 It's a thrill for me, and Linda is one of my heroes, so to be introduced by a giant like her, I already have my day started out on a happy foot. But I'm going to talk about the world's happiest places and the lessons we learned from them. But first, I want to start with you. I am going to identify the happiest people in the audience. And in order for me to do that, I need to ask you two binary questions. And the first question is about whether you think life is long or short. So raise your hand if you think life is long. Now raise your hand if you think life is short. Wow, OK. Take advantage of it here. The second question is about whether or not you think life is hard or easy. Raise your hand if you think life is hard. Now raise your hand if you think life is easy. Wow, it's hooked up in the middle. I want everybody who thinks, who raise their hand thinking that life is long and easy to stand up, long and easy to stand up. Don't worry, I won't humiliate you too much. So stay standing up. Stay standing up if you would. Please stay standing up for just a second. So a few years ago, a Harvard researcher by the name of Mike Moreton organized a team of surveyors and working in three continents. And he asked these exact two questions and correlated it with happiness, civics, and generosity. And that team found that the least happy people think that life is short and hard. The happiest people think that life is long and easy. They're about 40% happier, 30% more likely to vote, and about 60% more likely to donate money. So can we give a huge round of applause for the happy people who are here? Thank you very much. I want to invite them not only to your next cocktail party, but your next fundraiser. So for the last 15 years or so at National Geographic, I've developed somewhat of an expertise at finding remarkable populations around the world and then learning the lesson from them. Something called the Danish twin study established that only about 10% or 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes. The other 80% or so is dictated by lifestyle and environment and a little bit is how good your health care system is. But based on this assumption, we hired a team of demographers to parse through census data to identify five pockets around the world where people live statistically longest. The Adventists of the Loma Linda, California, the Costa Rica, the Highlands of Sardinia, the longest of men in the world, the Island of Ikaria, almost no dimension there, an alarmist of women on the planet, Okinawa, Japan. And then in a sense, we then brought on another team to, in a sense, reverse engineer longevity. Find the common denominators explaining longevity no matter where you go in the world. And we found nine of them. I'm mostly going to talk about happiness, so I'm not going to talk in depth about longevity, but I will give you the bottom line. And what I'm about to tell you now took me eight years to figure out. And that is, when you find a place where people live a long time and you have spry 90-year-olds who can stand in their heads and 100-year-olds who can water ski, it's not because, at age 50, they said to themselves, oh, darn it, I'm going to get on that longevity diet now and live another 50 years. They didn't buy a treadmill or sign up for a diet plan or take the latest new supplement. The fact of the matter is they have no idea why they live so long. Longevity happened to them. It was not something they pursued that we tend to do in our cultures. It's something that ensues. That the aha moment, that longevity ensues. No matter where you go and people live a long time, they eat wisely, they eat mostly a plant-based diet. They're nudged into movement every 20 minutes or so, so their metabolism stays high. But that's underpinned by a strong sense of purpose. It is energized by a social network, a tribe of people who share these healthy habits and keep people on the right track and facilitate it by the right community. And this interconnected, mutually supporting cluster of behaviors allows you to do the right things for long enough so you don't get a chronic disease. There's no short-term fix for longevity. You have to avoid doing the wrong thing for long enough so you don't get a heart attack, diabetes, or cancer. And this seems to keep the right behaviors in place for long enough so you can live a long time. Now, the foundation of any kind of study like this requires that you're able to carefully, incredibly measure. And when it comes to longevity, measuring long-term places is a fairly straightforward exercise. You go back 100 years, say between 1915 and 1920, and find a swath of birth. And you follow those people for 100 years, correcting for immigration and immigration. And you see how many people are still living. That's a slight oversimplification. But it's a lot easier than measuring happiness. Happiness is a rather spongier topic, a little harder to get your arms around. You could find somebody who's laughing today, but they may have been depressed all month or they're not quite sure what happiness means, or they maybe just had a few cocktails. So how do you measure happiness? It's actually an exploding field. About 20,000 studies have been undertaken by 12,000 researchers in the last 15 years. I'm proud to say that I brokered one of the cooler ones in the last year and a half or so. We're so collaborative between Gallup, University of Pennsylvania's World Wellbeing Project, and Google analyzed five billion Google searches in 200 communities and correlated it with subjective well-being. And they found that what you search for on the internet is a better predictor of how happy you are than income or age even. We found out also that people who own dogs and are googling about their dogs are happier than cat owners. That people looking for action movies or comedies are happier than people who are looking for romance. And in case you prefer romance in private in your own room, people who are looking for soft-core porn are happier than those people who prefer the harder stuff. And don't worry, this is anonymized data. We do not know who you are. So for this story I wrote for National Geographic Magazine, it was the November cover story and the book Blue Zones of Happiness, we took a more straightforward approach. And it turns out for the past 40 years, governments have been deploying these standard subjective well-being or happiness surveys. It's been done in 151 countries over 40 years. And with them you can discern where the happiest places in the world are and you can start to see some of the characteristics that accompany happiness. So let me explain this a little bit further. Now academically speaking, happiness is a meaningless term. You can't really measure happiness. But you can measure a few facets of happiness. You can measure life satisfaction. Life satisfaction, the question they ask is when you think of your life as a whole, on a scale of one to 10, one being your worst imaginable life, 10 being your best imaginable life, where do you place your own happiness? And when you ask enough people that it averages out the extremes, you get a pretty good answer. But the problem with this kind of evaluative question is you only really remember about 2% of your life. If I asked you what you had for lunch a week ago Tuesday, you probably couldn't tell me. So this kind of evaluative happiness only gets at a small sliver. That's why they ask a battery of questions about your daily emotions. In the last 24 hours, kind of remember the last 24 hours, how much of you smiled and laughed, felt sadness, felt stress, et cetera. And they can aggregate those and get a pretty good idea of how you're experiencing life. These two only have about a 0.5 correlations. They're sort of weakly correlated. And then they can ask you a question about your strengths and if you get to use them every day and get at your purpose, another very strong, fast and happiness. And then when you ask those questions and a number of other, about 80 other questions about your demographics and your values and your life characteristics and through the magic of regression analysis, you can see with remarkable consistency what sorts of characteristics are fueling these three facets of happiness. And that gives us a pretty good idea of what we should be doing if we wanna be happier. And I'm gonna tell you what those correlations are, but first in the spirit of National Geographic, da-da-da-da, you know, I'm gonna take you to a few parts of the world, the happiest parts of the world and tell you a few very quick stories. So first we're gonna go to the happiest place in Asia. Does anyone wanna guess the happiest place in Asia? Bhutan, Japan. I hate to say Bhutan, even though they have this great happiness, well-being index, they're number 91 in the world. It's mostly a PR, a whitewash. The happiest place in Asia is at the end of the Malaysian Peninsula in the very unlikely destination of Singapore. And believe me, you're not the only one rolling your eyes right now. My editor tried to kill the story when I told her this, but when you look at the data, they report the highest level of life satisfaction. In 1965, Singapore was more or less a fishing village. Their GDP, their economy has doubled 15 times in that time. They have the highest, one of the highest GDPs, one of the highest healthy life expectancies in the world, very highly correlated with happiness. The three ethnicities there, the Indians, the Malay and the Han Chinese live together in remarkable harmony, given their vastly different culture. And this whole place was, the happiness here, I argue, was largely manufactured by this man right here, Lee Kuan Yew. I had the honor of interviewing, Cambridge educated attorney who became the, they call mentor minister, but he supremely understood Confucian values, the values of his country, harmony, order, security, respect, and went about building a nation built on those values. So making sure that everybody spoke the same language. He made English the lingua franca. He made sure everybody, almost everybody could own their own houses. And in every one of the high rises that were built had to reflect the ethnic diversity of the nation. So you did not have a Malay ghetto or you didn't have a gated Chinese community. Kids went to school together, they worked together. There was almost no segregation of ethnicities. Very hard on crime. And he did this very consciously, not only tough on crime, but also he made sure there were consequences. So this joke about people spitting, he actually told me the reason there's a log against spitting is because he was trying to build a first world country when it was kind of third world in the 1960s. He needed to attract finance. If you commit a violent crime, you're likely to be caned if you're a man, corporal punishment. If you get caught with more than 15 grams of an opioid, you'll be put to death. And though a few dozen people are put to death every year in Singapore, they don't have an opioid crisis. Where I come from the United States, 45,000 people die every year because of opioid overdose. And that public health problem ripples through the economy, children suffer, prison systems are full, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not arguing for one or for another, but I'm just saying from a very utilitarian point of view, it wasn't a bad decision. And also, women and children can feel safe to walk in the streets in Singapore anytime during the day or night without really having to fear for themselves. So when it comes to the continuum between freedom and security, United States trumpets a lot about freedom, but actually security is more important to our happiness than freedom ends. If you had to take one or the other, most people would pick security and Singapore delivers security. This type of happiness appeals to the type of people who like a very clear path in life to success. Work hard, keep your nose down, forego some pleasures for today, and you're almost assured to have financial security, your mother will be proud of you, your friends will respect you. And this type of high life satisfaction is mostly happiness in the rear view mirror. But if you think you're happy, you actually are. On the other side of the planet, we found another very happy place, but a very different type of happiness in Northern Denmark, mostly Ohus and Alborg. We found a nation that has the highest levels of equality, trust, and tolerance in the world. Actually, when it comes to GDP, GDP is important for happiness for poor countries, places like Bangladesh, but added GDP to a place like Switzerland does almost nothing. Trust, tolerance, and equality predict happiness much more than higher GDP does in a place like Denmark. The old cliche that Danes are happy because they have low expectations, nothing could be further from the truth. Danes have among the highest expectations in the world. Every man, woman, and child in that country expects to have free healthcare. And when they have a baby, they expect 11 months paid vacation to make sure that baby gets a good start in life. They expect not only free education and tuition, but when they go to the university, they expect to get paid and they get it. They expect a secure retirement and indeed the happiest cohort of people in the world are Danish people over the age of 65. They have it made. So Denmark's happiness is, I believe, mostly explained by the fact that all their needs are covered. We tend to think of happiness as the attainment of joy and pleasure, but actually it's also getting rid of the things that graded our psyche. Like, well, I have enough money to pay if I get sick or when I get old. Danes don't have to worry about that because ambition is not celebrated there and their needs are taken care of. They're free to pursue their passions in their work. 80% of Danes love their job and America's 30%. So the type of jobs that suggests flow are the jobs that the Danes excel in. Furniture design, art, architecture. They work 37 hours a week. They sort of knock off at about 3 p.m. And then they get to go enjoy their hobbies. This is the type of happiness that will appeal to people who want to follow their purpose and their passions, rather whether it's a rabbit jumping competition or bicycling, all-natural. Which I don't recommend at home. By the way, I want to shout out the great photographers who worked on this story, David McClain and Corey Richards who brought this story to life so beautifully. And then the part of the world, this is the convergence of both longevity and happiness is Costa Rica. Longest live people in the world by one measure, Nikoia, Peninsula of Costa Rica. Healthy life expectancy, by the way, is one of the six top correlates to happiness on a national level. But the happiest people are in the middle of the country, the Central Valley, the Highlands, Perpetual Spring there, best coffee in the world. But this is the place where people enjoy their day, the highest positive affect of any place else in the world. This is the place where the highest values are placed on family and religion. Believe it or not, everywhere you go in the world where people purport be religious, they're happier than non-religious people. By the way, also gender equality is important. It turns out the parts of the world where women are treated equal to men, the men are happier in those societies. And the places where women aren't treated equally, the women are happier than the men. So it's in men's self-interest to treat women properly. But this is a place where people are getting enough social interaction every day. The happiest people in the world are socially interacting seven to eight hours a day. And I don't mean Facebook, sorry, Facebook's here, I mean face-to-face meaningful conversations. And the way that Costa Rican communities are set up, they're walking to church, they're walking to their friend's house, they walk to the market, where they have environmental nudges to interact that six or seven hours a day. They'll almost never work an extra couple hours and forego a good social opportunities. No matter where you go in the world and you see happy populations, it is not a coincidence. It is not because there's a bunch of happy natives who collectively decide to think positively and appreciate their day and are therefore happier. It is always because 50 to 150 years ago, enlightened leaders shifted away from just economic growth and focused on a bundle of policies that have yielded this happiness. Education, and I don't mean manufacturing PhDs, but making sure that every kid can read and get the equivalent of a high school education. Most important is the education of girls. Remarkably, Denmark and Costa Rica were the first places in their hemisphere to educate the daughters of peasants, which was a pretty radical idea back in the 19th century. But when you do that, girls grow up to be mothers, educated mothers have fewer children, more educated children, healthier children. Those children grow up to be better parents, more productive, they make better voting decisions and it starts this upward ratchety of well-being. At three or four generations level, you look back and say, oh, it's because we educated girls. Healthcare, and I don't mean the back-ass word sick care system of the United States. It's actually the kind of health that Linda Freed focuses on, which is public health, making sure, catching a chronic disease or infectious disease before it's a 911, six-figure problem. And then equality, making sure that the ladder between the haves and the have-nots is very short. And that boils down essentially that $100 buys much more happiness for a single mom than it does for a millionaire. So in all these places, there's efforts put in place to create a sense of equality or equality. When it comes to individuals, the picture's slightly different. So when it comes to happiness for individuals, about 40% of your happiness is dictated by your genes, about 15% is dictated by life circumstances. It's very hard to be happy if you're chronically depressed or you have congenital pain, or you have to wear shoe spikes to walk to your session in the snow. But about 40% of your happiness, or lack there is, is under your control. And I argue that the way to get it is to balance your portfolio, just like your financial portfolio, between daily emotions, purpose, and life satisfaction. And when you run these vast regression analysis of this ocean of data in 151 countries, you see very clearly that working full-time and achieving financial security favors life satisfaction. But for purpose, it's more important to do an internal inventory to know what your passions and values and what you like to do with your time, care for others. And to enjoy your day best from day to day, you might want to forego some work and make sure you're getting at least seven hours of sleep, laughing dailies and taking all your vacation. There's another set of factors that will favor at least two kinds, having a faith, going to college, have kids, favors life satisfaction and purpose, doesn't do much for your daily emotions. And then when it comes to enjoying your life every day and having very high life satisfaction, trying new things and getting laid twice a week. And that's not me speaking, that's the science. But there's a sweet spot here. Five things you can do that will favor all three of these domains. Picking a job that you love over money, socializing seven hours a day face to face, owning a dog. There you go, cat lovers. Being in love or essentially being married, you're three times more likely to be happy after 10 years if you stay married as opposed to throwing in the towel and then living in the right place. And this is the most important one. So happiness were a cake recipe. And the ingredients in that recipe include the necessities, you need food, shelter, you need some healthcare, some mobility, you want to marry the right person, you want to have meaningful work, you want to give something back. The most important ingredient in that cake recipe, the variable with the most statistical variability is where you live. In other words, if you live in an unhappy place and move to a happy place, that's about the most powerful thing you can do to get happier. And I'll offer some evidence for that. When you follow unhappy immigrants from Moldavia to Denmark or unhappier immigrants from Africa and Asia and follow them to Canada within one year, those unhappier immigrants start reporting the happiness level of their adopted home. And their gender doesn't change, their age doesn't change much, their education level doesn't change much, their sexual preference doesn't change much. What really changes is simply where they live. Now I know most of us can't change our where we live, but I'd like to suggest a few ways where you can change your surroundings or your median environment for the long term. And I've identified six domains of our lives within about eight kilometers of where we live. The first one's your inner self. So I'm not a big believer in these positive psychology tricks, savoring and gratitude and appreciation so forth. I believe they work in the short run, there's no evidence they work in the long run. However, there's some good evidence that if you learn how to meditate, a deep meditation training like Vipassana that you can permanently re-hardwire your brain to appreciate the moment more. When it comes to your finances, you actually get more happiness out of financial security than you do out of consumption. In other words, if you have a little bit of money left over after your paycheck, you're better off paying down your mortgage, buying insurance or signing up for an automatic savings plan than you are buying a new pair of shoes or a new gadget. Because the luster of that new thing will wear off in nine to 14 months and financial security can last decades. When it comes to your home, putting in big windows, we're happier with natural light. Plants, because we should be nudging to social interactions, better to have a front porch than a back deck. Dr. Ed Deaner gave me a great idea for something he calls a pride shrine, which is one place in your house that you walk by every day that you have pictures of your kids, awards you've gotten, pictures of your favorite vacation spot. And every time you walk by that, you'll feel a little surge of pride. Remember, one of the fastest of happiness is the aggregate of the pleasant moments throughout the day. When it comes to your social network, we are indeed defined by our five best friends. And we know now that obesity is contagious, unhappiness is contagious, and even loneliness is contagious. And while I wouldn't tell you to dump your fat unhappy friends, I will tell you that for every new happy person you bring into your immediate social network, you increase your own happiness by about 15% on average. When it comes to work, making sure you have a job you love, but if you can't leave your job, the most important thing you can do, and this comes from two million Gallup surveys, is make a best friend at work. If you're a boss implementing a program that facilitates workers to create best friends about the best investment you can make in workplace wellbeing, and finally picking the right community. And with National Geographic and Gallup, we identified the happiest communities in the United States. And uniformly they were places that were very bikeable, they had healthy food environments, and they were places where the city government focused on quality of life and not just development. So the headline here is trying to change your habits is mostly a fool's errand. If you wanna get happier or live longer, don't change your behavior, it'll almost certainly fail, change your surroundings. I wanna end with a toast from the happiest man I've met in the entire world. His name is Armando Fuentes, they call him El Caton, he's an 80 year old sort of lantern jawed journalist from Mexico. He writes four columns a day, I spent two hours with him. And after two incredible hours, I was just typing like somebody on, like an auctioneer. I asked him if he could sum up the secret to happiness and he closed his eyes and he thought for a minute and he said yes. He said, you wanna eat without gluttony, drink without getting drunk, love without jealousy, you can argue but don't go to bed mad and occasionally with great discretion, this behave. Thank you very much. Thank you Dan, very much. I would like to welcome everybody who has joined us today both on the online viewing audience and the people here in the room for a very happy morning. I'm Linda Freed, I'm a physician and scientist and I have the honor of serving as the Dean at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and today I'm partnering with Dan Butner who's taken us on this happiness quest. We're going to invite questions from those online and also those in the room and I'd invite you to contemplate what makes you happy and what really matters. But Dan, you've done a great job of taking us on the journey of what the individual experience is and linking it to the conditions, both of people's lives and the environments in which we reside and even the policies and practices of good governance that creates the stability and opportunity for wellbeing. In public health, we know that 70% of any population's health is created through these kinds of factors outside of medical care delivery, 20% from the right medical care and about 10% from our genes. So you're focusing on the 70% that creates a healthy population, wellbeing and longevity. How do you think, I'm going to start with one question and then we'll turn to the audience both here and online to hear what you want to suggest or ask about. But what lessons do you take from all of this if you think about the WEF theme for this year of creating a shared future in a fractured world? What lessons are there from the wellbeing of individuals and communities that we should take to thinking about our collective wellbeing and the principles we should be trying to enhance? So we only have about a minute here and I know this is going to end and by the way, I'll step outside and answer all your questions. I know you want to get to your next session, but I'll say this, that most governments and we have a lot of world leaders here, most governments focus on maximizing GDP as the main measure of quality of life. And we now have a sea of data that can inform policy that can help leaders better choose what they ought to focus on if they want to really deliver a happier nation. And I didn't get in this today, but we recruited a team of 17 of the world's top economists and psychologists and sociologists and ran something called a Delphi consensus. Took us nine months to get consensus between these top experts. And it turns out policies like increasing trust. That's about the best investment that a government can make to increase happiness. And these boil down to things like making sure police are planned, being really hard on corruption. If you don't trust your politician, that creates all kinds of problems. And even doing simple things at the local level, like making better lighting and also cleaning up graffiti. So, and I say these things because when it comes to happiness and longevity, you can't really pull the two apart. So, if you can manage to manage your life to get in the top quintile and the happiest people in your community, that adds about eight years of life expectancy over being in the lowest quintile. So, I understand from the back that we are, we have a minute maybe to take a question from the audience here. A little out of time, yes. How much is what? Weather. Weather doesn't affect happiness much at all because we adapt. And we actually, our brains are hardwired for novelty. So, there's actually some gratification we get when summer goes into fall, fall goes into winter. But I will say one thing, when you control for everything else in this worldwide body of data, you're about 5% more likely if you live in a sunny place or live on the water. So, if you're gonna choose your next home, you know, a place on the beach and the tropics is probably not a bad decision. So, we'll take one more question here. Look from your examples that population density doesn't really, population density doesn't really enter into it. Is that the case? The question was population density and entering into the equation. I would say yes, the happiest places tend to be middle-sized cities, often college or university cities. So, you want it big enough where people can find jobs and work that meet their passion and find the right mate. If the pool's too small, it's hard to find a good match there. But, big anonymous places also don't completely optimize the human experience. Middle-sized towns, so. Any last question before we end? No, well thank you. I wish you a happy day. And take care.