Dan Buettner

With his permission, I evolved the term to take it worldwide.

And now we have five areas where people live the longest, Blue Zones.

There's a whole company around it called Blue Zones, which is actually a trademark.

And I'm responsible for 99% of Blue Zones.

Well, it begins with something called the Danish twin study that established only about 20% of how long we live is our genes.

So one fifth of longevity is genes, but that still leaves four fifths with just something else.

You look at the data at trying to change habits and most people who are in my field will try to tell you to change your habit or change your behavior, get on this diet, this longevity hack.

these supplements this exercise program and all that fails it fails for almost all people almost all the time they're good business plans but they don't deliver longevity when you actually find populations who are living a long time it is not the result of heroic discipline or a sense of individual responsibility these people are simply living their lives

So we know it's not genes.

It's only one fifth genes.

So the other four fifth has to be something other than habits.

And my conclusion was that it was their environment.

They live in environments that engineer their micro decisions on what they eat, how they move, how they socialize on a day-to-day basis.

for years or decades.

And the value proposition of the right environment is about 10 extra years and being biologically younger every decade by about 10 years.

So it's a big deal when people turn 40 and they get their first wrinkle, the Blue Zone solution offers you a way to be biologically a decade younger going forward.

I'm solving a mystery.

So imagine you have this piece of data that shows you that these five areas are producing populations that are making it to 100 at 10 times the rate of, say, United States.

Well, how do they do that?

And how do you go about finding out how you do that?