258: How Having a Brain That Is Different Can Be Your Ultimate Gift with Peter Shankman

Imagine a piece of wood. It's a beautiful piece of wood with no blemishes or imperfections whatsoever. Every day, though, someone strikes it with a mallet. You don't notice it. But over time, you look at that piece of wood again in 15 years and there's going to be an indentation in that piece of wood. That's the problem with being told you need to fix something about yourself every day.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of finding grade and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. This is coming to you late June. Woohoo. My favorite month, my birthday month. And I am like always pinching myself at the people I get to speak with. And particularly today we have the deeply inspiring Peter Shankman. Peter, thank you for taking the time.

My pleasure. How are you?

I'm good. I am good. I'm feeling better today. I was all stressed, lost, lost my mother, 98 year old mother in March. And I'm so sorry. So hard, so hard. Even though people say, well, she lived a good long life. Yeah, she did. But that doesn't mean I'm not struggling at the loss of her. Thank you for letting me share. But we are talking about something that is not only near and dear to my heart, but impacting so many people. And we're going to talk about it. Neurodiversity and your new book for children. But it's obviously for everyone who works with children and loves children too. But we are talking about how having a brain that is different can be your ultimate gift.

Yeah, most definitely.

Thank you for being here. So people, let me tell you about Peter because the bio is long but I knew Peter and it turns out you sold your company haro help a reporter out when all along I was using it and it was such an incredible platform and tool and there you sold it and you've moved on many different companies but here I want you to know about Peter. Peter is a spectacular example of what happens when you find the best traits of ADHD and do the work to make them benefit you, which I think is an important part of this. You're going to talk about it. Diagnosed itself 7 years old with what Peter calls the sit down, you're disrupting the class disease. Peter wasn't formally diagnosed with adhd until his mid-30s. We're going to talk about that too. By that time, however, he'd started and sold two companies and realized that all the differences that formally labeled him as a troublemaker or probably difficult, were actually his greatest assets. After Pierre sold his third company, Haro, help a reporter out, he decided to focus on really under understanding this faster brain of his and learning exactly what it could do. Wow. From that, the Faster Than Normal podcast and best selling book of the same name was born. Since then, Peter has written, I think it's six best selling books now. Right. And Faster Than Normal is the Internet's number one podcast on adhd. There's more going on here with Peter, but I want to say you are considered now a futurist or help out as a futurist for Blue Shark Digital. Yeah. And Price Benowitz llp. And the list goes on and on. Peter, you're so inspiring and you know, why you're here is that you believe everyone has gifts and abilities far beyond what society deems as normal or healthy or advantageous. So can we start there? Can you tell us why you wrote this children's book? Why that first?

So the short story is that I didn't want any kid to grow up today, if you'll pardon the, the phraseology, with the same shitty existence I had growing up.

What was that like?

It was. It was not adhd. It was not add. It was, sit down, you truck in the class. And I was told over and over again that I was broken, that I was a troublemaker, that I was an instigator, that I was causing disruption to my fellow students. I was placed in the back, I was placed in the principal's office. I was placed in a quiet room. I was everywhere. And when you're told you're broken that much, it does tend to sink in.

Regardless, they use the word broken.

They didn't use the word broken, but I mean, they use the word troublemaker. Can't sit still, disruptive, needs to focus more, needs to pay attention more. Would be a better student if he just, you know, and, and they, you know, imagine, imagine someone telling you at age 12, you're so pretty if you just lose some weight. Right? That's, that's actually had that for the rest of your life. Right. So I Had you could do so much better if you just apply yourself. I'm like, what the hell do you think I'm doing every day? And what wasn't, what I wasn't aware of, the crazy things is that I didn't learn this till 30, 40 years later. ADHD and most neurodiversity is, is essentially the brain not making the right chemicals for adhd. It's not making the right amount of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, those are the focus chemicals. Those are chemicals that allow you to focus and sort of do whatever tasks in front of you when you love something. Like for me it was English or music or, you know, whatever. I worked non stop at it because I, I loved it when I didn't love something as much. Math, science, normally the brain would compensate. Okay, you don't love this. Here's some extra dopamine. Now you can focus and then we'll go do something fun. Mine didn't make that. So without realizing it, I was doing things to give me my own, to make my own dopamine. Okay? I realized that every time I made a joke in class, the class cracked up. And as soon as the class cracked up, I got a hysterical burst of dopamine. Didn't know why, didn't understand what was going on. But you know, and, and it was very addictive. It is, it's literally exactly like cocaine, right? You get that, you, you, you get that, get that first hit and you're like, wow, I need more of that. And so without realizing that I was getting that, you know, why can't I stop? Why can't I stop making jokes in class? I promised my parents I wouldn't do it anymore. Why do I keep doing it? Why am I going to the principal's office again? And the more I tried, the more I'd keep doing it and no one understood it, right? Why can't he just stop doing that? Well, why can't an alcoholic just stop drinking? Why can't a, an addict just stop being an addict? Right? It was very difficult. And, and again, no. 80s, 70s and 80s New York City public schools, nothing like that, right? It was. And the problem was they would have put me in special ed. But you have to have a certain level of, low level of reading and math. My math stuff, my reading was in college, since second grade.

Oh my God.

Because I loved reading. So I didn't even, I didn't even qualify for it. So why did I write the book? I wrote the book because I want kids to understand that they're not broken and they're gifted and they just need to understand how to use their brain in a different way. And, and perhaps that's therapy, perhaps, perhaps that's medication. I'm not anti med. I don't think it should be the first line of defense. You know, I have a prescription for something called Concerta. It's an ADHD drug. It's essentially an amphetamine. But instead of taking it me, I supposed to take it daily. Maybe I take it twice a month. Most of the time waking up at 4am and getting on my Peloton for two hours or going out for a run or a swim is enough to give me the chemicals I need to focus all day. When do I take it? When my assistant calls me and says if you don't get me those five last speeches, expense reports, you're not getting paid, take your damn pill and get it done.

All right, so sometimes we do. I have questions. Peter, can I interrupt this? So in your case, you know, working faster than the normal brain and for what you just described is very common. Can you talk? Just so you know, I'm a career coach and I was a therapist and I was a former corporate vp. All of it marries up that people come with problems that they don't recognize what those problems are. And one of those problems I hear about is procrastination. I don't, I can't seem to do the thing that I know I need to do. And on top of that there's an emotional shame and humiliation with that. Is that part of what you experienced as well?

Absolutely.

Like would you be playing sports or reading a book and then it's two in the morning and you're like oh my God, I have the chem homework. Would you have that? As a young kid it wasn't so much.

I mean I had procrastination but for me it was more about starting a project with every intention of doing it. And it's six hours later and I somehow I'm on, I'm reading encyclopedia Brown. My 18, you know, editions of Encyclopedia Brown from beginning to end or even today, you know, even, even nowadays. It's, it's. My girlfriend had, My girlfriend had a birthday back in March and I, you know, you come up with ways to, to prevent screwing up but it doesn't always work. I, I set every day for like a month. I would set an alarm, I would send myself an email. Make sure you start researching gifts. Get the gifts, get. It's two days before her birthday. I have nothing right and, and, and you feel like crap, you feel horrible about it, you know, and it's like, God, you can work so hard to prove so much and you still do some stupid ass stuff like that where you screwed up. But you know, it's much better than it was, right? It's much better than I ever was as a younger kid. But it is a constant struggle. And the problem is it is incredibly.

Hard to.

Imagine a piece of wood. And it's a beautiful piece of wood with no blemishes or imperfections whatsoever. Every day though, 15 years, someone strikes it with a mallet. Okay, a little, you don't notice it. It's a rubber mouth. You don't notice it. But over time, you look at that piece of wood again in 15 years and there's going to be an indentation in that piece of wood, right? That's the problem with, with being told you need to fix something about yourself every day. Because when you do, no matter how much therapy you have, and I've had a lot when you come back, you know, and when you do something like that, when you forget a birthday, when you miss something important, every single thing that you were told when you were 7, when you were 10, when you were 12, comes flooding back. And it, sometimes it sends you down this spiral that takes days, you know, weeks to come out. And again, it's not anywhere near as bad as it was. I have improved tremendously. And I understand that making a mistake today is, does not mean I've regressed and I'm seven years old again, but sometimes it's a bitch, you know, and if we can teach kids at a much younger age that they're not broken, they don't have to deal with that 30 years down the road, it's literally like back to the future, right? If you go back in time and fix the problem right, you're not going to have to deal with that problem 30 years later. So that's, you know, a lot of where I come from in that regard.

It's so important and it's so powerful. You know, Tell me what you think. This is going to sound way off, way from left field, but when you said that, I feel like that's what it feels like to be a woman in the business world. Let me explain. There's what society, culture, workplaces say is normal, is accepted, is what you should do. And you know, I'm 62, so I went through a lot of years in corporate life where a woman isn't supposed to be confident. A woman isn't supposed to be brave and assertive and talk about herself and you're told that something's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. My whole point here is, yes, we're focused on ADHD right now and a faster than normal brain or a different brain neurodiversity. But I think there's a bigger picture that society's norms are often very messed up, if you ask me. What do you think?

No question about it. But again, you know, I think it's, it's. And that's for several reasons, right? A lot of them I have no desire to get into, but I think one of the main reasons is because there's a wonderful story that I quote all the time in almost every one of my books about five baboons. A caretaker in a zoo puts five baboons in the cage, and at the top of the cage he attaches a thing of bananas and he puts a ladder there. And one day the baboons notice the bananas and one of them figures out the ladder and climbs up the ladder and starts eating the bananas. As he eat the bananas, the other four baboons get soaked with a fire hose, right? Ice cold water that, like, what the hell is that? Okay, baboons up on top, one, ooh, bananas. Next day, they put more bananas up there. And that same baboon season, he's like, oh, let me get bananas. Four baboons get soaked with a fire hose. The following day, the baboons put together that every time this guy goes up and gets the bananas, we get soaked. So as he starts to climb ladder, they take it down and beat the crap out of him, right? No one gets the bananas. No one gets the fire hose, okay? Next day, no one goes up to try and get the bananas. No one gets the fires. Following week, guy takes one of the baboons out, replaced him with a new baboon who has no idea about the fire hose, sees the bananas, starts to climb the ladder, gets the crap kicked out of him, has no idea why. Okay, fast forward the next four weeks. They remove every single one of the original baboons and replace them with five new baboons. None of them have ever gotten the fire hose. None of them who understand why. All they know is they're not allowed to climb that. That ladder to get those. Those wonderful bananas. What's the moral of the story? Well, that's the way we've always done it.

Yeah, there you go.

Right? So you look at something like that. I think a lot of our biases, a lot of our A lot of the problems we have are, are based in 100, 150, 200 year old rules, traditions that don't necessarily apply anymore. I went and spoke to a school last week in Staten Island, New York, of all places, that they, They've done away with desks in lines, like in, you know, first person, you sit where you want, right? Desk wherever you want, with the chair, wherever you want. Because they've proven that you can learn better that way.

Oh, my.

But how many.

When you choose your own spatial relations.

You want to stand, stand. How many? But that's like.0001% of schools. So it's those kind of things that, that are not there yet that, that hopefully this book and this kind of stuff will, will help teach.

Oh, my gosh. All right, so I want to break it down into two ways, if I could with you. There's what I'm sure you wish every child understood, who, you know, has a different brain. And then there's also what you go in and you said, big companies are asking you to come in and talk about neurodiversity. Look at you go, you're typing and you're thinking, oh, good.

Because it's it. The thing about companies bringing me in is they're finally starting to realize there is benefit. Do you know the concept of curb cuts?

No.

So curb cuts is fascinating. In World War II. Close to 600,000 veterans came back to the US after World War II, injured, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches, whatever. The country as a whole ordered all of the cities and locales to create curb cuts in the sidewalk or those little ramps at the corners of every sidewalk that you see. What wound up happening, not only did it help the 600,000 veterans, it helped pregnant women, it helped old people, it helped children, it helped moms with strollers, it helped dads with strollers, it helped people with carts. It changed the fundamental concept of how we get onto a sidewalk. It benefited everyone. The premise of doing one thing for one segment of society that can benefit everyone is exactly what we're seeing by diverting money to mental health in the workplace, to mental health issues, to mental health ideas. The premise that companies are starting to understand this thrills me. The concept that companies start to understand that putting money towards mental health in the workplace. And I'm not just talking about, you know, topical stuff or cosmetic stuff like, oh, you know, Hawaiian shirt Friday, but being able to help people, especially in today's times where one third of all teenagers and young adults are depressed, being Able to help them realize they're not alone and realize that the company cares and wants to help them. Has massive improvements. Both. Both in a employee centric as well as a financial perspective.

Right.

Worked with a company who I can't name, who was bringing back three days a week in the office. And they had a huge neurodiverse division. And the neurodiverse employees were pissed because they figured out how to work the best way they could at home. They were being hugely productive. So we came up with a color coded system. We put lights on all, put little lamps on top of every single desk. It's open floor system, Sit wherever you want. Right. And when you get to your desk, you choose red, yellow, or green. Red means don't bother me, I'm head down to work. Yellow means bother me if it's important. Green means come talk to me. I'm open for anything. And the executive mean they had, they.

Had control over it. I'm clicking the red button now.

And the executives were afraid that, that most people come in, just put up red, not talk to anyone and get their work done. What wound up happening was they put up red the very first day and by the second day they were in yellow or green. And by the third day they were all in green because they were so much more productive. They were so much more productive that very first day. So. So they're thrilled, right? So it's those kind of things that, that, you know, little tiny things that really.

Wait a minute, let me understand. They were productive because they had the red light on or productive because it was.

They were able to get three times the amount of work done. Giving them two more days to brainstorm and do whatever they want and really open with the rest of the team. That's what made it more productive and increased efficiency and productivity.

Did you come up with that idea?

Yeah. Oh, Peter, it's little things like that. It's, you know, I went to speak at Google and. And they knew that I was neurodiverse and I was on stage with like four other neurodiverse people. And they walked in and they, as we're walking to the, to the stage, they, they have a bowl full of fidget spinners and little grabby toys that take whatever you need. Feel free to bring it on stage with you.

Oh my.

That's forward. Such forward thing.

All right, so what, when you go and speak and, and you don't, you know, you don't skirt it. I'm sure you go right in. Tell us, let's say I'm a leader and I'm managing people and I care and I want this to work, but I'm scared about what to do. How do you break it down for us? What do we do?

Being a neurodiverse friendly company or being a nerd versus inclusive company? It's very simply put that, that dei, diversity, equity, inclusion cannot just be skin deep. Okay, it's wonderful that you, that you've hired a certain amount of people of color or you've hired people from overseas. That's great, but that's not where it ends, right? You managed to get through that. Now look at it even better. And the premise is, the fact of the matter is that every single study out there shows that creativity is boosted by bringing in neurodiverse and by making it a neurodivercentric workplace. Making it better for certain, you make it better for certain segments of society, you make it better for everyone. Curb cuts, you know, helping. Helping one segment. There are people who would not call themselves neurodiverse, but you tell them, hey, you're gonna get eight hours to work without being bothered by anyone or phone calls or meetings or emails. They're gonna be over the moon.

Wow.

Right? It doesn't mean they're adhd. It doesn't mean they're autistic. It just means that, hey, they like to work, you know, and they like to accept them without getting interrupted. And, and because they don't identify as neurodiverse, they can't use that and say, hey, I'm nerdiverse. Leave me the hell alone. They have to be nice. Oh, come on in, let's talk. Well, there goes my day, right? So, yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's opening that up to the entire world type thing.

I love it. Now, let me ask this because the former therapist in me always sees things with a therapeutic lens, right? So I'm a career leadership coach. And what I see is there's all sorts of things we're telling people they need to do, but they don't have one lick of understanding about how to do it. Let me explain. When you, we were talking earlier about how your childhood, you know, your experience and if you're a parent, and so, you know, I've had this in my family as well. If you're a parent, you, you see your kid's potential and you want that kid to live up to that potential. And in your mind, typically as a parent or a manager, you'll get the project done when it needs to be done. You'll present it. You'll do. Right. There are things that we've all come to assume, for good or bad, that has to happen, like your story with your girlfriend and the birthday.

Right.

She loves you. She knows you, and if you didn't show up with the gift, she might be forgiving of that more than someone who's not with a neurodiverse person.

Right. And here's the thing, though. It's not about her being forgiving about it, because I know she will be. She's a wonderful person.

Yeah.

It's me being able to forgive myself. I'm sitting there. When you had two months, you. You had two months, right? That kind of thing.

Yeah. And I would say, you know, the person with you would like you to do that kind of stuff. Right. So even though she would be forgiving of it, it's nice to do these things, you know, it's. It shows a certain thing. Right. In other words, it's not some stupid measure that means nothing. It's showing you care and taking the time out to do it. But going back to the other issue, what I see when we're my world is dei, you know, helping women in other underrepresented groups. And now I should definitely include neurodiverse. The problem is individuals don't know how to. How to deal with struggles. Like, let's say you work for me, Peter, and you had a struggle in getting something done on time.

Right.

If I'm not trained in understanding what's preventing it, I'm going to act like a typical manager. What do you tell individuals who struggle with. What do I need to understand about neurodiversity and how do I need to act differently?

I have several chapters in Faster than Normal about this because the. The concept is, you know, bosses want to. Want to allow their employees to be the most productive they possibly can.

Right.

A lot of times bosses do things that actually are detrimental. I know a ton of bosses are very much about, you know what? I trust you. You set your own deadlines. I need it by, you know, just get it to me as soon as you can. That's. That's the case of death.

Right. That'll be four years.

Well, no, if you tell me to get it to you as soon as you can, I'm gonna start dropping. I'll drop everything else to start working until the next thing that you need. As soon as I can comes to you, then I'm gonna drop the first thing go to that. Nothing ever gets done. Come to me and say, hey, I need this by April 26th at 4pm you will get it probably days before that.

Okay.

Right. Help me set the boundaries. I need to.

But what about the June 2nd birthday? That came and almost went.

Right. And again, that was. The problem with that was on me because that was a personal thing. That was, oh, I have time, I have time, I have time. I wasn't. There wasn't a consequence to that. I mean, there was a consequence that I felt like crap, but there wasn't the concept. I wasn't lose a job. I wasn't going to, you know, whatever it was. Oh, I have time, I have time, I have time. When I have a project due for a boss, someone who's paying me a client, that's a different world.

I see.

You give me a deadline, you're going to have it by that.

Well, what are the challenges you see in the workplace that managers have to do better with? What. What are people doing that isn't perfect?

A lot of it goes back to the baboons. Let it go back to baboons. The concept that we've always done it this way just because if Covid showed us one thing, it showed that just because you always have people come to the office five days a week doesn't mean that that has to be how it's done for the future. Right. That opened a lot of doors. It actually accelerated our timeline about 20 years in terms of neurodiversity because it allows us to realize that there are a lot of things that we can do that we weren't allowed to do before but are actually very beneficial. One of them being working from home or working in different environments. You know, I. There's a great story about a guy who worked for. He was Verizon. And one day Verizon's doing a routine security check and they realized that they had an intruder, cyber intruder, every, every night from like 9pm to like 4am from China. And they're like, oh my God, we're being hacked. And they did the research. Did the research. You know what they found out? There was a kid, there was a guy who worked for them, who was a senior programmer who was outsourcing his job to China. And they were doing all the work that he needed to do every night while he was asleep. It sent them like one fifth of his salary, right? Outsourced. They answers, everything. He came back the next morning, it was perfect. He was winning awards. Best programmer they ever had. Now, I'm not suggesting you do that, but it's the premise of looking at things in a different way. The people who are neurodiverse are the ones who look at things in a different way. And the problem is they're usually stopped by people who only see the old times. If you look at things in different way and as a boss, if you're open to hearing about those ideas and hearing about those new ways of doing things, that's where it gets pretty cool. Because, you know, I, I, I can't tell you how many times I've, I've, I've worked with clients. Like, what if we try it that way? Oh, I've never done it before. So what? Let's try it anyway. What's the worst gonna happen today? The luckiest ever got was I had one job in my life. I worked in America Online when I first started my career, back when AOL was the Internet and I was one of the founders of the newsroom there and AOL News back in the mid-90s, right?

I remember it.

And the coolest thing was they let us work. There was no rule book, right? So do something. If it works, do it again. If it doesn't work, don't do it again and try something else. And to this day, that's how I work. And it was the best. I mean, it got it. Problem was, it spoiled the hell out of me. I went, I left aol, I moved back to New York. I'm like, oh, I get an executive editor job and I walk in, they're like, okay, there's a meeting at 8:30 and 9:45 at a 9:15 and a 10. It was like Russia. I'm like, I can't do this. And I quit after a week. Never had another job again. So, you know, it's, it's. But the beauty of it was I learned that you can just try things. And my whole life has been, if it's not going to start an international incident or put me in jail or make me lose my passport, I'm going to go for it. Why not?

I love it. And I love what you say that. It's like, what is it? The rising tide lifts all boats. I remember 20 years ago saying to myself, going to the office every day and sitting in these four walls makes no sense. The meeting at 8:30 on Monday with 50 people makes no sen. But I was, it was sacrilege. I wasn't a team player to. But I love what you're saying. Challenge it. Now, what is the biggest thing since you wrote this book for children, what's the biggest thing you want? If if you know people 10 to 15, 18 are listening, even younger.

I want them to know they're not broken. I want them to know that. That the trouble they're having right now is twofold. It's because they haven't learned to use their brain in the way that works for them. And the second reason is because they're not allowed to. Right. It's hard to use the brain the way you want when you're being told to show your work and you're being told to sit here and you're being told to do that. But here's the thing that they don't tell you in school. That doesn't last. Right? When you get into school, you're going to have an opportunity to do whatever you want, and you're going to have an opportunity to make mistakes. You have an opportunity to succeed. You have to believe in yourself more. You have to shed the, The, The. The feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome that, that have been built into you over the past 15 years and start again. The easiest way to do that, and it's hard, but the easiest, the easiest, hardest. The hardest, easiest way to do that is to stop caring about what other people think. You know, my daughter, my girlfriend, and my parents pretty much are the four people whose opinions matter to me in that order. You know, I don't need.

Damn.

That's like, oh, no. Someone on Twitter didn't like what I'm doing. I'm. I'm. I'm crushed. My day's over. Who gives a. Who cares?

I love it. I love it. Do you. I have a. Two more questions, and I know you got to go. I. You're not going to like this question, but I got to ask it. I do think that women are not men in skirts. We're different neurobiologically and men socially and culturally. Do you see that women struggle more with what society is saying when they're neurodiverse than men?

I will say that I've seen it, and that's all I'll say, because I'm not a woman. And it is. I am not qualified to answer that. I, I have seen that women suffer the same and differently from what we go, from what men go through, but I would not have the temerity to tell you what those ways are because I'm not a woman. I can defer you to countless friends of mine who are female, who identify as female, who will tell you, give you much better and more profound answers than I ever could, because again, that's just not. My struggle is different.

Thank you for saying that so eloquently. And finally, for all parents and authority figures and teachers, what do you want them to do differently now?

I want parents to realize that their children are not broken, that they're gifted. They just need to learn how to. They've been gifted with this ridiculously expensive, fast race car, but all their lives, the parents have been making them drive it like it's a Honda Accord, which is a fine car, but you usually have to slam the accelerator down, the Honda Accord to get onto the highway and merge to speed. If you slam the accelerator down in a Lamborghini Countach 5000s to get on the highway and get up to speed, you're going 200 miles an hour. You're going to crash into a tree. So understand that you're driving a very, very fast. These kids driving a very, very fast brain. Their brakes aren't that great yet. They need to learn how to drive that car better. Once they take lessons, they'll be a race car driver and there'll be nothing they can't do.

And where do they get those lessons again?

Therapists. I. I have a. My daughter's school has what they call a feelings doctor, which is a child psychologist on staff. And it is. That woman is a godsend to these kids. Wow. You know, these are kids who lived. They lived in New York City through Covet, Right? This woman is a godsend. It's. It's. There's absolutely nothing wrong with therapy. I have been in therapies probably since age 12. I'm a huge fan of IS. It is. You can't even begin to explain what talking to someone who's there to listen can do for you. Understand yourself. Right? Understand why you feel the way you feel after certain things. Why do you feel so great after exercise? Right. Why do you feel awesome after a run or a biker? That's called dopamine. And if your body's not producing enough of it, that's an amazing feeling. Understand also that those amazing feelings can also come from doing bad things. And you have to understand where that line is. Right? The chemical release between exercising for two hours on a bike, a really hard bike ride, and doing two lines of cocaine is very, very similar. The difference is that one of them is artificial and fades a lot quicker and has a lot more negative connotations with it. The other one is natural. Is your body producing it? That's the one you want.

Peter, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you. What a. What A gift you are. Where do people get your books? Where do they go?

Where?

And boy, another time you'll tell us what your futurist work is all about. But we don't have that time. Where do we send.

All my books are available anywhere. You can get them on Amazon. You can get them at Barnes and Noble anywhere you buy books, including the Boy with Faster Brain. They're all available anywhere. My entire world is at Peter Shankman on all the socials. You. I welcome it. I look Forward to communicating. Petersenkman.com is my email. I answer all my emails. And yeah, reach out anytime. Happy to do it.

Thank you so much for coming on. So inspiring. What a gift. All right people, you better damn well have questions here. I hope and that this spurred you to love yourself more for every reason that you're different. For every reason that you're different. Because those are gifts. But I love Peter that you say, but we do have to do the work to access the benefit and that's the piece I think people struggle with. I hope you will reach out to Peter, to me, any questions you have. I hope it inspires you and makes you realize you're gifted and we need your gifts. Thank you for being here again, Peter, and thanks everybody. Have a wonderful few weeks and we will see you next time. Hey folks, Kathy here. Are you ready for a big positive shift in how you're working and what you're capable of achieving in your career? Let's make that happen for you. While you might know me best as a podcast host and writer, a key focus in my work is helping women achieve greater success in their work. In my career and leadership breakthrough one on one coaching program, I help women get what they want most, which includes more confidence, impact, advancement, financial reward and fulfillment. And I also help them achieve their most exciting visions for the future. In the past 16 years, I've worked with over 20,000 women across six continents. And before that I served as a therapist and before that I was a corporate VP managing multimillion dollar budgets and global initiatives. I leverage all of that experience to help women build a new chapter where they can reach their highest and happiest potential doing work they love. Check out Kathy Caprino.com CareerBreakthrough and I hope you'll register now. I'd love to support you. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out findinggrave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of finding grave.