AI transcript
0:00:05 Support for this episode comes from The Current. The Current podcast is back with an exciting
0:00:09 new season featuring marketing executives from the world’s most influential brands.
0:00:13 Tune in to hear what’s driving conversation in the fast-moving world of digital advertising.
0:00:17 The unique insights from brands is diverse as Hilton, Instacart, Moderna, Major League
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0:00:43 An experimental procedure that is giving hope to the world to get a heart transplant from
0:00:49 a genetically modified pig. There’s over 100,000 people on the organ transplant weight
0:00:56 list. And some scientists think the answer might be pigs. Nobody in the world knew how
0:01:01 a human would react to a pig heart, right? The next day when we asked him, you know,
0:01:05 how are you feeling? He said, “Oink, oink.”
0:01:11 This week on Unexplainable, are pig hearts really the answer? Follow Unexplainable for
0:01:14 new episodes every Wednesday.
0:01:21 Hey, I’m John Glenn Hill, host of a brand new show from Vox called Explain It To Me.
0:01:24 This week, the ethical murkiness of zoos.
0:01:29 Do we as humans feel like we deserve to just be able to walk around and see these animals?
0:01:35 Like, maybe we don’t deserve that. Maybe there’s just some animals we don’t get to see.
0:01:40 To zoo or not to zoo? That’s this week on Explain It To Me. Listen wherever you get
0:01:47 your podcasts.
0:01:52 Episode 316, 316 is the area of belonging to Wichita, Kansas in the surrounding areas.
0:01:57 Episode 316, the first birth control clinic opened in Brooklyn, New York. True story.
0:02:01 My spouse and I used the pullout method for birth control. We go to sleep, we pull out
0:02:09 our phones and ignore each other. True story, my birth control has holes in it. Crocs.
0:02:13 I went to the doctor to get birth control from my daughter and he said, “She’s sexually
0:02:20 active?” And I said, “Well, that’s wrong. That is wrong.”
0:02:35 That’s why you come here. Go, go, go!
0:02:41 Welcome to the 316th episode of the Prop G-Pod. It’s just, the dilemma there was not what
0:02:47 joke to tell, but what joke not to tell. Birth control is just a cornucopia. It is a fertile
0:02:52 field of jokes. This has made my day just going over all these jokes. By the way, 90%
0:02:57 of them, my producer said, “No fucking way.” In today’s episode, we speak with Dan Butner,
0:03:02 a National Geographic Fellow, a longevity researcher and the best-selling author of
0:03:05 the Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Lived the Longest. We’ve
0:03:11 had a bunch of the kind of New Age cool guys, right? The Cool Club, the Atia and Hubermans
0:03:16 of the World. And I wanted to go old school with the OG of longevity. And it’s also very
0:03:22 handsome man at 63. I just don’t think you can be talking about longevity if you’re fucking
0:03:28 slob at 40 and smoking and drinking. I knew a few of those things. Anyways, we discussed
0:03:33 with Dan Blue Zones and how community environment and diet play into longevity. Okay, what’s
0:03:40 happening? The dog is back into UK. How do you know? I am so pale and unhappy. Oh, what
0:03:45 do you know? It’s the fall, which means it’s 50 fucking degrees. And what else am I doing?
0:03:48 I’m going to get out of London. I’m going to the south of France soon. Then I’m going
0:03:53 to go to Madrid for a conference. And then I head back to the US. Anyways, isn’t it
0:03:58 exciting to hear my travel itinerary? What else is going on? By the time you hear this,
0:04:02 Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will face each other in their first presidential debate.
0:04:07 I’ll be discussing my thoughts and reactions next week with Jessica Tarloff on our new
0:04:13 show. That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we need more of. We need more dog. That’s
0:04:17 the hole that needs to be filled. That’s the white space for those of you in marketing
0:04:24 here, right? Daddy needs some more dog said almost nobody right now. I am an enormous
0:04:32 fan of Jess Tarloff. She is the star of the show, the five. My favorite way to describe
0:04:36 the five is it’s four people discussing politics and they’re conservatives and they’re kind
0:04:41 of like batshit crazy, I would argue. And then Jessica just comes with receipts and
0:04:46 logic and there’ll be a pause after she says something sane. And it looks as if the four
0:04:50 of them have just been caught masturbating. They literally don’t know how to respond or
0:04:57 what to say. I love that. I love that. Anyways, I think she is so talented, so charming. And
0:05:03 the way I met Jess was she was my co-panelist on the Bill Maher show or Bill Maher’s real
0:05:08 time. And I hated Jess. Why did I hate her? Because I’m a narcissist and immediately went
0:05:15 to YouTube to check out the comments and every comment was love Jess. Jess is amazing. She
0:05:22 literally like no one even saw me on the panel because her insights were so strong. Anyways,
0:05:26 I got over it and we’ve gotten to know each other. We’ve become friendly and I said, let’s
0:05:32 start a podcast. It focuses on the middle and tries to be a little bit more data driven
0:05:36 calling it raging moderates. Is it treat or call us moderates? Maybe. I mean, I think,
0:05:41 I don’t know. I think I’m center left, kind of going center right because of the head
0:05:45 up your ass narrative coming out of the far left on Israel, which I’ve had an emotional
0:05:49 reaction to. But anyways, she’s definitely center left. I think I like to think I’m right
0:05:54 down the middle, but people say that maybe it’s not true. Anyways, love the name. Love
0:05:58 the name. All right, enough of that. Let’s talk about Apple. Let’s get back to the world
0:06:03 of business. The big news is that it’s releasing four new iPhones that can run Apple intelligence
0:06:09 or put another way. The firm’s AI suite as exciting as that is. Is that exciting? I guess
0:06:13 so. We likely won’t see the phone’s full AI effect until next year. Apple claims the
0:06:19 new chips in these phones can perform 30% faster than last year’s processor. They also revealed
0:06:23 new air pod pros that will have hearing aid and protection capabilities. I’ve always thought
0:06:27 that was a huge opportunity. I just don’t understand. Seems to me that apples is going
0:06:31 to come in and take the entire hearing aid market. Anyways, year to date, Apple stock
0:06:37 is up 17%, which on, I think it was about a half a trillion dollars when you’re trading
0:06:41 at three trillion. Alphabet’s taken ahead, Nvidia’s taken a bit of a hit. Is that fair
0:06:47 to say in the last month or so? But I think Apple’s genius here, again, it comes down
0:06:53 to this. And that is my friend and former colleague Peter Golder, he had this one insight
0:06:57 that he sort of built a career around, is that the innovators don’t actually add shareholder
0:07:00 value. What does it mean to be an innovator? It kind of means you’re first. It means you’re
0:07:04 coming up with something new and different. And generally speaking, that’s not the right
0:07:09 strategy to add shareholder value. What is the right strategy? The second mouse strategy.
0:07:15 And that is the first people have to spend a lot of money to try and forge a new technology,
0:07:19 build a new type of housing design, a new type, I don’t know, something new. And then
0:07:24 if it works, the people kind of laying in the reeds can say, okay, we can do this almost
0:07:28 as well for less money, or we can improve upon it, or take these features out and add
0:07:34 this one. It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. This is the primary means of adding
0:07:41 shareholder value for the big companies. And let’s be clear, Apple defines the second mouse.
0:07:46 Were they the first in MP3 players? No. Object oriented computing? No laptops? No. Were they
0:07:51 the first to have a smartphone? Hell to the no. They haven’t been first around anything.
0:07:55 But Apple defines the second mouse. And where are they going second mousing right now? And
0:08:00 it’s going to add more value than, in my opinion, almost any AI company with the exception of
0:08:05 Microsoft AI. And that is effectively what they’ve said is, let’s let other people make
0:08:11 massive investments in AI. This is an arms race. It takes a ton of money, mostly spent
0:08:17 on products from Nvidia. And it’s a capital arms race. Computing all this shit just costs
0:08:23 a fortune. Instead, we’ll take the best of breed, and we’ll offer very consumer friendly
0:08:26 applications of AI, such as, you know what I would really like? I would really like the
0:08:31 ability to just search my photos using AI. If they offer that on the next iPhone, boom,
0:08:36 champagne and cocaine. By the way, I can’t help it. I get those Apple memories. Is that
0:08:39 what they call where they come up and they start showing my kids when they were like
0:08:46 little and cute and like, thought their dad was their hero?
0:08:51 Apple also announced, also announced that part of their AI package would be kind of an
0:08:57 ability to do AI assistant type work, image editing, and that they would update Siri.
0:09:00 So I own Apple. I’ve owned it for a long time. I think it’s just one of those companies
0:09:05 you hold on to forever. I do think it’s fully valued, but my capital gains would be I’ve
0:09:10 owned it since 2008. So I think I’m up 20x on it, maybe 30x. So I don’t want to take
0:09:16 the tax hit. I can’t find anything better to invest in. So I guess I’m still long Apple.
0:09:21 By the way, speaking of luxury brands, strongest luxury brand in the world that isn’t a university.
0:09:25 Because if the strongest is in fact Apple, why? If you own an Apple product, it says
0:09:31 very sort of implicitly, elegantly that you’re one of the billion wealthiest, most impressive,
0:09:34 most creative people on the planet. I think this is brilliant because what they’ve said
0:09:39 is I’m not going to get into an arms race about AI. I’m going to take the best of different
0:09:46 AI and maybe, maybe, here’s an idea. I’ll let open AI or llama or Gemini. I’ll do the
0:09:50 same thing I did with search and I’ll bid it out and say, all right, who wants a co-branded
0:09:56 AI application in front of the billion wealthiest consumers? Well, I do. Well, okay, it’s going
0:10:02 to cost you. Similar to how Google is the default search engine in an exchange for that, Alphabet
0:10:08 justifies paying $20 billion a year to Apple, of which about 19.9 hits the bottom line at
0:10:13 which point when a company is trading at a PE of about 20, you’re talking about literally
0:10:19 about a six or $700 billion deal in terms of market capitalization or shareholder value
0:10:22 to the organization. I think they’re setting themselves up to do the exact same thing in
0:10:26 AI and that is you guys spend all the money trying to figure out search. You guys spend
0:10:30 all the money trying to figure out AI will be the interface to the billion wealthiest
0:10:35 consumers and will give you some of that interface and some of that exposure in exchange for
0:10:41 some serious cabbage, serious cabbage. I think this is brilliant. I think these guys, I don’t
0:10:45 know who’s running strategy at Apple. You never hear about them. They have this sort
0:10:51 of shtazi-like or Mossad-like secrecy over there and it works. You’re not supposed to
0:10:55 be a star. You’re not supposed to be going on Johnny Carson and say, “Well, when I was
0:11:00 running strategy at Apple, but whoever is running strategy at Apple, they consistently
0:11:05 make really good moves.” Mixed reality headset, whatever. That was probably the right strategy
0:11:10 to make sure that Zuckerberg didn’t get out too far in front of them. But here’s the hard
0:11:14 part because this is the bottom line. This is what a CEO does. A CEO’s most difficult
0:11:20 decision is not what to do. It’s what not to do. Because the cruel truth of capitalism
0:11:24 is you have finite resources, even if you’re Apple. So your decisions around what not to
0:11:30 do, such that you have the capital to do what you decide to do really well, is just as important
0:11:34 as deciding what to do, if you will. They’re two sides of the same coin. And I think in
0:11:38 this instance, they said, “You know, rather than spending tens or hundreds of billions
0:11:43 trying to build out our own unique AI, we’re going to go the other way. We’re going to
0:11:46 be a remora fish. We’re going to be the second mouse here, and we’re going to continue to
0:11:54 drive a ton of value. Apple is the ultimate second mouse.” We’ll be right back for our
0:11:58 conversation with Dan Butener.
0:12:02 Support for PropG comes from Mint Mobile. If you’re serious about keeping your budget
0:12:05 in check, your monthly expenses are one of the first places to look. And one thing a
0:12:11 lot of us overpay for is our phones, especially between all the hidden fees and other nonsense
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0:13:56 When Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met on the debate stage, it was obvious that these
0:13:58 were two very different people.
0:14:03 But JD Vance and Tim Walls actually have a lot in common. They’re both white men from
0:14:06 the Midwest, they’re both family men, and they were both in the service.
0:14:09 But they disagree on what it means to be a man.
0:14:13 Here’s my light pack. Surround yourself with smart women and listen to them and you’ll
0:14:14 do just fine.
0:14:32 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14:35 Welcome back. Here’s our conversation with Dan Butner, a National Geographic Fellow,
0:14:40 longevity researcher and bestselling author of the Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer
0:14:42 from the People Who Live the Longest.
0:14:45 Dan, where does this podcast find you?
0:14:49 17 Blocks from the Raleigh Hotel Pool.
0:14:55 Let’s bust right into it. Your focus is longevity. So let’s start there. Can you break down what
0:14:58 a “Blue Zone” is?
0:15:05 A “Blue Zone” is a geographically defined, demographically confirmed area where people
0:15:11 live statistically longest. And we measure that through either lowest rate of middle
0:15:19 age mortality and/or highest centenarian rate. So mostly we’re looking at life expectancy
0:15:26 of people about our age because that factors out things like testosterone, toxicity, and
0:15:28 infant mortality.
0:15:32 And then what did you find? My guess is everybody, and I know some of this, but what are the
0:15:39 common features of lifestyles and habits for people who live in these areas where they
0:15:42 tend to live longer? I assume it’s not the geography, although maybe that has something
0:15:43 to do with it.
0:15:47 Oddly, geography does have something to do with it. Geography has more to do with it
0:15:54 than genes because only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. And these
0:16:00 places are genetically heterogeneous, which is to say they’re melting pods. Each of these
0:16:06 places, you find them on about the 20th parallel north. So it’s neither the tropics where people
0:16:12 are beleaguered by infectious disease, nor are they too far north where they don’t get
0:16:18 enough sunshine and outdoor activity, and in the case of the “Blue Zones” access to
0:16:24 fresh fruits and vegetables. But the common denominator is they’re eating mostly a whole
0:16:30 food plant-based diet. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole
0:16:39 grains and garden vegetables and so forth. Tubers, interestingly, about 75% of the caloric
0:16:44 intake in Okinawa, a place that produced the longest-lived women in history, came from
0:16:52 the purple sweet potato until about 1990. And then nuts and beans. Beans are the cornerstone
0:16:57 of every longevity diet, and if you’re eating a cup of beans a day, it’s probably worth
0:17:02 about four extra years of life expectancy.
0:17:07 So let me get this. If I want to add for it, I mean, I realize there’s more to it here.
0:17:12 But if you wanted to add, call it, “Multiple years of life expectancy, one serving of beans
0:17:13 a day.”
0:17:19 About a cup. It’s associated, and it may be because there’s something crazy good in
0:17:24 beans, or it might be because if you’re getting your protein from beans instead of bacon,
0:17:29 you’re getting the longevity bump. But it definitely stacks the deck in favor of longevity
0:17:31 if you’re eating a cup of beans a day.
0:17:35 So say more about the common denominators. I’ve read your book, and there’s a few of
0:17:36 them.
0:17:41 Yes. People seem to have a sense of purpose. There’s vocabulary for purpose in every “Blue
0:17:49 Zone.” So they’re not waking up with the existential stress of what am I going to do with my day.
0:17:55 They live in places where it’s easy to move naturally. They’re nudged into movement every
0:18:01 20 minutes, as opposed to thinking they can sit all day long at their offices and make
0:18:06 it up in the gym. Every time they go to work or a friend’s house or out to eat at occasions
0:18:13 a walk. They have gardens out back. Their houses aren’t full of the mechanical conveniences
0:18:19 that have engineered most of the physical activity out of our lives. The scourge of
0:18:25 network technology hasn’t quite struck “Blue Zones” yet. So most social interaction is
0:18:31 face-to-face, and they get a lot of it, largely as a result of their environment. So you can’t
0:18:38 step outside of your home and not bump into your neighbor or your aunt or person who delivers
0:18:45 your mail. So there’s spontaneous social interaction, which in some studies have shown these low
0:18:53 quality social interactions are as predictive of longevity as deep meaningful conversations.
0:18:57 And what about their social life or how they engage with others?
0:19:03 Well, they tend to live in extended families. They keep their aging parents nearby, which
0:19:12 conveys two to six year additional life expectancy as opposed to putting your aging parent in
0:19:19 a retirement home. They tend to be married or living with a partner, best heavily in
0:19:25 their kids. They live in walkable villages, so they’re constantly interacting with others.
0:19:33 The festivals is part of the annual cycle of life. In Icaria, for example, one of our
0:19:40 Blue Zones, there’s 90 festivals between April and September, and people show up to
0:19:45 them not only as kind of a social obligation, but because they’re fun. But what happens
0:19:54 at these festivals is people build bonds, social bonds. There’s almost always a philanthropic
0:20:00 objective to the party, plus they’re dancing all night, which is great for physical activity.
0:20:05 But the key insight, Scott, to longevity, and this is where we get it wrong in America.
0:20:15 In America, we tend to pursue health and longevity. We get in mind a diet, an exercise program,
0:20:22 maybe a supplement program, longevity hacks, and then we pursue it. But the problem is
0:20:29 our brains are wired for novelty. We get bored very quickly. We lose discipline, we lose
0:20:36 presence of mind. If you look at any of the sort of strategies we undertake to get healthier,
0:20:41 live longer, live weight, they never work for more than about nine months. Then the
0:20:50 vast majority of people have failed. In Blue Zones, longevity isn’t pursued in in-soups,
0:20:55 which is a huge difference. In other words, people in Blue Zones have no idea how they’re
0:21:00 living an extra 10 years at middle age than Americans do. They just live their lives.
0:21:06 But if you look at their environments, they’re living in places where their unconscious decisions,
0:21:14 their micro day-to-day decisions are better for not only a few months or a year or two,
0:21:20 but for decades or a lifetime. Because when it comes to longevity, there’s no short-term
0:21:27 fix. It’s regular, better day-to-day decisions for a long time that make the big difference.
0:21:30 That doesn’t happen with the conscious mind.
0:21:37 It feels as if it’s a little bit, “Okay, I have my life here in London. I try to purposely
0:21:45 eat better. I have a trainer to get in my exercise. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but
0:21:48 the weather in London is somewhere between awful and whatever is worse than awful.”
0:21:49 Feel real weather.
0:21:57 “Yeah, there you go. That is the wrong way to live long. It’s about moving to Greece
0:22:04 where I’m forced to walk somewhere. The Mediterranean diet just unfolds on me. I’m living close
0:22:09 to my family, so I have no choice, but to be highly social.” It feels like it’s more
0:22:15 of a … Instead of the accoutrements, it is your life. Is that a decent way to describe
0:22:16 it?
0:22:24 Yes. It’s about shifting the focus from trying to change your behavior, which fails for almost
0:22:30 all people, almost all the time in the long run, to shaping your environment. Of course,
0:22:35 the easiest way to shape your environment for longevity is, as you point out, is move.
0:22:44 There are areas in America where life expectancy is 25 years less than other places. There
0:22:51 are zip codes in Kentucky where life expectancy is 25 years below, say Boulder, Colorado.
0:22:58 What we found in the main focus of my work for the past 15 years has been shaping people’s
0:23:06 environment at the population level, largely through policy, but also through helping restaurants,
0:23:11 grocery stores, workplaces, schools, and even your home are designed so that the healthy
0:23:18 choice is either the easy choice or the unavoidable choice, and that’s what works.
0:23:22 It’s an issue we’re looking at. You mentioned Kentucky. Let’s go to the other side. I don’t
0:23:27 know if you have a term for gray zones or dead zones, but what is it about specifically
0:23:34 about these places where people live a lot less healthy lives and have much higher mortality?
0:23:37 What are the commonalities or the common denominators there?
0:23:43 They’re crisscrossed with highways, unwalkable streets. Every time you go to work, you have
0:23:50 to get in your car. More people have died in car accidents in the last 100 years than
0:23:55 have died in wars. Right there is your first mortality challenge, and then the fact you’re
0:24:02 not walking, they tend to be junk food forests. There’s no effort to curb accessibility or
0:24:08 junk food marketing, so junk food and ultra processed food is delicious, and it’s cheap,
0:24:13 and it’s ubiquitous, and that’s why we eat so much of it, not because we know it’s not
0:24:15 bad good for us.
0:24:21 There’s typically higher crime. People are more socially isolated. Think about suburban
0:24:27 cul-de-sac as opposed to downtown London where you live, where every time you step outside
0:24:32 your door, there’s a chance to bump into somebody, and there’s at least a chance that there’ll
0:24:37 be a meaningful social connection for you. Often air quality, which is also a function
0:24:48 of traffic, it’s a number of smaller things that add up to decades of life expectancy disparity.
0:24:54 We talked about purpose. Break down a little bit more, a little bit about work. I’ve read
0:24:59 somewhere that work used to be dirty, dangerous work. Now work for many people is purpose
0:25:04 and that their mortality actually goes up, especially men, when they stop working. Unpack
0:25:06 work and longevity.
0:25:14 A Gallup poll of 2 million workers found that only about 31%, fewer than a third of Americans
0:25:19 actually find purpose at work. Most of us are showing up to work because we need the
0:25:25 money or the insurance or it’s a status thing. Dr. Robert Butler, who was the first director
0:25:31 of the National Institutes on Aging, analyzed the writings of several thousand people over
0:25:37 time and found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight
0:25:43 years longer than people who are rudderless. We don’t know if that’s because people with
0:25:50 sense of purpose are some sort of a mechanism that makes us rise to the occasion, psychosomatic
0:25:57 benefit or if it’s because people who have a sense of purpose are more likely to stay
0:26:04 fit and take their medicines and make an effort with other people in connecting or find a
0:26:12 job where they’re not bored or uninspired. It’s so important and it’s so largely overlooked
0:26:15 in the United States, I believe.
0:26:21 I’ve been reading that there’s just a ton of stress placed on parents. I’ve also read
0:26:26 other places that actually while you have kids in the house, you’re actually less happy
0:26:32 than people without kids. Talk about the ideal scenario from a longevity standpoint for someone’s
0:26:39 relationship status. Kids, no kids, eight kids, one kid, married, boyfriend, whatever
0:26:44 it might be. What is the ideal scenario and what is the worst case scenario? I imagine
0:26:48 the worst case scenario is just to be totally alone, but that’s my thesis.
0:26:55 Yes, that’s the worst case. Let me unpack a few things. I also wrote a book and a cover
0:27:01 story for Natural Geographic on happiness called The Blue Zones of Happiness. There’s
0:27:09 two scientific ways of measuring happiness. The first one is something called life satisfaction
0:27:13 where you essentially ask people to think of their life as a whole and rate it on a scale
0:27:19 of one to 10. That’s the value weight of it. It’s your life in the rearview mirror. The
0:27:23 other way is something called affect, positive or negative affect, and that’s measured by
0:27:29 a time sequence of asking people how often they laugh, cry, feel stress, feel worry. That’s
0:27:33 more of an evaluative or how you experience happiness.
0:27:40 People who have babies, both the men and the women, tend to experience a dramatic drop
0:27:47 in affect. In other words, their experience happiness drops. Predictably, they’re exhausted
0:27:54 or there’s money stress in the family or the wife doesn’t want to have sex because she
0:28:02 just had a baby, whatever, but life satisfaction goes up. You get this up and down of happiness
0:28:11 and the picture’s not clear. In places like Denmark, both kinds of happiness go up. Presumable
0:28:17 will be because there’s better childcare and for the first year of life, both the man
0:28:24 and women can take up to 12 months off to take care of that infant. As far as longevity,
0:28:31 we did a study in Sardinia. Sardinia’s home to the longest-lived men in the world, about
0:28:36 11 times more male centenarians there than you’d expect to see in a similar population
0:28:43 in the United States. The guys with the best chance of reaching age 100 had five or more
0:28:50 daughters, specifically daughters. We don’t know if that’s because daughters tend to take
0:28:57 care of their aging fathers in that culture or if it’s because there’s a selection bias,
0:29:03 that if you can survive five adolescent girls making it to 100, it’s no problem. But it’s
0:29:04 very clear-
0:29:11 It’s got to be the former, isn’t it? I would just think logically. I was joking. I wish
0:29:15 I’d had two boys. I always wish I’d had a daughter because I thought the daughter would
0:29:19 take care of me. The daughter would call me and say, “Dad, did you pick up your medication?
0:29:27 Dad, did you get your colonoscopy?” That they make sure that you’re taking care of yourself.
0:29:33 To me, it’s so funny that that seems so obvious, and I never thought that, have a bunch of
0:29:35 daughters to live longer.
0:29:43 Yeah. Living in extended families seems to be a trend in all blue zones. I know people
0:29:48 think the idea of their parents living with them might be horrible, but often there’s
0:29:54 not a choice in blue zones, but you see very tangible benefits. Something called the grandmother
0:30:02 effect has shown not only in several cultures, but actually several mammal species that those
0:30:08 that keep a parent near the family, the children in those families have lower rates of mortality
0:30:15 and lower rates of disease. Not only that, if you’re aging moms living with you, she’s
0:30:22 not a retirement home. Again, retirement home, instant lowering of life expectancy. There’s
0:30:31 a beautiful symbiosis that you see in families. Having children, raising them well, I would
0:30:37 argue not coddling them. You don’t see coddled children in the blue zones. Children are expected
0:30:43 to be contributing members of the family. They’re all sometimes in the field. They’re
0:30:48 goldherders by the age of eight or 12, eight between eight and 12. They’re helping with
0:30:55 kitchen chores. They’re not just being driven to dance lessons and play dates, like we typically
0:31:03 see. There is a chance that they could get hurt. They have to take on some responsibility
0:31:10 in the attendant risk with that at a very early age as opposed to waiting age 25 to
0:31:16 take your first risk in life. So much of this is encouraging and discouraging. Do you have
0:31:26 kids, Dan? I have three. My kids basically get up. I hate to admit this. It’s our fault.
0:31:31 My kids don’t even make their beds. The most active thing they do is they do take the tube.
0:31:39 They do play sports at school, but they are coddled. They really are. What is your approach
0:31:43 after doing all of this research? What is your approach to raising your children that
0:31:47 might be a little different than how other people raise their kids?
0:31:54 Well, at a certain point in my life, I told them I needed them at a very early age, and
0:31:58 I gave them chores. I did need them. I needed them psychologically at that point, but I
0:32:05 also, you know, logistically needed help. I never made money until I was 40, and I made
0:32:12 a lot of money. But in a way, it was a gift to live in a household where, you know, we
0:32:18 had to make our own fun, and I needed them to help me with the laundry, etc., and with
0:32:24 the yard. And I think at the end of the day, that was good. That was a gift for them.
0:32:28 And why is that? I’m going to probe here. Are you a single father?
0:32:35 Yes. So during that time, you know, I needed them. I enjoyed having them around me. But
0:32:40 they all worked they were supposed to do. I also, you know, we didn’t go to Disney World.
0:32:46 We would go to the Yucatán Peninsula and crawl through batshit caves when they were
0:32:53 eight, nine, ten years old, and we would live in villages with Yucatec Maya. And childhood
0:33:00 with me wasn’t safe in the immediate sense of the word, but I believe it gave them enormous
0:33:06 resilience for later in life. They’re three very successful adults right now.
0:33:10 We’ll be right back.
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0:35:18 NMLS 1617539. This week on PropG Markets, we speak with
0:35:23 Lena Kahn, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss ongoing antitrust cases, how to
0:35:29 measure consumer harm, and her take on monopolies in big tech. We went through a 20-year period
0:35:36 where the Big Five technology companies, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon
0:35:41 collectively made over 800 acquisitions, and not a single one of which was challenged at
0:35:47 the time. And now there are lawsuits kind of retroactively identifying that some of those
0:35:52 were missed opportunities, and failing to stop those deals had a really negative impact
0:35:57 on the market. You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the PropG Markets
0:36:05 podcast. I like to think I can point, I can identify people who are good CEOs. I’ve spent
0:36:11 so much time with good and bad CEOs that when I interview a CEO for a position as a director
0:36:17 on a board, I feel like I’m a pretty good study. I’m not good at assessing other employees.
0:36:23 I get fooled all the time, but I get, I think I can kind of sum up someone’s CEO readiness
0:36:28 or not. What are the things, A, do you believe you can do that? And B, what are sort of the
0:36:32 obvious tells when you spend, say, an hour with somebody?
0:36:40 Well, just a level set. The chances of reaching 100 in America are less than one in a thousand.
0:36:48 So the capacity of the human machine, so the average person our age is, for men, it’s probably
0:36:56 93, maybe 94, and for women, it might be 96. So making it to 100 is exponentially more
0:37:04 difficult than hitting the early mid-90s. Okay, first thing, I look at you and I say,
0:37:09 I think you have a pretty good chance at reaching that capacity of the human machine. And it
0:37:15 might go up, by the way, by the time it’s our time that we might get to 100, but you’re
0:37:21 thin or you seemingly, you’re not overweight, you’re obviously physically active. You live
0:37:26 in London, which I would say stacks the deck in favor of longevity because you walk most
0:37:34 places, you’re mentally engaged, you seem to exude purpose. I don’t know what you eat,
0:37:40 but a few questions, I could, if I could, how often a week do you eat meat?
0:37:44 10 plus. I would eat at every meal if I could. I eat a lot of meat.
0:37:52 That is probably tripling your chances for cardiovascular disease, many types of cancers.
0:37:56 You’re not a big candidate for type two diabetes, but if you were an average American, that
0:37:59 much meat would be a negative. How about processed foods?
0:38:03 Not as much. And what’s interesting about the UK is one of the things I’ve noticed here,
0:38:11 and I think it’s much healthier. You buy milk, you buy fruit, you buy juice, anything. What
0:38:17 you notice is, wow, it rots right away. And then what you realize is there are thousands
0:38:22 of pesticides and preservatives that are legal in the US that are not legal here. And it
0:38:29 never struck me just how much shit I was putting in my body in the US until I moved to London.
0:38:34 And I’m blessed I have somebody who loves to cook. So when I eat out, I eat fairly well,
0:38:38 but when you eat out, my senses, it’s full of butter and salty come back. So I don’t
0:38:42 eat, I’m probably on the lower scale of processed food.
0:38:47 That’s good. Eating out in America, by the way, occasions consuming about 300 more calories
0:38:52 than you would if you eat at home. Higher salt, higher sugar as well. So eating at home
0:38:59 stacks the deck in your favor. How about your height to your midsection? Are you measuring
0:39:06 in centimeters or inches? Are you at least twice as tall as you are round at the midsection?
0:39:11 Oh yeah, I’m 6’2″, 189, I’m in good shape.
0:39:13 That’s exactly what I am.
0:39:14 Oh nice.
0:39:15 Exactly.
0:39:18 Are you shrinking though? I was 6’3″, now I’m 6’2″.
0:39:23 I was 6’2″, and now I’m 6’2″. Yeah, so I am shrinking a little bit. Everybody shrinks
0:39:28 a lot. It’s an effective gravity over time. How many hours of sleep do you get?
0:39:34 Good about sleep. I don’t sleep as well because I have to get up and pee a lot. But if I can’t
0:39:38 sleep, and it’s 2 or 3 in the morning, and we’ll come back to this, I will take an edible
0:39:45 and I will cancel my meetings in the morning because I spent so much of my life working
0:39:50 so hard that sometimes I would go 4 or 5 hours a night for 3 or 4 days in a row because
0:39:53 I was traveling and just going from meeting and meeting and meeting. And pretty much since
0:39:59 the age of 45, I don’t sacrifice sleep. So I’m pretty good on the sleep other than the
0:40:02 fact I have to get up and pee all the time.
0:40:09 Yeah, me too on that one. When you look at mortality, a number of hours slept per night.
0:40:15 People who sleep 7 hours seem to be optimal. Getting at least 7 hours most nice, that seems
0:40:23 to be the sweet spot. And so if you’re getting that, that’s going to favor your life expectancy.
0:40:28 How about fruits and vegetables? Do you eat those every day?
0:40:32 It’s horrible. 2 to 3 times a week max, and the fruits I eat are in the form of juice,
0:40:33 which has a ton of sugar in it.
0:40:38 Juice is horrible. That’s all. You’ve got to biologically as bad for you as a Coke. Yeah.
0:40:43 So I mean, mid-80s maybe for you?
0:40:48 Mid-80s? All right, I better go. Okay, so I got to get on this whole success and finding
0:40:50 meaning in one’s life. What about the-
0:40:55 I’m not, by the way, just to put a finer point, a more serious point on it, there’s very good
0:41:01 research that shows that people are eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet, eschewing
0:41:09 a standard American diet. At our age, 60, live about 6 years longer than people eating
0:41:15 a meaty, cheesy, fatty, processed food diet. So there’s real benefits to starting right
0:41:19 away. It’s not too late, in other words.
0:41:26 The other question I have is asking for a friend, alcohol and THC, alcohol and drugs.
0:41:32 Okay, so I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to alcohol. I’m very aware of the recent
0:41:38 epidemiology that no amount of alcohol is safe, but I can tell you in these blue zones,
0:41:45 Highlands of Sardinia in Ikaria, and I’ve seen the surveys. I’ve been part of the surveys.
0:41:49 About 90% of people who are making it into their mid 90s and hundreds are drinking every
0:41:55 day of their lives. Now, are they doing shots at tequila with their friends? No. They’re
0:42:03 drinking mostly homemade wine with friends or with a meal. So could they live to 101 instead
0:42:11 of 99? Maybe. But it’s so clear that part of the fabric of their culture, their festivals,
0:42:16 the way they’re connecting with friends, the way they’re, how this wine is interacting
0:42:21 with the diet they’re eating. By the way, glass of wine with a plant-based meal about
0:42:28 quadruples, the flavonoid absorption. So I’m not at all convinced that being a teetoler
0:42:35 is healthier than drinking. I would argue a glass or two of wine with meal and friends,
0:42:43 I believe is helping these people in blue zones live longer. You’re the original gangster
0:42:48 on this stuff. I remember when did blue zones come out? I wrote the cover story for National
0:42:54 Geographic in 2005, so almost 20 years ago. Yeah. And I’m sure you’re watching over the
0:43:00 last one or two years, Andrew Huberman and Peter Atia, both of whom are doctors, Huberman
0:43:05 and Atia, both of them had both of them on the podcast, and they have essentially declared
0:43:11 war on alcohol. And some of this is just to make myself feel better. But Ivo has seen
0:43:16 and read, including from your books, that social engagement or being really social
0:43:21 is important to longevity and overall happiness. And I find that alcohol is a critical component
0:43:24 of that. At least it is for me, and I think it is for young people.
0:43:31 Well, you see, doctors and marketers also, they tend to want to identify the silver bullet
0:43:38 and sell it to you. They tend to look at things in isolation. But I’ve spent 20 years with
0:43:47 these five blue zones. I’m there every year. And I believe I know and have read and metabolized
0:43:56 every single academic paper. There’s a very clear cluster of lifestyle characteristics
0:44:02 that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough
0:44:07 so they’re not getting a disease. And those are eating mostly a whole food, plant-based
0:44:12 diet with a little alcohol, moving naturally every 20 minutes or so, not marathons, not
0:44:18 triathlons, not Pilates or CrossFit. They’re mostly walking, by the way. Their life is
0:44:24 underpinned with purpose. So they know why they wake up in the morning and what their
0:44:32 responsibility is to the greater community, not just to their selfish selves. They tend
0:44:37 to curate a circle of friends that reinforce the right behaviors and insulate them from
0:44:44 loneliness and from the stresses of running out of money or a spouse leaving them or a
0:44:49 parent dying or a kid getting sick. And they live in places where the healthy choice is
0:44:55 the easy choice. And it’s that cluster of things that’s mostly environmental that is
0:45:02 producing measurable, extraordinary longevity in five disparate places on the globe. And
0:45:08 for me, that’s a persuasive argument of what to do to live to 100.
0:45:13 So let’s talk a little bit about the US. If the Biden administration, or maybe they have,
0:45:22 said to you, Dan, what two or three policies could we implement to dramatically raise not
0:45:25 only the lifespan but the health span, the quality of life of Americans? What would those
0:45:27 two or three policies be?
0:45:31 Well, I’m going to tell you, they’re not going to be popular. First of all, universal health
0:45:41 care. In every blue zone, the access to health care is close to free. Not only that, there’s
0:45:50 a much better emphasis on public health. So rather than trying to pay for cleaning up
0:45:57 the disease, they’re investing to keep the disease from happening in the first place.
0:46:01 There’s just no question that universal health care, 11% of Americans don’t even have health
0:46:11 insurance in this country. Number two, gasoline should be priced at a price very similar to
0:46:16 what you pay for in Europe, which is about twice or three times even you see in some
0:46:22 places. Why? Because what will happen if you raise gas, people will figure out how to take
0:46:28 public transportation. People who take public transportation have about 20% lower mortality
0:46:35 than people who drive back or to work. So it gets them out from behind their wheels onto
0:46:41 their feet. They’ll move closer to their schools and their jobs. There’ll be more population
0:46:48 concentration, so people will be more social. And then the last thing is the farm bill.
0:46:56 The farm bill right now is set up to subsidize soybeans, corn, sugar beets, and wheat. These
0:47:07 are all the inputs of all the junk food we eat, the Doritos, feedlot animals, crappy
0:47:15 beef and pork. If we pulled those subsidies out and instead of making it easy and cheap
0:47:21 to raise these junk food inputs and instead shifted it to beans and grains and greens and
0:47:27 organic vegetables, the price of those would come down and the consumption would go up.
0:47:34 Places like Singapore, they see very clearly and gas is 11 bucks a gallon and your car
0:47:40 is going to be taxed 300%. Meanwhile, there’s a great subway system where it’s easy to get
0:47:46 any from point A to point B in a safe, quick, air-conditioned way, but you’ve got to walk
0:47:50 back and forth to the subway and people are taking 10,000 steps a day without even thinking
0:47:56 about it. They subsidize brown rice and they’re going to tax sugar. They already have a sugar
0:48:04 tax in Singapore and not coincidentally, they tax tobacco. In Singapore, you have a country
0:48:12 where the health adjusted life expectancy, which is the estimate of how long people are
0:48:19 going to live minus the years lost to chronic disease and the years of healthy life lost
0:48:27 to disability. That’s highest. They live about 15 more good years than Americans do. Heterogeneous
0:48:33 society just because they can see clearly and make their policies, set policies to favor
0:48:37 the human being rather than to just favor business.
0:48:44 So if you, general reductive advice, two or three things get started are like table stakes
0:48:50 or most immediate incremental benefit. Talk about a 60-year-old, talk about a 25-year-old.
0:48:55 What are those two or three things? Like, okay, I got five minutes with the leading
0:49:00 authority on longevity. What are the two or three thing boxes you need to check when you’re
0:49:03 in your 20s and what about when you’re in your 50s or 60s?
0:49:10 At both ages, carefully curate the circle of friends that you spend time with. We know
0:49:16 that if your three best friends are obese, there’s 150% better chance you’ll be overweight.
0:49:23 So I wouldn’t necessarily dump your old unhealthy friends, but I would say making the effort
0:49:30 to find two or three new friends in your immediate social circle. These are people that you’re
0:49:35 going to see with some frequency or communicate with some frequency whose idea of recreation
0:49:45 is biking or golf or pickleball or gardening. Friends who care about you on a bad day. That’s
0:49:50 the real litmus test of a real friend with whom you can have meaningful conversation.
0:49:56 And it’s not a bad idea to have a whole food vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social
0:50:04 circle because they’re going to show you how and where to get healthy, plant-based food.
0:50:09 I can’t emphasize the importance of that enough. If you really want to live longer, it’s making
0:50:16 that shift to whole grains, greens, beans, nuts, and tubers. It’s indisputable in my
0:50:23 view. As an extension of that, get yourself a good cookbook. I’ve written Blue Zone Kitchen
0:50:29 books, but there’s a lots of cookbook, great cookbooks that tell you how to cook, show
0:50:37 you how to cook plant-based, learn how to cook at home. Instead of going on a diet or
0:50:42 joining a gym, say to yourself, “Well, for the next four Sundays, I’m going to get my
0:50:48 family together, and we’re going to cook three whole food, plant-based meals together on
0:50:53 Sunday afternoon, storm for the rest of the week, and eat them.” And the trick is to
0:51:00 not only know where you can get the ingredients, know how to make it, but the trick is to
0:51:07 find a handful that you love. Once you find that, my job is over because at the end of
0:51:12 the day, people really don’t give a crap about the environment. They don’t care that much
0:51:18 about animal cruelty or even their health when it comes to a hungry belly at lunch.
0:51:23 They want to eat something delicious. So as long as you can satisfy that hungry belly
0:51:30 in a delicious way, people don’t care that much. In other words, they’d happily take
0:51:34 a healthy meal over an unhealthy meal as long as the taste is that good.
0:51:38 Well, give us a little bit about your path professionally and what the big breaks were
0:51:43 and what advice you would have for a young person who says, “I would really like to have
0:51:47 that guy’s professional life.” What were the big breaks? What do you wish you’d started
0:51:52 earlier? What skills do you think you brought to the table? What advice? Someone’s 25,
0:51:58 maybe they enjoy thought leadership or science or they enjoy writing, and they want to be
0:51:59 Dan.
0:52:07 Well, heaven help them. They want to be Dan, but I would say I was an intern with George
0:52:14 Plimpton who was an editor of the Paris Review and a great writer, a participatory journalist.
0:52:22 I’d say number one, and I would say for any 25 years, learn how to communicate not only
0:52:25 verbal but written communication skills.
0:52:26 Story telling.
0:52:27 It’s kind of everything, isn’t it?
0:52:32 I think you get an age of AI because being able to write well is a reflection of your
0:52:43 ability to think and convey an idea and sell the idea whether you’re selling stocks and
0:52:51 bonds, a real estate development idea or, in my case, longevity. That is a good base.
0:52:58 When you were off doing useful and productive things, going to school and analyzing a fixed
0:53:04 instrument, financial instruments, I went and rode my bike. I hold the record for biking
0:53:10 from Alaska to Argentina, biking around the world and biking the length and width of Africa.
0:53:15 That’s what I did most of my 20s, which was actually very good training for life because
0:53:22 you develop discipline, you develop a sort of empathy for other cultures and a sensitivity,
0:53:29 also an ability to survive and to quickly learn, synthesize lots of information and put
0:53:30 it to work.
0:53:37 Then I started a company. I was trying to write for National Geographic. That was my holy
0:53:44 grail. I kept getting rejected. My editor said, “Everybody likes your bike rides around
0:53:51 here, but the new expeditions have to add to the body of knowledge or somehow illuminate
0:54:03 the human condition.” At the time, this capability to interact online was coming online. I developed
0:54:12 a way of solving ancient mysteries by letting an online audience direct a team of experts
0:54:20 to solve these mysteries. I took teams of 10, 12 people into Central America to try to figure
0:54:27 out why the ancient Maya civilization collapsed and across China following Marco Polo’s route.
0:54:33 We were connected to a million or so people and we harnessed the wisdom of the crowd.
0:54:39 This became very successful. All of a sudden, I had a company, which I sold eventually to
0:54:49 Hardcore Brace, a textbook company. I made money doing that. I made money not because
0:54:55 I was pursuing the dollars. The dollars was a byproduct of something I freaking loved,
0:55:05 which is expeditions and solving mysteries. Then I sold that company and now had a capacity
0:55:12 for networking to top experts and National Geographic like me. I got this cover story
0:55:21 assignment to unravel the mysteries of longevity. Like you, Scott, I think if I would have asked
0:55:29 the 20-year-old Scott Galloway to chart his career to the heights you are right now, you
0:55:36 might have gotten a year or two into it before everything fell apart. I’m pretty much the
0:55:44 same way. I’ve had lots of failures but learned from my bike rides that they’re not that bad
0:55:51 in the context of what African villagers are going through. Tomorrow, when I get on my
0:55:56 bike, it’ll be a new adventure metaphorically. I’ll figure that out when I get there.
0:56:01 Dan Butener is a National Geographic Fellow, longevity researcher and award-winning journalist.
0:56:05 He’s also the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Blue Zones,
0:56:11 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest and Thrive, Finding
0:56:17 Happiness the Blue Zones Way. Also, Dan is a three-times Guinness World Record holder
0:56:24 for distance cycling. That’s a flex. Anyway, Dan, this whole space has just blown up and
0:56:30 you genuinely are the OG here. You were in this before it was cool and kind of forged
0:56:37 a category that’s created so much attention, I think, so much good living, so much longevity,
0:56:42 and quite frankly, so much economic value. I think any, you know, the Huberman Lab or
0:56:46 Peter Atty, I feel as if they should all send you royalty checks because you were sort
0:56:50 of, you kind of paved the way here. It was really nice getting to spend some time with
0:56:53 you and congratulations on all your success.
0:56:55 Dan Thank you, Scott. And I’m big in my reviewers
0:57:02 as well. If I had a Blue Zone star, I’d lick it and put it on your forehead because I think
0:57:11 I’m going to see you when you’re a hundred.
0:57:17 I hope so, brother. I hope so.
0:57:22 Algebra of Happiness. I had this vision for what my relationship with my boys would be
0:57:27 like. I thought they would be fascinated by me. And when they got home from camp, they’d
0:57:31 want to sit down and tell me everything about what happened and talk about, you know, their
0:57:37 hikes thing went on. And as is often the case, my 14-year-old came home, hadn’t seen him in
0:57:42 two or three weeks, and kind of, he was tired, hungry, and just sort of, I said hi, didn’t
0:57:46 even say hi back, kind of slammed the door and went in his room. That is very upsetting
0:57:51 for me. And I want to get angry at him. That is unacceptable behavior, sure. But more than
0:57:56 anything, it doesn’t foot to what I thought our relationship was going to be, and I feel
0:58:04 insulted and hurt. And what I’ve come to realize as a dad, as a man, is that this basic notion
0:58:10 of masculinity and manhood is that you add surplus value. And one means of surplus value
0:58:16 is that dad just takes it. I’m not saying you tolerate or accept inappropriate behavior.
0:58:22 My kids actually have very good manners. But you realize as dad, dad takes some body blows.
0:58:30 And it’s not about me. It’s not, my kids aren’t here to serve or fill or ensure that our relationship
0:58:35 is what I imagined so I can feel like a hallmark commercial and have these dad moments. I get
0:58:40 a lot of those, but that’s not my job, and it’s not their job, and it’s an unreasonable
0:58:48 expectation. My job is to protect and provide and be a role model, to be good to their mother,
0:58:54 and to ensure that they have, you know, whatever I can provide such that they have developed
0:58:59 good character or healthy and have a shot at being productive, loving citizens as they
0:59:05 get older. But dad takes some blows. And if you’re expecting that your relationship with
0:59:10 your child is going to be two way, it is not. It is not going to be, I mean, there’ll be
0:59:13 moments where you’ll get more joy than you could have ever imagined. And we always talk
0:59:20 about those moments. But on the whole, on the whole, it is a what I’ll call diminished
0:59:26 or a debtor relationship. And that is you are going to give a lot more, you are going
0:59:30 to be much more expressive, much more emotional, much more supportive, much kinder to them
0:59:34 than they are going to be to you. And that is just part of it. That’s what it means to
0:59:39 be a parent. I also think that’s what it means to be a dad.
0:59:43 This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer
0:59:48 and Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from
0:59:53 the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as
0:59:58 read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods
1:00:18 for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
1:00:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:09 new season featuring marketing executives from the world’s most influential brands.
0:00:13 Tune in to hear what’s driving conversation in the fast-moving world of digital advertising.
0:00:17 The unique insights from brands is diverse as Hilton, Instacart, Moderna, Major League
0:00:22 Soccer, and more. And in this presidential election season, The Current explores when
0:00:26 a national political advertiser like the National Republican Senatorial Committee and
0:00:33 a major CPG brand like Hershey can learn from each other. Listen in and subscribe to The
0:00:39 Current at TheCurrent.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:43 An experimental procedure that is giving hope to the world to get a heart transplant from
0:00:49 a genetically modified pig. There’s over 100,000 people on the organ transplant weight
0:00:56 list. And some scientists think the answer might be pigs. Nobody in the world knew how
0:01:01 a human would react to a pig heart, right? The next day when we asked him, you know,
0:01:05 how are you feeling? He said, “Oink, oink.”
0:01:11 This week on Unexplainable, are pig hearts really the answer? Follow Unexplainable for
0:01:14 new episodes every Wednesday.
0:01:21 Hey, I’m John Glenn Hill, host of a brand new show from Vox called Explain It To Me.
0:01:24 This week, the ethical murkiness of zoos.
0:01:29 Do we as humans feel like we deserve to just be able to walk around and see these animals?
0:01:35 Like, maybe we don’t deserve that. Maybe there’s just some animals we don’t get to see.
0:01:40 To zoo or not to zoo? That’s this week on Explain It To Me. Listen wherever you get
0:01:47 your podcasts.
0:01:52 Episode 316, 316 is the area of belonging to Wichita, Kansas in the surrounding areas.
0:01:57 Episode 316, the first birth control clinic opened in Brooklyn, New York. True story.
0:02:01 My spouse and I used the pullout method for birth control. We go to sleep, we pull out
0:02:09 our phones and ignore each other. True story, my birth control has holes in it. Crocs.
0:02:13 I went to the doctor to get birth control from my daughter and he said, “She’s sexually
0:02:20 active?” And I said, “Well, that’s wrong. That is wrong.”
0:02:35 That’s why you come here. Go, go, go!
0:02:41 Welcome to the 316th episode of the Prop G-Pod. It’s just, the dilemma there was not what
0:02:47 joke to tell, but what joke not to tell. Birth control is just a cornucopia. It is a fertile
0:02:52 field of jokes. This has made my day just going over all these jokes. By the way, 90%
0:02:57 of them, my producer said, “No fucking way.” In today’s episode, we speak with Dan Butner,
0:03:02 a National Geographic Fellow, a longevity researcher and the best-selling author of
0:03:05 the Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Lived the Longest. We’ve
0:03:11 had a bunch of the kind of New Age cool guys, right? The Cool Club, the Atia and Hubermans
0:03:16 of the World. And I wanted to go old school with the OG of longevity. And it’s also very
0:03:22 handsome man at 63. I just don’t think you can be talking about longevity if you’re fucking
0:03:28 slob at 40 and smoking and drinking. I knew a few of those things. Anyways, we discussed
0:03:33 with Dan Blue Zones and how community environment and diet play into longevity. Okay, what’s
0:03:40 happening? The dog is back into UK. How do you know? I am so pale and unhappy. Oh, what
0:03:45 do you know? It’s the fall, which means it’s 50 fucking degrees. And what else am I doing?
0:03:48 I’m going to get out of London. I’m going to the south of France soon. Then I’m going
0:03:53 to go to Madrid for a conference. And then I head back to the US. Anyways, isn’t it
0:03:58 exciting to hear my travel itinerary? What else is going on? By the time you hear this,
0:04:02 Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will face each other in their first presidential debate.
0:04:07 I’ll be discussing my thoughts and reactions next week with Jessica Tarloff on our new
0:04:13 show. That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we need more of. We need more dog. That’s
0:04:17 the hole that needs to be filled. That’s the white space for those of you in marketing
0:04:24 here, right? Daddy needs some more dog said almost nobody right now. I am an enormous
0:04:32 fan of Jess Tarloff. She is the star of the show, the five. My favorite way to describe
0:04:36 the five is it’s four people discussing politics and they’re conservatives and they’re kind
0:04:41 of like batshit crazy, I would argue. And then Jessica just comes with receipts and
0:04:46 logic and there’ll be a pause after she says something sane. And it looks as if the four
0:04:50 of them have just been caught masturbating. They literally don’t know how to respond or
0:04:57 what to say. I love that. I love that. Anyways, I think she is so talented, so charming. And
0:05:03 the way I met Jess was she was my co-panelist on the Bill Maher show or Bill Maher’s real
0:05:08 time. And I hated Jess. Why did I hate her? Because I’m a narcissist and immediately went
0:05:15 to YouTube to check out the comments and every comment was love Jess. Jess is amazing. She
0:05:22 literally like no one even saw me on the panel because her insights were so strong. Anyways,
0:05:26 I got over it and we’ve gotten to know each other. We’ve become friendly and I said, let’s
0:05:32 start a podcast. It focuses on the middle and tries to be a little bit more data driven
0:05:36 calling it raging moderates. Is it treat or call us moderates? Maybe. I mean, I think,
0:05:41 I don’t know. I think I’m center left, kind of going center right because of the head
0:05:45 up your ass narrative coming out of the far left on Israel, which I’ve had an emotional
0:05:49 reaction to. But anyways, she’s definitely center left. I think I like to think I’m right
0:05:54 down the middle, but people say that maybe it’s not true. Anyways, love the name. Love
0:05:58 the name. All right, enough of that. Let’s talk about Apple. Let’s get back to the world
0:06:03 of business. The big news is that it’s releasing four new iPhones that can run Apple intelligence
0:06:09 or put another way. The firm’s AI suite as exciting as that is. Is that exciting? I guess
0:06:13 so. We likely won’t see the phone’s full AI effect until next year. Apple claims the
0:06:19 new chips in these phones can perform 30% faster than last year’s processor. They also revealed
0:06:23 new air pod pros that will have hearing aid and protection capabilities. I’ve always thought
0:06:27 that was a huge opportunity. I just don’t understand. Seems to me that apples is going
0:06:31 to come in and take the entire hearing aid market. Anyways, year to date, Apple stock
0:06:37 is up 17%, which on, I think it was about a half a trillion dollars when you’re trading
0:06:41 at three trillion. Alphabet’s taken ahead, Nvidia’s taken a bit of a hit. Is that fair
0:06:47 to say in the last month or so? But I think Apple’s genius here, again, it comes down
0:06:53 to this. And that is my friend and former colleague Peter Golder, he had this one insight
0:06:57 that he sort of built a career around, is that the innovators don’t actually add shareholder
0:07:00 value. What does it mean to be an innovator? It kind of means you’re first. It means you’re
0:07:04 coming up with something new and different. And generally speaking, that’s not the right
0:07:09 strategy to add shareholder value. What is the right strategy? The second mouse strategy.
0:07:15 And that is the first people have to spend a lot of money to try and forge a new technology,
0:07:19 build a new type of housing design, a new type, I don’t know, something new. And then
0:07:24 if it works, the people kind of laying in the reeds can say, okay, we can do this almost
0:07:28 as well for less money, or we can improve upon it, or take these features out and add
0:07:34 this one. It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. This is the primary means of adding
0:07:41 shareholder value for the big companies. And let’s be clear, Apple defines the second mouse.
0:07:46 Were they the first in MP3 players? No. Object oriented computing? No laptops? No. Were they
0:07:51 the first to have a smartphone? Hell to the no. They haven’t been first around anything.
0:07:55 But Apple defines the second mouse. And where are they going second mousing right now? And
0:08:00 it’s going to add more value than, in my opinion, almost any AI company with the exception of
0:08:05 Microsoft AI. And that is effectively what they’ve said is, let’s let other people make
0:08:11 massive investments in AI. This is an arms race. It takes a ton of money, mostly spent
0:08:17 on products from Nvidia. And it’s a capital arms race. Computing all this shit just costs
0:08:23 a fortune. Instead, we’ll take the best of breed, and we’ll offer very consumer friendly
0:08:26 applications of AI, such as, you know what I would really like? I would really like the
0:08:31 ability to just search my photos using AI. If they offer that on the next iPhone, boom,
0:08:36 champagne and cocaine. By the way, I can’t help it. I get those Apple memories. Is that
0:08:39 what they call where they come up and they start showing my kids when they were like
0:08:46 little and cute and like, thought their dad was their hero?
0:08:51 Apple also announced, also announced that part of their AI package would be kind of an
0:08:57 ability to do AI assistant type work, image editing, and that they would update Siri.
0:09:00 So I own Apple. I’ve owned it for a long time. I think it’s just one of those companies
0:09:05 you hold on to forever. I do think it’s fully valued, but my capital gains would be I’ve
0:09:10 owned it since 2008. So I think I’m up 20x on it, maybe 30x. So I don’t want to take
0:09:16 the tax hit. I can’t find anything better to invest in. So I guess I’m still long Apple.
0:09:21 By the way, speaking of luxury brands, strongest luxury brand in the world that isn’t a university.
0:09:25 Because if the strongest is in fact Apple, why? If you own an Apple product, it says
0:09:31 very sort of implicitly, elegantly that you’re one of the billion wealthiest, most impressive,
0:09:34 most creative people on the planet. I think this is brilliant because what they’ve said
0:09:39 is I’m not going to get into an arms race about AI. I’m going to take the best of different
0:09:46 AI and maybe, maybe, here’s an idea. I’ll let open AI or llama or Gemini. I’ll do the
0:09:50 same thing I did with search and I’ll bid it out and say, all right, who wants a co-branded
0:09:56 AI application in front of the billion wealthiest consumers? Well, I do. Well, okay, it’s going
0:10:02 to cost you. Similar to how Google is the default search engine in an exchange for that, Alphabet
0:10:08 justifies paying $20 billion a year to Apple, of which about 19.9 hits the bottom line at
0:10:13 which point when a company is trading at a PE of about 20, you’re talking about literally
0:10:19 about a six or $700 billion deal in terms of market capitalization or shareholder value
0:10:22 to the organization. I think they’re setting themselves up to do the exact same thing in
0:10:26 AI and that is you guys spend all the money trying to figure out search. You guys spend
0:10:30 all the money trying to figure out AI will be the interface to the billion wealthiest
0:10:35 consumers and will give you some of that interface and some of that exposure in exchange for
0:10:41 some serious cabbage, serious cabbage. I think this is brilliant. I think these guys, I don’t
0:10:45 know who’s running strategy at Apple. You never hear about them. They have this sort
0:10:51 of shtazi-like or Mossad-like secrecy over there and it works. You’re not supposed to
0:10:55 be a star. You’re not supposed to be going on Johnny Carson and say, “Well, when I was
0:11:00 running strategy at Apple, but whoever is running strategy at Apple, they consistently
0:11:05 make really good moves.” Mixed reality headset, whatever. That was probably the right strategy
0:11:10 to make sure that Zuckerberg didn’t get out too far in front of them. But here’s the hard
0:11:14 part because this is the bottom line. This is what a CEO does. A CEO’s most difficult
0:11:20 decision is not what to do. It’s what not to do. Because the cruel truth of capitalism
0:11:24 is you have finite resources, even if you’re Apple. So your decisions around what not to
0:11:30 do, such that you have the capital to do what you decide to do really well, is just as important
0:11:34 as deciding what to do, if you will. They’re two sides of the same coin. And I think in
0:11:38 this instance, they said, “You know, rather than spending tens or hundreds of billions
0:11:43 trying to build out our own unique AI, we’re going to go the other way. We’re going to
0:11:46 be a remora fish. We’re going to be the second mouse here, and we’re going to continue to
0:11:54 drive a ton of value. Apple is the ultimate second mouse.” We’ll be right back for our
0:11:58 conversation with Dan Butener.
0:12:02 Support for PropG comes from Mint Mobile. If you’re serious about keeping your budget
0:12:05 in check, your monthly expenses are one of the first places to look. And one thing a
0:12:11 lot of us overpay for is our phones, especially between all the hidden fees and other nonsense
0:12:16 phone companies throw at you, which is why Mint Mobile is doing things differently. When
0:12:20 you switch to Mint Mobile, you can get three months of premium wireless service for just
0:12:24 15 bucks a month. All of Mint Mobile’s plans come with high-speed 5G data and unlimited
0:12:29 talk and text. Plus, you don’t need to worry about getting a new device or phone number.
0:12:33 Just bring those with you over to your new Mint Mobile plan. To get this new customer
0:12:37 offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, you can go
0:12:44 to MintMobile.com/PropG. That’s MintMobile.com/PropG. You can cut your wireless bill at 15 bucks
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0:12:52 $45 up from payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month
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0:13:06 Support for PropG comes from Vanta. Customers aren’t going to support your business if
0:13:09 they don’t trust you. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting or scaling your company’s
0:13:14 security program. Demonstrating top-notch security practices and establishing trust
0:13:18 is more important than ever. Vanta can help you do both. Vanta automates compliance for
0:13:24 SOC2, ISO 27001 and more, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust.
0:13:28 Plus, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating
0:13:34 your security posture with a customer-facing trust center all powered by Vanta AI. Over
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0:13:48 security in real time. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta.com/PropG. That’s Vanta.com/PROFG
0:13:52 for $1,000 off.
0:13:56 When Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met on the debate stage, it was obvious that these
0:13:58 were two very different people.
0:14:03 But JD Vance and Tim Walls actually have a lot in common. They’re both white men from
0:14:06 the Midwest, they’re both family men, and they were both in the service.
0:14:09 But they disagree on what it means to be a man.
0:14:13 Here’s my light pack. Surround yourself with smart women and listen to them and you’ll
0:14:14 do just fine.
0:14:32 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14:35 Welcome back. Here’s our conversation with Dan Butner, a National Geographic Fellow,
0:14:40 longevity researcher and bestselling author of the Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer
0:14:42 from the People Who Live the Longest.
0:14:45 Dan, where does this podcast find you?
0:14:49 17 Blocks from the Raleigh Hotel Pool.
0:14:55 Let’s bust right into it. Your focus is longevity. So let’s start there. Can you break down what
0:14:58 a “Blue Zone” is?
0:15:05 A “Blue Zone” is a geographically defined, demographically confirmed area where people
0:15:11 live statistically longest. And we measure that through either lowest rate of middle
0:15:19 age mortality and/or highest centenarian rate. So mostly we’re looking at life expectancy
0:15:26 of people about our age because that factors out things like testosterone, toxicity, and
0:15:28 infant mortality.
0:15:32 And then what did you find? My guess is everybody, and I know some of this, but what are the
0:15:39 common features of lifestyles and habits for people who live in these areas where they
0:15:42 tend to live longer? I assume it’s not the geography, although maybe that has something
0:15:43 to do with it.
0:15:47 Oddly, geography does have something to do with it. Geography has more to do with it
0:15:54 than genes because only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. And these
0:16:00 places are genetically heterogeneous, which is to say they’re melting pods. Each of these
0:16:06 places, you find them on about the 20th parallel north. So it’s neither the tropics where people
0:16:12 are beleaguered by infectious disease, nor are they too far north where they don’t get
0:16:18 enough sunshine and outdoor activity, and in the case of the “Blue Zones” access to
0:16:24 fresh fruits and vegetables. But the common denominator is they’re eating mostly a whole
0:16:30 food plant-based diet. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole
0:16:39 grains and garden vegetables and so forth. Tubers, interestingly, about 75% of the caloric
0:16:44 intake in Okinawa, a place that produced the longest-lived women in history, came from
0:16:52 the purple sweet potato until about 1990. And then nuts and beans. Beans are the cornerstone
0:16:57 of every longevity diet, and if you’re eating a cup of beans a day, it’s probably worth
0:17:02 about four extra years of life expectancy.
0:17:07 So let me get this. If I want to add for it, I mean, I realize there’s more to it here.
0:17:12 But if you wanted to add, call it, “Multiple years of life expectancy, one serving of beans
0:17:13 a day.”
0:17:19 About a cup. It’s associated, and it may be because there’s something crazy good in
0:17:24 beans, or it might be because if you’re getting your protein from beans instead of bacon,
0:17:29 you’re getting the longevity bump. But it definitely stacks the deck in favor of longevity
0:17:31 if you’re eating a cup of beans a day.
0:17:35 So say more about the common denominators. I’ve read your book, and there’s a few of
0:17:36 them.
0:17:41 Yes. People seem to have a sense of purpose. There’s vocabulary for purpose in every “Blue
0:17:49 Zone.” So they’re not waking up with the existential stress of what am I going to do with my day.
0:17:55 They live in places where it’s easy to move naturally. They’re nudged into movement every
0:18:01 20 minutes, as opposed to thinking they can sit all day long at their offices and make
0:18:06 it up in the gym. Every time they go to work or a friend’s house or out to eat at occasions
0:18:13 a walk. They have gardens out back. Their houses aren’t full of the mechanical conveniences
0:18:19 that have engineered most of the physical activity out of our lives. The scourge of
0:18:25 network technology hasn’t quite struck “Blue Zones” yet. So most social interaction is
0:18:31 face-to-face, and they get a lot of it, largely as a result of their environment. So you can’t
0:18:38 step outside of your home and not bump into your neighbor or your aunt or person who delivers
0:18:45 your mail. So there’s spontaneous social interaction, which in some studies have shown these low
0:18:53 quality social interactions are as predictive of longevity as deep meaningful conversations.
0:18:57 And what about their social life or how they engage with others?
0:19:03 Well, they tend to live in extended families. They keep their aging parents nearby, which
0:19:12 conveys two to six year additional life expectancy as opposed to putting your aging parent in
0:19:19 a retirement home. They tend to be married or living with a partner, best heavily in
0:19:25 their kids. They live in walkable villages, so they’re constantly interacting with others.
0:19:33 The festivals is part of the annual cycle of life. In Icaria, for example, one of our
0:19:40 Blue Zones, there’s 90 festivals between April and September, and people show up to
0:19:45 them not only as kind of a social obligation, but because they’re fun. But what happens
0:19:54 at these festivals is people build bonds, social bonds. There’s almost always a philanthropic
0:20:00 objective to the party, plus they’re dancing all night, which is great for physical activity.
0:20:05 But the key insight, Scott, to longevity, and this is where we get it wrong in America.
0:20:15 In America, we tend to pursue health and longevity. We get in mind a diet, an exercise program,
0:20:22 maybe a supplement program, longevity hacks, and then we pursue it. But the problem is
0:20:29 our brains are wired for novelty. We get bored very quickly. We lose discipline, we lose
0:20:36 presence of mind. If you look at any of the sort of strategies we undertake to get healthier,
0:20:41 live longer, live weight, they never work for more than about nine months. Then the
0:20:50 vast majority of people have failed. In Blue Zones, longevity isn’t pursued in in-soups,
0:20:55 which is a huge difference. In other words, people in Blue Zones have no idea how they’re
0:21:00 living an extra 10 years at middle age than Americans do. They just live their lives.
0:21:06 But if you look at their environments, they’re living in places where their unconscious decisions,
0:21:14 their micro day-to-day decisions are better for not only a few months or a year or two,
0:21:20 but for decades or a lifetime. Because when it comes to longevity, there’s no short-term
0:21:27 fix. It’s regular, better day-to-day decisions for a long time that make the big difference.
0:21:30 That doesn’t happen with the conscious mind.
0:21:37 It feels as if it’s a little bit, “Okay, I have my life here in London. I try to purposely
0:21:45 eat better. I have a trainer to get in my exercise. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but
0:21:48 the weather in London is somewhere between awful and whatever is worse than awful.”
0:21:49 Feel real weather.
0:21:57 “Yeah, there you go. That is the wrong way to live long. It’s about moving to Greece
0:22:04 where I’m forced to walk somewhere. The Mediterranean diet just unfolds on me. I’m living close
0:22:09 to my family, so I have no choice, but to be highly social.” It feels like it’s more
0:22:15 of a … Instead of the accoutrements, it is your life. Is that a decent way to describe
0:22:16 it?
0:22:24 Yes. It’s about shifting the focus from trying to change your behavior, which fails for almost
0:22:30 all people, almost all the time in the long run, to shaping your environment. Of course,
0:22:35 the easiest way to shape your environment for longevity is, as you point out, is move.
0:22:44 There are areas in America where life expectancy is 25 years less than other places. There
0:22:51 are zip codes in Kentucky where life expectancy is 25 years below, say Boulder, Colorado.
0:22:58 What we found in the main focus of my work for the past 15 years has been shaping people’s
0:23:06 environment at the population level, largely through policy, but also through helping restaurants,
0:23:11 grocery stores, workplaces, schools, and even your home are designed so that the healthy
0:23:18 choice is either the easy choice or the unavoidable choice, and that’s what works.
0:23:22 It’s an issue we’re looking at. You mentioned Kentucky. Let’s go to the other side. I don’t
0:23:27 know if you have a term for gray zones or dead zones, but what is it about specifically
0:23:34 about these places where people live a lot less healthy lives and have much higher mortality?
0:23:37 What are the commonalities or the common denominators there?
0:23:43 They’re crisscrossed with highways, unwalkable streets. Every time you go to work, you have
0:23:50 to get in your car. More people have died in car accidents in the last 100 years than
0:23:55 have died in wars. Right there is your first mortality challenge, and then the fact you’re
0:24:02 not walking, they tend to be junk food forests. There’s no effort to curb accessibility or
0:24:08 junk food marketing, so junk food and ultra processed food is delicious, and it’s cheap,
0:24:13 and it’s ubiquitous, and that’s why we eat so much of it, not because we know it’s not
0:24:15 bad good for us.
0:24:21 There’s typically higher crime. People are more socially isolated. Think about suburban
0:24:27 cul-de-sac as opposed to downtown London where you live, where every time you step outside
0:24:32 your door, there’s a chance to bump into somebody, and there’s at least a chance that there’ll
0:24:37 be a meaningful social connection for you. Often air quality, which is also a function
0:24:48 of traffic, it’s a number of smaller things that add up to decades of life expectancy disparity.
0:24:54 We talked about purpose. Break down a little bit more, a little bit about work. I’ve read
0:24:59 somewhere that work used to be dirty, dangerous work. Now work for many people is purpose
0:25:04 and that their mortality actually goes up, especially men, when they stop working. Unpack
0:25:06 work and longevity.
0:25:14 A Gallup poll of 2 million workers found that only about 31%, fewer than a third of Americans
0:25:19 actually find purpose at work. Most of us are showing up to work because we need the
0:25:25 money or the insurance or it’s a status thing. Dr. Robert Butler, who was the first director
0:25:31 of the National Institutes on Aging, analyzed the writings of several thousand people over
0:25:37 time and found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight
0:25:43 years longer than people who are rudderless. We don’t know if that’s because people with
0:25:50 sense of purpose are some sort of a mechanism that makes us rise to the occasion, psychosomatic
0:25:57 benefit or if it’s because people who have a sense of purpose are more likely to stay
0:26:04 fit and take their medicines and make an effort with other people in connecting or find a
0:26:12 job where they’re not bored or uninspired. It’s so important and it’s so largely overlooked
0:26:15 in the United States, I believe.
0:26:21 I’ve been reading that there’s just a ton of stress placed on parents. I’ve also read
0:26:26 other places that actually while you have kids in the house, you’re actually less happy
0:26:32 than people without kids. Talk about the ideal scenario from a longevity standpoint for someone’s
0:26:39 relationship status. Kids, no kids, eight kids, one kid, married, boyfriend, whatever
0:26:44 it might be. What is the ideal scenario and what is the worst case scenario? I imagine
0:26:48 the worst case scenario is just to be totally alone, but that’s my thesis.
0:26:55 Yes, that’s the worst case. Let me unpack a few things. I also wrote a book and a cover
0:27:01 story for Natural Geographic on happiness called The Blue Zones of Happiness. There’s
0:27:09 two scientific ways of measuring happiness. The first one is something called life satisfaction
0:27:13 where you essentially ask people to think of their life as a whole and rate it on a scale
0:27:19 of one to 10. That’s the value weight of it. It’s your life in the rearview mirror. The
0:27:23 other way is something called affect, positive or negative affect, and that’s measured by
0:27:29 a time sequence of asking people how often they laugh, cry, feel stress, feel worry. That’s
0:27:33 more of an evaluative or how you experience happiness.
0:27:40 People who have babies, both the men and the women, tend to experience a dramatic drop
0:27:47 in affect. In other words, their experience happiness drops. Predictably, they’re exhausted
0:27:54 or there’s money stress in the family or the wife doesn’t want to have sex because she
0:28:02 just had a baby, whatever, but life satisfaction goes up. You get this up and down of happiness
0:28:11 and the picture’s not clear. In places like Denmark, both kinds of happiness go up. Presumable
0:28:17 will be because there’s better childcare and for the first year of life, both the man
0:28:24 and women can take up to 12 months off to take care of that infant. As far as longevity,
0:28:31 we did a study in Sardinia. Sardinia’s home to the longest-lived men in the world, about
0:28:36 11 times more male centenarians there than you’d expect to see in a similar population
0:28:43 in the United States. The guys with the best chance of reaching age 100 had five or more
0:28:50 daughters, specifically daughters. We don’t know if that’s because daughters tend to take
0:28:57 care of their aging fathers in that culture or if it’s because there’s a selection bias,
0:29:03 that if you can survive five adolescent girls making it to 100, it’s no problem. But it’s
0:29:04 very clear-
0:29:11 It’s got to be the former, isn’t it? I would just think logically. I was joking. I wish
0:29:15 I’d had two boys. I always wish I’d had a daughter because I thought the daughter would
0:29:19 take care of me. The daughter would call me and say, “Dad, did you pick up your medication?
0:29:27 Dad, did you get your colonoscopy?” That they make sure that you’re taking care of yourself.
0:29:33 To me, it’s so funny that that seems so obvious, and I never thought that, have a bunch of
0:29:35 daughters to live longer.
0:29:43 Yeah. Living in extended families seems to be a trend in all blue zones. I know people
0:29:48 think the idea of their parents living with them might be horrible, but often there’s
0:29:54 not a choice in blue zones, but you see very tangible benefits. Something called the grandmother
0:30:02 effect has shown not only in several cultures, but actually several mammal species that those
0:30:08 that keep a parent near the family, the children in those families have lower rates of mortality
0:30:15 and lower rates of disease. Not only that, if you’re aging moms living with you, she’s
0:30:22 not a retirement home. Again, retirement home, instant lowering of life expectancy. There’s
0:30:31 a beautiful symbiosis that you see in families. Having children, raising them well, I would
0:30:37 argue not coddling them. You don’t see coddled children in the blue zones. Children are expected
0:30:43 to be contributing members of the family. They’re all sometimes in the field. They’re
0:30:48 goldherders by the age of eight or 12, eight between eight and 12. They’re helping with
0:30:55 kitchen chores. They’re not just being driven to dance lessons and play dates, like we typically
0:31:03 see. There is a chance that they could get hurt. They have to take on some responsibility
0:31:10 in the attendant risk with that at a very early age as opposed to waiting age 25 to
0:31:16 take your first risk in life. So much of this is encouraging and discouraging. Do you have
0:31:26 kids, Dan? I have three. My kids basically get up. I hate to admit this. It’s our fault.
0:31:31 My kids don’t even make their beds. The most active thing they do is they do take the tube.
0:31:39 They do play sports at school, but they are coddled. They really are. What is your approach
0:31:43 after doing all of this research? What is your approach to raising your children that
0:31:47 might be a little different than how other people raise their kids?
0:31:54 Well, at a certain point in my life, I told them I needed them at a very early age, and
0:31:58 I gave them chores. I did need them. I needed them psychologically at that point, but I
0:32:05 also, you know, logistically needed help. I never made money until I was 40, and I made
0:32:12 a lot of money. But in a way, it was a gift to live in a household where, you know, we
0:32:18 had to make our own fun, and I needed them to help me with the laundry, etc., and with
0:32:24 the yard. And I think at the end of the day, that was good. That was a gift for them.
0:32:28 And why is that? I’m going to probe here. Are you a single father?
0:32:35 Yes. So during that time, you know, I needed them. I enjoyed having them around me. But
0:32:40 they all worked they were supposed to do. I also, you know, we didn’t go to Disney World.
0:32:46 We would go to the Yucatán Peninsula and crawl through batshit caves when they were
0:32:53 eight, nine, ten years old, and we would live in villages with Yucatec Maya. And childhood
0:33:00 with me wasn’t safe in the immediate sense of the word, but I believe it gave them enormous
0:33:06 resilience for later in life. They’re three very successful adults right now.
0:33:10 We’ll be right back.
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0:35:18 NMLS 1617539. This week on PropG Markets, we speak with
0:35:23 Lena Kahn, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss ongoing antitrust cases, how to
0:35:29 measure consumer harm, and her take on monopolies in big tech. We went through a 20-year period
0:35:36 where the Big Five technology companies, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon
0:35:41 collectively made over 800 acquisitions, and not a single one of which was challenged at
0:35:47 the time. And now there are lawsuits kind of retroactively identifying that some of those
0:35:52 were missed opportunities, and failing to stop those deals had a really negative impact
0:35:57 on the market. You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the PropG Markets
0:36:05 podcast. I like to think I can point, I can identify people who are good CEOs. I’ve spent
0:36:11 so much time with good and bad CEOs that when I interview a CEO for a position as a director
0:36:17 on a board, I feel like I’m a pretty good study. I’m not good at assessing other employees.
0:36:23 I get fooled all the time, but I get, I think I can kind of sum up someone’s CEO readiness
0:36:28 or not. What are the things, A, do you believe you can do that? And B, what are sort of the
0:36:32 obvious tells when you spend, say, an hour with somebody?
0:36:40 Well, just a level set. The chances of reaching 100 in America are less than one in a thousand.
0:36:48 So the capacity of the human machine, so the average person our age is, for men, it’s probably
0:36:56 93, maybe 94, and for women, it might be 96. So making it to 100 is exponentially more
0:37:04 difficult than hitting the early mid-90s. Okay, first thing, I look at you and I say,
0:37:09 I think you have a pretty good chance at reaching that capacity of the human machine. And it
0:37:15 might go up, by the way, by the time it’s our time that we might get to 100, but you’re
0:37:21 thin or you seemingly, you’re not overweight, you’re obviously physically active. You live
0:37:26 in London, which I would say stacks the deck in favor of longevity because you walk most
0:37:34 places, you’re mentally engaged, you seem to exude purpose. I don’t know what you eat,
0:37:40 but a few questions, I could, if I could, how often a week do you eat meat?
0:37:44 10 plus. I would eat at every meal if I could. I eat a lot of meat.
0:37:52 That is probably tripling your chances for cardiovascular disease, many types of cancers.
0:37:56 You’re not a big candidate for type two diabetes, but if you were an average American, that
0:37:59 much meat would be a negative. How about processed foods?
0:38:03 Not as much. And what’s interesting about the UK is one of the things I’ve noticed here,
0:38:11 and I think it’s much healthier. You buy milk, you buy fruit, you buy juice, anything. What
0:38:17 you notice is, wow, it rots right away. And then what you realize is there are thousands
0:38:22 of pesticides and preservatives that are legal in the US that are not legal here. And it
0:38:29 never struck me just how much shit I was putting in my body in the US until I moved to London.
0:38:34 And I’m blessed I have somebody who loves to cook. So when I eat out, I eat fairly well,
0:38:38 but when you eat out, my senses, it’s full of butter and salty come back. So I don’t
0:38:42 eat, I’m probably on the lower scale of processed food.
0:38:47 That’s good. Eating out in America, by the way, occasions consuming about 300 more calories
0:38:52 than you would if you eat at home. Higher salt, higher sugar as well. So eating at home
0:38:59 stacks the deck in your favor. How about your height to your midsection? Are you measuring
0:39:06 in centimeters or inches? Are you at least twice as tall as you are round at the midsection?
0:39:11 Oh yeah, I’m 6’2″, 189, I’m in good shape.
0:39:13 That’s exactly what I am.
0:39:14 Oh nice.
0:39:15 Exactly.
0:39:18 Are you shrinking though? I was 6’3″, now I’m 6’2″.
0:39:23 I was 6’2″, and now I’m 6’2″. Yeah, so I am shrinking a little bit. Everybody shrinks
0:39:28 a lot. It’s an effective gravity over time. How many hours of sleep do you get?
0:39:34 Good about sleep. I don’t sleep as well because I have to get up and pee a lot. But if I can’t
0:39:38 sleep, and it’s 2 or 3 in the morning, and we’ll come back to this, I will take an edible
0:39:45 and I will cancel my meetings in the morning because I spent so much of my life working
0:39:50 so hard that sometimes I would go 4 or 5 hours a night for 3 or 4 days in a row because
0:39:53 I was traveling and just going from meeting and meeting and meeting. And pretty much since
0:39:59 the age of 45, I don’t sacrifice sleep. So I’m pretty good on the sleep other than the
0:40:02 fact I have to get up and pee all the time.
0:40:09 Yeah, me too on that one. When you look at mortality, a number of hours slept per night.
0:40:15 People who sleep 7 hours seem to be optimal. Getting at least 7 hours most nice, that seems
0:40:23 to be the sweet spot. And so if you’re getting that, that’s going to favor your life expectancy.
0:40:28 How about fruits and vegetables? Do you eat those every day?
0:40:32 It’s horrible. 2 to 3 times a week max, and the fruits I eat are in the form of juice,
0:40:33 which has a ton of sugar in it.
0:40:38 Juice is horrible. That’s all. You’ve got to biologically as bad for you as a Coke. Yeah.
0:40:43 So I mean, mid-80s maybe for you?
0:40:48 Mid-80s? All right, I better go. Okay, so I got to get on this whole success and finding
0:40:50 meaning in one’s life. What about the-
0:40:55 I’m not, by the way, just to put a finer point, a more serious point on it, there’s very good
0:41:01 research that shows that people are eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet, eschewing
0:41:09 a standard American diet. At our age, 60, live about 6 years longer than people eating
0:41:15 a meaty, cheesy, fatty, processed food diet. So there’s real benefits to starting right
0:41:19 away. It’s not too late, in other words.
0:41:26 The other question I have is asking for a friend, alcohol and THC, alcohol and drugs.
0:41:32 Okay, so I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to alcohol. I’m very aware of the recent
0:41:38 epidemiology that no amount of alcohol is safe, but I can tell you in these blue zones,
0:41:45 Highlands of Sardinia in Ikaria, and I’ve seen the surveys. I’ve been part of the surveys.
0:41:49 About 90% of people who are making it into their mid 90s and hundreds are drinking every
0:41:55 day of their lives. Now, are they doing shots at tequila with their friends? No. They’re
0:42:03 drinking mostly homemade wine with friends or with a meal. So could they live to 101 instead
0:42:11 of 99? Maybe. But it’s so clear that part of the fabric of their culture, their festivals,
0:42:16 the way they’re connecting with friends, the way they’re, how this wine is interacting
0:42:21 with the diet they’re eating. By the way, glass of wine with a plant-based meal about
0:42:28 quadruples, the flavonoid absorption. So I’m not at all convinced that being a teetoler
0:42:35 is healthier than drinking. I would argue a glass or two of wine with meal and friends,
0:42:43 I believe is helping these people in blue zones live longer. You’re the original gangster
0:42:48 on this stuff. I remember when did blue zones come out? I wrote the cover story for National
0:42:54 Geographic in 2005, so almost 20 years ago. Yeah. And I’m sure you’re watching over the
0:43:00 last one or two years, Andrew Huberman and Peter Atia, both of whom are doctors, Huberman
0:43:05 and Atia, both of them had both of them on the podcast, and they have essentially declared
0:43:11 war on alcohol. And some of this is just to make myself feel better. But Ivo has seen
0:43:16 and read, including from your books, that social engagement or being really social
0:43:21 is important to longevity and overall happiness. And I find that alcohol is a critical component
0:43:24 of that. At least it is for me, and I think it is for young people.
0:43:31 Well, you see, doctors and marketers also, they tend to want to identify the silver bullet
0:43:38 and sell it to you. They tend to look at things in isolation. But I’ve spent 20 years with
0:43:47 these five blue zones. I’m there every year. And I believe I know and have read and metabolized
0:43:56 every single academic paper. There’s a very clear cluster of lifestyle characteristics
0:44:02 that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough
0:44:07 so they’re not getting a disease. And those are eating mostly a whole food, plant-based
0:44:12 diet with a little alcohol, moving naturally every 20 minutes or so, not marathons, not
0:44:18 triathlons, not Pilates or CrossFit. They’re mostly walking, by the way. Their life is
0:44:24 underpinned with purpose. So they know why they wake up in the morning and what their
0:44:32 responsibility is to the greater community, not just to their selfish selves. They tend
0:44:37 to curate a circle of friends that reinforce the right behaviors and insulate them from
0:44:44 loneliness and from the stresses of running out of money or a spouse leaving them or a
0:44:49 parent dying or a kid getting sick. And they live in places where the healthy choice is
0:44:55 the easy choice. And it’s that cluster of things that’s mostly environmental that is
0:45:02 producing measurable, extraordinary longevity in five disparate places on the globe. And
0:45:08 for me, that’s a persuasive argument of what to do to live to 100.
0:45:13 So let’s talk a little bit about the US. If the Biden administration, or maybe they have,
0:45:22 said to you, Dan, what two or three policies could we implement to dramatically raise not
0:45:25 only the lifespan but the health span, the quality of life of Americans? What would those
0:45:27 two or three policies be?
0:45:31 Well, I’m going to tell you, they’re not going to be popular. First of all, universal health
0:45:41 care. In every blue zone, the access to health care is close to free. Not only that, there’s
0:45:50 a much better emphasis on public health. So rather than trying to pay for cleaning up
0:45:57 the disease, they’re investing to keep the disease from happening in the first place.
0:46:01 There’s just no question that universal health care, 11% of Americans don’t even have health
0:46:11 insurance in this country. Number two, gasoline should be priced at a price very similar to
0:46:16 what you pay for in Europe, which is about twice or three times even you see in some
0:46:22 places. Why? Because what will happen if you raise gas, people will figure out how to take
0:46:28 public transportation. People who take public transportation have about 20% lower mortality
0:46:35 than people who drive back or to work. So it gets them out from behind their wheels onto
0:46:41 their feet. They’ll move closer to their schools and their jobs. There’ll be more population
0:46:48 concentration, so people will be more social. And then the last thing is the farm bill.
0:46:56 The farm bill right now is set up to subsidize soybeans, corn, sugar beets, and wheat. These
0:47:07 are all the inputs of all the junk food we eat, the Doritos, feedlot animals, crappy
0:47:15 beef and pork. If we pulled those subsidies out and instead of making it easy and cheap
0:47:21 to raise these junk food inputs and instead shifted it to beans and grains and greens and
0:47:27 organic vegetables, the price of those would come down and the consumption would go up.
0:47:34 Places like Singapore, they see very clearly and gas is 11 bucks a gallon and your car
0:47:40 is going to be taxed 300%. Meanwhile, there’s a great subway system where it’s easy to get
0:47:46 any from point A to point B in a safe, quick, air-conditioned way, but you’ve got to walk
0:47:50 back and forth to the subway and people are taking 10,000 steps a day without even thinking
0:47:56 about it. They subsidize brown rice and they’re going to tax sugar. They already have a sugar
0:48:04 tax in Singapore and not coincidentally, they tax tobacco. In Singapore, you have a country
0:48:12 where the health adjusted life expectancy, which is the estimate of how long people are
0:48:19 going to live minus the years lost to chronic disease and the years of healthy life lost
0:48:27 to disability. That’s highest. They live about 15 more good years than Americans do. Heterogeneous
0:48:33 society just because they can see clearly and make their policies, set policies to favor
0:48:37 the human being rather than to just favor business.
0:48:44 So if you, general reductive advice, two or three things get started are like table stakes
0:48:50 or most immediate incremental benefit. Talk about a 60-year-old, talk about a 25-year-old.
0:48:55 What are those two or three things? Like, okay, I got five minutes with the leading
0:49:00 authority on longevity. What are the two or three thing boxes you need to check when you’re
0:49:03 in your 20s and what about when you’re in your 50s or 60s?
0:49:10 At both ages, carefully curate the circle of friends that you spend time with. We know
0:49:16 that if your three best friends are obese, there’s 150% better chance you’ll be overweight.
0:49:23 So I wouldn’t necessarily dump your old unhealthy friends, but I would say making the effort
0:49:30 to find two or three new friends in your immediate social circle. These are people that you’re
0:49:35 going to see with some frequency or communicate with some frequency whose idea of recreation
0:49:45 is biking or golf or pickleball or gardening. Friends who care about you on a bad day. That’s
0:49:50 the real litmus test of a real friend with whom you can have meaningful conversation.
0:49:56 And it’s not a bad idea to have a whole food vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social
0:50:04 circle because they’re going to show you how and where to get healthy, plant-based food.
0:50:09 I can’t emphasize the importance of that enough. If you really want to live longer, it’s making
0:50:16 that shift to whole grains, greens, beans, nuts, and tubers. It’s indisputable in my
0:50:23 view. As an extension of that, get yourself a good cookbook. I’ve written Blue Zone Kitchen
0:50:29 books, but there’s a lots of cookbook, great cookbooks that tell you how to cook, show
0:50:37 you how to cook plant-based, learn how to cook at home. Instead of going on a diet or
0:50:42 joining a gym, say to yourself, “Well, for the next four Sundays, I’m going to get my
0:50:48 family together, and we’re going to cook three whole food, plant-based meals together on
0:50:53 Sunday afternoon, storm for the rest of the week, and eat them.” And the trick is to
0:51:00 not only know where you can get the ingredients, know how to make it, but the trick is to
0:51:07 find a handful that you love. Once you find that, my job is over because at the end of
0:51:12 the day, people really don’t give a crap about the environment. They don’t care that much
0:51:18 about animal cruelty or even their health when it comes to a hungry belly at lunch.
0:51:23 They want to eat something delicious. So as long as you can satisfy that hungry belly
0:51:30 in a delicious way, people don’t care that much. In other words, they’d happily take
0:51:34 a healthy meal over an unhealthy meal as long as the taste is that good.
0:51:38 Well, give us a little bit about your path professionally and what the big breaks were
0:51:43 and what advice you would have for a young person who says, “I would really like to have
0:51:47 that guy’s professional life.” What were the big breaks? What do you wish you’d started
0:51:52 earlier? What skills do you think you brought to the table? What advice? Someone’s 25,
0:51:58 maybe they enjoy thought leadership or science or they enjoy writing, and they want to be
0:51:59 Dan.
0:52:07 Well, heaven help them. They want to be Dan, but I would say I was an intern with George
0:52:14 Plimpton who was an editor of the Paris Review and a great writer, a participatory journalist.
0:52:22 I’d say number one, and I would say for any 25 years, learn how to communicate not only
0:52:25 verbal but written communication skills.
0:52:26 Story telling.
0:52:27 It’s kind of everything, isn’t it?
0:52:32 I think you get an age of AI because being able to write well is a reflection of your
0:52:43 ability to think and convey an idea and sell the idea whether you’re selling stocks and
0:52:51 bonds, a real estate development idea or, in my case, longevity. That is a good base.
0:52:58 When you were off doing useful and productive things, going to school and analyzing a fixed
0:53:04 instrument, financial instruments, I went and rode my bike. I hold the record for biking
0:53:10 from Alaska to Argentina, biking around the world and biking the length and width of Africa.
0:53:15 That’s what I did most of my 20s, which was actually very good training for life because
0:53:22 you develop discipline, you develop a sort of empathy for other cultures and a sensitivity,
0:53:29 also an ability to survive and to quickly learn, synthesize lots of information and put
0:53:30 it to work.
0:53:37 Then I started a company. I was trying to write for National Geographic. That was my holy
0:53:44 grail. I kept getting rejected. My editor said, “Everybody likes your bike rides around
0:53:51 here, but the new expeditions have to add to the body of knowledge or somehow illuminate
0:54:03 the human condition.” At the time, this capability to interact online was coming online. I developed
0:54:12 a way of solving ancient mysteries by letting an online audience direct a team of experts
0:54:20 to solve these mysteries. I took teams of 10, 12 people into Central America to try to figure
0:54:27 out why the ancient Maya civilization collapsed and across China following Marco Polo’s route.
0:54:33 We were connected to a million or so people and we harnessed the wisdom of the crowd.
0:54:39 This became very successful. All of a sudden, I had a company, which I sold eventually to
0:54:49 Hardcore Brace, a textbook company. I made money doing that. I made money not because
0:54:55 I was pursuing the dollars. The dollars was a byproduct of something I freaking loved,
0:55:05 which is expeditions and solving mysteries. Then I sold that company and now had a capacity
0:55:12 for networking to top experts and National Geographic like me. I got this cover story
0:55:21 assignment to unravel the mysteries of longevity. Like you, Scott, I think if I would have asked
0:55:29 the 20-year-old Scott Galloway to chart his career to the heights you are right now, you
0:55:36 might have gotten a year or two into it before everything fell apart. I’m pretty much the
0:55:44 same way. I’ve had lots of failures but learned from my bike rides that they’re not that bad
0:55:51 in the context of what African villagers are going through. Tomorrow, when I get on my
0:55:56 bike, it’ll be a new adventure metaphorically. I’ll figure that out when I get there.
0:56:01 Dan Butener is a National Geographic Fellow, longevity researcher and award-winning journalist.
0:56:05 He’s also the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Blue Zones,
0:56:11 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest and Thrive, Finding
0:56:17 Happiness the Blue Zones Way. Also, Dan is a three-times Guinness World Record holder
0:56:24 for distance cycling. That’s a flex. Anyway, Dan, this whole space has just blown up and
0:56:30 you genuinely are the OG here. You were in this before it was cool and kind of forged
0:56:37 a category that’s created so much attention, I think, so much good living, so much longevity,
0:56:42 and quite frankly, so much economic value. I think any, you know, the Huberman Lab or
0:56:46 Peter Atty, I feel as if they should all send you royalty checks because you were sort
0:56:50 of, you kind of paved the way here. It was really nice getting to spend some time with
0:56:53 you and congratulations on all your success.
0:56:55 Dan Thank you, Scott. And I’m big in my reviewers
0:57:02 as well. If I had a Blue Zone star, I’d lick it and put it on your forehead because I think
0:57:11 I’m going to see you when you’re a hundred.
0:57:17 I hope so, brother. I hope so.
0:57:22 Algebra of Happiness. I had this vision for what my relationship with my boys would be
0:57:27 like. I thought they would be fascinated by me. And when they got home from camp, they’d
0:57:31 want to sit down and tell me everything about what happened and talk about, you know, their
0:57:37 hikes thing went on. And as is often the case, my 14-year-old came home, hadn’t seen him in
0:57:42 two or three weeks, and kind of, he was tired, hungry, and just sort of, I said hi, didn’t
0:57:46 even say hi back, kind of slammed the door and went in his room. That is very upsetting
0:57:51 for me. And I want to get angry at him. That is unacceptable behavior, sure. But more than
0:57:56 anything, it doesn’t foot to what I thought our relationship was going to be, and I feel
0:58:04 insulted and hurt. And what I’ve come to realize as a dad, as a man, is that this basic notion
0:58:10 of masculinity and manhood is that you add surplus value. And one means of surplus value
0:58:16 is that dad just takes it. I’m not saying you tolerate or accept inappropriate behavior.
0:58:22 My kids actually have very good manners. But you realize as dad, dad takes some body blows.
0:58:30 And it’s not about me. It’s not, my kids aren’t here to serve or fill or ensure that our relationship
0:58:35 is what I imagined so I can feel like a hallmark commercial and have these dad moments. I get
0:58:40 a lot of those, but that’s not my job, and it’s not their job, and it’s an unreasonable
0:58:48 expectation. My job is to protect and provide and be a role model, to be good to their mother,
0:58:54 and to ensure that they have, you know, whatever I can provide such that they have developed
0:58:59 good character or healthy and have a shot at being productive, loving citizens as they
0:59:05 get older. But dad takes some blows. And if you’re expecting that your relationship with
0:59:10 your child is going to be two way, it is not. It is not going to be, I mean, there’ll be
0:59:13 moments where you’ll get more joy than you could have ever imagined. And we always talk
0:59:20 about those moments. But on the whole, on the whole, it is a what I’ll call diminished
0:59:26 or a debtor relationship. And that is you are going to give a lot more, you are going
0:59:30 to be much more expressive, much more emotional, much more supportive, much kinder to them
0:59:34 than they are going to be to you. And that is just part of it. That’s what it means to
0:59:39 be a parent. I also think that’s what it means to be a dad.
0:59:43 This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer
0:59:48 and Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from
0:59:53 the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as
0:59:58 read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods
1:00:18 for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
1:00:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, a longevity researcher, and the best-selling author of “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” joins Scott to discuss “Blue Zones” and how community, environment, and diet play into longevity. He also tells Scott what decade he might make it to based on how he currently lives his life.
Follow Dan, @danbuettner.
Scott opens with his thoughts on Apple being the ultimate second mouse.
Algebra of Happiness: what it means to be a dad.
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