In this episode, I sit down with the Chief Science Officer at Colossal, Beth Goldstein, to talk about how she got her start in the field of paleogenomics, why she loves to fight with people, and what it's like being a modern day archaeologist.
00:00:17.000It's been really interesting getting to talk to you and communicating with you and all the stuff that you guys have done at Colossal has been insane.
00:00:24.000So why don't you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do.
00:00:51.000And because I love to fight, I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those dire wolves.
00:01:04.000I don't really like to fight with people.
00:01:05.000I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute.
00:01:08.000I end up fighting with people, though, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.
00:01:17.000Well, it's certainly a controversial subject, and you guys are certainly groundbreakers.
00:01:22.000So whenever there's a controversial subject and people are groundbreakers, you're without doubt going to get a lot of pushback.
00:01:31.000And a lot of people that just want attention, a lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention.
00:03:48.000They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school.
00:03:51.000I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations.
00:03:55.000And this job, let's just say, wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college.
00:04:02.000There were mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but I had only been asleep for one and a half hours after being out for too late at night doing things that I shouldn't have been doing because I was underage, right?
00:04:13.000And had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station.
00:04:37.000We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals.
00:04:40.000And then we drove across the country and slept outside in national parks and learned about the history of North America, the geological history, the human history, everything, while being there in person.
00:04:53.000Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country.
00:04:56.000And I thought to myself while I was there, This is the story that I want to tell.
00:05:01.000I want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape.
00:05:13.000So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism.
00:05:19.000The ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something.
00:05:22.000I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing.
00:05:42.000How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?
00:05:45.000This is something I had no idea about.
00:05:47.000I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into, but wandering around the halls of the university that I did get into.
00:05:57.000And I met this guy called Alan Cooper.
00:06:00.000Who was one of the few people in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab that you need to be able to extract DNA from bones.
00:06:09.000So this DNA is in terrible condition, so we have to have a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something, because then your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify.
00:06:22.000So we had one of these labs, and I thought, well, that's kind of cool, because I was interested in geology, I was interested in human history.
00:06:28.000Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before or rewriting the stories that we keep telling.
00:06:34.000This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human ancestry, and there was a lot more to be learned.
00:06:40.000And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.
00:06:42.000And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool.
00:07:42.000Like, one of the times I was out in Timir, the north central Timir Peninsula, and we had brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up so that we could go inside and take the masks, take the masks off of our face, because you always have to wear a hood otherwise.
00:07:55.000Otherwise, you'll be breathing mosquitoes.
00:07:57.000And we were going outside and playing this game where we would just clap our hands in front of our face and then count how many you killed.
00:08:03.000And one time, I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.
00:08:17.000And early in the season, they're really big, and you can catch them fast.
00:08:20.000and then they get different species come out that are smaller and smaller, and toward the end of the season, they're really...
00:08:25.000Once I was up in the north of Alaska on the Ikpikpuk River, we were floating down the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things like that.
00:08:32.000And it had been windy for the first few days, so it was fine.
00:08:35.000And this was my first time out in the field, actually.
00:08:38.000It was northern Alaska, and I was like, these mosquitoes.
00:08:40.000People keep telling me there's mosquitoes.
00:08:50.000There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while, and this poor animal.
00:08:54.000We were following the river and he would, every few steps, he would just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come back up.
00:09:01.000The mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.
00:10:54.000Alan Cooper, the guy I went to work with, he was all, oh, I'm going to just wear this natural mosquito repellent and you don't need any of the stuff that actually has poisons in it.
00:11:30.000And it's all these subsistence people that are like fishing and trapping and they're living in these little cabins and they bring dogs with them everywhere.
00:11:48.000It's like these people have a very hard life, but yet they're always smiling and they're having a good time.
00:11:54.000And, you know, living this subsistence lifestyle somehow or another is like very fulfilling at like a, I don't want to say a genetic level, but like an internal level.
00:12:04.000There's something about it that like this makes sense.
00:12:07.000Whereas society like today You understand genes.
00:12:15.000We essentially have the same genes that people have 10,000 years ago had.
00:12:50.000When we were up there in Tymere, we'd flown for a couple of days in this really awful Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried to because, you know, infrastructure infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia.
00:13:02.000It's a repeated theme from It was in MI8, and it was in a place called Hatanga, which is where we were based while we were trying to get out into...
00:13:16.000And it's mostly these massive gas tanks.
00:13:18.000and you load all the gear into the gas tanks, and then all of the people I think the dog was the smartest person.
00:13:40.000We got up into the air and then the Russian and French leaders of our expedition team decided that they were going to celebrate finally having taken off in this helicopter by smoking, right?
00:13:52.000We're sitting on the gas tanks, right?
00:13:54.000In this helicopter that we already think.
00:14:06.000This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things like that.
00:14:13.000Also, I'm going to get to the story eventually, but also in part of this, we were traveling forever out into this part of the time era where they had predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones and woolly rhino bones and all the bones of the animals we're interested in.
00:14:26.000So we're flying out there, and we start to land.
00:15:02.000Just there was a lack of communication.
00:15:06.000But whatever, the helicopter took off twice, and then it landed, and everybody unloaded, and we set up the tent, the camp.
00:15:14.000And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs.
00:15:18.000You blow them up, and you bring out the outboard, and you put them on the lake, and we're looking around, and we discovered that we had landed in a place where we were going to be for six weeks that had been glaciated during the last ice age, which meant that our chances of finding what we wanted were really small.
00:15:40.000The Russian cooks had brought medical ethanol because it weighed less per unit of alcohol than vodka, which they would normally bring on the helicopter.
00:15:48.000So they brought medical ethanol to drink.
00:16:28.000Luckily, it's probably a lot of fish up there.
00:16:30.000Fish, and there were some geese and some ducks that they would try to shoot while we were on our zodiacs, normally without telling us that they were about to shoot.
00:17:38.000Except for this French family that we picked up randomly along the way.
00:17:41.000And everybody's looking around and there's this real moment of, what the hell are we going to do?
00:17:47.000And then the guy who was the expedition leader recognizes these two dudes and he's like, oh, friends, oh, good to see you, blah, blah, blah.
00:17:55.000And I'm thinking, what's going to happen?
00:17:58.000When they realize we don't have any more vodka, medical ethanol.
00:18:02.000And it turns out that they are, they were members of the Dolgon community, which is an actual family of subsistence people that still live up on the time air.
00:18:14.000And they had seen the helicopter and had wondered what we were up to and just set out over the landscape that they normally live on to try to find us.
00:18:29.000They were disappointed that we didn't have any alcohol, obviously.
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00:21:00.000And they're living in these tiny little things that they cut in half during the winter so that half of it is used for heating and half of it is used for the family to live in.
00:21:07.000Everything that they own is on these things, on skids, that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost.
00:21:14.000In the snow or in the summer, trying to find the land for the animals to graze.
00:21:21.000And that was the only time in that experience where I could take off the head net because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals.
00:24:17.000And really able to, you know, they're trying now to relearn their native languages because during the communist era they were all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the same way as everyone else.
00:24:31.000And they sent an emissary to say, guys, it's time to speak the mother tongue.
00:24:36.000Maybe they had to go to the squares like you see in Yakutsk and all these other places where they have the big squares with the speakers on the top where they would go for the daily admonishings or whatever from the communists.
00:24:50.000It's so fascinating that there's pockets of these humans that live like this all over the world.
00:24:56.000Obviously, the people in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes of the world.
00:25:03.000And we have so much to learn from them.
00:25:05.000And it would be, I mean, obviously that's such a cool job, how getting to go and actually try to communicate with people who haven't been talked to before.
00:25:12.000But you kind of don't want to, because you don't want to ruin that.
00:27:31.000Maybe they had a bad experience with some other person from some other Westerner and they decided, you know, we're done.
00:27:37.000But they're rightly terrified of humans because when these...
00:27:53.000There's horrific human rights violations that occur there where they just hire the worst people in the world to go in and wipe out these tribes because these tribes are resisting them taking over this land.
00:28:50.000The guy who, one of the guys who, he's the...
00:28:59.000When the first settlers went there, when the first explorers went there, they talked about these incredible, sophisticated civilizations.
00:29:08.000And then people went back 100 years and there was none of that, so they thought that they had just made it up.
00:29:12.000It turns out the first people probably gave these folks horrible diseases, and it wiped out millions of people, and then the jungle just consumed whatever structures and houses.
00:29:24.000and stuff that they had, and all that's left is these grids that you can see when you fly Yeah, that's so cool.
00:29:31.000You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really.
00:29:34.000I noticed that recently I was flying over Europe and you can see the old trellises from old, you know, I don't know how old, but it's just so cool how we can see remnants of civilizations and just makes you think.
00:29:46.000This is some of the coolest mysteries.
00:29:48.000That's what's so cool about working in ancient DNA, too, is we can just go to places, get DNA from stuff, and learn something that we never knew before.
00:30:39.000And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group, which was the first group to show that you could get DNA in something after it died.
00:30:52.000That was actually from a quagga, which is a type of zebra.
00:31:16.000They showed that you could get DNA from this skin.
00:31:18.000And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that I've heard in a long time.
00:31:23.000That must mean we can bring dinosaurs back to life.
00:31:26.000And everybody started racing to get the oldest and coolest DNA.
00:31:30.000And so there were papers in the best journals of science that never published anything that's wrong ever, ever, that said, look, here's dinosaur DNA.
00:31:38.000And look, here's DNA from a myocene-aged leaf.
00:31:47.000The first dinosaur DNA sequences that were published, if you took them at the time and you typed them into the internet and you compared them to the earliest of what is today this big repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequenced, what came back was a close match to a bird.
00:32:05.000We now know, because there's more DNA sequences there, that it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken, and some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd been working on those bones had Fried chicken for lunch every day.
00:33:25.000Anyway, he discovered a way to photocopy DNA to make lots of copies of the same thing, which then made it possible to learn the sequence using the technologies of the day.
00:33:33.000And that was what made it possible, really, for ancient DNA to take off, was this ability to photocopy.
00:33:38.000Because when an animal dies, or a plant dies, the DNA in the cell starts to get chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces by things like UV, right?
00:33:48.000We put sunscreen on, and that stops the UV from breaking our DNA.
00:33:51.000But it's not terrible to get some sunlight, as you probably just saw.
00:33:55.000There was an article out saying, hey, dummies, you know, we need some sunlight in order to make vitamin D. But we have a repair mechanism so that when your DNA breaks, it doesn't stay that way.
00:34:13.000And also things like bacteria and microbes get in there and chew up the DNA to recycle the animal to the next generation or plant or whatever.
00:34:20.000And so the DNA that we get in an old thing, like a mammoth bone, is really short fragments, like maybe 30 or 40 or 50 letters of DNA long.
00:34:31.000In comparison, if I were to take a swab from my cheek and sequence that, I could get strings that are hundreds of millions of letters long.
00:34:48.000I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA.
00:34:53.000I'll probably get some of my DNA because I touched that mammoth bone.
00:34:56.000I'll get DNA from whoever else touched that thing.
00:34:59.000This has been a real problem in archaeology because we're trying to get DNA from humans, but we are humans, and so we touch these things, and then I don't know if it's my DNA or if that thing DNA.
00:35:27.000Almost everyone has probably fed their dog kibble at some point.
00:35:30.000But if you do a little digging, you may find out how ultra-processed it is.
00:35:35.000Luckily, there's a better option for you out there, real food from people who care about what goes into your dog's body, like the farmer's dog.
00:35:45.000They make fresh food that's so simple, no magical or miracle recipes, just meat and vegetables, lightly cooked, complete and balanced for your dog's needs.
00:35:57.000And it's all developed by board-certified nutritionists with the same safety standards as our food.
00:36:04.000To make the switch, you'll see a massive impact.
00:36:07.000It can help your dogs be healthier, happier, and more energetic.
00:36:11.000And unlike kibble, which comes in a giant bag with vague serving suggestions, the farmer's dog food is delivered in packs, portioned for your dog.
00:36:21.000It makes it easy to help them maintain their ideal weight, which is one of the biggest predictors of a longer, healthier life.
00:36:29.000Look, no one, dog or human, should be eating overly processed foods for every meal.
00:36:34.000And it doesn't matter how old your dog is.
00:36:37.000It's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness.
00:37:09.000In my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world, it's like working in a virus lab where you're scared of everything, but we turn it around.
00:37:19.000So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out.
00:37:26.000We wear these suits where it looks like we're terrified, you know, with a face mask and a hairnet, and we're totally covered, and we bleach everything.
00:37:33.000It's not because we're afraid of those.
00:37:34.000We're afraid that we're going to get our DNA in that bone, and then we're not going to be able to do our work.
00:37:41.000So it took that and the ability to amplify those tiny little pieces of DNA for us to really figure out that we could get DNA out of things.
00:37:49.000For a long time, people thought we were never going to get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem.
00:37:54.000we touch a bone, we're just going to get human DNA, and we're never going to be able to know the difference.
00:37:59.000But then with PCR and with the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish, we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is probably one of the crowning achievements of my career.
00:38:19.000Neanderthal genome sequence was actually a mixture of several bones because, you know, there wasn't very much DNA in any of them, and they were able to pull it together.
00:38:25.000Actually, my husband, who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence.
00:38:32.000But then the Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that they had no idea was going to belong to a totally new species of human.
00:38:43.000And they were able to get a really high coverage whole genome out of this tiny little finger bone that totally rewrote what we thought we knew about evolutionary.
00:40:21.000And one thing that people have tested, actually this again was work that my husband did, was whether the people who live there today, the Rampasasa people, are related to them and they're not.
00:40:32.000It seems like, because they're small as well.
00:40:34.000And the question is, is there something weird about them?
00:40:55.000So there's lots of different genes that are involved with this.
00:40:58.000But we kind of have an idea of where those genes are in a genome and what they might be.
00:41:03.000And with these people who are all small, the idea, the hypothesis was that there was some new thing in their DNA that led to them being small.
00:42:10.000I think they used to think it was just poison, just botulism and just various bacteria.
00:42:16.000But now I believe they think it's a venom.
00:42:19.000I watched another horrible video where they would bite this buffalo They just bite its hindquarters and then follow it while the the venom is slowly like taking its And then eventually the poor buffalo gets to the point where it can't move and they just start eating it alive.
00:43:53.000So he was able to pry open the reptile's mouth and escape through a small feeding door in the cage while the zookeeper distracted the dragon.
00:45:16.000Yeah, I didn't know this, and I wouldn't have suspected it because they're so gorgeous, and you wouldn't think that something that gorgeous would be so dumb.
00:45:21.000But I have friends who are, Matt James, who's the chief animal officer at Colossal, he's worked with lots of different zoos throughout his career, and he's told me that there are multiple occasions where he has had to save a giraffe from accidentally killing itself because it's so dumb.
00:45:42.000When my kids were little, you could go to the San Diego Zoo and you would give them lettuce.
00:45:47.000And little babies are allowed to hold up.
00:45:49.000Like a two-year-old can hold up their arm and this enormous tongue comes wrapping around that piece of lettuce and they giggle and everything.
00:45:56.000But they trust them so much that they let little kids feed them.
00:45:59.000Like they set it up so people can feed.
00:46:22.000The ability to make inferences based on statistical information has so far been tested only on animals having large brains in relation to their body size, like primates and parrots.
00:46:30.000They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, can rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes.
00:46:38.000They presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quantities of highly liked food and less preferred food.
00:46:45.000The experimenter covertly drew one piece of food from each container and let the giraffes choose between the two options.
00:46:53.000In the first task, we varied the quantity and relative frequency of the highly liked and less preferred food pieces.
00:46:59.000In the second task, we inserted a physical balance.
00:47:00.000barrier in both containers, so giraffes only had to take into account the upper part of the container when predicting the outcome.
00:47:06.000In both tasks, giraffes successfully selected the container more likely to provide highly liked food, integrating physical information to correctly predict sampling information.
00:47:19.000But I also trust a person who has tried to keep giraffes from killing themselves by doing dumb things to tell me that a giraffe isn't always making the best decisions.
00:47:29.000Perhaps they're intelligent for the environment they belong in.
00:47:34.000I mean, otherwise, that's how evolution works.
00:47:36.000Yeah, but when you put them in the zoo, they're like, look, we have all our food.
00:47:39.000There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in.
00:47:41.000You know, like a kid that never leaves his parents' basement and plays Call of Duty until he's 35. You know, probably doesn't have, like, the best social intelligence.
00:47:51.000Probably going to be pretty awkward when you get them out in the wild.
00:51:16.000But it was just such a, I don't know, it's this awe.
00:51:22.000I think this is one of the best things about the de-extinction work and the species preservation work that Colossal is doing is that we live in such a crazy time.
00:51:38.000And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting, going and spending time in the woods or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience.
00:51:49.000This way to feel genuine wonder and excitement and enthusiasm and Khaleesi's birth.
00:51:55.000I wasn't there for the birth of the boys.
00:51:56.000I was in the UK at a conference and it was very sad.
00:52:00.000and I had COVID and I was asleep and trying to recover.
00:52:04.000And the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, Where are you?
00:55:13.000And it goes through interactions that Florida men have, and one of them is about a dude who was kind of lost in his life, and he climbed over a fence that he shouldn't have climbed over and went for a swim in a lake.
00:55:25.000and then an alligator bit off his arm.
00:55:43.000In this video, and I was trying to sleep, so I'm probably wrong.
00:55:47.000In this video, he laid on the side of the lake, like probably bleeding to death, when an alligator that was in the shape of his mom, I think, came up to him and told him he had to get his ass up and move or he was going to die.
00:55:58.000And he was like, okay, mom, I'll do that.
00:58:43.000One of the things that we did to save Florida panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced panthers from Texas, which are the closest genetically and geographically to Florida panthers.
00:58:53.000They were probably connected at some point until humans created stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth.
00:58:59.000And when Texas Panthers were introduced in the mid-1990s, that population recovered.
00:59:25.000And things want to survive, so they do.
00:59:27.000So you get these highly inbred populations and people fixed it by moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new genetic diversity.
00:59:36.000And that's a great way of bringing diversity back into a population.
00:59:41.000It's what we're trying to do with our red wolf project.
00:59:43.000Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world.
00:59:47.000They're the only endemic American wolf and they are nearly extinct.
00:59:52.000There's a successful captive breeding program.
00:59:54.000And a few years ago, some of the people that we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridget von Holt, who's at Princeton, who's a friend of mine.
01:00:01.000She was working and discovered because people were sending her photos.
01:00:05.000See, this is why you have to pay attention to people who you think might be crazy when they send you pictures If it's real, I want to be the person who finds it, right?
01:00:24.000So Bridget says this guy, who lives down in the coast of Louisiana, sent her a picture of an animal that she's like, that is not a wolf, and it is not a coyote, and I don't know what it is, and it's crazy.
01:00:37.000And she looked at it and she goes, yeah.
01:01:35.000But if we can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a way of concentrating more diversity.
01:01:42.000Better able to pick which parts are red wolf, either by breeding individuals or by editing their DNA, which is technology that we developed on the path to dire wolf, right?
01:01:52.000And we can actually help this population to survive.
01:01:55.000So there are ways that we can do this for mammals that are going to have really amazing consequences for the way we can protect biodiversity.
01:02:03.000Well, that's fascinating for things like red wolves and things like that.
01:02:10.000When you think of the python problem in Florida, I heard the worst idea.
01:02:14.000The worst idea, they were talking about introducing honey badgers.
01:02:20.000I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.
01:02:23.000Because we have never, as a species, humans, introduced a thing to try to control a thing, and that thing that we introduced just went horribly wrong.
01:06:42.000You should look it up and read the whole story because it involved these two guys.
01:06:47.000One of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America.
01:06:50.000And another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things.
01:06:54.000And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other.
01:06:57.000But they came together on part of this congressman's team.
01:07:00.000The scout thought it was a great idea.
01:07:02.000He wanted people to bring in all sorts of animals from Africa and put them in national parks so that people would want to go to national parks because they could hunt them.
01:07:09.000And that would, you know, have more reason for people to want to support the idea of national parks at the time, which is great.
01:07:15.000like, you know, this utility of nature.
01:07:17.000It seems weird compared to how we think of it now, but I think this is really interesting.
01:07:27.000And then the congressman, when he was pulling together the team of people that he wanted to be on his side for this, he went to a show that this other guy, the sort of con man, traveling salesman, pimp, escape artist dude, was having about how he was an intrepid explorer.
01:07:42.000And he was like, that guy is an expert as well.
01:07:53.000This con man, he was like, well, you know, there's plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from a baby's bottle with no evidence whatsoever, right?
01:08:02.000And everybody was like, yeah, awesome.
01:08:03.000Even the New York Times was completely behind it.
01:08:06.000They published an editorial talking about, they called hippos lake cow bacon.
01:08:36.000Failed House Bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing the hippopotamus that would be killed to make lake cow bacon.
01:08:50.000So they had testified in front of Congress too late for it to come up to a vote that year, and then just other shit happened, and people stopped paying attention.
01:10:42.000Where did the wild boars emanate from?
01:10:44.000What's their original country of origin?
01:10:46.000I think, well, I have a friend who works on domestication of pigs, and they've published a bunch of different papers that are always contradicting each other.
01:10:53.000He gave a hilarious talk at a meeting I was at last week about how he keeps saying something different as a way of, you know, keeping to publish more papers.
01:11:00.000He was just being nice about how he's open to changing his mind with new data, which I think is a valued trait in a scientist.
01:11:07.000But yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia, I think is the origin, or at least the domestication.
01:11:12.000And normally things are domesticated around where they were.
01:12:52.000They're not invasive because they do live.
01:13:04.000I think there was something I read about that yesterday.
01:13:07.000But the wolves that they've introduced to, like outside of Aspen in particular, I have a friend who has a ranch out there and I posted about it on Instagram.
01:13:15.000He actually sent me some more pictures yesterday.
01:13:18.000And I was going to post about it, but so much crazy stuff was happening in LA.
01:13:21.000I'm like, this is not the time to talk about, like, wolf problems.
01:13:24.000But they're just killing calves and eating their liver.
01:13:29.000They're just eating the tasty parts and leaving these calves alone.
01:13:32.000And these people are on a 24-hour run ragged, you know, they have these – And they're not allowed to shoot them, and, you know, they spent millions of dollars bringing them there, and they're just eating cattle.
01:13:54.000Yeah, I imagine it's really devastating to see something like that happening and know that somebody else made this decision and that you, who actually experience it, weren't.
01:14:05.000I mean, I imagine the people who voted for that, I wonder what they imagined.
01:14:12.000You get a bunch of people that live in the cities that don't have a lot of experience in nature and wild ecosystems, and then you introduce this idea, we're going to bring wolves back to their native habitat.
01:14:24.000What they're not telling you is, like, what this rancher told me is that, first of all, the original wolves that were introduced into Colorado were wolves that were taken from Oregon because these wolves were preying on cattle.
01:14:37.000Oh, so they already had a taste for it.
01:14:41.000And so then they brought them into Colorado where they And so then they moved them from this area where they were preying on cattle and put them outside of Aspen, where they start preying on cattle.
01:15:00.000And it's all being instigated by the Colorado governor.
01:15:04.000It's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists.
01:15:08.000I mean, we can see from Yellowstone how important having this keystone predator is in ecosystems where they can be and where there is space for them.
01:15:17.000But the land is not the same as everywhere as it is in Yellowstone.
01:15:20.000And we need to be able to make, you know, when I was at Santa Cruz, I taught an introductory biology class for non-majors where my goal was to give the students tools to be able to think on their own, which is amazing.
01:15:35.000And their midterm exam was a debate, and the topic of the debate was that wolves should be introduced into California.
01:15:47.000It's like when you're dealing with people that have cattle ranches, and this is their entire livelihood, and all they're doing now is just compensating them for the calves that get killed, and then so you have less output every year.
01:15:59.000So it's like the whole thing is crazy.
01:16:01.000They were already on their way to do a natural migration into Colorado.
01:16:27.000People have kind of like come to this sort of – People recognize that there was an overpopulation of elk for sure.
01:16:36.000They used to have these hunting seasons where they would hunt them in the snow in the winter because there were so many of them.
01:16:43.000They wanted you to just be able to pick them out and just shoot them for meat because they really didn't have the resources because they didn't have the apex predators because a lion can only eat so many of them.
01:16:53.000So mountain lions weren't really putting the dent in the population that a pack of intelligent hunting Cooperative animals like wolves could do.
01:17:02.000So they brought it back, and it's relatively successful.
01:17:06.000They've knocked the population of elk down more than 40%, but that's probably good.
01:17:12.000I mean, not for the people that hunt elk.
01:18:02.000They do this debate, and I did it four years in a row, and every year, After they had to do this, after they had to put themselves in somebody else's shoes and think about it from their perspective, it would shift.
01:18:14.000And the majority of people would be like, yeah, no, it's a bad idea.
01:18:17.000I think if you give people the tools to be able to think, they can imagine themselves in a different scenario.
01:18:34.000Right, but you shouldn't be able to vote on things that you're not educated in.
01:18:38.000It's like if you allow people to vote on things that have tremendous consequences to the ecosystem, like a reintroduction of an apex predator, and they don't understand those consequences, they just have this very utopian idea of what it means to bring back wolves.
01:19:03.000They're going to eat a lot of things that are penned up, whether they're sheep or goats or whatever people have that they can get at easily.
01:19:11.000They're not going to chase down a herd of elk.
01:19:38.000You know, when you look into a predator's eyes, there's something about it.
01:19:41.000It's like you realize, like, oh my god, I'm like a water balloon.
01:19:44.000I'm so, you know, we're just like so weak and soft.
01:19:48.000Yeah, we've been putting together, not because we're not going to release them, the next step for their lives is to study them and see how they're changed by their DNA being modified, measure things like their gene expression, their growth, their health span, their lifespan, learn the consequences of the work that we're doing, learn how they interact with the habitat, introduce Khaleesi to her brothers and the next animals that we make into that pack, to make a small pack, but they will stay on that secure, expansive, ecological preserve.
01:20:22.000How will you prevent them from breeding?
01:20:24.000Well, at the moment, they're separated.
01:20:28.000But we'll probably use subcutaneous, you know, you can put a hormonal, So we don't want to castrate them, which would obviously be a way to stop it, because we want them to be able to reach their full size because we want to know what that would be.
01:20:48.000And we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that.
01:21:51.000We want them back to help with our population problems.
01:21:57.000So let's get to the criticisms because there's people that are saying that these are not dire wolves, that what you've done is just manipulate the DNA of a great wolf.
01:22:09.000They are direwolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves.
01:22:14.000We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals, one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal that lived 13,000 years ago.
01:22:22.000And we lined them up next to each other and figured out what it is that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf.
01:22:28.000And then we used the tools of genome engineering to...
01:22:39.000And that has created these animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that direwolf coat.
01:22:47.000That coat, the light coat color that you see, was something that we absolutely could not have known without the ancient DNA because no one has ever seen.
01:22:57.000When we published a paper before I joined Colossal many years ago that was about dire wolf evolution, we had a paleo artist reconstruct what dire wolves looked like, and they made them red, or red-y brown.
01:23:09.000And that's because so many other animals seem to be red-y brown, like mammoths or Neanderthals seem to have had red hair, and so we thought, sure, why not?
01:23:16.000We didn't know because we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we could use to see what color their coats were.
01:23:21.000But both of these two animals that we had higher coverage DNA from had How are coats, the hair color and eye color and things like that.
01:23:34.000That suggested they had light colored coats.
01:23:50.000And I'm sure there were different colors, but it's interesting to me that two animals that lived so far apart from each other in time and geography would both have this light color coat.
01:24:00.000So maybe it wasn't that every dire wolf had a light.
01:24:09.000So if they lived 13,000 years ago, you're talking about the Ice Age, right?
01:26:07.000And the hot bears go out and do this, yeah.
01:26:09.000So whenever they overlap geographically, But what's interesting about this is that we always find the hybrids living like brown bears, even though it's probably that the mom is a polar bear.
01:26:23.000Because a brown bear boy will wake up from hibernation and go out onto polar bear.
01:26:31.000And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator, whereas brown bear females are seasonal.
01:26:38.000So a polar bear female will ovulate in the presence of a male.
01:26:42.000So the male comes up to her and will mate her.
01:26:45.000The other way around, if a polar bear bear, brown male, had encountered a brown bear female, he's probably more likely to eat her than to mate her.
01:26:56.000So why do we always find the hybrids living with brown bears instead of living with polar bears?
01:27:01.000And the polar bear biologists who we've worked with, I've worked a lot of time with Ian Sterling, who's a fantastic polar bear biologist from Canadian Wildlife Research.
01:27:10.000And his hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.
01:27:31.000But they hide in, I mean, they even have those things where they cover their nose with their hand, the black nose with their hand, because the black nose.
01:28:15.000This is actually how we discovered it because we found that the place where brown bears hybridized with polar bears during the last ice age was probably the ABC Islands off the coast of Alaska because the ice was that far south at the peak of the last ice age.
01:28:30.000And brown bear boys would move onto the islands as the habitat got better where they encountered these populations of polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice receded pretty much.
01:28:39.000And so they hybridized there and all brown bears.
01:28:42.000Polar bears in North America today have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears.
01:29:25.000Is this part of the problem with the criticism of the science is that we are being very specific about what we're calling these things based on our own definitions that we've all agreed upon?
01:29:50.000It's kind of that, but it's also that...
01:29:55.000So there's this group of academic scientists who are trying to say, trying to grasp so tightly to this very precise definition of a species as having to do with DNA, how much DNA matches something else.
01:30:11.000I think the reason that we keep having this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about species concepts.
01:30:18.000Come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts.
01:30:22.000And they're all for a particular purpose.
01:30:24.000You know, if I am wanting to have a conversation about dinosaur fossils or anything that's a fossil, I'm going to use the morphological species concept because that's all I've got.
01:30:35.000I'm going to compare the shape of this bone with the shape of this bone.
01:30:38.000And if they're similar enough to my trained eye, I'm going to call that a species.
01:32:18.000You go to the bars in Dawson City, and they still have this thing where there's the bell.
01:32:22.000And if you ring the bell, the person who's rung the bell is buying a round for everybody who's in the bar.
01:32:27.000And you learn, after you've been there for a while, that a person is only ringing that bell.
01:32:31.000Because he wants the right to talk to everybody who's in there because he wants to fight with somebody, right?
01:32:36.000This is somebody who's like a diamond driller who's just got paid in cash for the first time and he's like, now I want to fuck somebody up, right?
01:32:42.000That's what they want to do when they get paid?
01:32:44.000Rings a bell and then goes from table to table sitting around with people and we, the nerdy scientists, paleogeneticists sitting in the corner are trying to just be super nice Canadians talking to these people.
01:33:07.000There's gold mines like the site outside Fairbanks that are super productive like this, and every one of the miners out there has this cool collection.
01:33:15.000Not any nearly as cool as his, but because he's got so much land, they've been collecting it for such a long time.
01:33:22.000Oh, and I heard those great stories about how he donated material to the American Museum.
01:33:26.000Well, it was previous owners of his property.
01:33:55.000Because I'm sure it's true, because they have so much of that material at the American Museum.
01:34:00.000When I started working on bison, and I've worked on bison for 30 years, right?
01:34:03.000When I started working on bison, getting back to the species concept, I was trying to figure out if the DNA mapped to these species names, and they've got a fantastic There's so much bone there, broken pieces or other pieces, and you get to the point where you're like, what the hell am I going to do with this?
01:34:20.000Now, they shouldn't have dumped it in the river, obviously.
01:34:56.000That was when most of the collection came from.
01:34:58.000There was a ton of gold mining activity in the 50s and 60s around Fairbanks.
01:35:01.000So what they have found on John's property that's so spectacular is that it's really only a few acres that he's getting all this stuff from, which makes you question, like, how did all these animals die off in mass in this very small area?
01:35:16.000Where you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks.
01:35:31.000So you get this really fast, thick buildup of this really fine silt that preserves the bones really well.
01:35:36.000So when we go, the gold miners, they're placer mining.
01:35:39.000So they're taking these high-pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt.
01:35:43.000Then they let it thaw for a bit, and then they wash away the next layer.
01:35:46.000They're trying to get to the gold-bearing gravel that's underneath.
01:35:49.000But while they're doing that, literally thousands, tens of thousands of bones come out of there.
01:35:53.000And in some places, it's more rich, more intense than others, but it's there.
01:35:57.000I've taken students up there, and they're all mopey because of the mosquitoes, and they're mopey because they're 19. And they're like, oh, we're never going to find anything.
01:36:07.000They jump out of the trucks, and they're like, holy shit, is that a mammoth tooth?
01:36:49.000It was probably mastodons because it was these teeth that were melting out of the salt lakes and things like that in the part of the United States.
01:37:19.000He was like, Comte de Buffon, Comte de Buffon, I think was his name.
01:37:22.000I'm terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong.
01:37:24.000But he was writing a series of books about natural history.
01:37:27.000And the fifth, I think, of his books was called The Theory of American Degeneracy.
01:37:33.000And when it was essentially about how And it was during the War of Independence, and so it was really popular to hate on American stuff, right?
01:37:47.000And so he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more if he'd tried.
01:37:51.000He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson.
01:37:53.000He was busy fighting with Linnaeus, and Linnaeus was busy classifying things.
01:37:58.000And this guy was like, there's no more than 200 species of animals anywhere.
01:38:01.000So why would you bother with that sort of academic silliness?
01:38:05.000Rather than think about how the animals got this way in the first place.
01:38:09.000In his mind, discovering why American animals were so shit was the right way to be spending your time as a natural historian.
01:38:56.000And so there was probably something in it.
01:38:59.000So Jefferson went so far as he had a moose sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it was like partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody put the wrong antlers on its head.
01:39:42.000What I don't understand about this is how a person who is a scientist can look at how everything has changed in a couple hundred years or in...
01:41:45.000And he sent a letter, and it was a handwritten letter on his personal stationery, which had a naked girl dancing around a pole, which gave him, obviously, more credibility.
01:42:02.000And he sent a couple of cuttings of insulation from his basement, telling me that the family of Bigfoots that lived in his basement, he had seen urinating on this insulation.
01:42:12.000And so if I was going to get Bigfoot DNA, it was going to be from that insulation.
01:43:13.000Well, most things from paleoanthropology are, you know, I'm going to rewrite human history because I found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth.
01:43:35.000So we're essentially getting the tiniest little bits of information and we're trying to piece together this understanding of millions and millions and millions of years of creatures on this earth.
01:43:48.000And to do so arrogantly seems so crazy.
01:44:17.000So I can learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people that are around.
01:44:22.000And if I am lucky enough to get it from these bones that I know is real about human history, and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in the beginning of ancient DNA hated it because it was going in and going, oh no.
01:44:56.000And we've been able to learn so many things.
01:45:03.000I mean, I know people get hung up on DNA and how you need lots of DNA to define a species, but we have been able now to look.
01:45:13.000I think one of the coolest things that we've learned from the Neanderthal genome is that we all know We kind of get that now.
01:45:25.000You can get your DNA tested at one of these DNA testing places, and they'll even tell you how much Neanderthal you are so you can have a competition with your brother and your cousins, right?
01:45:38.000Less well-known, though, is that we all have a different 2% to 5% Neanderthal DNA.
01:45:43.000And if you were to go around the world and collect all of the Neanderthal DNA sequences that are in people alive today, we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome.
01:45:59.000Are they actually extinct, if we can put together 93% of their genome by...
01:46:06.000That's just a fun philosophical question.
01:46:08.000Second is, what the hell is going on in that other 7%, right?
01:46:13.000And if we want to know what it is that makes us human, that's where we look, right?
01:46:18.000That's where we ask, what are the mutations that arose since we split from Neanderthals, that if a baby got that part of the Neanderthal DNA, it didn't survive.
01:47:21.000So we have species concepts that we designed that allow us to have a conversation and know what we're talking about.
01:47:28.000So when I talk about, and I call this fossil a name, you and I know that we're having that same conversation.
01:47:33.000If I am in charge of I might use geography to figure out what one species is and what another species is.
01:47:49.000The species concept that we learn when we take our introductory biology course is a species concept that was very, But we know that lots of things violate that.
01:49:36.000You should look that up because this is going to be like there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these.
01:49:40.000Anyway, so people in the early 20th century decided that they wanted to make hybrid cattle and bison because they wanted animals that were as robust in the North American prairies as bison, but as tame and easy to deal with as cattle.
01:49:56.000So they started breeding them together.
01:49:57.000And we're just like, this isn't working.
01:55:11.000We can actually get DNA directly from sediments.
01:55:14.000And this has been a relatively recent revelation.
01:55:17.000Super cool because it means that you can take a plug of dirt from the inside of a lake and you can reconstruct the whole ecosystem as it changes over time.
01:55:28.000But recently there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada.
01:55:34.000They found mammoth DNA and horse DNA in Canada in these really well-preserved parts of the world where we've been working that date to probably around 4,000, 5,000 years ago.
01:55:58.000And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.
01:56:01.000But until we find DNA directly in dirt, I mean, this is just showing us how much we don't know, how much we have to be really willing to...
01:56:12.000And we don't just throw away the model with new data, but we have to incorporate the new data.
01:56:16.000You can't be arrogant about the model.
01:56:18.000So the model is, if you correct me if I'm wrong, that horses evolved in North America, but it went to other continents, but then eventually died off in North America.
01:56:50.000We were talking about this the other day, the big debate that happened with Clovis first, that they used to think that human beings, they came over here at a very specific time We've got to rethink this.
01:57:04.000And we're being forced to rethink this.
01:57:06.000And there was another time where archaeologists were horrible to each other.
01:57:10.000These scientists were horrible to each other because they attacked the guy who made the discovery.
01:57:19.000Which is this arrogance of these people.
01:57:21.000Yeah, they did that to Jacques Sankmaris, who discovered the bones in Alaska, northern Canada, that had cut marks on them that were older than the accepted time of when humans could be there.
01:57:30.000And now everybody accepts that as it's true.
01:58:32.000Yeah, I don't know anything about this.
01:58:33.000Yeah, they uncovered 6,000-year-old skeletons in Colombia that belonged to a mysterious group of people that could rewrite human history.
01:58:39.000It doesn't match any of the other known indigenous populations.
01:58:42.000Their genetic signature reveals a distinct, now extinct lineage that may have descended from the earliest humans to reach South America, one that diverged early and remained genetically isolated for thousands of years.
01:58:55.000Yeah, this is, I mean, I have no doubt that this is true.
01:58:57.000I mean, how many of these human settlements are gone now?
01:59:02.000And so we don't have any evidence of them.
01:59:03.000And they're all lineages that they all go back to humans originating in Africa at some point.
01:59:32.000They were showing us these skeletons that they found in Peru that are very bizarre.
01:59:36.000And people initially thought they were a hoax, but then they found these newer ones that they've discovered that they have three fingers and three toes, and they've done CAT scans on these things, and they seem to be human or human-like, these things.
02:00:20.000Because the CAT scans, when they show the 3D CAT scan of the body, you're seeing all the areas where the cartilage is, but it doesn't look totally human because this is it.
02:00:34.000They have three fingers and three toes.
02:01:09.000Go back to that image where it shows the back.
02:01:13.000Jamie, where it was like, yeah, like, when you see this thing, this guy's not, like, showing you the full body in this particular image.
02:01:20.000Whatever the hell that thing is on the back of his head is weird.
02:01:22.000The shape of its head is very weird, but it looks real.
02:01:27.000Like, if you guys could find that that's real, I know you won't bring back Neanderthals, but why don't you bring back one of them little three-toed alien people?
02:02:29.000This is how old these drawings are in these tapestries that show these weird three-toed, three-fingered Things that look like a little one of those things.
02:02:42.000So was this another type of human that lived with us at some point in time?
02:04:04.000And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there, they're there at the same time as Denisovans were there and Neanderthals were there.
02:04:10.000They would have, if they could have hybridized with humans, they probably would have.
02:06:06.000But it's just, you know, when AI gets involved in this stuff, when we have sentient AI that you can use, Like, you know, that's where things get weird.
02:06:26.000Like if we decide, okay, let's bring back the woolly mammoth.
02:06:29.000Okay, what's going to be the negative impact of bringing back the woolly mammoth?
02:07:40.000Well, obviously you guys are working with the red wolves and you plan to use which are normal native animals in North America that are threatened, which most people would agree is a good idea to give them a healthy population and release them.
02:07:52.000And that's the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh, this work could be used for conservation.
02:07:58.000It is being used for conservation, yes.
02:08:00.000That's so infuriating about some of these haters.
02:08:02.000It's like they don't even bother looking it up.
02:08:04.000Or they don't care because they just want attention and they just want to be negative and that's the best way to get attention.
02:10:11.000These technologies are not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors had because we are directly changing DNA sequences, but they are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to fix some of the things that we have fucked up already.
02:10:27.000And I think the biggest challenge that I have is to show people that deciding not We're still operating within regulatory frameworks.
02:10:45.000We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality.
02:10:50.000But if we decide that that's too scary, that we don't trust ourselves, that we're always going to make the worst decision, first of all, it's that attitude of negativity, right?
02:10:58.000It's the, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad.
02:11:20.000But we have the capacity to slow that rate.
02:11:23.000We have the capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to the rapid changes in their habitat.
02:11:30.000What if we could make Hawaiian honeycreepers resilient?
02:11:39.000Or figure out how to transfer resistance to bleaching to corals around the world.
02:11:45.000Or anything that we could do to save some of these habitats that we know are in trouble because of this combination of people expanding and natural change to the ecosystem that we just don't.
02:11:57.000We don't want to see spruce forests disappearing because it's getting drier, and that means that they can't make enough resin to fight off the beetles, right?
02:12:06.000We have the capacity to use these tools, or at least to think about how we might develop and deploy these tools, to have a future that is both filled with people and biodiverse.
02:12:15.000I think what people are concerned with is the crude application of these techniques and this science when it's in its infancy.
02:12:26.000And if you just take that and draw it out to its natural conclusion with improvements over time and innovation over time, it could be something that's of an enormous benefit to not just animal species, but humans.
02:12:52.000I mean, having And I think we're getting gradually more accustomed to using these technologies to cure genetic diseases, like the baby that was in the news over the last couple of weeks, baby KJ, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease.
02:13:18.000He had a genetic change, just a single mutation that meant that he couldn't digest protein.
02:13:24.000And people came together and mounted this incredible collaborative effort to find a cure using the tools of genome engineering for this child.
02:13:33.000And he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing, having gone into his own body to cure this particular disease.
02:13:55.000And we always have to start somewhere.
02:13:56.000Like, yes, it took six months, and it's one baby, and it took a lot of people to do this.
02:14:00.000But this is the beginning of how we can use these tools to cure your cancer, to figure out how we can engineer a fix for a baby who's born with cystic fibrosis.
02:14:10.000Or if you get blood cancer, can we edit the blood cells to make that cancer mutation just go away?
02:14:19.000And for de-extinction and conservation, this is also just the beginning.
02:14:23.000We've figured out how to learn DNA sequences from the past and actually transform that into an animal that has That's bigger than a gray wolf, and it's more muscular than a gray wolf.
02:14:35.000We've made dire wolves using dire wolf DNA and these amazing tools that we will have the potential to use to stop other species from becoming extinct.
02:16:08.000But if you did that, that would be where it would get sketchy.
02:16:11.000If you reintroduce an animal that can run 60 miles an hour to the plains, those poor antelopes who've been living it up.
02:16:19.000Because they evolved, you know that, pronghorn antelopes, the reason why they're so fast, they evolved to get away from these cheetahs that don't exist anymore.
02:16:44.000I mean, for every species, there will be different work that has to be done to figure out whether and where is a good idea to reintroduce them.
02:16:51.000And for each of the species that we're working with, we have councils that we've put together in the part of the world where we would bring them back together to have conversations about where they should go, whether they should go, how many there should be, and who is willing to be the long-term stewards.
02:17:05.000Now, I know that they've talked about releasing woolly mammoths if they ever do make them in Siberia, right?
02:18:09.000This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process.
02:18:13.000And like with the direwolves, there will be a stage in between the first calf being born and understanding how they're able to thrive in whatever habitat they're in.
02:18:21.000And these are really important parts of the de-extinction process.
02:18:24.000I was blown away when I heard that mammoths lived up till about 4,000 years ago on an island.
02:18:29.000Yes, Wrangell Island off the coast of Siberia, but now maybe even...
02:19:06.000And because the taphonomy, which means like how things are going to preserve, differs so much depending on where you are in the world.
02:19:13.000Like when things die in Alaska and you have this glacial silt that preserves things really quickly, we're probably finding a lot of things, right?
02:19:20.000But we've never found woolly rhinos in North America.
02:19:23.000So the hypothesis is they never made it across.
02:19:28.000When the sea level was lower, the Bering Strait was not a sea level.
02:23:51.000Or he would just like tuck his tail and run, and just leave me there to defend myself.
02:23:56.000But, you know, they know that like the ones that they get, the ones that are problem cats in Northern California, when they found them and they do these depredation tags, they found that 50% of their diet is dogs and cats.
02:24:28.000There's another one that Hearst, I think Hearst collected one of the last ones of the California golden bear in Southern California, had him shipped up to San Francisco, and he became the bear that's the inspiration for the flag.
02:24:40.000We actually sequenced his genome, too.
02:24:42.000The last guy that got killed by a grizzly bear, or a brown bear, whatever it was, in California, they have a town named after him, Lebec, California.
02:25:23.000Because the thing about it is, once you have them in your area, you can't manage them.
02:25:30.000because then people have decided that they're precious.
02:25:32.000So once they become problems and once they become overpopulated, like Montana has a bit of an issue with that now, They would like people to be able to hunt them.
02:27:01.000It's around the time when they come out and they're eating all the salmon because they have a competition between which is the best fat bear and you get to vote for them and then there's a fat bear that wins.
02:27:11.000To me, that's the most fascinating species of bears, is the bears that live on those salmon rivers, because they don't care about people at all.
02:27:19.000There's this crazy video of this guy that's sitting in a lawn chair, and this bear comes up beside him, and this bear...
02:30:59.000There was a paper that was published maybe a decade ago or so where people had done niche modeling, environmental niche modeling based on Bigfoot sightings.
02:32:29.000And my brain was going, I think it was a bear.
02:32:32.000Well, that's what this niche modeling or environmental modeling study found, is they looked at all the reported sightings of Bigfoot and then created what would be the environmental niche for a Bigfoot, and it pretty much just overlapped the niche for bears, for brown bears.
02:32:47.000I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense.
02:32:49.000But the weird thing about it is the Native Americans, because Native Americans have a name for that creature, and they have many names for it in different tribes.
02:32:59.000It's not like an isolated thing, but they don't have a lot of mythical animals.
02:33:03.000have fake animals other than Sasquatch.
02:34:23.000And it's just so weird to think that, you know, we live in houses and we have internet and we, you know, you drive an electric car to work and living in this sophisticated world.
02:34:34.000But not all the people are living in this world.
02:34:37.000And there's indigenous people that are living the same way they've lived, but now they have a snowmobile.
02:35:06.000I mean, people have used the word de-extinction, which I kind of hate because I can't figure out how to conjugate it in a way that doesn't make me cringe.
02:36:21.000I mean, why did short-faced bears go extinct?
02:36:23.000Probably because nobody wanted a bear that stood 12 feet high.
02:36:27.000What are you going to do about it, though?
02:36:29.000Imagine, would you imagine the daunting task of getting a group of guys together with spears to go after a short-faced bear when you know at least...
02:38:33.000I think dog domestication is one of those places where both we come to terms with what we don't know and the opportunity to discover new things.
02:38:43.000The very first scientific paper that said when dogs were domesticated looked at a type of DNA that's only inherited from your mom called mitochondrial DNA.
02:38:53.000Our cells have a nucleus that has the DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act.
02:39:25.000There weren't human populations, societies, which is kind of what you need for dog domestication because they're attracted to the garbage or the living around where people were.
02:39:35.000So you need communities of people that are staying in place together for some time before you can have dog domestication.
02:39:40.000Do we know for sure there weren't human populations like that 150,000 years ago?
02:39:44.000We don't, but we do know now that dogs probably aren't that old.
02:39:52.000Which is because we don't know everything.
02:39:54.000And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils.
02:40:00.000We don't have the DNA, and the fossils just didn't preserve.
02:40:04.000I think right now what people are happiest with is that it was probably sometime after the peak of the last ice age, sometime 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
02:40:14.000And I'm not sure where, because again, probably in a warmer spot.
02:40:28.000But what's cool about this date, 15 to 20,000 years ago, is that most of these people are like, yeah, that's probably the date for dogs.
02:40:34.000Which means if dogs only form when there are human communities that are together, groups of people that are living together in the same place for a long time, that they were around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
02:40:47.000That is not what archaeologists think, right?
02:40:50.000So these two weights of evidence are saying, you know, we still don't know.
02:41:06.000We like to have ways of classifying things.
02:41:08.000And so there was recently, a couple of friends of mine have published a paper in which they've redefined how you consider something domestic.
02:41:16.000And they say a domestic population is something that can only survive within a human environment, within a human niche.
02:41:22.000And if you think of that as what our dogs are, right, they can only really survive and breed as dogs within this human niche, then you need a lot.
02:41:30.000Of humans around, and you need a sort of steady stream of the crap that humans produce to do this.
02:41:37.000Like, it's still, yeah, maybe there were hunter-gatherer populations that were more, you know, established somewhere in the South where we don't have dog bones.
02:42:08.000But we don't know if dogs are outside of the diversity of gray wolves, so it's an extinct type of gray wolf that was the predator of dogs, or if they fall within the diversity of all the lineages.
02:42:34.000Well, dogs are the most fascinating to me.
02:42:37.000Because it's so obvious that there's manipulation involved.
02:42:41.000It's so obvious that through selective breeding and also getting these animals to get accustomed to people, getting close to the fire, feeding them so they don't have to hunt anymore, and then they bark when intruders come.
02:42:52.000And we developed this sort of relationship where we worked together.
02:43:31.000But, you know, is our backyard a laboratory?
02:43:34.000If I say, I like the way that dog looks, but I like the way that that one can swim in water.
02:43:39.000And I bet if I breed them together, I can make one that has this double layer coat so they can go get in that frozen water, but they'll still have that, like, cute look or something.
02:44:03.000I mean, when we graft plants together, I mean, that is like all of the vineyards in France, which are grafted onto American rootstocks because of the introduction of phylloxera, this aphid that came from North America that was going to completely devastate the wine industry.
02:44:17.000Now they're all spliced onto American rootstocks that can survive this aphid.
02:44:23.000I talked to a rancher in California, and they were telling me that I think it was either the It's amazing that the plants can survive that, that they don't go like, yo, that's not me.
02:44:48.000Again, that's another cool thing that we can do with this gene editing technology is we can turn off the genes that would cause that rejection to happen.
02:44:55.000So maybe someday we can use pig organs in the place of humans and save people from dying.
02:45:01.000Or we can just re-engineer a new version of your organs.
02:45:06.000This thing called the organoids where you can actually grow in a dish in a lab a version of a little brain.
02:45:13.000Something that approximates a brain or that approximates a heart or a kidney or something else.
02:45:19.000We're using this at Colossal, for example, to test hypotheses about what Changes we might make to bring about, to resurrect, to de-extinct the phenotypes that we're interested in.
02:45:29.000If we grow an organoid that grows hair, can we see what that hair looks like without having to make a mammoth in order to see what that change is going to do?
02:45:37.000But it has really amazing potential for personalized medicine.
02:45:41.000So I can take some of your cells, if you get a tumor, I can grow them in this dish, and I can challenge those cells with different drug cocktails to see what works before I put them in you.
02:45:50.000This technology is so cool and really just beginning.
02:46:08.000And the only way to find out is to do experiments like what you guys are doing.
02:46:12.000And so that's one of the reasons why some of this pushback is so silly.
02:46:16.000Like, would you rather no one ever do this work?
02:46:19.000Or would you like to be the one who does the work?
02:46:22.000Or is it just that you think the work should never be done?
02:46:43.000Because it's very gate-keeped even inside of academia, right?
02:46:47.000You work for a university and you have to get the approval of all the other people and you have to be politically aligned with them and everyone has to say the right things on Twitter.
02:46:56.000You know, it's like there's a lot of weirdness, a lot of groupthink that comes along with all that stuff.
02:47:00.000And then you have to play politics in order to get funding.
02:47:06.000Even if you have tenure, you know, when you see this with certain scientists that have very outside-the-box ideas, they get pushed out and they can't get funding anymore.
02:47:17.000Or if they don't agree with a certain narrative, what's being pushed, whether it's public health or the environment or anything, they get ostracized, even if they're actually talking about real data and science.
02:47:27.000Yeah, I think, you know, we can agree that it's a mess, right?
02:47:34.000Is genuine, real science that comes out of the university system, of the academic system, that we need?
02:47:41.000All the technology that led to MRIs, the early technology that gave us CRISPR, this gene editing platform, was developed using funding from the government in scientific labs by people who are willing to take risks and step outside of that box.
02:47:55.000And then it's taken outside of there and it's turned into all of these cool things.
02:47:59.000I mean, there has to be a place where we get both of these things.
02:48:03.000There's some things that no one is ever going to build a business around until it exists.
02:48:07.000And we need this public system in order to do that.
02:48:12.000Yeah, and that's what's so scary about what's going on with politics and funding and research.
02:48:20.000It's because it's like as soon as you stop defunding research, you start making it more scarce and then making people – Right.
02:48:36.000We are going to lose the place we have had innovators in biotechnology, innovators in physics, innovators in all of these technologies, because we've had such a robust system.
02:49:24.000When I heard this the first time, and I've only heard about the first one, my first thought was, you know, is this deliberate or is this super naivete on the part of the student?
02:49:34.000It's coming from China, which scares the shit out of me.
02:49:35.000Because if China wanted to cripple America's food supply, there'd be a great way to compromise basically everything.
02:49:41.000There is a country that is investing in science.
02:49:44.000Yeah, just their drone technologies off the charts.
02:49:47.000I was watching a documentary yesterday on the autonomous production of coal, and so they have these coal mines now that are done entirely with electric trucks, and everything's done with AI, and humans aren't involved at all.
02:50:01.000So these trucks go, they dig, they mine, they fill the trucks, they bring the coal back, and then when they're low on batteries, they charge themselves.
02:50:10.000Yeah, and they're running 24 hours a day around the clock.
02:51:49.000Another Chinese scientist also going to the University of Michigan.
02:51:53.000Boy, that's also really crazy because the thing about China and their scientists that come over to America is they all have to check in with the CCP.
02:52:01.000Like, if you are a Chinese scientist and you're from China and you're working in America, you got to check in.
02:52:07.000Which means, like, how much of this research is just getting shared with China?
02:52:27.000I worry about that, like your information, the stuff that you guys are working on, if that stuff can be compromised, if someone can get a hold of it, and then they start doing This stuff is all out there anyway, right?
02:53:17.000He actually did some training in the U.S. His name is He.
02:53:21.000But he was trying to use gene editing tools to...
02:53:36.000It's the one that stops the HIV from entering the cells where it then kills the cells.
02:53:40.000And I think this was a story that was broken by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of days before it was announced.
02:53:46.000But he thought that he was going to be able to announce this to great fanfare in front of a community that was going to celebrate him for having done this.
02:55:01.000So the reason that he got whatever ethical permission he did in China to do this is because they were children that were born by IVF because the dad had AIDS.
02:55:12.000And so what they were trying to do was create, what he claimed he was trying to do was create an environment where they would never accidentally get it, I guess, if there's blood.
02:56:25.000When you're saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have a conversation with another person and shut up so that you're actually listening to the other person?
02:56:45.000And then once it's defined, if you look for associations between genes at high frequency with people who rank high on whatever your thing is that you're ranking them on, it's different depending on which human population you're studying.
02:57:03.000And this makes total evolutionary sense.
02:57:06.000Different things were under selection in different habitats at different times, and that made different people smarter in different ways for whatever that was.
02:57:14.000I actually think this is not how we start editing ourselves because that's not how evolution works.
02:57:22.000As soon as we edit everybody to be smart in that particular way and to be 5'10", blonde with blue eyes and perfect and never going to have diabetes, the most attractive thing out there is going to be the opposite of that.
02:57:36.000So there will be – I just don't think – people are always thinking about we're going to get superhumans, but they have a specific picture in their mind of what that means.
02:57:45.000That's not the same picture that the Chinese government has in mind.
02:57:52.000And that's why I don't fear it as much, I think, because that's not how it's going to happen.
02:57:59.000How it will happen is there will be some massive pandemic and we discover that there is a particular mutation that means you're going to die.
02:58:07.000And then suddenly this most unethical thing that is completely abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution.