Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Welcome to the Age of Aging, a podcast about living well with an aging brain, produced by the Penn Memory center. I'm Jake Johnson.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: And I'm Terrence Casey. Well, Jake, we finished season one. How are you feeling?
[00:00:24] Speaker A: I'm feeling good. I think it was really a really fun experience to put all of those episodes together. It's been great just seeing people react to it and talking about it and listening to it. It's been so long working on it, so it's super rewarding.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: When we were starting planning for season one, we had these grand visions of what we could do with it, and I think one of the best pieces of advice we got was to plan it out as a four episode season and not try to plan out a podcast that would run in perpetuity. Anything stand out to you? Any stories that were particularly compelling from those first four episodes?
[00:01:03] Speaker A: I definitely have my favorites. I really enjoyed all of the stories that we did. I felt like all of them really fit together really nicely. I would say, listening back to it again, I really loved going to that memory cafe and talking with caregivers and people that regularly attend. It felt special to me to put that one together, and I really liked the piece we did on the poet Alexandra Martinez. I just thought that that one was a little bit more different than the other ones in terms of its style, and we were kind of trying some different things in terms of editing with that one and the music, I think that sounded really great. One thing I kind of want to ask you is I came into this a little bit late in the game, and you and the communications team had a list of ideas for this season. How does it feel to actually see it come out and be fully realized?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: It feels like we've finished a marathon. I think you're right. We had been working through the idea of this podcast for a couple of years, and some of the story ideas are from even beyond that. The Socrates study that we mentioned was from early on in my tenure at the Penn Memory center, and now I've been here for almost a decade, and so it's a relief to bring back important stories in a new format and a new medium. So what kind of response have you been getting? I imagine your coworkers, friends, and family now know you as the producer of the age of aging. What kind of feedback have they been giving you?
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I actually got a comment from somebody that works within the aging field that they really connected with stories that had a good balance between the kind of personal experience of participants and patients, as well as the kind of nerdier in the weeds details about Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And I really agreed with that. I think those were the stories that really stood out to me this season, and it's kind of inspired me to bring more of that balance as we go forward, because I think that that is really the heart of this podcast and of the memory center, is the balance between the caregivers and their loved ones and the participants in the study, the people that are a part of this, and the actual, like science, the treatments, the diagnostics, all of these kind of technical things.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: That gets to some of the lessons that we've learned over the last decade of doing communications work with an aging audience is that, for one, we refer to the caregivers and spouses of our patients and research participants as the lay community. And sometimes there's a negative connotation with that, that these are people who don't know as much as the enlightened researchers. But truthfully, a lot of caregivers are desperately seeking out information, and they're reading everything they can find, and they are constantly learning. And so we've pivoted to referring to this audience as they educated lay because they may not have a medical degree, but this is a very informed group. And yet, one standard of storytelling that we found is they still receive stories best when they can see themselves as a character in it. And so I was really pleased to get feedback like this and see that this is true. We never intended for the age of aging to be science textbook. I'm thinking more campfire than lab space, if you will.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, it's a topic that, as we've mentioned before, it impacts so many people. Everybody has a story about dementia or aging, all of this stuff. Everybody has a relationship to it. So I think the more we can talk about that and tell those kinds of stories, I think the better.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: So that's a wrap on season one. Obviously, if you haven't heard any of those episodes yet, we encourage you to go back into your feed and listen to them. You don't have to listen to them in order. The stories are, they all work independent of one another. But some of the chatter that we get about the progression of the podcast will make more sense if you start with episode one. So what can we expect for season two?
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah, so for season two, we wanted to make a few adjustments to the structure of the age of aging. And then one major one is that we want to cover one story and episode, so we'll still have our kind of chatter and reaction and talking about it. But instead of three to four different segments per episode, there will only be one. And I think what we're hoping to accomplish with this is to spend a little bit more time on each story and maybe flesh it out a little bit more, try and get up to as high a quality as we, as we can going forward, and make sure that we get that kind of balance of the human and the scientific right. So that's the major change for season two that we're thinking of in terms of how long we'll be. There will be six episodes in season two, and then we'll pick up the show with season three in January of 2025.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Do you want to give any hints or teases to what people might be able to expect in the next few months?
[00:06:30] Speaker A: It's been really fun to throw around ideas and see who we can talk to for season two. So one thing that we really wanted to make sure we covered were the new Alzheimer's drugs, the anti amyloid therapies, lecanumab and danamab. We wanted to make sure that we explain them, talk to somebody at the memory center about them. So there will be an episode on that. There's obviously a huge election happening this fall, so we definitely wanted to do an episode about voting and dementia and aging. And then actually, the largest Alzheimer's conference in the world, hosted by the Alzheimer's association, was held in Philadelphia this year. So we got to talk to a lot of researchers, hear a lot of lectures and interesting things going on in the world of Alzheimer's disease research.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: So we hadn't intended to talk about anti amyloid therapies again so soon. One of our season one episodes focused on the approval of lacanumab, marketed as Lekembe. But while we were making season one, the FDA approved a second anti amyloid therapy. And when we've surveyed our audience before from the Penn Memory center, we've known that developing treatments for Alzheimer's disease is a top priority of our listeners and our readers. So we knew we would have to address that one pretty quickly. I was fortunate enough to get to go to AAIC this year. Last year, the conference was in Amsterdam. This year, it was about a four minute subway ride across the city of Philadelphia, so travel costs were low. And it was fascinating to see not just the state of Alzheimers research across the globe, but how much of a role the University of Pennsylvania played there so well. Definitely talk about some specific highlights from that, but well integrate some of the lessons learned from that conference until AIC 25 because there were so many different topics that go so far beyond Alzheimers disease and well into this base that we constantly talk about, which is living well with an aging brain. So how long do we have to wait until season two?
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Fortunately, not super long. Season two will be starting on the regular schedule two weeks from now. It'll also release every other week, so stay tuned. Make sure you're following the age of aging on Spotify or Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts to make sure that you get notified when it is released.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: And in the meantime, please also rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. This really helps us know where we could do better, and you could certainly reach out to us at any time. Our contact information is in the show notes. And hopefully if you've learned anything from today, it's that we listen to feedback from friends, listeners and colleagues and integrate those changes into our next season.
