The Rich Roll Podcast - Dan Buettner On The Lost American Diet

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

The U.S. is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet—and yet, our country has never been more unhealthy. Here to offer us a fact-based prescription for living longer and better is the intrepid Dan Buettner. A true renaissance man, Dan is an investigative journalist, a National Geographic Fellow, a legit, boots-on-the-ground longevity expert, an in-demand public speaker, a serial entrepreneur, and a world explorer with three endurance cycling world records to his name. A New York Times bestselling author many times over, he’s a seemingly constant presence on the TODAY show, has appeared on Oprah twice, and has been profiled on every respected global media outlet, from CNN to David Letterman. Today marks Dan’s fourth appearance on the podcast, and he’s presenting a gorgeous new offering: The Blue Zones American Kitchen. A must-read primer on healthy living, it’s a cookbook meets road trip in which he excavates the history of American cuisine and food culture and unearths the original, indigenous American diet, which, let’s just say, is very Blue Zones. It is with great pleasure that I share Dan’s wisdom with you today. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Peace + Plants, Rich

I read about three years ago a statistic that about 750,000 Americans will die prematurely this year because of eating the standard American diet. I don't believe we're going to get anywhere by incenting people or educating people or wagging our fingers at them and saying, you know, you're a bad person because you don't have the responsibility to eat healthy. Forget that. We are set up for failure in this country. When we go out into the food environment, 97 out of 100 choices are bad choices. It's not going to change until we, first of all, make some of those choices healthier so that they can be unconscious and easier.

And secondly, provide people an opportunity to taste wonderful whole food plant-based and give them the skills to cook it. The food pattern that mimics the diets of longevity, quite honestly, happened among cultures where there was not a lot of money. And because that absence of money, it drove inventiveness and innovation and quite honestly, delicious food. And now we're at a time in history where coincidentally, that delicious food

is what we need to start addressing the healthcare problems and the fact that 72% of us are obese or overweight. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. On tap for today is the Blue Zone superhero himself, the ever so charming, gregarious, handsome, and intrepid Mr. Dan Buettner. So even if you've never heard his name before, chances are you have heard the term Blue Zones, which is a phrase he coined to describe hidden slivers of the world that boast the highest per capita populations of centenarians, people who thrive to a hundred and beyond.

In other words, places where people forgot to die. A true Renaissance man, Dan is an investigative journalist. He's a National Geographic fellow, a legit boots on the ground longevity expert, an in-demand public speaker, a serial entrepreneur, and a world explorer with three endurance cycling world records to his name. A New York Times bestselling author many times over, Dan is seemingly a constant presence on the Today Show. He's appeared on Oprah twice and has been profiled on every

respected global media outlet from CNN to David Letterman. And he's here today, his fourth appearance on the podcast with a gorgeous new book out called The Blue Zones American Kitchen. It's a must-read primer on healthy living. It's a cookbook meets road trip in which he excavates the history of American cuisine and food culture and unearths the original indigenous American diet,

which let's just say is very Blue Zones. And it's coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find

treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Thank you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the

first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their

loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you

to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself,

I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Dan, Dan Buettner. You know, Dan is a trifecta of charisma and scholarly experience,

matched with this really unusual preternatural ability to communicate. He's the absolute man when it comes to how to live long, how to live happily, how to live well, and how to fuel your life with greater meaning and a sense of purpose. Dan is a friend, he's a mentor, he is an exemplar of service whose life and work have positively, permanently, and quite unequivocally improved the well-being of millions. So it is with great pleasure that I share his wisdom with you today. So here we go.

This is me and Dan Buettner. It's good to see you. I'm very excited to have you back. This is your fourth appearance on the show. A lot has happened since we last sat down together, a couple of books. You moved to Miami. I mean, I guess I'd like to just start off with like,

how is life in Miami? Like, why did you move to Miami? I joke it's the land- You don't strike me as a Miami guy. A land of deep tans and shallow conversations. No, no. Well, it's actually a blue zone. You know, I live in a very walkable community, southern tip of South Beach.

I swim in the ocean almost every day. There's great access to good food. It's a easy jump to the Caribbean, easy jump to Europe. 15 minutes away from an airport, makes a lot of sense. The original reason for moving there is we had three blue zone projects there

in Naples, in Jacksonville, and then almost in Orlando that actually didn't come to fruition. But it just made sense for me to be there for a number of reasons. And I got stuck there. And some people have admitted life's crisis and buy a sports car or find a mistress.

I'm moving to Miami for a while. I like it down there for those reasons. There's a great public pool. There's rentable bikes everywhere. You can walk everywhere. It's always warm swimming in the ocean. I mean, year round, who doesn't like that? Like it's pretty fantastic.

I don't know if I could live there though. I joke about the shadow conversations, but actually since the pandemic, there's been an infusion of New Yorkers and Californians who've come there. Sure. And there's actually a very emerging, high octane group of people,

a lot of them involved with technology, but also just a lot, my particular group of people is really into philanthropy and doing philanthropy right. And you met a few of them at the YPO event we saw each other at. And it's just about any place in America, you can find 10 or 15 people who you resonate with.

And if you can't find them, the problem's probably not the place, it's probably you. And kind of approached Miami with that same attitude. Yeah, well, I've got some great friends there and the food scene there, I think is fantastic. What our mutual friends, Diego and Veronica are doing. We can talk about that as we get into the new book. Our mutual buddy, Marco Borges, like there's some great,

I love seeing my friends down there and visiting. So I get the appeal. Mark Perisky. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That whole crew as well. But I am very humored by the fact that you live in the same building as Mark Sisson and you've got this unusual like bromance with him. We do.

And he's a primal guy. He'll tell you himself, he eats a steak every day and I'm a plant-based guy. And yeah, we meet in the gym and we could not have more polar opposite ideas on what we ought to be eating, but yeah, we play pickleball together, we're pals. I've known Mark for a very long time.

I've always gotten along with him fine. And it's always kind of like a jocular sort of repartee with him about diet philosophy. Cause he is on the other end of the spectrum, but listen, the guy's totally fit. How old is he now? He's 69, he's completely ripped. Right.

Yeah, I worry about his arteries, but he's got good abs. Well, anyway, we're here to talk about all things, Blue Zones kind of expand on what we've talked about in prior podcasts and the kind of raison d'etre is this new gorgeous, incredible book that is coming out called the Blue Zones American Kitchen, which is sort of like, in thinking about this book,

it's sort of like a buddy road trip movie meets a cookbook from the perspective of like an archeological dig into the history of the American diet and indigenous cultures. Like it defies genres. You can't just call it a cookbook. Like it's many things, it's historical record. It's sort of a cultural canvas

of a certain slice of American history that has gone under, if not altogether unreported about our relationship to food. And I don't know, why don't you first like describe the book and what got you interested in the subject matter that we're gonna talk about today? I described Blue Zones American Kitchen as kind of an effusion between science writing,

unpack an idea in it, and National Geographic Magazine will have a condensation of it in the January issue. National Geographic Photography, David McLean, I think is the January issue. National Geographic photography, David McLean, I think is the best photographer, National Geographic. He's been your guy forever. Yeah. We've been working on Blue Zones together for 20 years, but he has six other cover stories for National Geographic. And then I learned a long time ago that giving people what they want as a delivery vehicle for your ideas makes just everything a lot easier. So I collected a hundred recipes from around America that bring this way of eating,

this lost diet of longevity to life. And I could have written a regular book that unpacks the sort of the science of the diet and the anthropology that we did to find in the epidemiology. But, you know, my last book, The Blue Zone's Kitchen was, you know, I never set out to be a quote unquote cookbook writer. I write for National Geographic, but it was by about a factor of five, my most successful book. And it had a hundred recipes. People love recipes. They do, yes, especially if they're original. They don't just want the why, they want the how.

Yes, and I think beautiful picture helps as well. Yeah, it does, right? Well, this book is a lot of how, but it's also the why, right? So with all of your experience traveling all over the world and identifying these pockets of humanity that not only live longer, but many of which also live happier,

you've kind of turned your lens on America. In the historical record of the blue zones, the only blue zone in the United States is the population of people in Loma Linda because of their spiritual tradition. But what made you think, hey, let's look at America and kind of go behind the scenes and figure out if there's more of a blue zone story here

than originally thought possible. People ask me all the time, are there more blue zones in the world? And there probably aren't, but I started taking a deep dive into America to look for a culture of longevity. And Mormons live slightly longer than other subcultures in the United States. You look at zip codes in Colorado

and you see life expectancy 20 years higher than certain zip codes in Kentucky. But instead of trying to take a geographical approach, I read about three years ago a statistic that about 750,000 Americans will die prematurely this year because of eating the standard American diet. And I got to thinking there must have been diets in America here eaten by different subcultures that more mimicked what we saw in blue zones. So I hired a researcher from NYU and together we

spent about six months going in the archives. We found 70 or so anthropological studies and then several of these dietary studies. Essentially, a researcher goes and sits with a group of families for about two weeks and records everything they ate. And sure enough, four ethnicities who lived, well, during the 1900 to 1920 were eating almost the exact same dietary pattern as we saw in the blue zones. So I thought, aha, now there is an alternative standard American diet or diets as it were, that ought to have a light shined on them because blue zones around the world, places where people are living the longest

are drying up because we are exporting our way of eating, this horrible way of eating that's largely emerged since the 1970s. And here there are these other four ways of eating that could not only save America or save several hundred thousand lives per year, but also it could be something we could be exporting for the good of the world rather for the detriment.

So you go back into this historical record, right? And you kind of unearth these studies. There's this guy, Wilbur Atwater, is that his name? That's right, yes. And this is the guy who, unearth these studies. There's this guy, Wilbur Atwater, is that his name? That's right, yes. And this is the guy who, did he originally coin the term calorie in the context of how to look at populations

and dietary patterns? He brought the idea to America and refined it. So before Atwater, there was no way to tell how much energy was in your food. And he's the one who more or less discovered that a carbohydrate has four calories per gram protein s6 and and a fat has nine and you know with that insight you're able to you know count calories and see which things are um could be making us fat and which things are calorically less less dense but he also for a precursor of the USDA

developed these dietary studies in America and started most- When was this? What's that? How long ago was this? He started in about 1895 and he and his colleagues went to about 1920. And they've been refined over the years,

but he did the first ones and not just with populations of of central europeans and northern europeans he embedded his teams with african americans with with uh latin america asian americans and native americans and uh came out with a very different picture of the way those people ate than my grandparents, for example, who were Central and Northern Europeans. Mm-hmm. And so immersing yourself in these studies, this historical record starts to paint

this very different picture of the history of Americans, indigenous and otherwise in their relationship to food and diet. Right. So when you look at the longest lived people in the world and you do a meta analysis, in other words, for the original Blue Zone project, we found 155 dietary surveys done over the past 80 years

in all five Blue Zones. Because if you wanna know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, you have to know what they were eating when they were 10 and when they were young adults and middle-aged and retired. You can't just ask a centenarian what they've been eating lately. And what emerges a very clear pattern, whether you're in Asia, Europe, Latin America, United States, they're eating 90 to 100% whole food plant-based.

The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, greens, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts, and beans. In fact, if you're eating about a cup of beans a day, it's probably adding about four years to your life expectancy. They are eating some meat, but on average adding about four years to your life expectancy. They are eating some meat, but on average, only about five times per month, way less fish and fewer eggs than you would think. No cows dairy in blue zones, by the way. And when they're drinking, it's mostly water, about six glasses a day, teas and coffee. So the filter that we were using to identify these diets of longevity in America were the dietary patterns being followed by Americans. And indeed, by looking at these dietary surveys done by Atwater, we found among African, Asian, Latin, and Native Americans, they were essentially

eating a Blue Zones diet about a hundred years ago. That's quite a light bulb moment. It was huge because- I would think as a writer. Few things are happening. First of all, there's these under celebrated ethnicities that we often think that they're eating crappy food or purveyors of crappy food,

but we largely corrupted the way they were eating 100 years, their traditional ways of eating and morphed it into something isn't all that healthy. But their original way of eating was not only a diet of longevity, but as we found in this book, there was culinary genius that in many respects has been lost for the last 10 decades or so.

Well, let's, before we kind of dig into the specifics of those cultural dietary patterns and habits, I think it would be really instructive to take a 10,000 foot view of how our relationship in the United States, how our relationship with food has changed over the last hundred years. I mean, currently we're this incredibly prosperous empire for lack of a better phrase and on many levels.

And yet we're so profoundly unhealthy. And in the introduction to the book, you do an amazing job of kind of recounting some statistics that are quite damning. You mentioned 750,000 people die every year from the standard American diet. 85% of the $3.7 trillion of healthcare costs are spent on treating preventable diseases of the $3.7 trillion of healthcare costs

are spent on treating preventable diseases that are caused largely by what we eat. And the amount of meat, sugar, milk, cheese, processed foods, et cetera, obviously is the primary culprit and contributant to all of these things. But walk us through sort of a little bit of like what it was like, what happened and what it's like now.

Yes, so before World War II, we were eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet. Meat consumption in America about tripled between 1880 and 1890, largely because of two things. Number one was the ice-cooled train car, which enabled meat to be transported over distance because before that, you more or less had to have a local butcher

or you had a farm and you killed your family cow, which happened infrequently. The other thing was the assembly line, which the meat packing plants largely largely in Chicago, invented. In fact, interestingly, Henry Ford, after observing these meat packing plants, Upton Sinclair wrote about them as well, created the assembly line that built the Model A. But disassembling animals very quickly and then shipping them in cool carts allowed enough meat to be distributed at a competitive price. So consumption went up by a factor of three. And that was the genesis of the factory farm

that we know today. The very first seeds. But it was really in about 1970 that our food system really went to hell. And it wasn't because of evil forces, by the way. Before 1970 or so, there weren't enough calories to feed Americans. And there was really an urgency

and American enterprise jumped into action. It's about then that high fructose corn syrup came online and started to replace sugars. Now, as a nation, we eat far too much sugar, about 140 pounds a year. That's up from 90 pounds in 1900. And almost half of that sugar is now high fructose corn syrup.

What's wrong with that? Well, high fructose corn syrup generates about 100 times more free radicals than when you eat it compared to just eating sugar. So the oxidative stress that comes from consuming high fructose corn syrup is really damn, it corrodes us from the inside out. But also high fructose corn syrup tells our liver to take the calories we just consumed and instead of using them as energy today to store them as fat for tomorrow. So about triple the amount we're consuming

about triple the amount of high fructose corn syrup today than we were in the late 1970s. Second problem, the popular revenue model for producing meat went from the individual farmer to the industrial meat generating farms that were filthy, that crowded animals in, diseases proliferated. The owners of those industrial farms had to then shoot the animals up with hormones and with antibiotics, creating a much less healthy meat supply. Thirdly, similarly, the factory farm came online. That was largely due to Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, a guy named Earl Butts. And again, he was, you know,

not having enough calories in America was a Cold War issue. So Nixon said, we need more calories. And Earl Butts created the system that made corn, wheat, soybeans, and sugar cane, the main crops in America, the sort of monocrops we hear about. And he was very good at it. And the good news is the price of those calories plummeted. The bad

news was that all of these cheap calories just completely washed over the American public. There's about 4,000 calories produced every single day for every man, woman, and child in America. And we should only be eating about 2,000 of them or maybe 2,500 calories. And you have billions of dollars being spent by Madison Avenue and these big food companies encouraging us to eat these calories, formulating foods that are irresistible. And for most of human history, we lived in this environment of hardship and scarcity. And now we live in this environment of overabundance and ease, all these calories in our food environment. The number of fast food restaurants has gone up by about a factor of five since the 1970s.

And 50% of all retail outlets from the place you get your tires changed to the place you buy your obesity medicine or your diabetes medicine force you to walk through a gauntlet of candy bars and sodas and salty snacks. So it's very hard for us to escape these unhealthy calories. Right. And at what point do subsidies enter the picture to continue to deflate the costs of these products, which would otherwise cost more and create some kind of stability for the farmers? Because that seems to be a huge problem

that we can't surmount now. That goes back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal. And again, it started with great intentions. The family farmer needed help, but it's been corrupted now so that farmers are paid only to, mostly to pay these corn, wheat, soybeans, and sugar. There's almost no incentive to grow organic, healthy, leafy vegetables,

and there's no distribution chain to help get it to market. So you have this sort of self-perpetuating system where all the economic incentives are behind creating these grains, which do three things. One, they're the cheap inputs for junk food. Number two, it's cheap animal feed for pork and beef and chicken. So we have too much of that meat at artificially low prices. So we tend to overeat these foods. And the third thing, it's making these vegetable oils, most of which, by the way, are inflammatory. Inflammation is the root of every age-related disease.

They make that too cheap and too integrated into our food system. So as a result, we're consuming about triple the added fats now than we were in the 1970s and inflammation ensues. Yeah, meanwhile, we're depleting the soil as a result of these monocrops. And as these conglomerates, the factory farms and the huge entities that are reaping the benefits

of these subsidies and are able to keep prices low, they can funnel massive amounts of capital into lobbying groups to make any kind of public benefit, regulatory change just intractable. If we had to pay the true cost of making a hamburger, it would be about $40. The cost of what it really costs to grow that grain and then the externalities, all the healthcare implications and pollution implications of a hamburger. If there were true market forces at work at the cost of

the food we eat, many of the problems would go away because eating this junky food would be too expensive. Yeah, it is a misalignment of healthy incentives on some level. All the incentives are set up to create this, you know, cataclysmic problem. But one thing I'm curious about is the insurance companies, because you'd think if they're paying out trillions of dollars every year to deal

with the downstream health implications of our dietary patterns, shouldn't they be incentivized to help solve this problem, to not have to pay out so much money to deal with all these chronic diseases? The great untold secret of most insurance companies is they are really more like your money manager. They take in premiums and then they pay out for sickness. And then they just sort of keep a percentage for profit. And there's actually a perverse incentive for insurance companies to insure

people who have a lot of disease because they have to collect more money and therefore their percentage goes up. So there are several great insurance companies like Kaiser Permanente and many of the not-for-profit Blue Cross Blue Shields companies who have a double bottom line. They not only have to manage to a certain profit, but their boards also hold them to a standard of creating a certain amount of community well-being or lower disease in their communities. But that's a minority of insurance companies in America. A big part of the solution from your perspective is to create environments

in which the healthy choice becomes the easy choice, right? On some level, and you've said this many times, that if you're unhealthy or you're obese or overweight, it's probably not your fault. The tectonic plates of culture are just driving you towards these choices that are creating these issues. The solution being to create an environment in which the healthy choice is the easier one. And you've accomplished that.

I think you've got like 49 Blue Zones project cities at this point. I know you're not, I don't know how involved you are in that anymore, but talk a little bit about that ongoing project. Yes, we're up to 72 cities now. So the internet needs to get updated. So I took 20 years to identify these blue zones

and to study them. I've been back every year since to these blue zones, including this year. In places where people are manifestly living longer, which means not that they have better genes or the capacity of their human machine is greater than yours or mine. It's just that they're not getting the chronic diseases

that foreshorten their lives. So they're not suffering from diabetes and heart disease and even dementia. And you look at these cultures and you ask, well, you know, how are they doing it? And it's not because they have, you know, rich role levels of discipline. It's not because they have outside size senses

of individual responsibility. They're not, you know, great diets. They're not smarter than we are. They simply live their lives. And in fact, you should see them at a party. I mean, some of these places they'll drink all night and live it up like we did when we were in college. But their moment to moment day-to-day decisions are fractionally better than ours because their environment is such that they're subtly nudged into moving every 20 minutes. The cheapest, most accessible and most delicious food we found are these simple peasant foods, beans and grains and greens. And they know how to make them, they have time-honored recipes to make them taste great.

Loneliness is nearly impossible. And in every one of these blue zones, there is a vocabulary for purpose. So observing this over and over in 2009, I got this idea of manufacturing a blue zone. And the idea wasn't to come into these communities and try to convince them to eat plant-based or convince them to move more or socialize more. It was simply to change the nudges and the defaults at the population levels to set people up for success. So they architect their decisions so they were unconsciously making better decisions

all day long. How do we do that? In each one of our Blue Zone Project Cities, we have three teams. One team is working with city council to adopt policies that favor healthy food over junk food and to limit junk food marketing, to favor the pedestrian over the motorist

and to favor the non-smoker over the smoker. And we don't achieve that by coming in and telling people what to do. We come in with menus and a consensus process where each individual city, we take them through each policy and ask them to identify which ones are most effective in their community and which ones would be most feasible in their community.

So we can usually get 20 or 25 policies working in the five years we're in that community. Secondly, we have a Blue Zone certification program for restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools, and churches. And we're usually pretty good at getting about a third to half of all those buildings blue zone certified. So when you walk in them, you're nudged into moving more. The steps are emphasized over the elevator and the vending machines are taken out. And at the food service, plant-based food is cheaper and more attractive than the fried junk food. And then finally, a third of our team

gets about 15% of the adult population to optimize their home environments. And I talk about how they do that in this book, The Blue Zone Challenge, and to optimize their immediate social circle. So we're trying to get people to make long-term changes to their ecosystem so they can forget about it and just mindlessly make better micro choices

every day for years at a time. In every single city, Rich, that we've been in, we've seen the BMI or the obesity rate drop, and we've seen the life satisfaction rate go up and that's measured by Gallup. And the incentive for the cities, the city manage, like what is the pitch to the city manager or the mayor, or are they coming to you?

Like, where are they seeing the benefit for, it's one thing in a long-term sense, like, okay, everybody would be better off if we're healthy, but is it a hard sell to get these cities on board or are they clamoring to come to you and your organization to figure this out? We've had about 500 cities come and ask us to blue zone their community, their population, and we've done 72.

So most we have to turn away. You asked what the incentives are. It's not right for every politician, but there are several mayors who make it as a priority, the health and wellbeing of their citizens. And for those mayors, this is perfect. There are other cities there, you there, I come from Miami where right now the focus is sort of building it up as a technology hub. So it's not really as high on the agenda where I am in Miami right now, but you take Fort Worth, Texas,

Betsy Price, the mayor there, she was a mayor, this is a city of a million people. You can meet her any week of the year on Tuesday afternoons. She was a fairly sizable woman, but she would put her lycra on and she would bike through the streets of Fort Worth and you could meet her. Now for her, health and well-being was an important value. But the only cities that work, our cities were the private sector and the public sector work well together. So that means the mayor, the city council, the superintendent of schools, the police chief, the CEOs of the big corporations all have to say, we want this.

We make them sign a pledge that they will work with us over the next five years to get it done. And then typically it's the enlightened insurance companies like it's usually the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan or the enlightened hospital systems like Texas Health who say, we can't keep shoveling money into this big healthcare problem and expect it to go away. They take the, it's usually a few enlightened CEOs

who take the reins and make health a priority rather than just cleaning up sickness. Yeah, so that's at the municipal level. Have you ever had conversations at the federal level, like going to Capitol Hill and like sort of laying out like what you've accomplished and what can be accomplished if you could get the support of the federal government behind you?

I was invited once to address the chiefs of staff of several congressmen. And I know there's congressmen like Dean Phillips, for example, who sees this as a priority. But the wheels of change move so slowly at the federal level. I can come into a city and affect change very quickly. With the right mayor and the right city council and the right business environment, I can turn a city around in five years. It would take two decades for the federal government, I think too.

But, you know, if they ever invited me, we actually, Vivek Murthy, the current Surgeon General, great guy. He's had me out to Washington and he's looked at this model several times, but in his position, he doesn't quite have the resources and access to implement it at the national level. All right, so we've sort of talked about the problem. We've talked a little bit about some of the solutions that you've been active in, but let's get into,

back to the history of the American diet and dive into what you discovered. Like you go on the road in this Sprinter van and you travel around and you meet people. But one of the first phone calls I know you made was to our mutual buddy, Jeff Gordoneer, right? Like who are the chefs I gotta talk to? Like tell me what's going on in the unseen America

with respect to cuisine that I might be interested in checking out. Yes, so there were a few criteria. I knew I wanted chefs steeped in history who could reproduce the diet that these ethnicities were eating 100 years ago, that for the most part. And I also wanted delicious food.

And Jeff, who was the New York Times food writer and then Esquire food editor for many years, he has an enormous Rolodex. And he instantly connected me to people like BJ Dennis, who was a Gullah Geechee chef down in the Carolinas. What does that mean? Gullah Geechee? Yeah, Gullah Geechee. So fascinating subculture of African-Americans. The Gullah Geechee, they occupied mostly the coastal areas of Northern Georgia and the Carolinas. And they were captured and brought over and enslaved

largely because of their ability to grow rice. There's something called the Ace Basin in the Carolinas, which by many metrics is the largest man-made installation on earth, bigger than the pyramids. It's vast. And you can still see remnants of it today. But a strain of rice was brought over from Africa. It's not the same as Asian rice and cultivated by the Gullah Geechee people. And because they had this unique know-how, their enslavers afforded them a certain level of freedom. So instead of having to live on

the plantation, they got to live in their own houses near these rice fields where they had their own garden, where they connected with local Native Americans and still had the influences of their European overlords. And they fused this genius culinary tradition that really gave rise to what we think of as Southern cooking. So they brought over black-eyed peas. They brought over the Scotch bonnet red pepper. They brought over sesame seeds, which they call benny seeds. They brought over okra.

Actually, you've heard the term gumbo. Gumbo is actually the West African term for okra. I didn't know that. So all of these foods came from West Africa. All of them came from West Africa, along with many, we know of fritters because of West Africans, several rice dishes from West Africa. And in the hands of a gifted chef like BJ Dennis or Roosevelt Browning,

he once cooked for Black Sabbath, kind of a cool 80-year-old Rasta guy. They would take black-eyed peas and tomato and garlic and the scotch bonnet peppers with a little bit of olive oil and then ferment these sesame seeds and the combination and a little bit of vinegar and the combinations acidy and spicy and umami. And you take a bite of this and it, there's no meat in it. It's a hundred percent whole plant-based food. You take a bite of it and you cry tears of joy. Wow. It's interesting because when I think of Southern cooking,

the first thing that comes to mind is everything is super fried. I trust that in your journey, you realize that this comes later and the antecedent to what we now think of as Southern cooking was something much more pristine and closer to its natural state. Correct.

You know, there was a certain inventiveness that comes out of the austerity that the only foods they could afford were the collard greens and the beans and then the corn and squash they learned from the surrounding Native Americans. So meat was very rare. So it forced them how to make plant foods taste delicious. Later on, when the price of meat went down, these people were hungry much of the time and craving calories and you know meat was always a very rich source of calories and often associated with prosperity and wealth and you know sometimes power so you know as the price of meat came down

and ubiquity came down it's now entered entered these cuisines, but their original manifestations for hundreds of years before really the 1950s was mostly whole food plant-based. And these dietary studies, we were finding that about 85% of their dietary intake came from whole food plant-based. And when they were using animal products, they'd use a little bit of lard to fry or they'd use a piece of pork the size of a marshmallow. Yeah, like the salt pork.

Yeah, to season a whole pot of food. Yeah, and you know, I mean, you and I agree, violently agree that nobody should be eating meat, I think. But, you know, if Americans ate the level of animal products at the Gullah Geechee did, for example, we probably have a fifth the rate of heart disease and quarter the rate of diabetes we're suffering from right now.

Yeah, and you make the decision with this book that all the recipes are 100% plant-based, even if aspects of them historically included small amounts of meat. Yes, because that's where the genius lies. You could take animal fat and sugar and pour it on cotton balls and fry it up. It tastes pretty good.

But when your inputs are beans and greens and sesame seeds and the spices around you, it takes an incredible amount of innovation and invention to make that food taste delicious. And it's there. We just forgot about it. And I spent the past three years trying to exhume it and bring it to life in this book.

So from reading the Atwater studies and trying to extract from the literature where these pockets might be, how do you begin to identify when you're going on this road trip, okay, we're gonna go here, here and here, and we're gonna meet these people. Like, how did you piece all of that together?

Well, Jeff Garnier gave me some leads, but then I hired a very clever producer named Karen Foshay who works at the LA Times. And I gave her the criteria and she worked in tandem with us for about nine months. We did the web searches, it was networking. We would find great vegan chefs and we'd ask them who their role models were

who cook whole food. In Philadelphia, for example, there's a famous restaurant called Veg, Rich Landau runs it. And Rich, it turns out it was kind of the godfather of most of the plant-based cooking in Philadelphia. And I said, who cooks whole food plant-based here? And he introduced me to the chefs around Philadelphia.

Incidentally, Philadelphia is the birthplace of American vegetarianism, which grew out of the same sort of permissive atmosphere that the abolitionist, that made Philadelphia the center of the abolitionists, the temperance movement and the woman's suffrage movement. Wow, I had no idea. I didn't know that.

I always thought it was in New York. No, Philadelphia. Robert Graham was one of the godfather. Robert Graham famously made, guess what kind of cracker? Not the Robert Cracker. I can't imagine. The Graham Cracker. The Graham Cracker. That's the history.

We learned nothing else today, Dan. Now I know the history of the Graham Cracker. There he is. And I am nourished by that refined processed food. It wasn't originally processed. The original recipe for Graham Cracker, very healthy. Whole wheat. You should bring that processed. The original recipe for graham cracker, very healthy. You should bring that back. Little bit of molasses actually.

The original graham cracker. I should have put that in here actually, yes. But no, the temperance movement in Philadelphia gave rise to the vegetarianism. And there was a satellite in New York, but I will argue that Philadelphia was the vortex of that. So the philosophical strain, like in the Venn diagram between abolitionism

and vegetarianism, I'm just trying to think, what is the sensibility, like the political sensibility in which those worlds kind of overlap and bleed into each other. And women's suffrage, enlightenment, evolution, I mean, societal evolution, a sort of liberal mindset that pervades to this day. That's cool.

That's really cool. So you identify Philadelphia. I'm interested in the journey to Hawaii and what you discovered there, the big island and kind of the cultural traditions that emerged from that experience. That is so rich. And I think some of the most interesting food in America

comes from Hawaii. It's very rich and ever evolving fusion of Japanese food, Filipino, Portuguese, and native Hawaiian. And several of those original strains are incredibly healthy and have remained so today. So we have a Blue Zone project in the Big Island of Hawaii. So it was very easy for me to engage the people who worked for that project to help me find the historian chefs that are still cooking the original way. But one of the neatest, by the way, findings in Hawaii is that it turns out that the

longest lived subculture of anywhere I could find in the world was among the female Chinese immigrants who live in Hawaii. Their life expectancies. So Chinese Americans living in Hawaii, females, life expectancy is 90. Wow. So the highest life expectancy of any country in the world right now is 88. But here, these women, these Americans are living longer.

And the only reason I can't call it a blue zone is because it's not geographically isolated. There are people among other people, but here's a fascinating culture. And we thought, well, maybe the first place to look at a diet of longevity in Hawaii is among these old Chinese ladies living there. Right, and so what are they doing

or what were they doing? It's basically they brought their traditional Chinese cooking which is heavy in tofu and mushrooms and noodles and they've continued to eat it. Asian people are also masters of greens. Like if you go to Whole Foods, you might see collard greens, or you might see kale or spinach.

Asian people will frequently know 40 or 50 different kinds of greens. You know, the type of shit we'd whack from our backyard, they'll know how to steam it up and make a beautiful dish out of it. And so Ruth, I met this 95 year old vibrant woman named Ruth Chang who cooked for us. And she wore a bright Kelly green dress

and full pearls and earrings. And she cooked a meal that her mother taught her how to cook 80 years ago. And it was mostly stir fry, but she did amazing things with tofu, which I think is one of the best longevity foods out there. But what is it about these Chinese women being in Hawaii that created this special sauce, right?

Like there's Chinese women living in China. How come their life expectancy is extended in Hawaii versus their native land? They continue to garden, number one. Number two, they have maintained their food traditions and cooking the same way. And number three, they probably benefit from the public health system they get in America

that they probably didn't have in China. So they're not suffering from the infectious diseases and they have access to a good hospital system there. Also the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan there in Hawaii is one of the best in the country. You went down into the Waipo Valley. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, the photos from that are unbelievable.

And there's a guy that you met that goes in, he's still cultivating the land in the traditional way. Yes, taro. The taro is the staple food of traditional wines. It goes back about a thousand years and it was probably two thirds of their killark intake. It's like a purple sweet potato sort of thing, right? Yeah, they can be prepared a number of ways.

Most famously, it's sort of beaten into a paste and then fermented to make this poix. Yeah, poix. Poi. Yeah. And that's how it's mostly eaten still. I don't find it very delicious, but there's lots of other ways to prepare it.

Interestingly, when the first settlers, James Cook landed on Hawaii and observed the native Hawaiians, he observed that they were fit, healthy, and they had great teeth. And now in Hawaii, thanks largely, I believe to the importation of the standard American diet,

the Hawaiians are the least healthy people, ethnicities in Hawaii. And if they, I think, paid more attention and celebrated their traditional diet, I think a lot of those problems would go away. There's something really special about the Waipo Valley. Like it's protected, right? You can't, not everyone can just go down there.

Like they keep it preserved. It was, wasn't it the original like land of the king? Yes. Yeah. And I think they still sort of hold domain over who can go down there and you can't. So if somebody's planting crops down there, that's a special situation.

Yes, we got permission from the Shabta or the landowner to let us in. The place looks like Jurassic Park. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Yeah, the giant ferns and cacao trees and papaya and it's rioting vegetation and around you on all sides this uh the the valley walls uh rocket out of the valley and go up several thousand feet you you can see two or three waterfalls and then it all comes out at the sea um yeah it's one of the

few places left on earth where it's preserved pretty much the way it was a thousand years ago. They will let you go down to like the front of it, the coastal area. You can go down and get a taste of it, but all the land as you go back in the valley is owned by native Hawaiians and they're very protective of that land.

What is the landscape of Chinese or more broadly Asian Americans look like on the mainland of the United States? Like you have these women in Hawaii who are outliving most people. What about, you know, when you get back to the 48? Yes. Well, it's, you know, among Asians, it's hard to, uh, to separate out their life expectancy over compared to the rest of the United States. But our mission was to find Asian Americans who were cooking the way their grandparents and great-grandparents were. So in Minneapolis, we found this Hmong lady who about 200 yards from a Target parking lot, she and her relatives had bought three acres of land in this tree grove and cleared the land

and is growing bitter melon and watermelons and sweet potatoes and pretty much the foods that she grew up with and still cooking the way her ancestors were. We found Cambodians here in Los Angeles, a group of Cambodian women who survived the genocide there. And they meet at least once a week and cook together as a way to bond and build community or keep their community together. In New Orleans, we met an Indian family, Asian Indian family, who has one of the most popular recipes in New Orleans and they created some of their recipes. But in all cases, the best recipes were 100% whole food plant-based. What did you learn about the native,

indigenous Native American diet? We've all heard about maize and what corn used to look like, et cetera. But what's the kind of the truth there? And I'm sure, I know that you met with a bunch of people. Yes, so my friend- Obviously it would be different per region. Yes, so up where I originated in Minnesota,

they were eating a certain amount of wild game, but wild game wasn't always available. So a wild rice, which is actually not a rice, it's a grass seed, several roots and ramps in the East. So my friend, Sean Sherman, who just won the James Beard Chef of the Year Award, he has been focusing on decolonizing Native American food. Pork and beef and chicken and sugar

were never part of the Native American diet. So he's bringing that back. He's contributed several recipes to this book. In Plymouth Rock, we cooked with a modern day pilgrim and a direct descendant of the Wampanoag people, Native Americans that welcomed and treated the pilgrims to the very first Thanksgiving. And it turns out that we have this incredibly corrupted idea

of what was served at, what a Thanksgiving dinner really looked like. The original Thanksgiving dinner, there's no evidence there was any turkey at all at the original Thanksgiving dinner. Is there evidence that there was an original Thanksgiving dinner? There is evidence. Is that apocryphal?

Or, you know, there's sort of a whitewashing of, you know, that tragic history. Yeah, so the pilgrims arrived and they arrived with some provisions, but they didn't know how to really grow food in this new land. And about 50% of them died within the first few months. And these Wampanoags were sort of observing them

and took pity on them. And Thanksgiving was probably more of a diplomatic summit than it was some great celebration of making it through the summer, as we're often heard. There was food there. There was some suggestion there were oysters there and corn and maybe some fowl, but they don't say exactly what kind of fowl.

But there was no butter. There was no flour. So there's no pumpkin pie. There was no stuffing. There was no indication that it was turkey. The Paula Marco, who was the historian, the food historian who was helping us recreate this original Thanksgiving pointed out to us that they were probably eating

the foods available to the Wampanoags, which was corn, beans, squash, probably made into a meal like succotash, dried blueberries, maple syrup, probably a type like succotash, dry blueberries, maple syrup, probably a type of corn tamale, hazelnuts, which were used as sort of a soup thickener. And that was probably what the original Thanksgiving looked like. And the pilgrims at that time,

they didn't have livestock or they weren't domesticating animals for food sources. Yeah, it was pre, before more animals came, but yeah, that first year. And how does that diet morph or change as you move across different parts of the country? Did you kind of go into a variety of indigenous Native American cultures and cuisines?

Yes, farther south, in the south eastern part of the United States, the cuisine starts to resemble Latin American, corn, beans, and squash, very ubiquitous in the Southeast. We had a Native American chef re-envisioned Boston baked beans, made from beans and just simply a little bit of maple syrup. He created a corn mash for us that had cranberries

and he made a nut milk out of hazelnuts. So it was creamy and delicious and sort of a re-envisioning of what breakfast might look like inspired by native American influences. Do any of the healthy historic diets that date back to this period emanate from any Northern European cultures or traditions, or did the Europeans just come over to America

and kind of ruin it for everybody? You know, I don't like to say ruin it, but my ancestors from Central Europe and Northern Europe, they brought their pigs and their cows and their chickens and their pickles. And in an environment where you're working 14 hours a day, you can handle those rich calories and the way it was raised was way healthier than it was raised was way healthier

than it was today. But the food pattern that mimics the diets of longevity, quite honestly, happened among cultures where there was not a lot of money. And because that absence of money, it drove inventiveness and innovation, and quite honestly, delicious food. And now we're at a time in history where coincidentally

that delicious food is what we need to start addressing the healthcare problems. And the fact that 72% of us are obese or overweight. Yeah. And what is the on-ramp for that? Cause that's a sticky wicket that on some level is almost more challenging than blue zoning a city,

like changing people's dietary health patterns when we have this desire, appetite, or proclivity for all these foods that are making us unhealthy. I'll tell you a story. Albert Lee, Minnesota was our first blue zone city. And this was a meat packing plant and their definition of vegetables were the orange flex and hamburger helper.

They didn't know what vegetables was. And I had a great advisor to that project, the woman who popularized the Mediterranean diet named Antonio Tricapulo. And I asked, I said, how do I get a Minnesota town, meatpacking plant town eating more vegetables? And we were sitting at a table in Ikaria, Greece, filled with these beautiful plant-based foods. And she closed her eyes for a minute and she opened up and she looked at me and she said, and she closed her eyes for a minute and she opened up and she looked at me and she said, feed them.

So when I collected what I thought was the most delicious recipe on Ikari, it's an Ikari and stew with black eyed peas and tomatoes and garlic and red peppers and it's umami and meaty and delicious, even though there's no meat in it. And- I've tasted it. Yeah. This is your go-to.

It is my go-to. For every dinner party. I eat it every morning for breakfast actually. But I invited the entire city to dinner and in two huge witches cauldrons, I made this Ikari and longevity stew for them. I had a chef with me helping me do it. I demonstrated how to make it.

I printed out the recipes and then I invited them all come eat. And I remember sweat dripping down the side of my face because I was so afraid they'd take one bite of this and spit it out. They not only ate every last drop, I still have this visceral memory of a guy with his arm in the cauldron all the way down to his armpit with a tablespoon getting the last little bit out of it. But I had them taste that food. Once people taste it and know how delicious it is, then you give them the skills to make it themselves. And they maybe need a little bit of equipment in their kitchen. You don't have to convince them it's good for the climate. You

don't have to convince them it's good for animal cruelty or it's good for their health. That's where the tire hits the road. I don't believe we're going to get anywhere by incenting people or educating people or wagging our fingers at them and saying, you know, you're a bad person because you don't have the responsibility to eat healthy. Forget that. We are set up for failure in this country. When we go out into the food environment and 97 out of a hundred choices are bad choices. It's not going to change until we, first of all, make some of those choices healthier so that they can be unconscious and easier. And secondly, provide people an opportunity to taste wonderful whole food plant-based and give them the skills to cook it. Ikari and stew is your, we are the world.

Throwing a massive concert, you know, at the O2 arena in London and serving everybody Ikari and stew. This is how we're gonna solve the problem, yeah. Believe me, it'll work better than most of the stuff we try. I dive, I'm with you, brother. You look at diets, you know, the recidivism curves that die, you start the best diet and I've done the research on,

you start with a hundred people today, in three months, you lose 10% of them, in nine months, you lose 90% of them and within two years, you lose 97% of them. So yet every year we get back on the Sisyphean treadmill and start a diet and think that we're going to burn off the calories that we ate during the holidays. And by about January 20th, 75% of people are no longer on that diet. It sells a lot of books. It sells programs. It sells this kind of crappy food plans often,

It sells programs, it sells this kind of crappy food plans often, but it's not doing anybody. It's just, we keep beating the dead horse of diet, expecting a different outcome and it's never gonna happen. So with that, I mean, this is a weird combination of pessimism and optimism. On the one hand, the optimism that if you can expose people to these foods and the food is delicious,

they will gravitate towards that. And that will lead them on a journey towards healthier choices, butting up against the reality of, you know, the monumental sort of problem that we're facing to overcome what ails us. Yeah, so my daytime job since 2010 has been creating these Blue Zone project cities, which have set out and successfully, I might add, changed the defaults of make the food environment

healthy in these cities I work with. So that's sort of the top down approach. And these Blue Zone kitchen books are my bottom up approach. And Just like mitigating smoking problem, there's not one answer. It's the perfect storm that comes together when you create the economic environment, the education, and then the policy environment where you're denormalizing the bad behavior, you're making it cheaper to do the good behavior,

and you're showing people in this case that it's not only cheaper, but it could be more delicious. Back to the road trip, you're cruising around. You can't write this book without delving deep into Latin American culture. Like when we're talking about America, it's many diaspora here and it's the confluence

of all these different cultural influences. But of course, the Latin American influence and the history of that cuisine is super important to this. So talk about like how that fit in and what you discovered on that part of the exploration. Mainly, this is a question to set you up to talk about our friends, Diego and Veronica.

Diego, yes. Because I love them so much. Well, I met them in Miami because of you and they have the hottest restaurant in Miami called Love Life Cafe. Everybody who passes through Miami has to go to this restaurant. It's my favorite. They're, in addition to being just beautiful people,

Diego is an absolute mastermind wizard in the kitchen. And what he's able to, you know, concoct is just magical. He's a genius. And his plant-based burger won the veggie burger of the year. I just had dinner with them on Saturday night and I'm having dinner with them again on this Saturday. I texted them this morning.

They're featured in this book and I took photos of it and sent it to them. And I was like, I don't know if you have this book yet or like if you've seen this, but Dan's coming in. I just wanted to show you this. They were super excited. I saw, I just got the book this week, so I wasn't able to show it to them.

But Diego's and Veronica are great examples of people who are committed to plant-based, very rooted in their food tradition. In the case of Diego, it's Venezuela. In the case of Veronica, it's Brazil. And they've taken their traditional foods and rifted off of them, but stayed in the plant-based lane and their Love Life Cafe,

you go in there on any given day, you see be suited people, you see hipsters, the Yoginis, the mayor of Miami is often seen there. So it's just proof that you can take these simple foods with some ingeniousness and appeal to all Americans. And I met another fabulous chef in Houston, Texas named Adam Medrano. He became a chef at about age 60.

He comes from, you know, Texas used to be part of Mexico, Tejas. Sure. And Texas is famous for Tex-Mex food, which we tend to think of, you know, steak fajitas or slathering cheese all over a burrito. But Adan Medrano had found the original ingredients that made Texas Mexican foods. And it's not steak, it's not cheese. It's things like walnuts and pecans and amaranth and mole. Moles are these wonderful, rich sauces

made with a variety of different chili peppers and tortillas and nopales, which are these cactus paddles that are stripped of their thorns and then fried. And once again, it's this fantastically inventive food rooted in what people really ate there 100 years ago that he's bringing back. And he shared several of his recipes for the book as well.

Yeah, those are the ones I'm most excited about for the appendix or for the television show or whatever's gonna come out of this cause there's so much good stuff here. But what was something that surprised you? I'm sure you go into this thinking you have some sense of what you're gonna discover and where this journey is gonna lead you.

But on some level, you must have been surprised to discover X, Y, or Z. I was surprised to discover that there are so many vegans among African-Americans. There are more percentage wise, there are more vegans among African-Americans than there are other races. Wow. Something like twice as many.

And the inventiveness of African-American chefs throughout and Ashland, North Carolina, the Benny Seed restaurant is all run by African-Americans and Matthew Rayford, the Gullah Geechies I mentioned, that's probably- Yeah, that's pretty cool. I'm about to have this woman, Chef Babette here. You heard of her?

She's unbelievable. She has a restaurant, African-American woman. She's got a plant-based restaurant in Compton. And I think she's like 72 and just unbelievably fit and vital. I had never heard of her. And I went to the Mercy for Animals, like gala party or whatever.

And they gave her an award and they showed this video of kind of like the work that she does. And I was just captivated by her and like what she's doing in her community. So I'm excited to talk to her. And I'm sure there's tons of people like that out there. People who aren't, African-Americans who are in touch with their roots are invariably interested

in plant-based food. It really wasn't until about 1920 that the African-Americans from the rural South started moving North to the industrialized North where there were more jobs, places like Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit. And what happens then is they no longer have their gardens and their diet starts to change in a hurry. And it gets more aggregated in restaurants where there's less vegetables, there's a little bit more cash, more food gets fried,

this fried chicken and everything cooked in this now ubiquitous and cheap fat. And we often look at soul food as an example of unbelievably unhealthy food, but it has its roots in unbelievably healthy food. Yeah. When you were meeting all of these people and photographing them, preparing food

and interviewing them for this book, I assume that you recorded all of this in audio. I hope that you did. Yeah, we met before you went on this road trip. And I was like, this is a podcast series. You need to like record all of these interviews and you're sitting on top of a gold mine. Because this is a beautiful historic record

of traditions that are in jeopardy of being lost or forgotten. Yeah, what comes natural to you Rich is not natural to me. I'm a writer. Well, you're gonna talk to them anyway. You might as well have a little thing and hit record. I actually bought the machine that you told me to buy and I brought it for the first three interviews

and then I forgot about it. Well, here's the thing. So, yeah, so I like to be participatory. So, a lot of these chefs have become my friends or were my friends. And so I would arrive and I don't try to make them an anthropological subject. I try to hang out with them and I cook with them

and find out about their lives and we go walk their land and I sit down and eat with them. And yes, when I have, I don't sit down like you and I are sitting right now and interview them as much as I can type as fast as you can talk. And I have probably 200 pages of notes that I just silently sort of type away as people talk and distilled it down. But maybe it's a follow-up project. I know the best chefs there

and I could easily, you know, go back and visit them and pursue this idea. But my, you know, my muscle, so to speak, my journalistic muscle is with the written word, not so much the spoken word. Yeah, I get it. So what is, of all of these chefs that you visited with and all the cuisine that you enjoyed,

where are the hidden gem restaurants, the off the beaten path, Jeff Gordoneer approved spots that you were lucky enough to dine at that we should all know about? Asheville, North Carolina, there's a place called El Gallo run by Luis Martinez, originally, I believe, from El Salvador. And he is one of these guys who started with austerity

and that inspired this incredible inventiveness. I think here, Jolena's, I think one of the most inventive, I covered Jolena's, it's a restaurant here in Abbot County in Venice Beach. Venice, yeah. It's a little bit on the expensive side, but- Yeah, it's a fancy place. Pure genius. Love Life, we talked about that.

Veg, we talked about that. Yeah, those are some of the, there's a place in Minneapolis called Dow Foods, which is a place you go buy herbs or tinctures and so forth. And they have just one little counter and maybe 10 tables, but they do the best macrobiotic food I've ever tasted. This is more kind of rooted in the Buddhist slash a hippie tradition.

I'd highly recommend that. When you're in LA, other than Jelena, what are the other places that you like to eat? Or you just cook up your own Icarus stew at home? No, well, you know, LA, I used to lived here for many years. And so my favorite restaurant in this whole journey was a place called Good Vibes Restaurant in Long Beach.

And it's run by a mother-son team. Their name is Kim and Viet Pham. And they were the most amazingly inventive. They had a salad, I remember, that was made from fresh cherries on top of a plant-based feta garnished with flowers. You'd never think that these three wildly inventive

ingredients would come together to create pure magic. But that was just one of the many fantastic dishes they did. And you know, cheap place to eat, easy to park too. I feel like there should be some sort of Zagat guide for all of these amazing restaurants for, you know, people who are traveling across the country or dropping in on a city that they're not familiar with and are looking for these hidden gems?

You know, I was able to capture about 50 chefs for the Blue Zone American Kitchen, but there are several hundred, I'm sure. They're not that plentiful. There are several hundred, I'm sure. They're not that plentiful. You know, it is the, is as you point out, it's a gem, but they're out there.

And if you look, you can find them. Right. Not everybody can get Jeff Gordoneer on speed dial going, listen, I'm going to Orlando. Like, where do I need to eat? You know, and he'll give you 10 recommendations off the top of his head. All right, well, listen, Dan,

it's one thing to have all of these recipes and they're beautifully photographed and they're amazing and nutritious and there are these amazing personal stories behind all of them, but I just want the food. Just can't you create a food company where you can just send me the stuff already made? How's that for teeing you up?

Yeah. That was like a softball pitch that stopped over home plate. Like so transparent. So thanks for teeing that up. Yes, I've teamed up with a team that knows exactly how to get food into grocery stores and we're creating the blue zones kitchen which is a food company that is creating

dishes inspired by these longevity recipes around the world and around america with a maniacal focus on deliciousness because at the end of the day if you can't make this food taste delicious, people aren't gonna eat it. And I know now for having spent the better part of five years traveling around the world, picking the absolute best recipes, I can curate a dozen or so that I think people like, whether they live in Oklahoma or Venice Beach or Manhattan

and make them, by the way, the inputs are all cheap. So you can make this food inexpensively so everybody can afford it. And our first food should be out early 2023. That's pretty exciting. That's no small endeavor. No, it's a big endeavor actually. But we were able to raise enough money

to hire professionals. So it's not my day-to-day job. We have a great CEO named Scott Marcus who comes from Kraft actually and is atoning for his sins over at Kraft and is now dedicated to making healthy food available to everybody. The hidden story in the narrative around Dan Buettner

that I think is under addressed is a story of serial entrepreneurship. Like you're the humble investigative journalist. Yes, I write these books. I go on these travels. I talk to people, but along the way, you have these ideas for businesses that germinate out of the work that you're doing and have become

unbelievably successful, like the cities project. And, you know, now this, like, it's interesting, like you're very dynamic in how you approach these problems and these solutions and how you kind of communicate and, and share, um, and then generate like extremely successful, viable businesses out of them at the same time. Yeah, but I would say I'm different than an entrepreneur in that they all begin with enthusiasms and curiosities. I didn't set off writing Blue Zones because I wanted to create a food company or even make American cities healthier.

It started because I was interested in this idea of reverse engineering longevity. And it just seemed incredibly cool that if I could identify places around the world where people are living the longest and use some established scientific techniques to find out their common denominators, I could find a de facto secret to longevity. And I didn't think beyond that. And it actually took me three years just to find the original Blue Zones. But then, you know, after writing the Blue Zones, it was a big successful book. And I was in, you know, I was in Oprah and Good Morning America and the Today Show and CNN. And I'd sit in these green rooms before going on and there's all these other, you know, I was in Oprah and Good Morning America and the Today Show and CNN, and I'd sit in these green rooms before going on.

And there's all these other, you know, diet gurus in there that had whatever diet du jour, you know, and they're all pretty nice people. But I thought to myself, well, actually what I found, I know it works. It's not just hype. These are real people living in the world who aren't suffering from heart disease and diabetes.

There's something real here. And then I got the idea, well, maybe you can manufacture this in America. And our first Blue Zone City, I got funding from AARP, made almost no money. If I were making money, I would have probably set up something else. But I basically took all the money I raised and plowed it into hiring experts who could help me realize this vision.

And even then, I didn't set out to start a business. A guy named Ben Lito, who was CEO of a huge healthcare company, he had 3,500 employees. 3,500 employees. He wanted to, he read about this and he was tired of telehealth, which didn't seem to be producing any long-term changes, even though it was a billion and a half dollar business. He flew out and he said, you know, I wouldn't even take his call. And after not taking his call, he and his four lieutenants get in the corporate jet and fly out to Minneapolis. is four lieutenants get in the corporate jet and fly out to Minneapolis. And I have like two employees and he walks in the door and I,

well, I'm gonna meet him now. And we talked for a half hour and he's the one who talked me into doing these Blue Zone City projects. So the point being, it's not like, well, Dan Buettner wants to set out to make a million dollars. It's Dan Buettner- No, but the best entrepreneurs

are trying to solve a problem you're very clear on the problem and you have ideas around the solution that's right that's right and it's and the and the fuel is curiosity and and wanting to see wanting to see what i discovered put into action and work that's what's. And you have the luxury of having a friend and somewhat of a mentor, I suppose, in John Mackey, who's one of the great entrepreneurial success stories of our generation. John Mackey's done more to put vegetables on people's plates

than anybody, and organic vegetables, than anybody in the history of the world. One of the great, great businessman entrepreneurs of our country, a conscious capitalist, great hiker by the way. He loves to hike. So what have you learned from him through that relationship? Hire good people,

probably the biggest and most important thing. Have a strong unwavering vision and only invite people on your team who share that vision. I've also learned, you know, he's brilliant in that even though he was CEO of Whole Foods, he somehow found a way to take about eight trips a year where he'd take off for a week and he'd go

sail around the Bahamas or he, I mean the British Virgin Islands or hike the Appalachian trail or take 15 disparate, but interesting people to Slovenia and for a week. And they were philosophers and people from business and people who've excelled at sports and people who own record companies. And these great hikes, he would learn from all of them. And a byproduct, he cross-pollinated his friends. So he created this sort of virtual community around him. And the big thing I learned is,

yes, it's cool to build a big business, but you also wanna excel at the art of life. And excelling at the art of life is doing something else once in a while, curating a cool social circle and being generous with those people. And John is a paragon of that. Yeah, he seems like an expert in that.

Is the Slovenia trip where you met my childhood next door neighbor? Yes, Tonya. You have to tell that story. Yeah, so Tonya Pankoff like reached out to me, I don't know, a handful of years ago, I think through Facebook and was like, "'Hey, I'm friends with John Mackey.'

And this is a person that I hadn't spoken to nor heard from since I was a young child in this home that I grew up in. She literally lived right behind us and she was friends with my sister. And I guess she became like an investment banker and somehow was in business with John at some point and fell into that circle. Yeah, she was an analyst

and for the grocery industry and the food industry and investment banking. And I found myself just a couple of weeks ago walking with her all day long. And she was just downloading investment banking to me and investment. And I was telling her about longevity and food and so forth. And one of these great conversations

that goes on for hours, you don't even realize you've hiked 15 miles. But at some point I brought your name up and she looks at me and she goes, Rich Roll, he was my next door neighbor. And I go, really? And I go, what was he like as a kid? And she said, he was a total nerd.

I was a super nerd, yeah. Which is funny because I look at you as like the paragon of hipness. You're at the very white hot core of LA hipness in my view. She knew me in my headgear days and eye patch days. And she was really good friends with my sister. I mean, this was when we were like in elementary school. Like I remember her and the story that I always tell

is that I used to be a chronic sleepwalker and I would go out, like one time I went sleepwalking out of my house and in the middle of a thunderstorm and walked like two blocks away before I woke up and my parents found me. I was the kid who would open up the dresser drawer and like urinate in it.

And like, I would do all kinds. We were at a motel hotel somewhere on a road trip family vacation where those little motels that are built around a pool, you know, one story places. And I ended up sleepwalking and going into another open hotel room where people were asleep in there.

But the point being that on one occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night. I didn't wake up. I slept walk in the middle of the night and I went't wake up. I slept walk in the middle of the night and I went over to Tonya Pankoff's house and I knocked on the door and her parents answered the door and I responded by demanding that they return the meat that they had stolen from us in my sleep.

And my sister and my parents still like tell that story. Like it's so embarrassing. Of course, now I wouldn't be demanding meat from anybody. Be the toefl. But yeah, I still remember like that. I must've been like nine years old or something at the time. But it's so weird that somebody from my childhood has found her way into this circle of friends now.

It's crazy. But it is cool how John has curated that. And I think that dovetails nicely into the last thing that I wanna talk about, which is this idea of the art of living. And this is something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about. I've spent the last several years

like trying to build this thing up and along the way, have experienced success beyond anything that I ever imagined, but there's been sacrifices and some of those sacrifices have come in the form of, you know, friendships that I've lost touch with. And as I get older, like I turn 56 next week, like I'm very mindful of the meaning of those friendships and how important they are. And I think there is something that is maybe even more particular to men as they age in how they kind of lose touch with their friends and their circle of friends tends to be smaller.

And I am much more aware of how important it is to nurture those friendships from the past, like my college buddies and things like that, we're not guaranteed a tomorrow and life is short and it is those experiences that you inevitably look back upon and never regret. Really, the average American works over about 45 hours a week.

It's too much of our waking life. You know, E.B. White has this great, E.B. White wrote Charlotte's Web and a number of other great books, but a New Yorker writer wrote, when you wake up every morning trying to change the world, you don't know if you should be trying to savor it or save it. And it makes it hard for you to plan your day.

But I become obsessed lately. I'm over 60 now and obsessed with this idea of the art of life and finding that sweet spot between doing something that's relevant, something that gives an outlet for your particular purpose, but also enjoying life. And it takes an enormous conscious effort to pull yourself away from work and getting sucked down these rabbit holes of busyness. And I found two things that have really helped with that. Number one, very conscious about living

in a walkable environment with easy access to recreation nature. So the places I live are all have that because when I walk outside my house, I'm bumping into people and it's just so easy to swim or to go biking, much harder to do if you live in an American suburb. Second thing, this past summer, I organized, I have a place on a lake called Church Pine. I organized what I call the Church Pine Summit. And I invited nine of guys about my age who are also at about the same place in life. They've achieved a lot, but they're trying to figure out their next chapter. So had Robert Stevens, who started Geek Squad and Brian Wansink, who wrote a big bestseller about food and Bart

Foster helped come facilitate it. But what really worked and anybody can do this. We got together for three days and it happened to be at a big cabin, but it could be anywhere. And during the day, every one of us got an hour to talk about what we were excited about or what our next chapter could look like. And we had the input of the other eight guys who have collectively 400 years of experience to help inform that. And these aren't things you can learn from a book, but we learn from each other. In the mornings we, you know, canoed or hiked or biked or played pickleball. And then at night we had these Jeffersonian dinners, which are single theme dinners. There's

no sort of chatty small talk among the participants, but we all have one communal endeavor around one theme. And it was a theme related to this art of living. And all of us walked away absolutely on fire and with a much better focus on what the next chapter looks like for us. And I couldn't recommend it highly. So what was your epiphany on the next chapter? Or is that what you're already doing now? I'm mostly doing it, but mostly it was this food company.

And I'm putting more effort into this Blue Zones Kitchen Food Company. I realize I love food. I love exploration. Most of my social connectivity these days happens around a meal. So it's an easy connection between this company, but also it activates my sense of purpose

in a very tangible way. I love to see taking what I've learned in these blue zones and putting it to work in America. And I think right now, my stage of the game, this is how I can make the biggest contribution. And you can go home to Miami and you got a neighbor in your building who knows a few things about how to build

a successful food company. But on the subject of the art of living, like now you have this opportunity to kind of teach it by dint of our mutual friend, Chip Conley and his Modern Elder Academy. Yes. We're gonna go down and teach there. Are you doing it down in Baja? In Todos Santos.

Oh, cool. Yeah, in Baja. Yes, in March. I've never taught a course before. I've done thousands of speeches, but I've never spent an entire week with a group of people. And I realized when I think back, I easily have 20 hours of curriculum in my head about Blue Zones, but Chip is a master at,

I would say, packaging it and delivering it and creating the right environment and creating the right sort of cadence. And I'm excited to learn from him and he's gonna co-facilitate it. Yeah, it's cool. Do you think of yourself as a modern elder? Increasingly, I can think of myself as an elder. I don't know how modern I am, sadly. You're pretty hip and modern.

I hope that I'm as, you know, as happening as you are. Well, I'd say like a couple of years younger than you, so. Yeah, well, I think unconsciously, I always kind of emulate what you wore. I remember I showed up at a Google Zeitgeist conference once and you were wearing the Lululemon suit jacket and ABC pants and I was wearing the same thing. We're both wearing black t-shirts.

That one when I tried, yeah. Cause I showed up, we did a podcast with Charlie Engel there. Yeah, that's right. And you were speaking. Yeah, the ultra marathon. And now I'm going to that event. I think it's in like two weeks.

That's a fantastic event. Any advice for me? You know, I can't sign out without telling this story. I love to tell my rich role story. So three years ago, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic on happiness. That's always been my professional goal to have a cover story for National Geographic.

And for the first time in over a hundred years, they put my name on the cover written by Dan Buettner. And I had a speech the day it came out big auditorium and um unleashed everything i learned in this cover story and showed the cover story and afterwards there's a whole line of people waiting to see me to to talk about what i presumed was the this cover story and i got down to the line of people and they'd all listen to me on the Rich Roll podcast. And they wanted to talk to me about the podcast. So, you know, it's surprising what a cultural force you've become in marshalling important stories. And without the hyperbole, without the pandering, I think, to the gossip and the celebrity

and you're so good at distilling the soul and the spirit and really the zeitgeist of what's going on in America and somehow getting Americans engaged with good news and not just the bad news that sells most newspapers. Well, I appreciate that, my friend. This show is only as successful as the quality of the messages and the guests that I have the privilege of hosting. And people wanted to talk to you about that podcast because you delivered a tremendous amount of value. And that value is a function of all of the hard work

over many years, your curiosity and your commitment, honestly, to service. Like you're performing a tremendous service to humankind. This book is just the latest incarnation of that ongoing commitment. And it's beyond laudable. For me, you're the North Star in terms of like being a servant to humankind.

And I only aspire to your level of commitment in that regard. And it's always an honor to talk to you. I consider you a friend and a mentor, and I'm super excited about this new book and this new chapter and everything that you have to share. So I only encourage you to get out there more and talk more about these important ideas

because you have a lot to say and we need to hear what you have to say. So I appreciate you coming in today, sharing this space with me. And if there's anything else that I can do in service of you and your mission, sharing this space with me. And if there's anything else that I can do in service of you and your mission, I am available to you 24 seven. Thank you, Rich.

It's an honor. Cool. So onwards until podcast number five. We'll see. I think you have a few things that are gonna be worth talking about soon. So you always have an open seat here. Thank you, Rich.

Thank you. Cheers. Peace. Plants. The American kitchen. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated,

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Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis.

Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.