Why The Future Of Health Is Better Than You Think.

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Foreign.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here. Now, occasionally, in lieu of our normal weekly crazy Q and A podcast, I'll release a special interview that I find to be especially thought provoking, entertaining, educational, and extremely compelling and unique. So today is one of those specific interviews. I hope you enjoy it. And there will be, of course, because this is one of those special interviews. No Q and A or news flashes or special announcements. However, if you want to support this podcast, you can definitely do so by going over to the one website where I store everything that I've ever recommended for you to get to your goals as quickly and safely and effectively as possible. And that website is greenfield fitness systems.com so check out greenfield fitness systems.com it helps to support this show. And now onto today's interview. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And a few months ago we had this amazingly popular podcast episode with Steven Kotler, who's the author of Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, a book called the Rise of Superman. And during that podcast, Stephen actually mentioned another book that he co wrote with a guy named Peter Diamandis, who you may be familiar with as the founder of the X Prize Foundation. And the name of that book was called Abundance the Future Is Better Than youn Think. When Stephen mentioned this book, frankly, I thought it sounded kind of like a little bit of like an airy fairy, positive thinking type of book. Like, you know, the, the everything is awesome Lego Movie soundtrack kind of a book. But then over the course of the next few weeks, three more people recommended it to me. And I was actually walking down the beach with Commander Mark Devine of Sealf and he mentioned the book to me. And so finally I figured that I should probably read this book, Abundance. And so I did. And the idea behind the book is it's based off this contrarian view that exponentially growing technologies and other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions of people on our planet. And that the gap between the privileged people and kind of the hardscrabble majority is closing really fast. And that's drastically affecting everything from water to food to energy to health care to education to our own Personal freedom. So in today's podcast, we're going to be talking with Stephen about this book and about some of the things that I thought were really relevant in this book to you, to the future of health, the future of health care, some of the really cool technologies that he talks about in the book as far as like food and water and protein and labs on a chip and all, all sorts of really interesting technologies. So as you're listening in, I will be sure to put a link to everything that Steven and I talk about over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com abundance. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com abundance so, all that being said, Steven, thanks for coming on the call today, man.

Thanks for having me back then. Appreciate it.

Well, I want to jump right in to this concept of abundance because you start off early in the book by talking about what you call the pyramid of abundance. Can you explain what the pyramid of abundance is?

Sure. When we were talking about abundance and what we mean by abundance, and it's good to clarify it up front, we're talking about meeting and exceeding the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. This is not about a life of luxury. This is not Rolls Royces and Mercedes Benzes. But it is meeting, exceeding those basic needs. And to drill down on it, to define it a little more, we created our abundance pyramid. And it's based on Abraham Maslow, psychologist Abraham Maslow's very famous hierarchy of human needs, which is essentially a theory arranged like a pyramid where there are five levels of human needs, from very basic safety and security needs all the way up to self actualization. So we based our pyramid of abundance on exactly those same needs at a basic level. On the bottom level, it's a three tier pyramid. We have physical needs, air, water, food, warmth, things along those lines. Then at the middle level, we put energy and abundant education and abundant information and communication technologies, which are all catalysts for further growth. And at the top tier, it's freedom and health care, which we believe are the two core prerequisites shaping an individual's ability to contribute to society. So that was kind of how we broke it down. And then we examined how four emerging forces are impacting at every level of this pyramid it and making this promise actually possible.

Gotcha. So one of the things that you talk about as you discuss how this pyramid of abundance actually works is the way that we're wired. I think that that's one of the things that really leapt out to me because this was one of the first books I've read in a while that wasn't like all doom and gloom and that the world's going to hell in a handbasket. But the way that we're wired that you talk about in the book from a. A biological standpoint, the way that you describe it is you say, if it bleeds, it leads. Can you go into why, you know, people are wired this way?

What we're the macroscopic look at what we're talking about. There is abundance. Sounds like this incredibly radical idea, right? And most of us, when we first hear it, have exactly your reaction. We bristle against it. It turns out there are very solid neurobiological reasons why this is the case. Meaning there are reasons why it's very, very hard to believe the world is actually getting better. And the first of those reasons is it all comes down to information processing, right? Our brain takes in billions and billions of bits of information every second. But what makes it up to consciousness is a vast, vast reduction. Some people put the reduction at 400 billion inputs a second. 2000 outputs make up consciousness, right? So the vast majority of what the brain does is sifts and sorts and tries to tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical to an organism than survival. The first stop, almost all this incoming information makes is the amygdala, which is our danger detector. It's the part of the brain that is in charge of really powerful emotions. Hate, rage, anger, fear, the fight or flight response. And it is an organ, especially in our modern world, that is almost always on high alert. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of the reasons is that we are now bombarded by news, right? And we have millions and millions and millions of news outlets, and they're all competing for our attention. And how do they compete? They're vying for the amygdala's attention. Which is why the old newspaper saying, if it bleeds, it leads. Meaning the goriest, most violent frightening story appears above the fold, because that's what's going to catch our attention, right? If it bleeds, it leads. Works because the first stop all incoming information makes is an organ that is already primed to look for danger. Now, we could go on and on. There's a bunch of other factors that come into play here, but specifically, you were talking about if it bleeds, it leads. And that's a reference to kind of how the amygdala screens information.

Okay, gotcha. So when we're saturated with these news headlines, basically, it's turning on our sympathetic, like our fight and flight nervous system response. And that almost like hardwires us to continue to respond in that stressful way.

Well, it's more complicated than that. There's a couple of things going on. So first of all, we have what is called what scientists call a negativity bias. This is a tendency, a very profound tendency shaped by evolution, to pay way more attention to negative information than positive information. So if I show you 10 news stories, nine of them are positive, one's negative, you're going to remember the negative. As a general rule, if I mix it up and don't make it that lopsided, you're not even going to notice the positive because your brain is just going to be so drawn to the negative. What makes this even worse is the amygdala emerged in an era of immediacy, right, where threats on the veldt were always of the tiger and the bush variety. But we live in a world that is probabilistic today, right? Terrorists might attack, the economy might nosedive, a meteor might impact the earth. The amygdala can't tell the the difference, and it can't switch off until the danger is gone completely. Probabilistic dangers are never gone completely. So when you add all these things up, you start to see, you know, there are pretty good reasons why we think we're all going to hell out of a hand basket and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Interesting. So, you know, the way that I read about this when it came to kids, and the way that kids are programmed, as far as stress goes, is this can start at a very early age, that it's almost like this, this sledding slope that you would ride a sled. Every time that you bring a slide down that slope, it makes that particular sled run just a little bit more packed down, a little bit more smooth and slick and fast. And depending on which type of pathways a child is consistently exposed to, that's the pathway that they're going to trend towards, the pathway they're going to slide down. And. And so you can almost program the amygdala to choose these stressful pathways.

Yeah, that's Rick Hanson's work at Berkeley. He's a neuropsychologist at Berkeley, wrote a nice book called Hardwiring Happiness where he talks about this. But you're very right. I mean, the brain is a plastic organ, but amygdala sensitivity, once you start privileging the negative very quickly, the amygdala at a very fundamental molecular level, becomes more sensitive to the negative. So it grows and it grows, which is basically saying, you know, you start out a little scared by life and, you know, after a little while, everything sends you into a panic.

Yeah. And you actually have a really good part in the book in chapter four where you. Chapter four settled. It's not as bad as you think. And you know, one of the quotes that you have in there from this Oxford trained zoologist, Matt Ridley, you know, he says this moaning pessimism, this knee jerk, things are going downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It's almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket. And that's actually what I really like about your book is because it comes at this rate from the perspective of the fact that all these amazing technologies around us actually mean that it really isn't as bad as we think, despite what all these headlines are telling us.

Well, you gotta. I mean, the best example I can give of this, and this is both Peter, and my favorite, I think is so right now, I mean, you can look at the numbers and use in pretty much any metric available. Life is so much better right now, today than it ever has been before in history. But we keep. We don't believe it and worse, we keep redefining, for example, what poverty means. Right. If you look at America's poor right now, the vast majority of them have running water, flushing toilets, a cell phone, a car, a television, air conditioning. You go back 100 years, the richest people on earth had none of these things.

Yep. Yeah, it's a great point. And that's where I want to delve into some of these amazing technologies that you talk about, because we've got a lot of listeners who will be fascinated with this stuff. I'm sure one of the things that you get into is this concept of growing food in water and vertical farming, which I thought was really cool. Can you explain that whole concept of vertical farming and growing food and water?

Sure. So we have a food problem. Right. The UN has said we have to double food production by 2050 to keep up with population. Arable land is 80% gone, meaning land that good soil that we can grow crops on. According to even the most conservative predictions, climate change can slow crop production 10 to 20% over the next 10 to 20 years. So the idea here is let's move farming from the country where it is to the city and why you would do that. And more specifically to build farms inside of skyscrapers. Vertical farms is what they're called. And there are a lot of reasons to do that. One of them is that the Average foodstuff travels 1500 miles to your plate. Right. That is insane. Not only is it a huge energy cost and it is a huge factor in the cost of the food itself, but every second a plant is out of the ground, it loses its nutritional value. Right. So there's a health, there's a health cost as well here. But if you move the farm to the city, by 2025, 70% of our population is going to be in cities. So you can reduce all that if you grow the food in the skyscrapers using hydroponics, which as you pointed out is growing food and water, or aeroponics, which is actually a newer technology which actually mist the roots of the plant. The water saving is insane. Put it this way, in a typical vertical farm, you can use one 30 story skyscraper to feed about 50,000 people. And you can do it with 80% less land, 90% less water. Grow your crops inside of clean rooms. You can have 100% fewer pesticides and zero transportation costs. So it is a massive, massive, massively potent technology. And the kicker, and this is what is so great about vertical farms, is we are also suffering a giant biodiversity die off. Right. The scientists are calling sixth great extinction. The fifth was the one that killed off the dinosaurs. We're losing about 100,000 species a year. And the only way to stop this slide is to take land away from humans and give it back to the animals. You need contiguous wildlands to stop the slide. That's been the agreed upon solution since the 60s. We know it will work. But where do you get the land? We need land to feed people and we've got more and more people. And well, here is a ton of land that suddenly can be repurposed to stop this giant loss of biodiversity that has incredible consequences for humanity.

Yeah, it's crazy. You never thought about like a skyscraper as being somewhere where you could actually grow enough food to feed 9 billion people on the planet. Or obviously it takes more than a single skyscraper. But the concept is really cool.

Yeah. Dixon Despalonier, who is at Columbia and came up with the idea. Not obviously, we've been growing food indoors for a very long, long time. I mean, we fed most of the U.S. army in World War II through food that was grown hydroponically indoors. So this is old technology, right? Repurposed, done differently. But he calculated that 150, 30 foot skyscrapers, which. 30 story skyscrapers, which, given are a lot of buildings, could feed all of New York City, which is kind of amazing.

Yeah, that's really amazing. And you're right, like hydroponics, I think in the book you explain how it goes all the way back to like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as far as.

Yeah, it's a very old technology and it, you know, it got really well developed, kind of World War II ish. But the green revolution came on. We started kind of using chemicals to fight this war and people forgot about it. And the only people who paid attention to hydroponics and aeroponics were marijuana farmers. Literally. Right. So it had this horrible reputation that, you know, that sort of retarded the technology and slowed it down for a very long time until the 90s when NASA started looking at it because they wanted to know how to feed astronauts on Mars.

Yeah, it's crazy. And one of the things that is difficult about it though is the whole issue of protein because like what you just described, it can increase crop production. But as far as protein and getting enough protein, like hydroponics doesn't actually produce like protein rich food sources, does it?

No, you're totally correct. And we have a protein problem, right? Optimal health means that 10 to 50% of your total calories have to come from protein. And, you know, we could eat more tofu for sure, but for much of the world, meat is the preferred choice. And you know, as we all know, meat might not be murder, but it's certainly murdering the planet. And it comes down to what you have to kind of talk about this problem. You've got to start with what happens with cattle. Cattle, for starters, are an energy hog. The standard ratio of energy in to beef out is 54 to 1. They're a land hog. 70% of our lands are used for 70% of our agricultural lands. And 30% of the planet's surface are used for cattle farming. It produces more greenhouse gas than all the car in the world. Leading cause of soil erosion, deforestation. I can keep going. There's enough water in a steer, in a fully grown adult steer to float a US Navy destroyer. So we've got this huge growing population, right? And as people come out of poverty, they want more meat. We've seen this in China, right? UN says we have to double meat production by 2050, right? So how do we do this? How do we get people all this protein? And there's two answers. Aquaculture is the first. Fish farming, which has already proven itself incredibly, incredibly Effective fish populations have been steadily declining. Yet from 1950 to 2007, aquaculture went from 2 million metric tons to 50 million metric tons. Fish farming has allowed us to continue to eat fish. We can scale this up. We can do it in a much more eco friendly and intelligent method than is going on right now and will stop a lot of devastation in the ocean. That's one answer. The other answer. Yeah.

And by the way, just to interrupt and you touch on this in the book, how there are issues with fish farming. Right. As far as like concentration of waste and disease in the fish and things of that nature.

Yeah, there are serious issues and a lot of it seems to be around the scale of the endeavor. This is something we're learning with meat as well, smaller, maybe better. And I'll give you a really cool example. Will Adams, who's a MacArthur Genius Award winner, has a company called Growing Power that is building a five story vertical farm in Milwaukee. And the bottom of the farm is the bottom floor is a fish farm. And there's like 110 gallons of water producing 100,000 tilapia, Lake Perch, and I think maybe bluegill a year. And they're going to pump the fish species up to use it to fertilize plants in the higher levels of the greenhouse. There are really cool ways to start to integrate these technologies and solve some of those problems. There's a long way to go, but we're at the start again. Then there's in vitro meat, which is a big tank. Yeah, it's a big fish tank. In vitro meat is, I think, the technology that's most exciting, which is literally growing steak from stem cells. But it's a technology that is here today. We have been working on it for a while. We have gotten it really, really good. What it comes down to now is to power it, you need a lot of electricity. So they need these giant bioreactors. And it's a power problem that hopefully solar, because it is on an exponential growth curve, is going to help to solve. But it's no longer, you know, it's no longer a question of can we actually make the meat. It's now just a question of can we scale up our energy technology.

Yeah. And I mean, in many cases, if you break it down into its individual amino acids, if you're taking a protein and you're growing in a petri dish, you might actually get exposed to fewer omega 6 fatty acids and growth hormones. And all the things that you're getting from.

A crazy thing is, the crazy thing is we can actually, with in vitro meat, do the impossible. Right? We can nutritionally fortify it. We can put fish oil into beef. We can make fast food good for you. Fast food hamburgers that are good for you using this technology, which is an insane thought.

Yeah. We still have to figure out the bun, but I guess we can always take the kale from the vertical farming and then the in vitro meat, and we're good to go.

Ben Greenfield's diet for the 21st century, here we come.

Exactly.

Hey, quick break here. This is Jessa Greenfield, Ben's boss. I mean, wife. I'm not sure if you know this, but Ben, being the complete nerd that he is, keeps track of everything he's ever recommended and found to work really well and puts it all over@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com from. From books to lab tests to supplements, he has it all there. So whether you want to build muscle, burn fat, fix your gut, sleep, better, balance hormones, learn about smart drugs, whatever, it's all there. Check it out@GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com okay, now back to the podcast.

Cool. So the other thing that you talk about, and this is actually related more to energy than to food, even though, you know, when you talk about fish, it makes me think about DHA and algae and, you know, how you get a lot of other cool things when you're eating fish. But you also have a really good part of the book that focuses on energy and biofuels. And in particular, you talk about using synthetic life to create biofuels. Now, I thought this was a really interesting part of the book because every year I go to Ironman, Hawaii, and I compete in Ironman, Hawaii. And one of the parts of Ironman, Hawaii is the famous energy lab, where you run through the hottest part of the course and you're running out in the Kona heat along the ocean. And it's this energy lab. And what I think a lot of people may not realize is what is going on inside a lab like that in terms of developing this new generation of biofuels. Can you explain specifically regarding algae, how we can use plants to make fuel? Because that's actually what's going on in that energy lab.

Sure. So synthetic biology, which is sort of the cutting edge of biology and genetic engineering right now, has turned essentially the four letters of the DNA code into the binary code. So we've learned. We're learning how to program life much in the same way we program computers. So that's what synthetic biology is advancing incredibly quickly. Just to give you an idea, Moore's Law, which is, you know, what is driving our computers and is the reason the cell phone in your pocket is 1000 times faster and a million times cheaper than a supercomputer from the 1970s. So that's Moore's Law moving really fast. Obviously, synthetic biology and all biotechnology is now moving at five times the speed of Moore's Law. So this stuff is coming very, very quickly. What they're trying to do with algae is algae normally makes an oil, it normally secretes an oil, and it does this at certain limited amounts, at certain limited times and in certain limited ways. But the idea is we can use synthetic biology to tinker with the kind of the algae's genome and to trick it into making huge amounts of oil. So that's the goal, and it's been a long goal. There are a lot of companies working on it. It's moving forward in fits and starts. I think there's a lot of technologies we describe in the book, and our general reaction after the book came out is, oh, my God, these things are arriving far faster than we thought. Turns out that using algae to produce biofuel, which a lot of people thought was going to be very straightforward, turns out is not straightforward. We're a number of years into the project. We've done a tremendous amount of the simple science, but it's not about kind of just moving one or two genes. And now it's about a whole genome level fix. And it's a new problem. And we're just, we're still poking into it. So that's coming. How fast is an interesting question.

Okay, got it. Interesting. But it's very, very cool how you can actually use this algae. And you describe it in pretty good detail in the book about. I think it's. Is it Venter who created the algae?

Half house, Craig Venter. I mean, he's one of the scientists working on his company, Synthetic Genomics. And Venter is most famous for being the guy who first sequenced the human genome and created the first synthetic life form on Earth. And this is, you know, this is one of his next projects.

Yeah, yeah. But it's, it's a very, very cool concept. Basically, plants are using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then combine it with carbon dioxide and turn that into a hydrocarbon fuel. Means.

Yeah, by the way, you hit on the cool part, right? The cool part is what do we feed the ox, the algae, with? Carbon dioxide, the same chemical that's, you know, causing global warming. So it's a great, great, great, you Know, carbon sequestration strategy. Yeah, or carbon repurposeration strategy, I guess.

It's very cool and something for all of our triathlete listeners to listen in. When you're running an Ironman Hawaii, just think as you're running through that hot energy lab, it's actually being used to produce really amazing biofuel. So speaking of global warming and. And really cool biofuel, let's talk about poop. We can't have a Ben Greenfield fitness podcast without talking about poop at some point, usually. So you have in your section on solving sanitation a description of this new kind of toilets. Can you elaborate on this?

Sure. I mean, the place you gotta start is the fact that toilets haven't been upgraded at about 130, 30 years. Right. Since Victorian England, basically. So, you know, in the developing world, where sanitation issues cause tremendous amounts of death and disease, a new kind of toilet will obviously save millions and millions of lives. In the developed world, three quarters of our water bill is hauling away waste and running sewage treatment plants. So the goal here is how can you solve both those problems? How can you find a way for people to go to the bathroom that doesn't involve running water or sewage while still rendering human waste completely harmless? So this has led to a new kind of toilet. And there's a giant building Melinda Gates foundation project dedicated to this. And that's what we're talking a little about in this section. But imagine a toilet with no pipes, no plumbing, no septic tank. The toilet burns and powders the feces and it flash evaporates the urine. And you can essentially use the energy that comes from the fecal portion of the waste to completely clean up the urine. There's over like a megajoule per day of energy in human feces. So we will then have electricity left over to charge our cell phones, power our lights, or if we have a smart grid, you could sell that electricity back and for the very first time in history, literally get paid to poop.

That's crazy.

And we have the technology today. We can literally do this with off the shelf parts. The question is cost. The challenge that Bill and Melinda Gates has set is they want to do it for 5 cents a day because that's the cost affordable to the developing world. So that's. And obviously it doesn't take a genius to tell you that this is a cost that mass production can solve. Right. We know how to bring the cost of things down.

I'd never thought about this until I read that section of your book. But you describe it as that there is over a billion megajoule per day of energy contained in human feces that can be turned into energy like you're talking about for cell phones and lights.

The really cool closed loop solution to look back on a previous technology because the thing that we try, one of the points we really try to make in abundance is a lot of the leverage exists in combining these technologies together to move them across disciplines and at a system level. And one example is this new toilet. You could literally run the vertical farms in New York City that are going to feed New York City with energy that you reclaim from poop that's excreted in New York City. You could close the entire loop on the thing.

It's amazing. I wonder if they could figure out how to do it with the fish feces as well from these hydroponic tanks.

Well, fish species make phenomenal fertilizer. That's a transportation problem. It's a slightly different, it's a slightly different problem, but it's also, you know, it's a, it's a good problem to have because we need the fertilizer.

Yeah, yeah, Interesting. Okay, cool. So let's go, let's go from a toilet to the lab on a chip. And I'm fascinated with this stuff because I'm totally into self quantification and you know, I print out the form online and drive to my local lab, bring it in, get the tubes of lab, you know, the tubes of blood drawn or the saliva as the case may be, and then it all gets sent off and a few days later I'll get like a PDF with my results emailed to me. But what you talk about in the book makes that sound like something out of like the, you know, the old pioneering era. Like you talk about the lab on a chip. Can you explain how a lab on a chip would even work?

So I want to paint you the bigger picture, which is the tricorder. So I don't know if you remember Star Trek, but if you remember your Star Trek. Right. The tricorder is the medical scanning device that booms waves over people and it tells them what's wrong with them. Right. So Peter Diamandis, my partner, started the Tricorder X Prize, the Qualcomm Tricorder X prize. It's a $10 million prize for the first team that can diagnose, can build a handheld device like cell phone sized device that can diagnose illness better than board certified doctor. Right. In the developing world, this is a huge savings, one out of three times when you go to the doctor, 45% they get the diagnosis wrong. So it's a huge cost, right? Huge healthcare savings. If we get this right in the developing world, where there are not enough doctors and nurses at all to begin with, this is a sea change. And to make this possible, you need three technologies, all of which are here today. The first is lab on a chip. And a lab on a chip is really simple. It is quite literally a silicon chip that you can put a drop of bodily fluids, spit, semen, blood, snot can go on this chip and it can break it apart and it can diagnose, break it down to a molecular level and basically diagnose what's wrong with you. And how it does this is it can run a battery of tests on it and then it uploads the information to the cloud. What is in the cloud? Do you remember Watson, the AI that won on Jeopardy? Yeah. So the big deal about Watson was Watson understood natural language, meaning you talk to Watson and joke with Watson and he would understand inflection and dialect and all that stuff. Right after Watson won on Jeopardy, they sent Watson to medical school where they have packed Watson with millions and millions and millions of pages of medical encyclopedia and case histories and doctor reports and everything else you can possibly think of. They basically put a medical diagnostic AI in the cloud and then they've opened it up for anybody to partner with IBM to develop platforms to use Watson in the cloud. And so if you attach a lab on a chip into Watson in the cloud and you have a handheld medical diagnostic device that can do exactly what the tricorder did. And just to give you a timetable for this, Peter believes that somebody's going to win the Tricorder X prize in the next 18 months.

Wow.

So we've got, I mean, version, lots of versions of the lab on chip. Everything kind of exists. It's getting it together, putting it together and getting it to work seamlessly. But the parts are all there, right?

You've, you've got like, you've got like the Stanford student, I forget her name, who's got these little, you know, drop, give a drop of your blood, type of lab reading. They're like lab reading machines popping up in places like I believe in. It's in like a Walgreens or a CVS down in San Francisco. And then, you know, I pre ordered on Kickstarter, there was this device called a, A Q Me I believe was where it was at and that plugs into your iPhone and allows you to get a few readings of like glucose and testosterone and stuff like that using your phone. So, yeah, you're right. Like all this stuff is just kind of floating around all over the place. One of the things that someone, I forget who I was talking to about this, but they were talking about how one of the big, big barriers to this is the fda. And I don't think you get into this too much in your book book, but I mean, how do you feel about that? Do you think that there are some pretty big barriers here from a governmental standpoint to developing and utilizing and making widespread the use of some of these health technologies?

Yeah, I mean, we flat out say in abundance that a lot of these technologies are probably going to emerge in countries with less restrictive environments and migrate to the US Is, you know, there is no. So we have a representative democracy that was designed by Jefferson to proceed slowly. It was. I mean, he didn't. He saw what happened in the French Revolution, he didn't want another one. So he balanced the houses and designed government to move slowly. We are now in a world where technology is advancing on exponential growth curves. Right. All information technologies are moving this fast and there's no possible way for government to keep up. It's just not. We're just not designed that way here today. There are other environments that are, that are better for this, but it's tricky here.

Interesting. So another thing that you get into in the book is DNA and genetic testing, obviously another kind of emerging technology. I think it's really interesting you talk in the book about obesity and the link between genes and obesity and how we may be able to actually treat obesity genetically. Can you explain how that would happen?

Well, so let me give you a picture of where we are. And this is circa 2011, which is the last time I saw kind of a meta analysis of the field, but really good meta analysis I like, from 2011 that looked at 15 years of studies on genetics and obesity. They found, found nine different locations that are directly involved in genetic obesity and 58 locations that contribute to polygenetic obesity right now. Are there more? Yes, for sure. Are there lots of other contributing factors? Absolutely. But we have really started to understand kind of what's going on at the genetic level with the disorder. And we know. I mean, I'm sure, you know, and I'm sure you've talked about, about this on the show. We were not, you know, we existed in environments where food was scarce. Right. So when we had access to large quantities of, for example, sugar, carbohydrates, that kind of thing, we stored it we ate everything we could get our hands on and stored it for later because we needed it. That's not the case anymore. Food is nowhere near that sphere. But we're still genetically programmed to do that. Right. And that is one of the big triggers for the obesity crisis. So the idea is can we basically block that programming?

Yeah. And the way that that's blocked is this process. You talk about the book RNA interference. So you're actually blocking the messenger RNA that these genes are sending out.

Yeah. Before they can even code to make proteins.

Yeah. And they've done experiments on this, I believe in the book you talk about experiments done in mice on shutting off the fat insulin receptors.

Yup. There are a lot of different people working on this from a lot of different angles. Right. And it does, it looks to many like low hanging fruit. It looks like this doesn't look as crazy as say the algae biofuel. But you know, the one thing I like to point out to people is, is this stuff, especially genetics. Genetics gets a tremendous, a lot of attention. We like talking about it, but it develops slowly. If you think about gene therapy, it was a big deal when the Promise first showed up 35 years ago, but it's only now that we're actually moving into things. Some of the earlier versions killed people. They were bad. It's only now that we're actually moving into this. So I think genetics is a little slower than we anticipated where other technologies are moving much faster than we anticipated.

Yeah. Have you personally done any of your genetic testing, Stephen, through 23andMe or any of these other genomic sequencing organizations?

I haven't. And I'll tell you why I haven't. And a lot of people disagree with me on this and it can go a lot of different ways. But I feel like we have done so much research saying there's mind, body connections that, and that we, and we don't fully understand them. And getting information that I have a 58% chance of getting an incurable disease, I can tell you right now, certainly going to help my stress levels, it's going to create more problems. And I don't personally think it's worth the risk yet. I don't think there's enough until, you know, until the, the level of the, until the information can really be directly useful to me, practical to me at a biohacking level, I don't want to know. But that's, you know, I am in the minority among my peers on this. Most people think it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.

Yeah. And for me, from, like, a biohacking level, I actually found the information to be relatively useful. Like, for example, I found out I have higher than normal risk of type 2 diabetes. That certainly affected my decision to shift towards a more, like, ketogenic diet and to begin using insulin stabilizers, you know, like cinnamon and apple cider vinegar and stuff like that on a more frequent basis. Or I found out, for example, that I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer. So that whole coffee nap thing that was recently in the news, like, that doesn't work for me. If I take a cup of coffee, like, I'm. I'm wired within, like, five minutes, and it's gone within, like, you know.

Yeah. It's funny. Jamie Wheel, my partner in the Flow Genome Project, likes the coffee nap idea. He can do it. I can't time with you. Yeah.

So I think some of. Some of it's practical, but, yeah, you're right. Like, if, you know, God forbid, I'd done the test and found out I had a 50% chance of, like, you know, I don't know, prostate cancer or something like that, then, yeah, it would be probably a little bit of a mental issue. And it's. It's a little bit scary to think about, you know, what happens if you can believe yourself into having a disease or that you have a disease. So it is an interesting.

I just, you know, as, you know, I spent three years in bed with Lyme disease and kind of fought my way back from that and kind of cured that. But, you know, the one lesson over and over was it was, you know, Lyme, it's got a stress trigger, and the more stressed out you get, the sicker you get because it's an autoimmune condition. And so many diseases have stuff like that built in. I just. I'm better. For me, I think you're better off not knowing. But that's, again, just my opinion. And a lot of people I know agree with you.

Yeah. And. And by the way, for those of you who don't know Steven's story about Lyme disease, go back and listen to the other podcast that we did with him about the rise of Superman, because it actually is a. An incredible story. And again, the show notes for the episode you're listening into right now are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com abundance and I'll put a link to that other podcast that I did with Stephen. I've got one more question for you, Stephen, and that is about what we can do. There are a lot of resources that you have in your book about the next steps are and how we can take action. But as far as, like the big wins for the people listening in who do have the power to make a difference and to help push this story of abundance along, what are some things we can do?

Well, it depends, you know, what level of involvement do you want? Right.

I want to, I want to invent the tricorder and win the X prize.

You know, I mean, for that, you know. Peter started Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, which is a university in Silicon Valley that is dedicated to using exponentially growing technologies to go after the world's grand challenges. You know, there. So then there's, you know, if you go to abundancethebook.com which is our website for abundance, there's a join tab. There's lots of different ways to get. There's over since the book came out, we're coming out. The paperback for Abundance hits stamps in I think two weeks. I literally got my copycat today. So it's been out a while. And the craziest thing about it is it's had a global impact and there are now abundance groups all over the world. So you can find them through Facebook, you can find them through our website, but there are really tons and tons of ways to plug it in and get involved. And in February, Peter and I have the follow up to Abundance coming out. It's called Bold and it is literally a guide for entrepreneurs and organizations who really want to take this forward. And it's the Abundance is the big macroscopic, big picture. Look at four emerging forces that give us the power to raise standards of living. Bold is how to get there. It's literally a how to manual for bringing about a world of abundance.

That's a book.

Yep.

Okay.

Coming out in February.

Cool. One last question for you because I'm a big fan of blogs and syndicated content and keeping my finger on the pulse of this type of stuff just so I can see where the action might need to be taken. Do you have a blog or do you have a resource that you think is a good resource for kind of keeping up to date with emerging technologies and biofuel and lab on a chips and power harnessing toilets and all that stuff.

I write about all this stuff in Far Frontiers, which is the blog I write for Forbes.

Okay, cool. I didn't know you had a blog for forbes.

Yeah, it's Forbes.com sites StephenCottler and the blog is Far Frontiers and I cover it there. You can also go to my website, stephencottler.com and sign up for my email newsletter and you will get a monthly newsletter with all of my writings on everything from human capability to disruptive technology to the intersection of technology and culture.

Cool. Just found the blog on Forbes. I will be adding that to my feedly feed.

Well, cool.

Stephen, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing this stuff with us.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

And if you're listening in again, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com abundance and check out the book, check out the other podcast that we did with Steven, and also the link to some of the resources that we talked about during this episode. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and Stephen Kotler signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

This has been Greenfield for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.