The Blue Zones Habits for Happiness: Insights for Living a Longer, Happier Life

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Transcript: The Blue Zones Habits for Happiness: Insights for Living a Longer, Happier Life

Season 11, Episode 21  | October 7, 2025

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back to Life Time Talks, everyone. I’m Jamie Martin, and I am so excited about our guest today. He has spent decades studying longevity factors of the populations of the longest-lived individuals around the globe.

And today, we’re really going to focus in on this idea of happiness and also talk about his new cookbook that’s coming out. We are welcoming back Dan Buettner. It’s been several years since you’ve been on the podcast. How are you, Dan?

I feel like I’m 10 years younger than the last time I saw you.

Well, you got to tell me how that happened. How does that happen?

Eating a lot of beans.

Oh, my gosh, I love it. Well, I want to just share a little bit about you in case they haven’t heard from you before. But Dan is a National Geographic Explorer and multiple New York Times best-selling author.

He discovered the five places in the world that he has dubbed the “Blue Zones,” where people live the longest, healthiest lives. These places include Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Nicoya, Costa Rica, where I was recently visiting. And I’d love to talk to you about that.

And he has shared his learnings from those areas with the world through his books, articles, and his podcasts. He had Live to 100 — Secrets of the Blue Zones released on Netflix in 2023, and it was nominated for six Emmy Awards, which he won three for.

He founded Blue Zones LLC, which works in partnership with city governments, hospital systems, and insurance companies to implement insights he gleaned in the Blue Zones to help make cities healthier.

And to date, more than 70 cities have adopted Blue Zones projects, improving the health of more than 10 million Americans. Dan’s newest book is the Blue Zones Kitchen — One Pot Meals, 100 Recipes to Live to 100, which is released in September of 2025. Dan, you’ve had a lot going on.

Idle hands are the workshop of the devil is what I always say.

[LAUGHTER]

Oh, my goodness. So you mentioned — even before I hit record, you said a lot has changed since the last time we talked. I’d love to just get a little bit of an update on what you’ve been up to, what you’re most excited about right now.

Well, I shifted the focus away from running the Blue Zones company to exploration again. Well, I guess the one thing I did, I’m really proud of, is I started Blue Zone Kitchen frozen foods, which are in Kowalski’s and Whole Foods throughout the country because it actually takes — longevity food, we discovered around the world makes it easy for people.

But I’m also writing another book. There’s a organization called the Global Burden of Disease. It’s about 10,000 scientists worldwide. And they’ve helped me identify the areas where people live the longest lives in full health.

So not just a long time, up to a dozen extra years. And I’m hard to work on that book. And the book you mentioned, the Blue Zone Kitchen — One Pot, people don’t realize this, but you hear all these anti-aging, quote unquote, “longevity hacks.”

There’s no pill, there’s no supplement, there’s no genetic intervention that has been shown to reverse, stop, or even slow aging of humans. Stem cells, rapamycin, metformin, it’s all theoretical.

But if you can move away from a standard American diet towards a whole food plant-based — you don’t have to be completely whole-food plant-based, but if you’re mostly eating the foods your grandma ate, at the level of plants and beans and grains and greens that your grandma ate, it’s worth about 10 extra years of life expectancy.

And that’s taken from a meta-analysis that followed two million people for 30 years. It’s very good science. And that’s within the grasp of every person listening here. And the key to that is eating at home.

Every time you go out to eat, you consume about 300 extra calories. Those calories tend to be laden with saturated fat and ultra-processed foods, sugar, and sodium. At home, you can control the ingredients.

So I spent the last two and a half years with the Stanford Statistic Lab to find the flavors Americans love. And seven of them — we looked at 650,000 recipes, found the best flavor patterns, and wrote 100 recipes to live to 100 from that, and that’s the One Pot book.

Oh, my gosh, I love that. Tell me a little bit about those flavor patterns that you just mentioned. What are a couple of them if you don’t mind previewing them for us?

I don’t want to reveal it right now. The book comes out in September. And I want to wait for the book, actually, because it took us a year and a giant data-backed effort. And I want the book to be —

The reveal. That’s awesome. Well, I want to talk a little bit specifically about happiness. I know the last time we were on, we went through the nine lessons from the Blue Zones.

We talked a little bit less about the happiness element, but that’s also something that you’ve talked about a lot over the years. And several years ago, at the World Economic Forum, you asked the audience two questions.

You said, do you think life is long or short? And do you think life is hard or easy? Can you share what someone’s answers to those questions can tell us about maybe their happiness?

Well, yes, it’s just predictive. So that was a study done by Harvard — 2,500 people done in three countries. And they asked the question — so there’s a standard question that gets at how happy you are. It’s actually called life satisfaction.

And it asks people to imagine a ladder with 10 rungs. Your best imaginable life is the top rung. Your worst imaginable life is the bottom rung. And they ask you to think of your life as a whole.

Not just how you’re feeling today, but how your life as a whole. And where would you place your own life satisfaction? And they get a number. And then they ask two more questions.

They ask the question, do you think life is long or short? And then another question is do you think life is hard or easy? And they found that — so then they do something called regression analysis.

It’s a fancy mathematical word, but it just essentially says how highly associated these two questions are with each other or the answers, actually. So we found that the least happy people — so the people most likely to rate their life low on that ladder — tend to think life is short and hard.

And people that are happiest with their life, they tend to think that life is long and easy. So it was just a fun way to get people thinking about happiness.

And my work, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic on this. And I wrote a book called The Blue Zones of Happiness on this. And so much of what we think brings us happiness is misguided or just plain wrong.

We think that if I could just get that job, or if I could just find that perfect mate, or if I could just lose this 20 pounds, I’m going to be happy. And what we find is that, first of all, there’s an ocean of data — data that represents about 95% of the human population — that, once again, you can do this correlation.

You can see, well, if I make an extra $100,000, how much more happy am I likely to be? If I eat a plant-based diet compared to a greasy diet, how much happier can I expect to be? If I get eight hours of sleep compared to six hours of sleep, how much happier?

And that’s the exercise that my books did. So I can pretty much tell you exactly what will stack the deck in favor of happiness. I can’t guarantee your happiness, but I can tell you what will give your proverbial deck of life cards more aces and jacks so you’re more likely to be happy.

And we’re going to get into a couple of those here in just a minute. You mentioned longevity and a lot of the work that’s been happening in that space. Is there a connection between happiness and longevity, like or a correlation at all?

Very strong correlation. So first of all, all of our Blue Zones, the original Blue Zones — and for those people who haven’t heard of them before, the longest lived women, we found in Okinawa, Japan. Longest-lived men in the highlands of Sardinia.

On an island in Greece called Ikaria, we found a population living eight years longer without dementia. And then we found in Nicoya, Costa Rica, lowest rate of middle-aged mortality, three times more likely to hit mid-90s than Americans do. And then among the Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda, California.

So what’s interesting is none of those people are on diets. None of them are running down to Tulum for stem cells. None of them are taking anti-aging hacks. In fact, they don’t do anything. They just live their lives.

And you look at their lives, they live close to nature. They grow their own food. They sit down to dinner with their families. They walk. They’re not driving. They’re not stuck in traffic to get to their work or school. They walk.

They have a spiritual life. They almost always belong to a faith-based community. They have a sense of purpose. They live in extended family, so older people aren’t sitting off by themselves in some soulless retirement home.

And we know that at middle age, my age, people can expect an extra 10 good years in Blue Zones. Now, you compare that with the longevity bros, the billionaires in Silicon Valley shooting up with stem cells or exchanging their plasma with their children, or taking these experimental drugs, first of all, we don’t know if they work.

But second of all, even if they do work, in many cases, they just prolong a crappy life. So to answer your question — I know I went off on a careen there into a cul-de-sac there.

But if you can arrange your life, if you can deploy strategies to get in the top 20 percentile of the happiest people, it’s worth about six extra years of life expectancy over being among the 20% who are least happy. So, in other words, stronger than any pill or supplement, getting yourself happy is a great strategy for longevity.

And I think so many of those factors you just mentioned that are tied to the Blue Zones, it’s a way of life for them. It’s not a pursuit of something. That’s something you’ve said, like often, what we’re doing is we’re pursuing happiness. We’re pursuing longevity in the US.

It’s part of our culture, in many ways, the pursuit of that next thing or the next phase of happiness in our lives. And it feels like there’s a difference between the two.

Often, the pursuit of longevity in these places isn’t a thing where they’re living long. It’s just the way things are happening.

Yeah, longevity is almost never successfully pursued. It ensues. So, in other words, my working theory — and I apply this to all of our blue zone cities — it’s a function of your environment.

What most people in the longevity and even health space get wrong is trying to go on a diet or an exercise program, or a supplement program or longevity hacks, they only work for a number of weeks or months.

If you look at the data on diets, they have about a three-month half-life. So 100 people start today, you have half of them in three months, and half of that half in seven months. And they’re all gone in two years.

The only thing that works when it comes to longevity are things that you’re going to do for decades. And the thing is the way we shape our homes, our kitchens, you can engineer out an extra 200 calories of mindless eating by setting up your kitchen the right way.

The way our cities are set up. If you live in a suburban-focused city like Houston or Atlanta or Phoenix or even parts of Minneapolis, life expectancy there is about five years less than a walkable city like Boulder, Colorado, or San Luis Obispo in California, or Ashland, North Carolina.

Why? Because people in walkable cities are getting about 10,000 steps a day without thinking about it.

It’s just what’s happening.

It’s pleasant to go get your cappuccino by walking. You feel safe letting your kids walk to school in zones, so it’s easy for you to walk to work.

Whereas in Houston or something, average commute is about an hour. And people drive from their suburban garage, muscles through traffic, go to an underground garage, and take the elevator up to their office.

And by the way, going from being completely sedentary to just 20 minutes of walking a day, that adds three years to your life expectancy. I challenge all of the pharmaceutical bros to give me one pill or supplement that will give you three years of life expectancy.

So, in other words, if you move to a soulless suburb, to a walkable town — and I know you’re in Minneapolis. If you move downtown to the North Loop or to uptown or downtown ST Paul, where it’s easy-to-walk places, that’s going to add real years to your life expectancy.

And that’s not sexy. It’s impossible for me to make money off of you doing that. But look at the data. That’s what works.

It’s so interesting that you say that. I have a long commute two to three days a week. And I think about how much less I move on those days compared to the days when I’m not commuting, it’s crazy how big of a difference that is and how I feel as a result, too.

So Nobel Prize winner named Daniel Kahneman did a study in our day-to-day, moment-to-moment happiness and associated it with different tasks. And it turns out the two things we love to do best, the first one happens in the bedroom, and it’s not sleep.

The second one is socializing with friends after work. The three things we hate the most, the things that give us the most stress, worry, and anxiety and unhappiness on a daily basis, in reverse order, are number three, taking care of kids, child care. That gets stressful.

Then number two is housework. We really hate housework. But the worst one, the one that gives us the most stress and anxiety, is our commute back and forth to work, our automobile commute. That’s where we’re most stressed and most unhappy during the day.

So a simple strategy to not only live longer and be happier is arrange your life so you can walk or take the bus or ride your bicycle to work. Very easy, cheap hack.

Can’t make money off of you. Marketers can’t make money off of you by doing that. In fact, oil companies lose money, so we get the opposite suggestion, but that’s what works. And it works in all Blue Zones.

Yep, and you’re finding it repeatedly. When you think about measuring happiness — and I mean, obviously, you’ve done this. Daniel Kahneman has done this.

How do you measure it? How are you going about doing that? Is it the questions you posed earlier, or what are other ways that it’s being measured in these areas that you’ve identified?

Well, the question I posed at the beginning, the ladder, it’s called the Cantril self-anchoring ladder. And it’s used by Nobel laureates in 145 countries. And the way you can measure the happiness of an entire country is you take a random sample of 3,000 people.

You only need 3,000 people in a population of 300 million. And you can get a read to within 1% or 2% margin of error. The other questions used to measure happiness, they call you several times over the course of a few weeks, and they ask you, what are you doing right now?

And to gauge, on a scale of 1 to 5, your worry, your anxiety. Is it making you smile, or is it making you unhappy? And so the latter question, how happy are you in your life with the whole, that’s evaluative happiness.

When they catch you at random times throughout a few weeks, that’s how you’re experiencing your happiness. And there’s only about 0.5 correlation between the two.

In other words, there are some people who just love their lives. Wake up every day, but their day-to-day experience is kind of crappy. And there’s people who sit on the porch and drink beer all day long, and you ping them on any given day, and they’re pretty happy.

But when they look back at what they have accomplished and how they evaluate their life, they’re not so happy. And so the reason we know what correlates to happiness is those two questions are asked on an international level by several organizations. And I’ve tapped that data.

And then they ask 85 other questions about how much money you make, what your sexual orientation is. Do you have kids? How old are you? Do you belong to a church?

What’s your attitude towards aging? What’s your attitude towards equality? And then you can do this regression analysis. It’s correlation.

Mathematicians can tell you how strongly associated, or what are the things that are likely to occur when people say they’re happy, and what things are likely to be happening when people say they’re unhappy. And that’s the core of my research.

Yeah, and with that, you’ve identified what you’re calling three strains of happiness. There’s pleasure, purpose, and pride. Can you talk through each of those for a minute if we start with pleasure?

Pleasure is that question where we ping you over the course of several weeks and ask you what you’re doing and what you experience. So I changed experience happiness to pleasure, because really, it’s measuring how pleasant you are feeling at this very moment.

The three Ps, you try to make it easy for people to remember. And then the pride, that’s how you look back at your life or how you evaluate your life.

So pride, if I made my mother proud, if I got a college degree, if I have children, and I’ve made some money with my life, scientists call that evaluative happiness. I just call it pride. Are you proud with your life?

And purpose is measured by Gallup. And they ask you a question about how often you are able to use your strength to do what you like best.

So, you’re a great interviewer and you’re a journalist, and lo and behold, Life Time pays you to do it. Well, probably, you would answer that question with a high degree of purpose.

Somebody who is making meaningless widgets and just working hard to pay for their health insurance, they’re probably not feeling very much purpose.

And the sad part about Americans, by the way, only about 30% of us are finding purpose at work. That means you either live your life without purpose, which takes a suboptimal life, or you find purpose after work.

Yeah, it’s so interesting you say that. I’ve been reflecting a lot on my own sense of purpose in work recently because I just hit 20 years at Life Time. I’ve spent my entire career here. I started as an intern.

Started at five?

[LAUGHS] I was a little older than that. It was in my early 20s. But I marked 20 years recently. And as I reflect on that, part of the reason I love it is I get to do what I do every day, but it’s also this content that is helping people, hopefully, out in the world.

I’m invested in it myself. I’ve been able to apply it to my own life. And I just like it’s a topic I’m constantly interested in learning more about. And I love going to work for those reasons.

So, for me, I am within that 30%, I think, that really has that at work. But then it also filters over into my day-to-day life, too, my personal life, because health and wellness, which I get it to talk about, that carries over into every aspect of my life.

So anyway, I’m in that moment of reflection right now as I’m marking that milestone for myself. Anyway, just want to share that.

First of all, I think you are doing something that you’ve acquired these research skills, you’ve acquired this very good understanding about what makes people healthy and what doesn’t really make them healthy.

And you’re a great communicator as well, so I could see why bringing those three things together and getting paid to do it, presumably, you’re probably very high on the purpose scale.

And by the way, another great study done by a guy named Robert Butler at the National Institutes on Aging, he was a former director, found that people who can wake up and they can articulate their sense of purpose live about eight years longer than people who are rudderless.

So once again, another counterintuitive strategy to add years to your life. It’s a strategy that makes day-to-day life pleasurable. But a lot of Americans, they continue to muddle through a shitty job because it makes them money or gives them status, and that doesn’t really bring them happiness.

What they should do is quit their job within their ability to support their family and do something that fuels their soul and engages their strengths and makes them feel like they’re living their values. That’s not only going to make them live longer, they’re going to enjoy the journey.

Yep, just pausing on that for one more second, I’m thinking back to the last five years. We’re now five years since the start of the pandemic. That period of time, for many people, was a time of great pause and reflection.

For those of us who didn’t go to work or who maybe their jobs were cut or they lost their jobs during that time, there was a lot of talk in the early first couple of years about people using that as an opportunity to find a sense of purpose. Have you observed that actually as an outcome of what happened at all, or not really?

I don’t know the data on that. Personally, that’s exactly what happened to me. I sold Blue Zones, and I focused on what was more important for me. It turned out to be rebuilding social relationships and investing more in my family. And I think that was true with a lot of people.

So, to the extent that allowed you to reshuffle your deck, I think it was a great thing. Actually, I’m pretty sure that the exodus from office back to home occasions lower happiness, because it turns out that the easiest strategy to add more happiness into our life — and this works for both extroverts and introverts — is more casual, face-to-face social interaction with other human beings.

And you don’t get that when you’re sitting in your bedroom doing Zoom calls. You get it when you bump into people at the water cooler or the coffee break room, or ideally, your employer helps facilitate that social interaction.

You look at all the high-profile studies right now, it all points to the same thing. Quality time spent with other humans with whom you can have a meaningful conversation is probably the best, cheapest, most effective strategy to both happiness and longevity.

And that just continues to prove true. Well, so you talked about the domains of happiness. We just talked about community and connection, having the social networks, both casual and I’m assuming intimate as well.

There’s also these other elements that you’ve talked about, like the self, like being connected to yourself and your person, finances, home, work. Can you talk a little bit about some of those, or which ones would you lean into the most?

Well, I have almost zero confidence in trying to change your behavior or the positive psychology, appreciation, and savoring and gratitude journals. They’re a lot like going on a whole food vegan diet.

It’s a good Idea, but 2% or 3% of people stick with them for long enough. It’s not only what works. It’s what people actually do. So when it comes to finances, there’s a few evidence-based guides.

First of all, experiences bring more happiness over the long term than buying things. So if you have an extra five grand, it’s way better to take your family on a vacation than to buy a big screen TV or something like that.

Same with giving gifts. We know that financial security is about three times more powerful than consumption when it comes to happiness. So what do I mean by that?

If you have an extra five grand, you’re way better off buying insurance, having an automatic savings plan to build wealth, or paying down your mortgage than it is going out and blowing it on shoes and dresses and electronics or a new house.

Because worrying about money grates at your psyche, and it grates at your psyche every single day, forever, until you don’t feel stress anymore about or until you have enough money that you feel covered.

On the other hand, if you buy, let’s say, a new big screen TV or a new car, the novelty of that only lasts about 12 months tops. And then, oh, that new car is no longer new. It’s my car. And that new flat screen TV, well, crap, now they got a newer version. I want that one.

It’s always the next.

Yeah, they call it the hedonic treadmill. So you can manage — we’re all on this monkey or a mouse wheel of constantly chasing something that’s on an ever receding horizon. And we never quite get there, or we get it for a fleeting second.

So similarly, I argue, as with longevity, the only way to get it is to shape your surroundings, optimize your environment so your unconscious decisions are better every day. So how do we do that?

We get on an automatic savings plan. We reshape our immediate social circle. We know that if we’re hanging out with people who sit around and eat junk food and complain and are overweight, we’re more likely to look like them and act like them.

So to go out and say, well, who are the three friends that I’m going to spend the most time with and have the most meaningful relationship with? And if they’re unhealthy, unhappy people, I’m not saying dump those people.

I will say one of your best strategies is look through your emails or your phone list and proactively make friends with the happy, healthy friends. It’s going to make a big difference.

The biggest thing you can do, by the way — and people are going to roll their eyes at this — but when you look at immigrants who come from unhappy places, like the Soviet bloc countries — Moldavia, Romania — and moved to Copenhagen, or come from unhappy places in Africa or Southeast Asia and moved to Canada, which, by the way, is a significantly happier country than America.

Within one year, their sex doesn’t change, their age doesn’t change very much. Their education level hardly changes. Their religion doesn’t change. Their sexual orientation doesn’t change much. Almost nothing changes about who they are.

But within one year, they report the happiness level of their adoptive home, which often represents a doubling of their happiness. None of that other positive psychology will double your happiness as dependably as where you live.

And people say, well, I live in Minneapolis. My kids go to school here, or I live in Houston. Well, first of all, there are happier, longer-lived neighborhoods in every city.

And the average American moves 10 times in their adult life. And one of the big criteria, if we’re interested in happiness and longevity, is moving to a happier place.

And if you go to the web and you look up something called the well-being index, Gallup’s WBI, you can see very clearly the happy parts of America and the unhappy parts. And the most dependable thing you can do to get happier is move to one of those happy places.

Again, it goes back to environment again and where you’re putting yourself on a regular basis, a consistent basis as well.

Yeah, living there.

Yeah, I mean you’re there every day. There, where you work, you’re spending how many hours at work every day? Where are the places you’re putting yourself? So again, going back to that.

So we know that if you live in a neighborhood that has easy access to fresh food, people there report higher level of happiness. If you have access to nature, people report higher levels.

If you have access to parks, people report higher levels of happiness. If you live in a walkable community, people there report higher levels of happiness. So these are all things you should look at.

Do people know their neighbors? One of the biggest indicators of happiness is the number of people you wave at every day.

I love that.

I mean, and of course that’s a reflection. Do you know your neighbors? And do you like your neighbors? If you scowl at your neighbors or ignore them, that tells you something about where you’re living.

So these are things that really work, and they work for the long term. Marketers can’t make money off of you so you don’t hear about them. But the data points very strongly to these things.

And you feel it. If you’re in that circumstance where you have that, you’re in a neighborhood where you’re connected, your kids are connected, you don’t need anybody to tell you because you feel it.

You feel safe where you are. It’s a sense that you have. Anyway, there’s a lot there. I was just going to tap into for a second — you mentioned the importance of experience versus stuff.

And you mentioned if you can take your family on a trip. I mentioned at the top of the episode that my family recently traveled to Costa Rica for the first time.

And when I think about what I experienced there, the access to fresh food, the easy access to nature and beauty in so many different forms, it’s one of those trips that I look back at.

I look at pictures of it now, and it takes me back, and I feel happier as a result of just having been there and having experienced it once in my life. So I think there’s something to that.

And again, that’s one of the blue zone areas, was right in Nicoya. We were in Nosara, where we stayed, and we were able to experience so many aspects of that.

And I get the chills thinking about it because it was just one of those — every day, since that trip, I have reflected on it and just how powerful that trip was for me. So anyway, I just wanted to share that, too.

Well, A, I’m glad you took your family. And B, I’m glad you felt the magic because there is magic in these places.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s something. It’s almost like it’s in the air. I know we want to spend — I want to spend a little bit of time talking about your cookbook.

You already talked about the factors, like when we move from eating a standard American diet toward a more whole foods diet. We know the impacts of all this ultra-processed foods in our body.

How did you go about deciding how you wanted to frame up the recipes and using the “one pot model.” I think that’s so important, especially in America, where people are busy and they want a little bit of convenience. That one pot is pretty important, I think.

Yeah, so I help out this nonprofit organization called Aon. And they help newly homeless people, people who should not be homeless, get back with a roof under their heads and looking for work.

And they asked me if they come in blue zone. And I said, well, people got to eat healthier here. All you have is a microwave. And almost nothing you put in a microwave produces a healthy outcome — burrito or hot pocket or whatever.

And I realized in touring through that, that a lot of people don’t — they don’t have good pots and pans. They don’t know how to use an oven. They don’t know how. Their parents never taught them how to cook.

So in order to get people to eat in at home — and by the way, I’m going to repeat what I said at the top of the hour here. If you can move from a standard American diet, which is about 60% to 70% processed — Americans, on average, eat about 220 pounds of meat per year, 300 pounds of dairy.

It’s a bathtub full of dead animal. It’s not to say there’s not room for meat in our diet, but we just eat way too much. If you can move towards a plant-based diet.

So you get your meat consumption down to maybe 20 pounds a year. And you get your processed food consumption down to 10%. That’s worth about 10 extra years of life expectancy.

That’s huge. There’s nothing. But the only way you’re going to get that is if you learn to cook at home. How do you get Americans to cook at home?

It has to be fast. I don’t have time. Mother’s say, I don’t have time. It has to be easy. It has to be cheap. And most importantly, it has to compete with the meaty, cheesy, eggy, processed.

So this Blue Zones Kitchen — One Pot Meals, I have 100 recipes in there. They’re all under $5 a serving. Most of them are more like $2. They can all be prepared in about a half hour.

They can all be done in one pot. So you don’t need the fancy cookware. I’m a big fan of the Instapot, by the way, because that’s super fast. And then they’re maniacally delicious.

And to get at that is I told you we scrape 635,000 recipes. We identified the ones with 5 star reviews or more. And then we used an AI lab to analyze the flavor patterns.

And we found seven of them. We gave them to the best recipe writer in America. And he came up, using Blue Zones food guidelines — 100 recipes to live to 100 that are maniacally delicious.

And the best thing you could do — you don’t have to buy my Blue Zone kitchen books, but a whole food plant-based book that you like, pick out five recipes, cook them with your family.

Keep trying until you find a half a dozen recipes that you love. And my job is done, because if you love them, they’re fast, they’re easy, they’re cheap, you’re going to do that instead of going out for McDonald’s or Taco Bell or any of this other crap that’s shortening our lives.

How does prep play into that? Because I know that’s one of my biggest struggles. I have two girls who are in the teen and tween years. They’re in too many activities, probably. And prepping ahead of time, is there any aspect of that to your cookbook that helps people plan ahead?

So people say, I don’t have time to cook. If you take that extra 10 years and you average it back through the rest of your life, you’re gaining about two or three hours per day free life.

So first of all, we forget to calculate the big picture. Secondly, one of the recipes is Sardinian minestrone that I eat every single day. And it’s got all the fiber you need, all the protein you need, by the way, with no dead animals in there.

And it’s mostly beans and grains, which make a whole protein. That takes about 15 minutes to prep in the morning. You’re basically cutting carrots and celery and onion and then throwing the ingredients in.

Put a top on, hit a button, and go to work. And when you come back from work, you have eight delicious steaming hot servings for your family, that, by the way, it’s all they really need to eat. It’s got all the nutrients they need. And I can’t find the flaw in that.

No. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest challenge that I’m seeing among people who are my age with kids in this age range and younger, too. It’s just knowing I can prep this pretty quickly and move on to the next thing, but know that I’m still feeding my family a nutritious meal. That’s huge for me.

Let me give you a hack.

Yes, I love that.

A hack is there’s these Pyrex glass Tupperwares. They’re very high quality. So you’re not going to have to worry about plastic, which I worry about, by the way.

Buy yourself a dozen of those things. They have them in the pint or the two-pint size. I have them. Take Sunday afternoon and cook with your family. Make that an activity. It’s fun.

Get a cookbook and cook four things on Sunday afternoon. Especially, you live in Minnesota. It’s too hot sometimes or too cold most of the year. And then freeze them, put them in your freezer, and then just pull out that Pyrex, take the top off, and microwave it.

Bam, you have a cheap, delicious, healthy meal that you don’t have to run out and buy. You don’t have to worry about coming home from work and being flustered and cooking it.

The thing is people don’t see clearly. We get bamboozled by marketers. And you don’t have time for that, we’ll make it easy for you. Just empty this box of ultra-processed ingredients into a bowl and add an egg.

No, that’s going to kill you sooner, and your children are not going to grow up healthy. And you’re not going to be happy in the meanwhile.

Absolutely. No, it’s those simple tricks, I think, that do make things a little easier. And it’s not a major — that’s not a major hack compared to some of the other hacks that we’re hearing about in society these days.

Well, Dan, I know that we have a hard stop here momentarily. Is there anything that we missed or you want to make sure that our listeners or viewers know before we sign off here today?

Well, if you have any lingering questions, my Instagram is @DanBuettner, and I answer all my questions. So anything I said here, you have any questions, I answer them myself, and I’d be very happy to answer the questions.

And I’d love it if people would buy the Blue Zone One Pot book or try the Blue Zone Kitchen Meals at their local grocery store in the freezer section.

But I just appreciate you paying attention. I appreciate Life Time. I was there two days ago. I work out there with my son. That’s how we bond. I think those are the right kind of institutions.

I appreciate your time. And I really appreciate people who just sat and listened to us for the last 50 minutes. There’s a lot of other podcasts out there where they could be spending their time. And I just want to say I’m grateful.

Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate your time, too. And my one last, final — we always call it a mic drop question. And you mentioned AI. What’s your take — how are you using AI in your life?

I use it for deep research. So when I mentioned that living in a walkable city is worth five extra years of life expectancy, that was using AI for about two hours to access research that would have taken me two weeks.

And so I like it like that. But I think AI is the wrong direction for the human race. I don’t think it’s going to make us happier. I think it’s going to provide way more challenges than it provides quality of life.

I know I’m a disruptor in that. But I’ve spent the last 25 years looking at very happy and very healthy populations. And they have never been technology-enabled.

They found their happiness in longevity through a little bit of struggle, through a little bit of discomfort, through a little bit of stressing their bodies and stressing their minds.

When I say stressing, I just mean pushing a little bit. And most of what gives us satisfaction and gratification in life requires effort.

And the more we seek to engineer effort and stressors out of our lives, I think the bigger chance there is of us being anxious and depressed. And I think the numbers of adolescent and young people’s depression and anxiety will support that thesis.

Yeah, so really, it brings —

On that happy note.

Yeah, I was going to say, well, it brings us back to those foundational elements that you always talk about. It’s the movement. It’s the social connections. It’s how we connect with one another. Those are the things that are really important and we got to remember.

So Dan, thank you so much for spending this time with me. We’ll link to your website, we’ll link to your Instagram, where people can reach out to you, and we’ll go from there.

But thank you again.

It was a joy to talk to you. And I’ll see you when you’re 100. And everybody else listening, eat your beans.

We’re going to get there. Eat your beans, your greens. All right, thanks, Dan.

I love it. All right, you guys. See ya.

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