Ep #039 | Secrets to Longevity: Keys to Living Longer and Healthier

Prisoners get more time outside than children.

If you could redesign schools so that kids were healthier, what would you be doing?

So the power of the mind, it is the most powerful thing about our health.

Health issues like autoimmune conditions, digestive issues, chronic sleep issues can be corrected.

This requires a total overhaul of your lifestyle, total overhaul of the way you think about the world.

Jason, shall we get started?

Let's do it.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to this episode with Jason Prowl. And we're going to be talking about longevity. Now, let me tell you why this man seated here next to me is so significant. Well, firstly, we are in Sardinia, and Sardinia is a very unique island off Italy. You see, in Sardinia, they found that there's about 10 times the number of people who live to be 100, as in other parts of the world. And scientists have been studying this for the longest time. Now, one of the things these scientists noticed about Sardinia was that their lifestyle played a factor in longevity. Now, Jason here is a documentary filmmaker and he decided to go deeper into what was going on and he produced an 11 part documentary series where he traveled all around the world, from Sardinia to Okinawa to investigate locations where people were living unusually long to try to determine the factors that cause this enhanced longevity. And so today we're going to be talking about what Jason has learned from his travels around the world from filming this remarkable documentary series. And we're going to talk specifically about what we can do so our kids are healthier, what we can do so our companies are healthy. We're going to look at from a business, from a company point of view, what can we do to make the people that we work with and ourselves and our businesses enhance human longevity and not make work something that degrades your health? And then we're going to look at common practices that you need to pay attention to that let you live longer. Now, the ideas here are somewhat counterintuitive. Some of these ideas that you're about to hear I recently heard for the first time as we were having coffee in the morning here together. So, Jason, firstly, you're a pretty young guy. How did this obsession on longevity start for you?

It started from this concept of chronic disease versus health, right? So oftentimes we're thinking about chronic disease, how do we avoid disease, how do we avoid and resolve chronic disease? But there wasn't a lot of people talking about health, where health comes from, how to initiate health, how to foster health. So this idea of health optimized health. Longevity, to me is really where we're Going when it comes to healthcare, when it comes to the new health model. So I think for me to understand longevity, I had to go out and get a taste for it because I'm only 37. I don't understand longevity because I'm not there yet. So for me to really get a hold on this, I felt like I needed to talk to some of the oldest people that I could get my hands on.

Well, whatever you're doing works because I would have guessed you were 27. So what I find fascinating about your work, Jason, is that your end goal. And Jason was telling this to me earlier. His end goal is to be able to go into cities and be able to advise the government, advise schooling systems, advise companies on what they have to shift so that people in these cities not just live longer, but are happier and healthier in terms of their lives. Okay, so I'd love to go there. I want you to help us unpackage this idea of wellness, of longevity, of living the life that you've observed people live in places like Sardinia. Let's start with schools. If you could redesign schools so that kids were healthier, what would you be doing?

I think the first thing we have to do is look at when kids start school. The kids circadian rhythm, this idea that the biology is operating on this 24 hour cycle. It doesn't start at 7:30 like most high school kids when they go to school or 6am if they're riding a bus. So if we can delay the start times for kids just till 8:30 or 9, that's more in line with their circadian rhythm. This means they're going to learn better. This means they're going to get injured less if they're playing sports. Everything is. And they've done studies, they've shown that SAT or test scores improve when you delay start times. So just delaying start times is the easiest thing we can do for high school kids. For younger kids, we can unstructure the day. Kids are using their environment to learn and to grow. So if we can give them more unstructured play. And these are very simple policy changes that don't require any investment really, just a little bit of shift in thinking and policy so we can start there. Then I would go to lighting, indoor lighting. This is a new problem that we've created for ourselves. We didn't evolve with this lighting. This is new lighting. And ever since we started to save energy with lighting, we've changed the spectrum and our biology, our eyes, our skin is not used to this color of light.

So you're saying lighting can actually influence aging.

This is probably one of the biggest influences in our lives today. When we look at screens, when we look at TVs, iPads, computer screens, phones, these are all influencing our biology through our eye into our brain. It tells our brain which hormones to turn on and off. It tells which cells how to operate the thyroid alone. We have a big thyroid problem in the US right now. The thyroid alone has 1000 genes that are determined, that are turned on or off, determining by which day or by which time of day. So if it's 9am, you might have certain genes turned on. If it's 5pm, you have other genes.

Turn on, then this, I'm sure, doesn't just apply to children, it applies to adults as well.

Everybody. So we're all under this new pressure of this artificial lighting.

So what would you recommend? If we had to make a change in schools, make a change in our homes so that us and our kids are healthier, what would we do when it comes to lighting?

The first thing we can do in our home, there are new lighting technologies out there that are reducing the blue spectrum of lighting. So this is the problem at night. Normally, if you were camping, imagine, right, you would have the fire, you'd have the moon, you'd have the stars. That's it. There's no blue spectrum of lighting. It's all orange, it's all red, it's all yellow. So if we can just tap into this understanding a little bit, the lighting that we're using in our house, can we use lighting that doesn't have that blue or green part of the spectrum? We can. We have new lighting technology because of this problem.

If we were shopping for these light bulbs. So these are specific light bulbs that we can buy?

Yes.

Tell us about them. Which one would you recommend?

There's a number of technologies out there. The easiest thing you can do, and the cheapest solution right now is to. You can go to Amazon and you can just look for orange lighting. There's a website called lowbluelights.com I believe, that has all this kind of stuff. So if you can just go to these orange lighting. And it's funny because I recommend this to some of the people that I work with for their health. And they think it's a really weird concept to just turn all their house orange. But once they do it, it's like lighting a candle. It's like lighting a fire. The nervous system calms down. They feel so relaxed, they start to get tired at 9. 9:30:10, when you're supposed to get tired. So sometimes it's just a shift. And once you start to do this, you start to notice, I'm sleeping better, I'm healing more, because sleep is where all healing happens.

No, Jason, I. I noticed that most of the light bulbs which people tend to buy right now are the energy saving light bulbs.

Right.

But those tend to be more on the white end of the spectrum. Sorry, the blue end of the spectrum.

That's right, yeah. Those are the worst things we can do for our health.

So although we are saving energy, it is bad for our health.

And I came from the energy efficiency engineering world. I was actually doing this in my work with Streetlights.

So is there a solution that gives us the best of both worlds?

They're working on that. There's a couple new companies that are coming out with these things. I hesitate to sort of recommend them at this point, but technology is moving in that direction, without a doubt, because this is a problem and it's a known problem. So in 2017, we saw a Nobel Prize given out for circadian biology. So this is a new understanding and we are now seeing technology geared towards this new idea that our bodies operate on a rhythm, and this rhythm is critical.

So I want you to pay attention to that, right? This idea of circadian rhythms and how much they impact our life. We've known about these for a long time, but how much they impact our lives is so new in terms of our understanding that only in 2017 did someone win a Nobel Prize for it. And so, which is why what you're hearing here is really some cutting edge stuff. And I guess 10 years from now this is going to be commonly known. But really pay attention to what Jason is saying because you're going to hear some incredible new ideas on adjustments you can make in your life so that you live healthier. So, Jason, we've spoke about why it's wrong to basically start school that early for our kids, why we need to pay attention to the lighting that we.

Use in a room.

What else do you recommend giving kids.

An opportunity to go outside, get in touch with the earth. This is not something. You know, there was a recent study done in the US that showed that prisoners get more time outside than children. This is kidding me. Big problem that we have. And what are we saying? Add, adhd, all these hyperactive disorders? Because we are putting kids in a chair from an early age and telling them to focus and pay attention inside under artificial lighting that we just talked about. So if we can get kids Outside, playing around in their natural environment. Not only are they interacting with the natural world and all the microbes that are feeding their microbiota and improving their immune system, but we understand that plants have energy. We understand that there's an outer world that can influence us in tremendous ways. Did you know just looking at a photo of an outdoor environment, an outdoor landscape, changes our brain states. An artificial photo of landscapes changes our brain states. So this is powerful stuff. So getting them outside, not only that, the sunlight, the daylight that enters their eyes, sets their circadian rhythm. So we can improve circadian rhythm just through the daylight, even if on a cloudy day. So this is very, very simple stuff. Getting them outside, getting them moving around, interacting with their environment, interacting with the microbes, improving their immune system, setting their circadian rhythm, giving them unstructured play. Simple, simple stuff.

So, Jason, we've spoken about allowing kids to start schools later. We've spoken about lighting, we've spoken about the importance of getting these kids outdoors more.

Anything else, the food has to change. This is a critical component to raising healthy kids and actually to longevity. I think the most important part of longevity is between preconception and 20 years old. And we are doing ourselves a massive disservice when we are feeding our kids this garbage food in school.

You just said something really important. The most important aspect of longevity, you said, is taking care of ourselves from the time we are born to the time we are 20 years old.

Absolutely. And I think it even happens pre conception. So the point of conception to 20 years old, most critical part.

So what are we feeding our kids wrong?

I grew up in the breakfast cereal pop tart generation, and unfortunately it still continued to do. And this is new. This isn't something that was, that was utilized 50, 60 years ago. These breakfast cereals, this garbage, this sugar, artificial sweeteners, it's nothing but crap. And it's absolutely destroying our health from the inside out. And it's primarily affecting our gut microbiota. And this has an impact on our brain, our immune system. It's completely destroying it.

Nestle, they market a product called Milo, which, you know, I've been in a campaign against. But they say it has vitamin B and vitamin D and vitamin C in it. And they say it's only 40% sugar, which is not a big deal because some of those are naturally occurring sugars. And then you have Kellogg's and they serve breakfast cereal to kids and they're colorful and beautiful and, you know, kids love them. Surely there's no harm in that. This is and by the way, I'm being sarcastic. This is the biggest fraud.

This is the biggest fraud that we've been taught is that because these artificial vitamins and artificial minerals that are being put into these cereals are somehow healthy for us. The reality is they're processed. They're artificial sugars. We're getting these things from genetically modified sources. These vitamins are not in a state at which we can actually even digest and metabolize.

So wait, so what you just said is that the vitamins in products like Milo is BS Your body doesn't metabolize them. So everything about their health claims, basically you're saying we can toss into the garbage bin.

I'd go one step further. Because they are not bioavailable. Our body has to do something to them or with them to get them out of us. So they're actually utilizing our own resources to get these things out of our system. Because we can't metabolize them, we cannot utilize these things. They're not in a state that the body recognizes. It's completely artificial. It is destroying health at every turn.

Now, with that much sugar going into a child's body because of breakfast cereal, because of products like Milo, does that do anything to the kid's brain?

It completely hampers the development of the brain. Again, they're artificial sugars. So sugar from, let's say, fruits, probably not going to be a bad thing, even in high amounts, because it's coming with the whole fruit. When you take artificial sweeteners, artificial sugars, you take them from genetically modified sources that are absolutely destroying our health in and of themselves. And you douse us with these things. Our brains cannot deal with this. Our gut microbiota cannot deal with this. And this is the second brain, the gut microbiota. And this is where the immune system is. So if you want a healthy child, if you want a healthy brain, you have to have a healthy gut.

So why is it then that the FDA approves products like Maltodextrin? If you look at Nestle's Mini Nestle Strawberry Mini cereal, the number one ingredient is Maltodextrin, right? Now, they say that Maltodextrin gives you energy. And the FDA has approved it. So surely it's not that bad.

This is the scam. That's all I can say. There's absolutely no reason for the FDA to allow this if they were doing the job that we think that they should be doing. This Maltodextrin may give you a spike of energy in two minutes, but it'll absolutely crash you for the rest of the day and it will rob you of energy ongoing for the long term.

Thank you for saying that, Jason. I'm so glad this came up because this has been a campaign that I've been so passionate about, making sure that parents stop believing the lies from companies like Kellogg's, companies like Nestle, and putting this horribly toxic products into their children. And of course, you know, our mutual friends like Dr. Mark Hyman have also said that this creates what is, not only is it going to impact your kids health, but it also impacts their cognitive ability. Studies are now emerging showing that too much sugar can reduce memory. Now, granted, they've done this on rats. You can't just test this on kids. Right. But doctors theorize that the same thing holds true for children. And Mark Hyman has gone on record to say that giving kids products like Milo can actually cause such a hampering on their cognitive ability that you create a permanent disadvantage for them in school and thus in life.

Can I add something to that?

Yes.

So we now understand that things like dementia and Alzheimer's start about 40 years prior to symptoms showing up. So when we create this neuroinflammation, this brain inflammation from all this artificial sweeteners, all these sugars, this is when Alzheimer's is starting for us, when we're 15, 18, 20, because of these types of things that we are inundated with from an early age. So if we want to prevent and avoid Alzheimer's and early onset Alzheimer's in particular, we have to avoid these things.

So what then should parents feed their kids and what then should we as adults eat? Because like you, I mean, my formative years were in the United States, right? As a college kid, I ate Pop Tarts, thinking that was a legitimate breakfast food. What do we eat?

This is a hard one, because when I was a kid, I hated vegetables. I didn't even eat a lot of fruits. But my palate was not adjusted to those because I grew up on Pop Tarts, because I grew up on cereals. Even though my parents were feeding me good, healthy dinners, my breakfasts were a complete nightmare. So I think if we feed our kids these healthy fruits, vegetables, very basic foods, from an early age, they develop a palate for it. They start to like fruits and vegetables. And even better, if you can plant a garden and you give a kid some carrot seeds and let them throw those into the dirt, watch them grow, those are my carrots. And they have a new relationship with food. So this is very, very powerful. If you want. It's one of the best hacks that I've given to clients to get their kids to eat healthy. So help them plant a garden.

And just to bring in some advice from Dr. Mark Hyman in his book what the Heck Do We Eat? He says, look, you need to go back to traditional farmers markets in countries in Asia, night markets, farmers markets are really popular. They're really common, they're really easy to access. And even if you're a low income family, you can still buy fruits for your kids. And that is healthy. Don't fall for the packaged products which you see in grocery stores. That is the American diet invading the rest of the world and causing spikes in obesity across the planet. Now in America, people are waking up. So sugar consumption in America is going down. Products like Milo would never take off in America because people are educated. And that's why these companies are now going for developing nations. And this is what if you are in a developing nation, if you are in Asia or Africa or India or China, you have to be very, very careful about this. So we've spoken about children and I really wanted to go there because even if you don't have kids, you might have them someday. But the same lessons on lighting, on circadian rhythms, on healthy food apply to you as an adult. Let's go deeper now. The other big institution where we spend 70% of our waking hours as adults is work. What do we need to fix about the way companies design workplaces and work environments and teams so that we can live healthier lives?

One of the concepts that really came to light for me in the work that we did traveling around to Sardinia and Icaria, Greece and these places where you have longevity is that the environment is dictating the human behavior. So instead of getting an individual to try to be healthy at work, what if we created a healthy working environment that allowed people to take on healthy behaviors? So this we can go to the food sources, right? So if we can give people healthy food options, whether it be in the form of a restaurant or even just a refrigerator and a kitchen where they can have time to prepare foods, they can bring foods in, they can store them, perhaps that's a very, very simple start. Because this is the biggest problem you see in the working environment is people don't have access to healthy foods at lunch, even though they want to. I've had clients that they know that they have to do this stuff, but they don't have an opportunity because the work environment doesn't allow that. So that's a Very, very simple place to start. Provide them with tea and healthy teas and healthy coffees, organic coffees and organic teas. This is simple stuff, very easy option. We can bring up the natural lighting. So instead of having all this harsh artificial lighting on all the time, why don't we save energy, turn some of those off, open up some windows, just open up the drapes or the curtains. Allow this natural lighting in. That is actually extremely powerful. You will actually essentially see an increase in productivity from your workers just by getting the lighting environment right. So they're very simple tips and tricks that we can utilize to increase the health and the productivity of our workers. Another one might be the air. I used to be in the energy efficiency space and we used to do H Vac stuff, right? So we're doing all this crazy technology with the heating and ventilation systems, opening windows and shutting down the H Vac and changing some of the settings there. If you have control over that, it's a very simple solution. Now, your indoor air environment is now improved. So these are very basic things.

Have you seen anything that has to do with plants in the workspace?

Again, anytime that you see or interact with a natural living plant environment stream, anything like this will increase cognitive behavior. It'll increase mood and benefit mood. So plants are fantastic and they clean the air in the environment. So just having plants around can calm people down, reduce stress. You get longer hours and better productivity out of your orchids just by including plants. Absolutely.

So some of the things we've tried doing is, for example, establishing a plant wall in the office. Right. So we work with a company that actually brings in plants and they send a gardener to come to our office every few days to take care of these plants. So we have plants across the office. Another thing that we started doing was getting rid of of practices such as this. I used to do this. I would show up to work someday with an entire box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and I would think I was doing a favor. I was being the nice boss. I was doing a favor for my team by treating them to Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the morning or Dunkin Donuts. And now I realize how stupid that is. So now, you know, when people in Mindvalley are traveling and we come back and we want to bring a gift for our co workers, it's typically something healthy. It might be dark chocolate, it might be nuts, it might be cured meat from some other country, but it's typically healthy. And the other thing is, I am shocked by the number of American companies that have Coke or Pepsi, unlimited Coke or Pepsi in a refrigerator, as if, I mean, I guess these CEOs think that Coke and Pepsi can help fuel their employees. They don't realize the massive cognitive damage it is going to do to energy to just cognition because of the influx of sugar to long term energy levels. You definitely want to eject Coke and Pepsi from your corporation.

Absolutely. And that'll give you the afternoon crash that we're so familiar with, right? Is by drinking all these things. And one solution is to go towards water, right? And facilitate some sort of fountain or something there. But what if you go one step further and you provide a filtered water station for people and that they can even, maybe even fill up and take home for their. Because water from the municipal water supply is one of, unfortunately one of the worst things. We're now seeing pharmaceutical medications showing up in our drinking water. We are seeing heavy metals, we are seeing chemicals and toxins of all kinds. Unfortunately, our municipal water supply in the west, in the US I can speak of is not good. So if you can give somebody filtered and they make these machines that are fantastic that you can bring into the office that people can use and maybe fill up and take home. So I think it's a great service.

And these machines are extremely affordable. So here are three things we do at mindvalley. The first is a filtered water system. That's really important. Please guys, don't bring in plastic bottled water. The second thing is an easy access to blenders, especially really high quality blenders so people can juice. And the third one is good coffee, like really good coffee machines. Bulletproof Kion Purity Coffee by John Butcher, who's a mindvalley author, that's one of his companies. These are amazing coffees that you can bring into your company.

I love those ideas. And that's so easy. And it's going to make. If I was working there, it would make me want to be there, right? So my whole perception changes. Instead of fighting my environment, trying to be healthy. And this is one of the keys too. And this is a very important thing to take home. I think if you're trying to be healthy and you know the healthy habits, but everybody around you is doing something unhealthy, you have a choice to make. You can either join the group and be a part of it and do the wrong things, or you can exclude yourself and do the right things. Which one's better for your health? Actually, science has shown that doing the wrong things with people is healthier for you. Long term. So what we need to change is we need to bring the group toward the health side of the equation. And if we can have more people and an environment. When you set up an environment that allows people to do the right things, they'll do the right things. But if we set up an environment where they are choosing the wrong things and you have one person that's trying to choose the right thing, it's such a cognitive and emotional gap that we're not sure which one's better at this point.

Right. So the best way is to simply retrain the entire group.

Absolutely.

Now, if you were in a company where you were that sole guy, that sole health junkie, right, what do we do? How do we create that change?

It's a tough one. I think what they can do is first of all, lead by example, right? If you're doing all these healthy things, you look healthy, you feel good, you're performing at work, naturally you're going to draw people to you and say, what are you doing? What's the trick that you know, so you're going to attract that. I think having an open conversation with your staff, with your boss, I think it's very smart presenting it in a way that's going to show them the benefits you're going to get. Higher productivity, you know, the, the claims, you know, if you have a medical claims, these are going to start to go down. These are like music to a CEO or CFO's ears when you start saying that the costs are going to go down, the productivity is going to increase. So I think you can have this conversation and it doesn't have to be an expense. And just doing these simple things that you've mentioned that you've done in your office, not a big expense, and it will raise the value in the office, the perception in the office, the environment, the social environment, everybody's going to be happier, everybody's going to work better.

And I can share a simple statistic. When we started bringing health practices into our office, so, for example, we had hundreds of our people go through Wildfit together, right? We had a whole number of people sign up for gym training that we would sponsor based on Mindvalley's 10X, which is also part of this program, one of the things we saw is that retention rates went up, people would stay with the company longer. And the other thing which was really interesting is that. And I don't know the statistic for women, but we kind of saw that men would join the company and on average would lose about 5kg in that first year.

Wow. And this is actually, if you look at statistics in the work environment, things like diabetes are a major cost to most corporations. If you do these type of things, the claims against something like diabetes can cut your medical claims in half.

Yes.

I mean, this is millions and millions and billions depending how big a company is. Potentially billions of dollars that you're saving every year. And you get people showing up, the sick days reduced everything by this simple measure.

And not only that, but people's cognitive functioning is higher. Look, just a simple statistic, right? If you let your employees get the right amount of sleep. So in other words, you're not creating a culture that rewards people for late nights or showing up super early in the morning. Cognitive functioning goes up dramatically. If you lose around 90 minutes of your required sleep, your brain is functioning at one third less than it should be. Now imagine what that's going to do for idea generation, for productivity. Yet we don't look at that. And we create these cultures in many companies that want people to work late nights, show up early. But this overwork means these people are actually doing their work with one third less cognitive functioning. And it's not healthy.

Sleep is the most critical part, health, no question. It's hands down when you don't get good sleep, when you don't get enough sleep, you can't recover that you can't get it back by sleeping more the next day. Science suggests that once you lose it, you lose it. So this will add up over time. Not only that, sleep deprived people make worse decisions. Worse decisions lead to more sleep deprivation. So it's a vicious cycle. We have to undo this. And a work environment that can facilitate good sleep, That's a place I want to be.

So again, for work, as Jason was saying, you want to look at lighting, you want to look at maybe bringing in plants, you want to look at encouraging healthy practices like sleep, you want to encourage healthy eating. So get rid of those damn Coca Cola vending machines. And what was the fifth point that we spoke about?

Water. Looking at it, water and then indoor air, just opening some, opening some windows. It's amazing how much that can change your mood just by getting some fresh air into a building.

That's phenomenal. So if you're a CEO, if you run a business, I hope you pay attention to these ideas. I can tell you they really will pay back like 10x fold because of just the boost in productivity and the loyalty you get from the people in your company when working for you makes people healthier. So Jason you said this. Health issues like autoimmune conditions, digestive issues, chronic sleep issues, thyroid conditions, metabolic syndrome, neurodegeneration, and chronic joint pain can be corrected. How?

This requires a total overhaul of your lifestyle, total overhaul of the way you think about the world, just by getting good sleep, improving your circadian rhythm, reducing toxins in your environment, in your world. And this includes toxic thoughts, toxic emotions that we often carry around with us. Doing these simple things every single day, eating better foods, more natural, organic foods, reducing your feeding window, and only eating between, basically when the sun's up. That's a good rule of thumb, 9am to 6pm, something like that. Eating only in that window, giving your body a break from food, improving relationships and emotional trauma is probably the most profound thing that we can do. And this is a tough one. It's the toughest one for most people. But as you peel back these layers and you start to remove the toxic things in your household, you start to make steps to eating better. You start to move a little bit more. And this doesn't mean working out hard. In fact, this is what I love about TEDx, is that 10x doesn't require you to kill yourself in a gym. I bet there's two things that people can do from a movement standpoint. If they just walk a little bit and do 10x every now and again, done, they will drastically improve their health. And exercise. It's more than just improving the way you look and even feel. Exercise changes the way your brain functions. It changes your immune function, changes your gut, microbiota and things that are happening there, changes your liver, the entire system changes by just improving and getting more exercise. So these are very simple things, getting outside. But I will say I do want to stress that the emotional traumas that a lot of us grow up with and the emotional baggage that we carry around with us and don't resolve is probably the most important thing that we can focus on. And this sometimes requires things like meditation, maybe some tapping, working with a coach to help you undress what's really going on there. But getting to know ourselves, like every spiritual and religious tradition has taught us, is probably the key to a lot of these health challenges and resolving them.

And that's amazing because I was just about to ask you, what role does mindset play in longevity?

I think it's huge. We know the placebo effect even in scientific research. In fact, that's why we have to design certain studies to negate the placebo effect. It is powerful. So the power of the mind is probably the most powerful, not probably, it is the most powerful thing about our health. So if we change the way we think about who we are, what we deserve, where health comes from, and we take back our power and understand that we can resolve this thing ourselves, whatever it is we're dealing with really sets. It sort of plants a seed for this health creation. And I think the biggest turning point for me and a lot of clients that I work with is looking at whatever disease or symptoms that you are dealing with, and looking that not as something that you want to get out of your life and resolve and suppress, but rather a gift you're being given. A gift that teaches you how to be in alignment with yourself, nature, people around you. And it comes in the form of pain, it comes in the form of suffering. But that's a perception. If we can flip that on its head and be grateful for this gift that we're giving. My knee is hurting. What is this trying to tell me? Where have I not looked yet? Now you can start to live in alignment. And this, to me, is the true gift. Because when we're out of alignment with ourselves, nature, and people around us, this is where suffering ensues all around. So this pain in my knee can be the key to solving the world's problems if we all take that approach. And this is how I think we all heal collectively as we start to understand what these pains are, really look for where we're out of alignment, start to correct those issues, look at this as a gift, and enjoy the ride that we are being taken on.

Beautifully said. So as you traveled around the world, like as we are filming this, we are actually in Sardinia, Italy. How cool is that? And this was the first blue zone that Michel Poulin identified in the year 2000, when he was studying, as a scientist, places around the world where people live to be a hundred plus. What is it about Sardinia, this particular culture here, which I know you've studied, which you think we can take back into our lives?

I think the key with Sardinia and the way that they have lived over the last 100 years is the simplicity, simplicity of thought, simplicity of food, simplicity of the way of life. In fact, it was a guy from Sardinia that, off camera, I didn't get this in the film, unfortunately, but he told me off camera, he said, you know, when I was young, what I noticed was that the body was active and the mind was still. Now what I see is that the mind is active and the body is still. And I thought, wow, that might be the most profound thing that we heard from the entire series. That's the key to everything. We are way too overactive in our minds, so slowing things down, making things a little bit more simple, moving consistently. A lot of the people, the centenarians in Sardinia, were shepherds, so they were walking 30, 40 kilometers a day just to get their herd from one place to the next. So. And they were drinking mountain spring water. Beautiful, amazing, healthy water. So these solutions are simple when we look backwards in time. You know, of course, they didn't have to deal with some of the things that we were dealing with, so they didn't have to avoid the artificial lighting. So it's a little tricky. But the things that we can take with us, good community, a strong family unit, supporting one another, not competing, not holding grudges. This was the most common thing that we heard was the key to longevity. And being healthy and happy is not holding any grudges, being in a good state with those around you. This is simple stuff.

That's beautiful. Thank you, Jason.

Thank you.

Hope you guys enjoyed and I hope you got some powerful ideas that you can bring back into your life so you live healthier and you live longer. Thanks. And Jason, tell them where can they find information on your documentary series?

They can go to humanlongevityfilm.com We've got an amazing list of experts, including yourself, so thank you for being a part of that. Humanlongevityfilm.com they can also find us on Facebook. Human Longevity Project.

Fantastic. Go check it out.