A Bit of Optimism - How to Live to 100 with Blue Zones explorer Dan Buettner

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Most of us would count ourselves lucky to live to age 80. And yet, there are places on Earth where people regularly live to 100, suffer virtually no chronic disease, and live life with a sense of purpose. These "Blue Zones" are the focus of Dan Buettner's work. He's a National Geographic explorer, an author, and a documentarian. He spent years traveling and studying the Blue Zones to understand why these 5 places on Earth produce some of the happiest, and longest-lived, people in the world. Dan and I discuss why happiness is the key to longevity, creating Blue Zones in our own lives, and how a longer life can begin with simply rearranging your kitchen.This...is A Bit of Optimism.For more on Dan Buettner and his work, check out:his Netflix documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zonesor bluezones.com 

If you've seen the Netflix documentary about the secrets of the Blue Zones, then you know Dan Buettner's work. Dan was an explorer with National Geographic, where, for years, he set out to uncover the mysteries of the world, which is how he first discovered what we now know as Blue Zones, these five places in the world where the people who live there regularly outlive Americans by 10 to 12 years. They suffer a fraction of the chronic diseases we do and, most importantly, live happier lives. Dan and I discussed how we can take the things he learned about blue zones and apply them in our own lives, right here, right now. That we can apply these principles to our corporate cultures and our home lives.

It can even impact how we organize our kitchens, all to help us live longer and much happier lives. This is a bit of optimism. So I'll just jump right in. I live in Los Angeles where people are obsessed with their health. They exercise, they hire nutritionists, they eat right, they take every supplement. And yet these people who live in the blue zones live longer, live happier. It seems like the lives that they live are just common sense. If I had no pressures on me, that's how I'd want to live my life. I'd want to eat with my friends. I'd want to walk places.

I'd want to have a glass of wine with my meals. Why is it that the work is so profound when it seems like common sense? Well, first of all, it's not at all common sense. You know, the Blue Z zones, just for reference point, Okinawa, Japan, longest lived women, highlands of Sardinia, longest lived men, the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, lowest rate of middle age mortality in the world, Ikaria, Greece, eight years longer life expectancy in Americans with virtually no dementia, and then the United States among the Seventh Day Adventists.

76% of Americans don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day. Until I wrote Blue Zones, nobody understood that there was a connection between your social network and your longevity. You know, we now know that if you're lonely, it shaves eight years off life expectancy. Nobody was making a connection between having a sense of purpose and longevity. And we know that if you can articulate your sense of purpose, it's worth about seven years. Populations that are actually achieving this extra 10 years of life expectancy, the big insight that we're largely missing is that longevity ensues. It's not successfully pursued.

We spend well over $150 billion a year pursuing health, which is we find the right diet program, we find the right exercise program, the right supplement, maybe throw in some longevity hacks, run down to Costa Rica for some stem cells. And that's how we're going to live a long time. That's common sense in America. But what's uncommon sense is this notion of instead of trying to change our behavior, we change our environment and thereby engineer our unconscious decisions over the long run. and thereby engineer our unconscious decisions over the long run. Oh, I love that. And I guess the parts that get left out, you know, I know the work of some of the longevity experts. And the thing that I always find astonishing, and you touched on this, the two things that they rarely, if ever, talk about is friends and purpose. You know, food,

sure. You know, exercise, sure. But friends and purpose, to your point, are not common sense in America, but are common sense in other places. Because, you know, why, Simon? Because you can't make money off of them. They're not easily distilled into a pill or a tablet or something marketers can make money off of. That's why it's not in our vernacular. And, you know, the boldface names, I'm sure we're both thinking about. Nobody's going to refute that. But it's not sexy. But the reality is, in a very evidence-based way, they're far more powerful at delivering a higher life expectancy than any pill or supplement or genetic intervention or stem cell right now. Things may change. And probably in our lifetime, we'll probably see the change, but not now. I mean, I've talked about this before, which is there's a paradox to being human, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups. You know, you are you, but you're also a son, a friend, a brother, a father, a member of a team, a member of a church, a member of a company. a brother, a father, a member of a team, a member of a church, a member of a company.

And these things very often operate in conflict, which is I'm forced to make sometimes small, sometimes big decisions. Do I put myself first at the expense of the group or do I put the group first at the expense of me? And there's entire schools of thought on one side of the aisle and the other, but the answer is you're both right and you're both wrong. It's a paradox. And the reason I think this is important is, and this is where I think your work is the antidote, which is if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, Maslow got it wrong because, you know, the most basic thing, he put food and shelter and he put relationships third on the tiers, third up from the bottom. And yet I've never heard of anyone dying by suicide from being hungry. I've heard of them dying by suicide from being lonely. The mistake he made, he's only considered us as individuals. He didn't think of us as members

of groups. And the reason I think your work is profound is a lot of these diets and exercise things and all these longevity experts is they think of us as individuals. They're making the same mistake as Maslow. And your work is contextualized, which is it considers the individual, but it also considers that we're members of groups. And that's an essential part to being human. That's right. It's our environment that largely determines our health.

Our social network is our social environment. There's our built environment, our work environment, our food environment, our social environment. And the Blue Zones approach would be to have you engineering, or at least curating. Some of those social networks you point out, you can't do anything about. You can't choose your parents, for example. Yeah, your parents, your family's your family. But you can choose to hang out with people whose idea of recreation is pickleball or gardening or biking or friends whose idea of recreation is going down to the bar and doing shots or going to the backyard and barbecuing wieners and hamburgers.

And we know that the health behaviors are measurably contagious. we know that the health behaviors are measurably contagious. So I would argue probably the most powerful thing you can do to add good years to your life is to recurate those social circles that you have control over. You have control over what job you take. You have a control over who your leisure friends are. You have control over who your best friends, who you spend the most time with are. And making those adjustments will your best friends are, who you spend the most time with. And making those adjustments will have profound and lasting impacts on how long you'll live and how healthy you'll be. And by the way, also how happy you are. You went across the entire world, all these very, very different cultures. And I'm curious what the connection was, what the pattern was, regardless

of where you were, what mealtime was like, like who prepared it, how many people at the table, you know, what kind of conversations were they having? Like what was an average mealtime like? What did they all have in common? So first the meta pattern, they all tend to eat enormous breakfast, medium size or large lunches and little or no dinner. They tend to eat all their food in about a 10-hour window, but breakfast will usually be a little bit more hairy. You know, they're going out to the field or shepherds, and that's not necessarily a family dinner. Midday is almost always a family dinner. They sit down. Interestingly, and I think this is more important than you think, is people will articulate some gratitude for their meal. There'll be some verbal punctuation between the busy day and, okay, now we're going to eat. And by the way,

thank you for this food. We appreciate this food. So you get a chance to slow down a little bit, lower that cortisol so you have better digestion. There's never a screen in the kitchen. Nobody's watching, eating to their favorite TV show or scrolling as they eat. They tend to eat as a family. That's actually a very big component, even if it's a smaller meal. At least some, if not all, family members will be together. So it provides a connection point. It's almost always women who are the keepers of the diet, the food tradition. So they're doing the cooking. Men are often doing the gardening. So men are bringing the food in,

women are cooking it. They have time-honored recipes. So until probably the year 2000 or 2005 in all these blue zones, they might have been eating almost the exact same meal that their great, great, great grandparents were eating. Those recipes had evolved over time to not only make the best use of the available food, which by the way, is almost always peasant food, very low on the food chain. But also, I argue that they evolved in taste. You know, it's the tastiest recipes that move get carried forward into the next generation. So you have all this beautiful, natural selection. So the food at the dinner table is almost always, you know, I like to say maniacally delicious or evolutionarily delicious. And I think that's one of the reasons that the whole

plant-based food in the Blue Zones is so hyper palatable. How did you get into this? How did you start studying this? Well, Simon, my previous business, I had an exploration business and I had a whole staff. I had 14 people on staff, scientists and technologists and videographers and photographers. And twice a year, we went out and solved some mystery. Usually, they were ancient mysteries. Why the Maya civilization collapsed? Did Marco Polo go to China? Our last expedition before I sold it was one to Okinawa. And we stumbled upon a World Health Organization report that showed that Okinawa, Japan, was producing the longest lived human beings in the history of the world. And it also was especially women, about 30 times more female centenarians among a cohort of women over age 60.

And I said, aha, this is a good mystery. But that gave me the idea. National Institutes on Aging gave me the funding to hire the demographers and National Geographic, you know, back in the golden days of National Geographic, they gave me the cover story assignment, which in the day, you know, they give you a quarter million dollar budget and nine months to do one story. But my real interest and when it comes to writing is finding the statistically most extraordinary populations and then distilling their wisdom. I've also done two books and a cover story for National Geographic on happiness, which took the similar approach, which is really a data-backed approach. What do statistics tell us about living longer, being happier, rather than sort of the

semi-anecdotal positive psychology? But, you know, I've iterated. I mean, I had a company, 200 employees that we took the insights from Blue Zones. And the core insight was don't try to change your behavior, change your environment. And today we've been hired by 70 cities, funded by insurance companies to lower the BMI, or basically the obesity rates of entire cities, using this sort of golden insight that I picked up from Blue Zones. That's so interesting. So that's important that it is repeatable. But you know, the way you talk about the work, which is, it's very similar to the work that I do in sort of corporate culture, which is the culture, the environment will drive the behavior, not the other way around. The leader set the environment, and you'll get the behavior of the environment.

Get the environment right, get the context and the conditions right, and the behavior will follow almost, I guess, instinctively, right? Is that true? You're one of the few people I've ever met who gets it. That's exactly right. First of all, you change an environment. It is long-term, you know, it's not like a behavior change, which has a half-life of about a month. But secondly, the big idea is people's unconscious choices. Yeah. Because it's very hard for people to remember to do something. It requires discipline. It requires presence of mind. You know, our brains

are wired for novelty. We like new shit, you know, and doing the same old thing, even though it's healthy as gets boring. But if we can engineer our environment so that the unconscious choices are good for productivity, are good for health, are good for well-being, all you have to do is close and play. You do that for employees. You can do it for citizens. You can do it for members of your household. That's the big idea. It's harder than all these sort of Fitbits and consultants and diets. It's harder to make money off of, but in every case, it will outperform in the long run. Everybody's got a magic bullet, right? And to your point, which is often there's a business sitting underneath that magic bullet,

whether it's some supplement or some exercise regime or some diet or some whatever it is, there's all these silver bullets. And no one of the things that you talk about in Blue Zones will work. It's the environment that allow those things to thrive in concert, that they thrive naturally. Those people that you met, they don't think about these things. It just happens. And I think the thing that's most interesting about your work is that it is repeatable. And the experiments that you're doing in the United States, I know some of the numbers, you obviously can fill them in.

But when you started in Albert Lee, this town in, where is it, Minnesota? Yes. You know, as an experiment to see if you could make your own blue zone, and that was going on 14 years now, is that right? Yes. The numbers are astonishing in terms of cessation and smoking, huge loss of weight, people being out active, walking their kids to school. I mean, you created these habits, these environmental things. Is there enough data yet to know if they will actually live longer? Well, you can predict that. You'd have to follow them against the control for 50 years to know that for sure. But to the extent that we know that

eating healthy and moving more and socializing more contribute to higher life expectancy, that's not in dispute. The city reported a 30% drop in healthcare costs too, which is why. But today, when we do it now, we work in Blue Zone project cities now, and we have them in Fort Worth, Texas and Scottsdale, Arizona, Jacksonville, Florida, to name a few. We hire Gallup to come in and measure BMI at the population level, life satisfaction, vegetable intake, physical activity levels, and we get a baseline. And then you use the term magic bullet or silver bullet. We call it silver buckshot. So we can unleash about 70 or 80 nudges or defaults at the population level. None of them are going to blow your socks off. They might have a quarter of a percent impact at the population level over time. But if we unleash 80 and we get 50 of them working, the collective result is always measurable.

Every city we've ever been in, we've seen the BMI of that city go down against control. And it never fails. Whereas a silver bullet may or may not work. And usually a silver bullet works for a certain subset demographic. We unleash our silver buckshot at the population level. There's a very well-famous in academic circle epidemiologist named Jeffrey Rose. And his Rose's theorem shows that if you aim an intervention at the entire population, you get a much better result than an intervention aimed at the people at higher risk. I mean, that makes sense, right? I mean, even evolution happens at a population level. So it makes sense that these things would have a benefit. I mean, we're social animals, things happen in populations. Did you measure other some of asymmetrical benefits as well? Did you notice lower divorce rates? Did you notice lower addiction rates?

You know, these things that are associated with higher levels of sociability, you know, that we get along with people better, you know, maybe quality of relationships between children and their parents, screen time addiction. Were you able to measure any of those things as well, some of the social benefits? I think the big Uber metric we use is Gallup uses a term they referred to it as thriving. And that's measured by thinking of your life as a whole on a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life today? And then they ask the same question and ask how satisfied do you think you'll be with your life in five years? And if the second number is higher, they say that's the thriving score.

So we always have higher thriving scores. In other words, people believe their lives are on the upswing at a greater numbers or greater percentages when we go in. But here's the thing. These things, these projects are expensive. We usually have to hire 20 or 30 people and they work, you know, they're full-time employees for five years. So you can imagine how much it costs. The numbers that people are always most interested are economic numbers. They want to know our healthcare costs are going down. And the other number we've been able to capture is in our blue zone cities, property values go up and also the tax base goes up. And that's usually where the rubber hits the road in America. You know, people kind of care about health, but what they really care about is economics. Fort Worth, Texas, for example, we saw about a 2% drop in BMI over the five year against Texas controls or against the rest of Texas. But the

number that really kept them on the program is Gallup reported out we're saving them about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in health care costs, our project. And that's where people decide or cities decide, yes, we're going to do this or we're not going to do this. Let's take it down a few thousand feet, right? Let's not talk about cities implementing. Let's talk about families implementing. How many days a week should we be sitting down with the family for dinner and having family dinner, old school, no TVs in the room? There's good research that shows that families who eat together, their nutrition is better. They consume less sodas, they consume higher quality, fewer calories when they're eating with the family as opposed to eating by themselves or with, you

know, one hand on the steering wheel. But the Blue Zone approach would say, in your kitchen, there's good research that shows if this Cornell Food Lab, but if you take your toaster off of your kitchen counter, you'll weigh three to four pounds less after two years compared with your counterpart that keeps a toaster on your counter. I like to joke we're all on a seafood diet. compared with your counterpart that keeps a toaster on your counter. You know, I like to joke we're all on a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if we're prompted by a toaster every time we walked into our kitchen,

you know, typically what goes into toasters and comes out of toasters isn't all that healthy. Putting a fruit bowl, a really nice fruit bowl in the middle of your kitchen, having a junk food drawer instead of, you know, putting your chips, a clip on your chips. All that makes a measurable difference in how much you eat over the course of the day. So, you know, I actually wrote a book called The Blue Zone Challenge where I aggregated all the available research on how to set up your kitchen, your bedroom, your home, your social circle, your workplace, takes a few weeks, but then you can turn your brain off because basically behavioral economics or these nudges will force you to consume 150 fewer calories a day, to move an extra 100 calories a day or 100 calories or so. And over time, that makes a vast difference on how much you weigh and how much physical activity you get. I love this, how simple

it is, right? No discipline required. Because as you said, if the toaster's on the counter, you walk into the kitchen, you're like, oh, I'll have a piece of toast. I'll have a Pop-Tart, whatever, whatever you put in a toaster. And if you simply hide the toaster, the impulse to have a piece of toast, because you're just not reminded of it, or if you have this, you can have the snacks, but if they're hidden, you know, you're less likely to have the impulse because it's, it's just not there. I did what you, what you're suggesting by accident, which is I put all of my, my snacks, my chips used to be in a standard cupboard that I'd open on a regular basis. And so I'd always just put my hand in, have a few bites,

and then close it up as I was getting something else. And I just decided to reorganize my kitchen. I, you know, it wasn't a blue zone thing. And all of my snacks went into the bottom drawer that you have to bend down to get to. i snack so much less i never open it that's exactly right and they're by cornell food lab is actually i can't cite the numbers but they have a statistically significant difference in the amount of junk food consumed when you put it either down or up where you have to reach or around the corner in a pantry the worst thing you can do is have it out in the open and it makes a big difference so rather than hound people or guilt people or shame them whatever or give them a free t-shirt

for not eating junk food i just as soon show them how to set up their their homes and their workplaces and their lives so uh they're mindlessly doing better, setting them up for success. We're making a very, very simple case here that behavior follows environment. That's right. You don't have to learn some habit-forming thing to stop eating junk food. You simply change your environment and the behavior follows automatically. to stop eating junk food, you simply change your environment and the behavior follows automatically. And if it works for something as compelling as junk food and sugar and salt and fat, you know, those things which are so appealing to us, then it follows that all the other things fall into

place. I love that no discipline is required or little discipline is required. You know, these five blue zones and none of them are people at 50 saying, well, call it on it. I'm going to get on that longevity diet and live another 50 years. They don't have CrossFit. They don't have Fitbits. They don't have yoga classes or Pilates.

They're not calling an 800 number and buying supplements or superfoods or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells. They're just living there. And by the way, they love to party. Some of the legendary parties in the world are on this Greek island of Icaria. But their day-to-day, moment-to-moment decisions, they don't even have to think about, are marginally healthier.

And that deployed over years and decades results manifestly at population level by the way my work is not anecdotal population level data you see very clear fraction of the rate of type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease fraction of the rate of the cancers of the gi tract prostate breast cancer fraction of the rate of dementia and they're the same thing over and over they're not they're not better humans they don't have a better sense of individual Breast cancer, fraction of the rate of dementia. And the same thing over and over. They're not better humans. They don't have a better sense of individual responsibility. It's your responsibility.

You know, like these politicians keep telling, your responsibility to eat healthy. Meanwhile, we live in an ocean of toxic food. You've got to find the healthy food here. In blue zones, the healthy food is the default. You know one thing I would love to do with you one day if we ever have the opportunity? I know you're making blue zone cities and you're recreating your work. I would love to make a blue zone company where we go into a company because your work and my work are exactly the same, which is fix the culture, fix the environment, and all the behavior that you want will show up.

The trust, the innovation, all of it, it shows up as a result. It's not an input, it's an output. And I would love to demonstrate it and change the culture and build a blue zone company. And we'll demonstrate it. We'll show profits and revenues and innovation and trust and churn all of those valuable corporate numbers. We will demonstrate the benefit of a Blue Zone company. I would love to partner with you on that. We already have a Blue Zone certification, but we only offer it in cities where we're actually doing a whole citywide project. I think the two of us putting our heads together would probably double the impact that we have but it's we go

through and we give them 30 evidence-based things they can do to change the designs and the policies so people are unconsciously nudged into moving more eating less and better socializing more and knowing and living their purpose. So we give them points for taking all sugar-sweetened beverages out of vending machines, for changing their break room policies so there's not chips, sodas, packaged sweets there, because a lot of junk food is consumed. And I would add to that, those are the nutritional ones, but I would also say no cell phones in conference rooms. I love that.

Ideally, no computers in conference rooms either, just pens and paper for taking notes. But at the very minimum, not a cell phone in a single meeting. I would say, when you have the company offsite, it doesn't have to be some big formal thing, but have a company family dinner. You can do it once a month. It doesn't matter. Where it's literally a dinner, bring your spouses, bring your family, and we have company dinner. And if the company's too big, do it by team. And these are simple things. And by the way, the point is just be friends with the people you work with. You don't have to like everybody, but you want to find out what their values are. And we build trust that way. There was a social construct in Okinawa that really inspired us.

It's called a moai. It's spelled M-O-A-I, moai. And it's a committed social circle, four or five friends. And they travel through life together. And when things go bad, they support each other. Like if you get a divorce or a parent dies or a child gets sick, the other four jump in, sometimes financially, but at least with social support. And if things go well, you know, you get a raise or there was a good harvest, you share it with your Moai. But one of the things we do in companies is you got to get the company to buy in,

but they allow us to get all the employees or the teams together. And we have this process by which we help them pick out their own Moai. We actually circle them up and we ask them, we throw out 20 questions. And we say before we ask the questions, pay attention to how other people are answering these questions. Because afterwards, we want you to go pick three or four of the people you're going to spend the next 10 weeks with. And then we ask questions like, raise your hand if you've seen a Disney movie in the last three months. The next question is about your vacation. Do you like a staycation, a European vacation, or a hiking trip? The idea is the 20 questions get at people's values and their interests. And then it's very easy then for people to cluster up in groups of

five. And sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're workers, sometimes they're executives. in groups of five. And sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're workers, sometimes they're executives. We try not to have these sort of artificial pecking order things. And then we just challenge them to eat lunch together or walk together for 10 weeks. And I don't know if you're familiar with this Gallup research that showed that the number one determinant of whether or not you like your job is not how much money you get or how much recognition is, do you have a best friend at work? Well, that's not going to happen in many cases unless the employer facilitates it. So we actually do these MOI programs to get people connected. So when they go to work, they have somebody who knows a little bit about their life, who shares maybe their political tendencies or their religions,

and people that you can actually have a meaningful conversation with. Let me change subjects on you slightly, change tacks on you here. Can you tell me something that you were involved in throughout your entire career? You've done some amazing things. You've solved some amazing problems, gone on some amazing adventures. Of all the things you've done, whether it was commercially successful or not, what's one thing you've done in your career that you absolutely loved being a part of and that if all your adventures, if all your experiences, if all your projects were like this one thing, you'd be the happiest person alive. So I call them quests. I got this new idea in 1986. The internet was brand new, or I'm sorry, 1996. The internet was brand new. Satellite technology had just become demilitarized.

The Inmarsats, laptop computers were just invented. And also at the same time, Mayan archaeologists or epigraphers were deciphering the hieroglyphics that gave us a window into the most successful civilization in the Western Hemisphere until about the 10th century. And I was able to be the conductor of an orchestra that came down there with all this new technology and a huge online audience. And I was like Indiana Jones working with all these archaeologists and solving the mystery of the ancient Maya, but largely by crowdsourcing it and doing it for the first time. So that, I mean, as far as being an explorer and doing something novel, that was one of the most exciting periods of my life.

But of all the amazing things you've done, and your Blue Zone work is like literally changing populations, what was it specifically about the Maya exploration that was so compelling that you want to talk about it now? What about it stands out so much more than all the other things you've done? you want to talk about it now. What about it stands out so much more than all the other things you've done? Well, the Maya, experience of the ancient Maya holds a mirror up to our world today, our modern day living. So, you know, America arguably is the greatest civilization on the planet right now. In the year 875, the Maya were the greatest civilization on the planet. They had used technology, mostly agricultural technology, these milpas and alluvial fields and brilliant forms of irrigation. They discerned the value of zero, the length of the solar year to within 17 seconds of the figure we come up with today.

They built the largest pyramids on earth, not in Egypt. They're actually in the Paten jungle. Incredibly complex administration, trade. I mean, they're a great civilization. And they completely collapsed. And they collapsed because they got a little bit lazy. They let their technology replace the disciplines that made them great

in the first place. They let equality go away. Power was concentrated with the elite, 2% of the elite, and the other 98% had a very tough life. The beginning of the collapse was the result of environmental degradation. They exceeded the carrying capacity of their land. They exhausted it. And America's kind of doing the same thing. We're overpopulation. We're seeing the disparity between rich and poor get wider and wider all the time. We have this new sort of environmental issue called global warming. I think most of your listeners will agree that's a real phenomena. And we run the risk of collapse in lots of ways that are very parallel to the Maya. So I was very interested in that.

But then I was working for National Geographic, and I love the notion of this new breed of explorers that weren't just going to the top of Mount Everest or contacting some uncontacted people in the Amazon. We were adding to the body of knowledge. We were using a new form of technology to harness the wisdom of an online audience to solve a socially relevant mystery. And I sat right in the middle of that one. And it wasn't as big a story as I hoped it would be. But it led to basically seven years of solving some more mysteries and a very successful kind of private venture on my part. Amazing. And eventually Blue Zones. And eventually Blue Zones. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory.

Eventually Blue Zones. And eventually Blue Zones. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory. My grandfather buying me a tricycle when I was five years old and doing laps in my front yard. It had a light on it. So I got to go out there at night and do laps in my front yard on my bicycle. My father at age five would take us into the boundary waters. at age five would take us into the boundary waters. And we would canoe through rivers and lakes and portages for weeks at a time and basically live off the land and camp. And that was a very grateful for those happy memories. Of all the great things that you experienced as a

kid, what is it about your grandfather giving you that tricycle that stands out so much? Well, you know, I went on to set three world records for biking across five continents and I can kind of trace it to that gift at age five, you know, but also I had a grant, he used to call me the champ, you know, which is ironic because I sucked at sports. You know, I was like, I've benched for football and baseball. I was the worst kid on the team often. He still called me the champ. And it was that sort of insoluble optimism and encouragement that, you know, that was a real gift in later life because, you know, you have somebody else has confidence in you. It's easier

to have confidence in yourself and go out and try things, not worry too much about the outcome. Yeah. Dan, I think that's your purpose, which is more than our health, you are building in us a sense of confidence that the future is bright, right? I like that. Like your grandfather gave you a bicycle and called you the champ, which I love. You're going on these quests and you're showing us not only what happened in the past, but you're showing us what's possible for us in the future. And as you said, it's not some, you know, you were the worst kid on the team. You weren't an athlete. And yet you went on to, to hold three cycling records. We beat ourselves up more for failing to eat right, failing to

exercise than we do give ourselves credit for the things we get right. And by showing us these blue zones in the environments, you're showing us that with the help of our friends, with the help of our grandfather, with the help of our dads, with the help of somebody else, we can build the confidence to live these wonderful, exciting lives of novelty and exploration, which who doesn't want that? I love that solution. I think that's what you are. You've become your dad taking us on adventures in the woods. You've become your grandfather showing us a new way to see the world and the joy of

going on those adventures. But you sort of like are fulfilling the mission that your dad and grandfather gave to you, which is ultimately what they did was build your confidence. And ultimately what I think your work does for all of us, all of it, your exploration work, your blue zones work, all of it, it is your work is building confidence. I've talked to many people who are, and some of the longevity experts, and they end up making me feel worse about myself, not better. Because I don't, you know, a lot of them are like freaks of nature with their discipline that I don't have. And yours is the only work I've ever come across where I not only feel I can do it, it actually seems, dare I say, easy, which is why I said at the beginning, it seems like such common sense. Like I can have dinner with my friends and then allow whatever

happens happen. I don't have to beat myself up if I want a glass of wine with my friends. I want to have a glass of wine with my friends. And I just, I really, I really love that. You've built our confidence up. And think about the communities in which you went and helped made them healthier. I think the true win there is not that you made them healthier, not that you saved the city money. It's that you build them confidence that they can live the lives they want to live. Yes. And showed them a way to do it that actually works for people. And it's also joyous. So many of these anti-aging or longevity interventions, shooting yourself up with your son's blood or testosterone or metformin, first of all, there's no proof they actually work.

Yeah. And even if they do, in many cases, they're just prolonging a shitty life. The life in blue zones is joyous. They're sitting down with their friends for dinner and they're going to the parties and they live close to the earth and they grow their own food and they make delicious meals. And they know they wake up with a sense of purpose yeah and they walk to their outside in the street and they see their friends this is joyous and they're manifestly simon living 10 years longer than americans do

where did we miss the memo you know instead we spend 4.44 trillion on a healthcare system that has seen American populations' life expectancy drop by two and a half years. And by the way, the rest of the world is recuperating after COVID. But we're just chasing the wrong, we're aiming at the wrong target, I think. I think you're right, which is happiness starts with our friends and the environment of wanting to be with the people we love and all the other things will simply follow. five are the things that make our lives happy. The happiest people in the world are connecting socially about six hours a day of face-to-face conversations. If you're eating seven servings of vegetables a day, you're about 20% happier than the category of people who are eating fewer than three servings of vegetables a day. People who are physically active are happier. servings of vegetables a day. People who are physically active are happier. People who are regular weight are happier. People who can articulate their sense of purpose are significantly

happier. Same things. That is beautiful convergence of happiness and longevity. But the reason we don't hear much about it is nobody can make money off of you. is nobody can make money off of you. The marketers can't sell you the very quick fix solution to it. It's hard to market and make a quick buck. That's why we don't hear much about it. Ozempic, on the other hand, is a billion dollars. But you're talking about something I think that,

you know, in our discussion seems obvious, but in practice is not. Six hours a day of face-to-face conversation. I mean, that's the average most people have of screen time, right? Yeah. I mean, it does require a little bit of effort. Most things that make us happy and help us live longer require a little bit of effort. It takes more effort to go out and meet a friend than it does to text them or direct message them on Instagram. It takes a little bit more effort to walk to school or work than it does to drive.

I always say beware of comfort and ease. Yeah. It very rarely teaches a valuable lesson or get us healthier or even make us happier. Things that really drive happiness and longevity take some effort, but less effort than you think. Dan Buettner, my mind is buzzing. My ideas are popping. You inspire me and you leave me more confident now

than I was when I started that I can live a happier, healthier life. I've done my job. I've done my job, Simon. I've done my job. I've done my job, Simon. You have done your job. I genuinely, genuinely am inspired. Thank you so, so much for taking the time. I loved it, Simon. Thank you very much. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenik.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself,

take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbinius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudershan.