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This time, we're going to talk about living to 100 with the author of Blue Zones, Daniel Butiner.

He's a journalist, author, and national geographic fellow who spent more than a decade scouring the globe with a team of anthropologists, demographers, and epidemiologists to understand what he calls Blue Zones.

These are five places on planet Earth where people live the longest, healthiest lives.

So, in our conversation, I started by asking Dan about how he got involved with this work.

Before I started the Blue Zones work specifically, I had a company actually, and we got paid to go around the world and solve mysteries.

Most of them were ancient mysteries like why the Maya civilization collapsed and human origins in Africa.

But the conceit was, we were very good at getting enormous online audiences and we'd sort of harness the wisdom of the crowd.

To help solve these mysteries and harness the wisdom of armchair academics everywhere.

And in 1999, I stumbled upon a World Health Organization finding that showed that in Okinawa, Japan, they had the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world.

In other words, people were living a long time, the longest in the world, and not, you know, not basically getting chronic disease.

And I said, aha, that's a good mystery. And we did perfunctory, kind of topical expedition in 1999, and I was riveted by it.

And a few years later, I had sold that company and I thought, you know, I bet you there's longevity hotspots in Europe and Africa, maybe in America.

So I pitched the idea to National Geographic and they bought it and gave me a big budget and off I went.

Sounds amazing. Okay. So before we talk about what the commonalities or the sort of recipe for healthy longevity is, you've also come up with, you called it an algorithm to predict longevity?

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