Michelle MacDonald (00:00):

We do hard things when we're young. When you're 50, when you're 60, you're still the same person. We've got to stop blocking ourselves that we can't do the hard things.

David Stewart (00:09):

We've been brainwashed in this idea of comfort, constantly seeking comfort. Alright? I can tell you where Total comfort lives leads to. It leads to total decay. So you want to be comfortable. You get the La-Z-Boy chair, you got your Netflix, you got your box of donuts, okay, comfort. Great. You do that for six months and you're dead.

Michelle MacDonald (00:36):

Welcome back to Stronger By Design. I'm your host Michelle McDonald, and today's guest is none other than David Stewart. He's the founder of We Are Ageist. I've been on his platform with Joan many years ago and he's created something fantastic, something new called Super Age. I'm proud to be one of their advisors, and David is one of the earliest champions of the age movement. I got to say. He was out there pitching big brands that the 50 plus market was something to be taken seriously, that we mattered, that we counted, and that we kind of in abandoned it by the marketing engine. Maybe that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. But he's really been at the forefront of the pro age movement. So today in this conversation, we're going to dive into his story. He was an incredible fashion photographer, traveled all around the world, but in his forties, he had a bit of a health scare that landed him in the hospital. And it was his return to health, return to strength, where he really dove deep into how people in that 40 plus crowd, how they could optimize their health that began his journey. So we're going to dive in and get it right from the horse's mouth, right from David Stewart, what it takes when we get older to live with agency, why language matters when we talk about longevity and how identity health and ambition evolve as we age. Let's get to it.

(02:12):

Welcome to the show, everybody. Welcome back to Stronger By Design. I'm Michelle McDonald, and today I'm here with guest David Harry Stewart and he's here from Ageist. Go on and check them out ageist.com. They also have a podcast. Joan and I actually have been on that podcast a couple of times and sign up for their newsletter. He also has a new platform called Super Age. I am also going to be on the advisory board for that. A lot of great minds, great thinkers in the longevity space, and please sign up for their newsletter. It's a mindset newsletter. You get here regularly with great information on how you can optimize the aging cycle. So David, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you here.

David Stewart (03:00):

You are the superstar.

Michelle MacDonald (03:02):

No, no, no, no, no, you are. I can't wait to dive into your story.

David Stewart (03:06):

It's great to be here and you all that you do with Wonder Woman and your mom, you guys are really setting the bar for what's possible. And I think that a lot of people think that what you guys do is impossible. And what we say in all the platforms that I'm on, our greatest, greatest obstacle is our poverty imagination of what is possible. And if we expand that imagination, we can do tremendous things. And that's what you guys are doing.

Michelle MacDonald (03:36):

Yeah, I mean, I love what you said. Our attitude towards later life needs a complete reboot on every level in that we've really locked ourselves into this culture that's totally

David Stewart (03:51):

Well, it's anti living, right? I mean, if you're two years old, you're aging well, you're alive. To be alive is to age. I mean, until we get to the Benjamin Button, genetic reboot or something, that's the way it is. So let's be positive about living and positive about aging is just, it's also, there's so many items on the menu. So I'm 66, so me at 66 at this time is maybe 30 years ago what a 40-year-old would've been like. So these goalposts have shifted quite

Michelle MacDonald (04:29):

Significantly, not for everyone. And this is important, I want to dive into your whole story, how this became your passion and did it start, you had a really fast-paced lifestyle and then you had a health crisis, did your a little bit. Yeah. So I want to talk about that and how that changed your perspective on health and longevity and your priorities

David Stewart (04:54):

Important. Well, I want to say William James talks about these sort of different forms of enlightenment. Sometimes people just have these white light experiences. I'm sort of the long educational variety. So it took me a little while. I had this very rocking career as a photographer. I was living in Paris, working in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, traveling constantly. And what happened was, I think I was in my 49th year, I spent a year in a hospital with a weirdo autoimmune disease principally found in young females like girls under 10. So I had this wacko thing called idiopathic, and what it is is your body flags your platelets as some foreign entity to be removed, not a good thing.

(05:48):

Wow. Yeah. So that led to a couple of Stephen King crazy scary incidences and a lot of medical science is amazing. If you do things like break your arm, they're just great at that. But once you get into autoimmune stuff, so cancer is one side of autoimmune. Autoimmune, what I had as the other side, it's all very experimental and that really set me back and it ended up with organ removal, not something I really signed up for. So they took my spleen out right away. They said, this is what we want to do. And I was like, whoa, I think I'm going to need that thing. You can't have that. But after a year of just sort of the risks of all the treatments they were doing to me was exceeding the risks of the spleen removal. So it was like, okay, take it out. And once they did everything reset.

(06:40):

And so that was 16, 17 years ago and I'm fine. But what it did was it was like we need to ratchet everything down here. So enough of this crazy travel lifestyle. And it took me, once I got out of the hospital, it was a couple of years to sort of get back and then to actually get back involved with my physicality, getting back to the gym, getting back to sports. That took a little while. And once I started ageist, that really accelerated everything because we realized we wanted to understand Michelle, what was different about us versus people who were older. And I'm going to carve out for your mom who's sort of an N of one over here. She's the anomaly versus my parents or my wife's family is from North Georgia and it's a completely different thing. So we wanted to understand what this was and what we found was people's behavior, their sort of future leaning behavior was based upon how they felt about their physicality, how they felt about their physicality in the future, which was based on how they felt about their physicality now. So that's what really turbocharged me into this world of health, wellness, health span, longevity, all this sort of stuff. I started from my podcast, I talked to a lot of these people and I realized that everything I tell people, what does your head sit on? It's your body. You got to hit the body dialed in. You don't have that. You don't really have anything.

Michelle MacDonald (08:17):

So you were in the hospital, you were 49, so I guess you got out when you were 50 or so. And that's a time of our life where age can really set in fast. If you're not doing all the things and if you're hospitalized, you're probably not doing all the things. We've all heard about hospital food. I don't know if they had a gym there. Probably not. It was a really fancy private gym,

David Stewart (08:42):

Michelle, I need to level set here with the drugs I was on. And it was walking across the room was like

Michelle MacDonald (08:51):

Tough.

David Stewart (08:52):

Wow, that's great. I need to rest.

Michelle MacDonald (08:54):

So if anything, you had an accelerated aging experience right

David Stewart (09:00):

At

Michelle MacDonald (09:01):

50. That's right. And then of course there's all the cultural, I don't know about you, but when I turned 50, I was like, I had all these preconceived ideas of what the fifties would be. And of course the close, I got to the fifties, I thought, well maybe they're not going to be true. But when you have a crisis like that and you rapidly accelerate the aging process, which would be like sarcopenia, you must have lost muscle and your metabolic rate slows down. And when you're ill and injured, we all know there's a depressive aspect to that too. So your thoughts of optimism and the future and long-term plans can take a hit. I don't know, but I'm just speculating. So here you are in your fifties, you know that your lifestyle, you can't go back to what it was and your health has changed. What was that process like and how did you shift before ageist? Right? What happened there? Because I'm sure that's one of the reasons why I would think you ended up going for ageist, creating it.

David Stewart (10:03):

Well, yeah, it was part of it. I think as I said, it was educational and you start to learn a little bit more every day about what to eat, about how to exercise. These things are, I mean, at least for me, it was really, I needed to learn a lot and it took a long time. And it's like ongoing still. Every day I learn more stuff. And what we're learning here is what are the best practices for most people? And then what works for you? What does work for the individual? So there's all sorts of people out there that'll tell you you need to eat. Sometimes people will say, you need to stop eating. I mean like Brian Johnson, you need to stop eating 12 hours before you go to bed. Brian, no, that just does not work for me. I need to have some kind of protein in my stomach or I'm going to wake up my cortisol spike that I can't go to sleep. So it's this sort of endless amount of ferreting out the information, curating that information, being an explorer for yourself, essentially going out there, explore, test, and learn. And just because you heard somebody like me on a podcast or somebody else say, you need to do X during the full moon, okay, whatever, try it. If that works for you, that's great, but if it doesn't, let it go. Try something else.

Michelle MacDonald (11:30):

So was this before ageist? You're getting yourself better. You're exploring, you're reading, you're going down that rabbit hole of reading about the stuff. And when did the realize, when I go on to ages, I mean there's so much great information there, it's incredible. But it also seems to have very much a right. It seems to be you are the space that companies can come to to get their act together when it comes to marketing, the Gen X people, we were invisible and now all of a sudden it's like we're hot, right? Okay, these guys are hot. How do we market to them? We can't be selling them. These young models and whatnot and fifties are no longer gray haired canes, 50 year olds or 60 year olds. We're doing stuff still. We're thriving.

David Stewart (12:25):

Well, yeah, I mean that's what we do is people often come to me, there's like, oh, ageist, you must be against something. And I'm not really, I mean, I think one of the things we learned from the sixties is the harder you push against something, the harder that thing pushes back. So we don't do that. I mean very, very rarely will we actually talk about ageism or that stuff. What we do is we just put on the menu, we say, okay, here's this person, this is their age. This is what they're doing. This is how they did it. If you want that, okay, it's on the menu. Here's some interesting food for you. Here's what we're learning about strength training. Here's what we're learning about VO two max. You can do this if you want to. And people say to me, they're like, oh wow, that's hard.

(13:11):

And I said, yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't say it was easy, but don't tell me it's impossible. And I think this is something that you and I really align on. This idea of hard is not impossible. They're different. So changing your life, even if you're coming from some level of low activity or you're sort of scared about going into the gym, this is hard. It's new, but it's not impossible. I'm not as strong as you and your mom, but I do okay from, I do much better than most of the very young people in the gym. So you can do this, you can build strength, you can build muscle, you can build agility, you can build video two max. You can learn mandarin if you want to, whatever. But I'm not saying it's easy, but you have to. It's this consistency of just staying with it every day. You get a little better, a little better. And then what happens, Michelle, is we teach ourselves. So it's one thing for me or you to tell somebody, you can do this. It's a whole other thing. When that person does it and they say to themselves, they have evidence to themselves, I did that. That's amazing. What else do I think I can't do that I can do?

Michelle MacDonald (14:27):

Yeah, you're such a champion that aging is an opportunity and shifting that dialogue that it's not over. It's like, no, it's another phase. And we've got to rethink and reboot our attitude. And I also like how you mentioned earlier that we do hard things when we're young. When you're 50, when you're 60, you're still the same person. We've got to stop blocking ourselves that we can't do the hard things.

David Stewart (14:55):

We've been brainwashed in this idea of comfort, constantly seeking comfort. Alright, I can tell you where total comfort lives. It leads to total decay. So you want to be comfortable. You get to Lazyboy chair, you got your Netflix, you got your box of donuts, okay, comfort. Great. You do that for six months and you're dead. Okay,

Michelle MacDonald (15:13):

Yeah. Choose your hard, right? We always go back, choose your hard, right this hard,

David Stewart (15:16):

Choose your hard. And it's what you said. We forget this. We were 18, 20, 22 years old. Everything was hard. And now we're like, oh, I need to take my comfort. Well, but we need to continually challenge ourselves as human beings. We are built to do hard things. And it doesn't mean we want to overdo because especially in terms of physical training, I mean, what I do is I look for what is the minimum stimulus that's going to cause the adaptation, which doesn't mean destroy David so he can't move. No, we just want to do that. And I think that's with most things. So pick that hard and you can do it.

Michelle MacDonald (16:06):

And then there's also this idea of being purpose-driven. And again, when we're younger, we can think, oh, I've got to find my purpose. I've got to have value driven work and all that. But then when we're older, we're thinking retirement, retirement. But instead, if we again choose to view age as an opportunity, the luxury of being able to be in a culture where we can age and we can age really well, if we see that as an opportunity to even look again at our perspective on our lives and make maybe different choices, okay, now where do I want to go with my life? Maybe it's changing your career or contributing back to society significantly. It can start in your fifties, in your sixties. It can start in your seventies.

David Stewart (16:55):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean when you say aging is a privilege, well yeah, you're not dead. Very blunt. I love it. You're not dead. And I think about the people that I went to high school with, 15% of them are probably not alive, and 20 or 30% of them couldn't do anywhere. They would just, they're just not mobile. They just can't do these things. So we show up not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. And I think oftentimes, I hear this from women that as they get older they say, well, I'm invisible. You're not invisible. As human beings, we are wired to see other people. And we have, I mean, I feel like at least to myself, I have a personal responsibility to really become the best version of myself. So other people can see that, and that's possible. And I think it's important to remember, bring who you are today to the table. That's who we're talking about, the best version of yourself today, which is not like my 20-year-old self. I could run. I can't run like that anymore. It just isn't going to happen. But that's okay. I'm bringing who I am today. I have to adapt somewhat because of where I'm at. I got some parts of me that don't work so well anymore, but that's okay. We work with that and we bring that best versions of ourselves to what we can do today.

Michelle MacDonald (18:25):

What about this idea of reinvention as we get older? The Madonna experience? Yeah, I think it's powerful because it's something that we pelletize a lot at the Wonder Woman. We don't just do physical transformations, but we want to help you radically shift that whole inner narrative so you can choose exactly how you want to write the next chapter.

David Stewart (18:50):

We've done a little bit of research on this a little bit. So what we found was that there's different on this, and I sort of hate to generalize,

Michelle MacDonald (19:03):

But you're going to do it anyways.

David Stewart (19:04):

I'm going to do it anyway because easier

Michelle MacDonald (19:07):

We get it

David Stewart (19:07):

These sort of periods of time, your twenties or so, you're trying to figure out who you are, put yourself out of the world, where do I fit in? And then you thirties, maybe your early forties, maybe you got kids, maybe you got a mortgage, maybe you got a business. And it's sort of head down on those railroad tracks going forward. And there's oftentimes this sort of parental thing back there like aligning with parental values or in opposition to, so you're either sort of reactive to that stuff or you're just head down, not really paying attention to stuff. But what starts to happen is people start to get this vision and it's like a mountain in the night. You get a feeling you can't see it, but there's something out there. And so we often see people late forties, early fifties, they start making these moves.

(20:00):

They don't know why. They haven't quite connected the dots yet, but by the time they're maybe mid fifties or so, they start looking back and they're like, oh, seven years ago I did that thing. I wonder why I did that. It's because you're beginning to manifest this thing that you thought was better for you. And not everybody changes track. Some people are like, I love what I do. I'm going to double down on this thing. This is the most amazing thing ever. Or I think I want to parallel track here. I need to set up some kind of an off-ramp to get over here to do this. But they start doing it unconsciously before they start moving into it consciously.

Michelle MacDonald (20:37):

Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated. My little mind is whirling on some of the decisions I've been making recently. Honestly, I think more of like, I got to get this done. I got to do it. I got to focus. That's what I think.

David Stewart (20:50):

Well, yeah. So I think I'll give you an example. One of the very first people we profiled at ages, so this was about 10 years ago, was this woman Sophia. And Sophia at that point I think was, she was 58, 59, and in her early fifties, she was the head of the architecture school at Yale. Now this is not a job that you leave. This is awesome. But she starts doing stuff. She buys some property in Spain, and then she starts hanging out there. Then she builds a house, and then she starts studying Spanish. Now, none of this is sort of making sense until I think at 56 she left Yale, she left the head of a architecture school and she became an architect in Spain. And when I was speaking to her, she was like, in fact, I think she started studying Spanish in her late forties.

(21:48):

She wasn't quite sure why. She's like, I'm going to study some Spanish. So these things started lining up and then suddenly she's at sort of the far end of this journey and she's like, she can look back and say, oh, I did that. I interviewed another gentleman, Joe was his name, and Joe was a little older and he was an attorney. And he realized in his mid fifties that he just loved being an attorney. So he was an attorney in the hospitality business and he just loved the whole scene. He got to hang out in restaurants and hotels, and he got to talk to these people and do this stuff. And he just thought this was playpen for him. He just thought it was great. But he sort of came to that realization. Now, I'm not saying this happens to everyone. I think that you need a certain amount of self-awareness. You can't really be in a crisis when this is going on. You need to be able to sort of sense who you are, how do you fit in with things to be in that non-reactive state? Because if you're reactive, you're going to be moving in opposition to something rather than an alignment with where you are, which is a different thing.

Michelle MacDonald (22:57):

Yeah, I love that. And this is in aligned with the idea of reinventing yourself or continuing to double down.

David Stewart (23:05):

It can be total reinvention. I've seen this hundreds of times. I've also seen flavors of this. So it can be somebody going from corporate job to something completely different, or it can be just a step slightly to the side. So they're taking the skills who they are in this one position, and maybe it wasn't quite right, and they just move it a little bit to the right and they're like, oh, that's a good fit. Oh yeah, that's better for me. So I don't think you have to do radical transformation. You can. I've seen it all the way to I'm perfect just the way I am. I love this thing that I'm doing.

Michelle MacDonald (23:47):

So

David Stewart (23:48):

Spectrum,

Michelle MacDonald (23:48):

Yeah, I think for me, as somebody who coaches woman, the real radical transformation comes with gaining of self-awareness or deep diving into it and really owning, radically owning the why. You're doing certain things, shifting things if you want to, but really truly owning your perspective. And it's so empowering and it changes everything. You could be doing the same thing, but because your perspective and attitude of change, it's different. It feels different, looks different, tastes different, smell, and it feels different. And it oftentimes has different outcomes too.

David Stewart (24:31):

I think it's scary to declare out to the world, this is who I am for real. This is who I am, this is what I believe in. This is where I'm going, is a very scary thing to do. But

Michelle MacDonald (24:47):

I think this idea just popped into my head. I followed a couple of gals on Instagram that have these great, they're Gen Xers and they have these really great accounts and they bring us down memory land, how we grew up in the experiences that we had. But I do feel that with the information era, the digital age that we're in, being Gen Xers, which is a very interesting all Gen Xers, I think we think that we're the coolest generation. We've really straddled some of maybe the hardships or the rawness of how socialization and parenting used to be. We've been through this huge digital transformation where we didn't start with this stuff. My first TV I think was a black and white TV with the big antennas and the knobs. And now, well, we know where we are now, and yet we are also immersed as we're going through this seminal period of time through our fifties and sixties where we're inundated with podcasts information. But coming again with that Gen X backbone, it's really interesting to be part of this generation and at this age, the fifties and sixties, there's so much I agree with you wholeheartedly. There's so much opportunity to reinvent everything, not just ourselves and our own narrative, but cultural narratives, especially around aging.

David Stewart (26:10):

Remember, do you ever watch Mad Men?

Michelle MacDonald (26:13):

No.

David Stewart (26:13):

So television series a few years ago, and it was about advertising and the Don Draper character at one point, somebody asks him something about his identity. He's working in this thing and he's like, he looks at them straight face and he says, this is America. You just make up who you want to be. I love that.

Michelle MacDonald (26:35):

I love that. It is true, especially these days, right?

David Stewart (26:38):

It's true. Yeah.

Michelle MacDonald (26:41):

For somebody, I want to end this first episode

(26:44):

With a simple strategy, your top recommendation. Because I mean, you really rock this space. It's incredible to see what you're doing. Thank you. The platform you created are incredibly successful and you really make it cool to be in your fifties and in your sixties. I love it. And you certainly don't shirk away from the messaging that like, yes, it's hard work, but it's worth it. And you've done it and you've interviewed so many people that are living examples of that. What's an advice for somebody who they're interested, they're intrigued by the messaging, but they're feeling stuck. How do they get started? How do they change things?

David Stewart (27:22):

Move. Yeah. Some people can think themselves into right acting. I'm not one of them. I need to act myself into right? Thinking. I need to educate myself. So I need to take a step, I need to do something. I need to do something physical. And that might be just like open the door. It might be if I'm feeling lonely, I get an elevator and I do this all the time. I say, love your shoes. Tell me about the shoes. Those are great. Whatever they are, people are.

Michelle MacDonald (27:53):

That's when your photography world,

David Stewart (27:56):

Well, everybody wants to be seen. They want to be heard. They want a discussion. And I live in a building where there's a lot of English as a second language, people from China who are very shy about speaking. And when I acknowledge 'em and I say, oh, I love that, that's great. Oh my God, they light up. They're like, oh, you saw me. Oh, you're talking to me. Oh, this is great. So little things like that, love it. These little actions, and I'm not a fan of Shel Sandberg, but lean in. You've got to go forward. Lean in. The scary thing is probably where you want to go. If the gym is scary, you need to learn about the gym. If talking to other people is scary, nice shoes, whatever it is you act thinking is only going to get you. You can really get tied up in your head, a lot of navel gazing there. Action.

Michelle MacDonald (28:49):

So act move, take care of your physicality, defy social norms, like continue to meet people, continue to be engaged.

David Stewart (28:58):

Do

Michelle MacDonald (28:58):

The hard things. I love it.

(29:01):

So let's wrap up the first episode here. And guys, in between these two episodes, again, I got to send you over to ais.com, sign up for their newsletter. They've got a ton. There's a podcast there as well. So newsletter, podcasts, a ton of interviews, a lot of great people that they spotlight. And you can go ahead and follow these people, whether it's on their websites or on their social media platforms. And it's this incredible world that David has curated for us. And he's got a ton, also a ton of great speeches he's done, collected there for you too. It's really great. It's really interesting stuff that will galvanize you that indeed there's this whole world waiting for you. If you're in that 50 sixties and above space, that is cool to be older. There's a lot of exciting things happening, and all we need to do is jump head over there and also to super age as well, get on their mindset newsletter and we'll see you guys in the next episode. David, thank you so much for joining. And guys, take care. We'll see you in the next episode.

(30:19):

David Stewart brings such a rare clarity to the aging conversation. It's probably because he's been a champion of the age movement for so long. I really appreciate his honesty around reinvention. His reminder that action often comes before mindset. Here are my top takeaways from today's episode. Number one, movement builds mindset. So we often think of thoughts create reality, but he's going to suggest that actually moving, acting, that's going to drive changes to how you're framing your situation. So when you're stuck, don't wait to feel ready, just go, just move. Go for the walk. Lift something, talk to someone. Two, your body shapes your beliefs, right? So if you're feeling like rundown and slow, your mind's not working the way you want it to. You've got to understand that how you feel physically is going to shape your reality. So strength, things like the O2 max, your recovery.

(31:14):

These are no longer luxuries. You've got to train for these things. They're really going to define your future. If you want to age well, you've got to nail these things. And then three, reinvention is totally normal. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of people, I like to say, are living out the realities based on decisions that made when they were in their teens. And you don't have to do that. It's okay to change, but the change doesn't always have to be this huge, dramatic overhaul. And David points that out. Oftentimes, it's just something quiet, a necessary pivot to get back into alignment. Sometimes it's huge. It's a career change, but it's not always. It's just be more intentional, be more purposeful with how you're approaching the world. Thanks for listening to Stronger By Design Guides. We are in the top 1%. I can't believe how well the podcast is doing.

(31:59):

I really appreciate all the support, all the love, the reviews that are coming in, the spikes to listeners and download. So keep doing what you're doing. If you're new to the podcast, please, if you like this episode, please leave us a review and share it on your social, share it with your friends. It really helps more people find the show. And if you're ready to take the next step, head on over to the Wonder woman.com. Learn more about our coaching our community, or go and visit my website, Michelle McDonald official.com and click shop to grab my ebook, empowered Strength. See you on the next episode.