Scott Fulton is a planner. He believes in the merits of planning, especially when it comes to planning for one’s later years around financial assets and health. Scott’s an expert on aging, too; he’s the past president of the National Aging In Place Council where he studied the lives of millions of older Americans.

That work has helped shape a strategy that Scott lectures on, gives talks about, and has now published.

His knowledge, love of data and his expertise on aging have been combined into a recent book titled Whealthspan: More Years, More Moments, More Money.

Scott is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Where does ageism begin? In the home? In the workplace? In the media?

Well, the simple and not entirely flippant answer is that ageism begins in all those places.

But its actual genesis is within the minds of each of us.

Hermetic philosophy puts it succinctly: “As within, so without.” Everything that we experience – everything – began as an idea and an idea is a thought.

So, what we think repeatedly – or worse, what we’re taught to think – we experience or encounter in our physical, everyday lives.

Such as ageism.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, is Ashton Applewhite who has been called America’s activist against ageism by such noteworthy organizations as The New York Times, New Yorker, and the American Society on Aging. She has been fighting the ageist fight since 2005 through her book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and her blog of the same name. She holds public lectures and hosts Ted Talks.

In short, she uses every available weapon in her war against the limiting beliefs around being older.

A Final Note: Around the 27th of December, I came down with a late Christmas gift in the form of a chest cold which resulted in me “sounding like Tron”, as my partner, Dave Grein told me. I thought I was more like James Earl Jones… Apologies in advance!

It was back in January 2024 that my creative partner, Dave Grein, and I began to explore an idea for a podcast and content series on Substack dealing with “getting old.” Dave came up with the name –The Art 2 Aging – along with our logo.

We got to work. I booked guests, conducted the interviews and Dave did the production work to make each episode sound great. We lined up enough content that we could generate at least a dozen episodes before we launched in mid-May of this year.

To date, we have 30 episodes that have been downloaded thousands of times just from Substack alone.

We’ve met so many inspiring people who have spoken about aging from just about every angle: from heart health to spiritual health; from aging in place to ageism in the workplace. So we want to provide you with a taste of some of the best interviews we’ve done so far as we wrap up the year.

It’s our way of signing off 2024 and looking forward to more (much more) in 2025.

A huge thanks to our subscribers, paid and otherwise. You have embraced our efforts and voted with thumbs up on our content!

Happy Holidays, everyone! See you next year!