Now, Brent had never dated a guybefore so and I had been living
(03:38):
in New York for a while. He had just moved to New York to
do his residency and he never dated a guy.
So he wouldn't go out. I kept asking him during in the
chat to go out and eat for coffee and he never would.
So we talked for hours. And so I, I realized he wasn't
going to meet me. So I became the world's first
Internet stalker. And I asked him throughout the
the chat. I say, I'm like, oh, what
hospital? You're doing your residency?
(04:00):
Oh, do you walk to work? Do you take the subway?
What direction do you walk? How long does it take you to get
there? So I figured out where he lived.
And before he disconnected, before we hung up, I said
tomorrow night at 8:00, you're either going to be there at the
subway stop, I'm going to be there, or you're not.
And he shut up. Oh, how romantic.
And how was that for you, Brent?Because you know, you were, you
(04:23):
were in residency to become a doctor and you probably had been
the, the, the best little boy inthe world to, to quote a, a book
that came out a few years, like decades ago.
You were on the path to your, your parents were proud of you.
And, and all of a sudden, well, you're in a chat room.
(04:44):
Let's start by saying, you know,that just means that you were
sort of exploring what it means to be gay.
And you meet Josh and he's he's unrelenting.
How was that? Had you dated at all before that
I? Had only dated girls throughout
college and medical school and high school.
And to add even more intrigue toit, I grew up in the South in
(05:06):
North Carolina, if you can't tell from my accent, and grew up
very evangelical. So there were a whole lot of
issues that I was dealing with, you know, leading up to this
point. And I think part of my reasoning
for wanting to come to New York City to do my residency was so
that I could explore this without the prying eyes of not
(05:28):
only my family, but, you know, you know, everyone else in the
South at that time. So I think that gave me a little
bit more permission, which is why I went into the chat room to
begin with. But even after we got together,
we were together immediately. So we've met at the subway stop.
We went to Chinese food right there at the subway stop and
basically had my first kiss and we've been together ever since.
(05:51):
But I did not come out to my family for years after that.
And and his family. Found out we were gay from our
television show. I I guess that would happen,
right? Well, tell, wait, wait, explain
that one. They explain how was it?
How long ago was that that they that that they found this out?
(06:12):
So that was 2009 and that happened.
So for those of you who who don't know our story, we were
two New York City guys. We bought a farm in upstate New
York. We took in a neighboring farmer
who was losing his farm and he had 80 goats.
So we became overnight goat farmers.
And this was around 2000 and six, 2007.
(06:33):
And then the recession of 2008 hit and we both lost our jobs
within 30 days of each other. So we were trying to start over
and we were, we started. We Googled what can we make with
goat milk in goat milk soap was the first thing that came up.
So we started making goat milk soap and we got a little bit of
press for being these, you know,in the midst of a recession,
being these two professional gayguys trying to start over as
(06:55):
farmers. And we got an offer from a small
television network to follow ourstory.
And so we had a reality show fortwo years called The Fabulous
Speaking Boys, which is really the early days of our company,
how it was being born and the early days of living on the
farm. And the name Beekman.
(07:15):
Explain the Beekman 18-O2 reference.
So the farm was originally builtin the year 18 O2 by a gentleman
named William Beekman. And when we were trying to
create our company, because I had just come from Martha
Stewart, which is where I was working to head up her health
and Wellness division, and we understood how a brand can go
(07:37):
the way of its founder if the founder is having issues.
It's named after the founder. And so we from the very
beginning did not want to call our company a name that
referenced the two of us in either in any way.
And in fact, when we first started selling, you know,
online 16 years ago, we weren't even on our website at all.
It was just Beekman 18-O2. You know, it's about the farm.
(07:58):
And, and we came up with the name Beekman 18-O2 by making a
list of all of the heritage brands that we could think of.
And one of the brands on the list was Chanel #5.
And so we said OK, we need a name and a.
My mother's favorite perfume. OK, there you go.
Model yourself after the best. So a name and a number.
So it's determined as we were not to name the company after
(08:21):
us. It turned out that we basically
were named after our company. So now everybody calls us the
Beekman Boys. Yeah.
Even though we're not. Boys, they kind of Beekman show,
yeah. 4 Beekman, Yeah. If you're enjoying the
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(09:09):
How did this get off the ground?I mean, you you were quite
benefited by having ATV show andthey and they found out about
you because of some of the articles that were written.
Is that and did you how did you get these articles placed?
How did people know about you? Are you guys PRI don't know
magicians or, or did it all justsort of happen rather
(09:32):
serendipitously? Well, we both, we both come from
a marketing media background. So you know that he was working
for Martha. So he, he knew the benefit of
of, you know, great publicity. And I work in advertising and I
knew branding. And so we, we just started
reaching out to not even friends, but we just knew how
to, we knew how to craft our story.
(09:53):
And it was a compelling story, you know, middle of a huge
recession, 2 unemployed gay guysbecoming goat farmers.
It's a compelling story. And we knew that if we just got
it, sent it out to the right people that they would pick it
up. And actually it was surprising
the television came along because I was going for a job
energy trying to get, you know, get back into the workforce at
(10:13):
the network where the where we eventually wound up.
And it was the president of the network that was interviewing
me. I started telling about the
farm. She said, oh, I think I read
something about that. And then she said, you're not
right for this job, but maybe wecould do a television show.
So it really was serendipity, but it's also knowing where the
(10:35):
germ of an opportunity is and blowing it up.
Speaking of blowing it up, tell us a little bit about in the
last 16 years how Beekman 18-O2 has grown.
And then let's segue into goat wisdom, which has the goat
obviously having two meetings. It's a bit of a double entendre.
So tell us, you know what, you know what it took to get to the
(10:57):
point where you are today, a very successful international
brand. And, and then let's dive into
goat wisdom because you know, MEA, the Modern Elder Academy is
the world's first midlife wisdomschool.
So we like wisdom and and your book, which as a best seller and
I Love Is All about almost like wisdom bumper stickers.
(11:19):
So take it, take it away. Tell us what what how you grew
this company over the last 16 years?
When we first started out, you know, as Josh said, we had
Googled what to make with goat milk and we start first started
making those bars of soap using goat milk from the farm.
And our neighbors would come over and help us wrap the bars
of soap. And that's why we still call all
of our customers neighbors to this very day.
(11:41):
And you know, as people started reporting back to us that it was
really helping their skin, then I just started researching what
could it be about the goat milk that could be influencing
people's skin barrier? Because they knew people would
use it for thousands of years. Millennium people would use it,
but they didn't really know why it was working.
And so then we just started looking at the components of
(12:03):
goat milk, how it was nourishingthe skin microbiome, how it was
prepare, repairing the barrier of the skin.
And that's how the company grew.And so from wrapping that
original bar of soap at our dining room table, we've now
sold over 60 million bars of that original bar of soap and
are now one of the world's leaders in understanding the
(12:23):
skin microbiome. We now extract exosomes from the
goat milk to use as a delivery vehicle for skin care actives.
So we really have grown into quite a biotech company.
We're the number one beauty brand that crosses QVC and HSN
and one of the top beauty brandsat Ulta Beauty as well.
(12:44):
Does that mean you have to go onQVC that you like?
You actually Are you on TV, in Philadelphia or wherever you
have to be. We do, yes.
And HSN for hundreds of hours a year.
All right, well, So what have you learned along the way?
So let's give me, give us some goat wisdom.
And again, for those who don't know GOAT with, with periods
after each one, the greatest of all time is one form of goat.
(13:06):
And of course we've been talkingabout the other form of goat.
Tell us about the book and and and and give us maybe three of
your goat wisdoms. Yeah, well, I, you know, I think
to what Josh was saying earlier about how we got our story
started, you know, there's neverbeen an opportunity that we let
pass us by. So anytime someone would bring
(13:28):
up something to us, maybe in theiteration that they brought it
up to us was not the right solution for us, but we would
figure out how to make it an opportunity for us.
And this book actually came about and, you know, we've
written multiple books. Josh has written, you know, 2
best selling memoirs and betweenus we've written 4 cookbooks.
(13:49):
We've written a book on style and so we didn't really need
another book, but we were on thetrain, the Amtrak train coming
from upstate New York back into the city for a meeting and one
of the Beekman neighbors, again,that's what we call of our
customers, just happened to see us on the train and just started
talking to us. So just trying to make small
(14:10):
talk with them. I say, what do you do?
And he said, oh, I'm the book agent.
Have you guys ever thought about, And he said, have you
guys ever thought about doing a business book?
And we're like, no, not really. We're you know, we're, we're
past our book writing component of our career.
And he said, Oh, no, I, I think you really should.
You've got such an amazing trajectory of your company and a
(14:32):
great entrepreneurial story. Fine, It's we traded cards and
then really thought nothing of it.
And he just was very persistent.Like, no, this story is amazing.
You should write this book. And I tried to deflect his
advances. I said, well, you know, we'll do
this book if you can convince Harvard Business Review to
(14:54):
publish the book. And he said, OK.
And then a month later, he came back and said, I pitch it to
Harvard Business Review. They want to write.
This and the reason we were, we really wanted Harvard do it
because we grew a very traditional Main St. old
fashioned business. We grew it the old fashioned
way. And the reason we wanted to
(15:16):
possibly tell this story was allof the entrepreneurial story and
advice that's out in the world today is all sort of, you know,
go for broke, become a billionaire, you know, the nine
steps between you and having hundreds of dollars, Like, it's
all very temporal. There's a hat for everything.
There's a, you know, they're allcelebrity brands, they're all
(15:36):
brands that get, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars
in of investment and, and we've realized we've been in business
now since 2008. We've seen these come and go.
We've seen all the ones that areheld up, as you know, amazing
examples be gone in two years. So we wanted to write a book
full of wisdom, not just advice,you know, trendy advice or fads.
(15:57):
And so we looked back to the wisdom that our parents gave us,
our grandparents gave us gave uswere were basically pretty
conservative in our in not in our politics, but in our
lifestyle. And we took these old parables
can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.
An empty vessel makes the most noise giving another one.
(16:21):
Love thy neighbor, love thy neighbor.
All these amazing old parables that have been around for
centuries. And we said let's apply them
like we applied them to our business and say how can you
build a business based on old fashioned wisdom, not the latest
information? And do you have, I'm going to
ask both of you, do both of you have a favorite, Each of you
have a favorite of of the ones in the book and how many are
(16:43):
there there? But there's like maybe 20 in the
book or so. We started with 12 because, you
know, you have to, you have to have room for a sequel.
And you know, and as Josh was saying, you know, the idea of
goat wisdom came from the fact that we are bombarded.
And it's even getting worse now with AI bombarded with too much
information in the world and buta severe lack of wisdom.
(17:07):
You're talking about language here.
We had seen, you know, because we work in the beauty industry,
you know, kind of crossing over into biotech.
So it's a very kind of fast-paced, rapid, trend driven
business. And, you know, over the past 10
years, with the rise in Instagram, then the rising
TikTok, you know, the way that businesses have sprung up and
(17:29):
then disappeared has become so rapid.
And, you know, people's have tended in this cycle to start a
business with already in mind how they're going to exit the
business. And you know, fortunately for
us, we started about four years before the Internet really took
(17:51):
off and certainly way before social media really took off.
And that enabled us to really lay down a great foundation for
the business. We really built it this old
fashioned way. And you know what we say is that
the reason so many of these companies that scaled up really
fit fast, maybe took a lot of money in the beginning and then
(18:13):
didn't pan out, was because you really didn't have the
foundation for a good business. And that's one of my favorite.
You asked what our favorite was.One of my favorite sayings that
we explore in the book is an empty vessel makes the most
noise. And we, you know, we may have
heard that through our lives. We don't really understand, you
know, what it means. You're like how to apply.
We know what it means, but we don't know how to apply it.
And that's the lesson we learned.
There are so many businesses that get hundreds of millions of
(18:35):
dollars or they have a celebrityback and we've seen them over
the years and you've suddenly they're everywhere in the media,
right? You know, their ads are popping
up online, They're in your social media feeds.
They're everywhere and Brent andI would we would get jealous and
we'd say, gosh, why are why is this little business getting all
this attention this, you know, the celebrity business and we
(18:56):
can't, you know, we're just growing like this.
And then we started seeing them go and come and go and come and
go. And an empty vessel does make
the nose most noise if there's no there, there, if it's just
paid PR, there's no company there, there's no brand there.
So we, we sort of take, that's one of my favorite sayings, but
we take all those things and apply it to today's world and
(19:18):
today's business world. And Brett, what's one of your
favorites? I think my absolute favorite is
Love Thy Neighbor. It's the one that we close the
book with. Your words would be love thy
customer, but it's also love than ever, yeah.
And I that comes obviously because of my religious
background. Yes.
But what's so interesting about that particular phrase is that
(19:40):
it exists in every religion around the world.
That idea of being a good neighbor and trying to take care
of the person who is right next to you.
It's, you know, it's. Universal and in every religion
the word neighbor in the translations is very specific
it's not love all of mankind or love you know the universe it's
(20:03):
love thy neighbor or the translations thereof and when
we've. Thought about that, when we
think about the word neighbor inthis day and age, we have all
the information of the world around us.
And so we panic about the whole world every day, right?
You know, like we, we, we hear all these stories, but we can't
take care of the whole world. We can impact the person next to
us and if the person that personimpacts the person next to them
(20:26):
and then a person next to them, eventually the whole world is
taken care of, which is why we believe the word neighbor is so
important. You really have to focus close
in and impact what you can closein and we related that to our
business and our customers. Like if we have a great
relationship with our close and customers, the business takes
care of itself. And have your neighbors loved
(20:47):
you back? I mean, what I mean by that is
have you had to deal with homophobia in the press or in
your customer base or neighbors,literally physical neighbors,
you know, the farm. I mean, how have you had to deal
with that? And has that been an issue based
upon the industry you're in? Maybe it would be less of an
(21:08):
issue. You're not, you're not, you're
not a contract, a building contractor.
So, so how have have you had to deal with that?
Well, you know, it's such an interesting question because,
you know, the farm is located inSchoharie County, New York,
which is one of the poorest counties in all of upstate New
York. It's very conservative, you
know. Yeah. 84% maca.
(21:30):
And you know, we when we startedthe company there, obviously it
was obvious that we were a gay cup when we bought this historic
property in the town. We never once had an issue.
And we were very strategic aboutthis because we said, OK,
obviously we're going to be outsiders with there's going to
be this connotation of these city slickers who are coming
(21:52):
here and they're going to tell us what to do.
And so we said, OK, how can we counter that?
And so we made sure that we knocked on every door in this
tiny village of 547 people and asked for their advice on, oh,
how do we start raising chickens?
How do we, you know, do XY and Z?
(22:13):
And we made, not made them. They were they were experts in
their field. They had wisdom.
They. You were tapping into their
wisdom. They had the wisdom, and we
honored and respected the fact that they had the wisdom.
And so that really made us a part of that community early on.
And then with the TV show, you know, the TV show was Planet
(22:34):
Green, which was owned by Discovery, so also at the time
of very conservative, you know, media company.
And I think what really helped us avoid any of the homophobia,
at least blatant homophobia, wasthat, you know, we were set in
this small town. We decided in that TV show that
(22:57):
we could be the butt of every joke, but we would make every
person in the town look like thehero.
And so when people watched it, yes, they saw, even if they were
a straight couple, they would see their own relationship.
In our relationship, you know, we were trying to start over.
We were trying to start this business.
We had this huge mortgage. We were struggling.
(23:17):
People could see their own relationship in our
relationship, and then they could see how we were being
respectful of our community, in the community was being
respectful of us. So there was a lot of modeling.
Yes, it was. It was by example, you know, we,
we just, we just put ourselves out there is that Rep that, you
know, representation is half thebattle.
(23:37):
But we there's also something wehave had, you know, obviously
emails come in over the years. You know some, you know random
rabbit homophobe that writes something and.
But fewer than you might think. Fewer than you might think, but
the, the some of them serve a purpose.
I'm going to use a couple of specific examples.
Some serve a purpose where you just, we can just put a random
(23:58):
rant, homophobic rant on social media and it galvanizes the
neighborhood, you know, because people are kind.
They really are kind. Most people are not homophobic.
So you can use homophobia to power the goodness of, you know,
kindness. But then this is how we handle
it personally. So we got a e-mail just this
past year, very homophobic, so much so that our the head of our
(24:23):
customer services forwarded up and said that the team was
disturbed by it. And then they wanted to put it
on social media like we have done with, you know, other rants
in the past to show what we dealwith.
And then they said, and we looked her up and she is an
amazing customer. She has been, you know, loyal
for years and years and she's bought so much stuff.
(24:44):
He said, gosh, that doesn't jive.
It really doesn't jive. So instead of saying, yes, let's
put this online and, you know, do you know, take advantage of
it? Our CEO, not even us, our CEO
said, I'm going to give her a call and she did.
And it turns out she was having an A mental distress episode and
we were able to help her, you know, like, so it really is just
(25:07):
that empathy and saying that what is the best that can come
out of this situation? Love thy neighbor, love thy
neighbor more. And moral beauty.
You know, it's interesting. There's a guy named Acker
Keltner on her faculty who's theworld's leading expert on awe.
He's AUC Berkeley professor and #1 pathway to most common path
in the world of feeling. Awe is not being in nature.
(25:30):
It's actually witnessing moral beauty and then being elevated
by it. And I what you just described as
a, a form of moral beauty. How about Brent, your family?
How's your family dealing with your evolution and is there a
message there for the rest of usto know that families can also
(25:50):
get over this it? It was interesting because you
know, when I my hesitation with coming out was always centered
around my paternal grandparents.They were the ones that were the
most deeply rooted in the evangelical church and they
started their own church. And it wasn't the fact that I
(26:11):
was frightened that they would disown me or not speak to me or
anything like that. I knew that my grandfather was
such a Christian. He was such a true Christian
that his thought would be if youwere gay, you would go to hell.
(26:33):
And and not that that would makehim hate me, it would eat him
alive for him to think that I was going to go to hell.
Like because he would just constantly think you're going to
suffer for eternity. Because he had lost two of his
sons, including Brent's father when they when they were young.
So Brent was really the last remaining boy, you know, and and
(26:56):
so and so I. Didn't want to put that burden
on him that for him to think I, I, I was going to suffer for the
rest of eternity. And it was, you know, so finally
it became inevitable. But public knowledge?
Public knowledge. And so actually it was one of
the episodes of the television show.
(27:17):
The the show was kind of more ofa docus series rather than like
a scripted reality like we tend to see now.
And they actually caught the conversation on air when my
grandmother, I'll, I'll call my grandmother every, you know,
Sunday religiously. And they caught the conversation
on air where she said, oh, I read Josh's book, which talks
(27:43):
about how our relationship started.
And that was her way of opening up the conversation, of giving
me permission to have the conversation with her, which,
you know, I subsequently did. And then that holiday we went
down to, you know, spend holidays with my family, which
was the first time that most of them had ever seen Joshua really
(28:04):
even knew of Josh. It was so amazing for me to see
my grandfather, who this is, a man so embedded in his religion
that he if you asked him what the weather was, he would quote
a Bible verse like he knew the Bible.
And he was so kind to me. He was like, he was so
attentive. He was so.
(28:24):
Christian like he was so like I am embracing you and I am loving
you even if I don't understand or maybe even don't even.
It was like the best test of hisChristianity.
And. And in my mind, he passed.
Yeah, he may still believe we'regoing to hell, but in my mind,
he passed the Christianity test.Yeah.
How has being partners in business and partners in life,
(28:47):
if you had, if you had some wisdom to offer, what would be
the wisdom you would offer abouthow you make that work?
Don't do both. You've done both.
I know. I would say.
It's not easy. It's it's probably not even
ideal like it, we, we made it work, but it was very, very
difficult in the early years. You know, relationships haven't
(29:11):
have a natural arc to them rightin the in the beginning years
are the hardest because you're you're getting to know each
other and and, you know, grow your shared memories and and to
have to be to have a startup business at that time was
incredibly difficult because we were fighting about everything.
(29:32):
In a weird way, the business is what actually kept us together
through that that first decade. We probably would have split up,
but the fact that we had nothing, you know, we had this
little business that we couldn'tsplit up.
There was nothing to do. So the in the business was us.
That's what did keep us together, but it was a it was
very difficult. I would say, you know, our, our
(29:56):
secret is our 51% rule that that's our secret sauce that
came. We learned that the hard way.
And we write about this in the book as well.
Yeah. You did write about that, talk
about that. Most books on partnership,
romantic or business, they talk about dividing up decisions and
responsibilities based on your skill set, what each each person
is good at. We found that to be really
difficult because we have a lot of overlap and what we like, I
(30:19):
think most partners do. So we struggled with that
because we would fight, fight, fight over who was better at
what. And that's that's not the fight
to hack. We decided on the 51% rule.
Whoever is most passionate abouta challenge or a decision that
needs to be made, whoever's the most passionate gets the extra
1%, not all of it 1%. And that's because the person
(30:45):
with less passion still has to argue they're 49% because they
can sharpen the answer, they cansharpen the result.
And the person with the 1% extra1% because they're more
passionate, they're also more afraid to fail.
So they're going to work harder to make that just, you know, a
success. So it's not letting anybody off
the hook and it's not dividing it up by skill sets.
(31:06):
It's really who is most passionate about something.
And then then there it also takes away the grudging in the
anger when you don't get something away.
You're like, you know what, I did my best.
You really want this to happen, Go for it.
And, and there's no ego involvedat that point.
And. No, no, I, no, I told told you
so later if it didn't work out that oh, there is some of that.
(31:29):
OK. We, we will actually ask, oh,
why did that not work out? You know, if, if you that
someone had the 51%. But it's interesting because
that wasn't just a natural part of our personalities to begin
with. And I think that pivot point for
us was when we were offered to run The Amazing Race.
(31:50):
And we were just, you know, at that point, we were two, these
two middle-aged gay guys. And we're like, we're never, you
know. We're not going to win.
The middle-aged gay guys never win.
They like they they stick through 5 episodes and make a
bunch of campy jokes and then then they get caught, right?
I mean, that's how it always happens in.
Reality but again trying to makethe most of every opportunity we
said OK, what how can we make turn this into a win for us even
(32:13):
if we are not going to win and so we said OK, we just have to
make it halfway through the racebecause you're halfway through
the season no one knew is going to come in and you know watch
that season of The Amazing Race after the.
Half. So you're going to reach your
biggest audience. So we just need to make it
halfway. And we said, OK, what is the
strategy for making it halfway? And so we had never really
watched many episodes of The Amazing Race, but we did.
(32:36):
And we saw, OK, it's usually notthe, it's not what usually makes
the team fall apart or and get some eliminated.
Skill with a stamina. It's the way they communicate
with one another. And so we really work in the
build up to The Amazing Race. Yes, we were running and like
lifting weights and trying to make ourselves as physically
appropriate as possible. But we said, how are we going to
(32:57):
communicate with one another during the race?
How are we going to have absolute transparency, honesty
so that things don't fester and then blow up and and it worked
and it worked. It worked.
Too, well, we actually won. But then that really it was a
valuable lesson to us in our professional and personal life
about absolute communication because I think so many
(33:21):
partners, whether the romantic partner or business partners,
hold too many things in. And our company is based on
kindness. We say that is a key ingredient
in everything that we make. It is our company culture.
It is the ethos of everything that we do.
And we say absolute transparencyis the ultimate kindness because
(33:43):
if you are holding something in invariable, you cannot hold it
in forever. And is I going to leak out in
some sort of toxicity or it's going to come with some sort of
explosion. So we set the expectation up
front for ourselves for all of our team that you're going to
get absolute transparency and kind.
And that's and that is kindness.And that's how we define
(34:04):
kindness. What kind of path are you
carving through midlife? Our free Midlife Pathfinder Quiz
helps you discover which of eight archetypes best describe
your approach to the stage of life, and what that means for
your next chapter. It only takes a few minutes, and
your results may surprise you. Find out your archetype now.
(34:25):
It's quick, it's fun, and it might help you see your journey
in a whole new light. Take the Pathfinder quiz at
meawisdom.com. Forward slash quiz.
So the two of you are in midlife.
MEA is sort of famous now as youknow AI.
Well, someone interviewed and it's introduced me on stage
(34:47):
recently for a big speech and they said, and here coming to
stage now after they said my bio, they said is the world's
leading midlife activist. I don't think that's something I
was imagining at in my teen years, that I would be a midlife
activist. What is your relationship with
midlife? And we call them this the
(35:08):
midlife chrysalis, partly because we believe it.
It's really not a crisis becauseon the other side of that low
point that often happens for many people around mid 40s to
early 50s. There EU curve of happiness
shows that we get happier and happier after that.
What's been your relationship with midlife, individually and
and collectively? Well, I think of midlife.
I love, I love it. This is how you approach it
(35:29):
because I, you know, my specialty in medicine was in
longevity and aging. Oh good, we're going to talk
more about that then. I saw so many people, you know,
when I was practicing at Mount Sinai Hospital, that extreme,
you know, ages and at the end oftheir life as well.
And what I realized is that the reason so many people are scared
(35:54):
of dying is because they have regrets of one or another,
either of what they accomplished, how they spent
their life, how they had the relationships.
And I think that the biggest pivot you can make, and I'll say
this, for me personally, I thinkthe way I knew I had gone
(36:16):
through the transformation was that I no longer feared death or
feared life being cut short. You know, the whole reason I got
into longevity and aging and initially was because I had this
desire to live to 100 like that had always been, even as a
child, my goal, like I'm going to live to 100.
(36:39):
I think once I got to that pointin my life where I no longer
felt like I needed to live to 100, like I could die tomorrow
and think I've done everything Ineeded to accomplish in this
life, I knew I had reached that midlife transformation because I
had no more regrets. I had no more fear of regret and
(37:02):
so that for me personally is howI approached this point in my
life. For, for me, I mean, this, this
is something really big in my mind right now and I'm actually
working on my next book. It will be about this as well.
And I really feel that, you know, when in our generation, as
we were growing up, the the common story was as you aged,
(37:26):
people were becoming invisible and irrelevant.
And that was the story that was out there.
And then I feel like the pendulum swung a little bit too
hard in the opposite direction where it became, don't be
invisible, don't be irrelevant, keep going, keep striving, keep
pushing. I would say at my age, I see my
(37:47):
colleagues retiring on LinkedIn.And the first comment is always,
I can't wait to see what you do next.
I can't wait for the next chapter.
And I feel like we've overcorrected so that yes, you,
you want to keep going, you wantto enjoy your life, you want to
have purpose, you want to do things that have meaning for
you. But you shouldn't feel you have
to, you shouldn't feel that obligation that you felt that 20
(38:07):
at 30, at 48 to make your mark on the world.
I call it the Grandma Moses fallacy.
You know, when somebody says shedidn't sell a painting until she
was 80, That kind of thinking that you're going to be Grandma
Moses stops you from picking up a paintbrush.
Look, you're like just paint because you want to paint, not
because you wanted to have this be your next chapter and your
(38:28):
your sole purpose. So I'm really exploring this
idea of how as a culture do we healthily age without putting
pressure on people to struck, keep striving, but at the same
time, of course, you know, not not becoming irrelevant and
invisible at the same time. Yeah, those those two, it's
interesting to use those two words Josh, because in our
surveys of our 7500 MEA alums from 60 countries, that number
(38:52):
one concern that women tend to have is invisibility and for man
it's irrelevance. It's those 22 I words.
So here's a question that's a popular in the MEA community and
it for Brent, maybe there's as your answer will be there's
nothing but 10 years from now, what would you regret if you
didn't learn it or do it now? Yeah, there's nothing I regret
(39:12):
because if I wanted to do it, I would do it.
I mean, I think that that's the,the purpose of, you know, of
being at midlife and truly knowing yourself.
You know, so many people say, oh, at midlife, I, I, I truly
knew myself. I understood, you know, what I
was all about. So I don't think I will have any
regrets because I'm going to do the things that I want to do.
(39:34):
And, and I think to Josh's point, you can't be defined by
what other people think that youshould do or what you should be
or, you know, writing your next chapter.
And that's one of the things that we try to talk about in the
book as well, about this idea ofsuccess.
And so much of what we see popularized as success in our
(39:56):
world is, oh, you have to be a tech billionaire or you have to
do XYZ, or you have to have X number of followers or whatever.
And those are the only representations of success that
we are given. But there's many, many different
ways to be successful. And every entrepreneur and every
(40:18):
person should really sit down and think what is it going to
take for me to be successful, tofeel successful?
And I think ultimately contentment is the ultimate
success, right? If you are content with your
life, no matter how much or how low you have how much pain.
And that's key because it's not relevancy or visibility that is
(40:40):
success, it's contentment. And, and this might be this
might be heresy in, in the the world that we're talking about,
but if that your fear is irrelevancy and invisibility,
the antidote isn't visibility and relevancy.
Part of the antivote is becomingcomfortable with becoming
irrelevant and invisible. And, and that may be heresy.
(41:03):
As we age, just as we do physically, we do become a
little less relevant to the world.
Our, you know, our capacities dodiminish.
That is a natural part of becoming that an old human.
You don't want to rush it. You don't want to become too
irrelevant or too invisible, butat the same time you have to be
comfortable with your life changing and altering in that
(41:24):
way. So that's what I think.
That's what that's what I would like to challenge us as a
society to say. How can we become content with
the changes in aging, not try tofight them?
Yeah, I think that that's so true.
And and one of the things that social science is trying to say
is that contentment is somethingwe don't necessarily want in our
20s, but it's something we long for in our 60s, and it's a
(41:46):
different form. So there's that pursuit of
happiness in our 20s, and then there's that practice of
contentment in our 60s or, you know, whatever.
Is there a philosophy of aging that Beekman 18-O2 has in terms
of especially, you know, you were, you do skin care, you do
all kinds of things. Sometimes people can sort of
(42:06):
think, Oh, well, it's all about beauty, you know, talk about
that. We banned the word anti aging in
a company. Yay.
So we're it's all about pro aging.
That comes from also being part of the gay community.
Like we had a lot of friends, our generation who did not get
the gift of aging. You know, we lost so many of our
(42:26):
contemporaries. So that's why I hate that word
anti aging. We call it better aging.
And you know, I always believed from the beginning of my career
that aging is something that begins at birth.
So the minute that you come out of the womb is going to
contribute to how well you age and every decision you make
about what you put in your body,on your body, the environment
(42:48):
you surround yourself with, the social connections that you
make, those are the things that are contributing to aging.
It's not something that all of asudden you look in the mirror
and there's a wrinkle and you'relike, oh, I better be concerned
about aging. And so we talk about better
aging and it starts very early on, not just on what you're
putting on your skin. That's the most trivial thing.
It really goes back to the kindness and how you are
(43:11):
treating yourself with kindness,both on a mental and physical
level, and how you're treating other people and making those
connections that are so important in life.
You know, early on in my career,I was working, I was doing a
fellowship, research fellowship at Harvard on the centenarian
study. And you know, we were looking so
(43:32):
aggressively to try to find somegenetic component that would
explain why there are certain families that have multiple
generations of longevity in their family.
And at the end of this like multi multi year study, of
course, nothing was ever found. There was a genetic contribution
to longevity. As we're hearing now, the
(43:55):
biggest contributor to longevityis your social connections,
which all comes back to kindness, how you treat
yourself, how you feel when you walk out, how you're treating
other people and how that ripples forward.
And so that's that's why on every one of our products, we
actually list kindness as an ingredient in the product
(44:15):
because we, we don't want you touse the product unless you can
think how am I being kind to myself and how more kind to the
world. You know, as you talk about
aging and, and I like to talk about this idea of old growth
forest, we have old growth redwoods.
How about old growth? Humans, we're, we are aging our
whole life. We're also growing our whole
life. You know, you see it, you see a
(44:36):
15 year old and you say, Oh my Johnny, you've grown a lot in
the last couple of years. You don't say that to a 60 year
old because they think of their waistline.
But the truth is we're always growing if we're, if we're
living, meaning that the growingis often going internal.
So it, you know, it's not, it's not external necessarily when
we're young, it's it's certainlyexternal through puberty.
(44:57):
But as we get older, yes, we're aging and growing at the same
time. And I, I just love that phrase
old growth humans, just because it suggests that that's part of
our role in life all the way to the end.
It's true, and you can count therings.
Yes, you can count the rings. SO2 Last questions 1 is like,
(45:20):
what's some farm wisdom that we can apply to aging and getting
older? Like is it patience?
Is it humility? Is it what, what, what?
What have you learned having a farm that relates to this idea
of getting older? Make hay while the sun shines.
This is is a true agricultural saying.
(45:41):
You have to make hay when it's not raining because after you
cut the hay, it has to sit for three days.
If it gets rained on, it gets wet and it will ferment and burn
your barn down. So you actually have to make hay
while the sun shines in life. It was a big learning for us in
that when we were starting the company and entrepreneurs, it
(46:03):
was it was 28 eight. Yeah.
I mean, it was just this crazy full time all the time.
And I was always worried a little bit because work life
balance was always something that, you know, comes up as part
of your, your health, you know, health check.
And I, we came to realize that work life balance should be
(46:24):
measured in decades, not in daysand hours.
And at the time we were startingour company, that was the time,
that was our work time. Our lifetime is now and coming
up, that's going to be our work life balance as measured in
decades. But if we didn't make hay while
the sunshine, while we were working with our company, if we
had said like, you know what, weneed to take two weeks off to
(46:45):
regroup, it would have derailed us.
So that idea of making a with the sunshine really hit home to
me. And I would say mine is there's
no use crying. Never spilled milk because guess
what? You have to let it go and go get
some more milk because there's plenty of milk out there.
Don't have to worry about the one that you.
(47:05):
Just milk some more, yeah? Are you going to stay on the
farm? I mean what what is the your
relationship with the farm todayand and into the future?
Well, we're still there for halfthe year.
The half when it's not snowing in upstate New York, Farmer John
is still there with the, you know, the original lineage of
goats. We have an amazing team.
(47:26):
A lot of our employees are stillwith us and the ones that's work
with us on the farm, farmer Johnis still there.
Megan was our second employee. She helps us out.
It's interesting because we are all, to your point, getting to
that middle age. So we're all talking to each
other, you know, like John, how long do you want to farm?
Megan, how long do you want to do this?
So the farm will always be an amazing, special place in our
(47:49):
heart, but what will the farm become will depend on what the
people involved in it become. Did you ever think about making
it into a bed and breakfast as well and having like?
Animal work. I don't need any more work, OK.
OK, well, you tell me. I, I, I'm a hotelier.
I was a boutique hotelier. So, you know, that's going to my
my natural thing. We have the idea of creating the
world's first kindness SPA. Is is is on our list of
(48:14):
contemplation? OK.
All right. Last question, which I ask all
of my guests and it's particularly relevant to you and
you can't repeat yourself. If someone said I want a someone
younger than you said, I would love to tap into your wisdom
based upon the school of Hard Knocks, what would be your
(48:35):
wisdom bumper sticker and what'sthe origin story behind it?
And it doesn't have to be 1 of your goat wisdoms.
It can be something else. It could be something quite
specific. It can be actually something.
It doesn't have to be an aphorism that is familiar out
there in the world. It can be just your own version
of hey I learned this lesson thehard way and I want to share it
with others because wisdom is meant to be shared.
(48:56):
Mine, mine would be, it doesn't matter that much.
It would, you know, as a, as a highly driven person with
anxiety issues, you know, and, and, and depression and all that
in my youth. But then again, I would also say
that's not my thing because that, that's part of what drove
(49:16):
me to become who I am today. But it would have been nice in
the back of my mind to know thatall these things that worried
me, that bothered me, really didn't matter that much.
Beautiful. Brent I think the the first one
would be self kindness starts the ripple because I think that
so many people look themselves in the mirror every morning or
(49:37):
wake up in the morning already with negative self talk.
And I think that that manifests itself in your life and also in
the life of everyone you interact with during the course
of the day. So if you can just figure out
how to treat yourself and talk to yourself more kindly, you'll
put more kindness in the world to make the world a better
place. So self kindness starts to
(49:58):
ripple. I would also say for anybody who
is alive in America, particularly despite all of the
flaws that we might perceive ourselves to have at the moment.
So this is in context, You won the lottery.
(50:21):
You know, you are born, you are alive and you are in America.
And you, in the whole grand scheme of things, you have won
the lottery, regardless of what position you are in life at that
moment. At this moment, so just the
gratitude from just. Just the gratitude from that.
(50:41):
I mean, you only get you. He asked for one.
You're. I know, I think.
You could do another one. I mean, it's fine.
No, that's it. I'll, I'll stop it too.
That's it. Oh, no, one more, one more.
Because we actually did make this bumper sticker at one
point. It was, it said Hi neighbor.
And again, I think that's because, yes, you're driving
down. HIGH or HI?
(51:03):
HI. You're you're driving down the
highway and yes, every car that you pass is probably a quote UN
quote stranger, but think of that person not as a stranger,
but as a neighbor and it will completely change your mindset
on the world. You guys remind me of Mr.
Rogers. We've heard that before.
(51:26):
Big compliment. Yeah, thank you so much for
joining us on the Midlife Chrysalis and, and giving us
some goat wisdom and, and, and really some old fashioned
wisdom. You know what, I think one of
the things that's particularly notable about the two of you is
you could people could say like,oh, it's a gay couple.
And then your philosophy and wayof doing business and doing life
(51:51):
is really old fashioned. It's very much it's not about
being trendy on the dance floor.So thank you for that, that
you're honest and candid wisdom.Obviously never seen me dance,
but thank you so much. It's the the work you're doing
is really important and we appreciate being part of it.
Beautiful. Well, I hope that gave you a
(52:14):
little dose of kindness in your heart.
My first lesson is that you can build a company based upon
kindness. And when I started Jawad Aviv,
my boutique hotel company, basedupon the French phrase for joy
of life, our mantra and mission was to create joy.
I was called a Kermit capitalistand I liked that.
(52:37):
What goes around comes around. It may take a while for it to
come around, but if you're doinggood things in the world,
hopefully that comes back to you.
But you don't do it for that reason.
You do it because it feels good to be kind and, and to have
gratitude about life. So at the core of Brett and
Josh's business is this idea of kindness.
(52:57):
And it's even, you know, on the products, you know, the product
wrapping that they send out to people.
So, so number one is yes, you can be an entrepreneur and kind
at the same time #2 is love thy neighbor.
Now that's one of the one of their favorites aphorisms from
the book Goat Wisdom. But here's the interesting part
of that. You know, here you have two guys
(53:19):
who a gay couple moving to a a county that is 84% Trump voters.
I mean, now they moved there waybefore the Trump era.
And the first thing they did wasto go out and survey their
neighbors around wisdom, around actually learning farm wisdom
(53:39):
because they were the city selectors from, from being in
town. And what a what a, you know, a
brilliant way to build relationships and that love that
neighbor philosophy, it really sort of is embedded in who they
are. They're very old fashioned in
many ways in terms of how they see you running a business and
how they see, you know, living alife, which again, when you hear
(54:03):
a gay couple as entrepreneurs, you might think that they're
like trendy and, you know, jumping on whatever the new
bandwagon is. But these are not two guys who
are when I made the joke about, you know, hi neighbor, I talked
about HIGH in some places in theworld, there's like, Oh yeah,
it's a high neighbor that, that,you know, I don't think they
even got what I was talking about.
(54:25):
So these are two guys who are both kind and old fashioned.
And then thirdly, I, I did love the, the discussion around
success scripts. You know, this is a topic we, we
talk about a lot at MEA because for a lot of people, it's around
midlife that we start to evaluate whose script are we
(54:46):
reading from who, you know, who gave us the success script, who
has our definition of success. And, and I get so many people
who come to MEA who are looking for a new form of purpose that
is different than the old. And for these guys, you know,
their definition of success is really contentment.
Again, a word that you, we don'thear it for people aspiring to
(55:08):
in their 20's, the contentment is something that it is maybe
more important than happiness aswe get older.
It's to really appreciate what you have and have gratitude
around that and to actually maybe get into a place where
you're you're not striving quiteas much.
One of the things I I learned inthe in my earlier life was if
I'm constantly in the attaining mode of doing things, I often
(55:32):
have to atone later because I have sharp elbows.
But if I'm in the attuning mode,trying to be more harmonious
with wherever I am and whatever surroundings I'm in, I feel at
1. So attain leads to a tone,
attune leads to feeling at one that is the chip ISM of the
week. Hope to see you again next week
(55:54):
on the Midlife Chrysalis. Thanks for listening to The
Midlife Chrysalis. This show is produced by Midlife
Media. If you enjoyed this episode,
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