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 increase in life expectancy of about two and a half 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 4 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 Buettner, the man who has spent more time with more centenarians around the world to 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 Kurzweil calls living long enough to live forever. This is a episode for you to take notes on. 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 Buettner. Hey, Dan, welcome to Santa Monica.

Great to see you, Peter.

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 re engineer this town we're in or move. But in all seriousness, congratulations. Your Netflix series has been nominated for six Emmys and I hope that you win many of them. And you know, you have lived with more centenarians, studied more centenarians than anybody I know. And my hope is to extract wisdom from that and talk about what you've learned. One of the people who've influenced me in the longevity world is Ray Kurzweil. Ray, one of the experts in AI but has written about it. Ray 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 natural ways of living longer, taking care of yourself. I think you represent the expert. You've looked at global experiments done in communities and seen whose lifestyles. Bridge 2 is really the beginning of biotech epigenetic reprogramming stem cells. And that's where I focus a lot of my life. And Bridge 3 is eventually nanotechnology and uploads. I hope we'll get there. I'm planning. But let's dive into Bridge one. To use Ray's parlance. Let me begin with this question. You've seen people who are making it routinely to 100. Are you seeing any of the blue zones who make it to 110 on a routine basis? Or is that stretch is like getting from 100, 110, like really hard?

Yeah. To put a finer point on it, 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% is 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, I do. You have to have won the genetic lottery. You'll come along this bridge. 2-bridge-3 may give us something that makes it more commonplace. But 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 genes. There are some people who have an amazing set of genes and they made their chance of making to 100 go up three or four fold. But what most of us can realistically shoot for, given the state of science right now, is about 94 and. And the people I found do it better than anybody else. And that is the body of wisdom I try to convey.

I get it. You and I are about the same age. I'm 63.

I'm 63.

63 as well. Okay. So when I think about this this is my calculations. And for folks listening here, you can do your own math. 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 and biotech ever. 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 there's two pools of demographers out there when it comes to longevity. There's one pool like Jay Olshansky, he's an American, he's very well known, who will show you that since about 1840, there's almost been a straight line increase in life expectancy of about two and a half years per decade. You know, we've seen big leap and drops. 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 63. We should get another three decades. Three decades, that's seven and a half years of extra life. So I just said it's 94. We ought to be able to make 101 just if progress continues. There is another pool of demographers who calculate the rate of discovery and of genetic discovery. For example, when you add that sort of calculus and the, the curve may look like 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 4 months.

That's the eldest, well documented individual, right?

Marie Calme Yes, France we theoretically, the human could go past that, but we just don't know of an example.

Yeah, and it's really strange, given hundreds of millions and billions of people, you would think that there would have been some outliers, somebody else who had gone past that. And that's 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 in the large of the population of humans on Earth, someone should have pushed beyond that.

Yeah. So our environment is constantly changing. And the way evolution works is species adapt to a. Changing to a limited resource, but also a changing environment. And if we were quadrupeds, if walking around in four legs with an IQ of 50 year, 50 points like a Neanderthal, we probably wouldn't do very well in the current Environment. So 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 change in environment. That is why we die. There's a good reason our species die in an evolutionary context.

I want to dive into that a little bit because it's something that affects my thinking about this a lot, which is why do we die? Why don't we continue? I think for folks trying to understand this, it really goes. We need to go back to 100,000 years ago as hominids, Homo sapiens are what, couple hundred thousand years old as a species? 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 go into puberty probably at age 11 or 12 back then, and you'd be pregnant by 12 or 13, 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. The best thing you could do is die. There's no selective pressure, no advantage for having people living longer. Is that correct?

Yes. I think generally there's been about 25,000 generations of the human species and for about 99.8% of that, life expectancy has been 30. For every mammal, whether it's a mouse or an elephant, the. We live about two and a half times the age of what we call procreative success. So procreative success is defined as not only having children. I'm sorry, the age of procreation. Two and a half times the age of procreation. So for every mammal, as soon as you start having babies, you live about one more generation until you have grandbabies, and then another half a generation and then you die off. And the idea being, evolutionarily speaking, obviously our offspring need us to survive, but our grandchildren don't need us as much. Grandparents help somewhat. So there's an evolutionary rationale for you to be around to see your grandkids survive. And then you're, you're kind of irrelevant.

In the scheme or, or you're. You tax on the family unit. You're. You're drag.

Historically, yes. Yes.

So, you know, interesting because I had kids at 50. I have two boys now who are 13. And I think about that as being actually a pro longevity part. They keep me energized. I'm excited about them. I want to see support them and growing. Is that, is there 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 the cohort of Americans most likely to reach age 100 are women who have babies after age 40.

Nice.

We don't know if that's because if you can still have babies after age 40, you're more physically fit, 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 yes, in blue zones, most of the people making it to 100 have had children, indeed are grandchildren or grandchildren and even great grandchildren.

Fascinating. So you said something earlier which I think most people don't realize. A lot of folks are like, man, oh man, my parents died in their 60s or 70s, and therefore I'm probably not going to live much longer than that. The numbers on how much of your longevity is genetic versus lifestyle are pretty shocking. Can you repeat what you said earlier?

For a population, it's somewhere between 6 and 15% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. 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 will run marathons and eat whole food, plant based and have great social network, and they'll be dead at 40 because they have some weird cancer. And then at the other end of the distribution curve, and we hear about them all the time, people drink four drinks a day and smoke and they make it to 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 made it 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 Demis, the CEO of DeepMind. This is Google's AI play. And they had done the work in developing something called AlphaFold that was able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. And they just released AlphaFold 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 create an AI model of a human cell and then maybe just specifically your cell based on your DNA. Right. And then from a cell to an organ, a tissue in a human and sort of the idea, because it really is fascinating what you just said that 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 lifestyle that is allowing this drinking, smoking individual to make it. And I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually. But until then, it's really following sort of what you've discovered and researched to maximize your chance.

There's often trade offs that we don't completely understand. For example, inflammation is the 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 response to diseases.

Is it genetically or from lifestyle?

We don't know. But they don't live around the sea, so they haven't been exposed to all the pathogens that, 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. So they can survive through early and middle age with a weak inflammatory response and therefore they're not suffering higher levels of inflammation later on, which favors their longevity. You take that same Sardinian and you bring them down to the coast where they were.

Coast in Italy or coastal coast.

In Italy. Yeah, in Sardinia or any. Yeah. Or Africa or 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 in later life wouldn't favor their survival in a place other than where they live. So these are.

People are optimized for their, for their environment.

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 in earlier ages. Yeah, you don't know.

I want to hit on something you just said that does worry me and that is the environmental pollutants out there, both RF plastics, preservatives and the like. Would you count that as one of the major drivers?

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 there was a story in the Lancet a few months ago that showed that micro. Microplastics are now causing more and more artery blockages because they get lodged in our arteries and they cause a clot. So, yes, worldwide, there's no question that the toxins in our environment are going to lower our life expectancy.

So, listen, I want to ask the question. I'm sort of jealous of your lifestyle and I love what you do.

Well, vice versa, by the way. Yeah. If I weren't me, I'd want to be you.

Thank you. Right back at you. Just to paint a little bit of the sort of range of things you do right now and where you go. You and I were last on stage together at Mike Milliken's event, and then you were off to some exotic location. Tell me a little bit about what you're up to. Like that.

Well, so the original blue zones were places where people lived the longest. And it was straight math. The people had the highest most likelihood of reaching age 90 or older. There's a new metric that's come on, which is health adjusted life expectancy, run by the 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 that again for your health adjusted life expectancy. I know what life expectancy is.

So it's years of life you can expect, 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 a health span versus lifespan.

Yes, that's like. Yes, that's a 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 heirs.

Fall off a cliff. Right.

Yeah. And. 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, 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 living it on the table. What does that mean? What do you mean your 10 to 15 years of life expectancy just because you're living in America?

Yeah. So These blue zones I found, for example, 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 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. My work 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 for much of the past 15 years has 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.

I love that model, by the way. It's the right way to do things, I think.

And then, you know, part of, I know we're going to talk about the nine common denominators here in a little bit, but the core insight to blue zones and the one that 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 the time. 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 read Longevity, your practical playbook, which by the way, is a great book and full of all the right ideas. 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 information or supplements or stem cells. They just live their lives.

It's their normal. The habits we'd love to have are their normal lives already.

Yeah. And they're not even habits. It's the default. Their unconscious decision is engineered day to day, moment to moment for decades. And what Americans, what makes money is this notion that do this one thing. Yes.

And sell it now. Right?

Yeah. And do it tomorrow and you're going to live longer. But none of it, none, nothing that we know of other than not dying works if we just do it for a month. There's nothing we can do this month or 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 if we don't continue to do it.

So no, I find that fascinating. It's like these are the, these are the eat the right foods because 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. 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 palate is fast food is.

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 transformation coming. There needs to be a positive motivator that's stronger than the feel good fat sugar motivator. There has to be. You have to have something countervailing 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 eat a fast food diet. But I have to know that if I go the other route, it is going to allow me to feel better, live a longer life. And I have to value that. And for me, it's mindset shift. Your mindset is how you react to things. So I've trained myself to just attack vegetables. I love broccoli. My favorite food in the world, you ask me, used to be ice cream. Now it's broccoli with olive oil and lemon.

It's like, yeah, well, I think 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 their health in 40 years. Because when you're 30 years old, you can eat Big Macs and pizza and KFC and you, you don't think about it, you feel fine the next day. You don't realize it's not for 30 years until that heart disease or type 2 diabetes, people kind of care about health. They kind of care about 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 caring about this?

In my 40s. I started this project when I was 40s, and I in my 40s. And I could very clearly see what was driving longevity. But I think the bigger point is I was tasting this food. And when you take all the culinary genius that's at work in blue zones and you put it to work at the. The, you know, food here, it. I was eating it because I loved it. You know, I start my day every day with a Sardinian minestrone, which is 100 plant based with three beans. And 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 I want to talk about that. I do want to get into that for folks to realize, because that little clip of Dan Buettner audio is placed in my brain. So it's important. Where did you get the data 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 two demographers who are three or actually four demographers that were experts in this sort of longevity. Jay Oshansky, Michel Poulon and Gianni Pessy. And they. I mean, their 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 find all of those, the people who were born then who made it to age 90. And then you correct for immigration, emigration. It's a big job. We spent two and a half years checking, finding these places and then confirming their ages before we even started this project. But there's not a shadow of a doubt that these people are living longer than we are.

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What's up So I was writing the story for National Geographic and my editor, Peter Miller said, 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. But it turns out that Adventists, there's something called the Adventist Health study that followed 103,000Americans for 30 years. 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, and the highest concentration of them are in Loma Linda. That's why we call Loma Linda Blue Zone. The reason they're living longer. Again, it's, it's a number of factors, but first of all, this idea of a Sabbath, I think, is a lot more powerful than we think. 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, which includes slowing down. Stress reduction includes taking the focus off of whatever's stressing out and placing it on a higher being. 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, chapter one, verse 26 through 30, God lays out the diet to the Garden of Eden.

Wow.

Very 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 stanza later, green vegetables or greens. And that's what the Adventist eat. There's. There's no mention of tomahawk steak or lobster thermidor. You know, it's, you know, or skittle.

Or skittles.

Yeah. So the Advent is actually followed. So they're mostly Advent. Adventists also tend to hang out with other Adventists. And this is another longevity strategy we overlook. 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 of tequila.

Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I write about this. You know, Tony Robbins speaks about. I mean, you're the average of the five people you 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 a pessimist, you want to optimistic, hang out with optimistic people. I mean, it really does, it is about shaping your neural net, shaping your, your mindset and your behavior. I want to begin working our way through the.

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 several dozen billion dollars spent on supplements 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.

Oh my God.

But we don't spend much money at all helping people optimize their social network. We kind of say it in passing, then we move on to the next topic. 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. You identified nine fundamentals of the blue zones. They're well covered in lots of your writings, but I'd like to talk through them. Ingrain and ask to develop a minimum takeaway from here, an action you can do. One of the things that end of the day is we can talk about this and people can listen to it. But if nothing changes as a result of our conversation here with folks today, it's a missed opportunity. Let's talk about the lowest hanging fruit. Literally speaking, the first one, and there are nine of them. Move naturally. Incorporate physical activity into daily Life.

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 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 American, the biggest longevity impact you're going to get for the 340 million Americas is make our streets more walkable and bikable.

Love that. I mean, hopefully people know if you're over 60, the number one impact on longevity is building muscle. It is movement. It is resistive training. And I think that 0 to 1, adding 20 minutes. So I think habits like taking a walk after you eat dinner, what are other. I mean, for me, I move to five workouts a week and I changed that from like three one hour workouts to five half hour workouts. I don't know how you think about that. And it's like, I'm not going to not get some exercise. The other thing I've done is walking meetings. Right. If I have a meeting, I mean, I feel anxious sitting here recording this podcast with you instead of being on the walking outside. So walking meetings. I have a walking desk that I've used. A lot of us are on zooms these days. I've got a techno gym, stationary bike, and I take all of my board meeting zooms on my bike. Other hints?

Well, I'd like to address the workouts at the gym. In none of the five blue zones do you see people going to the gym. Yet. You have the highest percentage of people making it to age 100. And if you look at gym adherence, you 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 comes to producing longevity. It will for people who actually do it, but people don't actually do it.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, for example, if you, if you take public transportation to work, which most of us can do, your chance of cardiovascular disease go down by about 20%. 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. And there's a nudge to go out and water or weed. It's low intensity range of motion, physical 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 that for sure those things work.

Or buy a puppy and take it for a walk.

Yes, there you go. Yeah. 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, big during COVID For me, the big thing was walking meetings. Walking.

Yes.

And now it's like I sitting on a zoom. Yeah. The phrase I use is sitting is then you smoking.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. Okay, let's go number two, purpose. This is one that I care about deeply, as do you. And what I have here is having purpose can add up to seven years of extra life expectancy.

So that sounds like a platitude, but it's not. 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 seven years longer than people who were rudderless in life. And the observation in blue zones, they almost always have a vocabulary for purpose. 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 live it. And by the way, most of the time in blue zones, there's an altruistic outlet. It's not just painting. It's sitting at home and painting. It's teaching karate or it's basket making, but with the idea of passing it on to the younger generation.

So.

So many Americans, I think. You know, 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. And I think it's so important.

I think a purpose driven life is the most important aspect. It's my number one thing on this list. Because if you're driven, if you wake up with purpose in your life, 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 interested, I created a large language model called PurposeFinder AI that will walk you through a series of questions for free and help you create 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 Prize, 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'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 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 are you adding seven years life expectancy now you're making 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 hang out the other part of this in the mindset world. And one of the books I'm working on is called Mindset Mastery is the notion that optimists live longer. There's a pretty amazing study of 69,000 women, 1500 guys, that said as much as 15% longer. I think all of that's tied into the work that you've done. Did you find optimism as a important factor in your work?

Well, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic and a book called the Blue Zones of Happiness, which took all this Time, statistical underpinnings of happiness. And it turns out. So, you know, optimism is usually measured in. You take a measure of people's life expectancy, right? I mean, their subjective well being. Now on a scale of 1 to 10, they say they're 75 and they think they're going to be happier in five years. They call that thriving. And that's kind of the, I think, the official way of measuring optimism. And yes, the people who are thriving have about six extra years of life. The top quintile have about six years of life expectancy over 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, if you can't measure it, you can't really manage it or proclaim it. But yes.

Can I bring up another subject? A four letter word called retirement. Okay. I'm not that great in math in that way, but it's like when my dad, God bless him, it was an OBGYN. And when he turned 65, I was like, dad, you really should retire. You know, this OB GYN is stressful. And I now look back and I wish I had never done that. Maybe slow down a little bit, Maybe give up the ob, the obstetrics, but stay in gyn. 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. Well, I know there's the 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 there's 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 of a sudden 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 soon after they could no longer work, they died.

Yeah.

But now we're living 20 years longer and 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 so. And the lack of these things, they're all toxic to us.

Yeah. You know, my mom, God bless her, lives in Boca and she's doing great. And I'm like, mom, 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 kids grow up. And I think if people don't. If you're retired, I think there are so many different things you can do to bring you a resurgent purpose. Whether it's teaching, whether it's mentoring, whether it's, like you said, just taking care of people in your community who are less well off than you. I mean, those things that create that level of connection and purpose, I think is the single most important thing.

We see it in blue zones, for sure. In Okinawa, for example, there's not even a word in their vocabulary for purpose. Instead, the word ikigai.

I love ikigai. Please explain what ikigai is.

It's essentially knowing why you wake up in the morning. It's. It metabolizes purpose with altruism. And the Costa Ricans have plan de vida. So that's so important. There's a researcher from Columbia University named Linda Fried.

I know Linda.

Yeah, yeah. And she found that 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 to lower, higher life expectancy. So it's actually been measured in the United States. 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 nine, number one, don't sit during your zooms. Take your walks, take your walking meetings. Purpose. If you're retired, finding your purpose, it is the greatest gift you can give yourself and the people around you. Downshift. Okay, this is my biggest problem. 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. The Okinawans have ancestor veneration. The Adventist pray. That works at downshifting. The Costa Ricans and the Icarians take a nap, which also works at lowering cortisol levels. Sardinians do happy hour, but it's having something every day that puts some punctuation between the hurry and worry of your life and allows you to take your mind off of.

Is there a good time of day to do that? Is it? Is it. I mean, is it later in the day, end of the day, midday?

There's no pattern on that. I mean, Okinawans, usually it's first thing in the morning. Is ancestor veneration. Adventist. It's usually first thing 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, you'll slow down. You're more likely to honor what you're eating rather than just plunging it down.

And you know, 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. So what's vitamin O? She goes, it's taking some deep breaths when you sit down to eat, to put yourself into a parasympathetic mode, to rest and digest mode. And the flip side of that is eating while watching cnn. Yeah, right. Where the world's blowing up, everybody's lying, everybody's dying, and you're eating food and you're under stress. And I agree with you that just a moment of doing gratitudes around the table or a prayer or just, just everybody together, take a deep breath in. It just out. And it just automatically just has this massive impact on the body. I mean, I just, just one breath just made me feel like just really just relax and slow down.

It's extraordinary. A prayer is kind of like taking a breath. And 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 connecting that to, I guess I've been getting up in the morning and my meditation time has been writing for an hour every morning. But I've added red light and a meditation during red light to it.

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 and it's also really supporting skin collagen, keeping your largest organ, your body, young.

Did you sit in a booth or something?

No, I bought a red light panel. It's a four foot by one foot wide. Wide. And I'm in, you know, basically naked in front of it for 20 minutes a day. And I'm meditating during that. The other thing I've added is a red light cap, which the numbers look pretty good at, stimulating follicle growth. So just for maintaining hair.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I'm gonna put that baby on.

Yeah, well, it's, it's, you know.

You have nice hair, Peter.

Thank you. It's doing okay. It's 20 minutes. I'm going to add that to the next generation of my Lunch Longevity playbook because I added the red light recently as part of my protocol. I always love doing two or three things at once and so being able to do the red light and meditation at the same time.

I know your audience has heard that some of they probably wouldn't mind a little reminder. What are your top three sort of new innovations that you put into work in your life?

It's not that. It's not that complicated. I made a decision last year to add 10 pounds of muscle, which was like my objective and it was increasing my protein intake to 1 gram per pound. And you need that adding creatine, 5 grams of creatine along that line to stimulate blood flow and muscle growth and then increasing the frequency of workouts to instead of three times a week to five days a week. And now it's going to be maintaining it. Sleep has always been important. I mean, my only challenge I mentioned this earlier Yesterday was the flight 4 of Starship and so I woke up at 4am to watch that. It was delayed till about 6, but it was funny waking up at 4am and then seeing my newsfeed, an article that one of the newspapers had written about Peter D. Madness thinks sleep is the most important element of longevity. And here I am getting up at.

4Am I went to bed after lunch yesterday.

But my dad used to say Pan Metron Ariston, everything in moderation. So I've added red light therapeutics 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. And I'll publish the next iteration of Longevity Practical Playbook next year. So 2024 version in front of you. I'll publish at 25 and I update everything I do and why. So downshifting 80% rule, please. What does that mean?

Well, it comes from. It was inspired by the Okinawan adage hara hachi bu, which essentially means stop eating when your stomach is 80% full. It actually goes back to Confucius and it's very much in step with the notion of intermittent fasting. You know that when you 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 the challenge of course is that there's this delay between us being actually full and feeling full.

Right. So the blue zone approach is not necessarily hara Hachi bu is what they say that instead of a prayer. So it's a sort of natural place to kind of insert a habit. I'm not a huge fan of habits, but they work better if they're coupled with another activity. But the way Hatahachi buu 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 affects the amount of food you're gonna eat. So instead of thinking about stop eating when your stomach is 80% full, there's only enough food on your table to fill your stomach. 80%.

Yeah.

They tend to eat off of smaller plates. Cornell food lab found that if you're eating off a smaller plate, your brain, you unconsciously eat fewer calories. You never see a TV in a blue zone kitchen. They tend to eat huge breakfast and a medium sized lunch and little or low knit and little or no dinner. So the impact is 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 American standard American diet shows up in these blue zones, longevity goes out the back door.

Wow. You know, a couple of tricks that I've learned from interviewing folks. One is the order in which your food eat, your food matters. And so 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. So I eat veggies first. So I'll literally eat all the vegetables on my plate first, 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 because you're digested first of all, you'll be more full and then it's slowed. The veggies and the protein have slowed your digestive process a little bit. So I'm not sure if you've seen that in any form.

Well, I'll say it's a dangerous Message to tell people not to eat carbs.

Okay, please.

Well, both jelly beans and lentil. Beans are carbs.

I had a great lentil soup last night.

I love lentils. And those are carbs, by the way.

Okay, so let's talk about beans. One second.

Okay, so people. So in blue zones, you know, I.

Wrote this book called and I should have said high glycemic index carbs I minimize.

But your audience knows what that. But most Americans don't know what the hell high glycemics car carbs means. And you tell people, by the way, even bread in blue zones, they're eating a ton of bread. 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 square that. 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, Brett, 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 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 live a long time. But anyway, back to that.

Yeah. So honestly, I want to go back to what type of beans and 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 Okinawa they show up as the soybeans and tofu. In Costa Rica they're black beans. In icaria. Greece, they're mostly lentils and garbanzos. In Sardinia, it's fava beans. It doesn't seem to matter. But people who eat a cup of beans a day also live about four years longer. And I can't draw a causal relationship, but I can tell you it stacks the deck 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 inner city 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 and 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 food first.

Yeah. Which gets to number five here, which is a plant based diet. Meats eaten in small amounts five times per month. That is a small amount that comes.

From a meta analysis 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 Willett. And that amounts to about 20 pounds of meat a year. The average American eats about 240 pounds of meat a year. And there's no question that quantity of meat is doubling, tripling or even quadrupling your chances of 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 levels we eat in America for, for sure are driving chronic disease.

Is that is eggs fall in the.

Same category there in blue zones, on average they're eating about three eggs a week. They're pasture raised. You know, they're typically the chicken running around the yard. Their home, home production and you know, eggs seems in low quantity, they're probably neutral. But in high quantities they're for sure a negative.

Yeah, I'm trying to balance protein, you know, plant based protein versus animal. And it's so much easier to get the amount of protein I'm looking for from, from animals.

Yeah. But when you 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, sure. But that's only about 2% or 4%.

I don't eat, I don't eat beef.

Oh yeah, you don't eat meat at all.

But I do eat chicken. I do eat fish and I mean salmon in particular. I want to come back to fish in a moment, but I recently, I do toxin testing all the time and my arsenic levels were high and I'm like, what's going on? And my physician 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 blew me away. It's like 37 billion chickens on planet Earth. We're a planet of church chickens. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's. Chicken is not a significant source of protein in 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 all 100% of chicken has feces in it and E. Coli.

So what meat products would you recommend based on your work?

None.

None.

But I will tell you and I'll be honest. People in blue zones the most common meat is pork and it's always eaten as a celebratory food. It's always home raised, it's not industrial raised. And you don't need meat to be. I haven't eaten meat in 12 years and probably, you know, my doctor tells me I'm his healthiest patient.

Yeah, you look great. Tell me about fish.

Blue zones that are consuming about 4 servings of fish a week. It's typically mid chain fish like anchovies or sardines, that sort of the cheap fish that rarely makes it to our, our grocery stores here in America. And interestingly in Blue zones, even though they're on islands like I would have.

Thought a lot more fish.

Yeah. But for example, In Sardinia they're 15 miles away from the ocean. You can see the ocean but they never go down there. It used to be a day's 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 Ikaria by the way, which is in Greece. The Blue zone in Ikaria 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 Ikaria. So they're eating mostly beans and, and greens, the type of shit we'd whack from our backyard. They're making in hortas and beautiful pies.

I'm familiar. My grandmother used to make that for me. I had a Blue zone diet when I was growing up living at home and it shifted when I went to medical school. This next one, wine at five. So I am seriously curious about this because a lot of the science data today says, listen, alcohol is no added benefits and it's detrimental. 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 everybody cites, 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 I know that 90% of people are making it into their 90s and hundreds in, in all the blue zones except Lomalin are drinking every day of their life. They're drinking homemade wine a couple glasses. It's 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 age 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. We, we don't know for sure. All I know is, 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 a challenge in our loneliness epidemic here, which is belong. Participation in faith based services. 4 times per month adds 4, 4 to 14 years of life expectancy.

Yes, again, that's a meta analysis. Gary Frazer. So I interviewed personally about 430 centenarians and all but about 5 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 people who show up. Church, temple, mosque, it doesn't seem to matter. Those are the ones living for extra years of life expectancy. Arguably the most cost effective public health intervention would be getting inner city youth involved with the church. I'm not a religious person, I'm not advocating anything here. But all I could say, those are the ones getting the extra 14 years of life expectancy. And it might be because they're lowering their chance of getting involved in risky behaviors. It might be belong because, because they, but who cares? Yeah, it works.

Yeah. Number eight, loved ones first keeping parents, grandparents nearby or in the home. I love that. And you know, I'm sad. My mom lives in Florida and I'm in, I'm in LA. I'm excited having, you know, my kids at 13 for the next five years. So it's just the bonds, it's just the experience of love and connection.

Yes. I think we're quick to dismiss the benefits of having our aging parents around. The definition of wisdom is knowledge plus experience. So the longer you've been around, the better chance your wisdom in these blue zones, older people, it would shame the family to put your older person in a retirement home, which by the way, you put your aging parent in a retirement home, instantly, it's a two to six year drop in life expectancy. And you talk about purpose. There's no purpose in a retirement home. 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 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 wisdom, 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. 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.

Last one on your list here. Right to tribe. So social circles that support healthy behaviors and this folds back into who are the five people you spend the most time with? And falls back into 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 I would argue that is the most powerful thing you can do to add years to your life. Because friends are long term adventures and they have a measurable impact on what we eat, how much physical activity we get, often our sense of purpose, how much quality social interaction we get. The Longevity project at Harvard that followed a cohort of Harvard graduates since 1925, millions of dollars of study. 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 is.

I, I'm, you know, I wanted to get back again to the what should people do now? Right. And, and I think I love that it's like who do you spend time with? I, I know I have my, my dearest and closest friends and who I love, you know, and are my, their family is staying with us this week and then we're spending the next two weeks in Greece. I'm going to Greece next Week. I'm so excited about this. Gotta take my 13 year old.

Jealous.

Yeah, I'm loving it. And just having that energy in the home and the hugs and waking up and there's someone there making coffee and it's great. So actively choosing that social life and putting yourself in those situations. I think also when you're looking to decide where you want to live, making sure that you've got, like you said, walkable streets and friends nearby, I mean, all those, 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 know when it comes to happiness that the number one thing you can do to increase happiness and therefore longevity is decide where to live. You can remember to do gratitude or try to remember or savoring. But for example, when you take unhappy people from Moldavia, a Soviet bloc country, and move them to Copenhagen, or unhappy people from Southeast Asia or Africa and move them to Canada, which is a happy coast 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 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 these things are there for the long run and we miss them. We miss them in the sea condition.

I love your work, buddy. I love this. Is there a place someone can go to check what, what the life expectancy of their zip code is?

Yes, it's the Gallup well Being index, known as the wbi. They have BMI and they have life satisfaction. That's probably the best source, I think.

Amazing. Amazing.

Or cdc.

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Yes. So if you're over 40 and you're having sex at least twice per week, you have about half the rate of mortality than your friend who's not getting it at all. But once again, we don't know if that's because it's a reflection of if you could still have sex over 40, you're fit to begin with, or if there's some longevity giving aspect to sex. I suspect it's the latter.

You know, causality versus correlation is a lot of the things you have to figure out.

But Peter, you know, I look at correlate for in most cases, correlation is a pretty good suggestion of the direction I look at it as it stacks the deck. 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 corporate correlates to longevity and putting it to work in your life.

So we talk about a bunch of things and one of the things I think about this a lot is food. And food has lots of factors. It's what's convenient, what do I actually know? I should be eating what tastes good and 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 the healthy choice is the appealing choice and the easy Choice. And over 80% of foods and grocery stores are 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 basically Blue Zones food and I said to them, I want them maniacally delicious. And they came up with four foods. Basically, they're bowls. They're in the frozen section of every Whole foods in America, 1200 other grocery stores, they're under $8 and they're all maniacally delicious. And I know that because People magazine just gave us the number one award. And according to Nielsen, of the four meals we have, they ranked number one, two, three, and six as the top sellers. And the company's only six months old.

Congratulations.

Who's owns kitchens?

So tell me more about it. So these are. It's a frozen bowl that I bring home. And how is it prepared?

You can put in your microwave or you can cook it 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 difference between ours and most frozen food, usually 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 vegetables, the best grains. And then we cook them at the right way, the right level, so that they maintain their texture and their flavor, forwardness. And so therefore, the sauces that we have have less sodium, no added sugar, but you still have all the flavor because it's not just a pile of mush, It's a symphony of deliciousness.

Symphony of.

I just made that up.

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 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 the team I have, their expertise is frozen food. And we got get really good at that first.

Congrats. I look forward to diving into that. What else? 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 at a certain point, I realized that work is more fun than fun. So I'm working on another National Geographic article and book about the healthy, the places where people enjoy the longest life in full health. 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.

All right, Text me, please. Let me know.

Yeah, I will. But I get to walk the red carpet. I feel like a big shot for it. I'm from Minnesota, you know, humble, demure people. And so I hope there's a second season of. Of Netflix. I believe there will be, and I really enjoy doing that. And I like to continue to evolve this city work. Galb calculates that we've worked with 72 cities, and they calculate that we've saved over 10 million life years. Those are real people. I haven't gotten anybody to 110, but I've gotten a lot of people an extra two or three years of life expectancy. Help them avoid type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancers and dementia and cardiovascular disease. And when I think about altruism, 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, you've done an amazing job building a meme that is powerful, that is penetrated, and which is hard to do. Do you mind if I ask you, I'm just curious the whole process of creating your Netflix series, because I am fascinated by that world. Living in la, was this something that they came to you with?

Yes, they came to me. I've been approached two dozen times to do that documentaries. And typically they want to 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 Biggest Loser construct. And I said, no, I want to create longevity porn. My stuff. Eating beans and socializing is not nearly as sexy as the type of stuff you do, Peter. And I know I didn't have that. So we made up for it by getting the best directors, the best cinematographers. And we sat down and we spent over a year and a half shooting.

This because you're in beautiful locations, beautiful location.

But we also. Clay Jeter was the director. He's up for an Emmy, I believe he's one of the best directors in this genre. Trained at chef's table, actually. And I needed to make living to 100 aspirational. And usually programmers can't see that as being good TV. And we cracked the code on it, but it took a long time. And it also, I think when you stick to your guns, when you have a mission and principles and I don't relent and it means saying no 14 times before you say yes to the right person.

Person.

And, and Netflix said, you know, we, they came to me during co. They flush with money, they had the right budget. It's, it's the number one. There's no better place to release a documentary series or a movie or t than Netflix. Right. They have the biggest penetration in the world. But it was hard work. I, I've written five New York Times bestseller books. Writing's hard. TV was twice as hard.

Fascinating. Next book?

Oh, next book is.

Are you working on something?

Yeah, I'm working on the book of this. Health adjusted life expectancy. Places around the world where people live the longest lives in full health.

So health span is health span. And do you imagine you might find that in your blue zones or will you find.

I already found the places. I can't tell you where the places are, but they're places.

Do I, do I live in one?

No, no, no. You know, America does a horrible job. So healthy life expectancy in the United States about 64. You know, we're, we're, you know, we're the juvenile delinquents of health. The, the A team, they're elsewhere. They enjoy 12 more years of life and 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 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 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.

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, advanced diagnostics to catch disease early and therapeutics and so forth, there's a budget behind that. But sleep, diet, exercise, community, all of these things are fundamentals implemented by some of the, I don't want to say the poorest people, but it doesn't take anything.

The Nicoya 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 so, they're all below the poverty line. They spend 1/15th the amount we do on health care in the United States. And after we just identified it as a blue zone, Stanford came in and they measured the telomeres and they found the people with the longest telomeres, which means the people with 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 their set of lifestyle factors are very replicable by the poorest Americans.

So important. Can you engineer? I know you're doing this with Blue Zones llc where you're working for cities to help bring these principles in and you're hired by who in that situation?

Usually insurance companies, the Blue Cross, Blue Shield plan or hospital systems.

And so that's great and I get that. Do you think it's possible to actually engineer from the ground up a Blue Zone? I have lots of friends of mine. Not lots of friends, a number of friends of mine who are excited about building cities in the future. In the uae, they're building new island communities and so forth. Do you think you can engineer from the bottom up?

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. We're always looking for the silver bullet and to a certain extent the X prize is a silver bullet.

Yes, exactly.

I'm interested in the silver buckshot. I'm looking at the 80 things that the healthy swarm of nudges and defaults we can unleash on our bigger life. And they're all insidious, but they all have that half a percent or quarter of a percent impact on our behavior behaviors. But when you add those all up over time, especially since they're Long lasting. They have a big bang for the buck.

Yeah, you know, I'm a very driven person, meaning I love what I do. And I'm, you know, I operate typically 24,7. 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 morning routines, which are important to me. Those routines, I feel good about them, but I don't do weekends well and vacations are a rarity. But I'm purpose driven in that. How do you think about that balance?

Well, you probably get as much joy and stress relief in sitting around with friends, coming up with new ideas or meetings, which would be agony for everybody else. I could probably give you energy so you're hardwired. You're probably three standard deviations from the norm when it comes to being purpose driven and having ideas and having the energy to execute on them. As long as you're not feeling stressed doing these things and getting enough SL sleep, you're probably in a better position in a blue zone sort of way of making it to 100 than, you know, people who can't wait for 5 o' clock to come around in the weekend. I'm interested before.

Yeah, please.

Where does this drive for you come? Because we were talking before we started. You tell me about these great events you're doing working with CEOs and an investment fund and the X Prize and spaceships, and you're doing the work of, you know, eight people. And I did you at a certain point in your life, say, God, I'm going to do all this stuff, or is it a kind of an unconscious drive? And if it's, where is it? What's the genesis of it? Because I bet you a lot of people would like to find that secret sauce.

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, I went through something called the Landmark Forum. Ever hear of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's the derivative vest. And one of the things you do is you look back at moments in time in your life that had like, events that you made mean something. And I'll tell a story I've never told before here, which was my mom was a Cub Scout leader and I was a member of the Cub Scouts. And during that Cub Scout year 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 distraught that I demanded that I get five other parts in the play to make up for not having to lead the play. And I think I made like. I think I made 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 I get. Today I get a rejuvenated energy coming to something new. And so this morning I was on a series of phone calls for Fountain Life. 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. 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 grow. But the more is better. Disease is what I call it.

But 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 maybe it's a message to mothers out there and having high expectations of your children. And when they do something, show your pride in them and maybe they'll. Maybe your child will be a Peter Diamante. 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 pedal to the metal.

At the end of this amazing discovery journey. You're a scientist and a sociologist and a explorer, where the earth is your petri dish, so to speak. And you're extracting all of this incredible data. And it's beautiful how you've interwoven it together. Where. Where does this go next? Are you just going to continue to cycle through this process of discovery?

At National Geographic, my beat is populations. I'm most interested in extraordinary populations and learning their lessons. In addition to longevity, I've done happiness, and now I'm doing healthy life expectancy.

In the intro I mentioned, know that you're an explorer, National Geographic fellow, and I forget about that part of your life. Right. Because I see you in such a different way. But, you know, with 8 billion people on the 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 are some that excel and they excel in measurable ways. And ultimately there are very clear drivers of what gets them to where they are. And that's what interests me. You know, I started my career, I set three world records for biking across five continents.

Yes, I saw that.

And my goal for all of those is I wanted to write for National.

Geographic, but that was writing for National. Nat Geo was your driver.

That was Ed. That was, that was my X Prize. In my mind I want to write for national geography.

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. And my early mentor was a polar explorer named Will Steger who was first to reach the Norse Bowl. And he's big, he's a Minnesota hero. You know, 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. And you know, when you think of the hero's journey, the, the Joseph Campbell hero is the one who goes out and 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 of. Or saves the community, but it betters the community. So mine is sort of a modern day. The bike rides turned out. 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 everybody loves what you do around here, but if you really. We're really looking for the type of stories that is going to 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 is fun. I had a team of 14 people and twice a year we went out.

Give us an example of like one mystery to go solve in the.

The greatest civilization in the western hemisphere until the 9th century were 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. They, they had a language, incredibly complex system of governance and they mysteriously collapsed. And in 909 AD 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 brought a multidisciplinary team with a huge online audience and did sort of a Meta. There are 14 different archaeologists, they all have their own pet theories, climatic warfare, disease. And I basically did a wisdom of the crowd. I we interacted with all of them and let an audience of a million and a half people decide what really happened. And we published that.

And answer is.

Well, the answer is they incredibly disciplined, innovative civilization that eventually got the upper hand on agriculture. And they were able to grow a lot more food which gave them more free time. And then the population got so big that they were exceeding the carrying capacity of their land and it was a very fragile system. And then a little thing happened. A drought moved from Panama up to this, 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 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 neighboring cities for food. And then farmers, instead of being in the cornfield or 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 8 billion people and the food system that underpins it. So at the time, you know, we, I think our theory made all kinds of national news. We did another one. I think we proved Marco Polo didn't go to China.

Oh really?

Yeah, there's actually pretty good evidence of it. But in 1999, the Japanese government asked us to do a mystery there and they were, 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 stumbled upon this study from the World Health Organization that their southernmost islands were producing the longest disability free life expectancy in the world. And that was Okinawa and that's birth. That's a good mystery. And that's what launched Blue Zones, actually.

Wow, that's a beautiful story, my friend. You know, obviously thoughts of Indiana Jones come to mind as you're telling your stories there. I love that idea of pursuing a mystery. I am curious if there are teams at National Geographic, including yourself, thinking about the Whole UFO aspects of 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 Geographic. The Earth. They're not. So there were some theories that the. The sarcophagus in. In a place called Palenque shows what looks like might be a figure sitting at 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, Such a pleasure. Excited for the work that you do. I have a couple of pages at the end of my longevity playbook just because I think it's so important.

109.

109, yes.

Which I have in front of me that you talk about the booze on. It's very flat. I was reading it like, well, this is a great book.

And then actually cleared it.

There I am. I liked it.

But 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.

Amen. Amen. Those of you interested, Dan Buettner.com you can hire Diane Dan as a keynote speaker. 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. And thank you.

It was a joy. Peter, I'm glad to finally sit down with you.

I know.

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, Sam.