Dan Buettner

speaker

1,467 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 18 Jan

Dan Buettner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Ground Truths · A Look Into the Blue Zones · 18 Jan 2026 podcast

We only work in the U.S.

right now.

So the central premise is if you try to get a million people, say, to change your behavior, you can spend a few billion dollars on advertising or incentives or education, and most of that money will go right down the toilet.

It's very hard to convince people

a certain way to eat and change their, but if you change their environment, you can engineer their unconscious decisions.

And there are many, many examples of shaping people's environments and better behaviors ensue.

I mean, the most obvious one is if you want people to walk more, you pass something called a complete streets policy bundle for a city, and you can get 20% more people walking.

And we see this very clearly comparing, for example,

Houston, Texas with Boulder, Colorado.

Boulder, it's very easy to walk and bike.

Houston, it's almost impossible.

Or Phoenix, Arizona with Santa Barbara.

Or Asheville with Miami.

uh in in those cities the the um city council has decided to prioritize the pedestrian over the over motorists and traffic so what what our company does blue zones llc is we go into a city and we spend full time i have a staff let's say we came into san diego i probably have 20 full-time people working for five years

who would work with city council to adopt policies that favor healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing, to favor the pedestrian over the motorist, to favor the nonsmoker over the smoker.

And then we'd certify restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools, and churches that

optimize their policies and their designs so people are nudged into moving more and eating better and socializing more.

Remember, we're not trying to convince people.

We're just setting them up for success.

And then we help individuals shape social circles.

Showing 181–200 of 1,467 · page 10 of 74