The Blue Zones Blueprint: Longevity Doesn’t Take Willpower. It Takes Design.

Longevity isn’t something you chase with willpower—it’s something that can ensue when your community is designed for it.

In this episode, Shanon sits down with Danny Buettner Jr., Executive Vice President of Blue Zones, to talk less about perfect personal habits and more about the real lever that changes outcomes: environment and culture. The original Blue Zones offered the learning. Blue Zones America is the application—partnering with cities, school districts, employers, and health systems to make the healthy choice the easy (and often unavoidable) choice.

Danny breaks down what Blue Zones America looks like on the ground—how communities build momentum through people, places, and policy; why “readiness” matters; and how leaders can create measurable wellbeing shifts that don’t rely on Superman discipline. They also unpack the forces working against health in modern life, and why the next era of longevity will be won through community design, not individual guilt.

If you’re a leader, parent, clinician, or anyone tired of feeling like health is one more thing to “try harder” at, this conversation offers a hopeful blueprint for building a life—and a city—where wellbeing can actually unfold.

www.bluezones.com

Transcript

Welcome back to the Redefine What's Possible podcast, where we explore the stories, science, and spirit of living fully in health, leadership, and life. My guest today is Danny Buettner Jr., Executive Vice President of Blue Zones, an organization leading a global movement to help communities live longer and better. Now, the original Blue Zones in Sardinia, Okinawa, Icaria taught us

how people naturally thrive. But Danny and the Blue Zones America team are now asking a new question. How do we design environments where longevity ensues in modern society? Danny, I'm so excited for this conversation today. Welcome to the podcast. Let's do it. It can be a better fit than the Re de fine show. So Blue Zones is here for it. Love it. So Danny, I love this idea that...

It's not about chasing longevity, but about creating a world where it unfolds naturally. Can you speak to that for a moment? Yeah, life gets weird real quick. You're a single mom or a firefighter or a nurse or a teacher or a podcaster or you're in sales and it's hard to make the healthy choice. It's hard to make time to call that friend.

and check in, you let yourself get a little bit too disconnected, disassociated. It's hard to find time to go for a walk or hit the gym or to go buy ingredients and cook a delicious and healthy meal for your family. It's hard to find that time and to find that muscle. Discipline is a muscle and muscle's all fatigue. So unless you're Tom Brady or Serena Williams and you have a private vegan chef and all the time and money and resources in the world, it's hard.

to stay the course on health. And that's not the launch of the original Blue Zones either. Original Blue Zones is not about Superman willpower. I love that. You know what? Willpower, as the day goes on for me, it gets less and less. Like we were talking about energy a little bit before starting this. And we gotta save a little bit for the kids at the end of the day and then it just evaporates. So anyway, I hear you.

Tom Brady, Serena Williams, my wife and I talked, if we won the lottery and whatnot, the first hire we would have is we would have an in-home chef. We would have the best food all the time. That's like the one thing we would start. Maybe they'll figure out humanoids and we can all have that delivered via Amazon. Indeed. I'm totally looking forward to that. I will invest in that.

So Danny, let's start at the beginning. For our listeners who may only know Blue Zones from a National Geographic event or a Netflix special or your father's books, can you share how this movement evolved from global research into local design? So Dan Senior, the ever investigative journalist, the ever curious mind, always been an explorer, a writer, storyteller.

And he inevitably partnered with National Geographic and the National Institutes of Health in DC to go out and try to find the Fountain of Youth. And instead they found back in 1999, 2000, 2001, these five places that are geographically defined, places demographically confirmed by the experts to be longevity hotspots. People are living to age 80, 90, even 100 at the highest rates. And there's two kickers. Kicker one is...

Three out of five of these places are at or below the poverty line. Wow, so they don't have pharmacies, they don't have gym memberships or supplements, they have something else going on. And the second kicker is of the 350 centenarians that we've now studied longitudinally over the last 30 years, not a single one pursued health, pursued fellowship or purpose or longevity. It ensued.

is a byproduct of two things. And this is why I started out talking about individual willpower is not the solution. There has to be some individual accountability for yourself and your family, no doubt. But real long-term gains at the individual or at the population level comes when you take inventory of what the Blue Zones have in spades, environment and culture, where you live, that architecture of choices that surround you and the culture, the squad, the people.

that reinforce either good habits or bad habits. If you can set up environment and culture, believe it, can autopilot for much, much longer, for years, if not decades, a healthier lifestyle than if you think every year on January 1st and 2nd, you're gonna stick to your New Year's resolution and actually go to the gym every day. That's such a powerful distinction. what's standing out to me, three out of five of those communities are below the poverty line.

Right? And in our country, I feel like if you're below the poverty line, your health, your longevity, it doesn't stand a chance. And so I think that's a powerful distinction on naming what is the environment, what is the culture. In addition to, I just really love what you just said. People didn't pursue longevity. It ensued. It feels like...

It wasn't about an obsession of going to the gym and all these things. Can you expand on that just a little bit? Through Dan's research and studying and science, they found nine commonalities from the five blue zones. We call them the power nine. And it's nine things that you see consistently are manifesting, are present in the lives of the people of the blue zones. The first is move naturally. They live in environments where you can walk.

They have hobbies like gardening, they have professions like sheep and goat herding, things that get them moving naturally throughout the day. So there's no sedation, there's no sedentary lifestyle. They have stress. They worry about money. They worry about their kids. They're not drinking Mai Tais or IPAs on a beach somewhere. They worry about money, they worry about their kids, but they have rituals and they have tactics and traditions that help them downshift. Practicing their purpose.

Ancestor veneration, the Okinawans, prayer for the seventh day of Adventist, happy hour for the Italians, of course, and the Greeks. They have a different diet than we do in the United States. So part of the power nine is plant slant. They're not vegans, but they predominantly plant based, lots of beans, lots of greens, lots of nuts, handful of nuts in a lot of cases. They wash it down with a glass of red wine in many of the blue zones, only one.

not a dozen, with friends and over a healthy meal. And then they have moderation or what we call today, mindful eating. So they have strategies passed down through generations, sometimes millennia. And there are these practices of mindful eating that were born from an era when things were more Spartan, when things were more hardscrabble and there was famines and invasions and pests and they had to conserve the food supply.

But today, they practice this moderation, this mindful eating, but it serves a different purpose in a world of abundance. It serves the purpose of not over- which in America, we do a lot of over-eating, even the healthy foods. This must be good for us, and we just scarf it down. That's diet. And then all the power nine rests on the foundation of social, of connect. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others. And so,

belong, loved ones first, and right tribe. having a group that ideally is a healthy group that you can take your journey with, they're gonna support you, you support them. We nurture each other's traditions and lifestyle and purposes. We know that from the CDC and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation that habits are as contagious as a cold. So if your three best friends idea of a good time is going out to the bar every day, eating nachos and drinking beers,

smoking cigarettes, we don't recommend dumping friends in a world of isolation, increasingly isolation, but augmenting with friends who want to volunteer, who want to go for a walk. That's so hard to do, would you agree, Danny? Once you're in your tribe, if you will, to that maybe it's unhealthy, maybe it's not serving you to break away from that can be really challenging. Do you have thoughts on that? Two things. One is there's got to be individual

accountability and responsibility. you have to first, it's much easier to take inventory of your surroundings and make those tweaks than it is to fight against them for decades, if that makes sense. But in order to trigger somebody to want to take that inventory, to augment their friend group or their environment, we always recommend start with their why, start with their purpose. Is it because they want to be around to play with their grandkids as their grandkids get older?

Is it because they love their job and they wanna be able to stay engaged and they wanna keep up with their friends? So if you start with your why, all of a sudden, and you get real clear on it, which means you can articulate your purpose to somebody, that's a good on-ramp to the hard stuff like augmenting friend groups and habits. Yeah. Taking that step back to reflect on that why, like what is my purpose, what drives me? We were talking ahead of time for me.

I'm 50 years old and my youngest is five. And I'm like, I don't want to be a decrepit old dad. I want to be out there skiing, biking, hanging with them, throwing the football around. And yeah, you're right. Like I'm surrounding myself with people who fitness is a priority. Movement, which you said at the beginning, moving naturally is a priority. And that's like my friend group is we're all out there moving together. So that's so important. Yeah.

I also want to talk a little bit on the belonging. Can you expand in this world where we are distracted by digital distraction, our phones, there's social media, and it seems like the incidence of loneliness is only increasing even though we should be more connected. Where do folks like...

create that pause to, gosh, where do I fit in? How can I belong? What are your thoughts on that? In the blue zones of the world, faith is very strong. And so it doesn't matter what the creed is or what the religion is, but they tend to make time every week for prayer, for ancestor veneration, for gratitude. And it's not enough to say, belong to a certain creed. They show up four times per month.

Now, in the United States, when we think about belong, it's not limited to religion or faith. We know that loneliness and isolation is a endemic. We have the former Surgeon General of the United States, who one of his big campaigns was a campaign against loneliness, which we know is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes every single day. And that's if you can't say that you have three good friends

who you can call when you're having a bad day, have a meaningful conversation with them, and you actually like them. You're not just stuck with them. And if you can't answer that with a yes, you're technically isolated. And when we think about belong, we need to turn the ship on that. And there's some macro forces that are working against us, to your point. There's nothing more anti-social than this right here. We partner closely with Oxford University and the World Happiness Lab.

which authors the World Happiness Report. And for the first time in 20 years, America fell out of the top 20 happiest nations on earth. Despite all of our abundance, all of our pleasures, and the reason we fell out was not because of boomers, not because of millennials, it was because our youth are hitting midlife crisis 15 years premature before real life hits the fan. And the reason that's, I don't know the reason, but it's coinciding.

with right around 2006, 2007, 2008, we start seeing that decline. those iPhones, digital devices, whatever it might be, iPad, not to pick on Apple, but any device. That's right. Yeah. So the work you're doing now with Blue Zones America is about making those lessons real, those power nine, but not just for individuals, but for entire cities and systems. I'm curious, Danny, what does that look like on the ground these days? Yeah.

I often tell people that Blue Zones is a great story of the longest lived people, inherited those best practices from our species after generations. A lot of the Blue Zones are dying off as Western culture seeps in. KFC and Pepsi and iPhones. But I submit to you that the legacy of the original Blue Zones and the even better story is the Blue Zones America story, which for the last 15 years, we've been partnering, had the honor of partnering with over a hundred American cities.

mayors, city councils, school superintendents, healthcare CEOs and leaders, large employers, grassroots straws that stir the drink, who partner with Blue Zones and say, form ourselves into a culture, into an environment, into a narrative where wellbeing is the norm, where the power nine is the norm. And it turns out that there are

blueprints that you can use to reverse engineer the best practices of the Blue Zones to mimic the behaviors and the effect of living in a Blue Zone right here in America. And it works for affluent communities and it works for not so affluent communities. So both sides of the railroad tracks and you can measure it. It's peer-reviewed, but it's premised on two things working out. Number one, they gotta want it.

It's like kids, we're talking about your kids, my kids. You don't do anything to kids, right? And they hit a certain age and it's like, there's nothing you can do to them. They have to do it for themselves. The best you can do is set them up and hopefully they run with it. The same is true for communities. They gotta want it, they gotta raise their hand and say, we're gonna do this. Otherwise it's pushing a rope uphill. As Socrates said, before you give,

medicine to somebody make sure they're willing to give up the things that made them unhealthy in the first place. And at Blue Zones, we consider that readiness of a community, that civic muscle of a community to be represented through good old-fashioned leadership. Leaders who have more than just the wisdom to make the healthy choice the easy choice, they have the courage to make it the unavoidable choice. That's number one. The second thing is, if you read any Malcolm Gladwell,

this idea of tipping point, this idea of critical mass. The way to shift behaviors and lifestyle at scale is to get a critical mass of people, 10, 15, 20 % of the population, excited about this new narrative, leaning in good old fashioned American civic muscle. Places, getting a critical mass of restaurants and grocery stores, churches, synagogues, mosques, employers, schools.

that are gonna lean in and do their part to make the healthy choice the easy choice in their environment. And then the third P, people, places, is policy. Is getting a plurality of policies around built environment and food systems, past. And if you can get enough of that silver, not silver bullet, but silver buckshot, people living in that environment, all of a sudden, they're walking a little more. They're eating one healthier thing a day.

at school or at the job site or in the checkout lane at the grocery store. They're bumping into people. They're hearing about these local purpose workshops and these local health and wellbeing events that are happening. And they're reading about their city in the paper. You got to celebrate it. You got to promote it. It's like kids, they do something good. They get an A plus fricking here's a banana split for you. Good job. Keep it up. So you got to celebrate the wins that we're reinforcing that.

Turns out that all those things I just said, they get into psyche. A lot of them are permanent or semi-permanent changes in an environment. And I'm cheesy. I'm a big America guy. It is such a great story of hope and self-determination with these Americans and these American communities declaring that disease is not destiny. Disease is a decision.

And so is the avoidance of disease. Yeah. ⁓ that's so good. And I'm excited to go down that rabbit hole. As a physical therapist, I'm working with people all day with injuries, but underlying the injury might be a chronic disease, might be the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the chronic inflammation and stress and anxiety. And the system feels like what you're trying to create is a new system.

to get out of that disease. But what's easy, the system right now is almost promoting disease. And I'm curious as we try to get out of that, you mentioned last time we talked that blue zones, like you're in American cities. You mentioned you're out here in the Pacific Northwest working with a multi-care health system and a community. A drive multi-care health system. Yeah. Yup, they are a wellbeing champion institution.

Can you share what's happening there and what results you're seeing? Yeah. It's not enough anymore for American healthcare to say, ahead and get sick. We'll be ready for you once you're already sick. Reimbursement's not going to keep up. Reimbursement's not going If you're the papers or following the news at all, that the current model is unsustainable, that reimbursement's not going to be there. There's not enough doctors, not enough nurses to meet the next five years of demand. Meanwhile,

The American chronic disease profile per capita is skyrocketing. You know this. Once you get one disease, the odds of getting a comorbidity skyrocket. The costs are skyrocketing. It's 20 % of our GDP. So when you see Elon Musk with the chainsaw talking about slashing, 20 % of what he's talking about slashing is sick care. And 90 % of that is preventable sick care. But to your point, the system is incentivized to wait until we get sick.

You notice pharmaceutical companies, they always have a drug to manage your symptoms. They always have a drug to care for your symptoms. They don't have any drugs that cure, cure the disease, doesn't exist. But then you've got these health systems like MultiCare, who say we have an obligation and a mission to our market, to our community, and

We are going to invest outside the brick and mortar of our hospitals and clinics into the actual health in the schools, in the faith-based world network, in the policies, in the communities. We are going to, we must command the improvement of wellbeing and longevity of our markets, of our corner of America, because A, it's the right thing to do. It's why they got into the business of health. But B,

They must do it because guess who's going to be left holding the bag? Providers and the American taxpayer. Yeah. It's so like, I'm trying to restrain myself right now because as a physical therapist, someone who comes to see me has to be approved by their insurance. They have to be so broken that by the time they get in our door, we're just trying to get them functional again. With insurance, if we were like, hey, I want to go see a physical therapist because I want to just, I'm nervous about my health, my decline.

they're not gonna pay for that. They're not gonna pay for anything preventative that will prevent them from having chronic back pain or eventually a knee replacement or whatever it might be. They're gonna wait until the knee is so far gone that they have to pay for physical therapy or a surgery or whatever it might be. There's no preventative. It's mind bending. it's follow the money. If you want me to show you the future,

show me the current incentives and I'll show you the future. And there's an interesting thing happening in America right now where there's a convergence of macro forces that I think are accelerating some of the things you and I know to be necessary. One of them is what I just talked about, the current healthcare economic model is unsustainable. that those chickens are coming home to roost right now with flattening reimbursement. The second is the American consumer.

The American consumer has never been a better advocate for themselves than they are today. They understand more. They're a little sicker. They've been touched by somebody who is sick or died too soon. And guess what the American consumer wants? They want to not get sick in the first place, to your point. And they're going to start to reward organizations and communities and employers and brands and podcasts with their loyalty.

for those that help them live a little better longer. And I think this idea of longevity is, you heard it here first, an even bigger opportunity than AI, as far as every single industry, every single nation, every single person. You can add just a couple years of productive life to everybody. The economic value of that in terms of purchasing power and productive output is

enormous. I think between what's going on in healthcare, the tumult there and the consumer wanting this, it's a unique time right now for what you and I focus on. we talk a little bit, Danny, about the forces that we're up against? Like, I love you just planted a seed of hope and I love that. But when we talk about the environment that we in, there's also the reality that we're up against what you've called the ubiquitous companies, industries that thrive on addiction.

convenience, disconnection, whether it's processed food, vaping, social media, these are multi-billion dollar forces working against health. How do we build awareness and a momentum in a culture like that? Yeah. So I laugh at some of the things that I come up with, but that's absolutely right. So these big food companies, these big beverage companies, big social media companies, big sugar companies, big

vaping and tobacco companies, they have a very elegant strategy. And it can be summed up in one word, ubiquity. Their products are everywhere. It's in the checkout lanes, the gas station, it's on the billboards, it's in your pocket with your phone, it's in your kid's it's in the workplace cafeteria, it's everywhere. They spend $50 billion a year on Madison Avenue in New York City.

on advertising for food companies. Why do food companies need advertising? It's ubiquity and it makes the unhealthy choice the easy choice. People ask me like, why is Blue Zones doing this? That kind of feels a little bit big brother. People should have freedom of choice, freedom of will. I'm like, I got news for you, brother. You and your kids and your grandma and grandpa don't have freedom of choice and freedom of will when your environment has been shaped by those big companies. So how do you shift that?

I've studied movements, social movements, going back to the French Revolution all the way up to, for example, MAGA. And these big social movements all have four ingredients over the last couple hundred years. Number one is a group of people who have a common problem, whether it's real or perceived, they have a common grudge. Number two is an inspirational person or

cause, some kind of charismatic thing. Usually it's a person that starts to emerge. The third is the spark. Something happens. There's an assassination. There's a pandemic. There's a war. There's some kind of event where the stars align for these first three things. But it's the fourth and final component that all social movements have.

that I think is the most fascinating. And it's the one that sets social movements apart, a shadow economy, some type of economic engine that is feeding off the social movement and in turn reinvest into the social movement. So there's a transfer of wealth. For the French Revolution, there was a transfer of wealth and power.

for some of the more recent movements. You think about media and swag and just there's some type of, someone's making money in the background. And when it comes to wellbeing and longevity, I think some of those components are starting to materialize, but it's hard to predict what that spark will be. But I see a longevity economy. I see the healthcare economy being disrupted. I see people increasingly having a common grudge and

By the way, the chronic disease prevalence rate in America is just gonna skyrocket. It's gonna be damn near everybody except for the ultra wealthy. And then is there that one moment where things spark? I don't know. That's very intriguing. And as you're talking this through, I'm even thinking about myself, like the common problem that we all have right now is healthcare. Like the system is broken and we see...

how often people come into our clinic and they're blaming themselves for lacking willpower. And I just can't do all the things when in reality they're swimming against this entire current of engineered disease. But I wear this thing, this whoop on my wrist every day, right? And it's turned into an obsession where I'm obsessed with how much am I sleeping? Did I get my proper recovery? And where's my strain? Am I moving enough throughout the day? And that's...

turning into, and I see this becoming and taking off when we talk about economy. And if we can make these devices to wake up the people right now, it might be privileged to have one of these, but the more common, could be a little bit of a spark and whoa, let's take a step back. What are these things that aren't working in the system? And so this is very intriguing.

Yeah, there's some good anthropology that suggests when you're trying to make something catch on from a behavior standpoint, like what we're talking about with awareness around health and well-being, when things go viral, they're not like a point A to point B. They start on the fringe and they start to pick up critical mass and then from the fringe, it collapses down on the center and the center being the bulk of the group or the population.

When it comes to some of the anthropology, we find, especially from the Blue Zone's perspective, that when you come in with an idea, with a good idea, 20 % is like the 20, 60, 20. 20 % are gonna come running. They're gonna get it from the get-go. Yes, I've been waiting for you. We're in, let's go. Say when. That 20 % will infect or recruit or influence the other 60%.

So once you get the first 20%, you don't have to get the other 60, because that 20 will do it for you. If it's a good idea, mind you. And then the final 20%, this little harsh, nothing's going to change them. And so you kind of write them off. They're never going to put down the Marlboro Reds. And again, that's harsh, but I think there's good precedent for that 20-60-20 rule.

Is there, I've heard that phrase something like the first 20 % are the early adopters, the last 20 % are the laggards, and then you got the middle part and I don't remember what that terminology is used, but yes. So Danny, it's almost like you're at the intersection of science, leadership, and community design. What does the future of longevity look like to you?

in the society that we've described facing chronic disease, burnout, disconnection? I think on one level, it's lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle is medicine. People talk about GLP-1s and Ozempic and Wigovia, and they talk about supplements, and they talk about regenerative cell therapy. And I'm not a doctor. I'm not an expert on any of those things. But none of those things are cures. None of those things

are reversing disease. None of those things avoid disease and none of those things delay disease. And I think the name of the game is reverse it if you got it, delay it if you can for as many good years as possible. And if you could prevent it, good on you. And there's only one thing that reverses delays and prevents chronic disease, lifestyle. And it exists in these places that are at or below the poverty line.

But America, the most abundant advanced nation to ever exist, is also the sickest nation and most pissed off nation to ever exist. So I think we really need to focus on lifestyle. How do we do that? My job is momentum. Momentum kills the monster. Momentum kills the monster. Wins beget wins. And at Blue Zones,

We're trying to kill the monster of chronic disease and low wellbeing in America by just snowballing the winds and then making sure that we're celebrating those American wins. Win, win, win at all costs to reinforce the behavior changes and we can kill that monster, but we're not at that first 20 % yet. We're not at that first 20 % yet, but maybe we'll get there. I hope we do. And I think the work you're doing is helping us move in the right direction.

I'm curious if you Danny were designing a Blue Zone city, what would it look like? We have a team that does a lot of design work, but I tell you what, if I was designing a Blue Zone city, it'd look an awful lot like a college campus. My God, I was just down in Texas and I had some downtime and there was a college campus nearby and I went walking through that campus and it was people walking everywhere, people playing everywhere, good.

safe security environment, green space all over the place. And I thought to myself, like, how can we do this for one set of Americans between the age of 18 and 22? And we can't do it for a large group of Americans. So again, I'm not the expert, but if you're asking me, it's figure out how to make college campuses more scalable because those places, you just feel better being on them. It wasn't the University of Texas, was it? It was not. OK.

I was in Austin last year and just found myself roaming through the University of Texas's campus and I was like, ⁓ place is cool. Okay, Danny, how about business leaders like myself or listeners or policy makers? We just had an election. We're recording this the day after the election. What, can they begin integrating these principles in their workplaces, in their schools? that's such a big.

Where's a curriculum of this in the schools and how are we putting this in our neighborhoods? Yeah. If only there was a company that existed that Blue Zone school districts and employer campuses and policies and communities. That's what Blue Zones does. For those leaders, they need to understand that they can't do it alone. And so they need partners, they need collective impact, they need local coalitions.

They need to first build that fabric that we call capacity and competency for self-determination. And then they need to decide what is our future state that we're aiming for. If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it. And for some communities, they're so dogged down with so many issues right now that they have paralysis when it comes to self-determination. So unfortunately,

While this model works in every single community imaginable in America, and we've seen them, there is a question of timing and readiness for self-determination around well-being in your community. And you got to have those building blocks before you can put together the castle. Okay. And the Blue Zones America team has those building blocks. Yeah. We'll get to that. So Danny, in this state of the world right now, what gives you hope?

when you see how fast the chronic disease is growing that we've been talking about. What gives me hope, I'm a big stoic philosophy guy. I read a lot of meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Epicticus, Seneca. What gives me hope is none of this is new. None of this is new. It's the same thing that has been happening for all time. It's the same thing that will be happening going forward. And what gives me hope is that we've seen it before. We've seen it before.

as a species, as a social creature, as a spiritual creature, and we will step up to overcome these things. think in 50 years we'll look back and history books will say we went through the Great American Sickness, just like the Great American Depression, and we came out of it. So what gives me hope is historical context of leaders and people stepping up. There's a great quote by Churchill that says, when great forces on

are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals. I like that. And there's something going on in time and space and beyond time and space, which whether we like it or not, spells duty. So I think there's historical precedent that we'll get through this too, although there'll be discomfort, which you could argue in America, we probably had too much comfort, at least for some. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And history does repeat itself and...

it gets me excited about re-imagining the systems that we all live in. that there's so much possibility within that. And Danny, before we wrap up, you've grown up around this work. You're also living in it. I'm curious, what are some of your own personal non-negotiables for health and wellbeing? For me, it's purpose and service. Before this, I was a firefighter for 10 years, city and wild land. So if I have my why,

I have my purpose, I have my resolve. I will make time to make myself an optimal instrument for what I want to do. And that requires some discipline around eating. It requires some discipline around working out. It requires balance of being a good dad and a present dad and husband and son and brother and friend. So I've really contextualized a lot of what I do that's healthy for me as also being of good utility.

to my purpose. And the other one is don't work with assholes. Life's too short. There's too many people out there that you can partner with that are fun to chat with on Monday, like you, Shannon. Yeah, I appreciate that. All right, Danny, do you have a daily ritual that helps you feel grounded? I have a steady diet of philosophy. So I am reading a lot of the content I follow on social media and Instagram, Facebook, Stoic quotes.

and other motivational quotes. I keep a copy of Meditations, the book by Marcus Aurelius, wherever I go. So a steady diet of philosophy keeps me grounded. Thank you for that. And how do you balance the drive for impact? Because the work you're doing and what you're up against, it's gonna take a lifetime. How do you balance that with your own personal wellbeing? Everybody's gotta eat shit sandwiches and

If you eat enough shit sandwiches and smile every time and say, thank you, may I have another. Then after a decade or two, you might look around and realized you're a role model, that you're a change maker, that you're a leader. And I think if you went back and met some of the great leaders of our past, they would tell you a ⁓ lot of their day to day was eating a shit sandwich and keep going forward. So when I have a bad day, things feel like they're going, they're sliding in reverse.

Which tastes like a shit sandwich, you gotta keep going. Shit sandwich. I appreciate that. I've had a couple of those in my life. Okay, Danny, what is one power nine habit you think people, or maybe not even most people, but people underestimate the most? Purpose. We've talked a lot about purpose. If you have a why, you can get through a lot of the what and the how. Yeah, yeah. That's powerful. Okay, got a little lightning round of questions for you here, Danny.

What is, let's go. What's one small change that adds the most life to your years? Friends. Favorite Blue Zones inspired meal? Icarian stew. It's a lentil, it's a garbanzo bean and lentil stew with lemon drizzle, olive oil drizzle, and basically garbanzo beans and homemade sourdough bread to dip in, maybe a little Parm cheese. Fantastic, great on a cold, winter day up here in Minnesota. That sounds delicious.

And if you could visit any Blue Zone tomorrow, where are you going? I've been to three of the Blue Zones. I have not been to Sardinia, so I'd like to go to Sardinia, OK. What is one modern trend out in the world that is actually supporting Blue Zone Live? That makes me nervous you're thinking so long on this. Yeah. I'm going to go back to my comment about the consumer and the general longevity industry surging.

and more consumers prioritizing brands, companies, health systems, communities that have a clear and articulate well-being and longevity value proposition. Love it. And our podcast is the Redefine What's Possible podcast. Danny, what does redefine what's possible mean to you? There's a lot of great data from Gallup. They have a well-being index. It's the largest survey data set anywhere compiled in the world.

that gives us a sense in how people self-evaluate their life and how they project their life is gonna unfold in the coming years, AKA hope. And what the data says is that what you project your life will become tends to be self-fulfilling prophecy. So redefine what your future looks like is a great way to orient your future towards that. That is beautiful. Thank you.

Well, Danny, thank you for sharing your insights and for the work you're doing, you and your team to help communities live better, not just longer. And for our listeners out there, you can learn more about Blue Zones America and their community work at bluezones.com and keep an incredible eye out for all the work that you all are doing. But Danny, I'm curious, what's the best way for people to connect with

to support your work, to follow your work. I think go to bluezones.com. You can get ahold of me and our company through the Contact Us and then sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is a strong cadence and megaphone for all things Blue Zones, both consumer and community. Go there and listen to the Redefine Podcast with Shannon. Bam, love that.

And what you're saying, today's conversation, reminds us that longevity isn't something we have to chase. It happens when we live in alignment with our bodies, our communities, and that purpose that you were talking about. Here's one small action for the week. Pick one power nine habit and make it easier. Maybe it's taking that daily walk.

adding one plant-based meal that one Danny recommended earlier, or sharing dinner with someone you love while putting your phone down. And when we design for health, longevity doesn't have to be pursued. It ensues. And until next time, keep moving, keep connecting, and keep redefining what's possible. Thank you, everyone.