445 - The Secrets of Happiness & Longevity: Dan Buettner discusses Blue Zones

0:00Dan, thank you so much for making the time to be here. So, I'm a huge fan of your work. I was telling you off camera that I saw a talk that you did and I went down the Dan Buettner Blue Zones rabbit hole. I bought all of your books. Sounds very dark. It was actually, it was really, really fun. And after like working all day and being on the computer, it was a source of such joy for me. I was like, oh, I'm getting to go into the Blue Zones again. So, let's take it back. Tell us how you ended up for the past 15 years studying longevity and happiness. How did you get here? I've been a lifelong explorer.

0:31started out setting three world records for biking across five continents and eventually got with National Geographic where I led scientific expeditions to solve ancient mysteries. Why the Maya civilization collapsed? Did Marco Polo go to China? In the year 2000, I stumbled upon a very interesting report from the World Health Organization that found that Okinawans have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. In other words, they live a really long time and they avoid the diseases that are killing us. And I said, aha, that's a good mystery. And so it's been since 2001 or so I've been trying to, you know, in a sense reverse engineer longevity and then later happiness.

1:13Yeah. So happiness, it is somewhat a nebulous term, right? It's really difficult to define. And from what I've learned from you, you know, it's a composite of things. So, as you've shared that while yes, we cannot really measure happiness, we can measure the facets of it. There are three big ones. Can you tell us about those? Yes. So, the first one and the most commonly used question is around something called life satisfaction. So, a researcher will ask you, if you think of your life as a whole with your best imaginable life being a 10 and your worst imaginable life being a 1, where would you place your happiness?

1:55When that's done at the population level, you can get a really good reading on how well people and places evaluate their lives. Then there's a second kind of measure of happiness where you get at how people experience their lives. Because you only remember about 2 % of your life, you tend to remember your high points When you got married or had your first child in your low points, when you got dumped by a girlfriend or boyfriend or when your grandma died, and what happened in the last 24 hours, asking people to remember their lives isn't a perfect way to measure well-being. But if you ask people, in the last 24 hours, how much have you smiled, how much have you felt joy, how much have you felt stress, and you do that a few times, you get a pretty good snapshot at how people experience their lives.

2:41That's called positive affect. And then there's a third kind of happiness measurement that asks people how often they're able to use their strengths to do what they do best. That's in the academic parlance, how you measure purpose. So when you ask those questions among populations around the world in a uniform way, you can start to see number one, where people are happiest in these three measurements, and number two, the things that associate with happiness or correlate to happiness. And so tell us about some of the happiest places. So Blue Zones of Happiness and the cover story I wrote for National Geographic sought to illustrate each of these three types of happiness.

3:22So we chose Singapore as the place to best demonstrate life satisfaction. So Singapore is a place where it's very easy to live out your values. It's very secure. It's a place that will appeal to the type of people who like success laid out in a very simple path. Go to the right school, get the right job, keep your head down, work hard, and at the end, you'll have status, you'll be financially secure, and that's a type of happiness. It's mostly happiness in the rearview mirror. I think I'm happy, therefore I must be. In Costa Rica, specifically Cartago in the Central Valley, that's a place where people are experiencing their life very well from day to day.

4:04It's a high valley where the temperature only varies 10 degrees a year between about 65 degrees and 75 degrees. Best coffee in the world. But more importantly, it's a place where the cities are designed so you're bumping into people with some frequency all the time. You go to the market, you run into the people selling you their fruits or your vegetables or your fish. The towns are built, the streets are built for human beings and not just cars. One of the biggest predictors of whether you'll be happy on a day-to-day basis is how many hours of face-to-face time you have with people you like. The happiest people in the world are interacting face-to-face about seven hours a day.

4:51And Kartago has an environment where it's easy to do that. And then we chose northern Denmark, a place called Alborg, to exemplify purpose. because Denmark's a place where healthcare is taken care of. Nobody has to worry about what happens if I get sick. Education is taken care of. Nobody has to worry about, can I save enough money to put my kid through college because kids now go to college, they get paid to go to university. And will I be okay when I'm old? Those are big drivers of whether or not you take a job. It's also a place where status is not really celebrated. So you get no extra credit for wearing Prada or driving a Mercedes.

5:30In fact, it's kind of prone upon. So people aren't taking jobs for status or health insurance. They're taking jobs because they love it. In America, only about 30 % of workers actually like their job. This comes from Gallup data. In Denmark, it's about 80%. They're working 35 hours a week. They're doing jobs suggestive of flow, furniture design, architecture, niche technology. That's what they excel in in Denmark. So these are jobs that really engage people's passions and their artistic abilities. It's not so hard that they give up and not so easy they get bored. They work 35 hours a week, take six weeks of vacation, have plenty of time for the social interaction we know is really fundamental when it comes to happiness.

6:17And was it interesting for you, like being energetically in these different places, could you feel just for yourself like, whoa, when you're in Costa Rica, that sense. I mean, I've been to Costa Rica several times and what's the saying of the country? It is viva... Pura vida. Pura vida. Yeah, exactly. Pure life. Yes. Yes. I would say more so in Costa Rica than the other places because you really have to live there. It's not quite as easy to go there. Of course, you get the vacation effect. I don't have to work today for crying out loud. The sun's shining and the beach is near and all those things.

6:58That's a different experience than actually living there. In the reality, we find that most, when it comes to happiness, most people are misguided or just plain wrong. In fact, we more often than not aim at the wrong target when it comes to lasting, authentic happiness. If you really want to understand those places, it can't just be a facile, well, I went there, I felt happy, and people danced, and we went to parties. That's not it. Yeah. Let's talk more about that, though, how people are aiming at the wrong things, because I've read that you suggest, we think about happiness more like a retirement portfolio and that it should be balanced.

7:35Yes. Yeah. So yeah, people ask me, what's the secret of happiness? And that's like going to your doctor and say, doctor, I'm sick. Make me well. Right. You know, you have to do some diagnostics. So for example, so we talked about life satisfaction, how you experience life and purpose. You want those three to be balanced. Yeah. You could work 70 hours a week and make a quarter million dollars a year and feel financially secure and your friends are all impressed with you, but your day-to-day experience is crappy. That's not happiness, even though you kind of checked all the boxes in life. So we actually have on our website, bluezones.com, we have a true happiness test, which is a diagnostic we did with the University of Pennsylvania that will ask you about 40 questions to be able to diagnose you.

8:24Are you experiencing mostly life satisfaction or experience happiness or lack of purpose? And we assess where you are in those three, and then we give you a prescriptive. It's free, by the way. I love it. We'll make sure that we include that in the blog, and we'll include that in the email as well. So according to science, we humans have control of about 50 % of our happiness, right? The other 50 % is about genetics and luck. Yeah. So lasting happiness from your perspective is something that everyone can create. So how do we start to take charge of that 50 %? I think to realize that... So 50 % is genetically prescribed for each of us.

9:05So we all have what I call a set range. So imagine scale one to 10 and you're a really happy person. And on a good day, you're a 10 and on a crappy day, you're a six. But somebody down the street who was born with a bad set of genes, on a good day, there are six and on a crappy day, there are two. So you have control of where you are within your set range. You might be able to get out of a little bit, but really you're sort of, for lack of a better, hormonally endowed with a certain capacity for happiness. I argue in Blue Zones of Happiness that if you want to maximize your set range, you want to shape your environment so you're more likely to be happy.

9:53And now there's big data around happiness. Gallup, the World Poll, World Database of Happiness for the book in the National Geographic Art. We sucked in 100 million data points and did the regression analysis to find out exactly what you can do to stack the deck in favor of happiness. Tell us, Dan. Tell us. Well, there's a number of things you can do. So, if happiness were a cake recipe, it's important to... you need food and shelter and education. That's by the way why Bhutan is not a very happy place. Bhutan is number 91 in the world. Everybody thinks Bhutan is a happy place. It's not a happy place.

10:37They did a good marketing campaign, right? They did a good marketing campaign and they do deserve credit for coming up with the idea of gross national happiness. So if you can't measure, you can't manage it. So they give big kudos. those. They just don't have an economy or distribution scheme so that enough people have the basics in life. So you need the basics. You need education. You don't need to have a doctorate degree, but it's really important to have at least a high school and some college to maximize your happiness. You need satisfying work. You're more likely to be happy if you are in a committed relationship than not.

11:10Having kids, by the way, is a mixed bag. You You want to have a feeling of giving back. But the most important ingredient, the ingredient with the most variance is where you live. And we know that because watching immigrants move from Moldavia, an unhappy place in the Soviet bloc country, to Copenhagen, and when we watch people from unhappy places in Africa and Asia move to Canada, which is a happy place. Those immigrants, they don't change their sex, gender. They don't change their education status much. They don't change their genetic endowment. They don't change their sexual preference. They're the same people.

11:54And all they do is move. And within one year, they report the happiness level of their adopted home. So in Moldavia, for example, the average score is three. They move to an eight. Wow. And in Canada, they move from a four or five to an eight. And all they do is move. So, your environment, where you live or how you shape your surroundings is the biggest, most important, and most impactful thing you can do to favor your own happiness. Let's talk about that for a second because we have viewers in 195 countries around the world and there will be a certain portion of people listening to this who hopefully will dive into all of your work.

12:29This is what I want them to do. And they may discover, you know what? I am going to pick up a move. I'm not a tree. So, they might be able to, and we'll talk more about what makes for a great environment in terms of where you live. But I know there are many, many other thousands of people watching, go, okay, well, if I can't pick up and move or necessarily change where I live, at least right now, let's talk about some of those shapers of our immediate environment and what we can do to stack the deck in our favor. Yes. So, the first and foremost is curate a group of friends around you. We now know that unhappiness and loneliness are contagious.

13:04So if you sit around with people who are unhappy and are lonely, I'm not telling you to abandon your old friends because they need a hand, but if you're continuously doing that, that's going to be contagious. You can actually measure that. A guy named Nicholas Christakis has found that. You want three to five friends who, number one, you can have meaningful conversations with them. I mean conversations of the heart, not just sports or celebrity. These should be friends you can call on a bad day and they'll care. That's kind of the litmus test. If my chips are down, are they still going to be with me?

13:39And number three, you actually have to like them. And you want to spend face-to-face. There's no really good research showing that connecting on Facebook or Snapchat or something is the same as what we're doing right now, connecting face-to-face. Number two, when it comes to your financial life, the impact of financial security is about three times more powerful than consumption. What does that mean? That means if you just got a raise or there's some money left over in your paycheck, over time you're actually better off paying down your mortgage, buying insurance, joining one of these automatic savings plans than you are going out and buying a new pair of shoes or new gadget because the luster of that new thing will wear off in 9 to 14 months, but financial security can last years, decades, or lifetimes.

14:30That's more important. I would say when it comes to your work life, this comes from more than 2 million surveys from Gallup. The biggest determinant of whether or not you're like your job is not how much money you make, not how much recognition you get, not what your boss tells you about yourself. It's do you have a best friend at work? I loved this insight. Tell us more. Yeah. So if you don't like your job or it's suboptimal, making the effort to invite a coworker out to organize the happy hour. I actually run these Blue Zone projects around the world, or around the country, actually, about 40 cities.

15:17And we have over 100 workplaces that work with us. And one of the things we do, we actually create MOIs. MOIs is a committed social network. And we get all the employees to come together. And we have a process by which we help them break into groups of five. And then we organize them around either walking, a healthy activity, or eating Blue Zones food, which is to say plant-based whole foods. And we find that about 60 % to 70 % of the time, these people, these kids, these workers stay together and become best friends. That's amazing. I was talking about this to someone the other day, and I was telling you off camera that we have a virtual company.

16:01And so we don't see each other face-to-face every day, but Team Forleo, which we call ourselves, everyone really actually... Where did you get that name? I don't know. It was such a creative brainstorm. But everyone really likes each other. And one of the things that's been really satisfying for me as a boss is oftentimes when my team has break time or we go on vacation or, you know, there's downtime, they get together in person on their own. I love it. And it makes me so happy because everybody winds up sending pictures and like, oh, I visited my friend here, but then I'm gonna go see so-and-so.

16:32And it's such a great feeling to know how connected everyone is. And then when we talk with folks who don't have a culture like we have, and I see so much pain because they don't feel connected to anyone at work, it becomes really apparent because we're spending what? Eight, 10, 12 hours a day, five days a week, if not more. Most of your waking life. Yeah. Do you actually vacation together? So last year, I took the entire company. They're off camera, raising hands. We actually all went on vacation together to Mexico. And there was absolutely no business meeting at all. We danced, we drank margaritas, we went in the ocean at midnight because we were like dancing and sweating and we're like, we need to cool off.

17:16But it was one of the best things that we've ever done as a company. And especially... That's so smart. Yeah, it was really great. And we have memories that will last a lifetime. And then it also kind of sends the message, by the way, that your employees aren't just here to further the interest of the company that you actually care about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They know that. And that's transparent. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, how do you feel? Do you know mama loves you? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Mama, I like that. Mama Marie. Well, I don't have biological kids. I have a stepson, but I affectionately known as Mama Marie.

17:51If you're struggling to make progress on your dreams, this free tool is going to help. It's called the yearly goals map. And in just 10 minutes, you're going to get clear on your top priorities and let go of what's keeping you stuck. It's super quick, it's powerful, and you can do it any time. Get it now at marieforleo.com slash yearly-goals or just scan the QR code on your screen right now. So let me, one of the other things I love about your perspective, because it's so fresh, that you're not a huge advocate of positive psychology techniques like savoring or appreciation or gratitude, not that they don't work, but only in the short run.

18:27So tell me about Um, why not that? And why, again, I agree with you, optimizing our environment is the way to go. Yeah. I could not find any research that shows that positive psychology interventions have any long-term, you know, it's a lot like a vegan diet. So there is, um, indisputable evidence that eating a vegan whole food diet will help you lose weight and live longer. But people can't stay on that diet. Diets last on average. Well, they work for 10 % of people for three months. Within seven months, you lose 90%. And within two years, you lose about 97%. I believe it's the same with these positive psychology interventions, savoring, appreciation journals, gratitude.

19:16They're all great ideas and they all work. I don't dispute the studies, but the studies are all done in three months or something like that. So when it comes to happiness, it's got to be a long-term pursuit. And I don't know of any way to establish gratitude for more than a year. Well, I think most of us as humans if we look at our own lives, and again, I have to say this because I know my audience and I know they're gonna be like, ah, no Dan. Especially because Kris Carr and I are best friends. She used to be like, vegan is not a diet, it's a lifestyle. So yes, everyone, for those of you who have adopted and you eat vegan as a lifestyle, we love you.

19:52What Dan's talking about is research and it's slightly different. Again, I have this ability to hear people's, what they're going to say in advance. Wait, wait, wait. What are they worried about? Remember when you said, well, the vegan diet, like people only do it for a short amount of time? I know people that, they're that way. Yeah, I do. You know, that's their life. Like Chris Carr, for example. Right. So I just mean, yes, and you're right. Vegans is more of a moral way of living, ethical way of living. But I should say just getting on any diet, trying to adopt a new diet. And there are hundreds of them that come on the scene every year.

20:29And there's been no diet in the history of the world that works for more than 2 % or 3 % of the people for over two years. So trying to ask somebody to remember to do the right thing and to have the discipline to do the right thing by themselves will almost always fail. Yeah, and that's why I like this idea about really setting up your environment to nudge you. You know, we were talking, again, before we had the cameras rolling, I spend some of my time here in New York City and I also spend some of my time in Los Angeles, specifically in Venice, where I ride my bike a lot. And I notice how happy I am there because I'm riding my bike, I'm walking around, there's less congestion typically than there is here in New York City.

21:09And I think it's just so interesting that rather than like striving to be happy, I feel like what your perspective is kind of laying out for us is like the lazy way to do it in the sense where if you set up your environment, it almost starts to happen automatically. That's right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And by the way, when you're in Venice, there is something called the sun bonus. So if you control for everything else, if you live in a sunny environment, you're about 5 % more likely to be happy. That's what it is for me. And also if you live by water. Yeah. Well, it's actually water or mountains.

21:42Interesting. So those two, you're just more likely to be happy. It may be because water is serene or it may be because you get to swim or it may be because you like sunsets. But yeah, moving to a sunny, beachy area stacks a deck in your favor. Yeah, one way to do it. So shifting over to longevity for a moment, I thought one of the most interesting things to come out of the research that you've done in Okinawa where we have the longest lived women was this concept of ikigai. Can you share a little bit more about what that term means? Yeah, roughly it's an Okinawan term that means roughly the reason for which I wake up in the morning.

22:25And interestingly, the Okinawan language does not have a word for retirement. So there's none of this sort of artificial punctuation between my productive and useful life and my life of repose or whatever. And it's legislatively mandated in this country, in many places, in many professions, you have to stop working. It doesn't happen in Okinawa. You'll see 104 year olds still in the market and 102 year olds who are still doing karate. They're putting their ikigai, their sense of purpose to work. And that's so important. I also believe the notion of ikigai, and I was just in Okinawa two weeks ago.

23:06I've been there several times for this research, also metabolizes the notion of responsibility. So it's not just I like to knit or it's not just I like to golf. It's living out your meaning, but in a way that gives back. So in all these blue zones, longevity hotspots, older people, A, are celebrated, but B, have a feeling like it's their job to make sure the next two or three generations have a successful life. So they're helping raise the children, raise the garden, pass down culinary wisdom, pass down resilience in many cases, pass down information on making sure crops work and how to deal with hardship and depression.

23:52Something called the grandmother effect is shown that when there's a grandmother or grandfather living in the home or near the home, the children in that home have lower rates of disease and lower rates of mortality. So it's a beautiful kind of circle that favors life expectancy. It favors happiness. None of it requires a pill. None of it requires you paying for a program. None of it requires that you conjure discipline. It's just a way of thinking about life that's very different than what's de riguier here in the United States. So for all of the research that you've done and all of the experiences that you've had over the past 15 years, how have the insights that you've gleaned changed or not changed your own personal behavior?

24:36Like have you noticed yourself making different life choices based on what you've discovered? Yes. I was an ultra marathon athlete and now I don't believe in that at all. I believe that's a net negative trying to be older than about 40 and trying to run triathlons. I think it's a bad idea. And so I've gone from ultra-distance cycling to doing yoga. I've gone mostly plant-based. I'm 99 % plant-based. I'm a big believer in that. I'm very clear at what my sense of purpose is. And I order my day so that I'm doing things to further the purpose rather than further my bank account or something. I don't chase after money or status or these things that I might have done when I was younger.

25:21I put a lot more time, energy, and effort into my friends. And I have let some friends go because I realized they weren't good for me. And I've added a new social network to my life in the last two or three years. And they tend to be people who are plant-based. They tend to be people's idea of recreation is playing tennis or ocean swimming or scuba diving. So that's what I do with them rather than sit around and watch football or eat hot dogs or something. They're friends that care about me. And so I've done that. And how would you define your sense of purpose? I learned the importance of it and I thought about, I actually sat down and wrote it down.

26:09It's not hard to do. We actually give purpose workshops. and purpose is really the cross section between what your values are, what you like to do, what you're good at, and what you have to give. One easy way to do is to simply take a piece of paper, four columns, each of those I just mentioned in the heading and write down. It just has to be two word. I'm good at the first idea. I'm good at communication. I'm good at education. I'm good at resolving conflict. And then you do the same thing with your values and what you like to do and what you can give back. And you look at that page, it becomes very clear.

26:58You'll see the same words show up in each of the four columns. And that's what your purpose is. And you should be asking yourself, is that what I do with my work? And if not, you might rethink your work. And then you should ask yourself, are the people I'm surrounding myself with, are they reinforcing what my purpose is? And asking yourself, in my leisure time, do I have an outlet for that? Given the whole spectrum of what we've covered, if we want to leave folks with one or two things that from your heart to theirs, you'd want them to either focus on or think about, what would you say? the cross-section for both longevity and happiness are your social network who you hang out with uh and also think about where you live i know this sounds stupid and you think well i can't move but we it's so clear places like boulder colorado and san luis obispo santa barbara minneapolis minnesota that people there are living measurably higher quality lives And I say this because nobody else will say it, but I also say it believing that it will have the biggest.