YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashton Applewhite

lines on the record: 66
first: 2019-04-01
most recent: 2019-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“About ageism in all these different domains, in your identity, in your sexuality, in the workforce, in health care, how it affects our end-of-life discourse. My favorite chapter is called the independence trap. When I rule the world, I'm going to erase all the times independence occurs in this discourse because no one is ever independent. And we live in a society where it's, I think it's especially American, you know, that the lone cowboy, the dude who doesn't ask for help ever. We all need help all the way along.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's a big topic, obviously. I wrote it, started writing it out here in Oakland, actually, at my friend's house and just put on a post-it or a postcard or an index card, you know, every smart idea I had come across and tried to organize it. So, you know, there's an introduction that explains how I came to understand it. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was that we really, that ageism is built deeply into our social and capitalist system and that it's undoing it is going to require political upheaval. No one gives up power without a struggle. I think we see that from the backlash against the Me Too movement, you know, with the obvious example of the appointment to the Supreme Court of someone with a record hostile to women's rights. And so I go on to explain what ageism is and how it came to be. And then I talk.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't do for sure. They don't. And we make really super deprecating jokes about ourselves. So the first, most difficult step is to look at our own age bias. We are all ageist, I think, and say ageist stuff. You know, young people forget something and I'm like, have they can't remember anything either? But once we start to see bias, then you start to see it everywhere. And that is really liberating. That's like a genie coming out of the bottle because once you start to see it in society, you realize, oh, this is around me. It's built into the world. It's reinforced. And we can, again, come together and do something about it.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a long way to go. A lot of people say ageism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. I used to be one of them. I don't say that anymore because we still have so far to go on so many prejudices. But this is a new idea.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why should aging be something to fail at? Right, we need to come together, we need to compare notes, and we need to see that the way aging is socially constructed, which means sort of how we make up our idea of it, you know, can change and needs to change just the way our view of what women were capable of in society has radically changed in the last 50 years.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a manifesto is a call for social action because we really need a broad-based grassroots movement. I think the best analogy is the women's movement, which was catalyzed by consciousness raising, right? Women came together and realized that what they'd been thinking of as personal problems, you know, not getting hired or getting harassed were widely shared political problems. And that's what we need to do around aging too, because we're really talking about the place of older people in society compared to the role of women. Although I do want to point out ageism affects younger people too. Any judgment about people on the basis of age. So we think the way it is now, we think if we can't open the damn bottle or there's no railing or we made the tragic mistake of somehow allowing wrinkles to develop that we failed.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Idea of sex is what it was at 20, especially for men for obvious reasons, you're going to be disappointed. But, you know, when it changes, and I'm not saying these changes are easy, but if you can accept a more whole body, slower, more playful version of sex, which is typically better sex for women, then you can continue to have satisfying sex for as long as you want to.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The physical decline is inevitable. Some part of your body is going to fall apart, but one thing tech has brought us is they call them age suits. You put them on and they weight down your feet and they blur your vision and they alter your balance. Those are deceptive because that there is no one to whom all of those things happen, right? They use those to sell long-term care insurance. You better buy up now before all these things happen. Again, it's not that the fears aren't real. Some part of your body is going to fail you. But just about everyone can continue to do the things that matter the most to them or some version of it. If your identity hinges on skiing black diamonds, you know, you may have to give that up. If you ski into a tree, you may have to give it up entirely, but you probably can't keep skiing. You know, same with sex.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss, and these become very damaging, self-fulfilling prophecies. If you can't remember the name of the movie and your thoughts go instantly to, oh, crap, I'm getting Alzheimer's rather than, you know, this is annoying, but I'm going to remember that name in five minutes. And it's not a sign of incipient dementia. We respond very differently. And those stereotypes damage our health and damage our perception, our place in the world. So it's cognitive.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do this. So you were scared yourself of this very thing you'd been taught to be scared of. Right. Right. I mean, I was. And what were your fears? What were your actual fears? Well, I would say probably my biggest fear was of cognitive decline. Right. Can't remember stuff. Yeah, CRS. Can't remember shit. About 20% of the population escapes cognitive decline entirely. We all know some of those really sharp 90-year-olds. Most of the rest of us are going to end up in the middle with some loss of speed and short thing in the memory where you can't remember the name of the movie you saw, but that's as far as it goes. It's not that Alzheimer's isn't terrifying. It's not that it's not a big public health issue, but no one talks about the fact that Alzheimer's rates are dropping fast.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where does it come from? I think it comes from. And is it different in other parts of the world? It comes from, you know, a hyper capitalist society. No one makes money off satisfaction. We see that from the body acceptance movement, right? If you look down at your fat's thumb, I can say I'm good with this. There's a lot of diet places that don't make money. It also comes from pop culture from which older people are almost completely missing, this, you know, fetishization of the young, the thin, and the blonde. And of course, we export pop culture and tech, you know, we're dead center in tech, which is also a very, very youthful ethos with this idea that older people, you know, can't use technology, can't learn new things, not one of those stereotypes is true. And when you have, when you layer that stuff on, when you're doing this, you know, it is part of culture, but how do you then begin to turn it around? You would say you start.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And where does that come from in our society, the idea? I mean, it's not. Eskimos and ice flows, but where does it actually?”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And experience, et cetera, et cetera. So I want to know why the narrative is in place. Why is the narrative entirely one of decline? Well, put simply, if aging is framed as a problem, we can be persuaded to buy stuff to fix it or stop it, air quotes around that. And if aging, if the natural physical changes and cognitive changes that accompany aging, physical changes are inevitable, cognitive or not, if they're framed as disease, pathologized, then we can be persuaded to buy stuff to fix it or cure it. And aging is not a disease, otherwise living would be a disease. But you can't make money off satisfaction. So there's a multi-billion dollar anti-aging skincare industry, a trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry that says, oh, if you can't remember the name of that movie, you saw you have mild cognitive impairment and you better buy this game or take this drug.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To get into Silicon Valley because it sort of the young eats its old here, essentially, but not just people, but companies and everything else. So let's talk a little bit about what the predominant view is right now and why it is that way. Well, the predominant view, I would say, is that aging and by, you know, aging is not just something annoying old people and parents do. It is a process we embark on the day we're born. But that somewhere, really young, I mean, in Silicon Valley, you know, guys, skilled white men in their 30s are getting Botox and hair plugged before key interviews. But we'll get into that. But to talk about what the narrative is right now. The narrative, I think, is just that it is one of loss. Whereas if you, you know, sit up and look around at the older people around you, I have never met anyone who actually wants to be any younger, right? Because we know that our years are what make us us. We know that age brings us confidence.”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Assumed it would be like to be really old, was way off base or not nuanced enough or just flat out wrong. So I became obsessed with the question of why so few people know these things. So why did you become scared? I mean, it's societally scary, but that's why I think that I am not a Pollyanna about aging. There are real things to worry about, but there are only two inevitable bad things about getting older. People you've known all your life are going to die, and some part of your body is going to fall apart, but not all your body, right? And not all your friends. And we never hear the other side of the story. Right. So I was deeply skeptical going in, but all these positive data points, I've started calling them realistic view of aging, not even a positive view of aging as a fact-based counterpoint to the predominant narrative of aging of loss and decline alone. So let's talk about the predominant narrative that exists. Now, I do want to”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in my spare time, I talked. A big problem here in Silicon Valley, and now she's the author of a new book called The Chair Rocks, a Manifesto Against Agism. Ashton, welcome to Reco Decode. Thank you. So how did you get to this topic? Let's talk a little bit about your background and how you moved to doing this. And I want to understand what the chair rocks. You're talking about a rocking chair, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a spoof on that, really. Got it. So talk a little bit about your background, how you got to be in this area. Well, my background has never made any sense. I back into everything, but I started thinking about this because I was afraid of getting old about 12 years ago when I was 55. All right. And if you had told me then that I would become fascinated by aging, I would have said, why do I want to spend my time thinking about something so sad and depressing? What happened was I started looking into longevity and realized in about two seconds how much of what I simply”
2019-04-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ashton Applewhite · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT