Why Americans Live 10-15 Years Less Than Other Countries W/ Dan Buettner | EP #107

if you're an average American living an average American lifestyle you're losing somewhere between 10 and 15 years of extra life expectancy just because you're living in America yeah the average maximum life expectancy of humans living in the first world if you do everything right is about 94 since about 1840 there's almost been a straight line uh increase in life expectancy of about 2 and 1/2 years per decade something is going on there it's not just random luck right now we know the capacity of the human machine is 122 years and four months that's the eldest

well documented individual and theoretically the human could go past that but we just don't know of an example I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually welcome to moonshots my conversation today is with Dan Butner the man who has spent more time with more centinary Ians around the world understand what allowed them to get to 100 years plus in a healthy fashion we're going to be dissecting the nine key attributes about the blue zones but going much deeper into what you can do right now what the data says you have to do

right now it's not expensive it's the first Bridge of what Ray kwell calls living long enough to live forever uh this is a episode for you to take notes on uh one of my favorite conversations with an extraordinary individual a National Geographic Explorer someone who is really creating a future that we can all live into if you love these kinds of conversations if you'd like me to interview more people like this on longevity and on their moonshots Please Subscribe all right let's jump into our episode on Blue zones and Dan Butner hey Dan welcome to

Santa Monica great to see you Peter you know I I'm trying to make sure that Santa Monica is one of the blue zones you write about because I live here and I want to live in the Blue Zone so I either have to engineer this town we're in or um move but in all seriousness I congratulations your Netflix series has been nominated for six uh emys and uh I hope that you win many of them um and you know you have lived with more centenarians studied more centenarians than anybody I know and my hope is

to extract uh wisdom from that and talk about what you've learned you know when of the people who've influenced me in the longevity world is Ray kwell um Rey one of the experts in AI but has written about it and and Ry has spoken about three Bridges towards I'll say the word immortality I don't normally use that bridge one is basically maximizing current health and current um uh you know natural ways of living longer taking care of yourself and I think you're represent the expert you've looked at Global experiments done in communities and seen who

you know whose Lifestyles Bridge 2 is uh really the beginning of Biotech um epigenetic reprogramming stem cells and that's where I focus a lot of my life and Bridge three is eventually nanotechnology and uploads and you know I I hope we'll get there I I'm planning but let's dive into Bridge one use raise parlaments um you know let me begin with this question you've you've seen people who are making it routinely to 100 um are you seeing any of the blue zones who make it to 110 on a routine basis or is that is that

stretch is like getting from 100 to 110 like really hard yeah to to put a finer point on it the the the whole idea behind blue zones is to given that between 6 and 15% of how long we live is dictated by our genes the other 85% of something else is to find people who have lived the longest and identify their common denominators or the correlates what seems to be driving longevity and the places I found these blue zones there are about 15 times more centenarians about 15 times more but that's probably not because they

have better human biological machines than we do it's more of an artifact that more people are getting to a healthy 80 and more getting to a healthy age 90 and therefore there are more left over to make it to 100 so the reality is if you want to make it to 100 right now yeah I do uh you you you have to have won the genetic Lottery um you'll come along this bridge two and Bridge three may give us something that makes it more commonplace but the the average maximum life expectancy of humans living in

the first world if you do everything right is about 94 about 96 for females maybe 92 or 93 for males if you have an average set of jeans um there are some people have an amazing set of jeans and they they they you know may their chance to make it to 100 you know go up uh three or four fold but you know what most of us can realistically shoot for given the state of science right now is about 94 and the people I found do it better than anybody else and that is the body

of wisdom I try to convey uh I get it you and I are about the same age I'm 63 or I'm 63 63 as well okay so um you know when I think about this this is my calculations and for folks listening here you can do your own math uh if in fact I can make it to 93 and I have every confidence that you and I can that's 30 years of progress ahead of us 30 years during the most rapid acceleration of AI in biotech ever um and so I'm counting on that a lot

but having said that I'm going to do everything I can to make sure I've got that Runway and so blue zones is definitely part of that critical part so so there's two pools of demographers out there when it comes to longevity uh there's one pool like uh J shansky Fair he's an American he's very well known who will show you that since about 1840 there's almost been a straight line uh increase in life expectancy of about two and a half years per decade you know we've seen big leap and drops uh the year penicillin was

discovered we had the big leap and the year that covid happened we had a drop but it's about two and a half so we're given we're 63 we should get another um three decades three decades that's 7 and 1 12 years of extra life so I just said it's 994 we ought to be able to make 101 just you know if progress continues there is another Pool of demographers who calculate the rate of discovery and of genetic Discovery um for example and when you when you add that sort of calculus in the the curve may

look like a a hockey stick as opposed to a straight line and in that case you're you know right now we know the capacity of the human machine is 122 years and four months that's the eldest well documented individual right Marie kelme from France um we we I'm theoretically the human could go past that but we just don't know of an example yeah and it's really strange given you know hundreds of millions and billions of people you know you would think that there would have been some outliers some somebody else who had gone past pass

that um and that's you know a lot of people use that as the argument for saying nope can't get there if there were genetic variations if there were lifestyle variations someone you know in large of the population of humans on Earth someone should have pushed beyond that yeah so so our environment is constantly changing and the the way Evolution works is is a species adapt to a changing um uh to to a limited resources but also a changing environment and um yeah you know if we were um if we were quadrip heads if walking around

in four legs with you know an IQ of 50 year 50 points like an Neanderthal we probably wouldn't do very well in the current environment um so um you you you need the younger generations to die off and get out of the way for the Next Generation in order for the species to evolve and respond to a changeing environment that is why we die there's a good reason our species die in an evolutionary context I I want to dive into that a little bit CU it's it's something that affects my thinking about this a lot

which is why do we die you know uh why you know why don't we continue and and I think for for folks to understand this it really goes we need to go back to 100,000 years ago right as we as homed so homo sapiens are what couple hundred thousand years old as species and you know you have um I'm speaking to the person who knows more about this way more than I do so correct me where I'm wrong but I think we used to go and be go into puberty probably at age 11 or 12

back then and you'd be pregnant by 12 or 13 um and by the time you were 26 or 27 you were a grandparent and before food was abundant you didn't want to steal food from your grandchildren's mouths and so the best thing you could do is die and so there's no selective pressure no Advantage for having people living longer is that is that correct yes I I think generally um so for there's been about 25,000 generations of the human species and for about 99.8% of that life expectancy has been 30 MH um for every mammal

whether it's a mouse or an elephant um the we live about two and a half times the age of what we call procreative success so um as so procreative success is defined as um not only having children I'm sorry the the age of procreation two and a half times the age of procreation so uh for every mammal um as soon as you start having babies you live about one more generation until you have grand babies and then another half a generation and then you die off and the idea being evolutionarily speaking obviously our Offspring need

us to survive uh but our great grand our grandchildren don't need us as much Grand grandparents help somewhat so there's an evolutionary evolutionary evolutionary rationale for uh you to be around to see your grandkid survive and then you're you're kind of Irrelevant in the scheme of or or you're you tax on the family unit you're you're a drag historically yes yes so you know interesting cuz I had kids at 50 I have two boys now who are 13 and I I I think about that as being actually a pro longevity part me they keep me

energized I'm excited about them I want to see you know support them and growing is is that you know uh is there any any Merit to this idea that having kids later in life choosing to have kids later in life is a good thing maybe and we know that uh the the cohort of of Americans most likely to reach age 100 are women who have babies after age 40 nice and we don't know if that's because if you can still have babies after age 40 you're more uh physically fit uh or if it's because having

babies that late forces you to stay more mentally and physically active to make sure your you know your babies survive but um yes um in in blue zones most of the people making it to 100 have had children indeed are Grand or grandchildren and even great-grandchildren fasina so uh you said to me earlier which I think most people don't realize a lot of folks are like uh man oh man you know my parents died in their 60s or 70s and therefore I'm probably not going to live much longer than than that and the numbers on

how much of your longevity is uh is genetic versus lifestyle are are pretty shocking can you repeat what you said earlier yeah so for a population this doesn't it's somewhere between six and 15% of how long we live is dictated by our genes yeah and but the way to think of it is you have to think of a Continuum and there's a sliver of people on one end of the distribution curve who who uh uh will you know run marathons and eat whole food plant-based and and have great social network and they'll be dead at

40 because they some weird cancer and then at the other end of the distribution curve and we hear about them all the time people are you know drink four drinks a day and smoke and they make it to a 100 but for those of us with an average set of genes or maybe even a standard deviation beyond the average you know genes just aren't that important in how long we live so the good news is you could have parents who died at 60 and you know you could still make it to 95 and you could

also have parents who committed to 95 and you could be dead at 60 so the point is you have to pay attention to what you do on this planet not what you were given I had a chance to spend dinner with uh Demis the CEO of Deep Mind this is Google's AI play and they had done the work in in uh developing um uh something called Alpha fold that was able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence and they just released Alpha fold 3 which is an AI model that can

predict how all the different molecules of Life interact like if you had a protein a lipid and a sugar together how they would interact and so forth and where they're going ultimately is to uh create an AI model of a human cell um and then maybe just specifically your cell based on on your DNA right and then from a cell to an organ a tissue and a human and sort of the idea you know cuz it it really is fascinating what you just said that six to 6 to 15% and we know people on both

ends of the spectrum so what's something is going on there it's not just random luck there is some combination of genetics and and lifestyle that is allowing this drinking smoking individual to to make it and I think I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually but until then it's really following sort of what You' discovered and researched um to maximize your chance there's often tradeoffs that we don't completely understand for example inflammation is the is the um root of every major age related disease and one Theory as to why sardinians for example

are living a long time is that they have a relatively low inflammatory RIS response to diseases and the reason is genetically or from lifestyle we don't know but um they they T they they live in the they don't live around the sea so they haven't been exposed to all the pathogens that people who live around the coast have been so they live in a relatively clean environment clean air clean water not a lot of visitors um so they can survive through early and middle age with a weak inflammatory response and um and therefore they're not

suffering higher levels of inflammation later on which favors their longevity you take that same s Sardinian and you bring them down to the coast where they were Coast in Italy or Co Coast in Italy yeah Sardinia or any yeah or Africa right southeast Asia where malaria is a big problem infectious diseases are a big problem in a weak inflammatory response they're less likely to survive the Infectious Disease so my point is that something that's favoring longevity and later life uh wouldn't favor their their survival in a place other than where they live so these are

people are optimized for their for their environment to yeah they're optimized for their environment and one trait which may be really good for them in younger age aren't good for them in an older age and vice versa so essentially what I'm saying is maybe you're folding proteins to maximize your life expectancy but maybe it's not so good uh in earlier ages yeah you don't know I want to hit on something you just said um that does worry me and that is the the environmental pollutants out there um both RF uh Plastics uh preservatives and the

like um is that would you would you count that as one of the major major drivers it not major yet but increasingly more I just I was looking at the worldwide data on healthy life expectancy this week and over since 1990 and toxins in the environment keeps jumping up the list as being more and more important and uh there was this this story in the Lancet a few months ago that showed that micr uh microplastics are now causing more and more artery blockages because they get lodged in our arteries and they cause a cause a

clot so yes worldwide there's no question that that toxins in our environment are going to lower our life expectancy so listen I want to uh ask the question I'm sort of jealous of your lifestyle and and I love I love what you do well vice versa by the way well if I weren't me I'd want to be you thank you right back at you um uh just to paint a little bit the sort of range of things you do right now and where you go um I I la you and I were last on stage

together at Mike milins event and then you were off to some exotic location tell me a little bit about what you're up to like that well uh so the the original blue zones were places where people lived the longest and it was straight math um people had the highest most likelihood of reaching age 90 or older and uh there's a new metric that's come on which is healthy adjusted life expectancy uh run by global burden of disease projects and I'm working with them to identify the parts of the world with the highest health adjusted life

expectancy Define define that again for you health adjusted life expectancy so and what life expectancy is so it's years of life you can expect in full health okay without chronic disease and without disability so that's what we want we don't want to just live a long time it's What I Call Health span versus lifespan yes that's like yes that's good word for it but it's live a long time and die quickly leave a beautiful corpse and a lot left over for your airs fall off a cliff right yeah and um and it turns out there's

some overlap with the original blue zones but there's lots of other things that that come come to play and I'm trying to parse that out and you know we if you're an average American right now uh you're losing somewhere living an average American lifestyle you're losing somewhere between 10 and 15 years of extra life expectancy you know we talk perspectively you mean you're leaving on the table what does that what do you mean your 10 to 15 years of of life expectancy just because you're living in America yeah so the these these blue zones I

found for example in s in Sardinia these are people with an average set of genes who at middle age about our age are expected to live an extra 10 years so this isn't some supplement or some the theoretical intervention these are real people with an average set of genes who are likely to live 10 more years longer than an American has and there's a very clear cluster of factors of what their environment looks like of policies being put to work of traditions that continue to live on and you know my work uh lies in identifying

that cluster and trying to put that cluster to work in people's lives and even more directly and we've had a lot of Success With It entire cities and my daytime job uh for much of the past 15 years is been we get hired by insurance companies to lower the disease load in cities and then we get paid a proportion of the health care savings so you know it's direct I love that model by the way it's the right way to do things I think and then um you I part of I I know we're going

to talk about the nine comma denominators here a little bit but the core insight to Blue zones and the one that uh everybody misses because it's very hard to make money at it is if you really want to live longer today yes trying to change your behavior is a failure for most people almost all of the time PE people you know there's a few people who you know single-digit percentages who have the discipline and the presence of mind to do even if they know the right thing if they they read longevity your practical Playbook which

by the way is a great book and full of all the right ideas um but it's very hard for people to have the discipline and with all the new information keep doing the right thing for long enough to make a difference people in blue zones are living a long time not because they have better individual responsibility not because they're better people or a better access to to information or supplements or stem cells uh they just live the lives and it's their normal their the habits we'd love to have are their normal lives already yeah and

they're not even habits the it's it's the default it's the their unconscious decision are is engineered interesting dayto day moment to moment for decades right and what Americans what makes money is this notion that do this one thing yes and sell it now righty now and do it tomorrow and you're going to live longer but none of none nothing that we know of other than not dying Works uh if we just do it for a month there's nothing we can do this month even this year that's going to have any bearing as to whether or

not we live a year another live another year of life in 2078 you know if we don't continue to do it so no I I I find that fasing it's like these are the these are the they eat the right Foods cuz that happens to be indigenous to what the cultures eat there they happen to get the exercise because that's they don't drive cars they're just walking um you know they happen to be in communities so all the things that the nine attributes the default attributes happen to be ingrained in their lives default in a

default fashion is that what you're saying yeah I mean almost you know I read in in longevity your practical Playbook when I when you talk about your diet that's a blue zones diet yeah very hard to eat that very hard to eat a whole food plant-based diet if you live in Iowa or if you live in Houston Texas because there's very you know we like to eat what's delicious and what's delicious what's engineered for our pallet is fast food yeah is I I think you have to I mean part of what I try and do

is give people a longevity mindset that there's a lot of of transformation coming there there needs to be a positive motivator that's stronger than the Feelgood fat sugar motivator there has to be you have to have something counterveiling that otherwise why wouldn't you go the McDonald's Route I mean if you know that instead spending extra time and money and difficulty because it's much easier just to eat a fast food diet but I have to know that if I go the other route it is going to allow me to to feel better live a a longer

life um and I have to value that and for me it's mindset shift your mindset is how you react to things um so I've trained myself to just attack vegetables I love I love broccoli my favorite food in the world you ask me it used to be ice cream now it's broccoli with olive oil and lemon it's like yeah well I you know I think you you nailed it I mean if you can get people to change their mindset but for most people it's very hard to get them to care about um their health in

40 years because when you're 30 years old you can eat Big Macs and pizza and KFC and you feel fine the next day you don't realize it's not for 30 years until that heart disease or type two diabetes people kind of care about health they kind of care about the envir the impact that eating makes on the environment or animal cruelty but what they really care about is what is delicious today yeah listen I didn't have this mindset and this focus when I was in my 30s even into my 40s it really was after 50

how about yourself when did you start thinking about this and really um caring about this in the my 40s I started this project when I was 40s and I in my 40s and I could very clearly see what was driving um longevity but I think the bigger point is I was tasting this food and when you take all the culinary genius that's uh at work in blue zones and you put it to work at the the you know food here um it I was eating it because I loved it you I start my day every

day with a Sardinian ministr which is 100% plant-based with three beans and um I look forward to it now but that is explosively delicious in My Mind by the way I know this about you it's like we were on stage together and like final recommendations and yours was eat beans so so I want to talk about that I do want to I do want to get into that for folks to realize because it that little clip of of Dan Butner audio is plays in my brain um so it's it's important um where did you get

the data uh for your I mean it's a huge amount of data did you work with governments institutions how did you actually get the numbers that allowed you to elucidate where the blue zones were so I work with uh two demographers who are or three or actually Four demographers that are experts in this sort of longevity J shansky Michelle pulon and and Giani PES um and they they I mean they're they're academic research is worldwide Census Data where you can kind of find life expectancy at the national level but you can also often break it

down to the regional level and then once you find an outlier we actually go to these places and we find birth certificates that go back let's say between 1900 and 1924 and you you find uh all of those the people who were born then who made it to age 90 yeah and then you you correct for immigration immigration it's a big job we spent two and a half years uh checking finding these places and then confirming their ages before we even started this project but you know there's not a shadow of a doubt that these

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one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let's go back to our episode I I I I was surpr I'm not surprised when I see you know okanawa and ikaria um and Costa Rica I was surprised to see Loma Linda um which isn't far from where we are and I I have never thought of you know uh that part of California as a blue zone so so I was writing the story for National Geographic and my editor Peter Miller said you you need to find America's

Blue Zone and there's actually not a geographic Blue Zone like you see in the other four areas U but it turns out that Adventist there's something called the Adventist Health study that followed 103,000 Americans for 30 years and and if you're an adherent Adventist your life expectancy is about seven years longer than it is if you're not an Adventist fasting and um and the highest concentration of them are in Lolinda that's why we call lomalinda BL Zone got it the reason they're living longer again it's it's a number of factors but uh first of all

this idea of a Sabbath I think is a lot more powerful than we think um they take it very seriously from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday no matter how busy they are no matter where the kids need to be driven or what the social schedule is demanding they stop everything and they take a sanctuary in time uh which includes slowing down stress reduction includes taking the focus off of of whatever stressing out and placing it on a higher being they have uh they always have a potluck lunch and then hardwired right in the

religion is a nature walk so this is something they're doing every single week for decades back to this old idea you have to think long term they also take their diet directly from the Bible and I'm not a big Bible reader but if you look at Genesis 1 verse 26-30 God lays out the diet to the Garden of Eden wow clearly three things I'm writing these down every tree that bears fruit so that's Citrus and apples and tomatoes and avocados every plant that bears seed so that's beans and Grains and seeds and nuts and then

one stance to later uh uh green vegetables or greens and um the that's help with the Adventist seat there's there's no mention of Tomahawk Steak or or Lobster Ador you know it's you know or or Skittle or Skittles yeah so the Advent is actually filed so they're mostly Advent Adventists all also tend to hang out with other Adventists and this is another longevity strategy we over look we know that if our three best friends are obese or overweight there's about 150% better chance that you'll be overweight who we hang out with has a huge and

lasting impact on our health and most Adventists because they have this Saturday Sabbath and they're conservative Christians they tend to hang out with each other so they're not going to the party where they're sitting around roasting wieners and you know doing shots at tequila I I i' so true I mean I write about this U you know Tony Robbins speaks about I mean you're the average of the five people who spend the most time with if you if you're overweight you want to get you want to get into good health hang out with healthy people

if you're pessimist optimistic hang out with optimistic people I mean it really does it is about shaping your neuronet shaping your your your mindset and your behavior um I I I want to begin working our way through the the fun let me just stop you there for a second please when you think about what really works what you just said really works and it works for the long run our friends tend to be long-term adventurers there's um several dozen billion dollars spent on supplements uh a year and if you look at the pool of people

who take supplements they actually have higher mortality than the pool of people who don't take supplements my God but we don't spend much money at all helping people optimize their social network we kind of say it in passing and then we move on to the next topic yeah but why we know it works we can measure it works Nicholas christakis at Yale measures he can tell you exactly if your friends drink too much here's your chance of drinking too much if your friends say they're lonely here's your chance of being lonely if your friends are

obese here's your chance of being obese why aren't we creating programs to help people engineer those five people because we know that's going to have a lasting measurable impact more so than anything else we're spending money on I love that I love that that is and it is so true I mean if you're lucky enough to be able to shape it proactively shape it um you identified nine fundamentals of the blue zones they're well covered in lots of your writings but i' I'd like to talk through them ingrain and and take and ask to develop

a s a minimum takeaway from here like an action you can do right one of the things that end of the day is uh you can we can talk about this and people can listen to it but if if nothing changes as a result of our conversation here with folks today um it's a missed opportunity so let's talk about the the lowest hanging fruit um literally speaking so uh the first one and there are nine of them move naturally incorporate physical activity in daily life so 70 more than 75% of Americans don't even get 20

minutes of physical activity this idea of going to the gym this idea of going to the gym and I'd even argue exercise has been a public health failure people like you and me will go but the average American doesn't so how are you going to get the average the biggest gain is to go from zero activity to 20 minutes a day that's that's three years of life expectancy right there how are you going to get the average American to do that the easiest way to do it is to change their streets so they're walkable and

bikable and safe and aesthetically pleasing that is going to get people off the couch to go get their cup of coffee or go walk to a neighbor's house or kids walking to school and that idea of just for the average am the biggest longevity P impact you're going to get for the 340 million Americas is make our streets more walkable and bikable love that I mean I hopefully people know if you're over 60 the number one impact on longevity is uh is building muscle it is it is movement it is resistive training um and I

and I think that zero to one you know adding 20 minutes so I think habits like taking a walk after you eat dinner um what are other I mean for me I move to five workouts a week and I changed that from like three 1H hour workouts to five half hour workouts uh I don't know how you think about that and it's like I'm I'm not going to not get some exercise the other thing I've done is walking meetings right if I have a a a meeting I mean I I feel anxious sitting here record

this podcast with you instead of being on the walking outside uh so walking meetings um I have a I have a walking desk that I'll uh that I've used I have I'll take my a lot of us are on zooms these days and I've got a uh a techno gym stationary bike and I take all of my board meeting zooms on my bike um other other hints well I'd like to address the sort of workouts at the gym in none of the five blue zones do you see people going to the gym yeah uh yet

that you have the highest percentage of people making it to age 100 and if you look at JY uh adherence you get tend to get a lot of people joining with Zeal during the new year right after the new year but there's only about 20% left at the end of the year so once again it's this sort of popular knowledge that really doesn't vet out when it when it comes to producing longev it will for people who actually do it but people don't actually do it uh meanwhile for example if you um if you take

public transportation to work which most of us can do your chance of cardiovascular disease go down by about 20% uh this is the time of year where it's not a bad time to put in a garden it's hard to do it in Santa Monica I'm sure but for most of America growing a garden is a perfect longevity strategy why because the moment you put the seeds in it you kind of care about those plants and there's a nudge to go out in water or weed it's low intensity range of motion physic IAL activity you know

when we Garden our cortisol levels go and at the end of the activity in a few months you have fresh vegetables you'll probably eat so um that for sure those things work or buy a puppy and take it for a walk yes there you go yeah yeah the the dog needs to get walked every day and therefore the human gets walked all right so move naturally is the first one and I you know the big during covid for me the big thing was walking meetings walking yes and and now it's like I sitting on a

zoom yeah I the phrase I use is sitting isn't you smoking um yeah I agree yeah okay let's go number two purpose this is one that I care about deeply as to you and what I have here is having purpose can add up to seven years of extra life expectancy so so that sounds like a platitude but it's not uh Robert Butler who was the original director of the National Institutes on Aging he was the author of a paper that looked at people's writing and Then followed them over time and the people who could articulate

their sense of purpose were living about 7 years longer than people who were rudderless in life and the observation in blue zones they almost always have a vocabulary for purpose yeah so taking the time to know what you like to do what you're good at and an outlet for it it's not just I know my purpose but you have to you have to live it and by the way most of the time in blue zones there's an ultral listic outlet it's not just painting it's sitting at home and painting you know it's it's um teaching

karate or it's um basket making but with the idea of passing it on to the younger generation so uh so many Americans I think you I just got a letter from a woman from Houston yesterday who saw my documentary and she asked was about my age her kids are grown up she's retired she's walking watching TV and you could almost feel her kind of dying in real time and you just want to say you want to take that lady and help her identify what she has to give to the world and find an outlet for

it I think it's so important I I think a purpose-driven life is the most important um aspect it's it's my number one thing on this list because if you're driven if you wake up with purpose in your life um you naturally are going to have a higher energy and want to hang out with people people want to hang out with you that drives social that drives movement you know I talk a lot about having a massive transformative purpose and more than just a purpose like what do you want to do that's going to make the

world a better place and it can start with your kids it can start on your block it can start in your area of focus I actually for those are interested I created a large language model um uh called purposefinding you know uh and help you create a uh a statement of purpose at the end so my MTP is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful compelling and abundant future for Humanity and so I get my greatest joy in life when I'm supporting entrepreneurs through X prise through my Venture fund through my writings whatever

it's like and my message to them is like go do go dream big go and and you know we we're living in a world of such incredible capabilities and resources you know tap into it and do something so I think that's the most powerful thing you're doing Peter actually because it impacts people right now some of these p p perspective ideas and I think they're very good ideas and right track they may indeed work but they don't necessarily make your life better it may be prolonging a shitty life in some cases whereas if you can

help people find their sense of purpose not only you adding seven years life expectancy now you're making their this week better yes better right now and people like hanging out with someone who's got purpose whatever it is right it's like you want to you want to hang out the other the other part of this in the mindset World um and one of the books I'm working on is called mindset Mastery is the notion that optimists live longer right and there's a pretty amazing study of 69,000 women 1500 guys that said as much as 15 %

longer and I think all of that's tied into to the work that you've done did you find optimism as a important factor in your work well I I wrote a cover story for National Geographic in a book called The Blue zones of Happiness which took all the statistical underpinnings of happiness and it turns out so you know optimism is usually measured in um you take a measure of people's life expectancy right I mean their subjective love being now on a scale of 1 to 10 they say they're 75 and they think they're going to be

happier in 5 years they call that thriving and that's kind of the um I think the official way of measuring optimism and yes uh the people who are thriving have about six extra years of life the top quintile have about six years of life expectancy over the people on the bottom quintile and there's lots of things you can do to stack the deck in your favor but it's hard to you know you can't measure it you can't really manage it or or Proclaim it but um yes can can I bring up another subject um a

four-letter word called retirement um what okay I'm not that great and MTH in that way but uh it's like when my dad God bless him um it was OBGYN and when he turned 65 I was like Dad you really should retire you know this OB joen is is stressful and and I now look back and I wish i' had never done that I I I maybe slow down a little bit maybe give up the uh the OB the obstetrics and but folus stay in GYN I I there's a there appears to be a very high

correlation between retirement and death like you give up your purpose in life have you studied that or looked at that yeah I well I know there's a second most dangerous year in your life is the year you retire the first most dangerous is the year you're born infant mortality but a big mortality Spike that year and we don't exactly know why but you know I think we would probably both agree is probably all a son your purpose is gone and you know two generations ago there was a good reason to retire because people mostly worked

at jobs they didn't like and um soon after they could no longer work they died yeah but now we're living 20 years longer and um with without having a sense of purpose there's no impetus to get out of bed in the morning or get out of the easy chair or take your medicines or keep your mind um so and the lack of these things they're all toxic to us yeah you know um I my mom God bless her lives in boka and she's doing great and I'm like Mom I I you know she's 88 now

and it's like Mom I need you to find a new purpose in life so you can stick around for the next 20 years to see my my kids grow up and I think I think if people don't if you're if you're retired um I think uh there are so many different things you can do to re renew uh a resurgent purpose whether it's teaching whether it's mentoring whether it's you know like you said just taking care of of um people in your community who are less well off than you I mean those things that create

that level of connection and purpose um I I think is the single most important thing we see it in blue zones for sure um in in Okinawa for example there's not even a word in their vocabulary for purpose instead the word eeky guy I love eeky guy and beti do please explain what eeky guy is it's essentially um knowing why you wake up in the morning it's it's like metabolizes Purpose with alism yeah and um the the the Costa Ricans have plev um so um that that's so important there's a there's a researcher from Columbia

University named Linda Fred I know Linda yeah yeah and she found that um older people who volunteer in a meaningful way in schools and that usually means reading to kids they have lower health care costs they have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and they have lower BMI and all of that equates essentially the lower higher life expectancy so it's it's actually been measured in the United States um but it has to usually has to be a meaningful you have to feel like you're doing something that means something all right so to catch you up again

if you're listening to these uh nine number one don't sit during your zooms take your walks take your walking meetings purpose if you're retired finding you purpose it is the greatest gift you can give yourself and the people around you downshift okay uh this is my biggest problem uh downshifting slowing down what does downshifting mean it means unraveling some of the stress of The Human Condition and that also usually means lowering inflammation so in all these blue zones they have these sacred daily rituals um the the okan have ancestor veneration the uh Adventist prey that

works at downshifting the the uh Costa Ricans and the eans take a nap mhm um which also works at lowering cortisol levels yeah sardinians do happy hour but it's having something every day that puts some punctuation between this the hurry and worry of your life and uh allows you to um take your mind off of is there a good time a day to do that is it is it I mean is it later in the day end of the day midday any there's no pattern on that I mean the okan is usually his first thing

in the morning is ancestor veneration Advent is is usually usually first thinging in the morning they'll say a prayer it's also a little prayer before a meal which by the way it sounds antiquated but the idea of expressing some gratitude for your food um you'll slow down uh you're more likely to honor what you're eating rather than just plunging it down and you know let me let me double on that because Helen Messier who's my chief medical officer at Fountain life talks about what she calls a vitamin o said what's vitamin o she goes it's

taking some deep breaths when you sit down to eat to put yourself into a parenthetic mode to rest and digest mode and the flip side of that is eating while watching CNN yeah right where where the world's blowing up everybody's lying everybody's dying and you're eating food and you're under stress and I I agree with you that just a a moment of doing gratitudes around the table uh or a prayer or just just everybody together take deep breath in it just and out and it just automatically just has this massive impact on the body I

mean I just I just one breath just made me feel like just really just relax and slow down it's extraordinary and the a prayer is kind of like taking a breath and um also it's easy to remember because you get the prompt of oh we're sitting down to dinner it's like I'm going to brush my teeth oh yeah I should floss too so it's a great opportunity yeah you're not going to forget dinner and so yeah connect connecting that to um I guess I I've been uh getting up in the morning and I my meditation

time has been writing for an hour every morning um but I've added uh red light and a meditation during red light to it um so tell us about red light well red light therapy right now photo modulation has an impact of reducing inflammatory factors so it's in reducing inflammation um and it's also uh really supporting skin collagen um keeping your largest organ your body young um did you sit in a booth or something no I I bought a red light panel it's a 4T by 1T wide and I'm in you know basically naked in front

of it for 20 minutes a day and I'm meditating during that uh the other thing I've added is a red light cap which uh the numbers look pretty good at stimulating follicle growth so just for maintaining hair oh wow yeah I'm going to put that baby on yeah well it's it's uh you know you have nice hair Peter thank you thank it's it's doing okay it's 20 minutes I'm going to add that to the next generation of my longevity Playbook cuz I added the red light uh recently as part of my protocol I and I

always love doing two or three things at once and so being able to do the red light and meditation um at the same time I know I know you're audien has heard that some of but they they probably wouldn't mind a little reminder what what are your of the top three sort of new innovations that you put it to work in your life what what what it's not that it's not that complicated I I made a decision last year to add 10 lbs of muscle which was like my my objective and it was increasing my

protein intake uh to one gram per pound um and you need that adding creatin five uh five grams of creatin along that line to stimulate uh blood flow and and muscle growth uh and then increasing the frequency of workouts to instead of you know three times a week to 5 days a week and now it's going to be maintaining it um sleep has always been important I mean my only challenge as I mentioned this earlier yesterday was the uh flight four of Starship uh and so I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to watch that it

was delayed till about about 600 uh but it was funny waking up at 4:00 a.m. and then seeing my newsfeed an article that one of the newspapers written about you know Peter D manness think sleep is the most important element of uh of longevity and here I am like getting up at 4:00 a.m. I want to bed after lunch yesterday but you know it's my dad used to say B meon iist everything in moderation um so I've added red light uh Therapeutics uh and I'll I will run the numbers I've been doing consistently now for

two months and I'm measuring inflammatory markers I'll keep this as part of my life the problem is you and I travel and maintaining these habits while travel is so difficult right um and I'll publish the next iteration of longevity uh practical Playbook uh next year said 20124 version in front of you I'll publish a 25 and I update everything I do uh and why so downshifting 80% rule uh please what does that mean well it comes from it was inspired by the okan uh adage harachi Buu which essentially means stop eating when your stomach is

80% full it actually goes back to confucious and um and it's very much in step with uh the notion of of intermittent fasting it's um you know that when you uh um feed monkeys as much food as they want compared to a group of monkeys that get 30% fewer calories the underfed monkeys live longer and I believe it's the same thing with humans so um the challenge of course is that there's this delay between us being actually full and feeling full right so I the Blue Zone approach is not necessarily uh hadachi Buu is what

they say that instead of a prayer so it's a sort of natural place to kind of insert a a habit I'm not a huge fan of habits but they work better if they're coupled with another activity U but the way hadachi blue shows up in the in the Blue Zone context is they tend to pre-plate their food and then put the rest away instead of eating family style which occasions eating fewer calories and what how does that affect the speed of eating oh so in other words I have a limited amount on my plate yeah

it it it affects the amount of food you're going to eat so instead of thinking about stop eating when your stomach is 80% full you there's only enough food on your table to fill your stomach 80% yeah um they tend to eat off of smaller plates Cornell food lab found that if you're eating off a smaller plate your your brain you unconsciously eat fewer calories you never see a TV in a Blue Zone kitchen they tend to eat you know huge breakfast and a medium-sized lunch and little or low L little or no dinner so

the impact is you know if you look at their dietary surveys over time until about the year 2000 they were eating about 80% the calories that Americans are eating right now and then so then modernization hit them yeah as soon as the soon as the uh American um standard American diet shows up in these blue zones longevity goes out the back door yeah wow you know I a couple of tricks that I've learned from interviewing folks um one is the order in which your food eat your food matters and so i' I've made this a

a part of my every meal so first of all when you go to a restaurant and they serve the bread and wine first that's like the worst thing you could eat at the beginning of your meal right it just makes you hungrier um so I eat veggies first um so I'll literally eat all the vegetables on my plate first uh which slows the digestive tract and then I'll eat my protein and then I've actually gotten away from all carbs but if you're going to eat carbs eat the carbs last um because you're digest first of

all you'll be more full and then it's slow the the the veggies and the protein of slowed your digestive process a little bit so I'm not sure if you've seen that in any form well I yeah I'll say it's it's a dangerous message to tell people not to eat carbs um okay please well um both jelly beans and lentil beans are carbs and and I love I had a great lentil soup last night I love lentil and those are carbs by the way okay I'm Bean so let's talk about beans one second okay so people

so in blue zones you know I I wrote this book called when I I should have said high glycemic index carbs I I I minimize but your audience knows what that but most Americans don't know what the hell high glycemic carbs means you know they they and you tell people by the way even bread in in blue zones they're eating a ton of bread I'm in the longest lived men in the history of the world in Sardinia until about 1990 60% of their caloric intake came from bread Breads and pastas so it's very hard to

squar that there's there but of course it's sourdough bread and sourdough bread actually lowers the glycemic load of a meal but people don't really they say bread oh my God dangerous carb so it's too much of a blunt instrument to tell people not to eat carbs you know we need a better word cor correction appreciated so thank you for that I appreciate your wisdom but it was more a reason to sort of slip in there some you know what people really eat to to to live a long time but anyway back so so uh honestly

I want to go back to what type of beans and uh are are you seeing as important to be part of your diet so all blue zones are eating about a cup of beans a day and in okanawa they show up as the soybeans and tofu uh in in Costa Rica they're black beans in in um ikara Greece that they're mostly uh lentils and gansos and Sardinia fava beans it doesn't seem to matter U but um people who eat a cup of beans a day also live about four years longer and I can't draw causal

relationship but I can tell you it Stacks the Beck in favor of longevity you know I hear this all the time we need to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into the inner city no that's the absolute wrong thing to do why they're expensive they're not shelf stable and people in the C don't know what the hell to do with fresh fruits and vegetables you give them beans and rice and by the way you take a bean in a grain you get all the amino acids you get a whole protein beans and corn tortilla beans

and pasta those Foods together you're giving people 95% of the fiber the complex carbohydrates the protein they need a lot of micro minerals they're cheap and the most important thing is you can make them taste delicious those are the longevity Foods I think we should be promoting first yeah which gets to number five here which is a plant-based diet uh Meats eaten small amounts five times per month that's that is a small that comes from a metaanalysis of 155 dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the last 90 years and I did it

under the ages of Harvard University Walter Willet and um um that amounts to about 20 lounds of meat A year the average American eats about 240 pounds of meat A year wow and there's no question that quantity of meat is doubling tripling or even quadring your chances of card cardiovascular disease and Cancers of the GI tract breast and prostate cancer so a little bit of meat is probably not a problem but the the levels we eat in America for sure are driving chronic disease is that is eggs fall into the same category there um in

blue zones on average they're eating about three eggs a uh a week uh they're pasture raised you know they're typically the chicken running around the yard um their home home production and you know eggs seem in low quantity they're probably neutral but in high quantities they're for sure a negative H yeah I'm I'm trying to balance protein um you know plant-based protein versus uh animal and it's so much easier to get the amount of protein I'm looking for from uh from animals yeah but when you you're remember you're also ingesting their hormones you're ingesting the

antibiotics you know you probably you probably say well I eat grass-fed meat um sure but that's only about 2% or 4% I don't I don't eat beef oh yeah right you don't eat meat at all right but but I I do I do eat chicken I do eat fish and I I mean salmon uh in particular I want to come back to fish in a moment but I I recently I do toxin testing all the time and my arsenic levels were high and I'm like like what's going on and my physician uh at at Fountain

life said it's chicken it's coming from the amount of chicken you're eating the number one driver of chronic disease in America is our sodium intake and the number one source of sodium in America is chicken really yeah it's the billion chickens we eat so by the way folks do you know how many chickens there are on the planet this number just blows me away it's like 37 billion chickens on planet Earth we're we're a planet of chickens it's crazy yeah it's and chicken is not a significant source of protein any of the blue zones it's

be careful of chicken and we think oh it's the other white meat but when you look at the subcellular level of saturated fat it's on par with beef and um all 100% of chicken has feces in it and um eoli so what meat products would you recommend based on your work none none but I will tell you and and I'll be honest people in blue zones the most common meat is pork and um it's always eaten as a celebratory food it's always home raised it's not industrial raised and um you you don't need meat to

I haven't eaten meat in 12 years and I'm Pro you know my doctor tells me I'm his healthiest patient yeah you look great tell me about fish blue zones are consuming about four servings of fish a a week um it's typically midchain fish like anchovies or sardines that sort of the cheap fish that that rarely makes it to our our grocery stores here in America and interestingly in blue zones the even though they're on islands like I would have thought a lot more fish yeah uh but for example in Sardinia they're 15 miles away from

the uh ocean you can see the ocean but they never go down there it's it used to be a day journey to get there then you catch the fish and then by the time they get the fish back up in the village it stinks same with karia by the way which is in Greece the Blue Zone in Kara is not on the coast not the coastal city it's up in like this crater because they had to always hide from the Pirates so it's sort of a hidden part of of Viara so they're eating mostly beans

and and uh you know greens the type of weed weed whack from our our backyard they're making in hortas and beautiful pies I'm familiar My grandmother used to make that for me you know I had a Blue Zone Diet when I was growing up living at home and it shifted when I went to medical school um this next one at 5 so I am seriously curious about this because a lot of the science data today says listen alcohol has no added benefits and it's it's detrimental um are you I mean this is not what science

is saying but this is what the blue zones do two glasses per day interesting yeah I'm investigating a place where it's more like more like four glasses so I'm familiar with the epidemiology which every everybody sites that there's no safe level of alcohol um but they also factor in things like Falls and drunk driving and fatal accidents it's not always just what you know and there's some I I I would say them weak studies on alcohol and and you know gray matter in your brain and so forth but um I know that 90% of people

are making it into their 90s and hundreds in in all the blue zones except lomalinda are drinking every day of their life they're drinking homemade wine a couple glasses it's all almost always with a meal or always with food it's almost always in the presence of other people and their life expectancy at middle AG is 10 years longer than us so I know for certain that drinking a little bit is not mutually exclusive with living a long healthy life could they live two or three more years without drinking it maybe yeah but maybe not not

we we don't know for sure all I know is um you know a little bit doesn't seem to seem to get in the way of living a long time in blue zones number seven is um a challenge in our loneliness epidemic epidemic here which is belong participation in faith-based Services four times per month adds four to 14 years of life expectancy Yes again that's a metaanalysis Gary Fraser um so it I interviewed personally about 430 centenarians and all but about five said they belong to a faith-based community and you can't really measure spirituality because it's

too vague but you can measure religiosity which is showing up and so people who show up uh church temple mosque it doesn't seem to matter those are the ones living for extra years of life expectancy um arguably the most coste effective Public Health intervention would be getting inner city youth involved with a church or I'm not a religious person I'm not advocating anything here but all I can say those are the ones getting the extra 14 years of life expectancy and it might be because um they're lowering their chance of getting involved in Risky behaviors

it might be belong because because they have who cares it works yeah um number eight loved ones first keeping parents grandparents nearby or in the home I love that um and you know I'm I'm sad my mom lives in Florida and I'm in I'm in La U I'm excited having you know my kids at 13 for the next 5 years so it's just it's just the bonds it's just the experience of love and connection yes I think I think we're quick to dismiss the um benefits of having our aging parents around that you know they're

the definition of wisdom is knowledge Plus experience so the longer you've been around the better chance your wisdom in these blue zones you older people it it would shame the family to put your older person in a retirement home which by the way you put your agan parent in a retirement home instantly it's a 2 to six year drop in life expectancy yeah they're not and you talk about purpose there's no purpose in retirement home uh so the longer you can keep your parent engaged ideally with your family because in blue zones you see them

they're the ones cooking they're the ones um stewards of this food tradition which seems to be driving longevity they're helping Mom with child care they're growing the garden they have the the agricultural wisdm the resilience yeah and it turns out that a child who lives in a home with a grandparent they actually have lower rates of disease and lower rates of mortality um we don't know exactly know why but it's this virtuous circle that we're quick to again quick to dismiss but very clearly a longevity strategy and last one on your list here right to

tribe so Social Circles that support healthy behaviors and and this folds back into you know who are the five people you spend the most time with um and falls back into you know default behaviors because of the tribe you're with yes yeah I call it tribe but it's the five people who we spend the most time with and they're typically people with whom we can have a meaningful conversation who we can call on a bad day and they'll care but yeah I would argue that is the most powerful thing you can do to add years

to your life because friends are long-term adventurers and they have a measurable impact on what we eat how much physical activity we get uh often our sense of purpose how much quality social interaction we get you know the longevity project at Harvard you know that followed a cohort of Harbor graduates since 1925 the you know millions of dollars of study um the core finding was the number one determinant of longevity quality of your Social relationships you have the power to curate your social relationships and that's what the your best longevity investment um is I I'm

you know I wanted to get back again to the what should people do now right and and I think um I love that it's like who do you spend time with uh I I know I have my my dearest and closest friends and who I love you know and are my have one uh their family is staying with us this week and then we're spending next two weeks in Greece I'm going to Greece next next week I'm so excited about this got take my 13-year-old jealous je yeah I'm I'm loving it and and just having

that energy in the home and the hugs and waking up and there's someone there making coffee and it's it's great so uh actively choosing that social life and putting yourself in those situations uh I think also when you're looking to decide where you want to live right making sure that you've got like you said walkable streets and Friends nearby I mean all those those do you do you add that to the equation when you're deciding where you're going to live I mean those are important things to do yeah I I know when it comes to

happiness that that number one thing you can do to increase happiness and therefore longevity is decide where to live it's you can remember to do U gratitude or try to remember or savoring um but for example when you take uh unhappy people from mavia a Soviet block country and move them to Copenhagen or unhappy people from southeast Asia or Africa and move them to Canada which is a happy country nothing else changes about them their gender doesn't change their sexual preference doesn't change their BMI doesn't change but within one year they report the happiness level

of their adoptive home which is often a doubling of Happiness there's no other thing you can do same thing with zip codes in the United States if you live in Kentucky re counties in certain counties in Kentucky your life expectancy is 22 years less than if you live in Boulder Colorado why you move to Boulder Colorado every Street's walkable it's quicker to bike across the city than it is to take a car across the city the healthy food options abound you're a 10-minute walk into nature and and these things are there for the long run

and we miss them we miss them in the SE I love your work buddy I love I love this is there a place someone can go to check what the life expectancy of their zip code is yes it's the Gallup well-being index known as the wbi that's uh that they have BMI and they have um um life satisfaction that's probably the best source I think amazing amazing or CDC also did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions

on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should

eat what foods you shouldn't eat as well as your supplements and probiotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommendations members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 40 8% reduction in IBS listen I've been using viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best

of all viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vi.com Peter I've asked navine Jane a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you'll find it at vom.com Peter you and I joked about this but I am C is there a correlation between sex life and Longevity yes so if you're over 40 and you're having sex at least twice per per week uh you have about half the rate of mortality than

your uh friend who's not getting it at all so but once again it's we don't know if that's because you know it's a reflection of if you can still have sex over 40 you're fit to begin with or if there's some longevity giving aspect to I suspect it's the ladder you know causality versus you know correlation is a lot of the things you have to you have to figure out Peter you know I look at correl for in most cases yeah correlation is a pretty good suggestion of the direction I look at it as it

Stacks the de if it can do no harm to put it in doctor's term all it can do is stack the deck in favor of a better outcome so I'm all for looking at what correlates to longevity and putting it to work in your life so we talked about a bunch of things and one of the things I think about this a lot is food and uh food has lots of factors it's what's convenient what do I actually know I should be eating uh what tastes good and and you just you've just come up with

a line of food called Blue Zone kitchen tell me about that well I'm a big believer that you have to create an environment where uh the healthy choices the appealing choice and the easy choice and you know over 80% of of foods in grocery stores are are uh highly processed or sugar added most of the things other than the vegetables by themselves are not all that healthy so I spent an entire year with a team of people and we took um basically blue zones food and I said I I said to them I want them

maniacally delicious and they came up with four Foods basically their bowls and they're in the frozen section of every Whole Foods in America 1,200 other grocery stores they're under $8 and they're Al maniacally delicious and I know that cuz People magazine just gave us the number one award ni and according to neelon of the four meals we have they rank number one two three and six as the top sellers and it's the company's only six months old congratulations owns kitchen so tell me more about so these are it's a frozen uh bowl that I bring

home and how is it prepared uh you can uh put in your microwave or you can cook it a stove top if you want most people put it in their microwave and it's all plant-based it's 100% plant-based and the the difference between ours and most frozen food usually the the um the main component is the sauce they've spent a lot of time making that sauce really delicious and then the food underneath that it's batched and it's cooked at one temperature but we Source the best ingredients the best beans the best veg vegetables the best grains

and then we cook them at did the right way uh the right level so that they maintain their texture and their flavor forwardness that and so therefore the sauces that we have have less sodium no added sugar but you still have all the flavor because the the it's not just a pile of mush it's a a symphony of deliciousness a symphony of I like that sounds good I mean but it's interesting right eight bucks I mean you're not going to get out of McDonald's for less than that no no so you're giving someone economically and

and and just buying these can you set up a subscription as well to have it delivered no not right now they're only in grocery stores eventually we hope to do that but um the team I have their expertise is is um Frozen food and and uh we got get really good at that first congrats I'm I look forward to to diving into that um what else what where are you going next what are you excited about where do you want to I mean you're young you've got your age like I said you're young you've got

you've got some good decades ahead what do you want to do next what purpose Purpose Driven Life do you want to lead next pal you know I tried to retire four years ago and I failed miserably at it and I at a certain point I realized that work is more fun than fun so I'm I'm working out another National Geographic article and book about uh the healthy the places where people enjoy the longest life in full health um my I hope to collect a few of these Emmys with my Netflix living to 100 series when

do you find out about that I find out on Saturday all right probably be after this podcast drop I um text me please let me know yeah I will but I get to walk the red carp but I'll feel like a big shot for a I'm from Minnesota you know put you know humble Demir people and um and uh so I hope there's a second Ser second season of of uh Netflix I believe there will be and I really enjoy doing that and I I I'd like to continue to evolve this city work um gal

calculates that our you we've worked with 72 cities and they calculate that we've saved over 10 million life years those are real people you know I haven't gotten anybody to 110 but I've gotten a lot of people um uh and exra two or three years of life expectancy uh help them avoid type 2 diabetes and and certain types of cancers and dementia and cardiovascular disease and when I think about ultris what I think about what my biggest impact on this Earth there's not a check I could write or a foundation I could start that would

have a bigger impact on Humanity than what I'm doing with these Blue Zone cities yeah I mean it's you've you've gotten you've done an amazing job building a meme that is powerful that is penetrated and which is uh which is uh which is hard to do do you mind if I ask you I'm just curious the whole process of creating your Netflix series so uh because I'm I am fascinated by that world living in in in La um was this something that they came to you with yes they they came to me I've been approached

two dozen times to do do documentaries and um I'm that typically they want hurl you in into the Gladiator ring of ratings and there's all these sort of cheap ways they wanted celebrities there and they wanted kind of a uh Biggest Loser construct and I said no um I want to create longevity porn uh my stuff eating beans and socializing is not nearly as sexy as the type of stuff you do Peter um and I know I didn't have that so we made up for it by buying by getting the best directors the best cinematographers

and we sat down and um we spent over a year and a half shooting this you're in beautiful locations beautiful location but we we also Clay Jeter is the director he's up for an Emmy I believe he's one of the best directors in this genre uh trained at Chef's Table actually and um I needed to make uh make living to 100 aspirational and usually programmers can't see that as being good TV and and we we crack the code on it but it it took a long time and it also I think when you stick to

your guns when you have a a mission and principles and I don't relent and it means saying no 14 times before you say yes to the right person and and Netflix said you know we they came to be during Co they flush with money they had the right budget it's a it's the number one there's no better place to release a documentary series or movie or then Netflix right they have the biggest penetration in the world but it was hard work i' I've written um five New York Times bestseller books writing's hard TV was twice

as hard fascinating next book oh next book is is are you working on something yeah I'm working on the book of this um um Life Health adjusted life expectancy place around the world where people live the longest lives without in full health so Health span is heal and and do you imagine you might find that in your blue zones or you will you find I already found the places I can't tell you where the places are but there're places do I live do I live in one no no you know the America does a horrible

job so uh healthy life expectancy in the United States about 64 um you know we're we're you know we're the juvenile delinquents of Health um and the the a team they're elsewhere they enjoy 12 more years of life in full health so think about that at age 75 you're just maybe you're done with your first career you have Financial Security you have a a spouse you have you want to travel just imagine the value proposition of 12 good years and these people have achieved and they've achieved it by very definable factors that we under celebrate

and my job is is going to be bringing them allowing people to see clearly what drives healthy life expectancy and then showing how to put it to work in their lives or showing cities how to put it to work in their policies that's my next point I love I love that I mean and again you're the first bridge that everybody who cares about this needs to be focusing on because it's in your control right now and by the way it's not expensive no I think one of the most important things people to realize because you

know listen a lot of the stuff I talk about um you know uh Advanced Diagnostics to catch disease early and Therapeutics and so forth It's there's a budget behind that but uh sleep diet exercise Community all of these things are uh fundamentals uh you know implemented by some of the uh I don't say the poorest people but you know doesn't take the nicoia peninsula Costa Rica currently has the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world so best chance of reaching a healthy age 93 or or so um they're all below the pro poverty line

they spend 115th the amount we do on Healthcare in the United States and after uh we just uh identified it as a Blue Zone Stanford came in and they measured the tars and they found the people with the longest tares which means the people with the the youngest biologically speaking were the poorest people not the rich people so it flies right in this face of the notion that you have to be rich to be healthy in this country and and uh their set of of of uh lifestyle factors are very replicable U by the poorest

Americans so important can you engineer I know you're doing this with uh blue zones LLC where you're you're working for cities to help bring these principles in um and and you're you're hired by by who in that situation usually insurance companies the Blue Cross Blue Shield PL or Hospital uh systems so that's that's great and I get that is it do you think it's possible to actually engineer from the ground up um a Blue Zone I have lots of friends of mine not lots of friends a number of friends of mine who are uh excited

about building cities in the future or and in in the UAE they're building new island communities and so forth could do you think you can engineer from the bottom up a Blue Zone yes and there's I wrote a book called The Blue zones challenge which talks about evidence-based ways that you can set up your kitchen your home your workplace your commute your bedroom um we're we're always looking for the silver bullet and to a certain extent the X prise it's a silver bullet yes exactly I'm interested in the silver Buckshot I'm looking at the the

80 things that the healthy swarm of nudges and defaults we can unleash in our bigger life yeah and they're all Insidious but they all have that half a percent or quarter of a percent impact on our behaviors but when you add those all up over time especially since they're longlasting they have a big bang for the buck yeah you know I'm a very driven person uh meaning um I love what I do and I'm you know I operate typically 247 I've shifted my life to really other than during a Starship launch going to sleep at

9:30 and then waking up at at 5:30 spending an hour writing going to the gym getting my my morning routines which are important to me those those routines I feel good about them but um I don't do weekends well and uh vacations are a rarity um but I'm Purpose Driven in that how do you think about that balance well well you probably get as much joy in stress relief and sitting around with friends coming up with new ideas or you know meetings which would be Agony for everybody else or probably give you energy so your

hardwire you're probably three standard deviations from the norm when it comes to um being purpose-driven and and having ideas and having the energy to execute on them and um you know as long as you're not feeling stressed doing these things and getting enough sleep you're you're probably in a a better position in a Blue Zone sort of way of making it to 100 than you know people who uh can't wait for 5:00 to come around in the weekend I'm interested before yeah please where where does this drive for you come because we were talking before

we started you telling me about these great events you're doing working with CEOs and investment fund and the X prise and spaceships and you you you're you're doing the work of you know eight people and I W did you at a certain point of your life say God I'm GNA do all this stuff or is it a kind of an unconscious drive and if it's where's it what's the genus of it because I bet you a lot of people would like to find that secret sauce I I consider myself a kid in a candy store

having a blast so I'm driven by the stuff I find exciting and like curiosity and desire to do you know it's interesting went through something called The Landmark Forum ever hear of it it's yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's the derivative vest and and one of the things you do is you look back at moments of time in your life that had like events that you made mean something you I'll tell a story I've never told before here uh which was my mom was a cub scout leader and I was a member of the Cub

Scouts and uh uh during that Cub Scout year uh there was a play that had to be done and my mom felt like it was the right thing to do not to give me the lead in the play so she gave the lead in the play to some other kid and I was so so distraught that I I I demanded that I get five other parts in the play to make up for not having the lead in the play and I I think I made like I think I made the the sense of like doing

more things means getting my mom's love and that's of course she's amazing and I love her dearly and she loves me immensely but that was the first moment in time that I could point at something so um I get today I get a rejuvenated energy coming to something new um and so this morning I was on a series of phone calls for Fountain life um this afternoon I've got some meetings for my Venture fund and so I come back but you can't do all these things well unless you have an amazing team yeah and so

I have learned having an incredible CEO someone running all of these I like the energy of starting something and then helping it helping it grow but uh the more is better disease is what I call it but you the the Pearl that you said in that story which I caught was you wanted to make your mother proud yeah and perhaps that is the maybe it's the intrinsic motivation there yeah and and maybe it's a message to mothers out there and having high expectations of your children and when they do something um show your pride in

them and maybe they'll maybe your child will be a Peter Damon but that's so I mean where does it come from where does this like you're not only Purpose Driven you're in a freaking purpose Maserati with the p um uh what at the at the end of this amazing aming Discovery Journey right you're you're you're a scientist and a and a sociologist and a Explorer where the Earth is your Petri dis so to speak and you're um you're extracting all of this incredible data and it's beautiful how you've interwoven it together um where where does

this go next are you just going to continue to to cycle through this process of discovery what at National Geographic my beat is populations I'm most interested in extraordinary populations and learning their lessons and uh in addition to longevity I've done happiness and and now I'm doing healthy life expectancy and you know I I you know in the intro I mentioned you know that you're an explor National Geographic fellow and and I I forget about that part of your life right because I I see you in in such a different way but you know with

8 billion people on the plan planet and so many thousands of cultures it's there are so many massive experiments going on for us to learn from we have the ability to learn now yeah and there there are some that Excel and they excel in measurable ways and ultimately there are very clear drivers of what of what gets them to where they are and that's what interests me you know I was uh I started my career I said three world records for biking across five yes I saw that and and the and my goal for all

those is I wanted to write for National Geographic but that was the writing for National that Geo was your driver that was it that was that was my ex prize in my I want to write for national g so what what caused that in your life for me it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that got me started what what got you was it like seeing a a magazine on someone's coffee table Yeah we used to get National I used to read it as a kid um and my early Mentor was a polar Explorer

named um will steager who's first to reach the North Pole and he's a big he's a Minnesota hero you know ticker tape parades type thing you know when I was in my early 20s you know he was kind of my hero an Explorer is and you know when you think of the hero's journey the the Joseph Campbell hero is the one who goes out and it it's not the hero that just leaves his or her community they find something they overcome their own demons and challenges and they bring something back that betters their community at

the end or saves the community and um um but it betters the community so um you know mine is sort of a modern day you know the the bike rides turned out you know I did the part of the journey where I left but I wasn't really bringing back something interesting and my editor at National Geographic he said you know everybody loves what you do around here but you know if you really we're really looking for the type of stories that is improve The Human Condition or add to the body of knowledge and it was

that little insight and that led me to a series of expeditions to solve ancient Mysteries I did about 16 of those and I stumbled upon that's got to be fun that that is fun I had a team of 14 people and twice a year we went out give give us an example of like one mystery to go solve in the um the greatest civilization in the Western Hemisphere until the 9th century where the ancient Maya they figured out the length of the solar year to within 17 seconds of the figure we come up with today

they built the biggest pyramids in the world um they U they had a language incredibly complex um uh system of governance uh and they mysteriously collapsed and in 909 ad there was no there was no more trace of them and what happened to them and there was all this sort of misguided theories and in the late 90s I I brought a multi-disciplinary team with a huge online audience and did sort of a meta there 14 different archaeologist they all have their own pet theories climatic Warfare disease and I basically did a wisdom of the crowd

I we we interacted with all of them and let I let an audience of a million and a half people decide what really happened and we publish that and the answer is well the answer is they incredibly disciplined Innovative uh civilization that eventually got the upper hand on agriculture and they were able to uh grow a lot more food which gave them more free time and and then they got the population got so big uh that they were exceeding the carrying capacity of their land and it was a very fragile system um and then a

little thing happened a drought moved from Panama up to this uh about Arizona 17 miles per generation when it hit the Central America in about the 8th Century these little droughts caused little food shortages but that threw the whole system off because all of a sudden they weren't making enough food that created social agitation and all these people who would do what the king asked them to do when there was enough food all of a sudden weren't listening anymore and the King Under Pressure starts attacking uh neighboring cities for food and then Farmers instead of

being in the in the corn field are in the battlefield and this whole system just exacerbates and it collapses wow and it was a climatic event that triggered the whole thing which of course makes us think about global warming today and the fragility of our AB billion people in the food system that underpins it um so at the time you know we I I think the our Theory made all kinds of of national news um we did another one I think we proved Marco Polo didn't go to China but really yeah there's actually pretty good

evidence of it but it in um 1999 the Japanese government asked us to do a mystery there and they were F we needed funding and they offered to fund it and we looked at some you know Bronze Age culture disappearance and they weren't very interesting but then we we stumbled upon this study from the World Health Organization that their southernmost Islands were producing the longest disability-free life expectancy in in the world and that was Okinawa and that's that's a good mystery and that's what launch blue zones actually wow that's that's a beautiful story my friend

you know um obviously thoughts of Indiana Jones come to mind as you're as you're telling your stories there I I love that idea of pursuing pursuing a mystery um I I am I am curious if there are teams at National Geographic including yourself thinking about the uh the whole UFO uh aspects of have you have aliens come to Earth before not the subject of our conversation here today but I am curious National Geographic is mostly their mission is mostly focused on G Geographic their Earth they're not so um there were some theories that the uh

uh the sarcophagus in in a place called pen shows what looks like might be a figure sitting at a a in a spaceship manipulating a kind of a joystick but that's been debunked oh well you know I guess I'll have to just stick with Starship as the way I'm getting off the planet buddy uh such a pleasure um uh excited for the work that you do I I have a couple Pages at the end of my longevity Playbook just CU I think it's so important 109 109 yes which I have in front of me that

you talk about the Blu on was very flat I was reading it like oh this is a great book and actually there I am I like it that no but it's I I love your work because it is it's so important for people to realize what they can do now nothing happens unless you take action now and these are actions you can take that don't cost a lot of money well my job Peter is to get the most people possible across the first Bridge so you can talk them across take them across Bridges two and

three I'm in I'm in those of you interested uh danner.com you can uh hire Don Dan as a keynote speaker he does that and does a beautiful job of inspiring people and giving them a vision of what's possible on Instagram it's Danner um and uh thank you it was a joy Peter I'm glad to finally sit down with you real conversation I know absolutely beautiful thanks pal we'll see you when you're 100 let's not stop there yeah that's an insult for you h [Music]