The Rich Roll Podcast - How To Live To Be 100+ (And Why You Should Invest in Adventure)

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

Somewhere along the way, you've likely heard of something called the Blue Zones — a term coined in reference to five hidden slivers of the world that boast the highest per capita populations of centenarians – people who thrive to 100 and beyond. Unlikely locales were people not only live inordinately long, but also seem resoundingly happier than their fellow western world equals. Places where people forgot to die. This is the work of my friend Dan Buettner. A renaissance man in the truest sense, Dan transcends categorization. Global adventurer. Three-time Guinness Book world record holding endurance cyclist. National Geographic Fellow. Multiple New York Times bestselling author. A wellness and longevity superhero, Dan has keynoted speeches for Bill Clinton’s Health Matters Initiative, Google Zeitgeist, and TEDMED. He's appeared on Oprah twice and his TED Talk “How to live to be 100+” has been viewed over 2 million times. Without mincing words, Dan is my hero. A man who exudes life. A man with huge vision. And a man whose life work has positively, permanently and quite unequivocally improved the well being of millions. You might have caught Dan on The TODAY Show (which is featuring segments on Dan and his work throughout the week), read about him in last Sunday's PARADE magazine, seen him on NBC News or caught him on CNN's The Wonder List a few weeks ago. The common theme of these stories? Grappling with the lifestyle tenets that govern Blue Zone cultures as a means to help the rest of us live longer and better. According to Dan, Blue Zone cultures extending wellness into Ponce De Leon territory all live in accordance with 9 identifiable, convergent lifestyle principles (listed in the show notes below). Principles that are replicable on both the individual and civic level, as demonstrated by Dan's Blue Zones Project– a community well-being improvement initiative that has wholly transformed 20 cities and municipalities to date by implementing permanent changes to environment, policy, and social networks that make healthy choices easier. The Blue Zones Solution*, Dan's new book out this week, is a highly detailed primer that extrapolates from these principles powerful eating and lifestyle tools to transform your health. Enjoy! Rich

The average American could hit about 92. Women may be able to hit 94. And that is the value proposition. In blue zones, people are coming close to that. They're living a long time. They're about a decade younger biologically at every major age milepost. That's Dan Buettner. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Rich Roll. Glad to be back with you for a second time this week. The simple, beautiful, and powerful mission continues. And that mission is to help you live and be better, to become who you really are. And to do this, each week I sit down with some of the best and the brightest, the most forward-thinking, paradigm-busting minds across all categories of life, health, and excellence to serve and assist you and me in discovering, uncovering, unlocking, and unleashing our best, most authentic selves. Thank you for subscribing to the show on iTunes. Thank you for spreading the word to your friends and your colleagues and your family members and your co-workers. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter, and thank you

for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So somewhere along the way, you might have heard of something called the Blue Zones. Well, that term was coined by myriad world travels that are, for the most part, with one exception, isolated from our fast-paced developing world. populations of centenarians, people who live to 100 and beyond, places where people seem to live the longest, and also places where, by pretty much all accounts, people also seem to be the happiest. Dan is truly a Renaissance man. He's a National Geographic fellow. He's a world adventurer. He's a longevity expert. He's a New York Times bestselling author. You name it, this guy has done it.

He's appeared on Oprah twice. He's keynoted speeches for Bill Clinton's Health Matters Initiative, Google Zeitgeist, TedMed, and his TED Talk, How to Live to be 100 Plus, has been viewed over 2 million times. Not enough? You want to know what? He also has three world records in endurance cycling. Are you kidding me? This guy has ridden his bike from Alaska to Argentina. He's biked almost 13,000 miles across the Soviet Union. And he biked almost 12,000 miles through Africa, including crossing the Sahara Desert, surviving by, according to his account, on little else but water and dates.

It's extraordinary. So basically, what am I saying? I'm saying this guy is my hero, straight up. You might have caught Dan on CNN a few weeks ago. He appeared on a show called The Wonder List with Bill Weir in an episode called The Island Where People Forgot to Die. And Bill and Dan traveled together to the Blue Zone island of Ikaria, which is in the Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey. And they went there to film and learn more about why so many people in this hidden corner of the world live so long and so well.

It was a really cool glimpse into what this Blue Zone ethos is all about. I don't know if it's online. I'll see if it is. If it is, I'll put it in the show notes for you guys to check out. Anyway, Dan's got a new book out this week. It's called The Blue Zones Solution. I highly recommend all of you check it out. And today we sit down to talk about that.

But we talk about a lot of stuff. It's a truly extraordinary conversation. It's such a gift to spend time with this guy that I respect and admire so much. And we span everything. We talk about his crazy endurance feats. We talk about the importance of investing in adventure. We talk about what exactly he discovered when researching the longest living, happiest cultures in the world, and what this means for you, how we can all make basic behavioral, social, and environmental changes that can help all of us live longer and get the absolute most out of our years. So in other words, this is a talk about what it truly means

to not only live longer, but to truly live well, something I think we can all not only aspire to, but embrace. Dan's a great guy. This is a great conversation. It's coming up in a couple few, 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

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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. 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,

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again, go to recovery.com. All right, let's enter the blue zone with Dan Buettner. I think it's good that we made the executive decision to do this today as opposed to yesterday. I was brain dead yesterday. Well, we were together all day and we were talking all day. So then to kind of sit down and then continue to talk, I don't know. I think we might have run out of steam.

Moreover, I tried to keep up with you for eight miles. So when I finished, there were literally no more consonants in my sentences. It was all vowels. Right. Well, we're here today. It's all good. And I'm super excited to be talking to you. I know there's a lot of people that are excited about it too, and really interested in your advocacy and your message. And just on a personal note, like expeditionist, adventurer, explorer, ultra athlete, wellness warrior. I mean, dude, you're like my hero. You know, like how can I be more like you?

Like will you be my mentor? I think it's a mutual love fest here, Rich. I love what you do. I love your message. And I'm honored to spend the time with you. So thank you for sitting down with me. And I think, you know, I'd like to just kick it off for people that are, you know, the four people out of everybody that are uninitiated as to what the Blue Zones are, what's behind the Blue Zones. Can you just sort of bring us up to speed?

Like, what is a Blue Zone? You know, what are we talking about here? And then we can kind of get into the origin story. So a blue zone is a part of the world where people live the longest. They're demographically confirmed, geographically defined areas where either people are reaching age 100 at extraordinary rates, they have the highest life expectancy, or they have the lowest rate of middle-age

mortality. In other words, they have the best chances of kind of reaching the global average of how long humans can live, which is about 92. And it began as a National Geographic magazine assignment, and it was funded by the National Institutes on Aging. It took us three years just to find these five areas where people are living a long time and confirm them. A lot of the places you've heard about before,

Vilcabamba Valley of Ecuador, the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, the Caucasus and the old Soviet Union, those have all been debunked. So we went in and did the math and made sure we were finding long-lived areas and then brought teams in to distill down exactly what they're doing that explains this longevity. And out of it came this torrent of content, of books and articles and TV shows. And now it's a program in citywide programs in 20 American cities. That's amazing. So essentially, it begins with identifying these geographical pockets, these five areas where people seem to not only sort of defy the statistics in terms of longevity, but also are living more fulfilling, happier lives, right?

in terms of longevity, but also are living more fulfilling, happier lives, right? Like, I feel like there's a lot of emphasis on the centenarians and how long they're living, but I think the key kind of thing here also is quality of life. People are a little drawn to three digits in their age. And 100-year-olds doing extraordinary things, that tends to capture people's imagination. 100-year-olds doing extraordinary things, that tends to capture people's imagination. But the average American, if you got rid of all chronic disease, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, these are all avoidable diseases largely, the average American could hit about 92. Women may be able to hit 94.

And that is the value proposition. In blue zones, people are coming close to that. They're living a long time. They're about a decade younger biologically at every major age milepost, suffer about a sixth the rate of heart disease, about a fifth the rate of certain cancers. One of our blue zones, there's about a 10th the rate of dementia that we have here in America. And they achieve this not by the way we think about health. They don't diet. They don't have exercise programs. But they live in places where the culture makes the right decisions for them.

And it turns out that there is this whole network of factors that come together that help them live along. And to your point, Rich, it's not just about the discipline of staying on a diet or an exercise regimen. It's about a lot of the things that also derive a happy life, not only a long life. Mm-hmm. And so we're talking about these hill regions of Sardinia, right? We're talking about an area of Costa Rica. Nicoya Peninsula. Loma Linda, California, ironically, which we'll get into. And where are the other regions?

There's a place, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey called Ikaria. And then the longest-lived women in the world live in Okinawa, Japan. So there are five of them. Right. And what are the sort of unifying factors? Because one of the things is you would think, well, these are cultures that are somewhat removed from the gestalt of kind of Western progress, I suppose,

and have maintained a certain lifestyle over generations. But what is it that kind of ties them together to create themes that you can extrapolate lifestyle principles out of? So we've discovered nine common denominators. We've discovered nine common denominators. First one is they live in environments where just about every trip occasions a walk. Their houses are deconvenienced. They tend to have gardens.

They have vocabulary for purpose. Deconvenienced meaning what specifically? There's not a button to push for yard work and another button to push for housework and another button to push for kitchen work. They're getting in there with their own hands and doing the work, kneading the bread, grinding the corn. They're going out back to their gardens to get food. They have yards, but they're doing yard work by hand often. So we're kind of deluded in this country to think that we can sit in our offices all day long and then go to the gym for a half hour or do a half hour run at the end of the day and get the exercise we need. When you look at the cultures of longevity around the world, these people are nudged into physical activity about once every 15 or 20 minutes.

So their metabolisms are kick-started. If you sit for more than about 90 minutes, actually it's about 75 minutes, without moving, your metabolism drops into a hibernative state. Whatever you had for breakfast very quickly goes to your midsection. So we should keep this podcast under 75 minutes. Or we can stand up halfway. Yeah, we can do that. But as you know, I'm part Italian, so you'll see my hands moving. Your metabolism is always going.

Yes, it's an exercise. So essentially, the circumstances of their environment dictate a more active approach to their life. So it's not about going out and pushing it or going running or the things that we kind of entertain ourselves with. But it's really just a defining aspect of how they live their life every day. They're kind of always on the move. Yes, gentle, low-int intensity physical activity. Their lives tend to be imbued with purpose. They live in places where there's actually vocabulary for it. There's a time to downshift every day, which is really important. Almost every age-related disease

finds its root in inflammation, in chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation wrinkles your skin. It atrophies your brain. It wreaks havoc on your arteries. These people suffer the same stresses that we do. They worry about their kids. They worry about their health. They worry about their money. But they have, either through meditation or through prayer or through happy

hour, sometime during the day where they're reversing it all. They're taking that moment. Again, these are culturally provided. They eat a plant-based diet. I want to talk more about that later, but in general, it's plant slant. About 95% of what they eat come from plants. They do eat some meat, which I know is an inconvenient message to some people, but we did a worldwide global average, and there's some meat in their diet, but not a lot less than we probably think. They keep their aging parents nearby, invest in their families. They tend to belong a, belong to a faith-based community, which is not to say they're spiritual or necessarily holier than thou,

but they have this network of friends that often are imbued with some sort of spiritual faith. And then they, finally, they tend to either be born into or choose, curate, so to speak, a social network that helps them practice these healthier behaviors without really thinking about it. I love this idea of purpose. There is that term. Is it the Okinawans that have the word that kind of defines? Ikigai.

Ikigai. It kind of sounds like that creepy guy at the end of the bar, but it actually means the reason for which I wake up in the morning. And this is culturally like a mandate for them, right? Like everybody sort of knows what their ikigai is, if you were to pull people. Traditionally, when you're about five years old, your parents will match you up with a half a dozen other five-year-olds,

and there'll be a ceremony, and then there's kind of cultural pressure that you travel through lives with those people. And they're there to, if you run out of money or there's a death in the family or a kid gets sick or you get divorced, you have this social safety net that you can count on. But likewise, you've got to step up to the plate when somebody else in that Moai. And it's really powerful. Actually, here in America,

if you are lonely, if you meet the definition of loneliness, which means you have fewer than three friends you can count on on a bad day, your life expectancy is about eight years less than it would be if you have a strong social network. That's amazing. You know, I think that's a huge problem. I think we're getting, with the sort of advent of the internet, ironically, we're getting lonelier and more isolated as a culture. Fifteen years ago, the average American had three good friends.

We're now down to about 1.5. And incidentally, we have this true happiness test that people take. It's 66 questions, and it measures their happiness. But we don't capture people's specific or individual information, but we can get the aggregate. So we've had about 280,000 people take it. So it's a big data set. And we can see very clearly that the more time people are on social media, Facebook, Twitter, except of course for Rich Roll. But they're- Seeing what Blue Zones is doing. They're actually less happy. They have,, actually, social media, Twitter and Facebook, brings you a little bit more happiness if you're using it between zero and 45 minutes a day. But

after about 45 minutes a day, the curve makes a U-turn. And the least happy people we find, i.e. the loneliest, I would argue, are on social media up to eight hours a day, we were seeing. Eight hours a day. Well, I mean, do you think that they're lonely because they're spending all that time there, or they're spending all that time there because they're lonely? I mean, it's sort of a cart and horse thing. It is a cart and horse. But I think friends, authentic friends require effort. We evolved face-to-face like you and I are right now.

There's a completely different dynamic we're having right now because we're six feet away from each other as opposed to if you called me up on the phone and we were talking on the phone. We evolved as social creature and we're successful as a species because we collaborate. It feels good to collaborate. It kind of puts our genes at rest. And it requires effort to go see people, to be there when they're hurting, to lend a helping hand. And when you're just, depending on social network, it's sort of the easy way out. It's too easy to not make that effort and build those authentic relationships. And there's where you get in trouble.

And this idea of kind of building community, having purpose, having a faith, all of these things kind of creating this web, this interdependent web of people that, and the relationship between that and happiness, I think is something that, you know, we've kind of, you know, in America, we're sort of moving away from, we're losing. And there's something really precious and beautiful about that. And there was something that you said that really struck me, which is, there's something really precious and beautiful about that. And there was something that you said that really struck me, which is, you know, I think it would be easy to say, well, these blue zone cultures, like they don't have the stress that we have. Like they're not experiencing stress. They

have a, they have a mellow life. Like they don't get worked up about stuff, but for you to say, like, they do have stress, you know, they are worried about the same things, but these other environmental factors that are built into their daily existence seem to buffer the negative impact of that. Yeah, we tend to take a pharmaceutical approach to health. It's, well, I'm going to rely on this diet, rely on this exercise program, rely on these supplements to stay healthy. And we tend to think that they're the panacea. I mean, when you look at, you Google health, you're going to see books on diet and exercise programs. And we really spent 10 years,

and I had a great team at National Geographic. And it's very clear that purpose, being able to articulate your sense of purpose, it's associated with about eight extra years of life expectancy and about halving of your mortality. And it cuts your chances of dementia in half if you can articulate your sense of purpose. So who thinks about health in terms of purpose? Social network. We know if your three best friends are obese, there's 150% better chance that you'll be overweight. The company that you keep. Yes. Loneliness is contagious. Unhappiness is contagious. Whether you smoke, how much you drink. Being aware that your social network is going to drive your health much more than some kind of activity regimen.

And that's what we really tried to distill out of these cultures of longevity around the world. Right. And these cultures are not uniform in the sense that when you look at one specific cross, Uniform in the sense that when you look at one specific cross, whether it's specifically, I guess what I'm talking about is the Seventh-day Adventist, where you have all different kinds of ethnicities that comprise this culture, right? So it's really more about the environment and the social culture created than it is about the genetic you know sort of framework of this particular culture so something called the danish twin study established that only about 20 percent of how long you live is dictated by your genes um the other 80 percent is dictated by lifestyle and environment so all except one of these blue zones it's's a heterogeneous population. In other words, it's a melting pot of people. They don't have genes any more special than the genes you and I have. You can eliminate genes.

If you're looking for an answer to why they're living so long, you can eliminate the genes variable of the equation. Then we can just focus on, well of the equation. So we focus that. Then we can just focus on, well, what's their lifestyle and what's their environment? And we tried to look at commonalities. We relied partially on, in some cases, there's been centenarian studies going on, which we've been able to leverage. In two cases, we had to create our own centenarian study, Icaria in Costa Rica.

But it's remarkable. You see the same nine things happening over and over and over again in completely disparate cultures around the world where people are living a long time. These places also are achieving happiness. They're landing in the top 20% of the happiest places in the world as well. So happiness and longevity travel hand in hand. What do you think people most misunderstand

when the conversation turns to longevity or happiness? People think about living a long time and it's something they don't want to really ponder people don't like pondering their age or their frailty i think especially younger people say well i don't want to live to 100 anyway i want to be i want to die before I get old. But I interviewed about 350 centenarians, and I'll guarantee you that every one of them wanted to live another year. So I think when it comes to happiness and to a certain extent longevity, there's no short-term fix. We tend to want to do one thing and it's going to change it. In all cases, achieving both longevity and happiness.

I wrote this book for National Geographic on happiness called Thrive and came up with similar conclusions. There's no one quick thing you can do today, but what you can do in each case is stack the deck in your favor for greater longevity or greater happiness by making changes to your surroundings. That is the key organizing tenet. Well, what I really appreciate about the way you speak to these issues is the fact that you're acknowledging that there is no quick fix and that you're refusing to take this reductionist approach to how we tackle this

problem. And we were joking about this the other day. I said to you, you talk about how these Sardinians drink this wine that's very potent, it's very high in antioxidants, and it would have been the American way for you to come back and bottle this potion and say, I have found the elixir of youth, and this is it. And no one would have batted an eye, and that's kind of the way the world works, right? And you said, no, I'm not doing that. I'm acknowledging that they drink this wine, but this is not inherent in and of itself, the solution to this problem. This problem is tricky. It's complicated. It's an interdependency of these nine things that we've distilled out and identified. And the way we can talk about this and approach it and try to find

real, tangible, sustainable solutions to our healthcare crisis. And the way that we talk about longevity is to really analyze what's going on here. And see if together we can find an approach that would work. Right? And so now you're taking this and you have created a model, which I think is really interesting, in the way that you're approaching kind of cities to tackle this problem on like a kind of a local government level. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing in urban centers? Sure. So when Blue Zones came out in 2008, I got booked on all these great TV shows, Oprah among them.

I got booked on all these great TV shows, Oprah among them. And you could just see that people were resonating with the message. But I could also see that in the green room, there was another health expert who was going to be on right behind me. And they had another prescriptive that would probably be equally as. On to the next. Very good, Dan. Very good, Dan. Very good. So I have a great relationship with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

Specifically this Dr. Bob Kane, who was dean of the school. Actually, he was dean at Stanford for a while and went on to run the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. He's been a great connector for me and convened this group of experts. And I essentially asked them, what can I do to make this stick? And they showed me all this research showing that diets only last three to seven months on average. Exercise programs last no more than two years. And it became very clear that no matter how good your message is, it's going to go away. So inspired by this project in North Karelia, Finland, which brought down cardiovascular disease by about 80%. It's amazing. What was that about?

1972, North Corolla, Finland had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world. And this researcher by the name of Pekka Pushka, a young idealistic physician slash epidemiologist came in and took it over and he tried doing the same things that that other preventative health programs have tried to do which is try to hound people and change their diet exercise program and saw very quickly it failed so what he actually tried to do was change the system. The Finns were frying everything in butter. And even back in the 70s, we knew that there was a strong correlation between animal fat, animal protein, and cardiovascular disease. He knew he had to get vegetable oils into the diet. And he started with olive oil promoting that but that was too

expensive to import from finland so he worked with some food engineers to create canola oil that would grow that far north and he created a distribution system so that canola oil would you could buy in grocery stores uh he knew he had to get more fruits and vegetables into the diet, but importing oranges and lemons from Italy and Spain was too expensive, but they all had berries only during the month of October, the month that thawed long enough. And he helped create a cooperative to pick the berries, freeze the berries, and then get them distributed through grocery stores all year long.

The great story, people love this sausage, this Finnish sausage, fatty, salty sausage. And he went to the, he wasn't going to convince these Finns to stop eating sausage. They've been eating it forever. He wasn't going to convince these Finns to stop eating sausage. They've been eating it forever. But he went to the sausage maker and he said, convinced them that this program was having a big enough head of speed and would he consider gradually lowering the salt and fat content and replacing some of that fat with mushrooms, actually.

And he did it very slowly over six months. And his sales actually went up slightly. So he was happy. But this whole region is eating the same amount of sausage without realizing it had 30% less fat and 20% less sodium. So that's the approach. That's the idea. Behind it, really, is you're changing these environmental factors and making better choices super convenient to make. So you're taking the thinking out of it, really. That's right.

So the key tenet in Blue Zones, in none of these places did people try to live to 100. None of these spry centenarians who are still standing on their heads or climbing trees at 101 said at age 50, well, I'm going to get on a longevity diet and live another 15 years. It ensued. They are a product of their environment. It was residue from a good environment. So that's the key organizing principle, that you can't try to change the behavior, you can change the environment. Our co-director on these Blue Zone projects runs the the cornell food lab his name is brian wansing and he will tell you that

we make about 250 food decisions a day only about 50 of them are conscious so i could spend a billion dollars to try to get americans to make better food to sit conscious food decisions, and I could affect only 50 of them. The other 200, I don't even touch, our project takes aim at those 200 food decisions you're making unconsciously and making them slightly better, all those 200. So give me an example of one of those decisions that we make unconsciously. Well, the sausage example I just gave you, I could try to hound you not to eat the sausage, but if I engineer the salt and sugar out. In schools, we're in 20 cities now,

so if you want to be a Blue Zone, if you want to be Blue Zone certified in one of our cities, one of the policies is no eating in classrooms and hallways. So if you're in an elementary school where there's no eating in classrooms and hallways, the BMI of that school is about 11% lower. In other words, the kids are 11% less fat than in a school where you can eat in hallways and classroom.

Because if they're eating in hallways and classrooms. Because if they're eating in hallway and classrooms, guess what they're eating? Chips, whatever the vending machine has. Exactly. Soda pops, candy bars. So we just changed that one little unconscious default, and we cut out eight hours of junk food eating in a kid's day, which has a bigger impact than their school lunch would have. So how does it all work? I mean, you go to, you go to like the mayor of a, of a, of a city and say, we are, they approach you and say, we need, we're trying to get our people to eat, our constituents

to eat more healthy or whether it's a university. I mean, how does it, what are the logistics of how it comes together? There needs to be two parts. First, you have to have a city that wants to change, and the leaders need to work well together. So we've had about 180 cities come to us and say, please make us a Blue Zone city. We've shown that we can lower BMI at the population level by anywhere from 15 to 20%. We've lowered smoking. That's huge. It is huge. In the beach cities right here, there are 1,900 fewer obese people because of our projects. We lowered smoking rate by almost 30% in at least four of our cities already, which makes.... So the word's sort of gotten out. They've come to us.

But in order to make it work, the mayor, the city manager, key people on the Chamber of Commerce and city council, the head of the superintendent of schools, the CEOs of the big companies, the head of public health, they all have to be on board. They all have to say, we're interested in a healthier community, and we understand that you're coming in trying to change environmental defaults, i.e. policies and the experience in the places we spend our day, grocery stores.

And then once we're convinced that they're ready, then we have to find a funding source to pay for it. Right, because it's not going to work if there's political backlash or they don't want you there or some CEO who's in charge of the company that controls the town is not interested. Yeah, we still have politics. And I will tell you, we're working in Fort Worth, Texas with Healthways and Texas Health Resources. We're working in Iowa with Wellmark, the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan. And there are strong business interests there. Fort Worth has got the stockyards, beef, and you'll play yogurt's big. Iowa has been called the pork state.

There are six pigs for every human in Iowa, numerically. But yet, even these big business interests will play along, we've found, if you're not just targeting them and saying okay you're the bad guy you're the thing we're going to focus all our effort on we we don't have a silver bullet approach we have a silver buckshot approach and if they can see enough will and they can see enough momentum in the other domains our experience has been they'll play along that's interesting because you know we were talking about iowa earlier i mean, for you to go into Iowa and that state being what it is to say, okay, are you guys ready for the plant slant?

How's that going to go over? What happens when you announce that as one of your tenants? Well, it was the front page of the Des Moines Register. There was like a pork chop or a hamburger with that prohibited circle around it with the line slashed through it. And they're just going to run you out of town. Yeah, and I thought so too when I was called out on the carpet and had to talk to the representatives of the poultry, pork, beef, and dairy industries. And believe it or not, they understand that 70% of Iowans are overweight or obese.

They're very aware, and they're people like you and me. And you have to have a conversation with them. You don't come in with mandates. is a, for lack of a better term, a menu with about 110 or 120 evidence-based interventions you can do at the city level that will move a population to half a percent or 1%. And we tell them, if this is too painful, if your economy is too dependent on that, this one thing, don't do it. But there are 99 other ones that we want you to consider. So the secret sauce is to not come in as a nanny state, but come in with

options that they can pick to help them facilitate the conversation between stakeholders at the city level. There's got to be serious upper strategy leaders and then remind them that you're not here to waste their time and you know i'm not there to waste my time they have to pick something off of this menu we usually try to get 10 or 20 things that we're going to work on at the policy level and then we help them manage those policies to fruition. Right. Very cool. I mean, they're coming to you.

You're not pitching these cities on your bag of goods. They're coming to you. They want it. So they already know kind of what they're in for, I would imagine. Right. So it's not like this is some big surprise that you're going to unpack this toolbox that they're not going to like. There's a selection bias. The cities that come to us, they tend to have an appetite for innovation.

They want to be thought leaders in their state or in the country in some cases. And they're sick and tired of their kids being overweight or their health care bill. Because there's a connection between the health care bill and multi-paying health care and productivity. Often it's driven by economic desire too, but the bottom line is if you can solve the health, you solve a lot of economic problems too. Yeah, for sure. So what are some of the top-level things? If you were like global things that you look at, like for example in the beach cities, how are you reducing BMI?

How is the rate of smoking going down? What are some of the things that are changing, the changes that you implement? So when it comes to smoking in on in hermosa beach we went to a cluster of restaurants on hermosa pier and we asked them to become blue zone certified which means they don't allow smoking on their premises and they said we'll do it we're we'll play along and um because a couple restaurants said we want to do it the rest were feeling left out so the whole whole pier went smoke-free or most appear it's where a lot of people kind of come together and socialize and yeah there's a bunch of bars there and stuff yeah and then neighboring manhattan beach which is also

part of the project not to be outdone they said well if manhattan pier can do it our whole city's going to do it so they prohibited smoking and we know when you make denormalized smoking, the smoking rate goes down, but it required organizing both the leaders and the business people and also the grassroots. And it took about a year and we have Gallup measuring, smoking went down. We got them, during smoking went down. We got them, Los Angeles is famously, shall we say, a car-driven community. The roads here have been built for cars. This is such a beautiful, Los Angeles,

such a beautiful place to bike. It's relatively flat, a lot of it. It's warm. It hardly ever rains, but nobody bikes because you're on the bottom of the transportation food chain and you'd end up getting right we convince the beach cities to adopt a complete street policy or an active living now every new street that goes in has to be assessed for a bike lane a wider sidewalk trees. So that applies to any new constructed street that's made.

Right. And you have to show people. We have a guy on our team named Dan Burden, who is kind of the Mozart of the intersection, we call him. He's very good at helping. He will take city leaders to certain intersections or certain streets that have been designed horribly just for cars and it's very clear it's congested very clear to see it's it's um lethal for a pedestrian he'll take them there he'll show them what what it looks like now and then he'll he'll have photographed it and he does these photomorphs and then he'll take the leaders and he'll show how this could change if you put a roundabout if if you widen the sidewalk, if you put trees, if you put a medium down the middle. And you can't ask people to make huge, expensive changes like that unless they can visualize it, you hold the conversation, you generate the political ground cover, and then you give them the menu to order off of so it becomes easy to start doing that. Right. And how many cities have you worked with on this?

We're up to 20. Wow. And then we just signed on the whole state of Hawaii, and we're starting with a statewide project in Oregon. So it's got a nice head of steam. That's pretty cool, statewide. Yeah, they tend to be, in Hawaii, it's HMSA, which is the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, and it's also the Blue Cross plan in Regents in Oregon. And because of the Affordable Care Act, there's been a shifting in the economics of health care away from just getting sick people less sick.

And actually, there's incentives now put in place to keep people healthier in the first place. And we tend to work with visionary early adopter organizations who are trying to get ahead of the way the world is going when it comes to health care. And they brought us in because they're innovators, visionaries, but also because they often insure enough lives that they can invest money in keeping people healthy and reap the rewards 15 years down the road when diabetes doesn't happen, when it would have otherwise. Right, you've got to be in it for the long haul in order to sort of substantiate that kind of investment. Yes and no.

As I said before, part of it's health care, but also it's productivity now. healthcare, but also it's productivity now. If you lower healthcare costs by about 10%, you tend to see an uptick in productivity by 15 to 20%. You also have less absenteeism. So if you're a big employer in a city, you begin reaping the benefits almost immediately. People have more energy. They're more present mentally. They tend to be, you know, if they're factory workers, they tend to be harder workers if they feel good as opposed to struggling with diabetes or being too overweight. You're living an amazing life. Like, is this what you thought you would be doing with yourself like when you were maybe you know even 10 years ago like how do you you know we were talking earlier and you you said you've approached your life in these kind of 10-year windows right where you like

every 10 years you go all right what's next i reboot yeah You're rebooting. And it's kind of amazing to see what you're doing, knowing kind of a little bit about your arc and your past. So I want to get into that a little bit. I want to go back to the young Dan, life as an adventurer, life as an explorer, what motivated you to go on these expeditions and kind of how that all led to what you're doing now. you to go on these expeditions and kind of how that all led to what you're doing now? I had a mentor in George Plimpton, who was a participatory journalist. I worked for him for a year. And I come from Minnesota, and he lived this big life. Very big life. Amazing guy.

Yeah. What an amazing experience to work with. How did you swing that? I blundered into it. I knew another guy, I got hired, and George and I hit it off. I helped organize a celebrity croquet tournament for National Public Radio when I was right out of college. And George had—he was supposed to be a lawyer, but he went on to edit the Paris Review and throw a pass in the NFL. He was kind of the Walter Mitty. The paper lion. That's right.

Boxed with Archie Moore. And he's a guy who could think big. He visualized what he wanted to do. And I was very inspired. He kind of gave me the courage to do it and some of the tools. And my version of participatory journalism was bicycling. In 1986, 87, I biked from Alaska to Argentina, Prudhoe Bay, the Arctic Ocean, all the way to the southern tip. How long did that take you? It took 305 days.

That's not that long. No, no. How many miles a day were you doing? If you average it out, it comes to about 70, but in reality, it's more like about 100 or 110 because there are big wars going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador. And we were stopped at borders. And we were stopped for battles, quite literally. There's a Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, which you can't bike across.

The driest desert on earth is the Atacama. We were pedaling literally through blizzards in Patagonia because we finished our trip. We had to start in— When you say we, who were you? There were four of us. There were four of you. There were always four on these expeditions. And we set a Guinness World Record, which I know sounds impressive, but it was all downhill.

What was—the record was for what? First—were you the first to make that trek? Yeah, first to make the entire we literally our rear wheels began in the arctic ocean and we finished in the straits of magellan we're actually south of ushuaia amazing front wheels and you were how old then 26 i started what what what what inspired that well i had a i had a father who was who was uh taught us outdoor when we were instead of going to disneyland we were taking three-week canoe trips into the wilderness and living off the land and uh like you i was a runner and a swimmer and and then this inspiration from George. I just wanted to do something cool.

Because George was just this so larger-than-life character. He just made you believe that you could do something extraordinary. I remember the Celebrity Croquet Tournament attracted lots of millionaires, people with vast wealth and Rolex watches. I remember saying, and George would walk in the room. And George didn't have a lot of money, but he was wealthy with experience. And all the people gravitated to George. And as a young guy, you kind of see, well, who do I want to be when I'm,

you know, he was probably 65 at the time. This wealth of experience I saw very clearly was much more valuable than wealth of dollars. It's inspiring. Yes. So again, he gave me that vision. And once you have that vision, it allows you to create a map to go after that vision. He taught me that he had a certain flair. First of all, he's a writer.

And if you can write about your experiences, you have your suitcase in your head and a way to make money. And I was a writer. I was interested in material to write about. Were you also working for the Paris Review when you were working for him or just for George personally? No, just for George. Well, George was the chairman of the Celebrity Croquet Tournament, you when you were working for him or just for george personally yeah just for well george was

the chairman of the celebrity croquet tournament and i only work for him in that capacity and then he actually inspired me to write and i there was a before the bike ride i spent a year writing in paris and he was uh kind of my de facto editor, and then the Alaska to Argentina. But he taught me, you know, if you think big, it's a lot easier to raise a million dollars than it is to raise $10,000, believe it or not. When you're approaching big companies to sponsor something, it's usually a vice president that makes the decision.

And that vice president wants to be recognized. People gravitate to thinking big. So before I biked Alaska Argentine, I thought, well, maybe a bike ride from Minnesota to Mexico would be cool. And then, no, you just kind of stretch it. Yeah, so when you get to the superlative, the complete length of the Americas, and then having Guinness endorse it, so to speak,

say it's a Guinness World Record, it's kind of a BS thing, but nevertheless it makes people pay attention. I think it's pretty cool. So you paint a big picture. People get on board. We were able to get it sponsored. There were four of us for a year, and we raised $12,000. So that means we lived off of $3,000 per person for a whole year,

which we weren't living high on the hog, but we got it done. We finished. which we weren't living high in the hog, but we got it done. We finished. And in the wake of that experience, you come home, and what's next? Well, you're permanently derailed from the street in Nero. You're screwed for the rest of your life. You're not going to go work at Kellogg or something. You're screwed, yeah.

Right. Yeah. So... Did you call George and go, I did it, man? Yeah. In fact, I came back, I was on Letterman. Oh, you did? Wow.

Yeah. You are like this zealot character, man. There's a lot of layers here. I was staying in his play. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and I told that to David Lettermanman and his of course his quip was does he know you're there but um and i went on i set a record for biking around the world um through the former soviet union 1990 and then another record for biking from the top of africa to the bottom of africa which by a factor of about three was harder than making it across the Americas.

Is that right? So, yeah, you have this, you called it America's Trek, Soviet Trek, Africa Trek. Yeah. The three, they're amazing. So the Soviet one was almost 1,300 miles, right? 13,000. I mean, that's what I mean, 13,000. Yeah, yeah.

And the Africa one, 12,000. I mean, that's what I mean, 13,000. Yeah, yeah. And the Africa one, 12,000 almost. Yeah, but Africa was a lot harder because you had to get across the Sahara Desert. So there were days where you're lucky to log eight miles, and you'd go 14 hours because of deep sand or getting through the Congo. Congo is about half the size of the continental United States, and there's about 150 miles of roads in the whole country. So most of the time you're on animal paths or you have to carry your bike through rivers. Yeah, this is crazy stuff.

We talked about this when we were hiking yesterday. You were telling stories of of riding across the sahara i mean you you packed in all your water so you would have uh what were you telling like uh 40 gallons about 40 liters 40 liters okay so 40 liters so that that would last you how many days two in general yeah so three it's not like you had a land rover following you with all your stuff in it so it's not like you had a Land Rover following you with all your stuff in it. Like, it's just you on the bike and whatever you could carry.

So, what I didn't know, which was fascinating, was you telling me about these barrels every five kilometers that kind of guide your way across the desert? Yes, in theory. And these maps that would show you where these wells were, and everything revolved around getting to that well before you ran out of water.

Yeah, crossing the Sahara is very serious business, and we did as much research as we could possibly do. The CIA produces these ONC charts. They're called operational navigational charts, and they're about as big as a wall map, but they might only cover 40 square miles. And we had 13 of them to help us get through. They got down to the dune, and also they denoted the wells. We had the first newly demilitarized GPSs. They're big, clunky things, and we had to wait about a half hour for it to get triangulate with three satellites. Right, so we're talking like this is 1996?

No. Or 1990? 92, 93. 92, 93 for that one. Right, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so you could chart your way. We'd navigate from well to well. We'd fill up our, we had a jerry can and we had created a bladder in the triangle of the frame to carry 40 liters of water.

dry or was poisoned somehow, which occasionally happened. And then you, at a certain point, part of the Sahara through Algeria is paved, actually. But then that pavement unravels to just open desert with tracks that look like a plate of spaghetti. And that's when it gets really dicey. And for most of that, there are barrels at five-kilometer intervals. But sometimes the barrels are gone, or sometimes there's a windstorm that kick up the sand. You can't see 20 feet ahead of you, much less. Wow.

So it was a risky, something I wouldn't do again. Yeah, I mean, and you had mentioned, you're you're rolling up on these wells like expecting to be able to refill you know your water tanks and the wells dry or the wells poisoned i mean that had to be those must have been perilous moments well you have a pit in your stomach for the next because if you get to the next one and that well is dry and you're really then you're screwed you have about two days to survive in the Sahara if you run out of water. And then you dehydrate. And dehydration is a horrible death.

Your tongue swells up and you can't swallow and you get irritable and you go mad. And there's no 911. You can't get out your iPhone iphone and you know syria or whatever you're you're you're done there was one time we we lost the road and for um about 24 hours we didn't know where we were and i'd read uh these bedouin accounts of how they get across the Sahara. And one of them had said that the wisdom is if you don't know where you go, you sit down and it comes to you. That's your best bet is to stay put.

You know, I come from this sort of hardware, well, let's figure this out. Let's try over there and try over there. And that often just gets you lost worse. So the four of us sat down, and we found this kind of hill, this rock outcropping. And we walked, I don't know, a quarter of a mile to that. And we camped on that while we climbed to the top. And we sat, and we looked, and we watcheded on that all while we climbed to the top and we sat and we looked and we watched the sun go down and then we uh we keep i was telling you yesterday you can actually find these prehistoric roots in the sahara you can build a fire and we build a fire it gets really cold at

night and then um and then the next morning we sat and we talked about death then we talked about what you know and I was the leader. And I kind of apologized to all of them. And I said, sorry I got you guys into this. And it could have gone either way. Wow. And finally my brother Steve said, I think it's this way. And we sat on the top of this little mountain, this little hill.

And we watched him. And he was supposed to turn around every hundred yards to make sure he could see us, and we had a line of sight. And he went out in two forays, and the second foray he saw a barrel, a wild marker, and waved his arms. Wow. That's amazing. So, yeah, being able to know where those barrels are,

that was basically, those are your lifelines, right? And it sounds to me like very similar to what it would feel like being adrift at sea or lost at sea. Yeah, or even lost in your life in a little bit. I think there's a useful metaphor to think about knowing where that next barrel is. And sitting down and not trying to will it into being one thing or the next, but just doing nothing for a moment. I mean, it was hard to get across the Sahara. You're exhausted all the time.

You're thirsty all the time. You sweat, and then the sand kicks up, and you feel like a sugar donut. And then under your arms, everything gets sandblasted. So you're just in pain and discomfort all the time. And if you think of the enormity of the Sahara, this is an area the size of the continental United States, and saying, shit, I'm going to try to bike across there. It's just overwhelming.

But you could always get to the next barrel. saying crap shit i'm gonna try to bike across there it's just overwhelming but you know you could always get to the next barrel and then we had a little ritual where you had to tell a joke when you got there so the four of us all took turns telling a joke and somehow you could kind of get to the next barrel i know it's probably a cliche but uh it worked for us. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. So you do these three incredible Guinness Book of World Records setting, ultra endurance cycling events, and that's your 10-year window for that, right? You kind of spend 10 years pursuing that aspect of your life, and then it becomes about something else. how do you transition into the next phase of what your life is going to be so i had a very smart editor at national geographic

named peter miller legendary's expedition editor and i'd been pitching geographic stories about these bike rides and they never got into the magazine and he said you know that's a great accomplishment but he said expeditions of the future really need to add to the body of knowledge or educate or somehow illuminate the human condition. It can't just be because you made it. Right. hyperfiction, which was developed at Harvard, a guy named Papper, this notion that you could follow a character through a story by a male and a female. And you could decide if you wanted to follow the female by turning the page to 19 and then read a little bit more, and then it would tell you, follow the female goal. It was a precursor to HTML, to the web more or less.

And I took that as a metaphor to think of a new type of expedition that wouldn't necessarily be linear, but be HTML. And conceived this, we called them quests. And the idea was a team of experts with laptop computers and a satellite dish connection to an online audience would plop into a part of the world where there was a mystery to be solved. We started with the collapse of the Maya civilization in Central America. And then we actually let an online audience vote to direct us to decide where we go to gather clues. And we let the online audience make sense of those clues decipher them and choose

which ones were best and then at the end we'd try to solve the mystery and i ended up doing 14 quests around this idea and they got huge back in the early days of the internet we had a million and a half followers most of them in schools i, this is like pioneering days of the internet. This is early days, right? Yes. And our good buddy, weird how the world works, but our friend Ed McCall, big venture or private equity guy, ended up buying the company,

and we eventually sold it to him. It was called Quest, right? Quest Network. Quest Network, right, right, right. Yeah, Ed's a college friend of mine. Yeah. I just saw it. My reunion is crazy, small world.

But that's so, yeah, it's cool. You had like school kids participating, like kind of going along virtually along with you throughout these journeys and helping kind of guide where you would go next. Is that accurate? these journeys and helping kind of guide where you would go next? Is that accurate? So if you watch kids use the internet, they don't sit around and read long form. So at the time, education publishing was trying to figure out how to take textbooks and put them online. And of course, putting textbooks online, they're not engaged.

Most of our audience were middle school and high school kids. They like to do something. Right, give them an experience they can invest in. Exactly. So instead of the great white explorer going to a faraway part of the world and reporting what he found, the idea here was that I had Harvard archaeologists and MIT biologists and National Geographic photographers and a real TV crew,

and the kids could decide where that crew went. Whatever they voted for every day, we listened to and we went there. So we relinquished the power, put it in their hands. So it was an empowering metaphor for them. And then around this core activity of trying to solve an ancient mystery, we wrote curriculum, essentially instructions to the teacher to show the teacher how to use that core activity to teach geography, social studies, language arts, science. And it replaced textbooks in about 20,000 schools for three or four years. I mean, this is a big idea. This is Plimpton-esque, right?

This had to be inspired by this spark that he lit for you of thinking big because that's not a small thing. I trace everything back to George. Wow, that's amazing. It was very successful. I did it for a decade. What did you learn about the Mayans? Well, they were the greatest civilization in the Americas

until about the 9th century. They developed a system of writing. They calculated the length of the solar year to within 17 seconds of the figure we come up with today. They built 24-story temples, but they collapsed catastrophically. And they collapsed, I argue, for reasons very similar to the challenges that we face in our world today. They got very good at technology, mostly agricultural technology. They figured out how to feed 10 million people in an area that only supports 200,000. But they deforested,

they destroyed their environment. There was a small climatic change, a drought that shouldn't have happened, which knocked it all off kilter, and that got people revolting. Wars broke out all over the place when you pulled farmers out of the cornfield and put them in the battlefield. It exacerbated the problem. And, you know, we use technology to build up all of our level of consumption, our level of consumption, whether it's cars or meat or the size of our houses. But eventually, you load up the carrying capacity of the land so much that it becomes a house of cards, and it doesn't take much to collapse it,

and that's what the Maya did. Sorry. That's all right. That's amazing. Is that kind of a consensus opinion now, or is that pieced together through the kind of archaeological work that you did when you were there? So that represents the collective wisdom of the crowd of our online audience. So the notion when we went into my area of Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and southern Mexico, there were 13 or 14 archaeologists actively working down there. And we, ahead of time, we knew what their work was. We knew what their theories were.

But we let the online audience decide which of those that we kind of collaborated with. And they actually downloaded their evidence, their research, their findings, and then we left it for the online audience to synthesize. So what I just told you was kind of the culmination of a— This is the early days of crowdsourcing. It was, yes. You know? That's pretty cool.

Wisdom of the crowd before sir wiki coined the phrase all right so when how do we get into like longevity and wellness like where where when do you start to get hip to like these cultures that are doing something different like where does your antenna start to perk up and go there cultures that are doing something different like where does your antenna start to perk up and go there's something here i want to explore so these quests got big in america and the japanese government came and said would you do a quest in in japan we'll we'll pay you and they waived an enormous check and we said sure so i had a researcher who we charged to find a mystery that would be compelling, a Japanese mystery.

And we couldn't find anything. We don't know much about the Japanese culture. There was no great collapse or anything like that. But we did notice, and this was in the year 2000, that the World Health Organization had found that in Okinawa, people enjoyed the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. In other words, they lived a long time without getting sick and then died abruptly, which is what we want at the end of the day. And I knew enough about genes and lifestyle to know that there had to be something special going on there. So we did a quest, which is a fairly, not a deep dive into it, but what you can find in two weeks by going there. We let our online audience.

And our website just went nuts. And it wasn't just for kids. It was adults. We could see that there was a real interest in secrets of longevity. How are they doing it? Imagine that. People might be interested in knowing how they might be able to live longer. People are interested in health.

Dating back to Ponce de Leon. That's right. The Fountain of Youth. Was there a Fountain of Youth in Okinawa? the fountain of youth was there a fountain of youth in Okinawa but I got some I went back to geographic who would routinely

probably turn me down 15 times and I was like a terrier on their pant leg you are a study in persistence when it comes to them because now as first of all what is a National Geographic Fellow like I know that's what you are but I don't know what that means

I wear my hat off to the side what is a National Geographic fellow? Like, I know that's what you are, but I don't know what that means. If I wear my hat off to the side, no. No, it's, well, I've been around, see, that was 15 years ago. So they fund my research. I don't have to show up to an office. I represent National Geographic in lots of different speeches and film festivals and, and, um, with their stakeholders. And, um, they tend to, they publish all my books. They, I tend to get, um,

considered on any idea I have sort of in the club. It's a lot easier to, to get a proposal considered when you're a fellow than you are and what's it what's well but what's interesting and then you know i want to hear the rest of the story but but this is on the heels of you know you pestering them for year after year after year and them saying no no no no no yeah to this day now where you're kind of like their guy i'm one of their guys yeah i think they'd say that all right go ahead with the story yeah gentle pressure relentlessly upon yeah so i came in there with this story of um longevity that i i said if there's a if there's one in um okina. There must be others around the world, and I'd like to find them. And they said, I love the idea.

And it took about four months to develop a pitch to get an assignment from the magazine. And simultaneously, I was working with the National Institute on Aging, who gave me a grant, which I used to pay for demographers to find these places. It's expensive work to parse through all the birth and death records in the world. That sounds like a horrible job. Well, I have a partner named Michel Poulon in Belgium, who at the Université Catholique, who at the the university catholic who uh that's his specialty so i i found him and and hired him we continue to work to this day in fact and his he lives for numbers and um he's you know for him good porn is a spreadsheet and uh he um he he did all the work on parsing the data. And then once the data seemed to point to an area, then we would travel there and we would confirm that people, the records are accurate, that people who say are 100 years old are really 100 years old.

That took three years. How many places did you go to that didn't bear fruit or didn't turn out to be what you thought? Just one. Vilcabamba, Valley of Ecuador. We thought that that might have been, and it wasn't. People, there weren't birth certificates. And when there aren't birth certificates, people don't really know their age. They forget.

They exaggerate later in life. You know, one year they're 80, and the next year they're 83, and pretty soon they're 90. And then people around town, that gets 100. Yeah. And that's usually what happens, by the way, when there's not. So we had to ground through that. We're very sure about these places. So that building of credibility, I've been at this 10 years.

Building up credibility, I've been at this 10 years, so methodically building up the credibility then enables you to speak about the tenets, the visit all these places, and this is, you know, where's the, I mean, was there an aha moment where you're like, this is a big idea? You know, like this idea kind of transcends, you know, maybe what I originally thought it was, or did it just gradually kind of come together? It keeps surprising me. Yeah. I never thought I'd get a grant from the national institute on aging the magazine i wrote a cover story for geographic and for i hope to just get in the main member i've been working at for 15 years so my first your first article for them was a cover story was a cover story and it was the third best-selling cover in their history it was not crazy and then had's crazy. Had you been writing

articles for other magazines and kind of doing a journalism thing all along for other publications and Geographic just wasn't on board until then? Was your writing finding its way to other outlets along the way? Yes, I wrote all the time.

I wrote for Outside, Chicago Tribune, Life Magazine. I wrote four or five books. Geographic's a very, the Yellow Magazine, it's got the biggest population in the country right now and at the time in the world, probably still in the world. Is that right? It's kind of like a sleeping giant

because you don't really think of it like that, but I guess that makes sense. It has 3.8 million readers. Wow. And, uh, you know, it's time magazine gently goes out the back door, National Geographic still alive. It's still, it's still thriving. Because I think, I think that's because it, it is, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's like a, each edition is like timeless, you know, it can sit can sit on your coffee table it doesn't it doesn't matter when it comes out they exist as like museum pieces forever

they get the very best writers the very best photographers every article is at least nine months in development they they're a whole floor full of individuals two floors seventh and eighth floor um work for months and months for every article so that's why they they they play well and they they last a long time so when this cover article comes out i mean does that change your life does that change the way you're pursuing your career i mean what happens well i was they've generated a bunch of media and i was i did good morning america and cnn and Good Morning America and CNN and Oprah and Dr. Oz. It was before Dr. Oz. And then an agent came to me and said, you should do a book. I did a book.

It became a New York Times bestseller pretty quickly. And I thought I'd be done then, and then I'd go do something else. And then, I don't know, I just had this idea of seeing if I could apply to American population. And I got funding to do that. I did that for a year. And actually, I didn't love doing it. I can do it. But I didn't love doing it.

But it was a huge hit. It was cover of USA Today and Good Morning America again and Nightline and U.S. News and World Report and Newsweek. And it worked. So then you kind of become a little bit of a slave of your success. Yeah. So are you at a point right now where you're thinking, I'm at the beginning of another 10-year window? Or where do you fall on your own timeline in terms of how you perceive where you want to invest your energy going forward? Well, I've committed to building these Blue Zones.

I have a partner, Healthways, and I have now a… You're running a huge company doing that. And I have really good people who I'm planning to pass the baton to. I already know when. It's July of next year. I have about 14 more months where i'm going to stay at the helm and then then reboot as it were and what does that reboot look like do you know you don't want to say yet i'm i'm i'm telling you with a bunch of ideas

it's time but in the meantime you've got uh you have this book coming out the blue zone blue zone solution it's coming out soon, right? That's exciting. So tell me a little bit about what's in this book versus your previous Blue Zone. I realize that for most Americans, whether we like it or not, their runway into health is through food. We love to eat. We do it at least three times a day. food. We love to eat. We do it at least three times a day. I fought that for a long time because I don't necessarily believe food is the most important, but I know that's the runway for

a lot of us. So I hired three researchers from the University of Minnesota and we spent about three years to gather up all the dietary surveys and all five blue zones for the last 100 years to find out the global average of what do people really eat to live to be 100. And do it with scientific responsibility so it's not just invented in some lab or somebody's opinion. And we did it with rigor. Uh, Harvard's Walter Willett has endorsed it. Um, Dean Ornish wrote the foreword, David Katz from Yale. So it's a very

careful distillation of the diet, the true diet of longevity. And then once you know what the right thing to eat is, then the rest of the book goes on to say, well, how do you set up your life so you'll actually do it for long enough that it'll matter? Because as I said, there's no short-term fix when it comes to longevity. But the reality is the average American could live about 12 more years if we optimize our lifestyle. I'd argue that's the blue zone lifestyle. That's the value proposition. But you have to set up your life so you do it for a long time. And so, you know, what are some of the core principles for creating that kind of sustainability? I mean, outside of what we already discussed, I mean, is there something different that we

haven't gotten into yet? Like, you know, it's that gap between information and action, right? Yeah. Bridging that. I would say number one is curating the right group of friends. And so the Blue Zone diet is about 95% plant-based, 5% meat. So if your friends sit around and barbecue, you're probably going to end up taking a bite of the burger eventually. Most people would. So ditch your friends. Yeah.

I say you don't want you don't want to necessarily i'd say you want that extra decade that's why i'm hanging out with rich roll for crying out loud no but i would say you have to know realize that your friends have a measurable impact so yeah first take stock who am i hanging out with um do i belly up to the bar with them all the time? Do I sit on the couch and watch football and eat chips with them? Or do I have friends who go take walks or bike or love to surf? Because what your friends are doing, you're going to be doing.

So that's actually huge. Friends tend to be long-term adventures. How you set up your house. It's a simple thing I've done is I still enjoy meat occasionally, very rarely. I still enjoy ice cream occasionally. I'll enjoy chips once in a while. If you have me over to your house and serve dessert, I'll eat it. Yeah.

But I'll never bring it into my house. What's Kathy got to say about that? Shh. of dessert, I'll eat it. Yeah. But I'll never bring it into my house. What's Kathy got to say about that? Shh.

So she suffers. So she's become my friend. And because of that, I've become way, way more vegan than I used to be. But I'm still just vegan-ish. I'm a pescatarian. Right. And then you kind of curate. You kind of decide who you're going to get close to you. And I wouldn't say dump your old friends,

but just know if health is a priority, you can sign up for the Jammer. You can buy the latest paleo fad diet, but I'll guarantee you, you won't be doing it in a year. Whereas if you make a new friend who you really like and who shares your values, that could easily be a lifelong adventure and influence you for your whole life. So setting up your house the right way, your social life the right way. Sorry.

We shouldn't have done the bong before we started. You're not supposed to tell them that. JK. And then knowing the right thing. I think when it comes to food, eating plant-based, two things you have to do. You have to know how to make a few things. You have to have the skills.

But then you also have to know you like it. I could tell you that broccoli is the secret to longevity. And if you don't like broccoli or you don't know how to make it, you're not going to eat it. So having a few core, having taken the time to learn a few core recipes that you actually like, then they start to become permanent parts of your repertoire. Yeah. They're simple things, but they're super powerful things, you know, super important. The company you keep, being conscious of your

environment, the environmental factors that are influencing your decisions, you know, creating habits around these practices that are going to inform and improve your life, you know, creating habits around these practices that are going to inform and improve your life. You know, it's huge. So it's exciting, man. Yeah. Yeah? You're not excited?

You're excited. Come on. Yes. Yes. It's cool. I just internalized it. So you were recently at the Clinton Foundation Summit, right? And you sort of occupy, you know, rare air in terms of kind of, you know, the people that are integral to healthcare policy, what's going on with health in America, the future of health, preventative health care, et cetera. What are the trends that are happening and where do you kind of see things moving in the next couple of years?

Where should we kind of place our focus? What needs to be looked at more intensely than it's getting looked at? And what is exciting happening right now? happening right now? Well, the efforts to promote health in the first place rather than just mitigating sickness. I will tell you that actually our health care spending actually went down a little bit in the years, in the last few years, so it's not a complete lost cause.

What do they attribute that to? few years, so it's not a complete lost cause. We still... What do they attribute that to? Well, I would argue that it's an awareness of how unhealthy soda pops are and the decreased consumption of them.

We now know that I think soda is the public health equivalent of, today's public health equivalent of cigarettes when it comes to obesity. I think policy is starting to line up. I think Michelle Obama has focused the attention on the right target when it comes to health. when it comes to health. The biggest thing, and Bill Clinton convenes the most powerful people in America.

They do it in Palm Desert once a year. And the topic of conversation, most of it, is not how do I make sick people less sick? It's how do we keep them healthy in the first place? That's the right question. That's the right question. We're starting to think that's the right answer. Unfortunately, the economics don't line up behind that, but that's where the great white hope is when it comes to reversing obesity and chronic disease in this country. I love it, man.

Thanks for doing the podcast. Man, this was the highlight. I don't know about that. You set your bar higher, man. I've been looking forward to this a long time. I really appreciate it, man. I'm a big fan of everything that you're doing, and I'm excited to see this book roll out, coming to every media outlet soon, right? You have quite a media blitz coming up, right?

You're doing all kinds of TV shows and stuff. It's going to be cool. Yeah, NBC, Dr. Oz, Parade Magazine. They're probably all out this week. Yeah, that's right because we'll be putting this up right around that time sweet well thanks so much man

and I hope you all come back and do this again live large peace plants I told you this guy was my hero, right? I can only aspire to Dan's level of advocacy and impact. It was such a treat to talk to him, and I can't say enough good things about this guy.

I hold him in such high regard. So don't forget to pick up his new book. I'm pretty sure you're going to be seeing a lot of Dan everywhere this week. He's making the morning show rounds. He's going to be on all lot of Dan everywhere this week. He's making the morning show rounds. He's going to be on all the talk shows like the Dr. Oz's and all that kind of stuff. So wave to him on the television set and enjoy. Send me your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. To find all the information, the education, the products, the tools, the resources, the inspiration you need to take your health, your wellness, your fitness, your self-actualization to the next level, go to richroll.com.

Peruse our nutritional products, our education products, and yes, our garments. We've got awesome t-shirts there, all made with 100% organic cotton. If you like the podcast, give us a review on iTunes. Come on, you guys. Pick up the free app in the App Store so that you can listen to episodes older than the most recent 50 that you can find on iTunes. Continue to support the show by telling your friends using the Amazon banner ad and sharing it on social media, especially Instagram. I love that. Don't forget to tag me. I'm at Rich Roll, and I'll see you in a couple days. Peace. Plants.