Dan Buettner: Lessons From the World’s Happiest People

We all want to be happy. But what exactly is happiness? Can it be cultivated? And if so, how? Somewhere along the way, you've likely heard of something called the Blue Zones — a term coined by this week's guest in reference to five hidden slivers of the world that boast the highest per capita populations of centenarians – people who thrive to 100 and beyond. Unlikely locales where people not live inordinately long, Places where people forgot to die. Interestingly, in addition to outliving their fellow western world equals, the Blue Zoners also seemed resoundingly happier. Dan Buettner wanted to know more. So he shifted focus from longevity and zeroed in on the elusive, ever-so-slippery nature of happiness itself. Deploying his expertise and that of others, he used hard science to better define the emotional state we seek most. He scoured the planet in search of the cultures that most exemplify happiness. He examined the internal and external factors that most promote happiness. And he extrapolated the key lessons that can be best applied for us to all ultimately live better and more fulfilled. The result of Dan's quest is the subject of today's conversation. It's also the the cover story of this month’s issue of National Geographic, the topic he explored all last week on the TODAY Show and the focus of his new Amazon #1 bestselling book, The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons from the World's Happiest People*. (full podcast on YouTube!) A true renaissance man, Dan is a National Geographic Fellow, a world adventurer with 3 endurance cycling world records to his name, a longevity expert, and a NY Times Bestselling author who has appeared on Oprah twice, as well as CNN, David Letterman, Good Morning America, Primetime Live, and the Today Show. He has delivered more than 500 keynotes over the last 10 years, including speeches for Bill Clinton’s Health Matters Initiative, Google Zeitgeist, and TEDMED. His TED Talk “How to live to be 100+” has been viewed over 3 million times. Long-time listeners will remember well our initial conversation. RRP 139 (April 2015) explored Dan’s fascinating, adventurous backstory and what he learned studying centenarians. This conversation picks up where that one left off to delve deep into the very nature of happiness. It's about the three pillars that compose it. And the extent to which your environment and lifestyle choices impact your ability to exude and maintain it. It’s a conversation about what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favor of happiness. And it’s an exchange about the impact of Dan’s work on fundamentally improving health and happiness in cities and municipalities across the United States. But ultimately, this is a powerful primer on how to cultivate greater awareness around the choices we all make daily around food, lifestyle habits, and the quality of our physical and interpersonal environments. And it's about how improving these choices can lead to the one thing we all seek – true, lasting happiness. Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Dan Buettner?

  Places where people are making it to 100 and still water skiing, or standing on their head, or doing karate, it's not because they tried. In all cases, longevity happened to these people. It was a residue of the right environment, an environment that nudges them into doing the right things all day long. And with that insight, we went about creating a program that would help entire American cities live longer by shaping their environment so they're mindlessly and relentlessly nudged into doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing.

• 1:45Rich Roll?

  That's Dan Buettner, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:03Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? How are you? What is happening? Hope everybody had a great weekend. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is a podcast, my podcast. Welcome or welcome back to the show where I have the great privilege of convening with great minds to bring you compelling conversations about things that matter. Health, wellness, longevity, your physical fitness, your spiritual fitness, your relationships, your career. And in the case of today's exchange, that elusive state of being we call happiness. What is it exactly? How do we cultivate it? How do we maintain it, elongate it, welcome it into our lives? And this is a subject that I think we can all get behind that applies universally even

• 2:46Rich Roll?

  in these most divisive of times. To walk us through it is the one and only great Dan Buettner, the Blue Zones man himself, pioneer of the principles of longevity. Longtime listeners will remember well our initial conversation. That was RRP 139 in April of 2015, in which we explored Dan's fascinating backstory and what he learned about health, wellbeing, and longevity by studying five hidden slivers of the world that boast the highest per capita populations of centenarians, people who lived to 100 and beyond, places where people essentially forgot to die. And that was an amazing one for me. And since that experience, I've become

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  quite close with Dan. We've become good friends. He is a kindred spirit, a guy who has done incredible work, somebody who is truly changing the world and somebody who has become an incredible role model and personal mentor to me. But before we get into the specifics of today's conversation, a couple of quick announcements. First, Thank you. Thank you to everybody who donated to my Charity Water birthday campaign. As of the date of this recording, together, together, that's an important point, we have raised an incredible $42,000. That is unreal and I am so grateful. Everybody at Charity Water, including Scott Harrison, is thrilled. It's amazing and I so appreciate all of your

• 4:10Rich Roll?

  contributions. We're still about $9,000 short of my $51,000 goal, but not to worry, the campaign is still open. So if you have been sitting on your hands, now is the time to finally make that donation. A donation that will literally provide clean water, a fundamental human right that 663 million people currently go without, to those who have never before experienced what we take for granted. So please check out my fundraising page at my.cheritywater.org/richroll and let's hit that goal. Thank you so much.

• 4:51Rich Roll?

  Okay, let me just take a quick breath here. I just got back from a pretty great Sunday adventure. I went on an amazing bike ride with Connor Dwyer, remember Connor from the podcast, Olympic swimmer, as well as Dylan Ephron and this guy Simon Garren. Simon is an Australian pro cyclist, a Tour de France guy, which was a total treat. It's amazing. I'm so grateful that I get to spend time with such cool people. I mean, how often do you get to go on a bike ride with a guy who has ridden in the Tour de France and a guy who swam in the Olympics? This is amazing. We grabbed a smoothie after, we jumped in the ocean in Malibu, we rode some waves, and then I took the crew over to my man Darren O'Leary's house, another awesome podcast guest, two-time podcast guest, for a little

• 5:36Rich Roll?

  superfood experience and tutorial, which was

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  Phenomenal. It was great. It's good, man. I'm, I'm so grateful and I'm happy. I'm really happy. I'm fulfilled. I'm content, but I'm also still very connected to what it feels like to not be happy because I wasn't for many years. I struggled for a really long time. I fought hard for the life I get to live today. And I know so many people aren't happy and don't know what to do to get happy or how to move towards it. So this subject, this subject of happiness is very near and dear to me. It's a huge part of this podcast. This podcast is my small way of trying to help others connect with their version of what I'm experiencing. And it's why I'm just

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  thrilled to have Dan back on the show to usher us through this elusive notion. For the uninitiated, Dan is truly a renaissance man. He's a National Geographic Fellow. He's a world adventurer. He has three world records in ultra endurance cycling. For that story, listen to our first podcast. It's unbelievable. He's a longevity expert, a New York Times bestselling author, who has appeared on Oprah twice, CNN, David Letterman, Good Morning America, Primetime Live, and the Today Show. He has delivered more than 500 keynotes over the last 10 years, including speeches for Bill Clinton's Health Matters Initiative, Google Zeitgeist, and TED Med. His TED Talk, How to Live to be 100+, has been viewed over 3 million times.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  Somewhere along the way, you might have heard of something called the blue zones. Well, that term was coined by Dan himself. It's a catchall term in reference to certain distinct areas of the world that Dan discovered during his world travels that are, for the most part, isolated from our fast-paced developing world, places where people seem to live the longest, and often places where people are by and large also the happiest, or at least happier. Dan's original research honed in on longevity, but he has since pulled focus on this issue of happiness. Yes, it overlaps with longevity, blue zones, but it's also

• 7:45Rich Roll?

  Its own distinct thing. So he went deep into trying to better understand the fundamental qualities of happiness, the environmental factors that promote it, and the places where people exemplify it the most. And the product of that inquiry is the subject of today's exchange. It's also the cover story of this month's issue of National Geographic. It's the topic that was explored all last week on the Today Show. You might have seen Dan. I think he was on four days in a row on the Today Show last week. And his new book, which is just rocking the world right now. I believe it hit number one on Amazon the other day, which is just mind blowing. It's called The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People. So this is a conversation about happiness itself,

• 8:28Rich Roll?

  the three pillars that compose it, and the impact of environment and lifestyle on your personal happiness quotient. It's about what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favor of happiness. And it's about Dan's work to improve health and happiness in cities and municipalities across the United States by enhancing the environmental factors and policies that contribute to better well-being. But ultimately, this is a powerful primer on cultivating awareness around the choices that we all make daily around food, around lifestyle habits, around the quality of our physical and interpersonal environments, and how improving these choices can lead to the one thing that

• 9:14Rich Roll?

  we all seek: greater health and greater happiness. Like I said, I absolutely love this guy. He is truly one of my favorite people. I appreciate our bromance. I aspire to his level of service, his character, his disposition, and his grace. And this one is just great. So let's dig into it.

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Kathy's always like, "Are you going to the gala?" "Are you going to the..." And I don't even know when these things... I'm not on the email list. So, I didn't even know about it, but Alexis was telling me about it the other night and I was like, "Yeah, I didn't... I wasn't even aware." So, but it sounds awesome.

• 10:00Rich Roll?

  Mercy for Animals, that's cool.

• 10:01Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, you know, it's a good... Such a great group of people. It somehow tracks not only these mission-driven people, but people who are high-octane and interesting. But I have a feeling, I saw you at one of them last year. You seem like you're like in a hurry to get out of there.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  No. Which one was that? Oh, the, um, was it the one in Beverly Hills? I wasn't in a hurry to get out of there.

• 10:26Dan Buettner?

  It was, um, the, um, Gene Bowers.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, Farm Sanctuary. No, I enjoyed that one.

• 10:33Dan Buettner?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  That was my rare appearance at a fancy event like that.

• 10:37Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know, maybe I just...

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  I was like, "Do I even have anything to wear to something like this?" You know?

• 10:43Dan Buettner?

  You're like this alter marathoner with people with tuxedos. You know, you look like an oboe in a jazz band.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  It doesn't fit, you know, it doesn't fit.

• 10:49Dan Buettner?

  Or a trombone in a string quartet.

• 10:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But thanks for coming to our little celebration the other day. I appreciated that, man.

• 10:57Dan Buettner?

  Man, that was the highlight of my year.

• 10:59Rich Roll?

  Ah.

• 11:00Dan Buettner?

  And David McLean, the geographic photographer who you met.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  He was great.

• 11:05Dan Buettner?

  He was just blown away. He talked about it for two days. It's, you know, he comes from rural Maine and all of a sudden be vectored into the rich rural world of sublime hipness. It was...

• 11:16Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, I don't know about that, but, I mean, I was fascinated by his story. I mean, I can't imagine, first of all, the path towards becoming a National Geographic photographer. I mean, you gotta be the dude, right? I mean, that is like the cream of the crop when it comes to nature and culture photography. You know, there's gotta be an amazing story there. And I would imagine he's like, he's sort of following you around now. Well, he traveled with you, obviously, but now he's still kind of documenting what you're doing.

• 11:44Dan Buettner?

  Well, we're doing a book together on the recipes. If you want to know what a hundred-year-old ate to live to a hundred, you have to know what they ate their whole life. So, we're trying to get recipes that are pre-1970. Because after 1970, the American food culture hit these Blue Zones like Hurricane Irma and just destroyed. It's destroying them. Places are becoming ripe with diabetes and cancer and the same things that Americans are suffering. So, we try, together, we're capturing not only the recipes, but the images. So, the resulting book is going to look like a hybrid between a cookbook and a National Geographic article.

• 12:26Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh. That's pretty cool. And did you work with him on all the Blue Zones stuff, like dating back?

• 12:31Dan Buettner?

  Yes. David shot the first Blue Zones cover story in 2005. And he and I, we were just hardcore explorers for about, almost a decade before that, before we worked our way up to National Geographic. We biked across China together and we did these quests to unravel the mysteries of the collapse of the ancient Maya civilization. And then we really kind of, just like, you know, like a band has to practice for 10,000 hours before they're good. We practiced for a decade, 10 years before we got good enough.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  And now you have your groove.

• 13:10Dan Buettner?

  Yeah. And he's doing his thing and I'm doing mine, but I hire him to come back to do things. And he's so hard, he's almost impossible to get him. And my past with him gives me access.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  Lures him back in.

• 13:24Dan Buettner?

  Yeah. And we have fun. You know, we don't, we don't, we don't crush it. We don't work 16 hours a day like we used to. We knock off at happy hour.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:33Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Rich Roll?

  Good, man. Well, you have a, you have a, you have a good quality of life, man. You're, you're, you're walking the talk. Like, you're actually living the principles that you've learned as a result of this crazy journey that you've been on, and it's nice to see.

• 13:45Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, thank you. You're right. It's a, it's, um, you immerse yourself in these places and you can't help but be influenced and somehow bettered by them.

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Well, the last time we sat down and did this, I think it was like three years ago? It was a while ago, at least two years ago.

• 14:04Dan Buettner?

  Two years ago, I think.

• 14:05Rich Roll?

  Um, there's a lot of new listeners since then and everybody should go back and, and I don't know what episode number it was, but I'll put a link up in the show notes to the first time that, that we did the podcast, but, uh, it might be worth just kind of at least, you know, establishing, you know, who you are and the work that you've done with respect to the blue zones to create a little context for, you know, the happiness stuff that we're going to get into.

• 14:25Dan Buettner?

  Yes, so my, I'm a lifelong explorer. I, I set three world records for biking, Alaska to Argentina, around the world and across Africa. Spent eight years of my life and then the series of expeditions that sought to unravel ancient mysteries and, and then on an assignment for National Geographic and funding from the National Institutes on Aging, about now I'm 14 years ago, we set out to reverse engineer longevity. So instead of relying on Petri dish studies or university epidemiology studies, we worked with demographers whose expertise is finding geographic areas where people live verifiably the longest.

• 15:09Dan Buettner?

  And once you find these populations, and what that really means is they're avoiding the diseases that are killing us. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, chronic diseases. Now, and then using established methodologies, we, uh, reverse engineered longevity, what these people do to make it to 100. And we found common denominators in all five of these blue zones longevity hotspots and the resulting articles and books. And, and now we have entire cities in America emulating these blue zones and that, that's been a, a big focus and passion of mine for...

• 15:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because I think it's one thing to kind of, I mean, first of all, you're not just going and interviewing a few people. Like you really did apply like the scientific method to population studies and you have this like, you know... Well honed, well established set of criteria by which to evaluate all of these parameters to arrive at the conclusions that you did. And it revealed these certain truths and commonalities amongst these cultures. And it's one thing to kind of understand that. And it's another thing to try to figure out, okay, well, what do we do with this? How are we going to apply this to better our own lives? And what's really great and cool about your work is that that's what you've done. You've created this program where you go to these cities.

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  And you basically like at the highest levels of government and planning, right? Like you're meeting with people and trying to configure a way to literally and systemically change urban planning and the sort of allocation of dollars to funnel in the right direction to promote these habits that are conducive to longevity and optimal health. So you're tell me a little bit about that. You were in Kauai from Instagram, it looked like you spent some time in Kauai?

• 16:58Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  Is that the most recent one that you worked on?

• 17:00Dan Buettner?

  The, well, right now we have blue, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Hawaii has hired us to blue zone the big island of Hawaii, much of Maui.

• 17:10Rich Roll?

  Oh, big island, yeah, sorry.

• 17:11Dan Buettner?

  And much of, much of Oahu. But just to go back to your earlier comment, I want to make a point. The way most people would cover longevity or centenarians is they find a centenarian and they ask the centenarian what they ate and how they slept and what their habits. And you know, you find these kind of silly articles about the hundred year old who ate three eggs a day and smoked cigars and drank liquor and had a six year old.

• 17:40Rich Roll?

  Everybody loves those stories.

• 17:43Dan Buettner?

  Yeah. But they, they're, they're hugely misleading because a centenarian no more knows how he or she got to live to a hundred than a tall man knows how he got, how he got to be tall. The right way to do it is you have to find a population that has achieved either highest centenarian rate, highest life expectancy, or lowest rate of middle aged mortality. Once you identify the population, then you can find out what this whole group of people do. Because they're, you know, about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes. The other 80% is lifestyle and environment. So if you find a centenarian, it might just be because he or she won the genetic lottery.

• 18:26Dan Buettner?

  And they can abuse their body for 100 years and still make it to 105. But that doesn't mean they have any useful lessons for us. If you want useful lessons, you have to find whole verified population reverse engineer. And the big aha rich, the big epiphany after almost a decade was places where people are making it to 100 and still water skiing or standing on their head or doing karate. It's not because they tried. It's not because at age 50, they got on a special diet or started taking a supplement or started running marathons. In all cases, longevity happened to these people.

• 19:09Dan Buettner?

  It was a residue of the right environment, an environment that nudges them into doing the right things all day long. And with that insight, we went about creating a program that would help entire American cities live longer, not by trying to convince 800,000 people to change their habits and eat their veggies and get their exercise, but rather by shaping their environment so they're mindlessly and relentlessly nudged into doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing.

• 19:48Rich Roll?

  Right, so healthy lifestyle is a byproduct of the environment, not a byproduct of conscious decision making. It's an extrapolation of what's available to you at arm's length. It's the convenient choice as opposed to the more difficult or more expensive choice.

• 20:06Dan Buettner?

  That's right. So you have Herculean.

• 20:10Dan Buettner?

  Discipline. I mean, you're these ultra marathons that you do that inspire so many people. They are for sure a positive force, but most people, if you look at the research, who start off and start running marathons, they're no running, no longer running marathons in two years. People who start off on a diet, no matter how much resolve they have on day one, ninety percent of them are off of them on, by the seventh month.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  And what do you, before we move off this point, like, what do you make of that? Like, what do you extract from that simple fact that people have trouble sort of staying on point?

• 20:46Dan Buettner?

  Our, our minds are hardwired for novelty. So we, we crave new things. Our, our attention can last only so long. Discipline is a muscle and muscle's fatigue. And eventually you kind of revert to the mean of what you're doing, or the baseline of what you're doing. So if you want that baseline, if you want people to perform better, eat better, move better, socialize better, have more purpose, you need to raise the baseline. You, you need to optimize the environment, which is exactly what we set out to do.

• 21:17Rich Roll?

  And so when you go into these cities, or you go to Hawaii, what are the talking points? Like, how do you, you know, shift that paradigm?

• 21:25Dan Buettner?

  First of all, the cities have to want us. So instead of a riot, we don't have a sales force. Cities come to us all the time and we say, if you like, if you're sick of seeing seventy percent of your population overweight and unhealthy, uh, we have a solution, but you have to prove to us, A, you're ready for it, sort of politically, uh, B, you have to show us your leadership works well together. And C, we have to collectively figure out a way to pay for it. Cause the only way you make these changes is if I can get a full-time staff in there from three to five years.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  It, I would imagine it requires, uh, the political will to invest in the long term, right? Because it's not about the next election cycle with whoever is mayor or governor, or what have you. Like, they have to think, what is in the best interest of, of our electorate, of our population? And it's a solution that's not going to manifest itself overnight, or in the next two years perhaps even. It's going to require You know, probably a large investment of capital and a long-term vision to, you know, raise that mean for everybody so that eventually everybody prospers, but it's not like the, it's not like a clickbaity kind of

• 22:39Dan Buettner?

  No.

• 22:39Rich Roll?

  immediate solution to what ails a particular urban environment.

• 22:44Dan Buettner?

  It's focusing on permanent or semi-permanent changes to the environment. And it also requires the political will. You know, America, we, we have this obsession with freedom. And in order to be successful, we have to come into a city where they're prepared to limit our freedoms to do unhealthy shit. That's the kind of the bottom line. I wouldn't put it that way to them. But at the end of the day, we're trying to limit their access to junk food. We're trying to limit their access to always getting in cars. We're trying to limit the occasion where they're going to implode into their devices. So in every city, I have three teams, three squads, full-time.

• 23:29Dan Buettner?

  One squad just works with city council to adopt food policy that favor fruits and vegetables over junk food. That works with the built environment city planner to design their, their cities for humans, not just cars. You can raise the physical activity level of the whole city by 30% by just making parks accessible, providing bike lanes, providing bus, public transportation, provide means to walk places to limit sprawl. And then lastly, we have an alcohol policy bundle, which brings in the evidence-based best practices to limit access to alcohol.

• 24:13Dan Buettner?

  Not, not cut it off altogether. The second squad goes to every restaurant, grocery store, workplace and school with a Blue Zone certification program, which makes those environments 20% healthier. And we recognize them and drive traffic to them. And the third squad works with individuals to help individuals optimize their home.

• 24:35Dan Buettner?

  So their kitchens aren't as accessible to junk food to optimize their social networks. So they're making three or four new friends who are plant-based eaters and who recreate with physical activity and then to know their sense of purpose and put it to work by volunteering. So when you, when you bring all three of those together, you create the perfect storm. With enough intensity, three to five years, in every single city, we see obesity dropping down and happiness going up.

• 25:04Rich Roll?

  Wow. And so when these, you know, three infantry teams, you know, paratroop down into these cities and, you know, occupy the territory, like, how long does that take? Like, how long do they stay there? What's the, you know, what is the kind of arc of that gestation cycle?

• 25:23Dan Buettner?

  So when you think of, so Fort Worth, Texas is our biggest. You know, bizarrely enough, we work mostly in very conservative areas because, and I can't explain why, but we've been very successful. So in Fort Worth, there are 200 schools. There are about a thousand different restaurants. So our team, you know, we have a team of 30 people. They have to get every one of those restaurants and schools and grocery stores and workplaces.

• 25:50Rich Roll?

  They're just literally going door to door?

• 25:52Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, they make appointments and they have to sit down and explain why to do this. With policy, the way our policy works is we come in with these, we don't tell people what to do. We don't tell city council, you have to do this or you're not going to be certified, blue zone. But we do show them a menu with 30 evidence-based policies that make their city healthier, either from a food point of view or a built environment point of view. We bring all the leaders together, help them arrive, arrive at consensus of what would be effective and feasible here. And then our team works with city government to adopt these policies and implement them. And that usually takes three to five years. But when you get them in there, they're in there forever.

• 26:37Dan Buettner?

  You know, if we get them to increase the walkability by 30%, those sidewalks are there for

• 26:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Dan Buettner?

  a half a century. So unlike trying to convince somebody to join a gym or start a, you know, CrossFit regimen, which is going to run out of gas in a year, this lasts for decades.

• 26:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So is Fort Worth the biggest success story? Or just the largest urban environment?

• 27:01Dan Buettner?

  It's the largest. The biggest success story is right here in California, the beach cities of Redondo, Ormosa and Manhattan Beach. And in the five years we worked there, we just got the Gallup data. The average BMI of the entire city dropped by 14%.

• 27:16Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 27:17Dan Buettner?

  You start saying, what does that mean? That means there are 1,900 fewer obese people there than when we started. The obesity rate among children has dropped by about 50%. And they've saved 50 to 60 million dollars in projected healthcare costs because of lower rates of diabetes and obesity. So it was a hugely great investment for them.

• 27:37Rich Roll?

  So, so give me an example of something that changed there. Like were there, were there like bike paths that were built or were there, you know, menu items changed at restaurants or school lunch altered? Or how did that, you know, play out?

• 27:50Dan Buettner?

  So we were instrumental in putting in about 220 more miles of bike path. And you know, LA is a place where people are obsessed with their cars. We were instrumental in connecting Palos Verde with the rest of the beach cities. So you can bicycle all the way up and down. We're instrumental in getting an active living policy in place so that now every new street, streets are rebuilt every five to seven years, has to be planned with a bike lane, trees and a sidewalk in mind. So that starts to shift the paradigm from the car to people being on their feet. Uh, when we started, absolutely no kids walked to school. Now about forty percent of all

• 28:33Dan Buettner?

  school, elementary schools have these walking school buses where they walk with an adult. So the kids and the adults are walking. School lunches have changed. We've prioritized vegetables. So when you go through the lunch line, the first food kid sees are vegetables. They're more likely to take it and eat it than when you put it at the end.

• 28:51Rich Roll?

  Right. That's a huge win. I would, I would think tackling the school lunch thing is, is tough. You know, there's a lot of money involved and contracts that, you know, are very rich for the people that benefit from landing them the food providers.

• 29:07Dan Buettner?

  Well, well, here's the great untold secret. The USDA provides most of the funding for school lunches. Most public schools cannot afford school lunches without USDA money. If you take the USDA money, you have to buy USDA foods, which ends up being meats and cheeses and milks. I mean, there's some, you know, vegetables, but, but, um, there's kind of a catch 22. And there's also not money to hire cooks, um, like before the Reagan era. Uh, the, the only money available for schools are very low paid, uh, employees in the, in the kitchen who just warm things. So you get a lot of like pizza pockets and pizzas and

• 29:47Dan Buettner?

  crap. Um, but actually there's one policy that is even more powerful when it comes to what your kids eat at school. And that's whether or not kids can eat in hallways and classrooms. So spending zero money, if a school says no eating in classrooms and hallways, the BMI of that school drops by about 11% over the course of a year.

• 30:11Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 30:12Dan Buettner?

  And that's just because if, if they can't eat in classrooms and hallways, they're not eating chips and sodas and, and, and candy.

• 30:20Rich Roll?

  And, and getting rid of vending machines? Is that part of it too?

• 30:23Dan Buettner?

  That's part of it. So once again, we, to, to be a Blue Zone certified school, we come with a menu and it has Twenty different things, about twenty things a school can do to to improve the health environment of the school. Other things are, you know, there's often snack carts after school. You can make sure there's only healthy choices on that snack cart. And vending machines, not necessarily taking them out, but only including water in them and healthy snacks. In Redondo Beach, they created a thousand-foot radius around the school where no junk food vendors could come after school.

• 31:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:04Dan Buettner?

  We've even had Spencer, Iowa, one of our Blue Zone cities, it's city towns, very conservative place. They had the courage to say no to a convenience store that was about to open up very close to the school because that convenience store opens up, what are the kids eating after school? If they're skipping lunch and running across the street to the convenience store, what are they eating? So by taking that, by zoning it so they don't have access to that to that convenience store, you just improve the eating environment. You know, kids have to stay in the lunchroom.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  It's so interesting that it's these conservative communities because you would think these are the these are the these are the government bodies that are saying, you know, we don't, we want less regulation, we don't want you, you know, government telling us what to do and all of that. So that's fascinating.

• 31:55Dan Buettner?

  But you have that juxtapose with people with, for the most part, you know, with with great family values. They care about their kids and they care about their community. It doesn't matter if you're left or right, but but sometimes I sense in our conservative communities, there's a stronger sense of civic, we're going to get this done.

• 32:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's probably right.

• 32:21Dan Buettner?

  So, yeah, it surprised me. I thought this was going to be a project for the San Franciscos of the country, but it turned out it's the Fort Worth and the Iowas and the Naples, Florida, all very conservative places and it's, it is going gangbusters.

• 32:38Rich Roll?

  It's got to be incredibly gratifying to Translate, you know, this work that you've done into a very real context where it's having a macro effect in an incredibly substantial way on vast numbers of people. It's not just like, I did this research, I found these conclusions, I wrote a book about it, and like, here you go. Like, you're actually shifting not only the way people think about these things, but their behavior in the way that it's influenced by the very habitat in which they live. It's crazy.

• 33:12Dan Buettner?

  There are two very different, yes, you're right, it's very satisfying. The first book, The Blue Zones, identified the nine common denominators in the longest lived people. So that's what you can do to live to 100. But the how is a very different animal. And I very consciously went about trying to find, how do you get people to adopt these habits long enough so they can avoid a chronic disease? So you have to not do the wrong thing for long enough to live a long time.

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:41Dan Buettner?

  So that...

• 33:42Rich Roll?

  It's less about the rehab, it's more focused on avoiding the wrong thing than doing the right thing.

• 33:46Dan Buettner?

  It really is, because that's what, I mean, that's what kills us at the end, I think. But it was a completely different science, and National Geographic, bless its heart, my home, they gave me a grant to look at communities that were unhealthy and got healthier. So not blue zones, as it were, but just places. 1972, North Corelli of Finland had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world. And miraculously, and this is the only place in the world, they were able to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular mortality in men by 80%, stomach cancer by about 60%. And it's, and they held it for 30 years.

• 34:30Rich Roll?

  I think we talked about this last time, but remind me what they were doing before and what the change was?

• 34:36Dan Buettner?

  This was 140,000 people who were mostly dairy farmers. They fried their cheese in butter. And an epidemiologist by the name of Pekka Puska came in and did everything that most public health people have done for years. They promoted these fun runs and eat your veggie campaigns and, and, and health messaging. And he burned through his entire budget in five years. And he got this idea, actually. They're the mothership of what we do. They got the idea of change in the environment. And they did things. They realized that people loved their sausage there. And they weren't going to convince 140,000 people not to eat sausage. Ain't gonna happen. But they went to the sausage maker and convinced

• 35:18Dan Buettner?

  the sausage maker to replace 30% of the fat with mushrooms and to take out 30% of the sodium. And they weren't, people in North Crowley weren't used to eating vegetable fruits, because they were expensive and they weren't accessible. And Pekka Puska convinced dairy farmers to take part of their land and grow berries, and then created a market for those berries, so that all of a sudden berries were accessible and you could buy them your own. So people started eating more of them. So it was a change in the environment.

• 35:45Rich Roll?

  Right. Interesting. That's super cool, man.

• 35:54Rich Roll?

  So, in the course of doing, you know, rolling up your sleeves and doing this Blue Zones work and traveling the world and meeting with all of these people, you know, one aspect of this Blue Zones equation is life satisfaction. And packed into that is happiness. And the idea that, you know, happiness and health are not mutually exclusive ideas, that these are very much, you know, integrated. They're, they're part and parcel of each other. So in many ways, I sort of think about this new, you know, sort of tangent that you're on, not tangent, but this, you know,

• 36:28Dan Buettner?

  Companion.

• 36:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, extrapolation of the work that you've been doing. Venturing directly into the world of happiness is really just an extension of work that you've been doing all along. But kind of more focused in one particular arena. Is that, is that accurate?

• 36:43Dan Buettner?

  Yes. So, first of all, it's, it's not worth living to a hundred if you're miserable. So,

• 36:50Rich Roll?

  You're probably not going to live to a hundred if you are, anyway, right? According to your work, at least.

• 36:56Dan Buettner?

  Exactly. But also, it turns out in America, if you're, if you're in the top quintile of the happiest people, you live about eight years longer than if you're in the lowest quintile. So, so, working on getting happier is almost as powerful as dropping a smoking habit when it comes to life expectancy. And, you know, I sort of developed, I think, this way of identifying the longest, the people who do it the best, evidence-based, and then reverse-engineering it. So, with Blue Zones, first Blue Zones, it was longest-lived people, and now with happiness, we're, we found the statistically happiest people in the world,

• 37:39Dan Buettner?

  and then reverse-engineered what exactly they did to get so happy.

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  Right. So, before we dig into that, let's define happiness, and then secondarily, perhaps you can talk a little bit about how you came up with a quantitative method for, for evaluating this on a community-wide basis.

• 38:02Dan Buettner?

  So, happiness is, academically speaking, a meaningless term. It, and I think I reveal this in the book in a way you probably haven't seen before, but, but, sort of simplify it, happiness is an amalgam of how you experience your life, day-to-day, how much joy you get out of every day. Number two, how you evaluate your life, what you think of yourself, how proud you are of what you've done and how you've lived up to the expectations around you. And number three, purpose, feeling like you're living out your values. And it turns out that all three of those facets of happiness are measurable. They're measurable on an international level, and indeed Gallup and the World Database of Happiness

• 38:46Dan Buettner?

  measure all three of those kinds of happiness in 151 countries worldwide. And I was able to connect with them, thanks to National Geographic, and get their statisticians to tell me where are people experiencing those three kinds of happiness at the highest level. And then go there and try to explain what they're doing to achieve those kinds of happiness.

• 39:11Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and in so doing, there's some overlap with the blue zones, right? But there are also distinct regions that live sort of askew from the, from the blue zones that you initially established.

• 39:24Dan Buettner?

  Well, they're not the exact same place, but the original blue zones areas of longevity, they are within the top 10% of the happiest places in the world. There are places that are slightly happier, but they're also very healthy. So Singapore, for example, it's the happiest place in Asia as measured by life satisfaction and also absence of worry and stress. But they also have the second highest life expectancy in the world. So to the point you made at the very beginning here, that longevity and happiness go hand in hand.

• 39:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're closely related. And the other thing that I think is interesting about evaluating happiness is that, once again, not a surprise to you, I'm sure, you find that the happiest people live in places where the environment is conducive to the factors that contribute to that happiness.

• 40:14Dan Buettner?

  That's the bottom line.

• 40:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:16Dan Buettner?

  It's just like, there's all these studies that show that the harder you work to be happy, the less happy you are. And in a sense that's-

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  That's what we're all doing now, right?

• 40:26Dan Buettner?

  You know? Yeah, it's like Sisyphus, you know, rolling the boulder up the hill and only to find it back down at the bottom the next day when you wake up. The, so positive psychology, Marty Seligman and Sonya Lubomirsky, who lives right around here, they're great scientists and they have identified techniques we can all do to get a little bit happier. And you've heard about them. Savoring, gratitude, meditation. They all kind of work, but they all kind of fall in the same category as diets, is they require a conscious behavior modification. You have to remember to do something every day, find time in your schedule and have the

• 41:10Dan Buettner?

  discipline and presence of mind to do it. And that there is no evidence to show that any of those things work in the long term because we, in order for them to work, you have to do them. They wear out. But there are dozens of things you can do to change your environment to make it more likely you'll be happy. So- The Blue Zones of Happiness book is more about what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favor of happiness.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  And, and I think, well, we should unpack that and get into it, but let's, let's run through a couple of the case studies, because I think it's super interesting when you talk about, um, you know, what it's like in Singapore and why they're happy, for example, you know, based on the way that, uh, you know, the way that the city was, was conceptualized and planned in terms of how people live and the tax structure and how they, you know, think about career, et cetera.

• 42:06Dan Buettner?

  Yes. So, you know, the, we love democracy, but often the problem with democracy, it amounts to a pooling of ignorance, especially if people aren't getting the right education. And that, it like, it's almost impossible for an American politician to make a long-term plan that, that extends beyond his or her own tenure. Uh, in Singapore, they were, blast, I would argue, with a great leader by the name of Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who came in in 1965 under a difficult time. Um, there was, um, wars with the communists brewing at the time. But he was very smart. He was imbued with Confucian values of harmony,

• 42:51Dan Buettner?

  of honoring, uh, older people, of embracing security, um, as, as, and he was a big gardener as well. And, uh, he was also a-

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  Hence the massive gardens.

• 43:05Dan Buettner?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It's, it's the second most densely populated place on earth. Uh, it's 45 miles long, home to 5 million people, and there's greenery all around you, beautiful parks, uh, very smart use of, of, of the land. But he went about taking a data-backed approach to building a country that enabled these people to live out their values, Confucian values in this, not Judeo-Christians, which Americans tend to embrace, but these more Asian values. And he's done a spectacular, a job at it. The, the, their economy has doubled 13 times since 1965, one of the highest GDPs in the world, highest life expectancies, and,

• 43:49Dan Buettner?

  and, uh, highest rates of life satisfaction in, in all of Asia.

• 43:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I thought it was really fascinating how you describe how they promote diversity in the way that people habitate, cohabitate, because a lot, most people live in these giant apartment buildings, right? And how the demographics of those buildings reflect the demographic of the city at whole, right? So there's no, you know, this is where all the Jewish people live, and this is where all the Puerto Ricans live, or what have you, right? Everything is integrated.

• 44:26Dan Buettner?

  Right. So Lee Kuan Yew

• 44:32Dan Buettner?

  inherited a diverse population. They're made up of Han Chinese, the Malay, from Malaysian ethnicity, and Indians, that's most of who live there, speak completely different languages, very different cultures, often at odds with each other. And he knew he was gonna have a seething stew of conflict. And he did a few very smart things. First of all, he made English the lingua franca. So none of the other three ethnicities got to use their language. They brought in this fourth language.

• 45:04Dan Buettner?

  Every school reflects the ethnicity of the country. And there are, Singapore, which is actually a country, it's sort of a city-state, has these subdivisions, so to speak, of about 250,000 people live in these high-rise. And every high-rise reflects, that contains Malay, Indian, and Chinese. And you go downstairs in the food courts, and they're all just these wonderful bazaars of these ethnic foods that reflect the people who live there, so.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  Right, and talk about the tax structure. And is Singapore one of the places where the tax structure is implicated in kind of infusing the culture with a higher happiness quotient?

• 45:46Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 45:47Rich Roll?

  There are a couple of other places.

• 45:48Dan Buettner?

  So, they're brilliant, Singapore. So, first of all, you see a correlation between places who take care of their elders and happiness. And Singapore spends more on its elders than anyplace else in Asia. And one of the things they very cleverly do, if you live within 100 meters of your aging parent, you get a tax break. That's because Lee Kuan Yew knows that, given their values of elder veneration...

• 46:17Dan Buettner?

  You're going to take care of your parents that they live nearby.

• 46:20Rich Roll?

  And you're incentivized to do so.

• 46:23Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 46:24Rich Roll?

  Which is such a foreign concept from our cultural point of view.

• 46:27Dan Buettner?

  Of warehousing our, our parents in a retirement home. The other very clever thing they do, if, if you want to consume imported luxuries like Swiss chocolate or electronics or jewelry, there's a very high value add tax. So it disincentivizes a consumption. Consumption, by the way, the happiness value of it wears out very quickly. But the anti, no matter who you are, no matter where you live in the world, in order to have happiness, you need food, shelter, health or healthcare, some education, some mobility, and you have to be able to treat yourself once in a while. So after that, the effect of money on happiness starts to wear out very quickly.

• 47:11Dan Buettner?

  Well, Lee Kuan Yew has made it very easy for everybody to have that, that minimum five or six things for happiness. And no matter if you are, uh, work at a food stand or sweep the streets or clean up public lavatories, as long as you make an effort to work, you're going to make enough money to cover your needs, those five or six things. They call it, instead of a welfare, it's called workfare. So they'll top up your wages so you get this minimum.

• 47:41Rich Roll?

  Right. And same thing in Denmark, right?

• 47:43Dan Buettner?

  Denmark, you just, it's

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  Everybody gets paid the same.

• 47:46Dan Buettner?

  No matter what.

• 47:47Rich Roll?

  Right. You're like the lawyer in the postman.

• 47:49Dan Buettner?

  You could sit on your couch, eat Doritos and watch reruns of Leave It To Beaver and you'll get that money.

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  Right. Which is the antithesis of capitalism. And yet here we have a very happy population of people. And it's, it's, uh, it's amazing because we all kind of intellectually know like, all right, so if we can meet our needs. And we could pay our bills and we have healthcare, then anything beyond that has a, you know, a diminishing return in terms of our happiness quotient, right? And your, your work seems to prove this out, yes?

• 48:22Dan Buettner?

  Well, when it comes to money, yes, but there are other things you do.

• 48:25Rich Roll?

  Right, I'm talking about money. I'm sorry, I'm talking purely about money.

• 48:28Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Rich Roll?

  And this idea that, you know, that money would be best spent saving to continue to alleviate the stress and anxiety that comes with the insecurity of not having enough. And also to be, you know, channeled towards experiences, right?

• 48:44Dan Buettner?

  Yeah. Well, let me, let me interject a nuance here that's important. This is from Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. So they're the ones that figured out that when it comes to money and how you experience your life, you don't get any more gratification or happiness after about $75,000 a year. But when it comes to how you evaluate your life, life satisfaction, the more money you make, the higher satisfaction is.

• 49:11Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 49:11Dan Buettner?

  So actually billionaires, they evaluate their lives better than millionaires. So it just depends what you're after.

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I guess. Um, I, it was, it's always been confusing to me that, you know, after a certain point, a millionaire and a billionaire still are, you know, propelling themselves forward to accumulate more and more and more. Uh, so obviously they are getting that kind of satisfaction out of it, although it's not changing the day-to-day quality of their life. In fact, it may be inhibiting it.

• 49:45Dan Buettner?

  Exactly.

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  I mean, they would, maybe they would say otherwise, but.

• 49:48Dan Buettner?

  But it's a little bit like, and I'm, I'm hoping this book kind of illuminates this, that, you know, people want to know the secret to happiness. And I can't tell you the secret of happiness unless I know who you are. So there are people for whom measuring themselves against other people is a prime value. And for them. Working to go from a million dollars to a billion dollars is a good investment for them. Most of us, I think you and me included, were more interested in really savoring our lives, being present, experiencing from day to day. You know, it's important for us to feel proud of what we do and achieve financial security, but after that, we're not going

• 50:30Dan Buettner?

  to kill ourselves. But there are people who are. There are people, that's their name of the game, and they're gonna, they're gonna, they can only be happy if they achieve some fanatic level of success.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  Right. Alright, so we talked about Singapore, we touched on Denmark, we have the Nicoya Peninsula, once again, front and center, right, and Costa Rica.

• 50:54Dan Buettner?

  Well, close. It's actually Cartago, Costa Rica. So, the blue zone area of longevity is Nicoya, which is on the coast. The happiest place, actually, is in the center of Costa Rica, in the central valley, a place called Cartago.

• 51:12Rich Roll?

  And similar to Singapore, it kind of started from the top down, because the powers that be came from education backgrounds, right? They were teachers?

• 51:23Dan Buettner?

  Yes. So, I argue that if you have a happy place in the world, it does never happens by chance. It's not just because they have a happy culture. That's, you look at Costa Rica, very happy place. You look north in Nicaragua, it's a basket case, and south in Panama, it's a basket case, and they're both, you know, Latin American cultures. But for some reason, Costa Rica is, by orders of magnitude, happier than Nicaragua to the north. And if, whether you look at Denmark, Singapore, Costa Rica, or I also profiled Boulder, Colorado.

• 52:02Dan Buettner?

  All of these happy places have their roots in four or so policies. Enlightened leaders between 50 and 150 years ago shifted away from kind of blind economic growth and channeled resources into educating kids, and I'm not talking about PhDs, I'm talking about getting 98 or 99% of children literate. Educating women. Interestingly, Costa Rica and Denmark were two of the first countries on earth to educate the daughters of peasants, not the sons, the daughters. And why is that important? Because daughters grow up to be mothers. And when you have an educated mother, she tends to have fewer children, she tends to

• 52:45Dan Buettner?

  take care of her children better, they tend to make sure they get a better education, they grow up healthier, smarter, they get better jobs, they're more productive, they're healthier, they make better voting decisions, and it creates this upward ratcheting of happiness. Also, the emphasis, in all happy places, there's a big investment in public health. And this is vastly different than the national conversation we're having now between Obamacare and whatever the Republicans are promoting. You know, in this country- Which is unclear right now. Yeah. But regardless of which one wins, it's the same flawed economic system.

• 53:29Dan Buettner?

  We incent for sickness. Nobody makes money in this country in health unless you get sick. Pharmaceutical companies make money when you get a prescription, hospitals make money when you rent a bed, and doctors get paid for procedures. And insurance companies. And insurance companies in between. You know, doctors are great people, but they get paid the same whether they cure you or they kill you. In places where people are happy, the investment is put way upstream to help make sure you don't get sick in the first place. So Costa Rica, for example, I think is the best healthcare system in the world. Every man, woman, and child, this is a very poor country, by the way, has the right of one visit a year from a health professional.

• 54:12Dan Buettner?

  Somebody's gonna come knock on your door, spend 30 minutes with you, no matter who you are, take your blood pressure, check you for diabetes, check you for depression, they're gonna go in your backyard, look for standing water, so that Zika doesn't breathe, they're gonna go in your refrigerator and give you some advice about what should be in there and what should not be in there. And they're catching diseases like diabetes and heart disease decades before it's a three alarm fire. And it's that health, as we started off this conversation, that health and happiness, they go hand in hand. And Costa Rica has about half the rate of mortality, middle-aged mortality, that Americans do. Two and a

• 54:53Dan Buettner?

  half time better chance of reaching a healthy age 92. And they spend 1/15th the amount we do on healthcare.

• 54:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:00Dan Buettner?

  So, there's a lesson there that we should be listening to.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. Well, the lessons that can be extrapolated from these various cultures are innumerable, right? And I think it goes back to political will, right? Like, what are the systemic changes that would have to occur in a country like the United States in order to begin implementing some of these policy shifts that are obviously, you know, so positively beneficial?

• 55:26Dan Buettner?

  So, as part of this geographic project, we hired the top 10 economists and happiness experts in the world and did this Delphi procedure, which is a scientific consensus, to get the best ideas together and to rank them for effectiveness and for feasibility. And we identified the 10 things that Americans, or leaders anywhere, should be doing if they really want a happier nation. And I think it starts with the evidence base, knowing what works and what doesn't work. I mean, what we think brings us happiness, both at a population level and an individual level, is misguided and often completely wrong. For example, growing GDP.

• 56:11Dan Buettner?

  That tends to be the artistic success of a country. That only works with poor countries. After you get to the GDP of Portugal, trying to raise GDP more has very little effect on how happy you are. But about one-sixth of any population in the world is suffering from some sort of mental illness, anxiety or depression. Those are the big ones, about 16% of the population. They drive about 50% of the unhappiness in any country. And it turns out you can resolve about 50% of the anxiety and depression cases with just 12 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. So if America, this is gonna sound weird, but this is what the evidence says.

• 56:53Dan Buettner?

  If America wanted to become significantly happier, the best investment we can make is make sure that everybody who's depressed and suffering from anxiety in this country got cognitive behavioral therapy. And by the way, those people with these mental illnesses, they drive about 50% of the use of social services. They drive about 50% of the crime, 50% of the absenteeism, and 50% of the hospitalization.

• 57:19Rich Roll?

  I would imagine pharmaceutical dependence as well. And, you know, extrapolating from that, you know, drug addiction, which obviously leads back to crime and the privatizations of our prisons and the lack of investment or interest in really developing, you know, treatment for these conditions. We're just warehousing these people and we're, we're just perpetrating that vicious cycle that leads to more crime and more disenfranchisement and more addiction and it just goes on and on and on.

• 57:49Dan Buettner?

  But yet we fail to see that. So if you have diabetes in this country, there's a nearly a 100% chance you'll be, you'll be treated for it. Anybody can get treatment for diabetes in this country. And there's a huge pharmaceutical companies make a ton of money off of diabetes drugs. If you have depression or anxiety, there's only about a 15% chance you'll be treated in this country. Largely goes untreated because, you know, there's no big sort of cognitive behavioral therapy lobby that's making sure that we're getting that kind of treatment here. It's not, it doesn't have the economic underpinnings that, that a pharmaceutical approach does.

• 58:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, although there's a lot of, you know, prescription medications getting doled out to deal with these things, but perhaps not enough focus on the cognitive therapy aspect of it.

• 58:36Dan Buettner?

  Yes, and we know cognitive behavioral therapy works. If cognitive behavioral therapy were a drug, it'd be a blockbuster drug. It is 50% successful. There's good research behind that.

• 58:50Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing. Tolerance is a big thing too, right? In these communities?

• 58:57Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, at an international level. Essentially, you want to live in a place where you can feel free to live out the life that's right for you. So, if you're a woman, you want to be, you have the same rights as a man. If you're old, if you're gay, if you're transgender. So Denmark is one of the most tolerant places in the world. So essentially, the, this, these findings start with a statistical basis. So, these international surveys ask you how happy you are in a variety of different ways.

• 59:39Dan Buettner?

  And then they ask you 60 or 70 other questions about how you live your life. How much money you make? Are you married? Your religiosity? Do you, are you doing new and interesting things every day? Do you feel healthy? Do you, do you trust your neighbors? Do you feel like you can live out your values, etc.? And then there's a statistical, um, uh, process known as regression analysis, where you can find out what correlates with happiness. So what, what goes hand in hand with happiness? And the big six are trust. Can I trust my neighbor? Tolerance. Can I live out my values? Do I have really good social connections? Healthy life expectancy. GDP is one of them.

• 1:00:24Dan Buettner?

  And freedom. But not so much freedom to do anything, but freedom, once again, to, to do the work that's right for you. Those are the, the, the big correlates to happiness, no matter where you live.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  And from that, you kind of drill down, tell me if I'm misinterpreting this, but you drill down on these kind of three core ideas. Pleasure, purpose, and pride.

• 1:00:48Rich Roll?

  As kind of cofactors in your own analysis of your personal happiness quotient? Is that?

• 1:00:55Dan Buettner?

  Well, all of these surveys measure life satisfaction, which is essentially pride, positive affect, which is how you've experienced in your life in the last 24 hours. I call that pleasure. And then purpose, do new and interesting things every day. So those three Ps are actually measured. I kind of simplified the academic terms. But we know statistically speaking, where those three types of happiness excel the most.

• 1:01:25Rich Roll?

  And where does the United States fall on this spectrum of happiness?

• 1:01:31Dan Buettner?

  You know, we get like a B. I mean, given our GDP, given how wealthy we are, we should be doing a lot better. We're about 27th in the country, in the world.

• 1:01:40Rich Roll?

  And is there any one of these factors where we're well below what would be considered average?

• 1:01:47Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 1:01:48Rich Roll?

  Like where's our, you know, where's our weak spots?

• 1:01:51Dan Buettner?

  So there are vast variations and it's not really fair to talk about the US because in the, in the southeastern, the Appalachia, the Rust Belt, those places are very unhappy on all three. But then you look to places like Boulder, Colorado, San Luis Obispo, Ogden, Utah, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Portland, those places are world-class when it comes to all three. So it depends where you are in the United States.

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  And Boulder is one of the ones that you selected as the top, right? Among the top in the world?

• 1:02:25Dan Buettner?

  So Dan Witters over at, the senior scientist at Gallup, and I worked on an index that we tried to find the 15, what he calls cowbell measures of what really is happiness. What are the, what are the, what's the componentry of happiness? And we created a special index and applied it to 171 cities in America. And Boulder came out the top. Santa Cruz was very high up there, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Charleston, North Carolina was actually pretty high, Naples, Florida.

• 1:02:57Rich Roll?

  And these communities, what are the main things that they share in common beyond what we've already talked about?

• 1:03:03Dan Buettner?

  They're walkable.

• 1:03:05Dan Buettner?

  And bikeable, very high corlet, there is a healthy food environment. There was enlightened leadership that shifted the focus from just economic development to quality of life. Often, building and developing and progress are mutually exclusive pursuits to creating a high quality of life. And most of these happy cities have said, we're putting, okay, we have enough, we've developed enough, now let's preserve our natural environment and let's focus on building quality of life, from both a policy point of view and a built environment point of view.

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  Bikes are a big part of this whole thing. Bikes and walking, right?

• 1:03:52Dan Buettner?

  You look at the walk score, which you can go online and plug in your zip code, and it'll tell you the walk score. Walk score is probably the biggest predictor of how happy your city is.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Dan Buettner?

  Copenhagen's the most bikeable city on earth, it's also the happiest.

• 1:04:08Rich Roll?

  That's cool. We don't live, I don't live in a walkable place.

• 1:04:13Dan Buettner?

  Well, think about cars. So, if you live on a street where cars are zipping by at 50 miles an hour, number one, you have that noise which creates stress, there's danger, there is, there's pollution. And we know now that car pollution is associated with diabetes, dementia, and even kidney failure. You can't, you don't want, you can't walk very, you can't move and get exercise because you're at the bottom of the food, the transportation food chain when you're on your feet. When you live in a place that's bikeable, it's quiet, you run into people, it's very easy to get to places to shop, and places to worship and socialize.

• 1:04:55Dan Buettner?

  It's, if America could see clearly, the best investment, I think, at an urban level would be making our cities more walkable and bikeable.

• 1:05:03Rich Roll?

  Hence, you're now living in Santa Barbara.

• 1:05:04Dan Buettner?

  Mama didn't raise no fool.

• 1:05:06Rich Roll?

  I know. And you don't even, you live in this region of the world without a car, which is not easy to do, although Uber helps, I know.

• 1:05:13Dan Buettner?

  I don't own a car. When I, when I install in Santa Barbara, I never get in a car. I mean, I come back and forth to the airport or something in a car, but I get on my bike and go everywhere.

• 1:05:31Rich Roll?

  So I took the Blue Zones 10 Minute Happiness Quiz on your website.

• 1:05:38Dan Buettner?

  True Happiness Test.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  True Happiness Test, yes. And I proudly scored an A+, which I'm very happy about.

• 1:05:46Dan Buettner?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:05:46Rich Roll?

  Despite the fact that there's one question about how much time do you spend in the car? And I had to slide that slider all the way over to the right. And I was like, this is gonna fuck up my score.

• 1:05:56Rich Roll?

  It's like, you know where these questions are going, right? I was trying to be as honest as possible, but I was like, yeah, this is definitely gonna put me down in the B- factor because I'm driving around all the time. But I think I compensated for it with, I think in large part, like a sense of purposefulness, like the ikigai that you talk about with Blue Zones, I think is very high in my life. And, you know, diet and exercise, obviously, movement and community. Like, I make a practice of making sure that I take time for friends, which isn't always easy and isn't my default thing. But when I do, my life is happier and better.

• 1:06:39Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, I had the privilege last Saturday to join you in your community. And you're very generous and you're also a curator, be one of these connectors. And one of the more dependable ways to get happier, no matter what kind of happiness, is improve your social equity, your social connections. And you are a master at putting interesting people together and sort of being at the center of it, not as a me, me, me, I want the attention, but supporting people from the outside. And you're a giver, to put it in Adam Grant's words.

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  Well, it was a pleasure and a delight to be able to host that thing. And Greg, my business partner, I have to give credit to him. He's the one who orchestrated the whole thing. But it was great. And I think for me... It was beautiful not just to get all these people that I love so much in one room and so they could meet each other and all of that, but then to take everybody over to see In-Q.

• 1:07:38Dan Buettner?

  Oh my god.

• 1:07:39Rich Roll?

  And I know like, you know, you probably, did you even know who In-Q was?

• 1:07:42Dan Buettner?

  No idea, I was ready to roll my eyes.

• 1:07:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you guys, you guys were out of there. Like, a lot of people were like, "Yeah, that's cool, I'm here for the party, I don't know about the In-Q part." And I was like, "No, no, no, you guys, you gotta check this out." So I think your perspective was common, like, a lot of people were like, didn't really know what to expect or who he was, and he was just, he was such a, it was kind of a beautiful gift to give to everyone else.

• 1:08:04Dan Buettner?

  It really was.

• 1:08:05Rich Roll?

  This is, he was so inspiring, and, you know, it's impossible to not, you know, sit there and listen to him and not leave, you know, feeling amazing.

• 1:08:13Dan Buettner?

  I think he metabolized the human condition living in 2017 and helped us. We all feel exactly what he described, but he helped, first of all, he didn't put himself above us, he was among us, you know, he was talking about seeing his old therapist at his new therapist.

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's right, I know. But, yeah, his old therapist in the waiting room, coming out from his new therapist.

• 1:08:42Dan Buettner?

  Like, "Hey." But, um, he helps, he helps us all make sense of this, of this crazy journey we're on.

• 1:08:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he really does, in a very beautiful, touched, poetic way, dare I say. So I'm glad you guys came and experienced that, it was cool.

• 1:09:00Dan Buettner?

  Loved it.

• 1:09:01Rich Roll?

  So, let's, let's, let's like, really distill down these principles of happiness and try, I want to get at the heart of like, how we can, you know, think about this, you know, the average person can think about these things, and think about how they can cultivate greater happiness in their own lives by making some lifestyle changes and decisions, you know, perhaps about the environment that they choose to surround, you know, the people in the actual physical environment in which they live, but, you know, even beyond that, I know that there are lifestyle, you know, things that can be tweaked to help promote these things, even though it's easier to put yourself in the environment that fosters that, but, you know, behavioral change, I think, is still, you know, an important part of it, is it not?

• 1:09:48Dan Buettner?

  It's, it's important if you can remember to do it.

• 1:09:50Rich Roll?

  If you can do it.

• 1:09:51Dan Buettner?

  And I just essentially assume that people aren't gonna remember to do it.

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  They're not, yeah.

• 1:09:54Dan Buettner?

  So, so, so happiness is a cake recipe and...

• 1:09:58Rich Roll?

  Move to Boulder.

• 1:09:59Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, kinda that's where I was going. Marrying the right person, um, or being with the right person, getting the right work, um, being healthy, feeling like you're giving back, they're all ingredients. The most important ingredient in that cake recipe is where you live. So if you're unhappy, probably the most powerful thing you can do if you wanna get happier is move to a happier place. And we know that statistically speaking. It has the biggest variance of any variable. And you might say, "Well, I can't do that," but the average American moves about 10 times in their adult life. So there's 10 opportunities. And if you're not, if you can't live to a happier city, you can live to a happier neighborhood. And a happier neighborhood looks like this. It has a sidewalk out in front of your house.

• 1:10:41Dan Buettner?

  You live on a street where neighbors have about the same status level that you do. There are trees. There's easy access to parks. Where I live in Minneapolis, uh, there's no, nobody lives more than four blocks away from a park. You're close to places to worship. You're close to, um, buying, being able to buy healthy food. Those are all elements more likely. If you live on water, you're about 5% more likely to be happy. Ocean, river, lake, um, you, uh, the happiest cities in America tend to be university towns. So that stacks a deck in your favor. When it comes to your house, you wanna position your house so that invites people in. The happiest Americans are socially interacting five to six hours a day.

• 1:11:25Dan Buettner?

  So you wanna position yourself so you're inviting people in. So instead of a back deck, a front porch.

• 1:11:32Rich Roll?

  And that's, that, that, those hours of socialization include home and, and profession, I presume.

• 1:11:38Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, the key is that you're interacting with someone with whom you can have a meaningful conversation and you actually like them.

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  Right, so if your best friend works where you work.

• 1:11:48Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, or it can just be an okay friend, but it has to transcend talking smack, sports, or celebrity or something. You have to be able to say, you know, "I just had a big fight with my spouse and, you know, what's ever happened to you type of thing."

• 1:12:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:05Dan Buettner?

  So, so that's the criteria. It's, it'd be meaningful conversation. And it could be with your family too, or your neighbors.

• 1:12:14Dan Buettner?

  You want to make sure that your bedroom is set up so it's easy for you to get between seven and a half and nine hours of sleep. So blackout windows, take the electronics out of that. The happiest people are sleeping over seven and a half hours a night, on average. If you're sleeping six hours a night, you're probably thirty percent less happy than you are. So that's a really big one as well. TVs, there's room in our life for TVs and other screens. We did this huge research project with National Geographics, a hundred thousand respondents, and found that people are most happy when they're watching between a half hour and an hour of TV a day. So having a little bit of intellectual repose at the end of a hard day is okay.

• 1:12:58Dan Buettner?

  But if you're watching more than an hour a day, it's probably at the expense of doing more authentic forms of happiness, like physical activity, or social interacting, or volunteering.

• 1:13:08Rich Roll?

  Are there studies on internet use?

• 1:13:10Dan Buettner?

  There's studies on, we also did one on social media. So like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the same thing. It's about forty-five minutes. Actually, people who are not on social media at all, and people using it about two hours a day are about the same level, report the same level of happiness. The best is about an hour a day, which suggests that they're on it for a little entertainment, maybe to connect in the real world. But after two hours, you see this direct correspondence of dropping happiness with more social media use. And the least happy people are on it eight hours a day.

• 1:13:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:47Dan Buettner?

  So it's an approximation of the truth.

• 1:13:50Rich Roll?

  And is there a distinction, obviously, community is important. Is there a breakdown or a distinction between those that are actively engaged in a faith-based community versus people that are just involved in their civic community?

• 1:14:06Dan Buettner?

  Well, religiosity is measured, and it's measured by how often you show up to church or temple or mosque. And as a rule, people who are religious are slightly happier, and you're especially happier if you live in a religious part of the country. So, being religious in Denmark, for example, where only about 20% of people show up to church, being a churchgoer doesn't help your happiness much. But if you live in the Bible Belt, you're much more likely to be happy.

• 1:14:35Rich Roll?

  But you're involved in your community in a more fundamental way, I would imagine.

• 1:14:40Dan Buettner?

  Volunteers are happier, no matter where you go. The most counterintuitive thing in the world, if you get fired from your job, the best thing to do is go and volunteer. Take that, focus off of your own woes and put it onto something else. Get out and network, and get out and put your purpose to work elsewhere. So, your point about community, yes. Getting involved with your community is definitely a secret to happiness.

• 1:15:09Rich Roll?

  And what about meditation?

• 1:15:10Dan Buettner?

  Not positive. And so meditation's one of these liminal things. So, here's the thing with meditation. I think you have to do it intensely enough for a while, either some meditation course, or sticking with it for 10 weeks, or doing a Vipassana, where you kind of rewire your brain. You're a meditator, and you know how to do it, and you can quickly do it. But if you're just gonna meditate in front of, you know, before yoga class for a while, it's not gonna do you any good. And meditation, like so many other positive psychology interventions, for the most part, it only works as long

• 1:15:52Dan Buettner?

  as you're doing it. So, we tend to do it episodically. And if you do it every day, yes, there's good evidence, but, you know, people won't do it every day.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  Most people don't. You're like the doctor who's like, "Yeah, I could tell them to eat better, but they're not gonna do it, so I'm just giving them this pill," and like sending them on their way.

• 1:16:06Dan Buettner?

  Well, you know, I-

• 1:16:07Rich Roll?

  But you're telling them to move!

• 1:16:09Dan Buettner?

  I mean, I'm like the doctor who says, "Tell them to eat better," but knowing they won't do it, I'll invite them over to my house, and I'll teach them how to make a delicious Ikarian stew, or Sardinian minestrone, and they'll taste that, and I'll have them.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  What about the distinction between movement? You know, in the Blue Zones, it's not about- You know, vigorous exercise and the, you know, the way we think about it, treadmills and gyms and CrossFit and all that kind of stuff. It's just movement, you know, is integrated into their, the daily lives in an almost unnoticed way and it's just continual and perpetual. But is there a distinction when you look at, when you hone in on happiness between people that are, you know, sort of active in the sense that they're walking and they're moving their bodies or, you know, maybe they work outdoors or what have you versus, you know, people that do kind of have a structured exercise regimen?

• 1:17:03Dan Buettner?

  Well, people who are getting some sort of physical activity, 60 to 90 minutes a day are happier, more likely to be happier than people who are, are slothful. But I'm not aware of any research that breaks down intense physical activity and increased happiness or increased happiness.

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  And you, you touched on volunteerism, but I would imagine, you know, happiness is, is very much tied to service, right? So people whose lives are, are focused on giving back, in my experience, seem to be, you know, happier people. And I know that I'm happier and more fulfilled and feeling more purposeful when I'm in the spirit of giving, even if that giving is really in the context of my professional life. That kind of, you know, ethos, for me, translates into a higher happiness quotient. So is there, are there studies on that or how does that break down?

• 1:18:02Dan Buettner?

  The, the best thing I've ever heard along those lines comes from a Norwegian Buddhist monk who lives in Minnesota, who says, points out that we all have 99 problems. Uh, we're getting a wrinkle, we have an ache, our roof is leaking, we have a dent in our car, whatever it is. And we can put all of our effort into fixing those top problems and maybe resolve the top 10 of them, but by the time we get those top 10 off the list, there's 10 new ones at the bottom. So it's accepting that we're always going to have 99 problems and putting our focus elsewhere.

• 1:18:37Dan Buettner?

  Usually on somebody else's problems or helping somebody else out. And in so doing that, the, those 99 problems diminish in size and, and they become less urgent and they become less salient in our everyday life. So, yes, volunteering, helping others is a surefire way of making yourself happier.

• 1:18:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a, it's a core precept of, of recovery, sobriety, like 12 step. Like when you're, when you're not having a good day, like the, it's like, this is what you're told, like pick up the phone and call somebody who's having a worse day.

• 1:19:12Dan Buettner?

  I like that.

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  Talking through it, you know what I mean? And then suddenly your day doesn't seem so bad. It's almost like selfish selflessness. You know what I mean? Like when you want to just, when you're feeling terrible and you just want, you want to focus on yourself and your world and your huge problems. If you can just get outside of yourself and invest yourself in somebody else's issue, your problems seem to

• 1:19:33Dan Buettner?

  Diminish.

• 1:19:34Rich Roll?

  Diminish. And also the solution tends to percolate up and seems more manageable and accessible. What was the thing that in the course of doing this research and studying these communities that was most surprising to you or, or counterintuitive or what you didn't expect?

• 1:19:53Rich Roll?

  Or it just play out the way you thought it would?

• 1:19:57Dan Buettner?

  Well, that Singapore was, would be so happy. I, I fully expected to, because Singapore is famous for caning people. And if you have more than 14 grams of drugs, they hang you. And, um, and thinking that this is all propaganda here and getting there and find out, yes, that, that actually there's a form of happiness where when you're, the path to success is neatly laid out for you and you live in this secure area where it's easy to live out your values, uh, it can indeed produce happiness. And then to go to the other side of the planet with a diametrically opposed way of doing

• 1:20:35Dan Buettner?

  things, the Danes are completely free, um, the, the laws are very lax and a completely different way of doing things. And that's produced the, the happiest, uh, in a different way happiest. Um, so, uh, the, the paths up the mountain of happiness, uh, they take different, uh, faces, so to speak, but the summit looks pretty much the same no matter what route you took.

• 1:21:06Rich Roll?

  Are you going to now set up a Blue Zones happiness program that you're going to take city to city, or are you going to incorporate these, some of these principles into what you're already doing?

• 1:21:18Dan Buettner?

  You know, it's taken me a decade, you know, I work with Sharecare and we have 200 employees right now, and I'm not about to subset that. We are developing a policy bundle, so laws and codes and policies that municipal governments can adopt that make it more likely that their city will be happy. So, again, we don't tell cities what to do, we show them the policies and we help them pick what's right for them, and then we help them get it passed. So some things that'll make your city more likely to be happy, water quality, there's a huge correlation between water quality, noise, as we talked about before, walkability,

• 1:22:02Dan Buettner?

  bikability, programs that help the depressed and people who are anxious, there are city programs that can do that. So just making it clear of what cities can do that will really favor happiness, so we'll just incorporate it into our current Blue Zones projects.

• 1:22:18Rich Roll?

  If you, if you were able to petition Congress, or let's say you held some high-ranking appointed position in the White House, what policies on the federal level would you like to see changed that could foster, you know, this, these ideas that you're working on at the municipal level? Like, what has to change at the federal government? Like, at the highest level, like, what's fixable? I'm not talking about, we're not going to turn into Singapore, but what can we work on?

• 1:22:49Dan Buettner?

  Okay, so number one, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So right now, we measure the economy, we should have, we should be using a Gross National Happiness Index to measure, because at the end of the day, in my opinion, a politician's job is to make us happy, to the greatest amount of Of well-being rather than so that should be the the North Star for all policy and how we're measuring our presidents and Congress and the Senate are they making us happier? Number two, Cameron's government in in Great Britain, he formed a team of 50 people

• 1:23:30Dan Buettner?

  whose job it was to develop policies most likely to increase happiness. So it has to start with an evidence base. So we should have a sort of a squad within the federal government that focuses on well-being. And you can't ramrod things through Congress. It requires a conversation and a consensus. And but we have to know what to do, and we have to be able to measure it. And those are the first two steps and be funding it.

• 1:24:03Rich Roll?

  What what changes have you made as a result in your own life? I mean, you know, you're living in Santa Barbara, you were you were living in Minnesota, you know, prior to that, like already, you know, very blue zones friendly regions, locations. But did this work kind of, you know, inform other changes that you're thinking about making or have made or need to make like what, you know, where's the like, where can you find greater happiness in your own experience, even after doing all of this stuff?

• 1:24:35Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 1:24:36Rich Roll?

  Because you know, the journey is always continuing.

• 1:24:39Dan Buettner?

  Right, right. So, okay, so you're way more likely to be happy if you're in a committed relationship. So I'm with the lovely and cruciferous Kathy Freston.

• 1:24:47Rich Roll?

  She is lovely indeed.

• 1:24:49Dan Buettner?

  And she is vegan. So I eat a lot more vegetables. It turns out that that people are eating seven servings of vegetables a day are happier. I know the importance of sleep. So I'm not penny wise and pound foolish when it comes to to my time. I get my eight hours of sleep, no matter what. I usually don't use an alarm. I know that I'm more likely to be happy if I'm healthy. So it is almost impossible to get me to spend a day without getting some form of physical activity I like to do. I am I love people and I make it I make time for my friends. I try to socialize six or seven hours. I take a nap.

• 1:25:33Rich Roll?

  You take a nap every day?

• 1:25:34Dan Buettner?

  Pretty much.

• 1:25:35Rich Roll?

  Do you?

• 1:25:35Dan Buettner?

  I'm good at a power nap.

• 1:25:36Rich Roll?

  Wow, what time do you wake up in the morning?

• 1:25:40Dan Buettner?

  I wake up after eight hours. So if I went out, went deep, last night I went to bed at midnight and I woke up at eight.

• 1:25:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:46Dan Buettner?

  You know, I took a little nap before I came over here, actually. So, yeah, it makes a big difference. Drinking a little bit is fine for happiness. Drinking a lot is probably against it. So I kind of cut off at two or three drinks.

• 1:26:00Rich Roll?

  Unless you're me.

• 1:26:02Rich Roll?

  One's not good, man.

• 1:26:04Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, I'm not even gonna go there with you, Rich, although I'd like to.

• 1:26:06Rich Roll?

  Different story. That's a different podcast.

• 1:26:10Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 1:26:11Rich Roll?

  And kite sailing, that's gonna be the new thing?

• 1:26:14Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, I'm really passionate about that. It's, it's, um, knowing your passions and trying them. So I live up in Santa Barbara that has this, um, the ideal kite, um, sailing conditions in the country. So.

• 1:26:28Rich Roll?

  I've seen those guys up there doing that, but I, I don't know that I've ever, I don't know anybody who's done it.

• 1:26:34Dan Buettner?

  Well, you'll know me in three months.

• 1:26:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, maybe you can rope me into it.

• 1:26:39Dan Buettner?

  We'll do a field trip.

• 1:26:40Rich Roll?

  Um, I think, you know, one of the things that, that has been inspiring to me, uh, about you and, and your example is, uh, is that you've accomplished a lot. Like you've created these, you know, incredible works through the, through the books that you've written and the talks that you've given and the advocacy that you do and how you've kind of institutionalized it for the benefit of these cities.

• 1:27:06Rich Roll?

  You know, that kind of social impact is, you know, what I aspire to. And you've been a great mentor and a friend and, and, you know, I've learned a lot by, um, by getting to know you and, and by just learning from, you know, your experience. But you're not a workaholic. You know, a lot of people who are, who are creating books like you, I mean, these are deep dives, like this is deep work, these take years and years to put together. And most people that are involved in that kind of work, like they're, they live hermetically and they're shut-ins and, you know, because what it, you know, the amount of focus and intention that, that's required to produce them is so intense, right?

• 1:27:48Rich Roll?

  But you've, you've been able to live these principles of the, of the, of the blue zones and create this life for yourself in which you're able to be as productive as you are and still maintain this extraordinary quality of life. And I, that's like a magic trick to me when I look at it.

• 1:28:07Dan Buettner?

  Well, in these blue zone areas, I, I, I walk the talk, I learn from them. But I do, when it, when it comes to work, I tend to be like a crack addict, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm on it for

• 1:28:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:22Dan Buettner?

  Eight hours a day, um, after, take my nap, eat my lunch, et cetera, get my workout. But you have to put a gun to my head to get me to work after five o'clock usually. So there's no upside to, um, being more fanatic. I could have maybe written this book quicker, but I would have had less fun doing it. So, I mean, thanks for pointing that out, but it's true. I, I, I put a deep emphasis in consciousness and enjoying, for the most part, enjoying my days with the right balance of doing something productive that will yield that life satisfaction, that, that pride that I think is important.

• 1:28:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it's cool that, that, you know, your, your passion for adventure, you know, you used to do these, these crazy expeditions, these bicycle, we talked about it the first time, um, that we sat down together, that, that, you know, the, the work that you do in these books seems to serve that wanderlust or that's, that, that desire to continue, uh, you know, continue adventuring.

• 1:29:20Dan Buettner?

  Well, I've been with National Geographic now for almost 20 years and Peter Miller, my great editor, pointed out a long time ago that, um, these geographic firsts are kind of passe right now, that if you want to be an explorer in this day and age, you need to add to the body of knowledge and you need to educate or illuminate the human experience. And the bike rides were Great experience. I think everybody graduating from a college and university in this country, even a high school, should be required to live abroad for six months or a year. You learn more during those times than anyplace else. And I was able to do that almost overdrive with eight years of these, seeing the world from my bicycle. And you develop empathy. You develop a certain amount of wisdom.

• 1:30:05Dan Buettner?

  After all, wisdom is knowledge plus experience. And maybe I didn't get the most knowledge in the world doing it, but I got a ton of experience. So that kind of adds to the wisdom. And it gives you a lot of quiet time to think. You know, I'm sure you probably get your best thinking done when you're, you know, doing a marathon across the Swedish archipelago.

• 1:30:27Rich Roll?

  I don't know how much thinking I was doing then. I was thinking about when it was going to be over. But in general, like on a daily basis, yeah.

• 1:30:34Dan Buettner?

  But I'll bet you find your running very meditative. And you probably get a lot of good ideas doing that. And so the expedition's leading up to what I'm doing now was part of that.

• 1:30:47Rich Roll?

  David just rode his bike across, David who's filming over here. He just rode his bike across Australia.

• 1:30:53Dan Buettner?

  You're kidding? I knew. I loved him. And not just because he's from Malta. And he's got a lot of hair.

• 1:31:01Rich Roll?

  He has excellent hair.

• 1:31:02Dan Buettner?

  He does.

• 1:31:03Rich Roll?

  But yeah, but then, then, you know, maturing those adventures to then, you know, mine the human spirit and extract from it, you know, ideas that can be beneficial to others. Like, that's the National Geographic, like, mission, right?

• 1:31:16Dan Buettner?

  More and more it is.

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Dan Buettner?

  Yes, they're finding, that's the only way they can be relevant. They can't keep covering summits of Everest or, you know, making it to the North Pole, which is going to disappear in a few years anyway.

• 1:31:31Rich Roll?

  Speaking of which, Blue Zones of Happiness is a cover story for Nat Geo. Is that the October issue?

• 1:31:38Dan Buettner?

  It's the November issue coming out mid-October.

• 1:31:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's exciting, man.

• 1:31:43Dan Buettner?

  I'm very psyched.

• 1:31:44Rich Roll?

  With David's photographs?

• 1:31:46Dan Buettner?

  Well, actually, it's Corey Richards' photographs, different photographer. But there was actually two photographers working on it. We worked, it took 14 months to cover and shoot that story. The photographers, super hard workers, they, they made at least two trips to each of these Blue Zones of Happiness to cover it, right? And...

• 1:32:10Rich Roll?

  And what's the difference between the book and what's going to be in the piece?

• 1:32:16Dan Buettner?

  So the piece just focuses on the happiest places. And the book is more about how to take what we learned in these places and put it to work in your life. It offers a blueprint for changing your personal environment, six different facets of your personal environment, to make it more likely you'll be happy. And then it marshals in the science, so we know what really works for happiness and what doesn't.

• 1:32:44Rich Roll?

  It's exciting, man. October 3rd it comes out? And you're gonna be doing like a residency on the Today Show? Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 1:32:52Dan Buettner?

  Yes, four days on the Today Show. It probably already have passed, but it's October 9th, 10th, 11th.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  No, I'll put this out before then. And is that gonna be you in studio at the Today Show with filmed stuff that you took place in these communities? Or how's that gonna go?

• 1:33:12Dan Buettner?

  It's, um, no, I've traveled to all of the Blue Zones areas with the Today Show.

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  I see. So this stuff's in the can already?

• 1:33:21Dan Buettner?

  Yes, but then I'm going to New York to be on set.

• 1:33:23Rich Roll?

  To be there, right.

• 1:33:24Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, marshaled in. But, um, no, I work with Cynthia McFadden there and a very gifted producer named Jake Whitman. And the three, we've done a number of stories with the Blue Zones, the longevity, and now we're doing happiness together and it's a great little team to work with.

• 1:33:43Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be amazing, man. Are you excited? Do you like the publicity, marketing side of all this kinda stuff, being the forward-facing personality of this?

• 1:33:53Dan Buettner?

  I can do it, but no, I'm from the Midwest and the tall tree gets chopped off in the Midwest. But, you know, as an author, you have to sing for your supper, or you don't eat. I enjoy talking with you. This is probably the most fun I'll have, actually.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  Dan's the most charming man on the planet.

• 1:34:10Dan Buettner?

  I'm a reporter. I just, I just report the facts.

• 1:34:15Rich Roll?

  October 3rd, so that's, so it's October 9th and that, and then four days on that, that week, right?

• 1:34:21Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 1:34:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool, man. And what's, uh, what's beyond that? What's next? What's getting you excited?

• 1:34:29Dan Buettner?

  Well, I'll just stay for a while. Um, I'm, I'm, I want to focus on the art of life for a while. And I've spent a lot of time developing this happiness idea and the blue zones idea. And now I want to create a new abocation and, and, um, focus on the art of life. And like, what, how do you optimize this experience we're all given? In Cusad, this great, this great story that a guy gets to heaven. And, uh, um, he, he says, he's, he says, well, okay, what do we do now when we're up here? And God said, you were just in heaven and you screwed it up.

• 1:35:12Dan Buettner?

  You know, I mean, this life is, I think if you really think about it and try, there's so much more to be made of, of our experiences here. And my research shapes the decisions I make, but now I need to, I need to customize that general knowledge into a personal prescriptive, so.

• 1:35:32Rich Roll?

  Well, I think you deserve it, man.

• 1:35:34Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, at least for a month.

• 1:35:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Rich Roll?

  Good talking to you.

• 1:35:38Dan Buettner?

  Likewise, Rich.

• 1:35:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, man. We did it.

• 1:35:40Dan Buettner?

  This is a privilege. Oh, my God.

• 1:35:42Rich Roll?

  Anything else you want to say?

• 1:35:45Dan Buettner?

  No, that, well, I will say, you know, when I first met you and I did this podcast, you know, I, it was just fun rapping with you, but I speak all over the country and I cannot tell you how, you know, I've done Ted Talks and Oprah. More people come up to me and say, oh, I heard you on the Rich Roll Podcast. And it's like an instant membership into the club of cool. So, thank you.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that. Thanks, man. You know all the right things to say to butter me up, man. I'm telling you.

• 1:36:16Dan Buettner?

  Just channeling.

• 1:36:18Rich Roll?

  All right. Uh, super fun, man. And I look forward to doing more of these with you. In the meantime, uh, everybody pick up The Blue Zones of Happiness. I'm sure you're going to be seeing a lot of this book. It's going to, uh, be in our atmosphere everywhere you look. You can catch Dan on The Today Show on those appointed dates and you can find- Find him on the internet at, uh, I always, is it at Dan Buettner or at Blue Zones?

• 1:36:44Dan Buettner?

  At Blue Zones.

• 1:36:44Rich Roll?

  At Blue Zones on Twitter, right? And you're on Instagram as well?

• 1:36:47Dan Buettner?

  At Blue Zones and BlueZones.com.

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  BlueZones.com for all your Blue Zones.

• 1:36:52Dan Buettner?

  Needs.

• 1:36:52Rich Roll?

  Edification and entertainment, man. All right. Awesome, man. Thank you so much.

• 1:36:57Dan Buettner?

  Thank you.

• 1:36:58Rich Roll?

  Peace and plights.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  What a superb human being. I just, I can't say enough good things about this man and the incredible work that he has done and that he continues to do. So give him a shout on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Let him know what you thought of today's conversation. Definitely pick up the new book. Also, we filmed this whole podcast and it is available on YouTube. It's beautifully filmed by David Zammatt. I think you guys are going to really dig it. It's so cool to be able to provide a visual component to these experiences and I'm so excited about having a presence in the visual space. So go to youtube.com/richroll to check it out. Hit subscribe. I would really appreciate it if you enjoy the video content there. Leave

• 1:37:45Rich Roll?

  a comment. Let me know what you think about what we're doing and what we could do and your ideas about how I can better maximize the video space to provide you with good content. That's what I'm all about. Also, you might want to take Dan's True Vitality Test, which will give you customized recommendations on how to live longer. It's just a three-minute thing. I'll put a link up in the show notes to that, so you can check that out. Look, you guys, you know, my mission in life is to help you experience your version of what I have experienced, eating and living the way that I do. And intellectually, I think you guys get it, especially if you've been listening to me for a long time. And yet, every single day, even today, as a matter of fact, I get messages and emails from people saying, "I really want to take that leap, but I just, I don't know how to do it. What

• 1:38:29Rich Roll?

  exactly do I eat? What if I don't know how to cook? What if I don't like this or that? Or I have an allergy and I don't really know where to buy any of these things?" And I realized, being on the receiving end of so many of these messages, that There was an essential tool that was lacking from the toolbox that I have been providing you guys. So that's why we created this meal planner product, the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's an unbelievably powerful, robust, online, mobile-friendly resource tool that takes all the mystery, all the guesswork out of this whole plant-based affair, and it does it at an incredibly affordable $1.90 a week, which is just basically like loose change. And I'm just so stoked and proud of this product. In exchange for that $1.90 a week, here's

• 1:39:12Rich Roll?

  what you get. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plant-based recipes, unlimited meal plans and grocery lists, everything is now metric system compliant. It's all totally personalized and customized based on your goals and your food preferences, your allergies, your time constraints. We have an incredible customer support team available to you seven days a week to answer any question you might have about cooking, food, nutrition, whatever. No question is too small. And these are people who live and breathe this stuff, people with graduate degrees in nutrition, athletes, moms, parents. We have grocery delivery in many metropolitan areas. We're getting amazing feedback. I really think this is life-changing stuff. This is the tool that really will help you access better nutrition and also

• 1:39:56Rich Roll?

  make it stick and do it in a way that's really not going to impinge significantly on your pocketbook, on your wallet. So check it out. To learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu at richroll.com.

• 1:40:11Rich Roll?

  You guys might know that last week was my 51st birthday. Thank you so much for all the amazing birthday wishes. Really warms my heart. I appreciate it. And also, thank you to everybody who contributed to my Charity Water fundraising campaign. As of the date that I am uttering these words, we have raised $42,000, which is unbelievable. I am so grateful and thank you. Everybody at Charity Water is thrilled about this. We're still a little short of my $51,000 goal, but there is time to still contribute. So if you've been on the fence, or sitting on your hands, or whatever, now is the time to make a difference. Every dollar counts. I'm asking for pledges of $51, but if that's too much, that's okay. Pledge whatever you can. And listen, if you can't afford this, then don't worry about

• 1:40:56Rich Roll?

  it. I'm not trying to put undue pressure on anybody. But if you do have a couple of extra dollars laying around, it's such a great feeling to contribute to a worthy cause that is making a significant Difference in the world on a problem that is huge, but also entirely solvable. To learn more, go to my fundraising campaign page at my.cheritywater.org/ritual. I'll also put a link in the show notes to that very page. And speaking of show notes, you guys should always visit the episode pages on my site because we put a ton of time and consideration into packing these pages with many, many links and helpful information related to the episode and the guests to enhance your experience

• 1:41:40Rich Roll?

  and sort of further inform the information that's provided in the context of these conversations that I'm sharing. If you would like to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, hit that subscribe button, please. We also have a Patreon set up for those who would like to contribute financially to my work. That banner ad can be found on any episode page. Thank you so much to everybody who has taken that leap and made a contribution. It's really amazing and I greatly appreciate it. And as I mentioned a couple of days ago on the last podcast, I've been thinking a lot about how I can give back to those that have taken that step. How can I, how can I reward you guys in some way?

• 1:42:23Rich Roll?

  Provide some kind of gesture for contributing to me financially. And I think a good first step that we decided on doing is I'm going to do, I'm going to start doing a monthly live video AMA just for Patreon supporters. I'm going to make an announcement soon about when that first one is, and I'll do it on the Patreon page. Again, it will only be available to those of you who have contributed there in a measure of just saying thank you for doing that. If you'd like to receive a free short weekly email from me, I send one out most weeks. It's called Roll Call. Five or six things I came across over the course of the week, a couple of articles, a documentary I might've watched, a product, new product that I'm enjoying, a video, a podcast, just things like that. Stuff I would ordinarily share on social media.

• 1:43:08Rich Roll?

  Sometimes I still do, sometimes I don't. You know, social media, it's so washed out these days. Even when I post something on one of my pages, I don't know how many people that are interested in what I'm doing actually see it. So this was just a way to, to communicate with you guys a little bit more directly. There's no affiliate links in this. I'm not trying to make any money. It's just a cool way of sharing with you guys information that I found inspirational or educational and to kind of enhance. The dialogue and the community around ideas that I think are important. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiola for audio engineering and production. Sean Patterson for help on graphics. David Zemmet for his photos, his portraits, and now all the amazing video work that he's doing.

• 1:43:52Rich Roll?

  He shot amazing portraits of Dan and I. You can check them out on the episode page. He's doing a great job. The interstitial music this week is by Moby. Thank you, Moby, for giving us permission to use your tune "Look Back In." Greatly appreciated. And theme music, as always, by Anna Lemah. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you soon. Make it a great week. Peace, plants. Namaste.