David Stewart: Looking Towards Success And Beyond Age

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

25.08.21

Both success and challenges will come to you regardless if you are a young student or a businessman on the verge of retirement. In that case, there’s no excuse for one not to look beyond age and embrace a learner’s mindset. Business consultant David Stewart joins John Livesay to share his inspiring journey of working with different companies for improvement and growth. He talks about his most interesting stories and takeaways when helping others build their teams, create a diverse community, and embrace stress as a springboard toward the next level. David also explains how his engineering education and career as a professional photographer allowed him to connect well with people in a precise way. By understanding others no matter their generation, he eventually found himself starting the publication Ageist.

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Listen to the podcast here

David Stewart: Looking Towards Success And Beyond Age

David Stewart is our guest. He is all about breaking down boundaries. After a certain age, a lot of people think, “I’m too old to learn something new.” He said, “Hard is not impossible,” and his whole philosophy is, “I want a bigger box.” Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is David Stewart, who is the Founder and face of AGEIST. He is a passionate champion of the modern 50-plus lifestyle and the leading authority on the mindset and aspirations that drive this influential demographic. As the go-to reference on people in our age group, he frequently shares his expertise and insights with major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, CNN and more. He has consulted for a wide range of Fortune 500 brands and businesses. He was the keynote speaker at The Global Wellness Summit in Singapore in October 2019. Before he launched AGEIST, David was an award-winning photographer specializing in portraits of people that combined his engineer’s precision with a refined design and visual aesthetic. David, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here, John.

There is so much there. I want to ask you questions about how did you come up with the name of this online publication and how did you get into photography. I’m going to let you take us back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood when you got your first camera. You can start the story wherever you want, but I’m always looking for how a passion that became a profession happened, as well as maybe some lessons that your parents passed on to you that have influenced your story.

The thread that goes through my life story is I want a bigger box essentially. The box was always too small. When I was a kid, my grandfather was into photography and I was given a camera, those polaroid Swinger cameras. Before that had a Brownie camera. I was young like five or something. My entire life, I love cameras and photography. I grew up in this small town in upstate New York, a lovely, idyllic place, and I never fit in. I felt like a one of one. I felt like I was from Mars or something. My parents love them to death, but my dad would say like, “You are not very smart essentially.” I was super curious. I was always into discovery. It often involved disassembling things that often he did not want to be disassembled. I was labeled as being not very smart.

My mom is all about being average. Mom loves average because she came out of depression. It was all about to keep it even, be like the neighbors, don’t stand out. A few years ago, John, I was going through some stuff and I saw standardized tests of mine when I was a kid. They are all like 99 percentile. If you had a kid like that now, you would do something different than what has handled me. In high school, I learned to be quiet because I realized anything I said, I was going to be ridiculed and teased for the kind of clothes I wore, the music I listened to. It’s this farm town in upstate New York. They are nice people but I was out of the box.

What happens is I don’t do that. I do great on standardized tests but in high school, my grades are not that good because I shut down. Anytime I opened my mouth and share anything, I’m going to get beat up so I don’t do that. The guidance counselor said to me, “We think you should go to technical school. Go to a two-year college because we don’t think you can handle it.“ I was like, “Let me show you.” I did the hardest thing I can. I went to engineering school for two years. I was on the Dean’s List. Going to engineering school, for anyone who doesn’t know, it’s like joining the Marines. It’s still the hardest thing I have ever done. It’s so demanding. They are not like the PC kind. They are always yelling at you like, “Sir, you should re-evaluate your career alternatives because this is not for you.” It was intense but after a couple of years, I realized the box was too small. I didn’t want to be an engineer because it was too focused. I wanted to learn more. I get a degree in Political Science from Boston University. Because I had a background in Engineering, which was full-on intense. Liberal arts school was nothing.

[bctt tweet=”I want a bigger box.” username=”John_Livesay”]

At the same time, I got a job. I worked at Fiorucci. At night, I went to photography school. I started studying photography. When I was 22, I graduated from school. I have a little temp job. As only a 22-year-old can do, I declared myself a photographer. I say it, therefore, I am. It worked out. My first ad in Vogue was at 24 and then by 26, I was living in Paris. I was working for the magazines. I moved back to New York, which was hard. All these other places you have lived, but if it’s New York, you have to start again. I was doing that thing and then I started doing advertising. I was doing pretty well. Then I moved back to Paris when I was about 40. I was commuting to Paris, New York, LA, Tokyo doing a lot of advertising, then I got sick.

What happened was when I was 49, I developed this weird auto-immune thing. I spent the better part of a year in a hospital as a science experiment. That caused some re-evaluation of the lifestyle I was living. There were consequences to that. I dialed that back a lot. I moved to Los Angeles and kept doing advertising. The way it works in advertising photography, your job is to carry out a vision that someone has created for you. I would go in and say, “This is great. We can do the light. We could do casting like this. This is the vibe but are we targeting the right people here? Is this the right message that we want to put out?” They would look at me and they would say, “You are thinking too much.”

It would be like asking the model in a fashion shoot if she likes the clothes. It’s like, “That is not your job. Stay in your lane.”

It was like, “You are here to take the picture.” I needed a bigger box so I started AGEIST when I was 56. AGEIST began as everything in my life begins, as a curiosity. It was an investigation. I thought people like you and I were living in this vital, vivid, forward-leaning way. Everything I see about myself and my age cohort out in the media is this medicalized and infantilized like, “Grab your bag of meds. You are not going to make it out the door.” I didn’t know anybody like that.

All the pharma and the ARP and I thought, “This is bananas. I’m not scared. I feel strong. What all is this about?” We did a lot of investigation on that and then we started publishing this little newsletter to 50 of our friends, with the grand global ambition of them remaining our friends. We started this thing and what we are is a branding consultancy with a media arm. The media arm is what everybody sees. We love our community. We love our social. We publish like demons. We have a super high bar with who we profile, the visuals and how it looks. We keep it smart and challenging. Because we have the social and this publishing, we are a consultancy. We are best in class because we have a minute-to-minute interaction with this cohort that everybody wants to know about and they are not very good at speaking.

In the consultancy, we do some large research like quant analysis and qual stuff. We produce content for a big sneaker company and a big car company. We help them with their messaging. We help them to understand our people and then connect the dots to whatever their brand values are. Because we are of the age that we are and a lot of their creatives are awesome people, they are so smart and clever, but they can’t time travel twenty years into the future. It’s impossible and asking them to do it is unfair.

Beyond Age: It would take 10 years to really learn how to use a camera and learn the technology and another 10 years to develop a point of view.

When we were twenty and somebody said they were 40, I can’t even fathom what that is. Let alone 60. I don’t know what your psychographics are in any way, shape or form, and that 60 now is different than it was even many years ago. What you are doing is allowing brands to realize that there is a lot of disposable income in 50-plus people. If they don’t see themselves in the stories that are being created by the brands, they tune out, whether it’s a luxury car, a cruise ship line or whatever else you might be trying to sell. You bridge that gap between what today’s affluent, healthy, 50-plus people are doing and figure out a way for brands to connect with them emotionally where they are. The people who are working for those brands are not that age for the most part.

It’s almost impossible for them to get inside that person’s head. Focus groups aren’t going to do it. Because you’re doing AGEIST, you are hearing firsthand what people’s motivations are, challenges, what lights them up now, why they want to make a difference, whatever is going on. That is unprecedented in a lot of ways because if the old way of doing it is to get a corporate job, stay there for 30-plus years, get the gold watch, retire and then maybe golf and travel. That is about as detailed as it ever got. Nobody had a model of people staying relevant. Every once in a while, you’ll read about David Gary is 92 and too old to retire. There are a few outliers like you were as a child, the Picassos of the world. I feel that people who are creative are the ones that stay curious and still produce content that keeps them young, relevant and vibrant.

It’s the people who, “If I’m not doing this, if I’m an accountant or whatever it is, and that stops, I don’t know who I am anymore,” where they lose a sense of self. Yet you are able to say there is a whole group of people that are creative, staying creative and connecting all those dots. You mentioned being young in your twenties and breaking into all these competitive industries, advertising, Paris. What was it you had? Was it your tech skills as an engineer that made you be able to shoot? Back in those days, because I remember taking a photojournalism class, it was still in the dark light room with a lab. Nobody was shooting in raw back then. There was no digital and yet you always need some technical expertise for the right lighting. Do you think you had an eye that other people didn’t, that your pictures popped? It’s like a model, you show your portfolio and you either get the gig or you don’t. You are competing against the Bruce Webers of the world and Michael Croft. There are a lot of well-known fashion photographers. What do you think it is that you brought to the table at such a young age that made people give you a shot?

Back then, it was transparency films. It wasn’t even negative films. The table stake is you have to be able to come out of whatever the assignment is with something usable. That required a certain level of technical expertise. As you said, nobody was shooting in raw. There wasn’t even an autofocus camera. The exposure, the color and all of that stuff, you have to be able to do that. There was a certain moat around that, which was good for us back then, which evaporated with digital. That was the beginning. I’m pretty good with that stuff like chemistry, optical camera stuff. I was able to have some points of view. It’s very difficult to have a developed point of view at 24.

Certain photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Weber, those people are known for a look. You probably didn’t have a look developed, but you were able to capture ads. You are working under pressure because if the things are out of film or something is out of focus, it’s a lot of do-overs.

Because of my engineering background, I have a good understanding of light refraction, light reflection, how things happen on people’s skin, how shadows fall, what kind of light. Those were easy for me. It was layered on top of that point of view. Back then we used to say, “It would take ten years to learn how to use a camera and learn the technology and another ten years to develop a point of view.” There weren’t any top-level photographers under 40 back then because the technical stuff took a while to get good at that. Maybe they thought I was cute or something. I got to say in that world, it counts.

[bctt tweet=”Keep learning at every age.” username=”John_Livesay”]

If you are an architect, an interior designer, a photographer, a stylist, you have to look like you stepped out of the pages of the magazine. Even as a salesperson selling advertising for Condé Nast, there was a certain level of expectation that your appearance would match the brand in some way. The line when I was selling advertising for W was “Everybody puts on clothes, but not everybody gets dressed. The people who read W get dressed.” Even if it’s the same look every day, whether it’s the black sweater of Steve Jobs, the hoodie with the startups, it’s an intentional statement. That people realize your talents alone is not enough. This is true in everything. People want to work with people that they like, trust, get along with, aren’t divas and dependable.

All of that at a young age is sometimes difficult, but if you are hungry enough, then you stand up. Here is where I think your story has an interesting twist. Many people would think, “I’ve made it, I’m in Paris and I’m this. Now I moved to New York and I got to start over? Forget it.” Ego would kick in so much. Yet you get in with the ultimate in-crowd that Andy Warhol interview days. That is the ultimate pinnacle of creativity. I have taken a tour of the museum in Pittsburgh. It’s so prolific like a Picasso of creativity and everybody wanting to be in that Studio-54 vibe. Even people who were born way after that still want to hear about what is that lifelike. You from a small town were able to figure out a way to get behind that line of not the red curtain, but they have those things where you can’t get past the VIP ropes. They opened the rope for you and said, ”You are one of us.”

As you said, I was from this little farm town. I had a very high level of naivete. Going into interviews and meeting these people was like, “Okay, whatever.” It’s like, “You there with funny white hair.” “Okay, what do you want me to do?” I remember I had a meeting with the art director of French Vogue and we were talking. I have no idea what the consequences of that could be. He was like, “I just liked him. He was a cool guy.” We were talking about pictures, whatever.

You are comfortable in your own skin. I would say that would be the big takeaway because a lot of people, especially when the stakes get high, they get uncomfortable. They get all in their head worrying about if they are likable or enough. I don’t think you’ve had any of that going on. You weren’t attached to the outcomes is what I’m hearing.

Pretty much. These people were highly sophisticated. They were at the pinnacle of defining style and fashion at that point. I’m a kid from a farm town in upstate New York. There is so much that I don’t know. People would set up these meetings with me, “We need to meet this person.” I would come in as my normal bouncy self and be like, “How are you? Let’s do this thing. This will be fun.” There was no filter. I don’t care.

You were speaking at The Global Wellness Summit. That topic is very important. You had your own health challenges but people just assume that as we get older, it’s like a car, you got to replace some parts. It’s a lot of maintenance and things you took for granted that you now can’t. What was your talk about? What was your insight?

Beyond Age: Through a diverse ecosystem of different ideas and points of view, a more cultural breakdown is possible.

A lot of my appeal on stage is my physicality. I’m a spunky guy. I’m 62. I come in bouncing up on stage and it’s the same naivete. It’s like, “How’s everybody?” It’s 700 C-level people and government officials and stuff there. I’ll start talking and I say, “I’m 62.” The whole crowd is like, “You are 62? How did that happen?” I tell them, “This is how you do this.” I think that your analogy of the car is correct. There is more that we have to do to maintain ourselves. We have to be more conscious and direct. I don’t eat anything like I did when I was 25. I don’t exercise that way. That doesn’t mean that everything comes to a crashing halt at 50. Do you see the Twyla Tharp thing on PBS? Twyla is 82. She is totally, single-minded, creatively obsessed. This is what someone 82 can look like and do if they take care of themselves all the time.

Dancers constantly moving and keeping everything well-oiled. It completely gives you the car analogy there. Who has been some of your favorites that you have photographed? Do you have a story or two of some people that you photographed that were like, “That was an incredible shoot or I’m so proud of that picture?”

I used to do a lot of work for the New York Times magazine. They would hire me to do portraits. I love doing portraits because I find portraits to have much greater longevity than fashion. Fashion is, to an extent, disposable of the moment.

Bill Cunningham was in the street now, and then the next he will be somewhere else.

I love doing fashion because of the team. It’s super creative and collaborative. Doing that in Paris is like I will probably never be around that tight group of super-focused creative people again. Portraits, you have to quickly understand, John, that the whole mythology in the media that this is a bad, good, great, less good person is not the case. That bad people aren’t that bad. The good people are not that good. A lot of this is a story that is told out there to sell. Partially, in the media business, we do that but I get that.

One of my more memorable stories is with Mr. Mike Tyson. This starts when I’m in Northern California. I’m photographing David Blaine who became my friend. He is an interesting guy. I’m photographing him for the New York Times. My phone rings and it’s The Times. They said, “Can you go to Maui next week to photograph Mike Tyson?” I was like, “Didn’t he eat Evander Holyfield’s ear? Didn’t he just get out of prison?” I was like, “Can’t you give me some nice pretty movie star or something. Why do you always give me the psychopaths?” I talked to Blaine. I said, “Blaine, this thing is going on.” He’s like, “Don’t worry about it. Mike’s cool.”

[bctt tweet=”There’s more that we have to do to maintain ourselves. We have to be more conscious and more directive.” username=”John_Livesay”]

We have this conversation about Mike. He is friends with Michael Jackson and all these funny people. I said, “I will do it.” We go there. It’s Mike’s training. Before the training, he has an interview with FOX Sports. FOX being FOX, what they do is they send a female sportscaster and everybody had been warned. I’m not the interview media. I’m just the photographer so I’m watching all this. She gets right up in his face and she says, “The first question, why do you hate women?” He’s like, “Huh?” It doesn’t stop. She’s inches away from him. “Why did you rape that woman? Why do you hate women?” Mike handles this for few minutes then he snaps.

Mike has two very large, strong guys who pick him up by the arms and hold him because he would have killed her like she would have been dead. Mike is out of his mind. The next two days, I have watched this and I’m like, “Please, God help me.” I’m in my hotel room and you wait until you are summoned to the secret training facility. I get the call and I go to this secret training facility in the front lobby of this outdoor thing. It was filled with very large bleeding men in a state of semi-consciousness. There are about a dozen of them moaning and blood coming out. I look at a conference room where Mike has set up a ring and they’ve got a DJ in there. I watched Mike hit this huge guy with an uppercut so strong, it picks him up and shoots him across the ring, then the guy is out.

Mike continues to train and throws up in the ring. The trainer comes out and says, “Mike’s in a bad mood. I’ve never seen him do this.” I’m thinking, “Please.” Mike comes out. He got a phalanx of guys behind. Mike’s not that big like 5’10. He has a fairly high voice. He comes up to me so I go up. I showed him a Polaroid of what we’re doing. I said, “Mike, we’re doing cover for New York Times magazine. I’m here to photograph you. He’s like, “I got to get a haircut. Come on down to my condo.” I’m thinking, “Okay, let’s do that.” We go down and I met him in his condo. Mike still got his trunks on. Now it’s a big old film camera that I’ve got. I’m an arm’s length away from Mike. He starts running this line of shit on me. He starts with this like, “I’m so bad. I would eat babies. I’m like horrible. You can’t believe the horrible things that go on in my mind.”

This is going on for a while. I realized I have to do something. I need to radically change the dynamic here or I’m not going to get the picture I need. I remember David Blaine so I had this moment. I reached out and I slapped Mike Tyson and I say, “Mike, you aren’t so bad.” I know there are two outcomes here. I will be dead. Mike would kill me. I slapped him right across the arm. I whack him and I say, “You aren’t so bad, Mike.” He looks at me and smiles. He’s like, “You’re okay.” What he was doing was like, “I’m going to mess with the honky journalists.” We got along great and we had this wonderful conversation. Mike is a very unusual human being but I like him. It was memorable.

It also shows how much more is there to take a great portrait than just pushing a click on a camera. There is rapport, finding the right moment, shifting the tone if you have an image of what you want in your head, building trust, all of the things that good entrepreneurs have to do to build their business.

It’s very similar. You need a point of view and the point of view needs to be yours. It needs to be distinctive. This is something that I tell all the companies I work with. I say, “When I’m in your world, I cannot be confused. I’m in anyone else’s world. It needs to be exclusively your world.” If I’m in Nike world, if I drive under their site or some of their stuff, I know exactly where I am. For so many people, that’s hard for them, especially the founders and the CEOs. You want to attract those super fans. You want them to love you more and then they will attract other people.

Beyond Age: Let your good stresses help you adapt and grow.

The other thing that I hear so often around age is all companies aren’t interested in reaching to them, whether it’s through advertising or even having them work there. Yet, there is this growing awareness for the need for diversity, which to me includes people of different ages. Are you seeing people starting to open that up and broadening the definition of what diversity is beyond gender and color to include age or no?

It’s a very loaded difficult thing to do. Let’s talk workforce versus advertising marketing because they are different things. The thing about age is we all age. If we feel negative about older people. What we are doing is we’re feeling negative about ourselves in the future.

We are looking at our own mortality. We don’t want to look at that.

You’re tied up with reproduction and illness, death. That is part of it. We talk to HR people about, where’s the fail here? We interviewed some HR people for big companies. We said, “Listen, talk to me about this. What’s going on? Are you trying to hire older people? Do you want age diversity?” They are like, “Yes because we realized if you have a bunch of twenty-year-olds in a room, they can drive the car fast, but it’s going to end up in the ditch. We need this diverse ecosystem of different ideas and points of view.” What happens is the breakdown is cultural. Generally, the younger people will be the boss. The older person is coming in probably 50, 60, and maybe their boss is 35 or 40. It’s bridging that cultural gap where there’s relatability. It’s something that I tell people who are out there looking for jobs. I say that you need to be in touch with popular culture because that’s how people communicate.

I was calling on Lexus’s ad agency. There were a lot of young girls, 20s, 30s in the media department. I would purposely watch The Bachelor because when I took them to lunch, I could have a conversation about, “Can you believe that?” It’s the willingness to speak that language to be in that currency. Now, it’s video games and Fortnite. It’s an ongoing thing. You have to decide whether you want to embrace it or not. The analogy I had from a friend was some actors made it from silence to talkies and some didn’t. It’s a choice we always face as we embrace new technology and conversations. If you don’t understand the difference between Bitcoin and blockchain, you may not be able to have a conversation with a lot of people. It’s an ongoing thing. I love that a lot. Is there any one myth that you think people have about people over 50 that you’ve been able to bust through your AGEIST publication?

There is a couple. The one is that people can’t learn. People can learn. There is a thing called neuroplasticity. It doesn’t go away. You can learn. I’d never use PowerPoint. I’d heard of it but I’d never seen it. I’d never written anything. All those Microsoft programs, Excel, Word, none of that, Google analytics, nothing. You just learn it. People can learn and I think this is on both sides of the age equation. The people our age have been, “No, I can’t learn that. The old dog, new tricks. I can’t do that.” That’s a cop-out. You can do that. It’s hard. The people on the other side are like, “They will never be able to learn.”

[bctt tweet=”Total comfort leads to total decay.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One of the ways to pop that bubble is exactly what you did. You immediately say, “I get what’s going on in the culture. These things are going on. Let’s have a conversation about The Bachelor or whatever.” They are like, “That is interesting. This guy’s cool.” That is one of the big things. What we do is we provide aspirational, inspirational and attainable role models where we say, “This is possible.” You may not want to live like us. That is okay. That’s fine. You can do whatever you want to do, but if you do want to, hear somebody and look at what they are doing. This is how they did it. It’s possible.

It breaks up the need. If there is no role model, then you have a belief possibly that it’s impossible. If someone has broken that mold, you say, “There is a precedent that’s been set that I can still do X at this age.” It opens up your own possibilities. Even if you don’t have to become Twyla Tharp, they can still say, “Maybe I can take a dance class, even if I have never danced” or whatever it is that keeps them moving. I love both of those so much. Any last thoughts or a favorite quote you want to leave us with?

Hard is not impossible. It’s just hard. The other side of that is total comfort leads to total decay. Adaptation requires stress and challenge. What I like to say is we looked at our parents and our grandparents. They got those La-Z-Boy chairs. They sat in front of the TV and ate donuts, look what happened. That didn’t turn out so well. As we get older, we get used to this idea of what we should be seeking as constant comfort. Stress has a bad name but stress is how we adapt. Learning is stressful. Meeting new people is stressful. Going to the gym is stressful. These are all good stresses that will help you adapt and you can.

The website is WeAreAGEIST.com. David, thanks for sharing your passion for life and all of your wonderful insights on how this demographic will continue to stay relevant and ways that everyone can not fear if they are not there yet.

It’s been so great to be here. Thank you.

Important Links

• WeAreAgeist.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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