Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Why Americans Live 10-15 Years Less Than Other Countries w/ Dan Buettner | EP #107

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

In this episode, Dan and Peter discuss the science behind living longer, what makes the Blue Zones possible, and common myths about Longevity.   21:51 | Decoding the Longevity Secret 46:01 | The Link Between Retirement and Death 55:57 | The Downshifting 80% Rule Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist, and New York Times bestselling author. He discovered the Blue Zones, regions where people live the longest, healthiest lives, and his articles in The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic are widely acclaimed. Buettner partners with municipal governments, employers, and insurers to implement Blue Zones Projects, well-being initiatives that improve community health by focusing on environmental, policy, and social changes, benefiting over 5 million Americans. His bestselling books include The Blue Zones, Thrive, The Blue Zones Solution, and The Blue Zones of Happiness. His latest, The Blue Zones Kitchen, combines scientific reporting with 100 recipes for longevity.  Blue Zones Kitchen: https://bluezoneskitchen.com/  Dan's website; www.danbuettner.com Dan's IG: https://www.instagram.com/danbuettner Netflix Series (nominated for 6 Emmys!) https://netflix.com/title/81214929 ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

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 a hundred and twenty two years and four months. That's the eldest well-documented individual. And theoretically, the human could go past that, but we just don't know of an example. I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually. Welcome to Moonshots. My conversation today is with Dan Buener, the man who has spent more time

with more centenarians around the world to understand what allowed them to get to a hundred years plus in a healthy fashion. We're going to be dissecting the nine key attributes about the blue zones, but going much deeper to 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 an 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 moon shots, please subscribe. Alright, let's jump into our episode on Blue Zones and Dan Buettner.

Hey Dan, welcome to Santa Monica. Great to see you Peter. Now 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. You know, one of the people who influenced me in the longevity world is Ray Kurzweil. Ray, one of the experts in AI, but has written about it. And 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. And I think you represent the expert.

You've looked at global experiments done in communities and seen who's 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 and I hope we'll get there. I'm planning. But let's dive into Bridge 1 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 to 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 comba 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, you have to have won the genetic lottery. You'll come along, this bridge two and bridge three 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've made their chance to make it to 100, go up three or four fold. But you know, what most of us can realistically shoot for, given the state of science right now, it's about 94. 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. I'm 63. 63 as well. Okay. So, you know, 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. 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 runaway. Blue Zones is definitely part of that critical part. 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.

We've seen big leap and drops. The year penicillin was discovered, 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 given, 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, you know, if progress continues. There is another pool of demographers who calculate the rate of discovery and of genetic discovery, for example. And when you add that sort of calculus in,

the curve may look like a hockey stick as opposed to a straight line. And in that case, right now we know the capacity of the human machine is 122 years and four months. That's the eldest well-documented individual. Right, Marie-Celme, France. And 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 a lot of people use that as the argument for saying, nope, can't get there. If there were genetic variations, if there were lifestyle variations, someone, you know, in the larger 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 yeah, you know, if we were quadrupeds, if walking around in four legs with, you know, an IQ of 50 points like an androthal, 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. Yeah. 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 to understand this, it really goes, we need to go back 200,000 years ago as hominids so

Homo sapiens are what couple hundred thousand years old as a species and you know you have I'm speaking to the person who knows more about this way more than I do so correct me where I'm wrong, but I Think we used to go and be going to 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.

And so the best thing you could do is die. And so there's no selective pressure, no advantage for having people living longer. Is that correct? Yes, I think generally. So for, there's been about 25,000 generations of the human species and for about 99.8% of that, life expectancy has been 30. For every mammal, whether it's a mouse or an

elephant, 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 grand babies, and then another half a generation, and then you die off. And the idea being, evolutionarily speaking, obviously our offspring need us to survive, 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 kind of irrelevant in the scheme of things. Or you tax on the family unit, your drag. Historically, 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. I mean, they keep me energized. I'm excited about them. I want to see, you know, support them and growing. Is that, you know, 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. And 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 babies survive. But yes, in blue zones, most of the people making it to 100 have had children, indeed, 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, you know, my parents died in their

60s or 70s and therefore I'm probably not gonna live much longer than that. And 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 percent of how long we live is dictated by our genes. 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 are, you know, drink four drinks a day and smoking, 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, 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, and a human, and sort of the idea, you know, cause it really is fascinating what you just said that six to six 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 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 people who live around the coast have been. So they live in a relatively clean environment, clean air, clean 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 Sardinia and you bring them down to the coast where they were exposed. The coast in Italy?

The coast in Italy, yeah, Sardinia or any. Yeah, 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 and later life wouldn't favor their survival in a place other than where they live. People are optimized 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 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. 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 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 this story in the Lancet a few months ago that showed that micro-pl plastics are now causing more and more

artery blockages because they get lodged in our arteries and they cause a cause a clot. So yes worldwide there's no question that that toxins in our environment are gonna 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. 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 and 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. So I know what life expectancy is. So it's years of life you can expect in full health. Okay. Without chronic disease and without disability. So that's what we want.

We don't want to just live a long time. It's what I call 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 it turns out there's some overlap with the original Blue Zones, but there's lots

of other things that come to play. And I'm trying to parse that out. And 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 perspective. You mean you're living on the table. What does that mean? What do you mean you're 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. And 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. 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 healthcare savings. I love that model, by the way. It's the right way to do things. I think And then um, you know part of I know we're gonna talk about the nine common denominators here 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 have better access to information or supplements or stem cells. They just live their lives. 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. What makes money is this notion that do this one thing.

Sell it now. sell it now. Yeah. And do it tomorrow. You're going to live longer. But 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 another year of life in 2078, if we don't continue to do it.

No, I find that fascinating. These are the, they eat the right foods because that happens to be indigenous to what the cultures eat there. They happen to get the exercise because they don't drive cars, they're just walking. They happen to be in communities. So all the things, the nine attributes, the default attributes happen to be ingrained in their lives in a default fashion. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, almost, I read in Longevity, your practical playbook, 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 palette is fast food. Yeah. 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 of transformation coming there needs to be a positive motivator that's stronger than the feel-good fat sugar motivator there has 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 to eat a fast food diet, but I have to know that if I go the other route, it is going to allow me to 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, it 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 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'll find 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? start thinking about this and really caring about this? In my 40s, I started this project when I was 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 food here, I was eating it because I loved it.

I start my day every day with a Sardinian minestrone, which is 100% plant-based with three beans. 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 plays 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 with three or actually four demographers that were experts in this sort of longevity, Jay Osansky, Michelle Poulon, and Gianni Pess. 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, immigration. 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, you know, there's not a shadow of a doubt that these people are living longer than we are. Everybody, I wanna take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. It's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go

to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, dexa scan, a grail

blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers.

So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my

friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I was surprised, I'm not surprised when I see, you know, Okinawa and Icaria and Costa Rica. I was surprised to see Loma Linda, which isn't far from where we are. And I have never thought of, you know, that part of California as a blue zone. So, I was writing the story for National Geographic and my editor, Peter Miller, was you know, that part of California as a blue zone. What's up there? 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 Adventist, there's something called the Adventist Health Study that followed one hundred and,000 Americans 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 the highest concentration of them are in low Malinda.

That's why we call low Malinda a blue zone. The reason they're living longer, again, 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. 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 you out

and placing it on a higher being. They always have a potluck lunch and then hardwired right into religion is a nature walk. They always have a potluck lunch and then hardwired right into 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 1 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 up with the Adventist seed. There's no mention of Tomahawk steak or lobster Thermidor. You know, it's, you know.

Or Skittles. Yeah. So the Adventists actually followed. So they're mostly Adventists. 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 there's 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 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're overweight and you want to get into good health, hang out with healthy people. If you're a pessimist, you want to be optimistic, hang out with optimistic people. I mean, it really does. It is about shaping your neural net, shaping your mindset and your behavior. I wanna begin working our way through the fundamental. 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. You can 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 take and ask to develop a minimum takeaway from here, like an action you can do, right? 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. So let's talk about the lowest hanging fruit, literally speaking. So the first one, and there are nine of them, move naturally, incorporate physical activity into daily life. So 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 gonna 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 bikeable 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 aesthetically pleasing. That is gonna 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 gonna get for the 340 million Americas is make our streets more walkable and bikeable. 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's zero to one, you know, adding 20 minutes. So I think habits like taking a walk after you eat dinner. What are other... I mean for me, I've moved 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. I have, I'll take my, a lot of us are on Zooms these days and 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 sort of workouts at the gym. And none of the five blue zones do you see people going to the gym. Yeah. 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.

Meanwhile, for example, if you take public transportation to work, which most of us can do, your chance of cardiovascular disease go down by about 20%. Uh, this is the time of year where it's not a bad time to put in a garden. It's hard to do it in Santa Monica, I'm sure. But for most of America, growing a garden is a perfect longevity strategy. Why?

Because the moment you put the seeds in it, you kind of care about those plants. And there's a nudge to go out and water or weed. It's low intensity range of motion, those plants. And there's a nudge to go out and water or weed. It's low intensity range of motion physical activity. We, 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 gas. And now it's like I sitting on a zoom. Yeah. I, the phrase I use is sitting as the new smoking. Um, yeah, I agree. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to number two purpose. The phrase I use is sitting as you're smoking. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Okay, let's go to 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. The people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about seven years longer

than people who were rudderless in life. The observation in Blue Zone is they almost always have a vocabulary for purpose. 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 ultra realistic 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 many Americans, I think, you know, I just got a letter from a woman from Houston yesterday who saw my documentary and she asked about my age. Her kids are grown up, she's retired, she's watching TV, and you can almost feel her kind of dying in real time. And you just want to say, you want to take that lady and help her identify what she has to give to the world and find an outlet for it. I think it's so important. I 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 who want to hang out with you that drives social, that drives movement. 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. Actually, for those who are 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 XPRIZE, through my venture fund, through my writings, whatever. And my message to them is like, go dream big. We're living in a world of such incredible capabilities and resources. 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 in seven years life expectancy now, you're making their this week better. Yes, better right now. And people like hanging out with someone who's got purpose, whatever it is, right? It's like you want to you want to hang out. The other 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, right? And there's a pretty amazing study of 69,000 women, 1,500 guys that said as much as 15% longer. And I think all of that's tied into the work that you've done. Did you find optimism as an important factor in your work? Well, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic in a book called The Blue Zones of Happiness, which took all the statistical underpinnings of happiness.

And it turns out, so, you know, optimism is usually measured in, you take a measure of people's life expectancy, right? I mean, their subjective well-being now, on a scale of one to 10, they say there are seven, five, 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 the people on the bottom quintile.

And there's lots of things you can do to stack the deck in your favor. But it's hard to, you know, 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. Well, I'm not that great in math in that way, but it's like, when my dad, God bless him, it was OB GYN. 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'd 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 a second most dangerous year in your life is the year you retire. The first most dangerous is the year you're born, infant mortality.

But there's a big mortality spike that year. And we don't exactly know why, but I think we would probably both be as probably all of a sudden your purpose is gone. And 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. 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, 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 renew 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 in Okinawa, for example, there's not even a word in their vocabulary for purpose instead of the word ikigai I love ikigai and be in please. Please explain what ikigai is. It's essentially Knowing why you wake up in the morning. It metabolizes purpose with altruism. The Costa Ricans have Plan de Vida. 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 higher life expectancy. So it's actually been measured in the United States. But it 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. That also usually means lowering inflammation. 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 Akkadians 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, I mean, is it later in the day, end of the day, midday? There's no pattern on that. I mean, the Okinawans usually, it's first thing in the morning is ancestor veneration. The Adventists, 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. 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, uh, or a prayer or just, just everybody together, just take a deep breath in. It just, and it just automatically just has this massive impact on the body. I mean, I just, I've 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 gonna forget dinner and so yeah Connecting that to Yeah, I guess I I've been

Getting up in the morning and I 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 So how was a red light and a meditation during red light to it. So tell us about red light. Well, red light therapy right now, photo modulation has an impact of reducing inflammatory factors. So it's in reducing inflammation. 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, and I'm 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. So yeah well it's it's you know. You have nice hair Peter. Thank you. It's okay it's 20 minutes I'm gonna add that to the next generation of my longevity playbook because I added the red light

recently as part of my protocol. I always loved 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 them, 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? What do you- 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 one gram per pound. And you need that adding creatine, five grams of creatine along that line to stimulate blood flow and muscle growth and then increasing the frequency of workouts to instead of you know 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, as I mentioned this earlier, yesterday was the flight four of Starship. And so I woke up at 4 a.m. to watch that. It was delayed till about about six. It was funny waking up at 4 a.m. and then seeing my news feed an article that one of the newspapers are written about you know Peter de Manis thinks sleep is the most important element of longevity and here I am like getting up at 4 a.m. I went to bed after lunch but you know it's my dad used to say by method on I just done everything in moderation so I've added red light therapeutics and I'll 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, you said 2024 version in front of you. I'll publish a 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. 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…

Harahachi Boo is… 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 Hata Hachi Blue shows up 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 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 you 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, you unconsciously eat fewer calories. You never see a TV in a Blue Zone kitchen. They tend to eat huge breakfasts and a medium sized lunch 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 modernization hit them? Yeah. As soon as the 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 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 track. And then I'll eat my protein.

And then I've actually gotten away from all carbs. But if you're gonna eat carbs, eat the carbs last because your digestive, first of all, you'll be more full and then it's slow, the, the, 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, I'll say it's, it's a dangerous message to tell people not to eat carbs. Okay, please. Well, both jelly beans and lentil beans are carbs.

Okay. I had a great lentil soup last night. I love lentils. Yeah, and those are carbs, by the way. So let's talk about beans one second. Okay. So in Blue Zones, I wrote this book. 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 glycemic carbs means. And you tell people, by the way, even bread. In blue zones, they're eating a ton of bread. 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. It's very hard to square that. Of course, it's sourdough bread, and sourdough bread actually lowers the glycemic load of a meal. People don't really, they say, bread, ohdough bread and sourdough bread actually lowers the glycemic load of a meal.

But people don't really, they say, bread, oh my God, dangerous carb. So it's too much of a blunt instrument to tell people not to eat carbs. We need a better word. Correct, correction, appreciate it. So thank you for that. I appreciate your wisdom. But it was more of a reason to sort of slip in there some, what people really eat to live a long time. But anyway back to you.

Yeah, so honestly I want to go back to you. What type of beans 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 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, People who eat a cup of beans a day also live about four years longer. I can't draw a causal relationship, but I can tell you it stacks the deck in favor of longevity. 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 their 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, the protein they need, a lot of micro minerals, they're cheap and the most important thing is you can make them taste delicious. Those are the longevity foods I think we should be promoting first. Which gets to number five here which is a plant-based diet. Meat's eaten

in small amounts five times per month. That's 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 quadripling 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 sure are driving chronic disease. Is that, is eggs fall into 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 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

animals. Yeah, but when you remember you're also ingesting their hormones, you're ingesting the antibiotics, you know, you probably say, well, I eat grass-fed meat. Sure, but that's only about 2% or 4% of all the- I don't eat beef. Oh yeah, you don't eat beef. Oh yeah, you're right. You don't eat meat at all. But I do eat chicken.

I do eat fish. 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 Felton Life said, it's chicken. It's coming from the amount of chicken you're eating. The number one driver of chronic disease in America is our sodium intake.

And the number one source of sodium in America is chicken. Really? Yeah, it's the billion chickens we eat. So by the way, folks, do you know how many chickens there are on the planet? This number just blows me away. It's like 37 billion chickens on planet earth. We're we're a planet of chickens. It's crazy.

Yeah. It's 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. When you look at the subcellular level of saturated fat, it's on par with beef. And 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 I'm probably, you know, my doctor tells me I'm as healthy as patient.

Yeah. You look great. Tell me about fish. Blue zones that are consuming about four servings of fish a week. It's typically mid-chain fish like anchovies or sardines. That's sort of the cheap fish that rarely makes it to our grocery stores here in America. And interestingly in blue zones, even though they're on islands. 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 Ikcaria 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 Icaria. So they're eating mostly beans and greens, the type of shit we we whack from our backyard. They're making in Horta's. Yes, beautiful pies I'm familiar my grandmother's to make that for me You know, I had a blue zone diet when I was growing up living at home and it shifted when I went to medical school This next one wine at five. So I am Seriously curious about this because a lot of the science data today says this an alcohol is no

Added benefits and it's detrimental. 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 four glasses. So I'm familiar with the epidemiology, which everybody cites, that there's no safe level of alcohol.

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 would say them weak studies on alcohol and gray matter in your brain and so forth. But I know that 90% of people are making it into their 90s and hundreds in all the blue zones except Loma Linda 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, but maybe not. We don't know for sure. life. Could they live two or three more years without drinking it? Maybe. Yeah. But maybe not. 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 care, which is belong. Participation in faith-based services four times per month adds four to 14 years of life expectancy. Yes, again, that's a meta-analysis. Gary Fraser. So I interviewed personally about 430 centenarians and all but about fives, that 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 some people 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 can 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 they have an art. they have 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 LA. I'm excited having 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 retirement home. 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 agricultural wisdom, the resilience. 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 it's this virtuous circle that we're quick to, again, quick to dismiss, but very clearly a longevity strategy. And last one on your list here, right to tribe. So social circles that support healthy behaviors.

And this folds back into, you know, who are the five people you spend the most time with and falls back into, you know, default behaviors because of the tribe you're with. Yes. Yeah, I call it tribe, but it's the five people who we spend the most time with. 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. You know The Longevity Project at Harvard, that followed a cohort of Harvard graduates since 1925. Millions of dollars of study. 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 your best longevity investment is.

I wanted to get back again to the, what should people do now? And I think I love that. It's like, who do you spend time with? I know I have my dearest and closest friends and who I love, you know, and are my, I have one, 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. I'm going to 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 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, right?

Making sure that you've got like 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 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 is no other thing you can do. Same thing with zip codes in the United States.

If you live in Kentucky, we cut counties and 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 is 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. I love your work, buddy. I love this. Is there a place someone can go to check what the life expectancy of their zip code is?

Yes, it's the Gallup Wellbeing Index known as the WBI. That's a that they have BMI and they have life satisfaction that's probably the best source I think. Amazing. Amazing. Our CDC also. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on bio-defense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health.

They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance. Like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following biomes recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, of lifestyle medicine after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viom for three years.

I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viom is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com slash Peter. You and I joked about this, but I am curious, is there a correlation between sex life and longevity? Yes, so if you're over 40 and you're having sex at least twice per 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 can 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. Causality versus correlation is a lot of the things you have to figure out.

But Peter, I look at correlation, 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 correlates to longevity and putting it to work in your life. So we talked about a bunch of things and one of the things I think about this a lot is food. And food has lots of factors. It's what's convenient. What do I

actually know I should be eating? What tastes good? And you just, you've just come up with a line of food called Blue Zone Kitchen. Tell me about that. Well, I'm a big believer that you have to create an environment where the healthy choice is the appealing choice and the easy choice. And over 80% of foods in 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 Zone's food and I said to them, I want them maniacally delicious. And they came up with four foods, basically they're bowls and they're bowls, and 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. Blue Zone's Kitchen. So tell me more about it. So these are a frozen bowl that I bring home. And how is it prepared? You can put it in your microwave, or you can cook it at the 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. A symphony of deliciousness. I like that. 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 to 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 a good-

From your age. Yeah, like I said, you're young. You've got some good decades ahead. What do you want to do next? What 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. It'll 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'll feel like a big shot for a dad from Minnesota.

You know, humble, demure people. And so I hope there's a second season of Netflix, I believe there will be. And I really enjoy doing that. And I like to continue to evolve this city work. Gallup 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, helped them avoid type two diabetes and certain types of cancers and dementia and cardiovascular disease. When I think about altruism, when 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. So, 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 documentaries. And typically, they want to hurl you

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, um, I want to create longevity porn. My stuff eating beans and socialize is not nearly as sexy as this type of stuff you do, Peter. Um, and I know I didn't have that.

So we made up for it by buying, by getting the best directors, the best cinematographers. And we sat down and 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.

And Netflix said, you know, they came to me during COVID, they had flush with money, they had the right budget. It's the number one, there's no better place to release a documentary series or a movie than Netflix, right? They have the biggest penetration in the world. But it was hard work. I've written five New York Times bestseller books. Writing's hard.

TV was twice as hard. Fascinating. Next book? Oh, and next book is- Are you working on something? Yeah, I'm working on the book of this health-adjusted life expectancy, the place around the world where people live the longest lives in full health.

So, healthspan is... Yeah, healthspan, yeah. 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 live in one? No.

No. America does a horrible job. So healthy life expectancy in the United States is about 64. We're the juvenile delinquents of health. The A team, they're elsewhere. They enjoy 12 more years of life in full health. So think about that at age 75. Maybe you're done with your first career.

You have financial security. You have a spouse. You want to travel. Just imagine the value proposition of 12 good years. And these people have achieved it, 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 lives or showing cities how to put it to work in their policies That's my next I love I love that I mean and again You're the first bridge that everybody who cares about this needs to be focusing on because it's in your control right now And by the way, it's not expensive

No, I think one of the most important things people to realize because you know, listen a lot of stuff I talk about you know 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 people, but you know, 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 one 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 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. Is it, 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 or in the UAE they're building new island communities and so forth. Do you think you can engineer from the bottom up a Blue Zone? Yes.

And there's, I wrote a book up a Blue Zone? Yes. Yes. I wrote a book called The Blue Zone's 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. To a certain extent, the XPRIZE 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 in our bigger life. Yeah. And

they're all insidious but they all have that half a percent or quarter of a percent impact on our behaviors but when you add those all up over time, especially since they're 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 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. And as long as you're not feeling stressed doing these things and getting enough sleep, you're probably in a better position in a blue zone sort of way of making it to

a hundred than, you know, people who can't wait for five 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 were telling me about these great events you're doing, working with CEOs and investment fund and the X-Prize and spaceships. You're doing the work of eight people. 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? What's the genus 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. It's interesting, I went through something called the Landmark Forum, ever hear of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, S I went through something called the Landmark Forum.

Ever hear of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the derivative of S. 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. 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 the sense of doing more things means getting my mom's love. 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, 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- 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, um, show your pride in them and maybe they'll,

maybe your child will be a Peter Diamante. But that's the way I mean, where does it come from? Where does this like, you're not only purpose driven, you're in a fricking purpose Maserati. What's the title of the medal? Thank you, buddy. What, at the end of this amazing discovery journey, right? 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 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. And in addition to longevity, I've done happiness. And now I'm doing healthy life expectancy. In the intro, I mentioned that you're an Explore National Geographic fellow. And I forget about that part of your life, right?

Because I see you in such a different way. But with 8 billion people on the planet and so many thousands of cultures, 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. That was the writing for National Geographic, that was your driver? That was it. That was my ex-prize in my mind.

I wanted to write for National Geographic. What caused that in your life? For me, it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that got me started. What got you, was it like seeing a magazine on someone's copy 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 Steeger, who was first to reach the North Pole. And he's a big, he's a Minnesota hero, you know, ticker tape parades type thing. And you know, when I was in my early 20s, you know, he was

kind of my hero. An explorer. And you know, when I was in my early twenties, you know, he was kind of my hero, an explorer. And, you know, when you think of the hero's journey, 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, or saves the community, but it betters the community. 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.

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 gonna 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 gotta 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 greatest civilization in the Western Hemisphere until the ninth 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 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 were 14 different archeologists. They all have their own pet theories, climatic warfare, disease. And I basically did a wisdom of the crowd. 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 the 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 eighth century, these little droughts caused little food shortages, but that threw the whole

system off because all of a sudden they weren't making enough food that created social agitation and all these people who would do what the king asked them to do when there was enough food all of a sudden weren't listening anymore. The king under pressure starts attacking neighboring cities for food and then farmers instead of being in the corn field or in the battlefield, and this whole system just exacerbates and it collapses. 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 we needed funding, and they offered to fund it.

And we looked at some 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 the birth. That's a the world. And that was Okinawa. And that's the birth. That's a good mystery. That's what Lungs Blue Zones actually. Wow. That's a beautiful story, my friend.

Obviously, thoughts of Indiana Jones come to mind as you're telling your stories there. I love that idea of pursuing a mystery. 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. Yes. They're not so. There were some theories that the

sarcophagus in a place called Palenque shows what looks like might be a figure sitting at 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. Page 109. 109, yes. Which I have in couple of pages at the end of my Longevity Playbook just because I think it's so important. Page 109. 109, yes. Which I have in front of me. Yes. You talk about the Boozah.

It's very flat. I was reading it like, oh, this is a great book. And then actually clear. There I am. I loved it. That was great. No, but it's, 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 take them across bridges two and three. Amen. Amen. Those of you who are interested, danbutner.com. You can hire Dan as a keynote

speaker. He does that and does a beautiful job of inspiring people and giving them a vision of what's possible. On Instagram, it's at DanButner. And thank you. It was a joy, Peter. I'm glad to finally sit down with you. I know. For real conversation. Absolutely. Beautiful. Thanks, pal. We'll see you finally sit down with you. I know. For a real conversation. Absolutely beautiful. Thanks, pal. We'll see you when you're a hundred.

Let's not stop there. Yeah, well, that's an insult for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.