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

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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're an average American, living in an average American lifestyle, you're losing somewhere between 10 and 15 years of extra life expectancy.

• 0:08Peter Diamandis?

  Just because you're living in America?

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  The average maximum life expectancy of humans living in the first world, if you do everything right, is about 94. Since about 1840, there's almost been a straight-line increase in life expectancy of about 2 and 1/2 years per decade.

• 0:30Peter Diamandis?

  Something is going on there. It's not just random luck.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Right now, we know the capacity of the human machine is 122 years and 4 months.

• 0:39Peter Diamandis?

  That's the eldest, well-documented individual.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And theoretically, the human could go past that, but we just don't know of an example.

• 0:46Peter Diamandis?

  I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually.

• 0:53Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots. My conversation today is with Dan Buettner, the man who has spent more time with more centenarians around the world to understand what allowed them to get to 100 years plus in a healthy fashion. We're going to be dissecting the nine key attributes about the Blue Zones, but going much deeper into what you can do right now, what the data says you have to do right now. It's not expensive. It's the first bridge of what Ray Kurzweil calls "living long enough to live forever." This is an episode for you to take notes on, one of my favorite conversations with an extraordinary individual, a National Geographic explorer, someone who is really creating a future that we can all live into.

• 1:37Peter Diamandis?

  If you love these kinds of conversations, if you'd like me to interview more people like this on longevity and on their Moonshots, please subscribe. All right, let's jump into our episode on Blue Zones and Dan Buettner. Hey, Dan, welcome to Santa Monica.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Great to see you, Peter.

• 1:52Peter Diamandis?

  Now, I'm trying to make sure that Santa Monica is one of the Blue Zones you write about, because I live here and I want to live in the Blue Zone, so I either have to re-engineer this town we're in or move. But in all seriousness, congratulations. Your Netflix series has been nominated for six Emmys, and I hope that you win many of them.

• 2:15Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know... You have lived with more centenarians, studied more centenarians than anybody I know. And my hope is to extract wisdom from that and talk about what you've learned. You know, one of the people who've influenced me in the longevity world is Ray Kurzweil. Ray, one of the experts in AI, but has written about it. And Ray has spoken about three bridges towards, I'll say the word immortality. I don't normally use that. Bridge one is basically maximizing current health and current, you know, natural ways of living longer, taking care of yourself.

• 2:58Peter Diamandis?

  And I think you represent the expert. You've looked at global experiments done in communities and seen who, you know, whose lifestyles. Bridge two is really the beginning of biotech, epigenetic reprogramming, stem cells. And that's where I focus a lot of my life. And bridge three is eventually nanotechnology and uploads. And, you know, I hope we'll get there. I'm planning. But let's dive into bridge one, to use Ray's parlance. You know, let me begin with this question. You've, you've seen people who are making it routinely to 100.

• 3:43Peter Diamandis?

  Are you seeing any of the blue zones who make it to 110 on a routine basis? Or is that, is that stretch, is like getting from 100, 110, like really hard?

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, to, to put a finer point on it, the, the whole idea behind blue zones is to, given that between 6 and 15% of how long we live is dictated by our genes, the other 85% is something else, is to find people who have lived the longest and identify their common denominators or the correlates, what seems to be driving longevity. And the places I've found these blue zones, there are about fifteen times more centenarians, about fifteen times more. But that's probably not because they have better human biological machines than we do. It's more of an artifact that more people are getting to a healthy eighty

• 4:40Speaker 00

  and more getting to a healthy age ninety, and therefore there are more left over to make it to a hundred. So the reality is if you want to make it to a hundred right now.

• 4:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I do.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  You, you, you have to have won the genetic lottery. Um, you'll come along, this bridge two and bridge three may give us something.

• 4:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  That makes it more commonplace. But the, the average maximum life expectancy of humans living in the first world, if you do everything right, is about ninety-four, about ninety-six for females, maybe ninety-two or ninety-three for males. If you have an average set of genes. Um, there are some people have an amazing set of genes and they, they, they, you know, maybe their chance of making to a hundred, you know, go up, uh, three or fourfold. But, you know, what most of us can realistically shoot for, given the state of science right now, is about ninety-four. And the people I've found do it better than anybody else, and that is the body of wisdom I try to convey.

• 5:39Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, I get it. You and I are about the same age. I'm sixty-three.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  I'm sixty-three.

• 5:45Peter Diamandis?

  Sixty-three as well. Okay, so, um, you know, when I think about this, this is my calculations and for folks listening here, you can do your own math. Uh, if in fact I can make it to ninety-three and I have every confidence that you and I can, that's thirty years of progress ahead of us. Thirty years during the most rapid acceleration of AI and biotech ever. Um, and so I'm counting on that a lot. But having said that, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure I've got that runway, and so blue zones is definitely part of that critical part.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  So, so there's two pools of demographers out there when it comes to longevity. Uh, there's one pool like, uh, Jay Oshansky, he's very, he's an American, he's very well known, who will show you that since about eighteen forty, there's almost been a straight line uh, increase in life expectancy of about two and a half years per decade. You know, we've seen big leap and drops. Uh, the year penicillin was discovered, we had the big leap and the year that COVID happened, we had a drop.

• 6:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  But it's about two and a half. So we're given, we're sixty-three, we should get another, um.

• 6:56Peter Diamandis?

  Three decades.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Three decades, that's seven and a half years of extra life. So I just said it's ninety-four, we ought to be able to make one-on-one, just, you know, if progress continued. There is another pool of demographers who calculate the rate of discovery and of genetic discovery, uh, for example. And when you, when you add that sort of calculus in, the, the curve may look like a, a hockey stick as opposed to a straight line. And in, in that case, you're, you know, well, the, but right now, we know the capacity of the human machine is a hundred and twenty-two years and four months.

• 7:33Peter Diamandis?

  That's the eldest, well-documented individual.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Right. Marie Kellmeier.

• 7:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  From France. Um, we, we, um, theoretically, the human could go past that, but we just don't know of an example.

• 7:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And it's really strange, given, you know, hundreds of millions and billions of people, you know, you would think that there would have been some outliers, some, somebody else who had gone past that. Um, and that's, you know, a lot of people use that as the argument for saying, nope, can't get there. If there were genetic variations, if there were lifestyle variations, someone, you know, in the larger the population of humans on earth, someone should have pushed beyond that.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so our environment is constantly changing and the, the way evolution works is, is a species adapt to a changing, um, uh, to put a limited resources, but also a changing environment. And, um, yeah, you know, if we were, um, if we were.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Quadripeds, if walking around on four legs with, you know, an IQ of fifty year, fifty points, like a Neanderthal, we probably wouldn't do very well in the current environment. Um, so, um, you, you, you need the younger generations to die off and get out of the way for the next generation in order for the species to evolve and respond to a changing environment. That is why we die. There's a good reason our species die in an evolutionary context.

• 9:03Peter Diamandis?

  I, I want to dive into that a little bit because it's, it's something that affects my thinking about this a lot, which is, why do we die? You know, uh, why, you know, why don't we continue? And I think for, for folks to understand this, it really goes, we need to go back 200,000 years ago, right? As we, as hominid, so Homo sapiens are what? Couple hundred thousand years old as a species. And, you know, you have, um, I'm speaking to the person who knows more about this, way more than I do, so correct me where I'm wrong. But I think we used to go and be going to puberty probably at age 11 or 12 back then,

• 9:45Peter Diamandis?

  and you'd be pregnant by 12 or 13. Um, and by the time you were 26 or 27, you were a grandparent. And before food was abundant, you didn't want to steal food from your grandchildren's mouths. And so the best thing you could do is die. And so there's no selective pressure, no advantage for having people living longer. Is that, is that correct?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Yes, I, I think generally, um, so for, there's been about 25,000 generations of the human species, and for about 99.8% of that, life expectancy's been 30.

• 10:22Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Um, for every mammal, whether it's a mouse or an elephant, um, the-

• 10:30Speaker 00

  We live about two and a half times the age of what we call procreative success. So, um, as, so procreative success is defined as, um, not only having children. I'm sorry, the, the age of procreation, two and a half times the age of procreation. So, uh, for every mammal, um, as soon as you start having babies, you live about one more generation until you have grandbabies, and then another half a generation, and then you die off. And the idea being, evolutionarily speaking, obviously our offspring need us to survive. Uh, but our great, our grandchildren don't need us as much.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Grand, grandparents help somewhat. So there's an evolutionary, evolutionary rationale for, uh, you to be around, to see your grandkids survive, and then you're, you're kind of irrelevant in the scheme of.

• 11:29Peter Diamandis?

  Or, or you're, you tax on the family unit, you're, you're a drag.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Historically, yes, yes.

• 11:35Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, interesting, cause I had kids at 50. I have two boys now who are 13, and I, I, I think about that as being actually a pro longevity part. I mean, they keep me energized, I'm excited about them. I wanna see, you know, support them and growing. Is, is that, you know, uh, is there any merit to this idea that having kids later in life? Choosing to have kids later in life is a good thing?

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Maybe, and we know that, uh, the, the cohort of, of Americans most likely to reach age 100 are women who have babies after age 40.

• 12:16Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  And we don't know if that's because if you can still have babies after age 40, you're more, uh, physically fit. Uh, or if it's because having babies that late forces you to stay more mentally and physically active to make sure your, you know, your babies survive. But, um, yes, um, in, in blue zones, most of the people making it to 100 have had children and did our grandchi, or grandchildren and even great grandchildren.

• 12:45Peter Diamandis?

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

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for a population, this doesn't, it's somewhere between six and fifteen percent of how long we live is dictated by our genes. Yeah. And but the way to think of it is you have to think of a continuum and there's a sliver of people on one end of the distribution curve who uh, uh, will, you know, run marathons and eat whole food, plant-based and and have great social network and they'll be dead at forty because they have some weird cancer. And then at the other end of the distribution curve, and we hear about them all the time. People are, you know, drink four drinks a day and smoking to make it to a hundred. But for those of us with an average set of genes or maybe even a standard deviation beyond the average,

• 13:56Speaker 00

  you know, genes just aren't that important in how long we live. So the good news is you could have parents who died at sixty and you know, you could still make it to ninety-five and you could also have parents who made it to ninety-five and you could be dead at sixty. So the point is you have to pay attention to what you do on this planet, not what you were given.

• 14:17Peter Diamandis?

  I had a chance to spend dinner with Demis, the CEO of DeepMind. This is Google's AI play and they had done the work in in developing um, uh, something called AlphaFold that was able to predict the folding of a protein from an amino acid sequence. And they just released AlphaFold three, which is an AI model that can predict how

• 14:42Peter Diamandis?

  All the different molecules of life interact, like if you had a protein, a lipid and a sugar together, how they would interact and so forth. And where they're going ultimately is to create AI model of a human cell. Um, and then maybe just specifically your cell based on your DNA, right? And then from a cell to an organ, a tissue and a human. And sort of the idea, you know, cause it really is fascinating what you just said, that six to six to fifteen percent. And we know people on both ends of the spectrum. So what's something is going on there. It's not just random luck. There is some combination of genetics and, and lifestyle that is allowing this drinking, smoking individual to, to make it.

• 15:27Peter Diamandis?

  And I think, I think we're going to be able to definitively know eventually. But until then, it's really following sort of what you've discovered and researched um to maximize your chance.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  There, there's often trade offs that we don't completely understand. For example, inflammation is the, is the um root of every major age related disease. And one theory as to why Sardinians, for example, are living a long time is that they have a relatively low inflammatory response to diseases. And the reason-

• 16:01Peter Diamandis?

  Is it genetically or from lifestyle?

• 16:02Speaker 00

  We don't know, but um they, they tend, they, they live in the, they don't live around the sea. So they haven't been exposed to all the pathogens that people who live around the coast have been. So they live in a relatively clean environment, clean air, clean water, not a lot of visitors. Um, so they can survive through early and middle age with a weak inflammatory response. And um, and therefore they're not suffering higher levels of inflammation later on, which favors their longevity. You take that same Sardinian and you bring them down to the coast. Where they were.

• 16:41Peter Diamandis?

  A coast in Italy?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Or in, coast in Italy, yeah, Sardinia, or any, yeah, or Africa, or Southeast Asia, where malaria is a big problem, infectious diseases are a big problem in a weak inflammatory response, they're less likely to survive the infectious disease. So my point is that something that's favoring longevity and later life, uh, wouldn't favor their, their survival in a place other than where they live.

• 17:06Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  So these are.

• 17:08Peter Diamandis?

  People are optimized for their, for their environment.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're optimized for their environment and one trait which may be really good for them in younger age, aren't good for them in older age and vice versa.

• 17:20Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  So essentially what I'm saying is, maybe you're folding proteins to maximize your life expectancy, but maybe it's not so good, uh, in earlier ages.

• 17:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  You don't know.

• 17:33Peter Diamandis?

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

• 17:56Speaker 00

  It, not major yet, but increasingly more. I just, I was looking at the worldwide data on healthy life expectancy this week and it over since 1990, and toxins in the environment keeps jumping up the list as being more and more important. And, uh, there was this, this story in the Lancet a few months ago that showed that micro, uh, microplastics are now causing more and more artery blockages because they get lodged in our arteries and they cause a, cause a clot. So yes, worldwide, there's no question that, that toxins in our environment are going to lower our life expectancy.

• 18:38Peter Diamandis?

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

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Well, vice versa, by the way.

• 18:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, you know.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  If I weren't me, I'd want to be you.

• 18:52Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, right back at you.

• 18:57Peter Diamandis?

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

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Well, so the, the original blue zones were places where people lived the longest and it was straight math. The people had the highest, most likelihood of reaching age 90 or older. And there's a new metric that's come on, which is health adjusted life expectancy. Run by Global Burden of Disease Projects. And I'm working with them to identify the parts of the world with the highest health adjusted life expectancy.

• 19:40Peter Diamandis?

  Define, define that again, where you health adjusted life expectancy. So I know what life expectancy is.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  So it's years of life you can expect in full health.

• 19:49Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Without chronic disease and without disability. So that's what we want. We don't want to just live a long time.

• 19:55Peter Diamandis?

  It's what I call health span versus lifespan.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yes, that's like, yes, that's a good word for it. But it's live a long time and die quickly. Leave a beautiful corpse and a lot left over for your heirs.

• 20:07Peter Diamandis?

  Fall off a cliff, right?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and it turns out there's some overlap with the original blue zones, but there's lots of other things that, that come, come to play. And I'm trying to parse that out. And, you know, we, if you're an average American right now, you're losing somewhere, living in an average American lifestyle. You're losing somewhere between 10 and 15 years of extra life expectancy. You know, we talk prospectively.

• 20:33Peter Diamandis?

  You mean you're living on the table? What does that, what do you mean your 10 to 15 years of, of life expectancy? Just because you're living in America?

• 20:41Speaker 00

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

• 21:23Speaker 00

  cluster and trying to put that cluster to work in people's lives. And even more directly, and we've had a lot of success with it, entire cities. And my daytime job for much of the past 15 years has been, we get hired by insurance companies to lower the disease load in cities, and then we get paid a proportion of the healthcare savings. So, you know, it's

• 21:45Peter Diamandis?

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

• 21:50Speaker 00

  And then, um, you know, I'm part of, I know we're going to talk about the nine common denominators here a little bit, but the core insight to blue zones and the one that everybody misses because it's very hard to make money at it, is if you really want to live longer today.

• 22:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Trying to change your behavior is a failure for most people almost all of the time. People, you know, there's a few people who, you know, single-digit percentages who have the discipline and the presence of mind to do, even if they know the right thing, if they read Longevity, Your Practical Playbook, which by the way, is a great book and full of all the right ideas. But it's very hard for people to have the discipline and with all the new information, keep doing the right thing for long enough to make a difference. People in blue zones are living a long time, not because they have better individual responsibility, not because they're better people or have better access to, to information, or supplements,

• 22:55Speaker 00

  or stem cells. They just live their lives.

• 22:59Peter Diamandis?

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

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they're not even habits. It's, it's the default. It's their unconscious decision is engineered.

• 23:13Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Day to day, moment to moment, for decades. And what Americans, what makes money is this notion that, do this one thing.

• 23:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  And.

• 23:24Peter Diamandis?

  Sell it now, right?

• 23:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and do it tomorrow, and you're going to live longer. But none of it, none, nothing that we know of, other than not dying. Works if we just do it for a month. There's nothing we can do this month, even this year, that's going to have any bearing as to whether or not we live a year another, live another year of life in two thousand and seventy eight. You know, if we don't continue to do it, so.

• 23:51Peter Diamandis?

  No, I, I, I find that fascinating. It's like, these are the, these are the, they eat the right foods because that happens to be indigenous to what the cultures eat there. They happen to get the exercise because that's, they don't drive cars, they're just walking. Um, you know, they happen to be in communities. So all the things that the nine attributes, the default attributes happen to be ingrained in their lives default, in a default fashion. Is that what you're saying?

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, almost, you know, I read in, in longevity or practical playbook, when I, when you talk about your diet, that's a blue zones diet.

• 24:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Very hard to eat that, very hard to eat a whole food, plant-based diet if you live in Iowa. Or if you live in Houston, Texas, because there's very, you know, we like to eat what's delicious and what's delicious, what's engineered for our palate is fast food is.

• 24:40Peter Diamandis?

  I, I think you have to, I mean, part of what I try and do is give people a longevity mindset. That there's a lot of, of transformation coming. There, there needs to be a positive motivator that's stronger than the feel-good, fat, sugar motivator. There has to be, you have to have something countervailing that. Otherwise, why wouldn't you go the McDonald's route? I mean, if you know that instead, spending extra time and money and difficulty because it's much easier just to eat a fast food diet. But I have to know that if I go the other route,

• 25:23Peter Diamandis?

  it is going to allow me to, to feel better, live a, a, a longer life. Um, and I have to value that. And for me, it's mindset shift. Your mindset is how you react to things. Um, so I've trained myself to just attack vegetables. I love, I love broccoli, my favorite food in the world, you ask me, it used to be ice cream, now it's broccoli with olive oil and lemon. It's like, yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Well, I, you, I, I think you, you nailed it. I mean, if you can get people to change their mindset. But for most people, it's very hard to get them to care about.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Their health in forty years because when you're thirty years old, you can eat Big Macs and pizza and KFC and you've

• 26:12Peter Diamandis?

  You don't think about it.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  You'll find the next day, you don't realize it's not for thirty years until that heart disease or type two diabetes. People kind of care about health. They kind of care about the impact that eating makes on the environment or animal cruelty. But what they really care about is what is delicious today.

• 26:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, listen, I didn't have this mindset and this focus when I was in my thirties. Even into my forties, it really was after fifty. How about yourself? When did you start thinking about this and really caring about this?

• 26:45Speaker 00

  In my forties. I started this project when I was in my forties and I, in my forties, and I could very clearly see what was driving longevity. But I think the bigger point is I was tasting this food. And when you take all the culinary genius that's at work in blue zones and you put it to work at the, you know, food here, it, I was eating it because I loved it.

• 27:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  I start my day every day with a Sardinian minestrone, which is a hundred percent plant based with three beans. And I look forward to it now, but that is explosively delicious in my mind.

• 27:24Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, I know this about you. It's like we were on stage together and like final recommendations and yours was eat beans. So I want to talk about that. I do want to, I do want to get into that for folks to realize because it, that little clip of Dan Buettner audio is a place in my brain. So it's, it's important. Where did you get the data for your, I mean, it's a huge amount of data. Did you work with governments, institutions? How did you actually get the numbers that allowed you to elucidate where the blue zones were?

• 27:59Speaker 00

  So I worked with two demographers who are, with three or actually four demographers that were experts in this sort of longevity. Jay Oshansky, Michelle Poulon and Gianni Pes. Um, and they, they, I mean, their, their academic research is worldwide census data.

• 28:17Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Where you can kind of find life expectancy at the national level, but you can also often break it down to the regional level. And then, once you find an outlier, we actually go to these places and we find birth certificates that go back, let's say, between nineteen hundred and nineteen twenty-four. And you, you find, uh, all of those, the people who were born then, who made it to age ninety.

• 28:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And then you, you correct for immigration, emigration. It's a big job. We spent two and a half years, uh, checking, finding these places and then confirming their ages before we even started this project. But, you know, there's not a shadow of a doubt that these people are living longer than we are.

• 29:04Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company's called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out.

• 29:46Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the U.S. today and we're building twenty around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. Hundred fifty gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 30:30Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 31:11Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. I was surprised, I'm not surprised when I see, you know, Okinawa and Iguaya and Costa Rica, I was surprised to see Loma Linda, which isn't far from where we are, and I have never thought of, you know, that part of California as a blue zone.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  So I was writing the story for National Geographic, and my editor, Peter Miller, said, "You need to find America's blue zone." And there's actually not a geographic blue zone like you see in the other four areas. But it turns out that Adventists, there's something called the Adventist Health Study that followed 103,000 Americans for 30 years. And if you're an adherent Adventist, your life expectancy is about seven years longer than it is if you're not an Adventist.

• 32:14Peter Diamandis?

  Is it fasting?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  And the highest concentration of them are in Lomelinda. That's why we call Lomelinda a blue zone. Got it. The reason they're living longer, again, it's it's a number of factors, but first of all, this idea of a Sabbath, I think is a lot more powerful than we think. They take it very seriously from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. No matter how busy they are, no matter where the kids need to be driven, or what the social schedule is demanding, they stop everything and they take a sanctuary in time, which includes slowing down, stress reduction, includes taking the focus off of of whatever stressing out and placing it on a higher being.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  They have, they always have a potluck lunch and then hardwired right in the religion is a nature walk. So this is something they're doing every single week for decades. Back to this old idea, you have to think long term. They also take their diet directly from the Bible. And I'm not a big Bible reader, but if you look at Genesis, chapter one, verse 26 through 30, God lays out the diet to the Garden of Eden. Wow. Very clearly, three things. I'm writing these down. Every tree that bears fruit, so that's citrus and apples and tomatoes and avocados. Every plant that bears seed, so that's beans and grains and seeds and nuts.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  And then one stanza later, uh, uh, green vegetables. Or greens. And the Advent, that's what the Adventists eat. There's, there's no mention of tomahawk steak or lobster thermidor, you know, it's, you know. Or skittle, or skittles. Yeah. So the Adventists actually follow, so they're mostly Advent. Adventists all also tend to hang out with other Adventists. And this is another longevity strategy we overlook.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  We know that if our three best friends are obese or overweight, there's about 150% better chance that you'll be overweight. Who we hang out with has a huge and lasting impact on our health. And most Adventists, because they have this Saturday Sabbath and they're conservative Christians, they tend to hang out with each other. So they're not going to the party where they're sitting around roasting wieners and, you know, doing shots of tequila.

• 34:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I, I, it's so true. I mean, I write about this, you know, Tony Robbins speaks about, I mean, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you, if you're overweight and you want to get, you want to get into good health, hang out with healthy people. If you're pessimist, you want to be optimistic, hang out with optimistic people. I mean, it really does, it is about shaping your neural net, shaping your, your, your mindset and your behavior. Um, I, I want to begin working our way through the, the fundamental.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Let me just stop you there for a second.

• 35:10Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  When you think about what really works, what you just said really works, and it works for the long run. Our friends tend to be long-term adventures. There's several dozen billion dollars spent on supplements, uh, a year. And if you look at the pool of people who take supplements, they actually have higher mortality than the pool of people who don't take supplements. But we don't spend much money at all helping people optimize their social network. You kind of say it in passing, then we move on to the next topic. But why, we know it works. We can measure it works. Nicholas Christakis at Yale measures, he can tell you exactly, if your friends drink too much, here's your chance of drinking too much. If your friends say they're lonely, here's your chance of being lonely.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  If your friends are obese, here's your chance of being obese. Why aren't we creating programs to help people engineer those five people? Because we know that's going to have a lasting measurable impact, more so than anything else we're spending money on.

• 36:11Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. I love that. That is, and it is so true. I mean, if you're lucky enough to be able to shape it, proactively shape it.

• 36:23Peter Diamandis?

  You identified nine fundamentals of the blue zones. They're well covered in lots of your writings, but I'd like to talk through them, engrain and take and ask to develop a minimum takeaway from here, like an action you can do, right? One of the things that, end of the day is, you can, we can talk about this and people can listen to it, but if, if nothing changes as a result of our conversation here with folks today, it's a missed opportunity. So let's talk about the lowest hanging fruit, literally speaking. So the first one, and there are nine of them, move naturally, incorporate physical activity into daily life.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  So seventy, more than seventy-five percent of Americans don't even get twenty minutes of physical activity. This idea of going to the gym, this idea of going to the gym, and I'd even argue, exercise has been a public health failure. People like you and me will go, but the average American doesn't. So how are you going to get the average, the biggest gain is to go from zero activity to twenty minutes a day. That's three years of life expectancy right there. How are you going to get the average American to do that? The easiest way to do it is to change their streets so they're walkable and bikeable, and safe, and aesthetically pleasing. That is going to get people off the couch to go get their cup of coffee, or go walk to a neighbor's house, or kids walking to school.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And that idea of just for the average American, the biggest longevity impact you're going to get for the three hundred and forty million Americas is make our streets more walkable and bikeable.

• 37:59Peter Diamandis?

  Love that. I mean, I, hopefully, people know if you're over sixty, the number one impact on longevity is, is building muscle, it is, it is movement, it is resistive training. And I, and I think that zero to one, you know, adding twenty minutes. So I think habits like taking a walk after you eat dinner.

• 38:23Peter Diamandis?

  What are other, I mean, for me, I've moved to five workouts a week. And I changed that from like three one-hour workouts to five half-hour workouts. I don't know how you think about that. And it's like, I'm not going to not get some exercise. The other thing I've done is walking meetings. Right, if I have a, a, a meeting, I mean, I, I feel anxious sitting here recording this podcast with you instead of being on the, walking outside. Uh, so walking meetings, um, I have a, I have a walking desk that I'll, uh, that I've used. I have, I'll take my, a lot of us are on Zooms these days.

• 39:05Peter Diamandis?

  And I've got a, a techno gym, stationary bike. And I take all of my board meeting Zooms on my bike. Um, other, other hints?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Well, I, I'd like to address the sort of workouts at the gym. And none of the five blue zones do you see people going to the gym.

• 39:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Uh, yet you have the highest percentage of people making it to age 100. And if you look at gym, uh, adherence, you get, tend to get a lot of people joining with zeal during the new year, right after the new year, but there's only about 20% left at the end of the year. So once again, it's this sort of popular knowledge that really doesn't vet out when it, when it comes to producing longevity. It will for people who actually do it, but people don't actually do it.

• 39:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Uh, meanwhile, for example, if you, um, if you take public transportation to work, which most of us can do, your chances of cardiovascular disease go down by about 20%. Uh, this is the time of year where it's not a bad time to put in a garden. It's hard to do it in Santa Monica, I'm sure, but for most of America, growing a garden is a perfect longevity strategy. Why? Because the moment you put the seeds in it, you kind of care about those plants. And there's a nudge to go out and water or weed. It's low intensity, range of motion, physical activity. Well, you know, when we garden, our cortisol levels go. And at the end of the activity, in a few months, you have fresh vegetables you'll probably eat, so. Uh, that for sure. Those things work.

• 40:39Peter Diamandis?

  Or buy a puppy and take it for a walk.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Yes, there you go.

• 40:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, eh, the, the, the dog needs to get walked every day and therefore the human gets walked.

• 40:47Peter Diamandis?

  Alright, so move naturally is the first one and I, you know, the big, during covid for me, the big thing was walking meetings. Walking.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:54Peter Diamandis?

  And, and now it's like, I, sitting on a zoom, you know, I, I, the phrase I use is sitting is when you're smoking. Um.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 41:04Peter Diamandis?

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

• 41:14Speaker 00

  So, uh, so that sounds like a platitude, but it's not. Uh, Robert Butler, who was the original director of the National Institutes on Aging, he was the author of a paper that looked at people's writing and then followed them over time. And the people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about seven years longer than people who were rudderless in life. And the observation in blue zones, they almost always have a vocabulary for purpose.

• 41:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  So taking the time to know what you like to do, what you're good at, and an outlet for it. It's not just, I know my purpose, but you have to, you have to live it. And by the way, most of the time in blue zones, there's an altruistic, uh, outlet. It's not just painting, it's sitting at home and painting, you know, it's, it's, um, teaching karate, or it's, um, basket making, but with the idea of passing it on to the younger generation. So, um, so many Americans, I think, you know, I just got a letter from a woman from Houston yesterday who saw my documentary and she asked, was about my age, her kids are grown up, she's retired,

• 42:23Speaker 00

  she's walking, she's watching TV, and you could almost feel her kind of dying in real time. And you just wanna say, you wanna take that lady and help her identify. What she has to give to the world and find an outlet for it. I think it's so important.

• 42:38Peter Diamandis?

  I, I think a purpose driven life is the most important um aspect. It's, it's my number one thing on this list. Because if you're driven, if you wake up with purpose in your life, um, you naturally are going to have a higher energy and wanna hang out with people. People wanna hang out with you. That drives social, that drives movement. You know, I talk a lot about having a massive transformative purpose. And more than just a purpose, like, what do you wanna do that's gonna make the world a better place? And it can start with your kids, it can start on your block, it can start in your area of focus. I actually, for those who are interested, I created a large language model um uh called purposefinder.ai

• 43:22Peter Diamandis?

  that will walk you through a series of questions for free, you know, uh and help you create a uh a statement of purpose at the end. So my MTP is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. And so, I get my greatest joy in life when I'm supporting entrepreneurs through X Prize, through my venture fund, through my writings, whatever. It's like, and my message to them is like, go do, go dream big, go and, and, you know, we are, we're living in a world of such incredible capabilities and resources.

• 44:03Peter Diamandis?

  You know, tap into it, do something.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  I think that's the most powerful thing you're doing, Peter, actually. Because it impacts people right now. Some of these pers- pers- perspective ideas, and I think they're very good ideas and right track, they may indeed work. But they don't necessarily make your life better. It may be prolonging a shitty life in some cases. Whereas if you can help people find their sense of purpose, not only are you adding in seven years of life expectancy now, you're making their this week better.

• 44:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it, it, it better right now. And people like hanging out with someone who's got purpose, whatever it is, right? It's like, you wanna, you wanna hang out. The other, the other part of this in the mindset world, um, and one of the books I'm working on is called Mindset Mastery, is the notion that optimists live longer.

• 44:51Peter Diamandis?

  Right, and there's a pretty amazing study of sixty-nine thousand women, fifteen hundred guys that said as much as fifteen percent longer. And I think all of that's tied into the work that you've done. Did you find optimism as a important factor in your work?

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Well, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic in a book called The Blue Zones of Happiness, which took all the statistical underpinnings of happiness. And it turns out, so, you know, optimism is usually measured in, you take a measure of people's life expectancy, right, I mean, their subjective well-being now, on a scale of one to ten, they say they're seven-five, and they think they're gonna be happier in five years. They call that thriving, and that's kind of the, I think, the official way of measuring optimism. And yes, the people who are thriving have about six extra years of life, the top quintile have about six years of life expectancy over people on the bottom quintile.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And there's lots of things you can do to stack the deck in your favor. But it's hard to, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't really

• 45:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  manage it or proclaim it, but, um, yes.

• 46:03Peter Diamandis?

  Can I bring up another subject, a four-letter word called retirement?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  What?

• 46:11Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, I'm not that great in math in that way. But it's like, when my dad, God bless him, it was OB-GYN, and when he turned sixty-five, I was like, Dad, you really should retire, you know, this OB-GYN is stressful, and, and I now look back and I wish I'd never done that. I maybe slowed down a little bit, maybe give up the OB, the obstetrics, but focused in GYN. I, there's a, there appears to be a very high correlation between retirement and death. Like, you give up your purpose in life. Have you studied that or looked at that?

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I know there's a second most dangerous year in your life is the year you retire. The first most dangerous is the year you're born, infant mortality, but there's a big mortality spike that year. And we don't exactly know why, but, you know, I think we would probably both be, it's probably all of a sudden your purpose is gone. And, you know... Two generations ago, there was a good reason to retire because people mostly worked at jobs they didn't like. And soon after they could no longer work, they died.

• 47:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  But now we're living twenty years longer and with, without having a sense of purpose. There's no impetus to get out of bed in the morning, or get out of the easy chair, or take your medicines, or keep your mind. Um, so, and, and the lack of these things, they're all toxic to us.

• 47:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, um, I, my mom, God bless her, lives in Boca and she's doing great. And I'm like, Mom, I, I, you know, she's eighty-eight now and it's like, Mom, I need you to find a new purpose in life so you can stick around for the next twenty years to see my, my kids grow up. And I think, I think if people don't, if you're, if you're retired. Um, I think, uh, there are so many different things you can do to re-renew, uh, a resurgent purpose. Whether it's teaching, whether it's mentoring, whether it's, you know, like you said, just taking care of, of, um, people in your community who are less well off than you. I mean, those things that create that level of connection and purpose.

• 48:23Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I, I think is the single most important thing.

• 48:27Speaker 00

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

• 48:37Peter Diamandis?

  I love ikigai.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  And be, and be their entire adult.

• 48:39Peter Diamandis?

  Please explain what ikigai is.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  It's essentially, um, knowing why you wake up in the morning.

• 48:45Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  It's, it's like metabolizes purpose with altruism.

• 48:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  And, um, the, the, the Costa Ricans have, uh, plan de vida. Um, so. Um, that, that's so important. There's a, there's a researcher from Columbia University named Linda Freed.

• 49:04Peter Diamandis?

  I know Linda, yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and she found that, um,

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Older people who volunteer in a meaningful way in schools, and that usually means reading to kids. They have lower healthcare costs, they have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, and they have lower BMI. And all of that equates essentially to lower, uh, higher life expectancy. So it's actually been measured in the United States. But it has to, usually has to be a meaningful, you have to feel like you're doing something that means something.

• 49:35Peter Diamandis?

  All right, so to catch you up again, if you're listening to these, uh, nine, number one, don't sit during your Zooms, take your walks, take your walking meetings. Purpose, if you're retired, finding your purpose, it is the greatest gift you can give yourself and people around you. Downshift, okay, uh, this is my biggest problem. Uh, downshifting, slowing down, what does downshifting mean?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  It means unraveling some of the stress of the human condition, and that also usually means lowering inflammation. So in all these blue zones, they have these sacred daily rituals. Um, the, the Okinawans have ancestor veneration, the, uh, Adventist pray, that works at downshifting, the, the, uh, Costa Ricans and the Acarians take a nap, uh, which also works at lowering cortisol levels.

• 50:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Sardinians do happy hour. But it's having something every day that puts some punctuation between this, the hurry and worry of your life and, uh, allows you to, um, take your mind off of.

• 50:42Peter Diamandis?

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

• 50:49Speaker 00

  There, there's no pattern on that. I mean, the Okinawans, usually it's first thing in the morning is ancestor veneration. Adventists, it's usually first thing in the morning, they'll say a prayer. It's also a little prayer before a meal, which by the way, it sounds antiquated, but the idea of expressing some gratitude for your food, um, you'll slow down, uh, you're more likely to honor what you're eating rather than just plunging it down and.

• 51:15Peter Diamandis?

  You know, let me, let me double on that, cause Helen Messier, who's my chief medical officer at Fountain Life, uh, talks about what she calls a vitamin O. So what's vitamin O? She goes, it's taking some deep breaths when you sit down to eat, to put yourself into a parasympathetic mode, to rest and digest mode. And the flip side of that is eating while watching CNN.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:37Peter Diamandis?

  Right, where the world's blowing up, everybody's lying, everybody's dying and you're eating food and you're under stress. And I, I agree with you, they just a, a moment of doing gratitudes around the table. Uh, or a prayer, or just.

• 51:52Peter Diamandis?

  Just everybody together, stay a deep breath in.

• 51:56Peter Diamandis?

  It just, and out, and it just automatically just has this massive impact on the body. I mean, I just, I've just one breath, just made me feel like just. Really just relax and slow down. It's extraordinary.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  And it, it, a, a prayer is kind of like taking a breath.

• 52:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  And, um, also it's easy to remember because you get the prompt of, oh, we're sitting down to dinner. It's like, I'm gonna brush my teeth. Oh yeah, I should floss too. So it's a great opportunity.

• 52:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you're not gonna forget dinner. And so.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:28Peter Diamandis?

  Connecting, connecting that to, um, I, I guess I, I've been. Uh, getting up in the morning and I, my meditation time has been writing for an hour every morning. Um, but I've added, uh, red light and a meditation during red light to it. Um, so.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Tell us about red light.

• 52:48Peter Diamandis?

  Well, red light therapy right now, photo modulation. Has an impact of reducing inflammatory factors. So it's in reducing inflammation. Um, and it's also, uh, really supporting skin collagen. Um, keeping your largest organ, your body, young.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Did you sit in a booth or something?

• 53:12Peter Diamandis?

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

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 53:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  I'm gonna put that baby on.

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

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

• 53:36Speaker 00

  You have nice hair, Peter.

• 53:37Peter Diamandis?

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

• 53:55Speaker 00

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

• 54:07Peter Diamandis?

  It's not that, it's not that complicated. I, I made a decision last year to add 10 pounds of muscle, which was like my, my objective, and it was increasing my protein intake, uh, to one gram per pound. Um, and you need that adding creatine, five, uh, five grams of, of creatine, uh, along that line to stimulate, uh, blood flow and, and muscle growth. Uh, and then increasing the frequency of workouts to, instead of, you know, three times a week to five days a week. And now it's gonna be maintaining it. Um, sleep has always been important. I mean, my only challenge, as I mentioned this earlier, yesterday was the, uh, Flight Four of Starship.

• 54:52Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, and so I woke up at 4:00 AM to watch that. It was delayed till about, about 6:00. Uh, but it was funny waking up at 4:00 AM and then seeing my news feed an article that one of the newspapers had written about, you know, Peter D. Mannes thinks sleep is the most important element of, uh, of longevity, and here I am, like, getting up at 4:00 AM.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  I went to bed after lunch yesterday.

• 55:15Peter Diamandis?

  But, you know, it's, my dad used to say, bind method and artist on everything in moderation. Um, so I've added red light, uh, therapeutics, uh, and I'll, I will run the numbers. I've been doing consistently now for two months and I'm measuring inflammatory markers. I'll keep this as part of my life. The problem is you and I travel and... Maintaining these habits while travel is so difficult, right? Um, and I'll publish the next iteration of longevity, uh, practical playbook, uh, next you said 2024 version in front of you. I'll publish a 25 and I update everything I do, uh, and why, uh, so downshifting 80% rule.

• 56:00Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, please, what does that mean?

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Well, it comes from, it was inspired by the Okinawan, uh, adage, harahachi bu, which essentially means stop eating when your stomach is 80% full. It actually goes back to Confucius. And, um, and it's very much in step with, uh, the notion of intermittent fasting. It's, um, you know that when you, uh, um, feed monkeys as much food as they want compared to a group of monkeys that get 30% fewer calories, the underfed monkeys live longer. And I believe it's the same thing with humans. So, um,

• 56:39Peter Diamandis?

  The challenge, of course, is that there's this delay between us being actually full and feeling full.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Right. So I, I, uh, the blue zone approach is not necessarily, uh, harahachi bu is what they say that instead of a prayer. So it's this sort of natural place to kind of insert a, a habit. I'm not a huge fan of habits, but they work better if they're coupled with another activity. Uh, but the way harahachi bu shows up in the, in the blue zone context is they tend to preplate their food. And then put the rest away instead of eating family style, which occasions eating fewer calories.

• 57:20Peter Diamandis?

  And what, how does that affect the speed of eating? Oh, so in other words, I have a limited amount on my plate.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it, it affects the amount of food you're gonna eat. So instead of thinking about, stop eating when your stomach is 80% full, you, there's only enough food on your table to fill your stomach 80%.

• 57:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Um, they tend to eat off of smaller plates. Cornell Food Lab found that if you're eating off a smaller plate, you're you're bright, you unconsciously eat fewer calories. You never see a TV.

• 57:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  In a Blue Zone kitchen. They tend to eat, you know, huge breakfasts and a medium sized lunch and little or no knit and low little or no dinner. So the impact is, you know, if you look at their dietary surveys over time, until about the year 2000, they were eating about 80% the calories that Americans are eating right now.

• 58:10Peter Diamandis?

  And then so then modernization hit them?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, as soon as the soon as the uh American um standard American diet shows up in these Blue Zones, longevity goes out the back door.

• 58:23Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. Yeah, I a couple of tricks that I've learned from interviewing folks. Um, one is the order in which your food, eat your food matters. And so I've I've made this a

• 58:36Peter Diamandis?

  a part of my every meal. So first of all, when you go to a restaurant and they serve the bread and wine first, that's like the worst thing you could eat at the beginning of your meal, right? It just makes you hungrier. Um, so I eat veggies first. Um, so I'll literally eat all the vegetables on my plate first, uh, which slows the digestive tract. And then I'll eat my protein. And then I've actually gotten away from all carbs, but if you're gonna eat carbs, eat the carbs last. Um, because your digestive, first of all, you'll be more full. And then it's slowed the the the veggies and the protein have slowed your digestive process a little bit. So I'm not sure if you've seen that in any form.

• 59:18Speaker 00

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

• 59:26Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, please.

• 59:27Speaker 00

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

• 59:33Peter Diamandis?

  I love I had a great lentil soup last night.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and those are carbs, by the way.

• 59:38Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, a bean. So let's talk about beans one second.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Okay, so people, so in blue zones, you know, I wrote this book called

• 59:47Peter Diamandis?

  And I should have said high glycemic index carbs, I minimize

• 59:52Speaker 00

  But your audience knows that, but most Americans don't know what the hell high glycemic carbs means. They, and you tell people, by the way, even bread, in, in blue zones, they're eating a ton of bread. I'm in the longest lived men in the history of the world in Sardinia until about 1990. Sixty percent of their caloric intake came from bread, breads and pastas. So it's very hard to square that, there's, but of course it's sourdough bread. And sourdough bread actually lowers the glycemic load of a meal. But people don't really, they say, bread, oh my God, dangerous carb. So it's too much of a blunt instrument to tell people not to eat carbs. You know, we need a better word.

• 1:00:34Peter Diamandis?

  Correct, correction, appreciated. So thank you for that. I appreciate your wisdom.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  But it was more of a reason to sort of slip in there some, you know, what people really eat to, to, to live a long time. But anyway, back to

• 1:00:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so honestly, I want to go back to what type of beans and are, are you seeing as important to be part of your diet?

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  So all blue zones are eating about a cup of beans a day. And in Okinawa, they show up as soybeans and tofu. Uh, in, in Costa Rica, they're black beans and, and um, Icaria, Greece, they're mostly Uh, lentils and garbanzos and Sardinia, it's fava beans. It doesn't seem to matter, uh, but, um, people who eat a cup of beans a day also live about four years longer. And I can't draw a causal relationship, but I can tell you it stacks the deck in favor of longevity. You know, I hear this all the time, we, we need to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into the inner city. No, that's the absolute wrong thing to do.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Why? They're expensive, they're not shelf stable. And people in their city don't know what the hell to do with fresh fruits and vegetables. You give them beans and rice. And by the way, you take a bean and a grain, you get all the amino acids, you get a whole protein. Beans and corn tortilla, beans and pasta. Those foods together, you're giving people 95% of the fiber, the complex carbohydrates, the protein they need. A lot of, uh, micro minerals, they're cheap. And the most important thing is you can make them taste delicious. Those are the longevity foods I think we should be promoting first.

• 1:02:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, which gets to number five here, which is a plant-based diet. Meat eaten in small amounts, five times per month. That's, that is a small amount.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  That comes from a meta-analysis of one hundred and fifty-five dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the last ninety years. And I did it under the aegis of Harvard University, Walter Willett. And, um, um, that amounts to about twenty pounds of meat a year. The average American eats about two hundred and forty pounds of meat a year.

• 1:02:48Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  And there's no question, that quantity of meat is doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your chances of cardiovascular disease and cancers of the GI tract, breast and prostate cancer. So a little bit of meat is probably not a problem, but the, the levels we eat in America for sure are driving chronic disease.

• 1:03:08Peter Diamandis?

  Is that, is eggs fall in the same category there?

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

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

• 1:03:31Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, but when you, you remember, you're also ingesting their hormones, you're ingesting the antibiotics. Maybe, you know, you probably, you probably say, well, I eat grass-fed meat. Um, sure, but that's only about two percent or four percent.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

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

• 1:04:06Peter Diamandis?

  But, but I, I do, I do eat chicken, I do eat fish, and I, I mean, salmon, uh, in particular. Uh, I want to come back to fish in a moment. But, uh, I recently, I do toxin testing all the time and my arsenic levels were high. And I'm like, like, what's going on? And my physician, uh, at, at Fountain Life says it's chicken. It's coming from the amount of chicken you're eating.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  The number one driver of chronic disease in America is our sodium intake. And the number one source of sodium in America is chicken.

• 1:04:37Peter Diamandis?

  Really?

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the billion chickens we eat, so.

• 1:04:41Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, folks, do you know how many chickens there are on the planet? This number just blows me away. It's like thirty seven billion chickens on planet Earth. We're, we're a planet of chickens. It's crazy.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, and chicken is not a significant source of protein in any of the blue zones. It's, I'd be careful of chicken. And we think, oh, it's the other white meat. But when you look at the subcellular level of saturated fat, it's on par with beef. And, um, all, uh, one hundred percent of chicken has feces in it. And, um, E. coli.

• 1:05:12Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  None.

• 1:05:17Peter Diamandis?

  None?

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:05:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You look great. Tell me about fish.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Blue zones, they're consuming about four servings of fish a, a week. Um, it's typically mid-chain fish, like anchovies or sardines. That's sort of the cheap fish that rarely makes it to our, our grocery stores here in America. And interestingly, in blue zones, the, even though they're on islands, like.

• 1:06:04Peter Diamandis?

  I would have thought a lot more fish.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, but for example, in Sardinia, they're fifteen miles away from the, uh, ocean. You can see the ocean, but they never go down there. It's, it used to be a day's journey to get there. Then you catch the fish. And then by the time they get the fish back up in the village, it stinks. Same with Ikaria, by the way, which is in Greece. The blue zone in Icaria is not on the coast, not the coastal city. It's up in like this crater. Because they had to always hide from the pirates. So it's sort of a hidden part of Icaria. So they're eating mostly beans and, and you know, greens, the type of shit we'd whack from our backyard. They're making hortas and beautiful pies.

• 1:06:45Peter Diamandis?

  I'm familiar, my grandmother used to make that for me. You know, I had a blue zone diet when I was growing up, living at home. And it shifted when I went to medical school. Um, this next one, wine at five. So I am seriously curious about this because a lot of the science data today says, listen, alcohol has no added benefits and it's detrimental. Um, are you? I mean, this is not what science is saying, but this is what the blue zones do. Two glasses per day.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm investigating a place where it's more like, more like four glasses. So I'm familiar with the epidemiology, which everybody cites that there's no safe level of alcohol. Um, but they also factor in things like falls and drunk driving and fatal accidents. It's not always just what, you know, and there's some, I, I would say them weak studies on alcohol and, and you know, gray matter in your brain and so forth. But, um,

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  I know that ninety percent of people are making it into their nineties and hundreds and, and all the blue zones except Lomelinda are drinking every day of their life. They're drinking homemade wine, a couple glasses. It's all, almost always with a meal or always with food. It's almost always in the presence of other people. And their life expectancy at middle age is ten years longer than us. So I know for certain that drinking a little bit is not mutually exclusive with living a long, healthy life. Could they live two or three more years without drinking it? Maybe, but maybe not. We, we don't know for sure. All I know is,

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  um, you know, a little bit doesn't seem to, seem to get in the way of living a long time in blue zones.

• 1:08:36Peter Diamandis?

  Number seven is a challenge in our loneliness epidemic here, which is belong. Participation in faith-based services four times per month adds four to 14 years of life expectancy.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Yes, again, that's a meta-analysis. Gary Fraser. So I interviewed personally about 430 centenarians and all but about five said they belonged to a faith-based community. And you can't really measure spirituality because it's too vague, but you can measure religiosity, which is showing up. And some people show up, church, temple, mosque, it doesn't seem to matter. Those are the ones living for extra years of life expectancy. Arguably, the most cost-effective public health intervention would be getting inner-city youth involved with the church. I'm not a religious person, I'm not advocating anything here, but all I can say,

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  those are the ones getting the extra 14 years of life expectancy. And it might be because they're lowering their chance of getting involved in risky behaviors. It might be belong because they have...

• 1:09:45Peter Diamandis?

  But who cares?

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it works.

• 1:09:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Yes, I think, I think we're quick to dismiss the benefits of having our aging parents around. You know, they're, the definition of wisdom is knowledge plus experience. So the longer you've been around, the better chance your wisdom. In these blue zones, you, older people, it would shame the family to put your older person in a retirement home. Which, by the way, you put your aging parent in a retirement home... Instantly, it's a two to six year drop in life expectancy.

• 1:10:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  They're not, and you talk about purpose, there's no purpose in retirement home. Uh, so the longer you can keep your parent engaged, ideally with your family, cause in blue zones, you see them, they're the ones cooking, they're the ones, um, stewards of this food tradition, which seems to be driving longevity. They're helping mom with childcare, they're growing the garden, they have the agriculture was and the resilience.

• 1:11:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  And it turns out that a child who lives in a home with a grandparent, they actually have lower rates of disease and lower rates of mortality. Um, we don't know exactly know why, but it's this virtuous circle that we're quick to, again, quick to dismiss, but very clearly a longevity strategy.

• 1:11:28Peter Diamandis?

  And last one on your list here, right to tribe. So, social circles that support healthy behaviors. And, and this folds back into, you know, who are the five people you spend the most time with? Um, and falls back into, you know, uh, default behaviors because of the tribe you're with.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yes. And, yeah, I call it tribe, but it's the five people who we spend the most time with. And they're typically people with whom we can have a meaningful conversation, who we can call on a bad day and they'll care. But I would argue that is the most powerful thing you can do to add years to your life. Cause friends are long-term adventures and they have a measurable impact on what we eat, how much physical activity we get, uh, often our sense of purpose, how much quality social interaction we get. You know, the longevity project at Harvard, you know, that followed a cohort of Harvard graduates since 1925,

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  the, you know, millions of dollars of study. Um, the core finding was the number one determinant of longevity, quality of your social relationships. You have the power to curate your social relationships and that's what the, your best in longevity investment, um, uh, is.

• 1:12:48Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  Jealous.

• 1:13:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm loving it. And, and just having that energy in the home and the hugs and waking up and there's someone there making coffee and it's, it's great. So, uh, actively choosing that social life and putting yourself in those situations. I think also when you're looking to decide where you want to live, right? Making sure that you've got, like you said, walkable streets and friends nearby. I mean, all those, those, do you, do you add that to the equation when you're deciding where you're gonna live? I mean, those are important things to do.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I know when it comes to happiness, that, that number one thing you can do to increase happiness and therefore longevity is decide where to live. It's, you can remember to do gratitude or try to remember or savoring. Uh, but for example, when you take unhappy people from Moldavia, a Soviet bloc country, and move them to Copenhagen, or unhappy people from Southeast Asia or Africa and move them to Canada, which is a happy country, nothing else changes about them. Their gender doesn't change, their sexual preference doesn't change, their BMI doesn't change, but within one year, they report the happiness level of their

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  adoptive home, which is often a doubling of happiness. There's no other thing you can do. Same thing with zip codes in the United States. If you live in Kentucky, counties and certain counties in Kentucky, your life expectancy is 22 years less than if you live in Boulder, Colorado. Why? You move to Boulder, Colorado, every street's walkable. It's quicker to bike across the city than it is to take a car across the city. The healthy food options abound. You're a 10-minute walk into nature and, and these things are there for the long run and we miss them. We miss them in the.

• 1:15:18Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the Gallup Wellbeing Index, known as the WBI. That's, uh, that they have BMI and they have, um, Life satisfaction, that's probably the best source, I think.

• 1:15:38Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Or CDC also.

• 1:15:40Peter Diamandis?

  Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons? The ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and use their AI models to deliver members' critical

• 1:16:24Peter Diamandis?

  health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health.

• 1:17:09Peter Diamandis?

  If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. You and I joked about this, but I am curious. Is there a correlation between sex life and longevity?

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  Yes, so if you're over 40 and you're having sex at least twice per week, you have about half the rate of mortality than your friend who's not getting it at all.

• 1:17:42Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  But once again, it's, we don't know if that's because, you know, it's a reflection of if you can still have sex over 40, you're fit to begin with, or if there's some longevity giving aspect to sex. I suspect it's the latter.

• 1:17:58Peter Diamandis?

  You know, causality versus, you know, correlation is a lot of the

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:18:03Peter Diamandis?

  Things you have to, you have to figure out.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  But Peter, you know, I look at correlate, in most cases.

• 1:18:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Correlation is a pretty good suggestion of the direction of it. I look at it as it stacks the deck. If it can do no harm.

• 1:18:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  To put it in doctor's term, all it can do is stack the deck in favor of a better outcome. So I'm all for looking at what correlates to longevity and putting it to work in your life.

• 1:18:27Peter Diamandis?

  So we talked about a bunch of things and one of the things, and I think about this a lot, is food. And food has lots of factors. It's what's convenient. What do I actually know I should be eating? What tastes good? And, and you just, you've just come up with a line of food called Blue Zone Kitchen. Tell me about that.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Well, I'm a big believer that you have to create an environment where the healthy choice is the appealing choice and the easy choice. And, you know, over eighty percent of, of foods and grocery stores are, are highly processed or sugar added. Most of the things other than the vegetables by themselves are not all that healthy. So I spent an entire year with a team of people and we took, um, basically Blue Zone's food and I said, I, I said to them, I want them maniacally delicious. And they came up with four foods, basically their bowls, and they're in the frozen section of every Whole Foods in America, 1,200 other grocery stores. They're under eight dollars.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  And they're all maniacally delicious. And I know that because People Magazine just gave us the number one award.

• 1:19:36Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  And according to Nielsen, of the four meals we have, they rank number one, two, three, and six as the top sellers. And it's, the company's only six months old.

• 1:19:46Peter Diamandis?

  Congratulations.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  Blue Zone's Kitchen.

• 1:19:47Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Uh, you can, uh, put it in your microwave or you can cook it at stove top if you want. Most people put it in their microwave.

• 1:20:01Peter Diamandis?

  And it's all plant-based?

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  It's a hundred percent plant-based and the, the, the difference between ours and most frozen food, usually the, the, um, the-

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  Main component is the sauce. They've spent a lot of time making that sauce really delicious. And then the food underneath that, it's batched and it's cooked at one temperature. But we've sourced the best ingredients, the best beans, the best vegetables, the best grains. And then we cook them at the right way, the right level, so that they maintain their texture and their flavor forwardness. And so therefore, the sauces that we have have less sodium, no added sugar. But you still have all the flavor because the, it's not just a pile of mush. It's a symphony of deliciousness.

• 1:20:47Peter Diamandis?

  A symphony of deliciousness. I like that. That sounds good. I mean, but it's interesting, right? Eight bucks. I mean, you're not going to get out of McDonald's for less than that.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:20:57Peter Diamandis?

  So you're giving someone economically and just buying these, can you set up a subscription as well to have it delivered?

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  No, not right now. They're only in grocery stores. Eventually, we hope to do that. But the team I have, their expertise is frozen food and we got, get really good at that first.

• 1:21:20Peter Diamandis?

  Congrats. I look forward to diving into that. What else? What, where are you going next? What are you excited about? Where do you want to, I mean, you're young.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  I'm your age.

• 1:21:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, like I said, you're young. You've got, you've got some good decades ahead. What do you want to do next? What purpose, purpose-driven life do you want to lead next, Mel?

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  You know, I tried to retire four years ago and I failed miserably at it. And at a certain point, I realized that work is more fun than fun. So I'm working on another National Geographic article and book about the healthy, the places where people enjoy the longest life in full health. My, I hope to collect a few of these Emmys with my Netflix Living to 100 series.

• 1:22:06Peter Diamandis?

  When did you find out about that?

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  I find out on Saturday.

• 1:22:09Peter Diamandis?

  All right.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  Probably be after this podcast.

• 1:22:11Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I, um, text me, please let me know.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will, but I get to walk the red carpet. I'll feel like a big shot for a day. I'm from Minnesota. You know, play, you know, humble, demure people. And, um, and, uh, so I hope there's a second series, second season of, of, uh, Netflix. I, I believe there will be. And I really enjoy doing that. And I, I, I'd like to continue to evolve this city work. Um, Gal calculates that our, we've worked with 72 cities and they calculate that we've saved over 10 million life years. Those are real people. You know, I haven't gotten anybody to 110, but I've gotten a lot of people, um, uh, an extra two or three years of life expectancy, uh, help them avoid type two diabetes and,

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  and certain types of cancers and dementia and cardiovascular disease. And when I think about altruism, when I think about what might biggest impact on this earth, there's not a check I could write or a foundation I could start that would have a bigger impact on humanity than what I'm doing with these blue zone cities.

• 1:23:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, it's you, you've gotten, you've done an amazing job building a meme that is powerful, that is penetrated and which is, uh, which is, uh, which is hard to do. Do you mind if I ask you, I'm just curious, the whole process of creating your Netflix series? So, uh, cause I'm, I am fascinated by that world, living in, in, in LA. Um, was this something that they came to you with?

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  Yes, they, they came to me. I've been approached two dozen times to do documentaries. And, um, I'm, they typically, they, they want to hurl you in, into the gladiator ring of ratings. And there's all these sort of cheap ways. They wanted celebrities there and they wanted kind of a, uh, biggest loser construct. And I said, no, um, I want to create longevity porn. Uh, my stuff, eating beans and socializing is not nearly as sexy as this type of stuff you do, Peter. Um, and I know I didn't have that. So we made up for it by buying, by getting the best directors, the best cinematographers. And we sat down and, um, we spent over a year and a half shooting this.

• 1:24:29Peter Diamandis?

  Cause you're in beautiful locations.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  Beautiful location, but.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  We also, Clay Jeter was the director, he's up for an Emmy, I believe. He's one of the best directors in this genre. Uh, trained at chef's table, actually. And um, I needed to make uh, make, living to a hundred aspirational. And usually programmers can't see that as being good TV. And, and we, we cracked the code on it, but it, it took a long time. And it also, I think when you stick to your guns, when you have a

• 1:25:02Peter Diamandis?

  Principles.

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  A mission and principles.

• 1:25:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  And I don't relent.

• 1:25:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  And it means saying no fourteen times before you say yes to the right person. And, and Netflix said, you know, we, they came to me during COVID. They had flush with money. They had the right budget. Uh, it's a, it's the number one. There's no better place to release a documentary series or a movie or TV than Netflix. Right. They have the biggest penetration in the world. But it was hard work. I've, I've written uh, five New York Times bestseller books. Writing's hard. TV was twice as hard.

• 1:25:36Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm. Fascinating. Next book?

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Oh, and eh, next book is, is

• 1:25:42Peter Diamandis?

  Are you working on something?

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm working on the book of this um, uh, life, he- health adjusted life expectancy. Places around the world where people live the longest lives without, in full health.

• 1:25:54Peter Diamandis?

  So, he- health span is?

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, health span, yeah.

• 1:25:57Peter Diamandis?

  And, and do you imagine you might find that in your blue zones? Or you'll, will you find?

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

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

• 1:26:07Peter Diamandis?

  Do I live in, do I live in one?

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:26:09Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  No, but the, you know, the, America does a horrible job.

• 1:26:13Peter Diamandis?

  I bet.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  Uh, healthy life expectancy in the United States is about sixty-four. Um, you know, we're, we're, you know, we're the juvenile delinquents of health. Um, and the, the A-team, they're elsewhere. They enjoy twelve more years of life in full health. So, think about that at age seventy-five. You're just, maybe you're done with your first career, you have financial security, you have a spouse, you have, you wanna travel, just imagine the value proposition of twelve good years.

• 1:26:46Peter Diamandis?

  Oh.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  And these people have achieved, and they've achieved it by very definable factors that we under-celebrate, and my job is gonna be bringing them, allowing people to see clearly what drives healthy life expectancy, and then showing how to put it to work in their lives, or showing cities how to put it to work in their policies. That's my next.

• 1:27:06Peter Diamandis?

  I love, I love that. I mean, and again, you're the first bridge that everybody who cares about this needs to be focusing on, cuz it's in your control right now. And by the way, it's not expensive.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:27:17Peter Diamandis?

  I think one of the most important things people to realize, cuz, you know, listen, a lot of the stuff I talk about, um, you know, uh, advanced diagnostics to catch disease early, and therapeutics and so forth, there's a budget behind that, but, uh, sleep, diet, exercise, community, all of these things are, uh, fundamentals, uh, you know, implemented by some of the, uh, I don't wanna say the poorest people, but, you know, it doesn't take anything.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  So, the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica, currently has the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world. So, best chance of reaching a healthy age ninety-three or so. Uh, they're all below the poverty line. They spend one fifteenth the amount we do on healthcare in the United States, and after, uh, we just, uh, identified it as a blue zone, Stanford came in, and they measured the telomeres. And they found the people with the longest telomeres, which means the people with the lo-, the youngest biologically speaking, were the poorest people, not the rich people. So, it flies right in this face of the notion that you have to be rich to be healthy in this country.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  And, and, uh, their set of, of, of, uh, lifestyle factors are very replicable, uh, by the poorest Americans.

• 1:28:33Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:28:53Peter Diamandis?

  And, and so that's, that's great, and I get that. Is it, do you think it's possible to actually engineer from the ground up? Um, a blue zone. I have lots of friends of mine, not lots of friends, a number of friends of mine who are are excited about building cities in the future or and in in the UAE, they're building new island communities and so forth. Could, do you think you can engineer from the bottom up?

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:22Peter Diamandis?

  A blue zone?

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Yes. And there's, I wrote a book called The Blue Zones Challenge, which talks about evidence-based ways that you can set up your kitchen, your home, your workplace, your commute, your bedroom. Um, we're, we're always looking for the silver bullet.

• 1:29:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  And to a certain extent, the X Prize, it's a silver bullet.

• 1:29:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  I'm interested in the silver buckshot. I'm looking at the, the eighty things that the healthy swarm of nudges and defaults we can unleash on our bigger life.

• 1:29:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  And they're all insidious, but they all have that half a percent or quarter of percent impact on our behaviors. But when you add those all up over time, especially since they're long lasting, they have a big bang for the buck.

• 1:30:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, I'm a very driven person, uh, meaning, um, I love what I do and I'm, you know, I operate typically 24/7. I've shifted my life to really, other than during a Starship launch, going to sleep at nine thirty and then waking up at, at five thirty, spending an hour writing, going to the gym, getting my, my morning routines, which are important to me, those were, those routines, I feel good about them. But, um, I don't do weekends well and, uh, vacations are a rarity. Uh, but I'm purpose driven in that. How do you think about that balance?

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

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

• 1:32:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Speaker 00

  Secret sauce.

• 1:32:08Peter Diamandis?

  It, I, I consider myself a kid in a candy store having a blast. So I'm driven by the stuff I find exciting and like curiosity and desire to do. Uh, it's interesting. I went through something called the landmark forum. Ever hear of it?

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's, it's the derivative of S and, and one of the things you do is you look back at moments of time in your life that had like events that you made mean something. You know, I'll tell a story I've never told before here, uh, which was my mom was a Cub Scout leader. And I was a member of the Cub Scouts and, uh, uh, during that Cub Scout year, uh, there was a play that had to be done and my mom felt like it was the right thing to do not to give me the lead in the play. So she gave the lead in the play to some other kid. And I was so, so distraught that I, I, I demanded that I get five other parts in the play to make up for not having to lead the play.

• 1:33:11Peter Diamandis?

  And I, I think I made like, uh, I think I made the, the sense of like doing more things means getting my mom's love and that's of course, she's amazing and I love her dearly and she loves me immensely. But that was the first moment in time that I could point at something. So, um, I get. Today, I get a rejuvenated energy coming to something new. Um, and so this morning I was on a series of phone calls for Fountain Life. Um, this afternoon, I've got some meetings for my venture fund and so I come back. But you can't do all these things well unless you have an amazing team.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Peter Diamandis?

  And so I have learned having an incredible CEO, someone running all of these. I like the energy of starting something and then helping it, helping it grow. But, uh, the more is better disease is what I call it.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  I, but you, you, the, the pearl that you said in that story, which, which I caught was you wanted to make your mother proud.

• 1:34:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  And perhaps that is the, maybe it's.

• 1:34:20Peter Diamandis?

  The intrinsic motivation there.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and maybe it's a message to mothers out there and having high expectations of your children. And when they do something, um, show your pride in them and maybe they'll, maybe your child will be a Peter Diamandis.

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  But, but that's the only, I mean, where does it come from? Where does this like, you're not only purpose driven, you're in a fricking purpose Maserati.

• 1:34:50Peter Diamandis?

  Um, uh, what, at the, at the end of this amazing discovery journey, right? You're, you're, you're a scientist and a, and a sociologist and a explorer where the earth is your Petri dish, so to speak. And you're, um, you're extracting all of this incredible data. And it's beautiful how you've interwoven it together.

• 1:35:14Peter Diamandis?

  Where, where does this go next? Are you just gonna continue to, to cycle through this process of discovery?

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

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

• 1:35:37Peter Diamandis?

  And, and you know, I, I, you know, in the intro, I mentioned, you know, that you're an explorer at National Geographic Fellow. And, and I, I forget about that part of your life, right? Because I, I see you in such a different way, but. You know, with eight billion people on the planet and so many thousands of cultures, it's, there are so many massive experiments going on for us to learn from. We have the ability to learn now.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there, there are some that excel, and they excel in measurable ways, and ultimately, there are very clear drivers of what, of what gets them to where they are, and that's what interests me. You know, I was a, I started my career, I set three world records for biking across five continents.

• 1:36:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I saw that.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  And, and the, and my goal for all of those is, I wanted to write for National Geographic.

• 1:36:28Peter Diamandis?

  But that was, the writing for National, Nat Geo was your driver?

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  That was it. That was, that was my X Prize in my mind. I wanted to write for National Geographic.

• 1:36:36Peter Diamandis?

  So what, what caused that in your life? For me, it was the Apollo program and Star Trek that got me started. What, what got you, was it like seeing a, a magazine on someone's coffee table?

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, we used to get National Geographic. I used to read it as a kid. And, um, and my early mentor was a polar explorer named, um, Will Steger, who was first to reach the North Pole, and he's a big, he's a Minnesota hero, you know, ticker tape parades type thing. And, you know, when I was in my early twenties, you know, he was kind of my hero.

• 1:37:05Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:06Speaker 00

  Uh, an explorer. He's, and, you know, when you think of the hero's journey, the, the Joseph Campbell hero is the one who goes out, and it, it, it's not the hero that just leaves his or her community. They find something, they overcome their own demons and challenges, and they bring something back that betters their community at the end, or saves the community. Um, uh, but it betters the community. So, um, you, you know, mine is sort of a modern day, you know, the, the bike rides turned out, you know, I did the part of the journey where I left, but I wasn't really bringing back something interesting. And my editor at National Geographic, he said, you know, everybody loves what you do around here.

• 1:37:48Speaker 00

  But, you know, if you really, we're really looking for the type of stories that is going to improve the human condition, or add to the body of knowledge. And it was that little insight.

• 1:37:58Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  And that led me to a series of expeditions to solve ancient mysteries. I did about sixteen of those, and I stumbled upon-

• 1:38:06Peter Diamandis?

  That's gotta be fun.

• 1:38:07Speaker 00

  That, that is fun. I had a team of fourteen people, and twice a year, we went out-

• 1:38:12Peter Diamandis?

  Give me, give us an example of like, one mystery to go solve.

• 1:38:16Speaker 00

  In the, um, the greatest civilization in the western hemisphere until the ninth century were the ancient Maya. They figured out the length of the solar year to within seventeen seconds of the figure we come up with today. They built the biggest pyramids in the world. Um, they, uh, they, they had a language incredibly complex, um, uh, system of governance, uh, and they mysteriously collapsed. And in nine oh nine A.D. there was no, there's no more trace of them. And what happened to them? And there was all this sort of misguided theories. And in the late nineties, I brought a multidisciplinary team with a huge online audience and did sort of a meta.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  There are fourteen different archaeologists. They all have their own pet theories. Climatic warfare, disease. And I basically did a wisdom of the crowd. I, we, we interacted with all of them and let, I let an a- audience of a million and a half people decide what really happened. And we published that.

• 1:39:18Peter Diamandis?

  And answer is?

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Well, the answer is they incredibly disciplined, innovative, uh, civilization that eventually got the upper hand on agriculture. And they were able to, uh, grow a lot more food, which gave them more free time. And, and then they got, the population got so big, uh, that they were exceeding the carrying capacity of their land and it was a very fragile system. Um, and then a little thing happened. A drought moved from Panama up to this, uh, about Arizona, seventeen miles per generation. When it hit the Central American about the eighth century, these little droughts caused

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  little food shortages, but that threw the whole system off because all of a sudden they weren't making enough food. That created social agitation. And all these people who would do what the king asked them to do when there was enough food, all of a sudden weren't listening anymore. And the king, under pressure, starts attacking neighboring cities for food. And then farmers, instead of being in the, in the cornfield or in the battlefield, and this whole system just exacerbates and it collapses.

• 1:40:31Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  And it was a climatic event that triggered the whole thing, which of course makes us think about global warming today.

• 1:40:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Speaker 00

  And the fragility of our eight billion people and the food system that underpins it. So, at the time, you know, we, I, I think, our theory made all kinds of, of national news. We did another one, I think we proved Marco Polo didn't go to China.

• 1:40:54Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's actually pretty good evidence of it. But in, in 1999, the Japanese government asked us to do a mystery there, and they were, we needed funding, and they offered to fund it. And we looked at some, you know, Bronze Age culture disappearances, and they weren't very interesting. But then we, we stumbled upon this study from the World Health Organization, that their southernmost islands were producing the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. And that was Okinawa.

• 1:41:25Peter Diamandis?

  And that's the birth.

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  That's a good mystery. And that's what longs blue zones, actually.

• 1:41:29Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. That's, that's a beautiful story, my friend. You know, obviously, thoughts of Indiana Jones come to mind as you're, as you're telling your stories there. I, I love that idea of pursuing, pursuing a mystery. I'm, I'm curious if there are teams at National Geographic, including yourself, thinking about the, the whole UFO aspects of have you, have aliens come to Earth before? Not the subject of our conversation here today, but I am curious.

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  National Geographic is mostly, their mission is mostly focused on geographic, their earth.

• 1:42:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  They're not so. There were some theories that the sarcophagus in a place called Palenque shows what looks like might be a figure sitting at a spaceship, manipulating a kind of a joystick, but that's been debunked.

• 1:42:28Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, well. You know, I guess I'll have to just stick with Starship as the way I'm getting off of it.

• 1:42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Peter Diamandis?

  Buddy, such a pleasure. Excited for the work that you do. I have a couple of pages at the end of my longevity playbook, just because I think it's so important.

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  Page 109.

• 1:42:45Peter Diamandis?

  109, yes.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  Which I have in front of me. You talk about the boozers. It's very flat. I was reading it like, oh, this is a great book.

• 1:42:52Peter Diamandis?

  And then, and then I actually clicked.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  There I am. I loved it.

• 1:42:57Peter Diamandis?

  No, but it's, I love your work because it is, it's so important for people to realize what they can do now. Nothing happens unless you take action now. And these are actions you can take that don't cost a lot of money.

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  Well, my job, Peter, is to get the most people possible across the first bridge.

• 1:43:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:43:17Speaker 00

  So you can talk them across, take them across Bridges 2 and 3.

• 1:43:20Peter Diamandis?

  Amen, amen. Those of you interested, danbuettner.com. You can hire Don Dan as a keynote speaker. He does that and does a beautiful job of inspiring people and giving them a vision of what's possible. On Instagram, it's @danbutner. And thank you.

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

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

• 1:43:42Peter Diamandis?

  I know.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  Have a real conversation.

• 1:43:43Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely. Beautiful. Thanks, pal.

• 1:43:45Speaker 00

  We'll see you when you're 100.

• 1:43:48Peter Diamandis?

  Let's not stop there.

• 1:43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's an insult for you.