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.

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

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

National Geographic does not give grants casually, and I led teams.

And those grants yielded the Icaria, Greece, and the Costa Rica Blue Zones.

But we went to Vilcabamba Valley, Ecuador, and rejected it because there weren't good birth records, exactly as our critics would accuse us of doing.

We actually rejected.

Similarly, we rejected Cuba.

We're pretty sure there's a blue zone there, but we couldn't get the data, so we didn't say it.

And we rejected Barbados as well.

Um, so those have all been rejected.

Uh, uh, the blue zone in, um, Singapore, the Netflix lived to 100 documentary.

Uh, you know, that for that, we, we, um,

created kind of a new class of Blue Zone.

I was careful to call it a new Blue Zone.

And the reason I gave a designation, A, I came up with the concept, so I figured I'd get to do it.

It's getting more scientific now, but according to Global Burden of Disease, the IHME,

Singapore enjoys the highest health-adjusted life expectancy in the world, about a dozen more years than Americans have.

So I thought it was well within reason to recognize them.

And by the way, their life expectancies jumped about 25 years since 1960.

So what they've done there...

largely under the prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, lots of foibles, but health improvement isn't one of them there.

And I've written a lot about Singapore for National Geographic and it wasn't a flippant designation.

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