E42 - ADHD Musing + guest Stephon Brown

Julie Legg chats with Stephon Brown (Los Angeles, USA), an author and self-described modern-day muse, to discuss his journey with ADHD. While school posed significant challenges, he discovered his love for improv, which became a powerful outlet for his creativity and quick-thinking mind. ADHD musing at it’s best!

Together they explore concepts like mental cartography and performative communication, The Barstool Theories, and the importance of recognizing and nurturing the strengths of ADHD individuals rather than forcing them into rigid systems.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Early ADHD Diagnosis: In the 1980s ADD was poorly understood, often leading to medication without holistic support. Rigid education systems can suppress joy and creativity in neurodivergent children. Teachers and mentors who see beyond standardized learning can make a profound difference in ADHD individuals’ success.
Careers & Brick Walls: Traditional career paths often aren’t designed for neurodivergent thinkers. Despite being intelligent and creative, rigid work environments that don’t accommodate ADHDers way of thinking can lead to forcing oneself into a mould that doesn’t fit. Stephon’s journey is a reminder that success doesn’t always follow a straight line, and sometimes, breaking through the wall means finding a door that was never on the blueprint.
Shame & Guilt in ADHD: Growing up in a time when ADHD was poorly understood, Stephon recalls how early treatment focused on “Ritalin and shame”, making him feel broken rather than supported. Over time, he realized that this shame wasn’t his burden to carry; it was the result of a system that didn’t know how to nurture different thinkers. By reframing his ADHD as a strength rather than a deficit, he was able to let go of guilt and embrace his uniqueness.

LINKS

TRANSCRIPT

JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52. Welcome to ADHDifference. In this episode I chat with author and modern-day muse Stephon Brown. He was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age and while he found school challenging, he also found his love of improv. We discuss mental cartography and also performative communication. Thank you so much for joining us today, Stephon.

STEPHON: Hello. [Hello, hello.] It’s great to meet you, Julie.

JULIE: Nice to meet you too. And we’ve got so much to talk about today, so as usual I’m just going to dive straight in with the questions and let it all unfold. So the first one is really, you were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD at a very young age. Yeah. And I’d like you to share if you can about how that diagnosis shaped your childhood experiences and particularly with regards to the education system?

STEPHON: Wow, so much there. Yeah I was… so I’m 40… I’m 46 now. I was born in ’78. I was diagnosed in the early ’80s and back then they didn’t have the H yet. It was literally just ADD, attention deficit disorder. And there were various facilities in… I grew up in New York State and they were like, you had to drive to certain facilities to get tested. And I remember, I believe I was five or six and I had to drive to Middletown New York, which is a couple of towns over. And I didn’t at the time, they didn’t tell me what was going on. That’s the fun part about you know, a lot of treatments at that time. They didn’t really think about treating the child or treating the person. They treated the symptoms. And so they didn’t tell me what was happening and they kind of took me to a bunch of testing and it was bunch of blocks, and like different things, and how does your mind work? They ran me through an IQ test and all these different things and they… that’s where they defined it. But of course, at that point they still didn’t… they had no idea really what it was. And the only treatment at that time was basically Ritalin and shame. And neither of which I use right now, don’t use anymore. Good. But they put me on Ritalin for… I want to say a year and I don’t remember it. My mother says I was a walking ghost. I was just kind of a… just a kind of you know, not there as it were which was really tricky as a child. My mother said that I was very happy. And she had a lot of depression and anxiety, just like I do, and when she was going through this rough time, as a child when I grew up as a baby, I would wake up with this joy and brilliance to my face that she loved. And she used my energy to get through her day and she said that stopped the second I went into school. And all of that joy left me [wow] as soon as the American education system tried to force me into a box. And I was one of those brilliant kids that was brilliant at one thing, or a few things, and then really horrible at others. I have a… I guess the version of this numerical dyslexia where numbers get jumbled in my head. As well, I have horrible handwriting because my brain moves faster than my hands, and so I struggled. And terrible eyesight as well. I’ve had laser surgery, so these are actually corrected. So I was the kid who couldn’t see, couldn’t sit straight, couldn’t stay still, and couldn’t do math. But everyone kept telling me I was special. And so I spent most of my time coming in and out of resource rooms for my entire career through education, through you know standard, high school, all that. I took tests that never that were like, were two grades above me and then one grade below me for different sections, because my mind just didn’t work normally. And there were a handful of educators and special people that really helped me get through. And they were the ones who you, looked beyond just the standardization and kind of found the real person underneath. And that’s honestly what I think the first step in dealing with anyone who’s neurodivergent, is getting past that and getting to who they are. Because the good chance… what I’ve discovered as a muse is when you run into a neurodivergent person, you don’t run into them. You run into the person they’ve created to deal with the world. And it’s your job to remind them it’s okay for you to be you. Let me see who the real you is and…

JULIE: It is wonderful that at your schooling age that there were people that could see you and could bring you out of that. And what a big shock for your mom too. This joyous boy just to turn. And I can see that you radiate a lot of energy… and not to have that in you know, in the household would have been a bit of a shock too, wow.

STEPHON: She was my champion for my proper education. And I didn’t realize till later it was because she saw the joyest boy that I was, and then she saw what the system did to me. Wow. And so she fought against it you know, for it was a mission of her life and it was great.

JULIE: Wow. And so tell me, after school… so you made it through… you made it through school.

STEPHON: I barely graduated high school. Our system in high school it was a credit system so you got half a credit for half a year of a school, of a class. Most of my friends were graduating with 23 or 22 credits because they were all in AP classes. They were all educated. Like the minimum to graduate was 17 credits. I graduated with 17.5. I literally had… I could have failed a whole another half class and still graduated. Because nothing interested me. I only was only good at what interested me and that, I didn’t know why. But that was it. It was like…

JULIE: What did interest you at school?

STEPHON: Storytelling. So everything that involves stories interests me, which is history, acting, literature, war… like war history, or like theater. I did theater and all this, all those things that activated the interesting parts of my mind that I knew I would use. But the things that didn’t? Like I couldn’t do Algebra. Like world politics didn’t interest me because it’s mostly lies, anyway. And like all these other things that you were forced to learn about that I knew… What I’ve learned later now is like neurodivergent people. I’ve heard they will forget things if they don’t find them interesting or think they will help them. It’s almost as if the brain is so full that you actually have to get rid of the things that you’re not interested in to allow for the good stuff to come in. Right. Because your brain doesn’t care about the situation. It just cares about you. So your brain’s activating on its own and it’s saying “This is the interesting stuff. I’m going to hold on to that,” about you know… Society teaches us that we have to listen to everybody and remember everything and that’s not actually how we’re made.

JULIE: So does your joy and interest in storytelling, did that lead on to your discovery of improv? [Yes.] Yeah, tell me about that.

STEPHON: I discovered my… so I saw improv for the first time at improv performance in middle school, which in the United States is seventh and eighth grade. So 7th, 8th, and 9th. So 9th grade I saw an improv group that was at the high school. And as soon as I saw them I knew that was what I had to do, because they didn’t do the traditional improv that a lot of people recognize now, they did dramatic improv where they… It was a club at school where a group of students would learn improv techniques and then we would go do performances for other students in our school based upon like social issues that they were going through. So we would do scenes about underage drinking, scenes about abuse, scenes about teenage suicide, scenes about all these things and we would… So we would do a scene in a character in front of a group of students, stop the scene, stay in character and then everyone in the audience would ask us questions while we were in those characters to learn. And then would break character and then they would be able to ask the actors how that felt. It was three… it was called three-step processing. This is the thing that in my… was invented at, well, we created here. And it was such intense work for young people. I was 16 years old and I was doing… I was like doing scenes about teenage abuse to other teenagers, and then helping them through the process. And I didn’t realize at the time but that’s incredibly high intensity like training, that I did for three years straight. [That’s incredible.] It… but it gave my mind something to do because that’s what I needed. As an ADD person I needed something that my mind could do all the time that was positive, that I could give it energy to. And I think that’s what improv does, is it allows you, you know, I can let my mind think anything it wants while I’m improvising. And they give me forms to play in to shape it that I now know I can make something funny that someone else would enjoy. And that’s all, that’s all an ADD kid wanted was like something I can do with this to benefit someone else.

JULIE: Absolutely. I love the idea of this group therapy really in college or high school, and… yeah yeah high school. Sorry, we call it college in New Zealand but no, it’s not yeah university college. Anyway no, how wonderful for real life interaction as a way of group therapy. It’s brilliant, excellent, wow. So tell me, what led… what happened after high school?

STEPHON: I went to film school in San Francisco and studied the Academy of Art College which was actually a visual art school. So everyone in the school was either a sculptor, or an architect, or a painter, or a dancer, and it was all these visual artists. So I was studying film which was my passion and because I believe film, like a film is actually one of the perfect forms of telling a story that we’ve ever found as a human, as a culture. That’s why they stuck around so much. So studying that, and how those are made, and how basically humans are tricked into believing these stories, like taught me so much about the psychology and how we think and how we process. And like… and I was getting to do it, all my General Ed classes. So I had to take history and all these other things, were with other brilliant minds who were like you know, the person right next to me studying fashion, and then architecture was right here. And I got all of this kind of energy from different creative minds that I didn’t realize at the time, was such a unique perspective to go through, especially at that time of life. There was a famous group in San Francisco called BATS, which was Bay Area Theater Sports, which is now just Bats Improv. They’re one of the best in the world and I studied with them for four years while I was there. And that’s where I really cut my teeth and learned how to combine you know, storytelling in a way that made it that could not just function as a story but like function as parables, and morality tales, and really allow people to, I don’t know, dive into themselves a little bit.

JULIE: Wonderful. Now there is a gap between this marvellous high school, and then further improv development, and where you are now. There was this stretch in your life where you kind of dived into more a corporate career. [Yes.] Can you tell me about that?

STEPHON: So for 20 years I spent trying to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. And while doing that, you take, I took on entertainment jobs as like in post- production, and I also took on corporate jobs in project management. And both of them were kind of soul draining because most of those situations are all about fitting, finding the right peg to fit in the hole and that’s… The entertainment industry is extremely streamlined to the fact where they, if you’re not above the line… the statement is “above the line” is where the people that make money, and then the “below the line” is everyone else. If you’re not “above the line” they can replace you in a second. So they don’t care about original thought. They don’t care about like taking care of people. There is no work-life balance in the entertainment industry. The standard days are between 12-to-14-hour days for almost everybody. And they just… because time is money, and so they’ll they say “We’re gonna pay you an extreme amount of money but we’re going to work you to death right now.” And I’m like, I gotta get out of this. So I jumped to corporate and corporate is the same beast, just shaped differently. Because they care about money and they streamline the process that way. They care about money and result instead of originality or humanity. And I just saw… I kept seeing the same patterns of things in corporate that I was seeing in entertainment, which were very just dehumanizing. And, you know through this process I’m like “There’s got to be something better, there’s something more.” And I just started kind of developing ideas, and concepts, and theories together. And about five or six years ago now, but I just kind of broke away from everything. I need to make something unique. And so I wrote my first book which was The Barstool Theories: a late-night crossfaded conversation that may just explain all of human behavior. And it’s a book that I had to write. Some night, like one of those things… I don’t know if you ever get become obsessed about things, but like my obsession forced this out of me. And it’s two gentlemen talking in a bar in the middle of the night who are getting drunk, and a little high, and discussing life their theories of life. And so it’s a very Socratic method of you know, presenting the theories in a conversation form. And because that’s what I feel, that’s where I feel like humanity is at its best. It’s where we’re sitting down and talking together. No matter who it is, if we can find common ground between each other. And I feel like it’s been it’s just our differences has been used to just force us apart for so long, that I tried to… I’m trying to find a way to unite everybody.

JULIE: So tell me Stephon [instead…] is it a book of philosophy, your own life philosophy? Technically well it’s theories. It’s theories that I’ve come up with. The lead belief of the whole thing is that we’re all here because of feels. Feels are emotions and your tactile responses. And everything we do is driven by those. And it all makes sense if you, once you accept that, everything else in the world makes sense. So it’s just a book about my observations on the world because I was allowing my brain to kind of be itself. That’s what I was trying to do as much as possible when I wasn’t forced to work in entertainment, or forced to corporate, when I had free time. I was trying to let my brain be and it didn’t want to slow down. It wanted to speed up in the directions it wanted to go.

JULIE: Did you find that creative process very cathartic? [Incredibly, yeah incredibly.] There is making sense of it all as you wrote, really.

STEPHON: Yeah, yeah because I work in musing. It’s about understanding who you are, and where you are, and what’s going on. And then using that understanding to understand the rest of the world. And there are so many… there’s so many negative things that are just kind of thrown around us that we don’t even know are there. And so it’s really about… I learn, I love to learn. I love to learn but I don’t like to be taught, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of people with ADD have the same thing is, there we… it’s hard for us to find minds that run at the same speed as us, or run at the same turn. Because you can find someone and be like you’re both going like this, but when we find them, when we find the right person like “Oh my, just pfffff ” and when we find the right idea it just changes your life. It changes your world. The biggest thing that I want to share with your audience, because this is what… this is the thing that really, the thing that I through musing I learned, is someone once said that they realized they’re spending a lot of their time justifying what their existence to the rest of the world. And that I think once I heard that I’m like “That’s what I was spending my entire time trying to be a screenwriter.” It’s because I have a brilliant fast mind. I have to find a way to display it. I have to somehow justify my existence to the world and that was something I was chasing for so long. But I’m not chasing it anymore because that’s what everyone puts boundaries on us, without asking.

JULIE: And then we put our own level of boundaries on ourselves as well. Right. So it’s the external narrative and our self-narrative and sometimes it goes a bit wonky, doesn’t it. We just need to give ourselves a good talking to.

STEPHON: Because sometimes, there’s sometimes there’s something you learned, you taught yourself that you know from when you were five, that you still hold on to. You don’t need that anymore. It’s a truth that you believed at that time was real. Like “Oh yeah like oh that dentist is a scary person,” so you’re scared of dentist for the rest of your life because you’ve just never changed that thought. Because you don’t know it’s there. But musing teaches us to dig in and find all the fun parts in our heads because if we do it with positivity it’s… all we’re going to find is love and joy.

JULIE: I want to ask you more about modern musing but before I do, for our listeners, The Barstool Theories, on the show notes of this podcast there’ll be links to where you can buy it and check Stephon out. So that’ll be in the notes, just for the listeners. Modern day musing tell me… [Yes.] You make a… this is your career now. Tell me, tell me.

STEPHON: This is actually my calling I believe. It’s, I’ve stepped it up one from a… Muses of… there were muses, the Greek goddesses. There were actually nine young ladies who were semi-gods, who would gift people that they found worthy with ideas and science, art, philosophy. They would do all these things and then, if you actually kind of skip ahead to the Renaissances. Like there’s a few renaissances or the age of enlightenment, you’ll actually find there were more practical muses. There were really talented artists who would help other artists get like get better. They would have like there were like famous sculptors who would just do the hands of famous like better sculptor’s work. And so it was this community at times of artists who were committed to just making art or creativity. I learned that I love a lot of different things. That’s what ADD does. It makes you blast out your love in every direction. [Yes.] And so no one teaches you a career where that works. There is no… there is no one thing except for the statement a Renaissance person, which is a muse, is someone who is dedicated to knowing things, and knowing how things work, and knowing how people work, and then try and integrate the ideas. And that’s what a muse really is about, understanding what creativity is, and then how to allow it in other people. [Wow.] And the biggest thing is permissions, the biggest thing is permissions. So many people need permission to be creative, or to be silly, or to be childish, or to allow themselves to think differently.

JULIE: It’s a shame isn’t it. Something got messed up along the way that you know, as a child we don’t … we just are. We don’t need permission to giggle or play. And somewhere along life to sort of feel restricted in that way is a sad… but it’s a sad thing but it is reality. And a lot of us, neurotypicals and neurodivergents will battle with that.

STEPHON: Right. And there’s ways against it. That’s what musing is about is… musing is really about figuring out what are the forces that are at work controlling you. Are they for you, or they against you? Are they good or are they bad? They’re not all bad. A lot of them are good.

JULIE: Tell me, is this to do with your mental cartography and your… tell me about that, highly interesting.

STEPHON: Mental cartography, yes so me, I use mental cartography in my musing. It’s a tactic of musing. Mental cartography is something that human beings have done for all the time. I’m just labeling it and kind of making it a number. So yeah, the easiest one is, you know, what would WW blank do? What would, like who is someone you look up to, in your life, a celebrity?

JULIE: Yeah oh I was gonna say closer to home, my father. There you go. I look up to my father. [What’s his name?] Del.

STEPHON: Del, okay. Yes. So the easiest form of mental cartography is what would Del do, right. So if you’re think, if you’re sitting there, what would my father do? Now that’s very simple to understand but it’s actually very complicated if you think about it. To do it accurately you would need to understand your situation fully. You would need to understand Del’s view of the world, how they view what they see. How they would react to things. And then put that accurately into you, translate it to something you can actually use practically, and then respond to the situation in kind. That’s all something you can learn to do in your head, like that’s mental cartography. It’s mapping something else into a way that you can use it practically. [Wow.] So mapping ideas like taking famous ideas. Like my concept is taking big ideas and then being able to translate them into either stories or something unique. Like the fire triangle is the example that I give in my book, which is there are three elements that are needed for a fire to exist. It needs oxygen, heat, and fuel. If you remove any one of them you can get a fire to stop. That’s a reality. That’s a reality of the world. That’s a truth. Analyze your friend group. Like when you’re with your friends, who’s the oxygen, who’s the fuel, who’s the heat? [Yes, yes.] And it’s little things like little truths of the world and using those to break down your own life to help understand. That’s what mental cartography is.

JULIE: Oh fabulous. And along with that is your performative communication. Now I haven’t … Performative communication, yes. I haven’t heard that phrase before. Would you be able to help me out? What’s that all about?

STEPHON: That’s taking, that’s basically an example of what I told you about… it’s taking improv into real life. So as Shakespeare put it, we are all the world’s a stage, we are constantly playing. Well he was more right. Like I am performing right now. You are performing right now. We are both performing in our situations to get illicit, to get specific responses from specific audience members. As a muse, my job is to understand what kind of response I need to get out of you as an audience member and know how I have to act to get that. So that’s performative communication. It’s using improv skills in normal conversation or in normal situation to get the response that is needed. So it’s it’s almost like studying acting but everyday acting. Because how I can ask, a how I ask you a question could change the way you answer it. Will change the way you answer it. Hey could you… did you remember to pick up eggs? You forgot to pick up eggs, didn’t you. Where are the eggs? Those are three different ways to ask that same question and each of them gives a… creates a different mental emotional response in the person you’re asking.

JULIE: And to that I would say “I haven’t collected them yet.” [There you go.] They’re in the hen house but I’ll do that after this.

STEPHON: Right and your answer just tells me a huge amount of about what like about you and like that just that reveals it. So it’s about listening. It’s about being aware of ourselves and each other.

JULIE: Oh wow, very very interesting. Very interesting indeed. So you’re … you understand your ADHD more than ever now after having this lived experience and different… and different joys that you found, and cathartic times when you’ve been able to write and you’ve put it all together. What do you love most about your… I call it a job, but most about what you do now?

STEPHON: Oh I love talking to people. I love communicating. I another thing that happened as a kid because of my ADD is I didn’t have much intimacy with my family because I was made fun of. Like my family basically existed in two you know, two volumes – sarcasm and silence. So they were very funny, very sharp and anything you did wrong they would make fun of you. Like Santa Claus would bring a list at on Christmas Eve and read everyone’s name and harass you for something you did that year. This is legitimately in my family. So as an ADD kid the one … I was even weirder. I was the weird one of them, so I withdrew so much and got quiet, and got into my own head, that it took me yeah it took me so long to just figure out what I like I was different. Because I couldn’t even figure out what was wanting, like why I was different. So hard. Sorry I forgot. I forgot what the first question was?

JULIE: No, what you love most about your job. But I have a feeling it’s you finally being you. Yeah. And being celebrated for that and but not… you’ve always been you but you’ve given yourself permission.

STEPHON: Yes. I’ve accepted myself. And what a freeing awesome feeling that is. Yeah. And I did it by reducing a lot of my shame intake.

JULIE: How did you manage to do that because shame is a big part of ADHD. It kind of… we carry it around in our backpacks as if it’s an essential part of you know, our life.

STEPHON: Right. We’re taught. Because shame is used to control us. It’s shame and guilt are both exterior forces that we have to choose to use on ourselves. We, people can guilt you but no one can make you feel shame unless you feel it yourself. And part of my journey was reducing my shame outlets because from a child like you just have to understand that people don’t… people who don’t understand you have no business giving you shame. They really don’t. They have no idea what’s going on in your head. The only people you should… what I did was I reduced my shame intakes just to my wife. She’s the only person I allow to shame me because she knows who I am. She knows what I’m capable of. She knows when I’m good and when I’m bad. The rest of the planet doesn’t know anything. They judge you from their own shame filters and judging someone else from their shame filter you’re never going to… you’re never going to meet up to anybody else’s standards. So I just realized I’m like they, other people’s shame has nothing to do with me. When I do something shameful, that I know of, I feel shame and I atone for it. But if I don’t feel shameful, I don’t allow anyone to shame me because they have no idea. A lot of my work deals with society versus humanity. I don’t… I’m not on the side of society anymore because society is now against, has been against humanity forever. I’m on the side of humanity. Anytime, if … here’s the thing. Because anytime society has to sacrifice humanity it will do it in a second. It will sacrifice humanity, some humans, for the benefit of all. And that’s where almost all the ADD kids fell. We were being sacrificed. We’re the ones who had to deal with this unreasonable like “Oh everyone else can do these chores and everyone else can do these tests, why can’t you?” And so I’m like “Sorry, screw you. I’m not doing it anymore.” I don’t play by society’s rules. I look at what’s good for humanity and what’s good for the human in front of me and I do not care what anyone else thinks. Because everyone else thinks about themselves, because they need to. They need to. Just like I need to take care of me, they need to take care of them. So I want to give them the tools to take care of themselves better so they can leave me alone. Stop trying to shame me when the shame is actually about you. Don’t hand off your shame, shame handers.

JULIE: I’ve got a couple of questions for you and one is… [What have we got?] One is misconceptions about ADHD. What would you… are there any misconceptions people have about you as a character with ADHD or ADHD in general? What would you like to myth bust?

STEPHON: Well, here’s the misconception, that everyone has, everyone wakes up and thinks oh most people think like I do. They do not. Working from that supposition is what causes so many issues. Start from the fact that your brain is unique. All brains are unique. And trying to put them in the same box, that’s the part that’s bad. Find the things that are unique that are helpful. That’s what the real key is. Don’t try and be the version that everyone wants you to be. Be the version that you can be that helps. But the problem is like they don’t want to give jobs to ADHD people. They like, what let this crazy person just run around the field, create things? We don’t know what he’s going to do. And that’s the point. You don’t know what we’re going to do. But so many people are afraid of new things and new change that they won’t let you know, they won’t let the inmates run the asylum even though we can do it better.

JULIE: So true. I was going to ask you too about some common roadblocks that people find in the creative industry particularly coming from an ADHD point of view. You spent so much time in the entertainment and creative field. What sort of roadblocks did you sort of come up against during your time?

STEPHON: Well the one of the one of the difficulties of being an ADHD person in the entertainment industry is there are so many, there are you know gatekeeping situations that you just have to get through. Like there are things you have to do and every single person has their advice of how you’re supposed to do things. Not just that, how you’re supposed to like deal with things like the grind mentality, like you know you got to get up, you got to grind if you want to be successful in the entertainment industry. You got to wake up at 6:00 am. You got to have three screen plays by 9:00 am and then you got to be making agent calls. It’s like the misconception is if that’s not natural to you will die in that industry. If that’s natural to you, if you’re trying to get into an industry where you have to hustle and break yourself to get in, it’s not going to get easier once you’re in. It’s not. You have to, you go in at the speed that is comfortable for you and either it works or it doesn’t. But if you go in hauling like you know like I gotta do this, where my like or my life’s over, like great. You’re going to turn around five years, you’re going to be like five years down the road and you’re like oh my God, I just spent my head down running full speed and now what do I have? But if that’s who you are, do it. But if it’s not who you are, don’t try to force yourself into someone else’s system. To try and succeed find your own system. That’s the hard part is figure out how you work and you could take other people’s models and like take pieces of them and try them but don’t continue bashing your head against the same wall with someone else’s name on it. You got to find a wall with your name on it because that’s the one that just tip right over.

JULIE: And by the sounds of it that’s where you’re at, at the moment. You know you’ve … yeah all the trials and tribulations and you found your happy space, which you created yourself. [Yeah.] Which I think is fabulous. So you know, I’m not surprised really. ADHD and being entrepreneurs, and thinking outside the box, risk takers, high energy, you know. High thinkers.

STEPHON: Well that’s the thing, it’s not. It’s the things I do aren’t risky for me but they’re risky, like other people seem risky. Like improv seems like a very scary risky thing or admitting your intimacy seems very scary and risky but it’s not. It’s like being a daredevil. It’s like oh I can jump across the Grand Canyon. It doesn’t frighten me. It frightens everyone else. So for ADHD people or anybody neurodivergent, find those things that other… that you can do that other people are scared by. That’s what you have. That’s your superpower. Because if you can do what they can’t, they got no way. They can’t complain. They got nothing. Like he’s the only one can do it. You know, Tony Stark built one of these in a cave with a box of scraps. Well no one else is Tony Stark. And I guarantee you there are people listening to this podcast who are ADHD or neurodivergent and no one else thinks like you. And you’re awesome because of that. And never let anyone tell you different.

JULIE: Beautiful words Stephon, absolutely beautiful words. And on that note, I will say it’s been an absolute joy to have you on the show and thank you so thank you so much for sharing your lived experience and your insights and your enthusiasm. It’s been truly great.

STEPHON: Thank you. If I get down to that side of the world I’d love to get a drink and muse with you sometime. [Would love that.]