Dan Buettner and Ben Leedle: ON How to Design Your Life to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier

In today’s episode, I sat down with Dan Buettner and Ben Leedle to discuss Blue Zones, what they are and what we can learn from them. Blue Zones are places around the world where people statistically live the longest, avoid common diseases, and all-around live extremely healthy lifestyles We talk about how modern exercise is a public health failure, why environment plays more into our longevity than genetics, and how each of us can improve our environments to live a longer, better life today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:30Jay Shetty?

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• 2:16Jay Shetty?

  And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and is clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1

• 2:59Jay Shetty?

  Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.

• 3:10Dan Buettner?

  You'd be shocked how many middle Americans wake up in the morning exhausted. They get breakfast for their kids, they go off to work on a long commute. 70% of Americans do not like their job. They come home tired, they don't have time, they make a crappy dinner for their kids, they watch, as you pointed out to me today, 1.5 hours of Netflix every night, and that's after social media and watching network TV. And then they go to sleep and don't get enough sleep.

• 3:41Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose. Thank you so much for coming back to the podcast. I'm so excited because this week I'm with the Arthur M. Blank Foundation. We're in West Creek, we're in this beautiful, beautiful ranch. It's in Montana, it's absolutely stunning. I wish you could see this view, we'll probably edit in some B-roll so you can actually see the beautiful grounds that we're in. And we're here for a summit and a series and looking into health and wellbeing in America. And as part of this, I found out that a group of people that I deeply look up to are here. And out of that, I had the honour of sitting down with two of them today, and their work has been huge. I've actually made videos on this work, I've mentioned it in several of my coaching sessions,

• 4:25Jay Shetty?

  I've credited it a specific amount of times in so many different talks that I've given. So to actually sit down with both of them is Truly, truly meaningful to me. So let me give you a quick overview. Dan Buena is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and a New York Times bestselling author. And Ben Lidl is a transformative business leader who envisions and creates world-class companies. Together, they co-founded a company called Blue Zones that helps people live longer, better lives by improving their environment. And the reason why this is so, so meaningful to me, because of both of you, is because I actually got to visit a Blue Zone last year in Sardinia. And that's where I started to really uncover more about them. But first of all, so grateful to have you here. Thank you for being on the podcast.

• 5:10Dan Buettner?

  Delighted.

• 5:11Jay Shetty?

  And you're the first duo we've ever had on.

• 5:14Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, the pressure's on, Ben.

• 5:18Jay Shetty?

  I think it's awesome. I think it's great. I think it's great. I want to start off, and you both can choose who takes which question. I'm just going to ask you both questions. You can decide who's the deeper expert on either one, because both of you are experts in your own right. So I'd love to start off by just explaining to my audience in a broad way, what are Blue Zones? And how did you first get introduced to them?

• 5:40Dan Buettner?

  I can probably take that one. So, Blue Zones are populations around the world where people live statistically longest. And we found five of them. This began with a National Geographic project, so we really did the homework. We spent three years with demographers who really do the homework to make sure people are living as long as they say they are. And we found the longest-lived women in Okinawa, Japan, the longest-lived men in the Highlands of Sardinia, where you visited, in Icaria, Greece, a population that not only lives among the longest, they elude dementia. So the lowest known rates of Alzheimer's disease in the world. In the Koya Peninsula of Costa Rica,

• 6:25Dan Buettner?

  we found a population that has the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality, which means 50-year-olds have the best chance of reaching a healthy age of 92 or 93, without disease, which is what we want. And then in the United States, we found them among the Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California. And the project Blue Zones and the company we run was based on the idea that, or based on actually the research, that only about 15% of how long you live Is your genes explained by genes? The other 85% or so is is explained by the lifestyle and environment. And we distilled a blueprint from these blue zones. And now we're putting it to work in how many cities now, Ben?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Forty nine.

• 7:08Dan Buettner?

  Forty nine Americans. I can't even keep up.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Forty nine, forty eight in in America. And we just launched our first outside the US project in Airdrie, Canada, in Alberta.

• 7:20Dan Buettner?

  Wow, I love that.

• 7:23Jay Shetty?

  And that stat that you just mentioned there, 15% of our health and wellbeing and mindset is based on our genes?

• 7:30Dan Buettner?

  No, no, specifically, it's how long we live.

• 7:33Jay Shetty?

  How long we live.

• 7:34Dan Buettner?

  And by the way, that's in with certain biological limits. So let's just set it up right now. Your average listener is prob, given the science right now, probably will not live to 100. The maximum average life expectancy of people living in the first world right now is about 93. So if you do everything right, 93, maybe 95 for women. Women, you know, do most things better than men, including living longer. So the value proposition that Ben and I are really evangelizing and putting to work in city is trying to get those 95 years without chronic disease, without heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia that foreshorten their lives.

• 8:19Dan Buettner?

  We're not in the this sort of, I guess, hopeful realm of trying to help you live to 120 because the science just isn't there yet.

• 8:29Jay Shetty?

  Right, right. And and tell me about some of the things that you found when you were traveling in the different regions and what you uncovered about what was making sure that people were living longer and more importantly, what you said, free from disease? Because I think that's the most fascinating part.

• 8:45Dan Buettner?

  Yes, so the so we're looking for the common denominators that were the correlates or what we believe explain longevity in all five places. We found nine of them, but I'll sum it up with just talking about four of them. Number one, and this is disruptive, in blue zones, people don't exercise.

• 9:04Dan Buettner?

  At least not in the way that we think of exercise. And I always say, and Ben hates when I say this, but exercise has been an unmitigated public health failure. Fewer than 18% of people in the developed world exercise enough. So it isn't working for the vast majority. In blue zones, however, people are getting plenty of physical activity into their 90s and into 100s because they live in environments that nudge them mindlessly into moving every 20 minutes or so. So every time they go to work, every time they go to a friend's house, every time they go out to eat, it occasions a walk. They don't have a button to push for the housework and kitchen work. They're doing it by hand. They have gardens out back. So they're in constant mindless movement, which is what I believe we need to start thinking about if we're going to make healthier cities.

• 9:49Dan Buettner?

  Number two, they're eating mostly a plant-based diet. 90 to 98% of what they put in their mouth is low-processed, plant-based foods. The four pillars of every longevity diet in the world are, what I'm going to tell you now took me eight years to figure out. So the four things are whole grains of every kind, greens, nuts. If you're eating a handful of nuts a day, it's probably adding two years to your life expectancy. And beans. Beans, about a cup of cooked beans a day are the pillar of every longevity diet in the world. And if you're eating a cup of beans a day, it's probably adding about four years to your life expectancy. Wow.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Do you have beans at lunch?

• 10:31Dan Buettner?

  I do. I did. By the way, I saw Jay eat beans today, so he's... I'm also a plant-based guy. I have a full plant-based diet. I licked a little blue star and put it on his forehead. Most people aren't old enough to remember those old stars. I do.

• 10:46Jay Shetty?

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• 11:30Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July twenty twenty six, Mazda has won more twenty twenty six IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 12:15Jay Shetty?

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• 13:36Jay Shetty?

  Let's dive into these a bit. Let's dive in before you tell me all of them. I think you're so fascinated.

• 13:39Dan Buettner?

  Go ahead, dive.

• 13:40Jay Shetty?

  I think we should dive into them. Let's talk about the exercise one. So you're actually telling us that this whole culture of going to the gym, weight training, HIIT workouts, high intensity, you know, all of that world. You're actually saying that that doesn't necessarily lead to optimal health, but we're seeing it more in these regions through natural activities of the day.

• 14:00Dan Buettner?

  That's right. So exercise, by the way, is a great idea. And for the, you know, the 20% or so people who actually get it, it's great. But it's just, you know, in our countries, we see obesity on the rise in most countries. The school kids aren't moving enough. It's just not been a successful strategy to deal with healthcare problems. It sells a lot of books. It sells gym memberships and gadgets and TV shows and yoga classes. Great, it's a great business, but it's not doing the job.

• 14:41Dan Buettner?

  And nobody, I feel like the emperor's new clothes by pointing out it ain't working. And it's a good idea, but...

• 14:50Speaker 02

  It's one of our first moments on stage together.

• 14:52Dan Buettner?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Dan makes that announcement and he's explaining exactly what he's saying. My master's degree is in exercise physiology. Okay. And people that know me know that I'm a big fan of exercise. But I think what struck me about Dan's discoveries in the Blue Zones was he calls it, "They were nudged constantly." But this idea that here in this country, people go exercise, they might kill it for an hour, maybe two, and then the rest of the day, almost nothing.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  In the blue zones, people were moving about every 20 minutes. And there is no exercise prescription for that. And so the point that Dan is making, even the hardest core scientists, which you have some of the world leaders gathered with us out here this week. It's just a different mind shift in how to think about. And I think about it less as exercise and more as answering the question, how physically active were you today? Rather than the intensity of any one period of time, but a consistent pattern of movement through the day.

• 16:05Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. And the second one was the plant-based diet.

• 16:08Dan Buettner?

  Let me just add on that exercise. So Ken Cooper's here. I don't know if you're going to interview him, but, but, but he's, he's a legend in exercise. And just to, just to point out the power of walking. People think they have to go pump iron or run triathlons or do, you know, break a sweat. But actually, walking gives you about 90% of the physical activity value of training for a marathon. And Ken told me, and he's on top of all this data, that if you're 80 years old and you can walk a mile in under 17 minutes, it adds about six years to your life expectancy overnight. So just the act of walking.

• 16:48Dan Buettner?

  Now, I could ask you, Jay, or, or any of your, of your audience, you know, get out there and get your exercise. But if I can just create your, your city, so it's easy to get to your coffee shop, your kid's school, to work, you're going to get that, that walking, that's going to get you 90% of the physical activity you need.

• 17:12Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Absolutely. And then Ben, that's the project where you're really building. Like that's what you're creating when you talk about those 49 locations.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  We bring in.

• 17:20Jay Shetty?

  You're actually trying to construct cities in ways we walk more.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 17:24Jay Shetty?

  So explain how you do that specifically for that.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  We have experts who have spent their entire careers looking at.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  How movement happens in our environments, and particularly in cities, and understanding transportation, how cities have been engineered and constructed. And most in America, the communities have been built for the automobile. And these experts go in with an eye and an understanding and bring a whole menu of evidence-based approaches that can tilt the built environment back in favor of walkability and bikeability. And so those experts go in, do very deep assessments, think through design constructs, hold charrettes or summits with the leaders who are committed to creating the change, and present them with an evidence-based

• 18:16Speaker 02

  list of menu items with understanding not all have equal impact, but collectively looking for city leadership, business leadership, civic leadership, to stack hands around enough changes so that creates a tipping point in what we're talking about. Sometimes that's just creating sidewalk and trails, and sometimes it's a matter of connecting neighborhoods, or from neighborhoods to downtown areas. And if you look at how America has evolved over the last 30, 40, 50 years, it's all been toward the attention of favoring automobiles instead of human transportation, the natural way.

• 18:58Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. I actually feel, when I used to live in New York, I used to walk a lot more.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're in Manhattan, that's all you do.

• 19:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's right. I lived in Manhattan, and that's all I did. And the reason I did it was also because of the way the streets were numbered. So I think because of the grid system, it made me want to walk more. Because I knew that I was on First Avenue, and I was trying to get to Sixth Avenue, and I knew I was on First Street, and I was trying to get to 20th Street, or whatever it was. And just because of that simple calculation... I used to walk forty five minutes to get somewhere instead of jumping in a car for eight minutes because it just felt easier.

• 19:32Dan Buettner?

  By the way, that's wasn't a coincidence that you were walking. Bloomberg, when he was mayor of New York, he made a very

• 19:41Dan Buettner?

  hard push for walkability and he hired a person who kind of an ambassador of walkability, bikeability. So now, New York sidewalks are cleaned up, they're safe. There's little subtleties, the way sidewalks are designed, how wide they are, are they dangerous, are you stepping off a big curb or is there a nice ramp? The bike share program, they've eased traffic there and unleashed this army of bikes that just about anybody can take. That's how you get a population. And not coincidentally, the obesity rate of New York City is about a third of what it is in middle America. So you can actually raise the physical activity level of an entire city by thirty percent

• 20:24Dan Buettner?

  by just optimizing streets for walkability and bikeability, cleaning up parks and making sure people can take public transportation. That's been in our approach. Rather than trying to get eight million New Yorkers to get down to the gym, which you're never gonna do, we just make it easy for them to go get their coffee.

• 20:43Jay Shetty?

  I'm totally impressed and fascinated right now. Like, this is awesome. I'm so glad that this is happening because I couldn't agree with you. The more natural we can make it for people to get moving, the more

• 20:54Dan Buettner?

  To make it unconscious.

• 20:55Jay Shetty?

  To make it unconscious, absolutely, to make it unconscious. I love that, that's incredible.

• 20:58Dan Buettner?

  Dan always talks about people's individual will and how it can be motivated and but that it fatigues.

• 21:07Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Dan Buettner?

  And that's why you see so much recidivism from people who start exercise programs, diets, other things. This is just, the intervention is. Where you spend your time and who you spend your time with and what the cultures and policies are like for that time.

• 21:24Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, and it's so interesting because even in the media space and what I'm trying to do is the same that I feel that if you just supply people with junk media, just like junk food, they'll eat it. But when you provide people with healthy media, but that tastes good and looks good, like healthy food, you can switch off to it, you can switch up to it immediately when it's there in the same places. And so I'm seeing that habit change in people as well, that people will go for a better alternative if it's presented correctly and it's available. And that's one of the biggest challenges is accessibility and availability.

• 21:57Dan Buettner?

  That's absolutely brilliant. That's the absolute right idea. Make it easy, make it accessible. And quite honestly, you have to compete with the other alternatives out there.

• 22:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, but we can do it. We're doing it right now. So this is awesome. I love this. This is fantastic, by the way. Anyone who's listening or watching right now, if you're listening right now and you cannot see my face, I just want you to know that I am.

• 22:16Dan Buettner?

  He's looking good.

• 22:16Jay Shetty?

  That happy. I am very happy right now that this work is happening in the world because yeah, what you're both doing is going to change lives of millions of people in the future. So, and hopefully sooner too.

• 22:33Jay Shetty?

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• 23:17Jay Shetty?

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• 23:45Jay Shetty?

  Tell me about the plant-based diet. So, any added points to that? I know we already mentioned we all ate beans today, but...

• 23:51Dan Buettner?

  So, you know, there's an army of scientific research out there that will support anything you want to eat. You know, there's, there's research that butter's good for you. There's research that these paleo or keto diets, you can eat a steak a day or bacon. But, um, here's what I know, and I, I would argue I know it better than anybody else on earth. The, the longest-lived people in the world, if you look back for the past hundred years, my team aggregated 155 dietary surveys done in each of the five blue zones. You can't just, by the way, ask a hundred-year-old what they ate to live 100. They don't remember. If I asked you, and I'm gonna ask you actually, Jay, what did you have for lunch a week ago Tuesday?

• 24:36Jay Shetty?

  Oh, I'm, no, I'm not a good person to ask.

• 24:39Dan Buettner?

  Okay.

• 24:40Jay Shetty?

  I'll tell you why, because I have a very regulated diet. I pretty much eat the same thing every day.

• 24:44Dan Buettner?

  I'm gonna ask everybody else.

• 24:45Jay Shetty?

  Pat answer for that. Avocado toast. That's like my avocado on toast is like my go-to lunch.

• 24:50Dan Buettner?

  You lived 100. Okay, I'll ask everybody else out there what they ate a week ago Tuesday. 98 out of 100 can't tell you. So, you can't really ask a hundred-year-old what they ate in the last 100 years. So, we found dietary surveys done when these people were 10, and when they were newly married, and when they were 50, and newly retired. And when you aggregate in this process called a meta-analysis, what emerges is a very clear pattern. So, mostly plant-based. I talked about the, the four pillars. They do eat meat, but on average only five times a month. They eat fish on, they're not big fish eaters, as you would expect, even though they're on islands, they live inland away from the sea. So, they're eating fish only two or three times per week.

• 25:34Dan Buettner?

  And no cow's dairy in any blue zone, which I found striking. Uh, they do have some sheep's cheese milk, like feta or some pecorino from sheep's milk. Um, and then when it comes to drink, drinking, they're drinking about six glasses of water a day. Herbal teas of all kinds, even black tea. Coffee! One of the best beverages you can consume, and people are gonna love me for this, is coffee. It is the biggest source of antioxidants in the American diet, which is probably more a commentary on the American diet than the virtues of coffee. But nevertheless, as long as you're not putting a bunch of caramel sauce in there and cream, your cup of coffee is a net positive. Try to drink it before noon. And then wine.

• 26:17Dan Buettner?

  So, most Blue Zones, they're drinking one, two, one place, maybe three glasses of wine a day, usually with their meal, though, and among friends. They're not slugging it down in their, in their room by themselves. So that's really, if you average these five places over the last 100 years, that is the diet that is manifestly getting people to 100 or 95.

• 26:39Jay Shetty?

  And Ben, oh, go on, no, go on, please.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, and there's also the things that you observe around their strategies for not overeating.

• 26:48Jay Shetty?

  Oh, yeah, tell us about that.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Go ahead, Ben. Well, I mean, in, in Okinawa, there's a term haraachi-ku, which they said before all their meals, which basically centered them around what I think of as mindful eating. They weren't like many of us Americans who just grab it on the go and slam it down and don't even realize how much they're eating. And, you know, they're, they're stopping. And when you, when you think about the translation of their term, it's basically they're kind of stopping when they feel about 80% full. And those strategies were key. You won't see the big family-style bowls of food sitting in front of people

• 27:34Speaker 02

  where they're heaping on big, huge portion sizes. They ate off of smaller plates. They plated the food, the kitchen, took it to where they ate, stored all the rest away. So there's a whole set of things that have been learned from those cultures that you are easy to institute in your own home.

• 27:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's so fascinating to me because it's so similar to monk life. So, we were, we were training that when I lived as a monk for three years, the plates that we were eating from were smaller. And it was the same reason that my portion size shrunk because of the size of my plate. And then when I was traveling and visited the US many times, and I started to see like, when you went to get like soda, and you just see like the extra, extra large option, and you just think, wow, because that's available. That's now attractive and we never had that availability and it was the same that you ate what was on your plate and you only took on your plate what you would eat. Nothing could be wasted and so there was no food waste either. And so you never wanted to overeat and be in that position.

• 28:33Jay Shetty?

  So same, that's 70, you said 80%, but it was 75% for us was eat till you're 75% full. And that's why breath and air and water were such important components of feeling full and ready. So, no, I love it.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  But it's also a former collaborator of ours, Brian Wansink, showed that if when you put food on a smaller plate, you perceive the same amount of food as bigger.

• 28:57Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And sends the visual cue to your brain, you're having a big slop, big mound of food here. So people tend to eat 20 to 25% fewer calories when they're eating off a 10 inch plate than they are, you know, the garbage can lid plates that Americans eat off of these days.

• 29:15Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. So we can trick ourselves into eating healthier by buying smaller plates at home.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:19Jay Shetty?

  So head over to Crate and Barrel or wherever else.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  10 inches.

• 29:23Jay Shetty?

  Home Depot and then, yeah, go and get that. I love that. Ben, this one seems harder to implement into cities. So I understood about reconstructing cities for walking, like walking to school and walking to work, et cetera. But how do you incorporate the plant-based diet and all these diet options into a city?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's work that you can do with policy where people spend their time. So where do, you think if you're getting a recommended amount of sleep, then half your waking life as a kid is in schools and half your waking life for a good part of your adulthood is at work. And, and there are policies and cultures that govern food, food accessibility. It's just simple things in the schools in Albert Lee where Dan did, did the first translation work was to no food allowed in the classroom in the hallways. Made a huge impact in terms of affecting be my of the students.

• 30:21Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  And I think the other. Opportunity is when we're out and about in our communities, we do work with restaurants, grocery stores, helping to create healthier choices so that where the places are that you spend your time around food, that healthy choices abound. And then finally, there are an individual pledge that we ask people to do, that's a list, just like we do with the city around built environment. We do that and drive awareness and ask people to take the pledge in their own home. And they may not make all of the changes in it, but a lot of those changes are stacked in favor of helping to impact how food's consumed

• 31:06Speaker 02

  and the types of foods that are consumed in their homes.

• 31:08Dan Buettner?

  Amazing. That's awesome. So, the organizing principle behind Blue Zones, in none of these places are people on diets or exercise programs or doing any of the things that we do to live longer. And the big aha for me, this came after about six years, I've been studying these Blue Zones for 15 years, is they never tried to live a long time. They didn't pursue it the way we pursued it. It ensued from the right environment. These people live a long time in Sardinia or Okinawa, they don't have better discipline than we have. They don't have better individual responsibility. They don't have better diets or exercise program. They

• 31:51Dan Buettner?

  simply live in an environment where the defaults are, happen to be healthy. That's the easiest and cheapest. So, how do we translate that? So, when Ben and I take on a city, we have three teams: people, places, and policy. So, the policy team, they're our top experts in the world who know how to work with cities with policy menus for best practices for food, favoring fruits and vegetables over burgers and fries and sodas. Built environment, as Ben talked about, favoring the pedestrian over the car and favoring the non-smoke over the smoker. One of the things we're talking about at this conference is the possibility of adding a happiness policy bundle. And we don't

• 32:33Dan Buettner?

  It down people's throat. We just say, here's a menu of policies that have worked elsewhere. City council, Mr. Mayor or Mrs. Mayor. Pick eight of them. We'll help you get them done. If you get them done, we'll give you blue zone certification. Second team, the place team, we have blue zone certification for schools, restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces and churches. And the idea there is to make those environments 30% healthier by nudging people into move and presenting healthier food choices and more social interaction. The third team, and this is the team that talks about smaller plates, is we have a very simple blue zone pledge for people. We give them a checklist. We try to get

• 33:14Dan Buettner?

  15% of the population and we have people to help. They take checklists into their homes and we ask them to do things like get rid of your big plates and change them out for small plates. We ask them to make sure you have a junk food drawer that's out of the way. We make sure to ask them to make sure they have comfortable shoes and bicycles. So at least if you're moved, it's easy to do it. It's a number of things like that. We ask them to join what we call a MOI, a connected social network. We bring people and organize them around walking and around eating plant-based food. It isn't a program for walking or plant-based food. It's more a program to get people connected and we have a secret sauce to make sure people make new friends.

• 33:57Dan Buettner?

  Loneliness, as you know, is a huge problem in America. And then finally, and really to the point, I think of this podcast, is we have a very effective purpose workshop.

• 34:10Jay Shetty?

  Purpose is the third.

• 34:12Dan Buettner?

  This is among the third. So this is the people. So the people, people are doing the checklist, the MOI, and then they're doing a purpose workshop. And the purpose workshop, you'd be shocked how many middle Americans wake up in the morning exhausted, tired. They get breakfast for their kids. They take a, they go off to work on a long commute. 70% of Americans do not like their job. They come home tired. They don't have time. They make a crappy dinner for their kids. They watch, as you pointed out to me today, 1.5 hours of Netflix every night, and that's after social media and watching network TV. And then they go to sleep and don't get enough sleep. So the taking time to help people identify.

• 35:01Dan Buettner?

  What they like, what they're good at, what their passions are. We take an hour to do this and what an outlet for that because it ain't going to be work most of the time. So then to make sure that they have an outlet for it, we do these curated volunteer opportunities. So you don't just fling them at some volunteer opportunity. We make sure then there's a half a dozen volunteer opportunities in these cities and we speed date people with a volunteer. So if you like animals, you're walking dogs. We have the Humane Society. If you have a passion for care, we might couple you with the Better Women's Organization.

• 35:42Dan Buettner?

  If you like old people, we'll help you volunteer with the elderly. So we get people activating their purpose. And you know, when people who have a sense of purpose are living about eight years longer than people who don't. So, once you get it started, it has a sort of self-perpetuating.

• 35:58Jay Shetty?

  Is that the, eight years is the longest you've mentioned there? Is that the, is purpose correlated to the highest form of identity?

• 36:05Dan Buettner?

  So this comes, the very first director of the National Institutes of Aging in the United States is a guy named Robert Butler. And he's the one who looked retrospectively at writing and he found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life. So, that's the best study I know. It's the longest term, biggest cohort, biggest study I've known. But, not coincidentally, in Blue Zones, they actually have vocabulary for purpose. You go to Nicoya, Costa Rica, it's plan de vida. And when you ask people that, they know it off the tip of their tongue. In Okinawa, it's ikigai.

• 36:47Dan Buettner?

  We were identifying ikigai 15 years ago as the key. By the way, in Okinawa, there's not even a word for retirement. There's none of this sort of language for the artificial punctuation between your useful life and your life of repose. Your whole life is imbued with Ikigai, the reason for which I wake up in the world. It's way more important than people think because I believe you can't package it and marketers can't sell it to you. Can't make a lot of money off a purpose like you can a diet or a supplement or exercise program. The purpose is really the great under celebrated.

• 37:26Dan Buettner?

  Let me put it this way, if it were a drug, it would be a blockbuster drug.

• 37:33Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. That's why the podcast is called On Purpose.

• 37:36Dan Buettner?

  Yes, you should be packaging it, you know.

• 37:38Jay Shetty?

  He's packaging it. I totally agree with that, but the Sanskrit word is dharma for purpose.

• 37:46Dan Buettner?

  I didn't know that.

• 37:47Jay Shetty?

  And it's the same thing. And so dharma sometimes can be made into duty that we live with, but it's also eternal duty, that which we are internally, eternally connected to, that reason for being, as Ikigai says.

• 37:59Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, if I could just make it, that's a great point. You said this would be a conversation, so I just learned.

• 38:03Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it is a conversation.

• 38:05Dan Buettner?

  But one of the things we've learned, you know, one of our biggest Blue Zones project is with HMSA in Hawaii. And, you know, we, every place is different and they're in there all the same, but, you know, Hawaiians have very strong cultures. And, you know, we introduced Moai and we, I mean Ikigai, we introduced, you know, Plandevita and they kind of got it, but actually they have a word for it, which is ohana. And ohana means not just following your own little passions or your own hobbies or whatever. There's also a component of responsibility. And you also see that in the Blue Zones. It's when you get older, your purpose always has an element of giving back.

• 38:50Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 38:51Dan Buettner?

  It's making sure kids grow up well. It's making sure that they're helping the mayor make right decisions because they've been around for 90 years and they've seen it all. It's making sure that other people in their family get through periods of difficulty because they have the resiliency of having survived all these decades.

• 39:10Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And so those are the, those are three that we've been through. We've been through. The natural exercise or the, you know, the organic forms of exercise that come in the day to day, then we had the plant-based diet with the four pillars, and then we've had purpose. What else was the key trends that you found?

• 39:27Dan Buettner?

  So, we now know that if your three best friends are obese and unhealthy, there's a hundred and fifty percent better chance you're going to be overweight. So, health behaviors are as contagious as catching a cold. Alcoholism is contagious, smoking is contagious, drug use is contagious, even loneliness is contagious. If you go out to eat with somebody who's lonely, you can actually feel lonelier than you would be if you just ate alone. So, so the really important-

• 40:00Jay Shetty?

  Not laughing, not a laughing matter actually at all, so but-

• 40:03Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, but it sounds funny, but it's sad. The, my grandmother used to say to me, "Show me your friends and I'll tell you your future." And you see very clearly in blue zones with these MOIs, like in Okinawa, a curated group of friends who you surround yourself with, they drive your long-term behavior more than anything. So, the people in blue zones, people they're hanging out with, their idea of recreation is gardening, or it's taking a daily walk. They're, they tend to eat well, so when they go over to each other's house, they're not confronted with baby back rebs or a burger. You know, they're all, in Okinawa, they're eating this, they cook this wonderful stir fry, and there's not an influence. The

• 40:47Dan Buettner?

  Adventists, you know, they're really big on prayer, a spiritual support, when you're down, taking care of you. So, the big prescriptive here, the takeaway, and probably the biggest thing you can do today to add years to your life, is think about who the closest people are to you. I wouldn't necessarily tell you to dump your old friends, you know, if they're toxic and, you know, smoke too much and sit around and drink Mountain Dew and watch reruns of Breaking Bad. But I will tell you that if you proactively bring some people into your social network, whose idea of recreation is physical activity, or, and by the way,

• 41:30Dan Buettner?

  it wouldn't hurt to have a few, couple vegetarians and vegans into your immediate social network, because they'll do more to influence your behavior than any diet will over the long term.

• 41:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Ben, did you want to add anything to that?

• 41:43Dan Buettner?

  No.

• 41:44Jay Shetty?

  No, okay.

• 41:44Dan Buettner?

  No.

• 41:45Jay Shetty?

  That was it.

• 41:45Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. I'm intrigued by, I think people aren't used to seeing people come together because we're like, okay, well, what do they talk about, right? Like, when you think about people coming together, we think about people talking and sharing and discussing, like we're all doing this week. And I think a lot of people find that their own circles, we end up doing things like complaining, comparing, criticizing, gossip, right?

• 42:10Dan Buettner?

  Otherwise known as bitching.

• 42:12Jay Shetty?

  Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we spend a lot of time in our circles, often in that space. I'm not saying always, and I'm not saying all the time, but that can take up a significant. I've had one-on-one conversations with so many people, different age groups, different backgrounds, who've said to me, yeah, when I get together with my girlfriends, or when I get together with my friends, this is what we end up talking about. How did you find that their conversation, was it more elevated or no? Was it actually at that level and that worked out just fine?

• 42:38Dan Buettner?

  Yeah, I, I, I do think there is room for us to vent. But that, there's a difference between being able to vent with your friends every once in a while and those who are chronically complaining. And the chronic complainers, that's why I say don't necessarily dump your old friends, because they might need you. But I will say that's going to be contagious. The approach we take in our cities, we learned this very powerful idea in Okinawa, known as the MOI, committed social network. These four or five people you surround yourself with, and you really commit to them in thick and thin. So here's the secret. Those people, they, they might be lonely, or they might have who they think are toxic friends. We take them through this process so that they can identify people.

• 43:21Dan Buettner?

  We like to hang out with people like us. I hate to say it, you know, this beautiful idea of a diverse world, but, you know, most people end up picking people who kind of look like them, with shared political beliefs, share religion, et cetera, who share interests. You know, it's very hard to, you know, have the golfer, hang out with the tennis player, and what are we going to do together, you know? I like a club, why like a racket? So, so we don't try to, we don't try to beat that barrier down. And then people's schedules have to line up. So, in our cities, we bring huge numbers of people together, and we take them through an hour-long process so they find people like them. And we just challenge them to walk or to eat plant-based foods for 10 weeks. And that's a long enough. For people to really make friendships. After about six weeks, there's a tipping point.

• 44:06Dan Buettner?

  Like if you and I hang out, you and I have seen each other twice now. You know, I like you and I call you a really good acquaintance. But I'll bet one more time of having, I'll bet if we still like us, we're probably friends. So it's the, it's, it's a, there's actually terminology for it. It's called homophily. We kind of like people who are like us. If we hang out with them long enough, propensity, they tend to become our friends.

• 44:30Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, absolutely.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  I think it is best friends too. They've done a lot of work looking at the measurement of well being with the projects that we do. And there's an interesting question that, that asks whether you have a best friend at work or not. And for those that do, their well being is so much higher.

• 44:49Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Than those who just simply don't have that. And, and it's maybe not so much.

• 44:54Dan Buettner?

  Tell me that statistic from Gallup then.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 44:56Dan Buettner?

  The one about 2 million people being interviewed and what the most important driver of whether or not a person likes their job.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's going to be whether they have the best friend at work and whether or not they, they like their boss.

• 45:10Dan Buettner?

  Right.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  And what kind of relationship they have.

• 45:11Dan Buettner?

  So did you hear that?

• 45:12Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Dan Buettner?

  You didn't hear pay. You didn't hear vacation. You, you didn't hear promotion.

• 45:18Jay Shetty?

  Yep.

• 45:18Dan Buettner?

  I think it's so huge.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  And remember, remember as a kid, you want, you had a best friend somewhere, right? And, and as we grow up as adults, everything gets busy. Things get oriented around work, family, kids. And, and I think we, we lose this idea that we have a best friend. And Dan's work, a Gallup's study knows that, um, you know, do you have on a really bad day, you know, three people that you know, you could call unconditionally, they're going to respond to support to you.

• 45:47Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  So when we do these blue zone projects and we're creating these MOIs and we're introducing people to a new network that are beyond their current network and they're built around, you know, health and common interests. And, and to Dan's point, 10 weeks plus, you start seeing behaviors turn to habits. People are expanding their network of what they would call friends. And the more of that you can get, the greater chance you have when you hit trouble on bad days, uh, to be supported in a way that creates resiliency that you otherwise wouldn't have if you were alone.

• 46:20Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And this is what Jan was saying, right? You don't leave your job, you leave a bad manager. Right, you leave your manager, you were saying that yesterday.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Probably not leaving the company.

• 46:27Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, you're not leaving the company.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Maybe not even leaving the work that you do.

• 46:30Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  You just don't like the relationships.

• 46:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. That makes so much sense. And I think that's a great reflection for everyone who's listening and watching right now to have that reflection in your life and just think of that really simply like, who's that go-to person in the workplace? You know, how could you better your relationship with your manager in a proactive way? It may be great already, it may not. And the other one of just in your personal life, having three people that you could call that you know are going to respond. And I think that's, yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  A very high percentage of American adults that can't name three people.

• 47:03Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  That would unconditionally help them.

• 47:05Dan Buettner?

  I'd pay Ben to be my friend. So I got one.

• 47:13Jay Shetty?

  But yeah, no, I think this is really powerful stuff because I feel like, you know, what you've uncovered in these blue zones is what's directly affecting not just our longevity. And I wanted to draw at that point that you're, what you're saying is this isn't just about living a longer life or a healthier life, it's also about living a happier life. Right? Is that connect true as well? Or are we just talking about longevity and health?

• 47:38Dan Buettner?

  There's about an 80% overlap.

• 47:39Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 47:40Dan Buettner?

  On the, so as a rule, the same things that will get you to a healthy 95 will also ensure you enjoy the journey. I also wrote a book called Blue Zones of Happiness in a cover story for National Geographic that took the same approach of finding statistically happiest places and then reverse engineering what they did as to offer lessons for people. And it turns out, you know, as we heard today, that most of what we think brings us happiness is misguided or just plain wrong.

• 48:10Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 48:11Dan Buettner?

  So this notion that Ben just got done talking about that your best friends are gonna, making a... A friend at work is going to be more important than pay. So when we work, you know, we have, we certify workplaces. And when we go into workplaces, we're not counseling the, the boss on paying their employees more. We're counseling, why don't you set up a sponsor happy hour? Or take a coworker to lunch? Or really create this environment where it's easy to meet that person across the hallway? And it's not always just a commercial relationship or a business conversation. It transcends into the real life and a bigger picture.

• 48:53Jay Shetty?

  Are you, are you seeing workplaces want to create blue zones in the workplace?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 48:58Jay Shetty?

  As a mindset, I can see it being very effective. I worked for two years at Accenture. And Accenture was an organization that really wanted to do more for the health and wellbeing of its employees and was trying to put so many different things in place. And in different ways, we were using a lot of these concepts. And so I can definitely see it being an amazing place for people. What, tell me about some of the experiences you've had implementing the organization.

• 49:21Dan Buettner?

  You should tell them a little bit about your, this guy's a legend, legendary past.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  I've spent 20 years with the Fortune 1000 companies in this country trying to identify the right ways to be able to improve health in their workforce for all sorts of reasons. The number two line item on any corporation's budget are big organizations that are self-insured are healthcare costs. And then, and then that's not even counting things like lost productivity and how engaged or unengaged people are distracted when they show up at work. Wellness is a term that I think of that is a bit different than what we're pursuing with blue zones.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  And, and we made a shift away from wellness because all the things that Dan has talked about is that When, when programs were offered in the workplace, most of them were oriented around a model of the individual gets connected with an expert, a coach, a professional, a plan is designed, and then the person's encouraged to go follow the plan. And, you know, if you need help, here's some digital tools, or, you know, you can make a phone call and someone will, will work with you. But essentially, it's education, guidance, and then a plan that you're supposed to do. And the same statistics hold true that, that Dan talked about. And in fact, it's about single-digit percentage of the effectiveness

• 50:53Speaker 02

  of this type of an approach where it's all about the individual and expert type of, of plan. And if you take blue zones into the workplace, to the chief financial officers, to the CEOs, to health benefits leaders, and heads of HR, human resources, it's such a very different model because it is really setting up their environment differently. It's doing those purpose workshops, it's creating Maliz in the workplace, it's, it's making the extended effort for the workforce to be able to, with their purpose, better known and understood and, and clear time away to be able to do volunteer, just a, a

• 51:35Speaker 02

  whole different array of an approach. And, and we are seeing those organizations that go through about a three-year process to make these type of changes and institute their own policies in their own environment on the things that they can control in the workplace on behalf of, of their, their colleagues, outperforming kind of traditional wellness in the workplace type of models. And, and people are very excited about it.

• 52:01Jay Shetty?

  For the, for the residents in these blue zones, how much was success, ambition, achievement relevant in their life at all?

• 52:12Dan Buettner?

  Not at all.

• 52:13Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 52:14Dan Buettner?

  Now, you have, before we go into a city, we, we interview the mayor, the city managers, superintendent of schools, this big CEOs, the police chief, and we show them, we open the kimono. We are coming in to create an environment where healthy choices are easier. And quite honestly, we're going to limit freedoms to do unhealthy crap. And if they're not signed up for that, we go to the next city. We've had over 400 cities ask us to do it. We've only done it to 49 because if we can't get the buy-in of all the top leaders, they should go spend their, their resources elsewhere. Right. Let me tell you why Ben and I are such good partners, if I can. Absolutely. I came back from Blue Zones and I Blue Zoned one little city called Albert Lee,

• 52:56Dan Buettner?

  Minnesota. It was a big success. And Ben's wife, Liz Lito, Ben couldn't sleep one night and she had my book, Blue Zones. And Ben was complaining he couldn't sleep. And Liz says to Ben, here, read this, it's a good book. And Ben reads my book, Blue Zones. At the time, Ben is a pioneer in wellness. 25 years, he built a billion and a half dollar company. He, a legend, a CEO legend. He's the one who started, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. He's the one who got behind Gallup's Wellbeing Index, which all the Nobel Prize winners use now. It came out of his, he was the man who got, made it happen. And he reads my book and he calls me up and says, Dan, I love what you do.

• 53:41Dan Buettner?

  This is the future of healthcare. Let's team up. There's no way I could have built this out to this size I have without Ben's gift and talent for management, for vision, for bringing the most important people to the table. So, you know, this is why, it's like you and your partner, you know, it's like if you don't have a yin and a yang, it just, it careens out of control. That's an awesome story. I wish you'd told me that at the start.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  And the thing is, is that

• 54:09Dan Buettner?

  Amazing.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  The, the research and the brilliance of Dan's work is that he's a master at synthesizing really complex things. And when you start looking at what he's done, he's basically, you know, boiled down the secrets of life for, for people who live longest, happiest, best, into these nine core principles. And healthcare in our country is so complicated and it's just a morass of, of waste and, and poorly spent resources. And it was just like this bright light. And it's like I had spent almost 30 years You know, working like crazy to figure out how to perfect the wrong model.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  And instantly saw that this was going to be a way that would redefine. And it breaks all the rules. It breaks all the rules and it breaks the chops of all the things that we've thought were fact based. But actually, I think of Dan as introducing really inconvenient truths to the establishment. And it's so much fun to go mix it up and take his wonderful, beautiful work. And have a chance to put it into motion and partner with him to do that. It's, it's, it's the most exciting part of my career and life doing this work.

• 55:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I can see it. I can tell it's

• 55:35Speaker 02

  It's love.

• 55:35Jay Shetty?

  It's beautiful to watch. No, but it's awesome. I love seeing it because I think that it just proves to the fact that this is so much more meaningful and purposeful and deeply connected to what both of you believe is, is your Ikigai and your, you know, your purpose in life.

• 55:52Dan Buettner?

  You know, we're here at this wonderful event that Arthur Blank put on. I salute him for it. And there's so much theoretical horsepower in that room. But it's so hard for academics to often put their work into, to, to work in the real world.

• 56:09Jay Shetty?

  Correct.

• 56:10Dan Buettner?

  And so that's what Ben has been able to do. So it's really, really, you know, it's, it's just a blessing from heaven that I met Ben.

• 56:20Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. No, it's amazing to hear the story and put all the connections together.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  My wife will claim.

• 56:26Dan Buettner?

  Liz, we don't get it.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  My wife will claim.

• 56:29Jay Shetty?

  The credit. Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  She was, look at all this. She goes.

• 56:32Jay Shetty?

  How did she get it? Did she buy it from a store? Was she just fascinated? How did she get it?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  She, her, her reading list is always eclectic and good. And mine's typically science stuff. And there's just time where you just don't want to read heavy science.

• 56:45Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  And she tossed me a total serendipity.

• 56:48Jay Shetty?

  I love that.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  And, and I started reading it, thought I would fall asleep in a few minutes and got out of bed. She goes, where are you going? I go, I'm going to go read the rest of this book. Cause this is, this is what we've been searching for. And it came right on the heels of having spent time with that advisory group of scientists on the Gallup Wellbeing Index in Washington DC. And, and asking the question, if, if you didn't just want to measure wellbeing and report the state of it, but you actually wanted.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  To at scale, improve well being for large groups, for populations, for countries. You know, what are the levers to pull?

• 57:26Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  And so I traveled home and, and as Dan said, I was running a big company and we had, there were like five things. You have to give individual knowledge, tools and, and ways that they can work on this themselves. And we checked, we got that. There was access to experts, all kinds of experts. We had more networked experts than you could shake a stick at. I was like, yeah, check the box. And it was like, how good are you at helping people create new social connections? And we just kind of paused. And then it was like, how well do you have ways to be able to influence people's surroundings, the manmade surroundings and make semi-permanent, permanent changes in those that yield and nudge people to better

• 58:08Speaker 02

  health? And I'm like, I don't know. And then finally, it was the, you know, the big things. How do you affect law and policy and culture? And what do you have for that? And so I was looking at this scoreboard flying home and I'm like, really want to change well being and, and pursue it, this deep passion. And it was that same night when I got home that my wife tossed me in a book and then I'm reading this thing and I'm like, oh my gosh, this Dan Buettner guy has crafted the master plan for not just longevity, but for well being.

• 58:39Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  And, you know, he didn't answer the phone on the first ring either. He had, he was guard, well guarded from corporate America leaders. He wanted no part of it. He wouldn't take my call. I called and called and called and called. And finally, his, his gatekeeper, I thought I would wear him down. And, and, and finally, I just said, okay, this is it. I go, this is the last time. I want you just to listen for two minutes and I'm going to describe to you.

• 59:06Dan Buettner?

  Wait, wait, wait. He flew the corporate jet up from, I had exactly two employees and he ran a company with 3,500 people and he flew his corporate jet up and showed up at the office. And then, of course.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  He took the meeting.

• 59:21Jay Shetty?

  You just showed up without an invite?

• 59:23Dan Buettner?

  I wasn't, I had never talked to him and I go, all right.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  So Dan's famous for walking. Meetings. So we met for a little while and he's a little restless. He's taking notes. We're asking questions. He's so good at interviewing and investigative kind of techniques. And finally, he said, Ben, let's go for a walk. And his office was in an area that was close to Mississippi River where there were paths. And it was close to three or four hours later, after a long walk, that we just said, let's go Blue Zone America, shook hands and went after it.

• 59:55Dan Buettner?

  And note too, the handshake, at the end of the day, we have very complex, you know, we work with cities and insurance companies. In every place, the mayors have to agree and we have a partner, Sharecare, and we have, you know, it's ultimately the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan or the hospital. So they're labyrinthine contract. Ben and I shook hands almost nine years ago. We have a big contract that underpins, but we have always, he's, you know, I was, he didn't always, we didn't always work together. We were on the, he was a partner company and I was, you know, partner companies often have to get through a lot of, work a lot of things through and there can, all these layers.

• 1:00:35Dan Buettner?

  And Ben and I have always operated where, first of all, we had a handshake, we looked each other in the eye and we said, okay, you got my word. And 120 pages of contract don't matter, we're gonna work it out. And now, three years ago, Ben became available, or two years ago, and now he's CEO of Blue Zones. And you can imagine the thrill it is for me to have such a talented executive powerhouse, running a company that had two people, three people when we first met. So, and now we're growing.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Growing crazy.

• 1:01:14Jay Shetty?

  That's awesome. And it just shows how we can use such a diverse range of skillsets.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:19Jay Shetty?

  Interests and backgrounds to want to do more meaningful work in the world and how actually all your experience is so powerful for this use.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  You gotta find partners. Dan and I partnered to do this, but we have to go find partners in the communities themselves too. So this thing is a, is a connected link of really deep partnerships and it's a leader, it's a leadership model. And it's not a surprise, if you go look at our 49 communities, you will find, you know, 49 groups of just incredible leaders who wanted to partner with Dan and I. So, you know, it's, it's fun.

• 1:01:56Jay Shetty?

  I've got two more questions for you before we round up. One was, how much has this all impacted your own personal lives? How much of this are you trying to practice and use in your day to day lives for yourselves?

• 1:02:09Dan Buettner?

  Well, most of it, I would say of the nine, power nine, blue zones, I do eight of them pretty regularly. So I eat mostly a plant-based diet. I do, my, my rule for physical activity is I do something fun every day. I know exactly my sense of purpose. It's this work here and, and I do this work. It's very hard to get me to do something that outside those certain boundaries. I have let go a few friends in my network because I knew that they were, they weren't healthy for me and I proactively added a few new friends. I don't go to church as much as my mother would like me to go to.

• 1:02:50Dan Buettner?

  This is one of the things, but I do, I keep, invest in my family, which is another really big and important one. And, you know, I do happy hour, which is coming right up here.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  It is, it is. My profile is pretty similar. So I always think about where can I, where can I add? And one thing we didn't talk about, well, we did talk about purpose, this idea of downshift. And that's taking time, you know, purposely to reflect. You heard some of it discussed today, you know, the gratitude, you know, the pieces. So that's what I'm working on the most right now because what we do in our partnership and what we're doing is really busy.

• 1:03:33Dan Buettner?

  I get it.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  And, you know, I think your happiness research would point out that well-slept people are, are much happier and, and you, we even heard data this morning about you could, you could knock out a bunch of mental health illness if people just slept right. So, you know, my two things that I'm working on in addition to the good things that I'm doing out of Dan's work is purposely downshifting each day.

• 1:04:00Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Which is hard to do for me and, and getting the right amount of sleep.

• 1:04:05Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. And tell me about that family piece. And the reason why I saved it to last is I wanted to answer this question was, I feel so many people today struggle to find their home with their family.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Board games.

• 1:04:18Jay Shetty?

  Right, that's the solution?

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  It's epic in our household.

• 1:04:22Jay Shetty?

  Really?

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  When you say we're doing board games, everybody comes out of the woodwork. And it is, it is fun and, and we have, we exchange gifts at birthdays and holidays. Christmas, there's always new, who can find the newest, best, most challenging board game to play?

• 1:04:44Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  And it's interesting because it creates this social construct for the family and, and creates a whole different atmosphere for conversation and, you know, the, the board game itself kind of creates an equivalency.

• 1:05:00Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Just about it. So we, so it's a great time. It's not TV. It's not even, you know, going and doing something, but just time together.

• 1:05:08Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Any other thoughts on that one?

• 1:05:11Dan Buettner?

  Well, I do see in blue zones, people are keeping their aging parents nearby. And which imparts not only more life expectancy, one of the surest ways to see the life expectancy of your mom or dad drop is put them, put him or her in a retirement home. Shaves off two to six years of life expectancy. In blue zones, that would shame the family. So aging mom, dad stay home, but that not only helps aging mom and dad because they feel a sense of purpose and they get out of bed in the morning and they, they are more likely to stay active, but also there's something called the grandmother effect that has shown that in, in households where there's a grandparent involved, the kids are healthier and lower

• 1:05:55Dan Buettner?

  rates of mortality, and they even do better in school. So it's this beautiful virtuous circle. And I know not all families get along, but I will say investing in trying to keep that into the family, to try to keep people together is really a worthwhile endeavor for longevity and for happiness.

• 1:06:14Jay Shetty?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:15Dan Buettner?

  So one of the tragedies of the blue zone is the standard American diet hit in the 1970s and 80s, and now they're disappearing. The same problems that are killing us today, diabetes, heart disease, cancer are hitting, are starting to hit the blue zone. So the National Geographic photographer I work with, David McLean, and I went back to all five blue zones. And we got older women, seventy, eighty years old, to cook the traditional foods that they've grown up on. So this is the food that people have eaten to live to be a hundred. And I sat on a stool with a computer and captured the recipes, captured the techniques. National Geographic photographer captured the images, the context, the foods and the

• 1:07:00Dan Buettner?

  ingredients. And the result, Blue Zones Kitchen, which comes out in December, is a hybrid of a National Geographic article and a cookbook, a hundred recipes to live to a hundred. I'm super excited about it. It gets me back to my journalistic roots. Plus, I did a whole lot of good eating.

• 1:07:18Jay Shetty?

  My wife is gonna absolutely love it. My wife's a dietitian, nutrition, and vegan recipe developer.

• 1:07:23Dan Buettner?

  Oh, my God. It's music to my ears.

• 1:07:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and she's fascinated by Ayurveda. So she's an Ayurveda practitioner. So like, healing your body through food is like her addiction. So she's

• 1:07:34Dan Buettner?

  She gets the first copy then.

• 1:07:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. She's gonna love learning about that, too. I love that. Yeah, we'd love to talk about that. Hundred percent. Audience would love that, genuinely. It'd be amazing. And I hope, I hope all of those things are accessible and available in, in all the stores in the US, too.

• 1:07:48Dan Buettner?

  It's on, it's on amazon.com right now.

• 1:07:50Jay Shetty?

  The book's not out yet.

• 1:07:51Dan Buettner?

  It's not out, but you can

• 1:07:52Jay Shetty?

  You can preorder.

• 1:07:53Dan Buettner?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Jay Shetty?

  Okay, great. If anyone wants the book, you can preorder the book right now. That's amazing. It's on Amazon. And the name is?

• 1:07:58Dan Buettner?

  Blue Zones Kitchen.

• 1:08:00Jay Shetty?

  Okay, Blue Zones Kitchen.

• 1:08:01Dan Buettner?

  A Hundred Recipes to Live to a Hundred.

• 1:08:03Jay Shetty?

  I love it.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  And you mentioned the connection to National Geographic article that you're writing.

• 1:08:08Dan Buettner?

  Yes, there should be an article out, the January's issue of National Geographic will be about why these foods help you live to a hundred.

• 1:08:17Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. I love it. Check it out, guys. If everyone's listening or watching right now, make sure you go and

• 1:08:21Dan Buettner?

  It'd be awesome.

• 1:08:21Jay Shetty?

  Take a look at that. Yeah, that sounds awesome.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  More things for us to go implement.

• 1:08:25Jay Shetty?

  Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.

• 1:08:26Dan Buettner?

  But I love the way you Job's gonna get more complex still.

• 1:08:29Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. So we have what we call the final five, which we end every interview with. This is a quick fire, rapid fire round. So you can only answer questions with one word or one sentence maximum.

• 1:08:40Dan Buettner?

  Goodness. One word or one sentence?

• 1:08:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, I

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  One word.

• 1:08:43Jay Shetty?

  I'm lenient.

• 1:08:44Dan Buettner?

  I'm gonna do a Faulkner eight sentence.

• 1:08:45Jay Shetty?

  You both have just, I'm, this has become easily one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. So on that basis.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  I've seen this on ESPN before.

• 1:08:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah?

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Jay Shetty?

  Okay. It's, it's kind of like that, but

• 1:08:55Dan Buettner?

  They stole it from Jay.

• 1:08:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Jay Shetty?

  Question number one is, what's the best piece of well-being advice you've ever heard?

• 1:09:10Jay Shetty?

  Curate your best friends.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Know your purpose.

• 1:09:14Jay Shetty?

  Nice. Okay, second, what's the worst piece of well-being advice you've ever heard?

• 1:09:21Jay Shetty?

  Get rich.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Count on other people to deliver it to you.

• 1:09:25Jay Shetty?

  Nice, okay. Third question is, if you could give the whole world one habit to practice for 30 days, what would it be?

• 1:09:36Dan Buettner?

  Love.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Social connection.

• 1:09:41Jay Shetty?

  Okay, amazing. The fourth question is...

• 1:09:47Jay Shetty?

  Where do I want to go with this? This is too far... Oh! Out of all the Blue Zones, if anyone wants to travel to one, which one should they visit and why?

• 1:09:54Dan Buettner?

  You should go to Thea's Guest House in Icaria, specifically in the city of Nas. That wasn't one word, but...

• 1:10:01Jay Shetty?

  That's not... And why? No, I'm opening it up, because I want to know why that one.

• 1:10:05Dan Buettner?

  So that is the best place I know. This is this beautiful guest house in the Aegean Sea. Very simple, very cheap, but they cook Blue Zones food. And it's now... It has attracted people from all over the world who are seeking also longevity. There's no better place to see it than this simple little guest house in Nas Icaria.

• 1:10:27Jay Shetty?

  Amazing.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  The Queen Peninsula, Costa Rica. People there, no matter where you turn, are genuinely happy. And I think Dan's book underscored it. You know, there's pride that feeds into happiness and purpose that feeds into happiness, but there's also pleasure. And the country with the pleasure and the Blue Zone is Costa Rica.

• 1:10:55Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. I love that. And question number five, last one of the final five is, what's the best place for people to visit to see the Blue Zones in the modern world, in our world? For in terms of a city that you've worked on, that you're working on for them to start seeing that happen.

• 1:11:11Dan Buettner?

  You don't have to go too far. If you're, you go to Naples, Florida, Fort Worth, Texas, Hawaii, the island of Maui, the whole island of Maui is undergoing a blue zone.

• 1:11:23Dan Buettner?

  I would say upgrade.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  I favor the beach cities in South LA, Hermosa, Manhattan, Redondo Beach.

• 1:11:31Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. Awesome. Thank you both so much, Ben and Dan. You're the best. Thank you so much. That was genuinely such an interesting conversation and both of you are just incredible. I can't wait for my audience to learn more about you, find out more about you and hopefully help in some way too, if there's any way.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Partner with us.

• 1:11:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. We should figure that out. I'm so passionate about the work you're doing and I'd love to learn more and more and more. So this is definitely the first of hopefully many conversations and walks. Next time we can go on a walk together. I like walking meetings too.

• 1:11:59Dan Buettner?

  Yes.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  He's legendary about that.

• 1:12:01Jay Shetty?

  It's hard to do.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Get your walking shoes on.

• 1:12:02Jay Shetty?

  Get the sound right. I don't like, I don't like getting walking podcasts, but we can do walking meetings. But thank you both so much for your time. I'm very grateful.

• 1:12:09Dan Buettner?

  Complete delight. Thank you.

• 1:12:10Jay Shetty?

  Thank you. Everyone who's watching this, make sure you share this on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, wherever you are active, because I'd love to see what are the key nuggets that you took away. I want you to think about the one thing that you can try and practice for the next week. So take something out of this conversation, see what resonates with you and see what you can put in as an experiment into your life for the next week. Dan and Ben, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being guests and thanks everyone for watching and listening. Take care.

• 1:12:41Jay Shetty?

  Thank you so much for listening through to the end of that episode. I hope you're gonna share this all across social media. Let people know that you're subscribed to On Purpose. Let me know. Post it. Tell me what a difference it's making in your life. I would love to see your thoughts. I can't wait for this incredibly conscious community we're creating of purposeful people. You're now a part of the tribe, a part of the squad. Thank you for being here. I can't wait to share the next episode with you.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.