The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Living for Longevity — with Dan Buettner

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, a longevity researcher, and the best-selling author of “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest,” joins Scott to discuss “Blue Zones” and how community, environment, and diet play into longevity. He also tells Scott what decade he might make it to based on how he currently lives his life.  Follow Dan, @danbuettner. Scott opens with his thoughts on Apple being the ultimate second mouse.  Algebra of Happiness™: what it means to be a dad.  Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash innovation. This is a paid advertisement. Episode 316. 316 is the area code belonging to Wichita kansas and the surrounding areas in 1916 the first birth control clinic opened in brooklyn new york true story my spouse and i use the pull out method for birth control we go to sleep we pull out our phones and ignore each other

true story my birth control has holes in it crocs I went to the doctor to get birth control for my daughter, and he said, she's sexually active. And I said, that's wrong. That is wrong. That's why you come here. Go, go, go! Go! Go, go, go! Welcome to the 316th episode of the Prop G Pod.

It's just, the dilemma there was not what joke to tell, but what joke not to tell. Birth control is just a cornucopia. It is a fertile field of jokes. This has made my day, just going over all these jokes. By the way, 90% of them, my producer said, no fucking way. In today's episode, we speak with Dan Buettner, a National Geographic fellow, a longevity researcher, and the best-selling author of The Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Lived the Longest. We've had a bunch of the kind of new-age cool guys, right? The cool club, the Attia and Hubermans of the world.

And I wanted to go old school with the OG of longevity. And it's also a very handsome man at 63. I just don't think you can be talking about longevity if you're a fucking slob at 40 and smoking and drinking. I knew a few of those things. Anyways, we discussed with Dan Blue Zones and how community, community environment and diet play into longevity. Okay, what's happening? The dog is back in the UK. How do you know? I am so pale and unhappy. Oh, what do you know? It's the fall, which means it's 50 fucking degrees. And what else am I doing? I'm going to get out of London. I'm going to the south of France soon. Then I'm going to go to Madrid for a conference. And then I head back to the US. Anyways. I'm going to the south of France soon. Then I'm going to go to Madrid for a conference.

And then I head back to the U.S. Anyways, isn't it exciting to hear my travel itinerary? What else is going on? By the time you hear this, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will have faced each other in their first presidential debate. I'll be discussing my thoughts and reactions next week with Jessica Tarloff on our new show. That's right. That's right. That's what we need more of.

We need more dog. That's the hole that needs to be filled. That's the white space for those of you in marketing here, right? Daddy needs some more dogs said almost nobody right now. I am an enormous fan of Jess Tarloff. She is the star of the show, The Five. My favorite way to describe The Five is it's four people discussing politics and they're conservatives and they're kind of like batshit crazy, I would argue. And then Jessica just comes with receipts and logic and there'll be a pause after she says something sane. And it looks as if the four of them have just been caught masturbating. They literally don't know how to respond or what to say. I love that.

I love that. Anyways, I think she is so talented, so charming. And the way I met Jess was she was my co-panelist on the Bill Maher show or Bill Maher's Real Time. And I hated Jess. Why did I hate her? Because I'm a narcissist and immediately went to YouTube to check out the comments. And every comment was, love Jess. Jess is amazing. She literally, no one even saw me on the panel

because her insights were so strong. Anyways, I got over it and we've gotten to know each other. We've become friendly. And I said, let's start a podcast that focuses on the middle and tries to be a little bit more data-driven, calling it Raging Moderates. Is it true to call us moderates? Maybe. I mean, I think, I don't know. I think I'm center left kind of going center right because of the head up your ass narrative coming out of the far left on Israel, which I've had an emotional reaction to. But anyways, she's definitely center left. I think, I'd like to think I'm right down the middle, but people say that maybe it's not true. Anyways, love the name. Love the name. All right, enough of that. Let's talk about Apple. Let's get back to the world of business. The big news

is that it's releasing four new iPhones that can run Apple Intelligence, or put another way, the firm's AI suite. As exciting as that is, is that exciting? I guess so. We likely won't see the phone's full AI effect until next year. Apple claims the new chips in these phones can perform 30% faster than last year's processor. They also revealed new AirPod Pros that will have hearing aid and protection capabilities. I've always thought that was a huge opportunity. I just don't understand. It seems to me that Apple is just going to come in and take the entire hearing aid market. Anyways, year to date, Apple stock is up 17%, which on, I think it was about a half a trillion dollars when you're trading at 3 trillion. Alphabet's taken a hit, NVIDIA's taken a bit of a

hit. Is that fair to say in the last month or so? But I think Apple's genius here, again, it comes down to this, and that is my friend and former colleague, Peter Golder, he had this one insight that he sort of built a career around, is that the innovators don't actually add shareholder value. What does it mean to be The second mouse strategy. And that is the first people have to spend a lot of money to try and forge a new technology, build a new type of housing, design a new type, I don't know, something new. And then if it works, the people kind of laying in the reeds can say, okay, we can do this almost as well for less money, or we can improve upon it, or take these features out and add this one. It's the second mouse that gets the cheese. This is the primary means of adding shareholder value for the big companies. And let's be clear, Apple defines the second mouse. Were they the first in MP3 players? No. Object-oriented computing? No. Laptops? No. Were they the first to have a smartphone? Hell

to the no. They haven't been first around anything. But Apple defines the second mouse. And where are they going second mousing right now? And it's going to add more value than, in my opinion, almost any AI company with the exception of Microsoft. AI. And that is effectively what they've said is let's let other people make massive investments in AI. This is an arms race. It takes a ton of money, mostly spent on products from NVIDIA. And it's a capital arms race. Computing, all this shit just costs a fortune. Instead, we'll take the best of breed and we'll offer very consumer-friendly applications of AI, such as, you know what I would really like? I would really like the ability to just search my photos using AI. If they offer that on the next iPhone, boom, champagne and cocaine. By the way, I can't help it. I get those Apple memories. Is that what they call it? Where they come up and they start showing my kids when

they were like little and cute and like thought their dad was their hero. Apple also announced, also announced that part of their AI package would be kind of an ability to do AI assistant type work, image editing, and that they would update Siri. So I own Apple. I've owned it for a long time. I think it's just one of those companies you hold on to forever. I do think it's fully valued, but my capital gains would be, I've owned it since 2008. So I think I'm up 20x on it, maybe 30x. So I don't want to take the tax hit. I can't find anything better to invest in. So I guess I'm still long Apple. By the way, speaking of luxury brands, strongest luxury brand in the world that isn't a university, those are the strongest, is in fact Apple. Why? If you own an Apple product, it says very sort of implicitly, elegantly that you're one of the billion wealthiest, most impressive, most creative people on the planet. I think this is brilliant because what they've said is,

I'm not going to get into an arms race about AI. I'm going to take the best of different AI and maybe, maybe, here's an idea, I'll let OpenAI or Lama or Gemini, I'll do the same thing I did with Search and I'll bid it out and say, all right, who wants a co-branded AI application in front of the billion wealthiest consumers? Well, I do. Well, okay, it's going to cost you. Similar to how Google is the default search engine in exchange for that, Alphabet justifies paying $20 billion a year to Apple, of which about 19.9 hits the bottom line, at which point when a company is trading at a P of about 20, you're talking about literally about a $600 or $700 billion deal in terms of market capitalization or shareholder value to the organization. I think they're setting themselves

up to do the exact same thing in AI. And that is you guys spend all the money trying to figure out search. You guys spend all the money trying to figure out AI. We'll be the interface to the billion wealthiest consumers, and we'll give you some of that interface and some of that exposure in exchange for some serious cabbage, serious cabbage. I think this is brilliant. I think these guys, I don't know who's running strategy at Apple. You never hear about them. They have this sort of Stasi-like or Mossad-like secrecy over there, and it works. You're not supposed to be a star. You're not supposed to be going on Johnny Carson and say, well, when I was running strategy at Apple, but whoever is running strategy at Apple, they consistently make really good moves. You

know, mixed reality headset, whatever. That was probably the right strategy to make sure that Zuckerberg didn't get out too far in front of them. But here's the hard part, because this is the bottom line. This is what a CEO does. A CEO's most difficult decision is not what to do, it's what not to do. Because the cruel truth of capitalism is you have finite resources, even if you're Apple. So your decisions around what not to do, such that you have the capital to do what you decide to do really well, is just as important as deciding what to do, if you will. They're sort of two sides of the same coin. And I think in this instance, they've said, you know, rather than spending tens or hundreds of billions trying to build out our own unique AI,

we're going to go the other way. We're going to be a remora fish. We're going to be the second mouse here. And we're going to continue to drive a ton of value. Apple is the ultimate second mouse. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dan Buettner. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, longevity researcher, and bestselling author of The Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer

from the People Who Lived the Longest. Dan, where does this podcast find you? 17 blocks from the Raleigh Hotel pool. Let's bust right into it. Your focus is longevity. So let's start there. Can you break down what a quote unquote blue zone is? A blue zone is a geographically defined, demographically confirmed area where people live statistically longest. And we measure that through either lowest rate of middle age mortality and or highest centenarian rate. So mostly we're looking at life expectancy of people about our age because that factors out things like testosterone, toxicity, and infant mortality. And then what did you find? My guess is everybody, and I know some of this, but what are the common features of lifestyles and habits for people who live in these areas where they tend to live longer? I assume it's not the geography, although maybe that has something to do with it.

Oddly, geography does have something to do with it. Geography has more to do with it than genes, because only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. And these places are genetically heterogeneous, which is to say they're melting pots. Each of these places, you find them on about the 20th parallel north. So it's neither the tropics where people are beleaguered by infectious disease, nor are they too far north where they don't get enough sunshine and outdoor activity and, you know, in the case of the blue zones, access to fresh fruits and vegetables. But the common denominators, they're eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet. The five

pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, greens and garden vegetables and so forth. Tubers, interestingly, about 75% of the caloric intake in Okinawa, a place that produced the longest lived women in history, came from the purple sweet potato until about 1990. And then nuts and beans. Beans are the cornerstone of every longevity diet. And if you're eating a cup of beans a day, it's probably worth about four extra years of life expectancy. So let me get this. If I want to add four, I mean, I realize there's more to it here, but if you wanted to add, call it multiple years of life expectancy, one serving of beans a day? About a cup. It's associated. And it may be

because there's something crazy good in beans, or it might be because if you're getting your protein from beans instead of bacon, you're getting the longevity bump. But it definitely stacks the deck in favor of longevity if you're eating a cup of beans a day. So say more about the common denominators. I've read your book and there's a few of them. Yes. People seem to have a sense of purpose. There's vocabulary for purpose in every blue zone. So they're not waking up with sort of the existential stress of what am I going to do with my day? They live in places where it's easy to move naturally. They're nudged into movement every 20 minutes as opposed to thinking they can sit all day long at their offices and make it up in the gym.

Every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat at occasions of walk, they have gardens out back. Their houses aren't full of the mechanical conveniences that have engineered most of the physical activity out of our lives. The scourge of network technology hasn't quite struck blue zones yet. So most social interaction is face-to-face and they get a lot of it, largely as a result of their environment. So you can't step outside of your home and not bump into your neighbor or your aunt or person who delivers your mail. So there's spontaneous social interaction, which in some studies have shown these low-quality social interactions are as predictive of longevity as deep, meaningful conversations. And what about their social life or how they engage with others?

Well, they tend to live in extended families. They keep their aging parents nearby, which conveys a two to six-year additional life expectancy as opposed to putting your aging parent in a retirement home. They tend to be married or living with a partner, invest heavily in their kids. They live in walkable villages, so they're constantly interacting with others. The festivals is a part of the annual cycle of life. In Icaria, for example, one of our Blue Zones,

there's 90 festivals between April and September, and people show up to them not only as kind of a social obligation, but because they're fun. But what happens at these festivals is people build bonds, social bonds. There's almost always a philanthropic objective to the party. Plus, they're dancing all night, which is great for physical activity. But the key insight, Scott, to longevity, and this is where we get it wrong in America. In America, we tend to pursue health and longevity. We get in mind a diet, an exercise program, maybe a supplement program, longevity hacks, and then we pursue it.

But the problem is our brains are wired for novelty, and we get bored very quickly. We lose discipline. We lose presence of mind. And if you look at any of the sort of strategies we undertake to get healthier, live longer, lose weight, they never worked for more than about nine months. And then the vast majority of people have failed. In blue zones, longevity isn't pursued, it ensues, which is a huge difference. In other words, people in blue zones have no idea how they're living an extra 10 years at middle age than Americans do. They just live their lives.

But if you look at their environments, they're living in places where their unconscious decisions, their micro day-to-day decisions are better for not only a few months or a year or two, but for decades or a lifetime. Because when it comes to longevity, there's no short-term fix. It's regular, better day-to-day decisions for a long time that make the big difference. And that doesn't happen with the conscious mind. It feels as if it's a little bit, okay, I have my life here in London. I try to purposely eat better. I have a trainer to get in my exercise. I don't know if you've heard, but the weather in London is somewhere between awful and whatever is worse than awful. The overall weather.

Yeah, there you go. That is kind of the wrong way to live long. It's about moving to Greece where I'm forced to walk somewhere. The Mediterranean diet just kind of unfolds on me. I'm living close to my family, so I have no choice but to be highly social. It feels like it's more of a, instead of the accoutrements, it is your life. Is that a decent way to describe it? Yes. It's about shifting the focus from trying to change your behavior, which fails for almost all people almost all the time in the long run, to shaping your environment. And of course, the easiest way to shape your environment for longevity is, as you point out, is move. And there are areas in America where life expectancy is 25 years less than other places. There are zip has been shaping people's environment at the population level, largely through policy, but also through helping restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools, and even your home are designed so that the healthy choice is either the easy choice or the unavoidable choice. And that's what works. It's an interesting way of looking at it. You mentioned Kentucky. Let's go to the other side.

I don't know if you have a term for them, gray zones or dead zones. But what is it about, specifically about these places where people live a lot less healthy lives and have much higher mortality? What are the commonalities of the common denominators there? They're crisscrossed with highways, unwalkable streets. So every time you go to work, you have to get in your car. More people have died in car accidents in the last hundred years than have died in wars. So right there is your first mortality challenge. And then the fact you're not walking, they tend to be junk food forests. There's no effort to curb

accessibility or junk food marketing. So junk food and ultra processed food is delicious and it's cheap and it's ubiquitous. And that's why we eat so much of it, not because we know it's not bad, good for us. There's typically higher crime. People are more socially isolated. Think of a suburban cul-de-sac as opposed to, you know, downtown London where you live, where every time you step outside your door, there's a chance to bump into somebody and there's at least a chance that there'll be a meaningful social connection for you. Often air quality, which is also a function of traffic. It's a number of read somewhere that work used to be dirty, dangerous work. Now work, for many people, is purpose and that their mortality actually goes up, especially men when they stop working.

Unpack work and longevity. A Gallup poll of 2 million workers found that only about 31%, fewer than a third of Americans, actually find purpose at work. So most of us are showing up to work because we need the money or the insurance or it's a status thing. Dr. Robert Butler, who was the first director of the National Institutes on Aging, analyzed the writings of several thousand people over time and found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight and found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight years longer than people who are rudderless. Now, we don't know if that's because people with sense of purpose are some sort of a mechanism that makes us rise to the occasion, psychosomatic benefit, or if it's because people who have a sense of purpose are more likely to

stay fit and take their medicines and make an effort with other people in connecting or find a job where they're not bored or uninspired. It's so important and it's so largely overlooked in the United States, I believe. I've been reading that there's just a ton of stress placed on parents. And I've also read other places that actually while you, kids, no kids, eight kids, one kid, married, boyfriend, girl, whatever it might be. What is kind of the, what is the ideal scenario and what is kind of the worst case scenario? I imagine the worst case scenario is just to be totally alone, but that's my thesis. Yes, that's the worst case. Let me unpack a few things. So there, you know, I also wrote a book and a cover story for National Geographic on happiness

called The Blue Zones of Happiness. There's two scientific ways of measuring happiness. The first one is something called life satisfaction, where you essentially ask people to think of their life as a whole and rate it on a scale of one to 10. And that's evaluative. That's your life in the rearview mirror. The other way is something called affect, positive or negative affect. And that's measured by a time sequence of asking people how often they laugh,

cry, feel stress, feel worry. And that's more of an evaluative or how you experience happiness. People who have babies, both the men and the women tend to experience a dramatic drop in affect. In other words, their experience happiness drops and predictably, you know, they're exhausted or, or there's stress, money stress in the family, or, you know, the wife doesn't want to have sex because she just had to be whatever. But life satisfaction goes up. So you get this sort of up and down of happiness. And it's the picture's not clear. In places like Denmark, both kinds of happiness go up,

presumably because there's better child care. and for the first year of life, both the men and women can take up to 12 months off to take care of that infant. As far as longevity, we did a study in Sardinia. Sardinia is home to the longest-lived men in the world, about 11 times more male centenarians there than you'd expect to see in a similar population in the United States. And the guys with the best chance of reaching age 100 had five or more daughters, specifically daughters. And we don't know if that's because daughters tend to take care of their aging fathers in that culture, or if it's because there's a selection bias, that if you can survive five adolescent girls making it to 100, it's no'd had, I have two boys. I always wish I'd had a daughter because I always thought the daughter would take care of me. The daughter would call me and say, Dad, did you pick up your medication?

Dad, did you get your colonoscopy? That they would, you know, that they make sure that you're taking care of yourself. To me, that makes just sort of, it's so funny that that seems so obvious. And I never thought that, have a bunch of daughters to live longer. Yeah. Living in extended families seems to be a trend in all blue zones. And I know people think the idea of their parents living with them might be horrible, but often there's not a choice in blue zones. But you see very tangible benefits. Something called the grandmother effect has shown

not only in several cultures, but actual several mammal species that those that keep a parent near the family, the children in those families have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease. And not only that, if your aging mom's living with you, she's not in retirement home. Again, retirement home, instant lowering of life expectancy. So there's sort of a beautiful symbiosis that you see in families. So having children, raising them well, I would argue not coddling them. You don't see coddled children in the blue zones. Children are expected to be contributing members of the family. They're out sometimes in the field. They're gold herders by the age of eight or 12, between eight and 12. They're

helping with kitchen chores. They're not just being driven to dance lessons and play dates like we typically see. There is a chance that they could get hurt. You know, they have to take on some responsibility and the attendant risk with that at a very early age as opposed to waiting to age 25 to, you know, have to take your first risk in life. Yeah, I mean, so much of this is encouraging and discouraging. I don't, do you have kids, Dan? I have three. And how do you, so my kids basically get up, you know, I hate to admit this, it's our fault. My kids don't even make their beds. They, the most active thing they do is they do take the tube.

They do play sports at school, but they are coddled. I mean, they really are. And so what is your approach after doing all of this research? What is your approach to raising your children that might be a little different than how other people raise their kids? Well, at a certain point in my life, I told them I needed them at a very early age, and I gave them chores. I did need them. I needed them at a very early age and I gave them chores. I didn't need them. I needed them psychologically at that point, but I also, you know, logistically needed help. And I, you know, I never made money till I was 40 and I made a lot of money. Um,

but, uh, in a way it was a gift to live in a household where, uh, you know, we, we had to make our own fun and I needed them to help me with the laundry, et cetera. And, and, uh, with the yard. And I think at the end of the day, that was, that was good. It was a gift for them. And why is that? I'm going to probe here. Are you a single father? Yes. And so during that time, you know, I, I needed them. I enjoyed having them around me. Um, but they, they all, they all worked they were supposed to do. I also, you know, we didn't go to Disney World. We would go to the Yucatan Peninsula and crawl through batshit caves when they were eight, nine, ten years old. And we would live in villages with

Yucatec Maya. And childhood with me wasn't safe in the immediate sense of the word, but I believe it gave them enormous resilience for later in life. They're three very successful adults right now. We'll be right back. I like to think I can point, I can identify people who are good CEOs. I've spent so much time with good and bad CEOs that when I interview a CEO for a position as a director on a board, I feel like I'm a pretty good study. I'm not good at assessing other employees. I get fooled all the time, but I think I can kind of sum up someone's CEO readiness or not. What are the things, A, do you believe you can do that? And B, what are sort of the obvious tells when you spend, say, an hour with somebody? Well, just to level set, the chances of reaching 100 in America are less than one in a thousand. So the capacity of the human machine, so the average person our age is, for men, it's probably 93, maybe 94, and for women, it might be 96. So making it to 100 is exponentially more difficult than hitting the early mid-90s. um when okay personally you know i look at you and i say i think you have a pretty good chance at reaching uh that uh capacity the human machine and it might go up by the way but by the time you

know it's our time that we might get to 100 but you're thin or you seemingly you're not overweight you you're obviously physically active uh you live in london which I would say stacks the deck in favor of longevity because you walk most places. You're mentally engaged. You seem to exude purpose. I don't know what you eat, but a few questions. How often a week do you eat meat? 10 plus. I would eat it every meal if I could.

I eat a lot of meat. That is probably tripling your chances for cardiovascular disease, many types of cancers. You're not a big candidate for type 2 diabetes, but if you're an average American, that much meat would be a negative. How about processed foods? Not as much. And what's interesting about the UK is one of the things I've noticed here, and I think it's much healthier. You buy milk, you buy fruit, you buy juice, anything. What you notice is, wow, it rots right away. And then what you realize is there are thousands of pesticides and preservatives that are legal in the U.S. that are not legal here. And it never struck me just how much shit I was putting in my body in the U.S. until are not legal here. And it never struck me just how much shit I was putting in my body in

the U.S. until I moved to London. And I'm blessed I have somebody who loves to cook. So when I eat out, I eat fairly well. But when you eat out, my sense is it's full of butter and salt so you come back. So I don't eat, I probably on the lower scale of processed food. That's good. Eating out in America, by the way, occasions consuming about 300 more calories than you would if you eat at home, higher salt, higher sugar as well. So eating at home stacks the deck in your favor. How about your height to your midsection? Are you measuring in centimeters or inches? are you at least twice as tall as you are round at the midsection oh yeah i'm i'm i'm six to 189 i'm in good shape that's exactly what i am oh nice exactly are you shrinking though i was six three now i'm six two i was six two and a half and now i'm six two yeah so i i am

shrinking a little bit every everybody shrinks so i you know it's effective gravity over time how many hours of sleep do you get good about sleep i don't i don't sleep as well because i have to get up and pee a lot but if i'm if i can't sleep and it's two or three in the morning i will and we'll come back to this i will take an edible and i will cancel my meetings in the morning because i i don't i spent so much of my life, Dan, working so hard that sometimes I would go four or five hours a night for three or four days in a row because I was traveling and just going from meeting to meeting to meeting. And pretty much since the age of 45, I don't sacrifice sleep. So I'm pretty good on the sleep other than the fact I have to get up and pee all the time. Yeah, me too on that one. When you look at mortality and number of hours slept per night, people who sleep seven hours seem to be optimal. Getting at least seven

hours most nights, that seems to be the sweet spot. And so if you're getting that, that's going to favor life expectancy. How about fruits and vegetables? Do you eat those every day? Terrible. Two to three times a week max. And the fruits I eat are in the form of juice, which has a ton of sugar in it. Juice is horrible.

It's all metabolically as bad for you as a Coke. Yeah, so I mean, mid-80s maybe for you? Mid-80s? All right, I better go. Okay, so I got to get on this whole success and meaning finding meaning in one's life what about the i'm not by the way just just to put a finer point and a more serious point on it there's very good research that shows that people are eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet uh eschewing a standard American diet at our age, 60, live about six years longer than people

eating a meaty, cheesy, fatty processed food diet. So there's real benefits, uh, to starting right away. Yeah. And I, I'm a hundred percent in other words. The other question I have is, you know, asking for a friend, alcohol and THC, alcohol and drugs. Okay, so I'm a bit of a contrary when it comes to alcohol. I'm very aware of the recent epidemiology that no amount of alcohol is safe. But I can tell you in these blue zones, Highlands of Sardinia, in Ikaria, and I've seen the surveys, I've been part of the surveys, about 90% of people are making it into their mid-90s and 100s are drinking every day of their lives. Now, are they doing shots of tequila with their friends? No. They're drinking mostly homemade wine with friends or with a meal.

So, could they live to 101 instead of 99? Maybe, but it's so clear that part of the fabric of their culture, their festivals, the way they're connecting with friends, the way they're, how this wine is interacting with the diet they're eating. By the way, a glass of wine with a plant-based meal about quadruples the flavonoid absorption. So I'm not at all convinced that being a teetoler is healthier than drinking. Now, I would argue a glass or two of wine with meal and friends, I believe is part of is helping these people in blue zones live longer. You're kind of you're the original gangster on this stuff. I remember when did Blue Zones come out? I wrote the cover story for National Geographic in 2005. So almost 20 years

ago. Yeah. And I'm sure you're watching over the last one or two years, Andrew Huberman and Peter Atia, both of whom are doctors, Huberman and Atia, both of them had both of them on the podcast and they have essentially declared war on alcohol. And some of this is just to make myself feel better. But I've always seen and read, including from your books, that social engagement or being really social is important to longevity and overall happiness. And I find that alcohol is a critical component of that. At least it is for me. And I think it is for young people. Well, you see, doctors and marketers also, they tend to want to identify the silver bullet and

sell it to you. They tend to look at things in isolation. But I've spent 20 years with these five blue zones. I'm there every year. And I believe I know and have read and metabolized every single academic paper. There's a very clear cluster of lifestyle characteristics that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough so they're not getting a disease. And those are eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet with a little alcohol, moving naturally every 20 minutes or so, not marathons, not triathlons, not Pilates or CrossFit. They're mostly walking, by the way. Their life is underpinned with purpose, so they know why they wake up in the morning

and what their responsibility is to the greater community, not just to their selfish selves. They tend to curate a circle of friends that reinforce the right behaviors and insulate them from loneliness and from the stresses of running out of money or a spouse leaving them or a parent dying or a kid getting thick. And they live in places where the healthy choice is the easy choice. And it's that cluster of things that's mostly environmental that is producing measurable, extraordinary longevity in five disparate places on the globe. And for me, that's a persuasive argument of what to do to live to 100.

So let's talk a little bit. So let's talk about the U.S. If the Biden administration, and maybe they have, said to you, Dan, what series of, what two or three policies could we implement to dramatically raise not only the lifespan, but the healthspan, the quality of life of Americans? What would those two or three policies be? Well, I'm going to tell you they're not going to be popular. First of all, universal health care. Every blue zone's access to health care is close to free. Not only that, there's a much better emphasis on public health. So rather than trying to pay for cleaning up the disease, they're investing the disease to keep the disease from happening in the first place.

There's just no question that universal health care, 11% of Americans don't even have health insurance in this country. Number two, gasoline should be priced at a price very similar to what you pay for in Europe, which is about twice or three times even you see in some places. Why? Because what will happen if you raise gas, people will figure out how to take public transportation. People who take public transportation have about 20% lower mortality than people who drive back and forth to work. So it gets them out from behind their wheels, onto their feet. They'll move closer to their schools and their jobs. There'll be more population concentration, so people will be more social.

And then the last thing is the farm bill. A farm bill right now is set up to subsidize soybeans, corn, sugar beets, and wheat. These are all the inputs of all the junk food we eat, the Doritos, feedlot animals, crappy beef and pork. If we pulled those subsidies out, and instead of making it easy and cheap to raise these junk food inputs, and instead shifted it to beans and grains and greens and organic vegetables, the price of those would come down and the consumption would go up. Places like Singapore, they see very clearly and gas is 11 bucks a gallon and your car is going to be taxed 300%.

Meanwhile, there's a great subway system where it's easy to get any place point A to point B in a safe, quick air conditioned way. But you got to walk back and forth to the to the subway and people are taking 10 000 steps a day without even thinking about it they subsidize brown rice and they're going to tax sugar they already have a sugar tax in singapore and not coincidentally they tax tobacco singapore you have a country where the health adjusted life expectancy, which is the estimate of how long people are going to live minus the years lost to chronic disease and the years of healthy life lost to disability, that's highest. They live

about 15 more good years than Americans do. Heterogeneous society, just because they can see clearly and make their policies, set policies to favor the human being rather than to just favor business. So if you, general reductive advice, two or three things, get started are like table stakes or most immediate incremental benefit. Talk about a 60-year-old, talk about a 25-year-old. What are those two or three things? Like, okay, I got five minutes with the leading authority on longevity. What are the two or three boxes you need to check when you're in your 20s? And what about when you're in your 50s or 60s? At both ages, carefully curate the circle friends that you spend time with. We know that if your three best friends are obese, there's 150%

better chance that you'll be overweight. So I wouldn't necessarily dump your old unhealthy friends, but I would say making the effort to find two or three new friends in your immediate social circle. These are people that you're going to see with some frequency or communicate with some frequency whose idea of recreation is biking or golf or pickleball or gardening. Friends who care about you on a bad day. That's the real litmus test of a real friend with whom you can have meaningful conversation. And it's not a bad idea to have a whole food vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social circle because they're going to show you how and where to get healthy plant-based food. I can't emphasize the importance of that enough. If you really want

to live longer, it's making that shift to whole grains, greens, beans, nuts, and tubers. It's indisputable in my view. As an extension of that, get yourself a good cookbook. I've written Blue Zone Kitchen books, but there's lots of cookbook, great cookbooks that tell you how to cook, show you how to cook plant-based, learn how to cook at home. Instead of going on a diet or joining a gym, say to yourself, well, for the next four Sundays, I'm going to get my family together and we're going to cook three whole food plant-based meals together on Sunday afternoon, store them for the rest of the week and eat them. And the trick is to not only know where you can get the ingredients, know how to make it,

but the trick is to find a handful that you love. And once you find that, my job is over. Because at the end of the day, people really don't give a crap about the environment. They don't care that much about animal cruelty or even their health when it comes to a hungry belly at lunch. They want to eat something delicious. So as long as you can satisfy that hungry belly in a delicious way, people don't care that much. In other words, they'd happily take a healthy meal over an unhealthy meal as long as the taste is that good. Well, give us a little bit about your path professionally and what the big breaks were and what advice you would have for a young person who says, I would really like to have that guy's professional life. Like, what were the big

breaks? What do you wish you'd started earlier? What skills do you think you brought to the table? What advice? Someone's 25, maybe they enjoy thought leadership or science or they enjoy writing and they want to be Dan. Well, heaven help them, but they want to be down but but um i would say you know i was an uh intern with george plimpton who was a editor of the paris review and a a um uh great right participatory journalist i'd say number one and i would say for any 25 years learn how to commit communicate not only verbal but written communication skills storytelling it's kind of everything isn't it you get in an age of ai because being able to write well is a reflection of your ability to think and um and and convey an idea and sell the idea whether you're selling um

uh stocks and bonds a real estate development idea, or in my case, longevity. So that is a good base. You know, when you were off doing useful and productive things, going to school and analyzing fixed instruments, financial instruments, I went and rode my bike. I hold the record for biking from Alaska to Argentina, biking around the world and biking the length and width my bike. I hold the record for biking from Alaska to Argentina, biking around the world and biking the length and width of Africa. That's what I did most of my 20s, which was actually very good training for life because you develop discipline, you develop a sort of empathy for other cultures and a sensitivity, also an ability to survive and to quickly learn, synthesize lots of information and put it to work. Then I started a company. I was writing, well, I was trying to write for

National Geographic. That was my holy grail. And I kept getting rejected. But my editor said, you know, everybody likes your bike rides around here but the new expeditions have to add to the body of knowledge or somehow illuminate the human condition and at the time this capability to interact online was coming into into um coming online and And I developed a way of solving ancient mysteries by letting an online audience direct a team of experts to solve these mysteries. And I took teams of 10, 12 people into Central America to try to figure out why the ancient maya civilization collapsed and across china following marco polo's route but we were connected to a million or so people and we harnessed the wisdom of the crowd and those became very successful and i all of a sudden had a company which i sold

eventually to hardcore brace a textbook company and that you know i made money doing that i made money not because i was pursuing the dollars the dollars was a byproduct of something i i freaking loved which is uh expeditions and solving mysteries and then i sold that company and uh now had a capacity for networking to top experts and National Geographic like me. And I got this cover story assignment to unravel the mysteries of longevity. But, you know, like you, Scott, I think if I would have asked the 20-year-old Scott Galloway to chart his career to the heights you are right now, you might have gotten a year or two into it before everything fell apart. And I'm pretty much the same way. You know, I've had lots of failures, but learned from my bike ride that they're not that bad in the context of what African villagers are going through. And tomorrow when I get on my bike, it'll be a new adventure,

metaphorically, and I'll figure that out when I get there. Dan Buettner is a National Geographic fellow, longevity researcher, and award-winning journalist. He's also the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest and Thrive, Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. Also, Dan is a three times Guinness World Record holder for distance cycling. That's a flex. Anyways, Dan, this whole space has just blown up and you genuinely are the OG here. You were in this before it was cool and kind of forged a category that's created so much attention, I think so much good living, so much longevity, and quite frankly, so much economic value. I think any, you know, the Huberman Lab or Peter Attia, I feel as if they should all send you royalty checks because you were sort of, you kind of paved the way here. It was really nice getting,

getting to spend some time with you and congratulations on all your success. Thank you, Scott. And I'm big admirer of yours as well. If I had a blue zone star, I'd lick it and put it on your forehead because I think I'm going to see you when you're a hundred. I hope so, brother. I hope so. Algebra of Happiness. I had this vision for what my relationship with my boys would be like. I thought they would be fascinated by me. And when they got home from camp, they'd want to sit down and tell me everything about what happened and talk about,

you know, the hikes they went on. And as is often the case, my 14-year-old came home, hadn't seen him in two or three weeks, and kind of, he was tired, hungry, and just sort of, I said hi, didn't even say hi back, kind of slammed the door and went in his room.

That is very upsetting for me. And I want to get angry at him. That is unacceptable behavior, sure. But more than anything, it doesn't foot to what I thought our relationship was going to be. And I feel insulted and hurt. And what I've come to realize as a dad, as a man, is that this basic notion of masculinity and manhood is that you add surplus value. And one means of surplus value is that dad just takes it. I'm not saying you tolerate or accept inappropriate behavior. My kids actually have very good manners. But you realize as dad, dad takes some body blows. And it's not about me. My kids aren't here to serve or fill or ensure that our relationship is what I imagine so I can feel like a Hallmark commercial and have these dad moments. I get a lot of those, but that's not my job, and it's not their job, and it's an unreasonable expectation. My job is to protect and provide and be a role model, to be good to their mother, and to ensure that they have whatever I can provide such that they have developed good

character, are healthy, and have a shot at being productive, loving citizens as they get older. But dad takes some blows. And if you're expecting that your relationship with your child is going to be two-way It is not It is not going to be I mean there'll be moments Where you'll get more joy than you could have ever imagined and we always talk about those moments But on the whole on the whole it is a what i'll call diminished or a Debtor relationship and that is you are going to give a lot more.

You are going to be much more expressive, much more emotional, much more supportive, much kinder to them than they are going to be to you. And that is just part of it. That's what it means to be a parent. I also think that's what it means to be a dad. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer

and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Oh my God. Let's be honest. Daddy's a genius. Daddy's a genius. That was just so elegant, so puncturing, so insightful. So daddy.