App INSIDER: The Unforeseen Costs of Civilization And What You Can Do About It.

Ben Greenfield (0:00)

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to this App Insider Interview with Spencer Wells, the author of a really cool book called Pandora's Seed, and an expert in genetic testing. If you want to know more about websites like 23andMe, and genographics, and this mysterious and intriguing world of digging into your genetics, you'll definitely want to listen to this one.

And I think that you can actually get 23andme.com testing right now for about 99 bucks via Salivary Drip. It's a pretty good deal.

I did it last year. I'd highly recommend you check it out if you want to see a glimpse into your genetics. But that being said, let's go ahead and jump in to today's App Insider interview with Spencer Wells.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation.

So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting edge content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Ben Greenfield (1:17)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and my guest today is Spencer Wells. Spencer is a leading population geneticist, and he's the director of a genome project that he'll be telling you a little bit more about in the podcast today. He's not only a scientist as well as a documentary filmmaker, but he's also an author. He wrote a book called Pandora's Seed, which I actually read last month after meeting Spencer at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Boston a couple of months ago. Fascinating book. So fascinating, in fact, that I wanted to get Spencer onto the show to talk about it a little bit.

And kind of the whole link between modern agriculture and health, where it's brought us and where it's bringing us.

So Spencer, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Spencer Wells (2:12)

Great to be here, Ben.

Ben Greenfield (2:14)

So, you know, the title of your book kind of sort of hints at what it's about, but can you go into why you called this book Pandora's Seed?

Spencer Wells (2:25)

Yeah, well, so let's just look at the title Pandora.

If you think about the myth of Pandora and actually tell that in the foreword to the book, Pandora was a woman who was given to the gods and she was innately curious. And there was this box that had all of these sorrows and travails for humanity. And she opened it up because she was curious about it and they all flew out. And that's the reason we have so much trouble in the world, according to the myth. But the one thing that was left in the box was hope. And she clapped down the top and managed to preserve that. So it's basically a story of what happens when you are, in the case of Pandora, curious, but in a broader sense, what happens when you're thinking about the here and now, answering some questions, solving some problem that is vital at this point in time, without thinking about the longer term consequences of what you're doing.

And the argument that I make in the book is that the development of agriculture was very much in that same vein. I talk in the book, and we can get into some of the meat of this in a second, I guess, but I talk about some of the reasons why we would have made that profound shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that we had lived for 99% of our evolutionary history to this radically different lifestyle, settling down in permanent villages, eventually cities and towns, and growing food. And why would we have done that? And it turns out the likely reason was there was a food crisis going on. At the end of the last ice age, lots of shifts in climate, and we basically had to figure out a way to produce enough food, and agriculture was the end result of that. And so it's solved this immediate problem, but in the long run, it's had all these knock-on effects, these unintended consequences.

Ben Greenfield (4:06)

That was one of the interesting things you went into in your book, is how we figured out with agriculture how to bring crops to us rather than going out and getting those crops and how it affected the way that we eat. Can you explain a little bit about that, about how we went from moving around a lot to bringing agriculture to our backyard?

Spencer Wells (4:27)

Yeah, if you think about the way that hunter-gatherers have lived since time immemorial, as they say, and the way some of them still do today. I've been lucky enough to live and work with hunter-gatherer groups, mostly in Africa, over the last few years, including doing research for the book. What you do is you basically rely on the bounty that nature provides, so to speak. And if it's a tough year, then you may have to move on. You typically are leading a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, but you have that freedom to kind of move around and choose places to live that work for you in terms of finding food, finding water, whatever it might be, shelter.