The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro

00:00:11.000 Hello, Beth.

00:00:13.000 Hello.

00:00:14.000 It's very great to see you again.

00:00:16.000 I am pleased to be here.

00:00:17.000 It'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.

00:00:24.000 So why don't you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do.

00:00:29.000 I'm a scientist.

00:00:29.000 I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics.

00:00:34.000 It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it.

00:00:39.000 And what is fantastic about that is it's being a modern-day explorer. 0.96

00:00:43.000 I get to go somewhere, I get to find out something new that completely rewrites what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant.

00:00:49.000 And I get to fight with people a lot.

00:00:51.000 And 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.

00:01:02.000 Why do you like to fight with people?

00:01:04.000 I don't really like to fight with people.

00:01:05.000 I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute.

00:01:08.000 I 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.

00:01:17.000 Well, it's certainly a controversial subject, and you guys are certainly groundbreakers.

00:01:22.000 So whenever there's a controversial subject and people are groundbreakers, you're without doubt going to get a lot of pushback.

00:01:31.000 And a lot of people that just want attention, a lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention.

00:01:35.000 There's a lot of stuff going on.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, there's a big, I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset.

00:01:41.000 And this leads people to be kind of negative about everything.

00:01:46.000 That's going to be too hard.

00:01:47.000 If I say that that's good, then that means that the thing that I want to do probably isn't going to get that money.

00:01:52.000 Or if you get attention, that means I can't get attention.

00:01:55.000 And it leads to this negativity that I think stifles innovation.

00:01:59.000 There's a lot of gatekeeping, too.

00:02:01.000 You know, we talked about that.

00:02:02.000 Recently, there's a lot of people that want to be the only people that are allowed to either discuss or work on things.

00:02:10.000 Yeah, I've spent my whole life working on this.

00:02:12.000 Therefore, I am the only expert.

00:02:14.000 And if anybody says something that disagrees with what I believe to be true, they're just wrong.

00:02:18.000 I'm not even going to think about it.

00:02:20.000 They're just wrong.

00:02:21.000 It's unfortunate, but fortunately, And so I think that's also one of the reasons why people push back so much as well.

00:02:36.000 It's because they don't like that.

00:02:38.000 They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.

00:02:42.000 Yeah.

00:02:42.000 There are going to be people, there are going to be colleagues of mine that are angry with me that I have come here to talk to you.

00:02:48.000 And that is part of the problem.

00:02:50.000 Yeah.

00:02:51.000 It just seems kind of silly.

00:02:53.000 But the subject, without all that stuff, the subject is absolutely fascinating.

00:02:59.000 So how did you get started in this?

00:03:01.000 What did you initially want to do when you first started your career?

00:03:05.000 I actually started in broadcast journalism.

00:03:07.000 Really?

00:03:08.000 I was in high school.

00:03:10.000 I was convinced that I wanted to work in broadcast journalism.

00:03:12.000 I got a job working at the local TV station.

00:03:15.000 I grew up in Rome, Georgia, northwest corner of Georgia.

00:03:18.000 And I got a job at the TV station where I was first operating the camera and helping people write copy.

00:03:24.000 And then I got to be on air.

00:03:26.000 I auditioned for a spot in the morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news in the 24 and 54 after the hour.

00:03:33.000 But I had to wake up.

00:03:35.000 I was in high school.

00:03:37.000 Go to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to read the teleprompter.

00:03:41.000 It was pretty fun.

00:03:42.000 And I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career.

00:03:46.000 I went to the University of Georgia.

00:03:48.000 They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school.

00:03:51.000 I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations.

00:03:55.000 And this job, let's just say, wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college.

00:04:02.000 There 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?

00:04:13.000 And had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station.

00:04:20.000 It was terrible.

00:04:20.000 Anyway, how did I move from there to science?

00:04:22.000 I took this amazing class.

00:04:26.000 It's similar to a class that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently, where it was a field.

00:04:31.000 Geology and archaeology program.

00:04:34.000 And we started off on the East Coast.

00:04:37.000 We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals.

00:04:40.000 And 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.

00:04:53.000 Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country.

00:04:56.000 It was nine weeks.

00:04:56.000 And I thought to myself while I was there, This is the story that I want to tell.

00:05:01.000 I 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.

00:05:13.000 So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism.

00:05:19.000 The ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something.

00:05:22.000 I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing.

00:05:25.000 And that's the history of it.

00:05:26.000 I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist.

00:05:29.000 I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out.

00:05:32.000 I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist because it's so much fun.

00:05:37.000 So you just followed your fascination, which is the best advice anyone could ever get.

00:05:42.000 Yeah.

00:05:42.000 How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?

00:05:45.000 This is something I had no idea about.

00:05:47.000 I 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.

00:05:57.000 And I met this guy called Alan Cooper.

00:06:00.000 Who 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.

00:06:09.000 So 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.

00:06:22.000 So 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.

00:06:28.000 Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before or rewriting the stories that we keep telling.

00:06:34.000 This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human ancestry, and there was a lot more to be learned.

00:06:40.000 And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.

00:06:42.000 And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool.

00:06:45.000 This would be fun.

00:06:45.000 Plus, if you join my lab, you can go to Siberia.

00:06:48.000 And I was in.

00:06:49.000 I was like, yeah, sure.

00:06:50.000 That's the deal for me.

00:06:51.000 I'll go to Siberia. 0.56

00:06:53.000 Whoa.

00:06:53.000 So you got sent to Siberia?

00:06:55.000 That's usually what they do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad. 0.92

00:06:59.000 Yeah.

00:06:59.000 Well, I mean, I have had several not amazing experiences in Siberia, but overall, it's been fun.

00:07:06.000 I've been a couple of times.

00:07:08.000 What time of year did you go?

00:07:10.000 Summer.

00:07:11.000 Wow.

00:07:12.000 Yeah.

00:07:12.000 So the first time I went, it was for a meeting.

00:07:14.000 And I spent some time in Moscow first as a guest of one of my Russian collaborators.

00:07:19.000 And then we went out to this meeting in Yakutsk.

00:07:21.000 And we got on a boat.

00:07:23.000 What I learned about Siberia is that everything goes wrong.

00:07:26.000 There's no bit of infrastructure that functions the way it's supposed to function.

00:07:31.000 And I learned that initially.

00:07:32.000 We ended up on this boat that was two hours late.

00:07:34.000 It was warm and hot.

00:07:36.000 And there are so many mosquitoes.

00:07:37.000 I was going to ask you about that.

00:07:38.000 I've heard the mosquitoes are insane.

00:07:40.000 So crazy.

00:07:42.000 Like, 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.

00:07:55.000 Otherwise, you'll be breathing mosquitoes.

00:07:57.000 And 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.

00:08:03.000 And one time, I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.

00:08:08.000 And it's just awful.

00:08:10.000 It's miserable.

00:08:11.000 So they're trying to sting you through your clothes.

00:08:14.000 They're big, too, right?

00:08:16.000 Well, it depends the time of year.

00:08:17.000 And early in the season, they're really big, and you can catch them fast.

00:08:20.000 and then they get different species come out that are smaller and smaller, and toward the end of the season, they're really...

00:08:25.000 Once 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.

00:08:32.000 And it had been windy for the first few days, so it was fine.

00:08:35.000 And this was my first time out in the field, actually.

00:08:38.000 It was northern Alaska, and I was like, these mosquitoes.

00:08:40.000 People keep telling me there's mosquitoes. 1.00

00:08:42.000 They're full of shit. 1.00

00:08:42.000 There's no mosquitoes out here. 1.00

00:08:44.000 The wind is blowing. 0.99

00:08:45.000 Then the wind dies down, and then it's like, oh, fuck. 1.00

00:08:48.000 Like, this is awful. 0.99

00:08:50.000 There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while, and this poor animal.

00:08:54.000 We 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.

00:09:01.000 The mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.

00:09:05.000 I've only been to Anchorage.

00:09:06.000 Well, I've been to a couple parts of Alaska, but I was in Anchorage.

00:09:11.000 And when I was there, it was the summertime.

00:09:13.000 We were salmon fishing, my friend Ari and I. And we got bug repellent because we heard you got to spray mosquito spray.

00:09:20.000 We stepped out of the car.

00:09:21.000 The moment we opened up the car door, there was a cloud of mosquitoes.

00:09:26.000 We're shrieking like little girls.

00:09:28.000 We're like, ah! 0.91

00:09:30.000 Like, what the hell?

00:09:32.000 I'd never experienced anything like it in my life.

00:09:34.000 Like, where'd they come from?

00:09:35.000 Right.

00:09:35.000 You don't expect it.

00:09:37.000 There was nothing there.

00:09:38.000 It wasn't like we saw a cloud of mosquitoes, but we opened up.

00:09:41.000 There was an impossible amount of mosquitoes that got into the car.

00:09:44.000 It's terrible.

00:09:45.000 In Time Era, I remember we would walk along the grass.

00:09:50.000 Exactly the kind of place you can imagine mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there.

00:09:56.000 But as you were walking, you would kick up the grass and they would just emerge off of the needles of grass.

00:10:02.000 It was just really awful.

00:10:04.000 Well, they're so aggressive because they only have like three months to live.

00:10:07.000 Yeah.

00:10:08.000 And I learned actually, because I was curious about this, how did they survive if there are so few, They take it to reproduce.

00:10:23.000 Otherwise, they feed on nectar.

00:10:24.000 So how do these, how does so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there?

00:10:29.000 And it turns out, So they're after you, but they don't need you.

00:10:40.000 Whoa.

00:10:40.000 It kind of makes it worse, right?

00:10:42.000 Whoa.

00:10:42.000 It really is fascinating how aggressive they are.

00:10:45.000 Yeah.

00:10:45.000 Because, you know, Texas has mosquitoes, but they can live all year round, so they're kind of chill.

00:10:51.000 They're not that worried about you.

00:10:53.000 My boss was so funny too.

00:10:54.000 Alan 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.

00:11:02.000 Look at me at my natural.

00:11:03.000 And we're out there and the wind dries down and the mosquitoes come and I'm with my deet.

00:11:06.000 I'm like, you know, your natural repellent.

00:11:09.000 He's going, did you bring the deet?

00:11:11.000 I'm like, yeah, yeah.

00:11:13.000 Yeah, you give up on that natural stuff real quick.

00:11:15.000 I was watching a documentary where they were using pine pitch.

00:11:18.000 Have you ever seen It's really good.

00:11:25.000 It's really fascinating.

00:11:26.000 He follows these people that live on the Taiga River in Siberia.

00:11:30.000 Cool.

00:11:30.000 And 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.

00:11:38.000 They travel around on snowmobiles.

00:11:40.000 Really, what's amazing about it is the title, is Happy People.

00:11:45.000 They're all happy.

00:11:46.000 That's what's so weird.

00:11:48.000 It's like these people have a very hard life, but yet they're always smiling and they're having a good time.

00:11:54.000 And, 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.

00:12:04.000 There's something about it that like this makes sense.

00:12:07.000 Whereas society like today You understand genes.

00:12:15.000 We essentially have the same genes that people have 10,000 years ago had.

00:12:19.000 Very different world.

00:12:20.000 Right.

00:12:21.000 And we're not really designed for this world.

00:12:24.000 Right.

00:12:24.000 Well, you can see that in the increased rates of obesity, increased rates of diabetes.

00:12:28.000 We're not.

00:12:29.000 Also depression, anxiety, all that stuff.

00:12:32.000 And this is what Happy People is kind of all about.

00:12:34.000 I mean, Werner Herzog is, you know, he's brilliant.

00:12:37.000 And so he's narrating this whole thing, too.

00:12:40.000 I kind of get this understanding of his appreciation for these people that are living this very basic life but are very happy.

00:12:49.000 Yeah, it's impressive.

00:12:50.000 When 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.

00:13:02.000 It'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...

00:13:16.000 And it's mostly these massive gas tanks.

00:13:18.000 and you load all the gear into the gas tanks, and then all of the people I think the dog was the smartest person.

00:13:28.000 And our expedition team.

00:13:29.000 But they would load us up and they would try to start the helicopter and it wouldn't start and they would unload us.

00:13:34.000 We would go back to the places we were staying and then they would tinker with it and fix it.

00:13:37.000 Anyway, we flew out.

00:13:39.000 We got in the helicopter finally.

00:13:40.000 We 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?

00:13:52.000 We're sitting on the gas tanks, right?

00:13:54.000 In this helicopter that we already think.

00:13:57.000 Right.

00:13:58.000 Fortunately, the helicopter had some missing windows.

00:14:02.000 Oh, boy.

00:14:03.000 There was airflow.

00:14:04.000 It's fine.

00:14:05.000 No, this was insane.

00:14:06.000 This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things like that.

00:14:13.000 Also, 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.

00:14:26.000 So we're flying out there, and we start to land.

00:14:29.000 And I'm thinking, great, we're there.

00:14:30.000 I get out of this crazy firebomb in the air that I'm in.

00:14:34.000 No, no, we did not get off.

00:14:36.000 Instead, we picked up a random family that had been out there on their own.

00:14:41.000 Parents, a child.

00:14:42.000 Yeah, it was two parents and a child.

00:14:44.000 And they had a backpack with their gear and a massive cooler.

00:14:48.000 Right, that's what they had.

00:14:49.000 No words.

00:14:50.000 They're French.

00:14:51.000 They speak French to the team that's there.

00:14:53.000 People are having a conversation in Russian.

00:14:55.000 and then we take off again.

00:15:00.000 Or were they trapped?

00:15:00.000 I think it was planned.

00:15:02.000 Just there was a lack of communication.

00:15:06.000 But whatever, the helicopter took off twice, and then it landed, and everybody unloaded, and we set up the tent, the camp.

00:15:14.000 And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs.

00:15:18.000 You 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.

00:15:32.000 Oh, no.

00:15:35.000 And the Russian... 0.63

00:15:40.000 The Russian cooks had brought medical ethanol because it weighed less per unit of alcohol than vodka, which they would normally bring on the helicopter.

00:15:48.000 So they brought medical ethanol to drink.

00:15:51.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:15:51.000 Well, you know, you can only take so much stuff with you. 0.71

00:15:54.000 Because it weighs less than alcohol.

00:15:56.000 That's a crazy decision.

00:15:59.000 Well, you know, they decided it was safe.

00:16:02.000 Anyway, by three days in...

00:16:06.000 We're at 72 degrees latitude.

00:16:08.000 Did you try it?

00:16:09.000 The medical ethanol?

00:16:10.000 I tried the medical ethanol.

00:16:12.000 I mean, obviously.

00:16:15.000 You water it down with a little bit of river water and you have it with your freshly caught fish that you've laid.

00:16:21.000 And yeah, it's great.

00:16:22.000 Yeah.

00:16:23.000 We had fish and rice for the whole time.

00:16:27.000 We had to catch our food, yes.

00:16:28.000 Luckily, it's probably a lot of fish up there.

00:16:30.000 Fish, 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.

00:16:36.000 It was a very...

00:16:38.000 So you just hear boom, boom.

00:16:50.000 Anyway, at least I don't know why I'm telling this story.

00:16:53.000 Because it's fun.

00:16:54.000 It's a fun story.

00:16:55.000 So we were there.

00:16:56.000 We're there for, I don't know, maybe it was two or three days looking around, and it was about two o 'clock in the morning.

00:17:02.000 We were inside this little tent that we'd built so that we could eat in it, sort of the kitchen tent where we were.

00:17:06.000 And it was a big mesh tent to keep the mosquitoes out so we didn't have to have anything.

00:17:09.000 And everybody is just staring off into the distance, glumly.

00:17:13.000 The medical ethanol was gone.

00:17:14.000 You know, everybody was sober.

00:17:16.000 We were going to be for the next five weeks.

00:17:17.000 We were going to be stuck in this place where we weren't able to find what we were.

00:17:21.000 And then all of a sudden, these three dudes show up outside of our tent with machine guns.

00:17:27.000 Right. 0.99

00:17:28.000 And I'm thinking, everybody's thinking, what the fuck? 0.99

00:17:32.000 Like, we just flew forever in a helicopter over two years. 0.99

00:17:38.000 Nothing.

00:17:38.000 Except for this French family that we picked up randomly along the way.

00:17:41.000 And everybody's looking around and there's this real moment of, what the hell are we going to do?

00:17:47.000 And 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.

00:17:55.000 And I'm thinking, what's going to happen?

00:17:58.000 When they realize we don't have any more vodka, medical ethanol.

00:18:02.000 And 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.

00:18:12.000 They heard reindeer.

00:18:14.000 And 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.

00:18:23.000 Wow.

00:18:25.000 Yeah.

00:18:25.000 Pretty cool, actually.

00:18:26.000 That's cool.

00:18:27.000 So did you hang out with those people?

00:18:28.000 Well, we did.

00:18:29.000 They were disappointed that we didn't have any alcohol, obviously.

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00:19:49.000 That's a theme.

00:19:50.000 It's a theme.

00:19:51.000 It was Russia, so it's a fair theme. 0.97

00:19:53.000 But the French couple, this is just... 0.99

00:20:01.000 Okay, the French couple...

00:20:04.000 And they get up and they go back to their little tent area that they'd set up in the middle of nowhere.

00:20:08.000 And they bring back their cooler.

00:20:10.000 And they open it up.

00:20:11.000 And inside is cheese.

00:20:18.000 Like a massive Gouda.

00:20:22.000 And a massive Brie.

00:20:24.000 Why?

00:20:25.000 I don't know.

00:20:26.000 I don't know.

00:20:27.000 Right?

00:20:28.000 But they had cheese.

00:20:29.000 And so we cut the cheese.

00:20:32.000 And shared the cheese with our doggone friends, and they were happy.

00:20:36.000 And the next day, we took them back with the Zodiacs to their community. 1.00

00:20:40.000 And you know what was most amazing about this experience?

00:20:44.000 Everything about it was cool.

00:20:46.000 We saw these people that were living in these tiny little huts in part of the world where it goes to 40 below.

00:20:50.000 And it doesn't matter if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius because they cross at that level, right?

00:20:54.000 It's 40 below during the winter for months and dark.

00:20:58.000 And they're herding reindeer.

00:21:00.000 And 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.

00:21:07.000 Everything that they own is on these things, on skids, that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost.

00:21:14.000 In the snow or in the summer, trying to find the land for the animals to graze.

00:21:20.000 And this is how they live.

00:21:21.000 And 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.

00:21:29.000 Really?

00:21:30.000 It was really impressive.

00:21:32.000 They only wanted to attack the animals?

00:21:34.000 They were after the animals, and they really left us alone.

00:21:36.000 Probably because that's their natural source.

00:21:39.000 Yeah, more natural.

00:21:40.000 There's more of them there.

00:21:41.000 I mean, I don't know, maybe they're larger, but it was...

00:21:46.000 Though also, like, for thousands of years, they've probably been just feeding off of reindeer.

00:21:50.000 Yeah, I think about that, though.

00:21:51.000 But I think about that poor moose from Alaska who was also clearly bothered by the mosquitoes.

00:21:56.000 I imagine the reindeer were as well.

00:22:00.000 Were these people riding the reindeer?

00:22:01.000 They did ride them.

00:22:02.000 In fact, they put me up there and showed me how I could ride the reindeer.

00:22:05.000 Is this their place?

00:22:06.000 Wow.

00:22:08.000 So you were in this area?

00:22:10.000 Yes.

00:22:11.000 I was there during the summer, though.

00:22:12.000 So there wasn't snow on the ground.

00:22:14.000 It was all just a very grassy, wet, super wet grassy.

00:22:17.000 And the moisture in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.

00:22:21.000 It is so fascinating to me that people live like this generation after generation after generation.

00:22:27.000 And the fact that you can somehow...

00:22:33.000 Yeah.

00:22:34.000 And people ride them.

00:22:35.000 And milk them.

00:22:36.000 Yeah.

00:22:37.000 Yeah.

00:22:37.000 And then occasionally whack one.

00:22:39.000 Yeah.

00:22:39.000 I mean, they're great, right?

00:22:41.000 Animals have always been a really great storage mechanism.

00:22:45.000 That's one of the hypotheses about animal domestication.

00:22:48.000 Why did this take place?

00:22:48.000 if we had plants, but there are going to be years where there's plenty to eat and years where there's not enough to eat.

00:23:01.000 So it's a very safe way of storing what you can grow.

00:23:04.000 That's a fascinating way to look at it, storing.

00:23:06.000 I just want to know how they ever figured out how to herd those reindeer.

00:23:10.000 Like, what did you do?

00:23:11.000 Who was the first person to figure out how to get them all to stay together?

00:23:15.000 Right.

00:23:15.000 I think that about a lot of domestic animals.

00:23:18.000 I also think that about milk.

00:23:20.000 Like, who was the first person who decided?

00:23:23.000 I can have a go at that.

00:23:24.000 I mean, they're probably starving.

00:23:27.000 I mean, they must have tried everything.

00:23:28.000 I mean, that's how we found out what mushrooms are edible, right?

00:23:31.000 Because a large percentage of them will just kill you immediately.

00:23:34.000 But people are so desperate for anything.

00:23:36.000 Yeah, some of them are trying to tell you, though, by being like, break red or bright purple.

00:23:40.000 Right, right, right. 0.99

00:23:41.000 But we're dumb. 1.00

00:23:42.000 So we're like, bright red, I'll lick that. 0.99

00:23:44.000 Yeah, it might be an apple.

00:23:46.000 It's confusing.

00:23:48.000 Some bright red things are delicious and really good for you.

00:23:51.000 Wow.

00:23:52.000 So these people that live up there, what was their history?

00:23:56.000 Like, have they been living up there their whole life?

00:23:59.000 Those particular individuals have, yeah.

00:24:01.000 But I think they have a long history.

00:24:03.000 The culture has a long history there.

00:24:05.000 And we're still, I think, we're still learning about how humans have dispersed around the world and how they got there.

00:24:14.000 Absolutely.

00:24:17.000 And 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.

00:24:28.000 Even up there?

00:24:29.000 Even up there.

00:24:30.000 Wow.

00:24:31.000 And they sent an emissary to say, guys, it's time to speak the mother tongue.

00:24:36.000 Maybe 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.

00:24:50.000 It's so fascinating that there's pockets of these humans that live like this all over the world.

00:24:56.000 Obviously, the people in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes of the world.

00:25:02.000 It's so interesting.

00:25:03.000 And we have so much to learn from them.

00:25:05.000 And 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.

00:25:12.000 But you kind of don't want to, because you don't want to ruin that.

00:25:16.000 Right.

00:25:16.000 Isn't that an interesting perspective?

00:25:18.000 Because I don't want to live like that.

00:25:19.000 Like, I don't want to live in the Amazon with a leaf over my private parts.

00:25:22.000 But we assume they do.

00:25:24.000 Not even for a week?

00:25:25.000 Nope.

00:25:25.000 Don't want to do it.

00:25:27.000 There's so many things out there that'll eat you.

00:25:29.000 There's so many bugs that can kill you.

00:25:31.000 Snakes that could kill you.

00:25:32.000 It's like, uh-uh.

00:25:34.000 I'd rather watch a video.

00:25:36.000 Right.

00:25:36.000 David Attenborough documentary.

00:25:38.000 I don't want to go there.

00:25:40.000 I have a good friend who lives there, Paul Rosalie.

00:25:42.000 He goes there all the time.

00:25:43.000 He's been on the podcast a few times.

00:25:45.000 And he lives in the Amazon.

00:25:46.000 And his whole thing is he's there protecting the rainforest.

00:25:50.000 And what they do is they take these people that are just poor people that have no options and they're loggers.

00:25:57.000 And so he pays them more money to protect the rainforest.

00:26:01.000 So they get to quit the logging job and then protect the rainforest.

00:26:04.000 And then through funding, they buy up parcels of land and protect it and save it.

00:26:09.000 But he's had some gnarly encounters with uncontacted people where at one point in time they realized they were actually being hunted.

00:26:17.000 and they barely escape with their life. 0.99

00:26:19.000 Holy shit. 0.99

00:26:19.000 And you start hearing weird noises in the bushes and then you realize like, oh boy, these are people. 0.99

00:26:25.000 We're being stalked right now.

00:26:27.000 by the most sophisticated hunting animal out there.

00:26:30.000 But not only that, I would imagine, They probably have incredible perception, incredible senses.

00:26:43.000 Because they have to.

00:26:44.000 Right.

00:26:44.000 They probably knew these people were coming a long time ago.

00:26:48.000 They probably heard the boat coming down the river.

00:26:51.000 They prepared.

00:26:52.000 They got ready.

00:26:53.000 They know where all the paths are.

00:26:56.000 They know which way the people would go.

00:26:58.000 You're utterly helpless.

00:26:59.000 How did he get out of this?

00:27:01.000 They got out just in time.

00:27:02.000 Just in time.

00:27:03.000 They just escaped.

00:27:04.000 Yeah, but one of his friends, one of the people that he was working with, did not.

00:27:08.000 They would have these gifts.

00:27:11.000 So they would take these rafts and try to make contact with these people.

00:27:15.000 They would float these rafts towards them filled with food.

00:27:18.000 And they were doing this as like a peace gesture.

00:27:21.000 And this guy had done this several times.

00:27:23.000 And then one time he didn't come back and they found him filled with arrows.

00:27:27.000 Whoa.

00:27:28.000 Yeah, they just killed him.

00:27:29.000 They just decided, you know.

00:27:31.000 Maybe they had a bad experience with some other person from some other Westerner and they decided, you know, we're done.

00:27:37.000 But they're rightly terrified of humans because when these...

00:27:53.000 There'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.

00:28:05.000 We have a history of this.

00:28:07.000 Yeah, we do.

00:28:08.000 We have a deep history, which is really fascinating about the Amazon in particular because...

00:28:28.000 And then slowly over time, they're like, no, there was like a huge civilization here of millions of people.

00:28:34.000 So these people that are the uncontacted people, I mean, I wonder how many of them were like the preppers of the Amazon world. 0.61

00:28:42.000 From, you know, 4,000 years ago or whatever it was.

00:28:45.000 Right.

00:28:46.000 It wasn't even that long ago.

00:28:47.000 Percy Fawcett?

00:28:48.000 Percy Fawcett, right?

00:28:50.000 That's his name?

00:28:50.000 The guy who, one of the guys who, he's the...

00:28:59.000 When the first settlers went there, when the first explorers went there, they talked about these incredible, sophisticated civilizations.

00:29:08.000 And then people went back 100 years and there was none of that, so they thought that they had just made it up.

00:29:12.000 It 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.

00:29:24.000 and stuff that they had, and all that's left is these grids that you can see when you fly Yeah, that's so cool.

00:29:31.000 You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really.

00:29:34.000 I 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.

00:29:45.000 What happened?

00:29:46.000 This is some of the coolest mysteries.

00:29:48.000 That'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.

00:29:57.000 It's fun.

00:29:58.000 So you get interested in DNA, you go to Siberia, all that jazz.

00:30:03.000 How do you get started working with a company like Colossal?

00:30:07.000 How does that take place?

00:30:09.000 All of us working in ancient DNA.

00:30:12.000 We are constantly answering the same question from the media, which is, when are we going to bring dinosaurs back to life?

00:30:20.000 Because Jurassic Park!

00:30:21.000 Yeah.

00:30:22.000 Right.

00:30:23.000 We're so simple.

00:30:25.000 One great movie and everybody's like, when's that going to happen?

00:30:29.000 And people say, people actually say that.

00:30:31.000 My field was spawned by Jurassic Park.

00:30:35.000 The whole idea that we could get DNA stuff, that's not true.

00:30:37.000 It was actually the other way around.

00:30:39.000 And 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.

00:30:52.000 That was actually from a quagga, which is a type of zebra.

00:30:56.000 What a cool name.

00:30:59.000 In Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the kwaha.

00:31:03.000 Ooh, even better.

00:31:04.000 Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kind of bad for the microphone, probably.

00:31:07.000 Gross.

00:31:09.000 I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right? 0.96

00:31:12.000 Oh.

00:31:13.000 So they sound like that.

00:31:14.000 I don't know.

00:31:14.000 Who knows?

00:31:15.000 Anyway.

00:31:16.000 They showed that you could get DNA from this skin.

00:31:18.000 And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that I've heard in a long time.

00:31:23.000 That must mean we can bring dinosaurs back to life.

00:31:26.000 And everybody started racing to get the oldest and coolest DNA.

00:31:30.000 And 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.

00:31:38.000 And look, here's DNA from a myocene-aged leaf.

00:31:41.000 And look, here's this. 0.99

00:31:42.000 And all of it is crap. 1.00

00:31:45.000 We now know. 0.96

00:31:47.000 The 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.

00:32:05.000 We 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.

00:32:20.000 So it's chicken contamination.

00:32:22.000 Yeah, it's like greasy fingers on your dinosaur fossils.

00:32:25.000 And look, now we have ancient DNA.

00:32:27.000 That is hilarious.

00:32:29.000 That's how little they knew about DNA.

00:32:31.000 What year was this around?

00:32:32.000 That would be the early 90s.

00:32:34.000 The early 90s.

00:32:35.000 And when was DNA first discovered?

00:32:38.000 Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that, but it was really the idea It's an acronym for polymerase chain reaction.

00:32:51.000 Carey Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip.

00:32:56.000 On LSD.

00:32:56.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:32:57.000 We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you have your best ideas when you're high.

00:33:01.000 Some people have great ideas.

00:33:03.000 Some people go kooky.

00:33:05.000 Some people lose their marbles and never come back.

00:33:08.000 Yeah, I think I probably would not have good ideas on LSD, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

00:33:12.000 I like your scientific exploration mind.

00:33:15.000 A good scientist always wants to know.

00:33:17.000 You never know.

00:33:18.000 Maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that little piece of paper.

00:33:22.000 Probably not.

00:33:23.000 Probably not.

00:33:24.000 You never know.

00:33:25.000 Anyway, 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.

00:33:33.000 And that was what made it possible, really, for ancient DNA to take off, was this ability to photocopy.

00:33:38.000 Because 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?

00:33:46.000 We go out in the sun.

00:33:48.000 We put sunscreen on, and that stops the UV from breaking our DNA.

00:33:51.000 But it's not terrible to get some sunlight, as you probably just saw.

00:33:55.000 There 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.

00:34:05.000 we evolved this mechanism.

00:34:06.000 But once you're dead...

00:34:13.000 And 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.

00:34:20.000 And 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.

00:34:31.000 In 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.

00:34:37.000 This is living DNA. 0.77

00:34:39.000 So ancient DNA is in really crap condition.

00:34:43.000 And it's also mixed with stuff.

00:34:45.000 So if I extract DNA from...

00:34:48.000 I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA. 0.99

00:34:53.000 I'll probably get some of my DNA because I touched that mammoth bone.

00:34:56.000 I'll get DNA from whoever else touched that thing.

00:34:59.000 This 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.

00:35:09.000 Right.

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00:37:05.000 Even just breathing on it, right?

00:37:07.000 Yeah, or dropping an eyelash.

00:37:09.000 In 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.

00:37:19.000 So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out.

00:37:24.000 We don't want any air coming in.

00:37:26.000 We 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.

00:37:33.000 It's not because we're afraid of those.

00:37:34.000 We'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.

00:37:40.000 Of course.

00:37:40.000 Yeah.

00:37:41.000 So 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.

00:37:49.000 For a long time, people thought we were never going to get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem.

00:37:54.000 we touch a bone, we're just going to get human DNA, and we're never going to be able to know the difference.

00:37:59.000 But 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.

00:38:15.000 Bones.

00:38:16.000 Different bones.

00:38:17.000 The very first.

00:38:19.000 Neanderthal 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.

00:38:25.000 Actually, my husband, who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence.

00:38:30.000 Wow.

00:38:30.000 Yeah, it was cool.

00:38:31.000 That's really cool.

00:38:32.000 But 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. 0.97

00:38:43.000 And 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.

00:38:55.000 Yeah.

00:38:56.000 Yeah.

00:38:56.000 Within the last decade.

00:38:58.000 Jamie and I, we did a podcast recently where we were talking about the big head people.

00:39:01.000 What are they called again?

00:39:03.000 What was it?

00:39:05.000 Giuliani or something?

00:39:06.000 Julianne's.

00:39:06.000 I've seen this.

00:39:07.000 This is really recently.

00:39:08.000 Super recent.

00:39:09.000 It was like December of 2024, they released this paper.

00:39:13.000 Yeah, it was super cool.

00:39:14.000 And it just highlights how much we don't know, right?

00:39:18.000 Especially in paleoanthropology.

00:39:20.000 And this is a field where, you know, people will take, like, yeah.

00:39:24.000 Julleran.

00:39:25.000 Julleransis. 0.90

00:39:27.000 Lost species of humans with an abnormally large skull, which lived alongside Homo sapiens.

00:39:32.000 So they died off somewhere.

00:39:35.000 They lived in China between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.

00:39:39.000 Yeah.

00:39:39.000 And so if they were able to breed with humans, they probably did.

00:39:43.000 And they probably bred with Neanderthals and they probably bred with Denisovans because, you know, that's what we do. 0.88

00:39:48.000 Wild stuff.

00:39:49.000 Yeah.

00:39:50.000 Yeah.

00:39:50.000 And then, of course, the Hobbit people.

00:39:52.000 The Island of Flores people.

00:39:54.000 Yeah, Flores.

00:39:55.000 A little tiny.

00:39:56.000 No one has still been able to get DNA from those samples now, but I mean, someday.

00:40:00.000 So it's just bones?

00:40:01.000 Someday it'll happen.

00:40:02.000 We've tried.

00:40:04.000 Sponti's team has tried.

00:40:05.000 A lot of people have attempted.

00:40:06.000 It's just they're too degraded.

00:40:07.000 They're from a hot place.

00:40:08.000 All of those things that degrade DNA, it happens faster in hot places.

00:40:12.000 That makes sense.

00:40:13.000 Yeah.

00:40:15.000 There's probably a lot more to be discovered, too.

00:40:17.000 So much.

00:40:18.000 I mean, they only really found it at a one location, right?

00:40:21.000 Yes, yeah.

00:40:21.000 And 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.

00:40:32.000 It seems like, because they're small as well.

00:40:34.000 And the question is, is there something weird about them?

00:40:37.000 This is actually really cool.

00:40:38.000 It was a really cool result.

00:40:39.000 It's hard to know exactly what bits of...

00:40:46.000 But clearly it's not just one thing because there's not just people my size and people normal size.

00:40:52.000 I'm only five feet tall, right?

00:40:53.000 We have a big spectrum of help.

00:40:55.000 So there's lots of different genes that are involved with this.

00:40:58.000 But we kind of have an idea of where those genes are in a genome and what they might be.

00:41:03.000 And 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.

00:41:12.000 But it wasn't.

00:41:13.000 They just are at the extreme.

00:41:14.000 Is it just island dwarfism?

00:41:20.000 And so do lizards.

00:41:31.000 They dwarf or they get bigger?

00:41:32.000 They get bigger, yeah, like the Komodo.

00:41:34.000 Oh, yeah.

00:41:35.000 That's one of the scariest animals.

00:41:36.000 Creepiest animals.

00:41:37.000 I'm so embarrassed to tell you how many times I've watched videos of them eating large animals whole.

00:41:42.000 Like cattle?

00:41:43.000 Yeah, they eat like sheep and monkeys.

00:41:45.000 It's horrific.

00:41:47.000 Why do we watch that?

00:41:48.000 I don't know.

00:41:49.000 You're like, is this going to happen?

00:41:51.000 You know, you open up Instagram, like, oh, no.

00:41:53.000 You see this poor goat and you see this slobbery lizard.

00:41:56.000 And you can't help.

00:41:56.000 You're like, I'm going to watch.

00:41:58.000 They're so gross. 0.99

00:41:59.000 Their mouth is filled with botulism. 0.99

00:42:02.000 Is that what kills them?

00:42:03.000 The botulism?

00:42:04.000 I think there's a venom as well.

00:42:06.000 They think there's a lot of toxins in their mouth.

00:42:08.000 And I think there's also a venom.

00:42:10.000 I think they used to think it was just poison, just botulism and just various bacteria.

00:42:16.000 But now I believe they think it's a venom.

00:42:19.000 I 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.

00:42:37.000 I think I've seen that one.

00:42:39.000 I do think I've seen that one.

00:42:40.000 Nature is so rough.

00:42:42.000 Would you go?

00:42:44.000 It's so brutal.

00:42:44.000 To Komodo Island?

00:42:45.000 No chance.

00:42:46.000 Really?

00:42:47.000 I remember Sharon Stone's husband.

00:42:51.000 I believe he was either a journalist or someone who owned a newspaper or something like that.

00:42:56.000 And they went to see the Komodo dragons at the zoo.

00:42:59.000 I think it was in San Francisco.

00:43:01.000 And they took their shoes off when they enter into this Komodo dragon area to not contaminate.

00:43:07.000 And apparently he had white socks on.

00:43:09.000 And they decided that his foot looked delicious.

00:43:12.000 And they bit him.

00:43:13.000 Yeah.

00:43:14.000 Yeah, it bit him.

00:43:14.000 I don't know what happened with that.

00:43:16.000 This was, you know...

00:43:20.000 Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.

00:43:21.000 I don't think she did.

00:43:22.000 I think it was just one of those things where this guy just didn't know what he was getting into and shouldn't have had white socks on.

00:43:28.000 Or it's just doing what a Komodo dragon does and biting whatever it can.

00:43:33.000 I wouldn't have thought white socks.

00:43:34.000 Here it is.

00:43:35.000 Bronstein underwent surgery to reattach several thousand.

00:43:40.000 Severed tendon sand.

00:43:42.000 Severed tendon sand.

00:43:44.000 To rebuild his big toe that was crushed by the dragon's jaws.

00:43:49.000 Yeah, it's just missing his face.

00:43:51.000 Oh, tendons.

00:43:52.000 Okay.

00:43:53.000 So 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.

00:44:02.000 Oh my god!

00:44:03.000 Wait, he was in the feeding cage?

00:44:04.000 Yeah, whoopsies.

00:44:07.000 Oh, they mistook his white tennis shoes.

00:44:10.000 That's what it was.

00:44:11.000 It wasn't socks.

00:44:12.000 So this story's old.

00:44:15.000 Oh, they had him remove his white socks.

00:44:17.000 Oh, it was a shoeless foot.

00:44:20.000 Oh, so they thought that his tennis shoes would look like the rats.

00:44:24.000 So they told him, take your shoes off so they don't look like the rats.

00:44:28.000 And his foot looks like flesh.

00:44:30.000 Oh, my God. 0.99

00:44:32.000 Someone did a dumb thing. 1.00

00:44:35.000 Absolutely. 1.00

00:44:36.000 A lot of dumb things. 0.99

00:44:37.000 What year is this, Jamie? 0.99

00:44:39.000 2001.

00:44:40.000 2001.

00:44:41.000 Yeah.

00:44:43.000 Well, bad decisions.

00:44:44.000 Bad outcomes.

00:44:45.000 Yeah.

00:44:46.000 Yeah.

00:44:46.000 No, I'm not going to Komodo Island.

00:44:49.000 Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.

00:44:51.000 No, no, I'm not going to any of those places.

00:44:54.000 No.

00:44:54.000 No, no, no, no, no.

00:44:56.000 I get it.

00:44:57.000 Like, I know what they are.

00:44:58.000 I can watch them through the cage.

00:45:00.000 I'm good.

00:45:00.000 I don't need the additional thrill.

00:45:02.000 Right.

00:45:02.000 But there are places where there are big things, like dodos, that are amazing and probably not going to kill you.

00:45:08.000 Sure.

00:45:09.000 There's some stuff that won't kill you.

00:45:10.000 Like giraffes. 1.00

00:45:12.000 Giraffes, I've been told that a giraffe is the dumbest animal. 1.00

00:45:15.000 Really? 1.00

00:45:16.000 Yeah, 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. 0.98

00:45:21.000 But 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. 0.96

00:45:35.000 Wow.

00:45:36.000 Well, they're so kind that they let babies feed them. 0.93

00:45:41.000 Yeah.

00:45:41.000 There's nothing going on.

00:45:42.000 When my kids were little, you could go to the San Diego Zoo and you would give them lettuce.

00:45:47.000 And little babies are allowed to hold up. 0.71

00:45:49.000 Like 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.

00:45:56.000 But they trust them so much that they let little kids feed them.

00:45:59.000 Like they set it up so people can feed.

00:46:02.000 And they seem so calm.

00:46:04.000 Docile, yeah.

00:46:05.000 Yeah, like they're just happy they're not getting eaten by lions.

00:46:08.000 Sounds a little dangerous to me, though. 1.00

00:46:09.000 If they are genuinely stupid, will they accidentally at some point take that baby's hand? 1.00

00:46:13.000 And then they have huge, strong necks. 1.00

00:46:16.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:17.000 They fight each other with their necks.

00:46:18.000 It says they're kind of smart.

00:46:19.000 Oh, really?

00:46:20.000 But this is...

00:46:22.000 The 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.

00:46:30.000 They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, can rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes.

00:46:38.000 They presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quantities of highly liked food and less preferred food.

00:46:45.000 The experimenter covertly drew one piece of food from each container and let the giraffes choose between the two options. 0.67

00:46:53.000 In the first task, we varied the quantity and relative frequency of the highly liked and less preferred food pieces.

00:46:59.000 In the second task, we inserted a physical balance.

00:47:00.000 barrier in both containers, so giraffes only had to take into account the upper part of the container when predicting the outcome.

00:47:06.000 In both tasks, giraffes successfully selected the container more likely to provide highly liked food, integrating physical information to correctly predict sampling information.

00:47:16.000 Huh.

00:47:18.000 I mean, cool.

00:47:19.000 But 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. 0.89

00:47:29.000 Perhaps they're intelligent for the environment they belong in.

00:47:33.000 I'm sure that's true.

00:47:34.000 I mean, otherwise, that's how evolution works.

00:47:36.000 Yeah, but when you put them in the zoo, they're like, look, we have all our food.

00:47:39.000 There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in.

00:47:41.000 You 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.

00:47:51.000 Probably going to be pretty awkward when you get them out in the wild.

00:47:55.000 Probably.

00:47:55.000 Yeah.

00:47:56.000 It's probably the same thing with giraffes.

00:47:57.000 Yeah.

00:47:58.000 Did you hear that, James?

00:47:58.000 Talking to my 15-year-old.

00:48:00.000 Oh, does he play a lot of video games?

00:48:02.000 They're very addictive.

00:48:03.000 It's a real problem.

00:48:04.000 And they're going to get worse.

00:48:05.000 They're going to get way better, you know, as science.

00:48:09.000 Makes things more and more addictive.

00:48:11.000 Yeah.

00:48:12.000 One of the things they're really good at, these designers.

00:48:15.000 And algorithms.

00:48:15.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:16.000 But they're just so good at making games that are just incredibly compelling.

00:48:20.000 And fun.

00:48:20.000 Oh, so fun.

00:48:21.000 Way more fun than going outside and getting bullied.

00:48:24.000 Yeah.

00:48:24.000 You know?

00:48:24.000 That's the problem.

00:48:26.000 You know, you could be a badass in Call of Duty.

00:48:28.000 All you do is sit in there.

00:48:30.000 Or War Thunder.

00:48:31.000 That's the game that my son is into.

00:48:33.000 War Thunder?

00:48:33.000 I don't even know about that one.

00:48:34.000 What's that one?

00:48:35.000 It's about, like, planes and things that you build and then fight.

00:48:38.000 I don't know.

00:48:39.000 Yeah, pretty crazy stuff.

00:48:41.000 Just imagine if you could take one of those Denisovans and show them that.

00:48:45.000 That is an interesting question.

00:48:47.000 What would we do if we could bring a Neanderthal or a Denisovan back, de-extinct one of them? 1.00

00:48:53.000 We are not doing that at Colossal.

00:48:54.000 They're humans.

00:48:55.000 We cannot ask them for consent to do this.

00:48:56.000 We're not working on them.

00:48:58.000 You won't.

00:49:00.000 China's like, tell me more. 0.83

00:49:06.000 Maybe.

00:49:06.000 I think it's a bad idea, but if they do, I would like to know.

00:49:12.000 Well, I mean, what did you think of the Dire Wolves?

00:49:15.000 Well, fortunately, after the last podcast I did with Ben, I did actually get to go visit them, and I was blown away.

00:49:22.000 It's extraordinary.

00:49:24.000 It's one thing to see them in photographs, but it's another thing to be close to them, where you're outside.

00:49:31.000 There's no fence between you and them.

00:49:34.000 and you look in their eyes, you're like, that is a different animal.

00:49:37.000 That is a totally different animal.

00:49:40.000 That is a totally different animal.

00:49:41.000 I've never seen a wolf in the wild, though.

00:49:43.000 I saw one, but it was running across the road at a distance, and it was dusk.

00:49:47.000 That was in Alberta.

00:49:49.000 There's a lot of wolves up there.

00:49:52.000 I've never seen, I've never like looked in one's eyes.

00:49:55.000 And it's like, these aren't even that old.

00:49:58.000 Right.

00:49:58.000 You know, they were more than six months old, but they were almost 100 pounds already.

00:50:04.000 Yeah.

00:50:04.000 And they have this look in their eye.

00:50:06.000 And you can see they're bigger, they're more muscular, and you see that coat, the dire wolf coat.

00:50:11.000 It's extraordinary.

00:50:12.000 The mane that they have, it's very, it's really incredible.

00:50:16.000 And then there's the little female, Khaleesi. 0.95

00:50:18.000 Yes.

00:50:18.000 She's adorable.

00:50:19.000 And she is like a puppy right now.

00:50:21.000 You were able to hold her?

00:50:23.000 She's adorable.

00:50:24.000 Yes.

00:50:24.000 She nibbles on your fingers.

00:50:26.000 She's a little thing.

00:50:28.000 But she's, you know, one day going to be 140 pounds. 1.00

00:50:31.000 You can't get anywhere near her.

00:50:32.000 Right.

00:50:32.000 Which is really crazy.

00:50:33.000 Yeah.

00:50:33.000 I'm glad you got to see the boys before.

00:50:35.000 They were probably already a little bit standoffish.

00:50:37.000 Yep.

00:50:38.000 Especially compared to Khaleesi.

00:50:40.000 Yeah, they're standoffish.

00:50:41.000 They get fairly close, though, within like 20 feet of you, checking you out.

00:50:46.000 They pee all over the place, you know.

00:50:48.000 Marking their territory.

00:50:49.000 It's just so strange to see an animal in the flesh that didn't exist.

00:50:56.000 You know, for 10,000 years.

00:50:58.000 It's amazing.

00:50:59.000 I was there for Khaleesi's birth, and people were asking me afterward, how did that feel?

00:51:05.000 And I just, you can't even describe it.

00:51:08.000 This moment when she was born, and then she screamed. 0.99

00:51:12.000 She had this cry, this scream.

00:51:14.000 I have it on my phone, actually.

00:51:15.000 I can play it for you.

00:51:16.000 But it was just such a, I don't know, it's this awe.

00:51:22.000 I 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.

00:51:38.000 And 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.

00:51:49.000 This way to feel genuine wonder and excitement and enthusiasm and Khaleesi's birth.

00:51:55.000 I wasn't there for the birth of the boys.

00:51:56.000 I was in the UK at a conference and it was very sad.

00:52:00.000 and I had COVID and I was asleep and trying to recover.

00:52:04.000 And the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, Where are you?

00:52:11.000 Why are you not responding?

00:52:12.000 And I'm like, oh my God, I've missed this moment.

00:52:14.000 So I made sure that I was there, present for Khaleesi.

00:52:17.000 And I'm glad I was, because what an amazing...

00:52:22.000 I'm glad I got to see them too.

00:52:24.000 It's really a crazy experience.

00:52:26.000 I felt very fortunate just to be in their presence and also very conflicted by it all.

00:52:31.000 Like, this is so odd.

00:52:32.000 Like, is this the beginning?

00:52:34.000 Like, are we going to bring back everything?

00:52:35.000 Like, is that a good thing?

00:52:36.000 Are things supposed to go extinct?

00:52:38.000 Are we supposed to just bring back everything that's ever lived?

00:52:40.000 At what point do we draw the line?

00:52:42.000 You know, all these thoughts in my head.

00:52:43.000 Like why are human beings the deciders of what lives and dies?

00:52:48.000 Like are we...

00:53:01.000 We know what happens with invasive species.

00:53:03.000 When invasive species come into new territories, they destroy everything.

00:53:07.000 Florida is an amazing example of that. 0.90

00:53:10.000 Florida is so crazy.

00:53:12.000 I mean, it is Florida.

00:53:15.000 You know, I mean, like when you think of Florida, you think like Florida man.

00:53:19.000 So the only state that you can say like the name of the state and then a man and everybody's like, what did he do?

00:53:24.000 But that's Florida ecologically.

00:53:27.000 Yeah.

00:53:27.000 Like the entire center of it, the Everglades, is infested with Burmese pythons.

00:53:32.000 Yeah.

00:53:32.000 Did you see that there is a competition every year to go out and kill as many as they can?

00:53:36.000 And there's a there's a monetary reward for people who kill.

00:53:39.000 I think it's the most or maybe the the biggest.

00:53:42.000 There's some something like this.

00:53:43.000 Even that's not going to put it.

00:53:44.000 No, it doesn't at all.

00:53:45.000 People kill—and during this competition, they kill hundreds, maybe thousands of these snakes, and it doesn't even touch them.

00:53:52.000 There's an estimate of a half a million.

00:53:54.000 They think there might be a half a million there.

00:53:56.000 And there's a guy that's been on this podcast before.

00:53:58.000 He calls himself Python Cowboy.

00:53:59.000 He's quite a character.

00:54:01.000 And didn't he give us a head?

00:54:02.000 We got a head laying around here, right?

00:54:04.000 You got it over there?

00:54:05.000 That python head?

00:54:07.000 But that dude.

00:54:09.000 He has been catching them.

00:54:11.000 He uses dogs.

00:54:12.000 The dogs find where the nests are.

00:54:14.000 And the video of these things, you know, you're pulling out this 15, 16, 17. I think he's got as big as an 18-foot-long snake.

00:54:22.000 Wow.

00:54:22.000 They're hundreds of pounds.

00:54:23.000 They're enormous.

00:54:24.000 They swallow deer.

00:54:26.000 They eat alligators.

00:54:28.000 They're eating alligators. 0.99

00:54:29.000 Thank goodness, because alligators are doing great.

00:54:31.000 That's one thing I don't mind them doing.

00:54:32.000 We need something that's hunting alligators. 1.00

00:54:34.000 That's another problem in Florida.

00:54:36.000 It's infested with alligators as well.

00:54:38.000 On the endangered species list.

00:54:39.000 When I lived there, they were on the endangered species list.

00:54:41.000 One of the class of 1967, right?

00:54:44.000 The first species to be officially listed.

00:54:46.000 I wonder why did they list them?

00:54:47.000 Because they were almost gone at that point.

00:54:49.000 How did they do that?

00:54:50.000 Like, I can't imagine that you could do that now.

00:54:53.000 That you could get them to the point of extinction now.

00:54:56.000 Because they're so hard to find, and they're everywhere.

00:54:58.000 I don't want to say they're so hard to find, but when they get in the water, you're not going to get all of them.

00:55:05.000 How are you killing all of them?

00:55:06.000 You know there's a show, I don't know where it's on, but it's a show that's called Florida Man. 0.73

00:55:10.000 I was watching it on a flight the other day.

00:55:13.000 Seriously.

00:55:13.000 And 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.

00:55:25.000 and then an alligator bit off his arm.

00:55:27.000 That is the, that's the story.

00:55:30.000 Oh, I saw that guy in the news.

00:55:32.000 That's the guy that, like, he had to walk, like, for a whole day with, like, one arm.

00:55:36.000 I don't know.

00:55:37.000 I remember there was a guy who...

00:55:41.000 There's probably hundreds of stories like this.

00:55:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:55:43.000 In this video, and I was trying to sleep, so I'm probably wrong.

00:55:47.000 In 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. 0.90

00:55:58.000 And he was like, okay, mom, I'll do that. 0.52

00:55:59.000 It was, I don't know.

00:56:00.000 Oh, boy.

00:56:01.000 He was probably not sober.

00:56:04.000 It was blood loss at that point.

00:56:06.000 Sure.

00:56:06.000 And then also whatever contributed to making him...

00:56:10.000 Right.

00:56:11.000 I won't play the video, but there you go.

00:56:13.000 Is that the dude?

00:56:13.000 I mean, this is not...

00:56:17.000 Is it?

00:56:17.000 This is a similar thing that did happen a month ago.

00:56:20.000 Here's the video of it.

00:56:21.000 The one that was the show that was about...

00:56:25.000 The show was about something that happened years ago.

00:56:27.000 There's enough go for them to be able to make it.

00:56:31.000 I bet it happens all the time.

00:56:31.000 Yeah, right?

00:56:32.000 I mean, it's Florida.

00:56:33.000 They are huge.

00:56:35.000 Now they're in Georgia, too, right?

00:56:36.000 Oh, they're in Texas.

00:56:38.000 They're here.

00:56:39.000 Yeah.

00:56:39.000 They find them.

00:56:41.000 And the golf courses in Florida are like, good luck playing golf out there. 0.98

00:56:44.000 Are you crazy? 0.71

00:56:45.000 You're playing golf in Jurassic Park. 0.96

00:56:47.000 I'm sure you've seen the videos.

00:56:49.000 There's one amazing video of this.

00:56:51.000 It's a huge alligator.

00:56:52.000 It's like a 14-footer.

00:56:54.000 And it's walking across this golf course.

00:56:56.000 And it looks like a dinosaur.

00:56:58.000 Because it's not walking like dragging its belly on the ground like they sometimes do.

00:57:04.000 It's kind of puffed up.

00:57:05.000 There it is.

00:57:05.000 Look at that.

00:57:06.000 Holy.

00:57:07.000 Oh, my God.

00:57:07.000 That's wild.

00:57:08.000 That is so big.

00:57:10.000 Look at the size of that thing.

00:57:12.000 You're out there playing golf.

00:57:14.000 You see that guy and you know that they can run fast.

00:57:18.000 Yeah, they run like 30 miles an hour. 1.00

00:57:20.000 Look at this dork! 1.00

00:57:21.000 This dork can't run 10 miles an hour. 1.00

00:57:23.000 Florida man. 1.00

00:57:23.000 Yeah, that's totally a Florida man. 1.00

00:57:25.000 Give me a selfie for the Facebook.

00:57:28.000 Get right up on that thing.

00:57:30.000 And, you know, there's a lot of them there, too.

00:57:32.000 I mean, they say that pretty much any undisturbed body of water likely has an alligator in it now.

00:57:38.000 So what ate them?

00:57:39.000 That's a good question.

00:57:41.000 Back in the day, they probably just ate each other.

00:57:43.000 You know, they cannibalized each other.

00:57:45.000 Maybe they're going to do that, too.

00:57:46.000 I'm sure they probably do.

00:57:47.000 They probably have to at a certain point in time.

00:57:50.000 I mean, what are the snakes going to eat?

00:57:51.000 Snakes have wiped out 90% of the mammals in the Evergrades.

00:57:54.000 And they're terrible for birds, too.

00:57:55.000 Oh, yeah, for everything.

00:57:56.000 Ground nesting birds, anything they get a hold of.

00:57:59.000 I mean, and if there's a half a million of them, that is a killing population of extraordinary proportions.

00:58:06.000 I mean, half a million things that could eat a deer.

00:58:09.000 You know, there's no skunks left.

00:58:12.000 There's everything.

00:58:12.000 Raccoons, they're all gone.

00:58:14.000 Everything's missing.

00:58:15.000 But this is exactly why we need these technologies that we're trying to develop a colossal.

00:58:20.000 We're not just bringing species back to life, right?

00:58:23.000 This sounds like a sales pitch.

00:58:24.000 We're a species preservation company.

00:58:26.000 It is a sales pitch.

00:58:27.000 But birds, whenever I think about birds, I think of this, right?

00:58:31.000 We know that there are are things that we can do to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat, right?

00:58:37.000 We can do things like...

00:58:43.000 One 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.

00:58:53.000 They were probably connected at some point until humans created stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth.

00:58:59.000 And when Texas Panthers were introduced in the mid-1990s, that population recovered.

00:59:05.000 They stopped.

00:59:06.000 They had a disorder called cryptorchidism, where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend. 0.78

00:59:12.000 of heart problems.

00:59:13.000 Is that because there's a small breeding population?

00:59:15.000 Yeah, because there were very few of them.

00:59:17.000 And so-No genetic diversity.

00:59:19.000 The choice was to mate with your family.

00:59:22.000 That's it.

00:59:23.000 Oof.

00:59:24.000 Right?

00:59:25.000 And things want to survive, so they do.

00:59:27.000 So you get these highly inbred populations and people fixed it by moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new genetic diversity.

00:59:34.000 It's called genetic rescue.

00:59:36.000 Right.

00:59:36.000 And that's a great way of bringing diversity back into a population.

00:59:41.000 It's what we're trying to do with our red wolf project.

00:59:43.000 Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world.

00:59:47.000 They're the only endemic American wolf and they are nearly extinct.

00:59:52.000 There's a successful captive breeding program.

00:59:54.000 And 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.

01:00:01.000 She was working and discovered because people were sending her photos.

01:00:05.000 See, 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?

01:00:24.000 So 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.

01:00:37.000 And she looked at it and she goes, yeah.

01:00:39.000 It's not.

01:00:40.000 It's something else.

01:00:41.000 It's something in between those.

01:00:43.000 And so she tested it and found that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves.

01:00:49.000 And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes.

01:00:55.000 Canids are always hybridizing with each other.

01:00:57.000 We know that because there are wolves that are black because black gene for wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog.

01:01:06.000 Had his way with a wolf in heat, right?

01:01:09.000 That's how that allele got into that population. 0.75

01:01:11.000 So we know canids do this all the time.

01:01:13.000 And she was like, this is so cool, because this captive breeding population was established with just a few founder individuals.

01:01:21.000 And the team working with them are doing a great job trying to maximize genetic diversity.

01:01:25.000 Picking who's going to pair with who to keep all that diversity there.

01:01:29.000 But it's still just a few individuals.

01:01:31.000 So they are going to lose genetic diversity.

01:01:34.000 It's just how it works.

01:01:35.000 But if we can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a way of concentrating more diversity.

01:01:42.000 Better 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?

01:01:52.000 And we can actually help this population to survive.

01:01:55.000 So 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.

01:02:03.000 Well, that's fascinating for things like red wolves and things like that.

01:02:10.000 When you think of the python problem in Florida, I heard the worst idea.

01:02:14.000 The worst idea, they were talking about introducing honey badgers.

01:02:18.000 Honey badgers?

01:02:19.000 Because they eat snakes.

01:02:20.000 I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.

01:02:23.000 Because 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.

01:02:32.000 We've never done that before.

01:02:33.000 Right, Australia?

01:02:34.000 Right. 0.85

01:02:34.000 Australia's a wreck. 0.85

01:02:35.000 They have a terrible... 0.98

01:02:38.000 Yeah.

01:02:39.000 And in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails.

01:02:43.000 Oh, yeah.

01:02:44.000 I heard of those.

01:02:45.000 Yeah.

01:02:45.000 That they introduced this thing called a rosy wolf snail that they were going to get to eat the giant African land snails.

01:02:52.000 But instead, the rosy wolf snail prefers the taste of native endemic Hawaiian snails.

01:02:58.000 And so the rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone.

01:03:01.000 And they're big.

01:03:02.000 Have you seen one of those?

01:03:03.000 I don't think I have.

01:03:05.000 A giant African land snail.

01:03:06.000 Worth looking at it.

01:03:07.000 Did they come over on cargo ships or something?

01:03:09.000 I think people introduced them for some reason that I can't remember what it was.

01:03:14.000 So we have a good history of doing this kind of thing.

01:03:16.000 Is it for giant escargot?

01:03:18.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:03:19.000 Right?

01:03:20.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:03:21.000 Can they eat those? 0.96

01:03:22.000 Are those delicious?

01:03:23.000 I think people can eat them, probably.

01:03:24.000 But they eat everything, from all of the vegetation to the other snails.

01:03:28.000 The size of that thing.

01:03:29.000 To plaster.

01:03:30.000 You know, they'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built.

01:03:33.000 Oh, great.

01:03:34.000 Yeah.

01:03:34.000 Oh, great.

01:03:35.000 Yeah.

01:03:35.000 So we introduced these little things, rosy wolf snails, to try to control them.

01:03:39.000 But instead, they're killing all the endemic snails.

01:03:42.000 We never learn.

01:03:43.000 Yeah, I hope they don't bring honey badgers to Florida.

01:03:47.000 I don't even know if this article I was reading was a serious article.

01:03:50.000 But it was just like, that sounds like something that someone would...

01:03:57.000 That's what they like to do.

01:03:58.000 they kill Cobras and they have an unbelievably Like, they can tolerate getting bit by lions.

01:04:07.000 I mean, they're freaks.

01:04:08.000 They're really weird animals, like honey badgers.

01:04:11.000 And they just really do.

01:04:12.000 They're cute, right?

01:04:13.000 I remember when my kids were little, watching the Wild Kratts.

01:04:16.000 There was a Wild Kratts episode about honey badgers.

01:04:19.000 How they were all cute when they were babies because they were hiding in camouflage.

01:04:22.000 Yeah.

01:04:23.000 Maybe when their babies are cute.

01:04:24.000 They're pretty ferocious.

01:04:25.000 Yeah.

01:04:27.000 Yeah, very similar to wolverines.

01:04:29.000 I think they're all in the same family, right?

01:04:31.000 Yeah, there he is.

01:04:32.000 Look at that face.

01:04:33.000 I think they look very cute. 0.89

01:04:35.000 Look at that face, just big old deadly snake, and that's his lunch.

01:04:39.000 And they get bit all the time, and they just, like, they get sick, pass out for a couple minutes, and then recover and kill a snake.

01:04:45.000 That's amazing.

01:04:46.000 Yeah, they're ferocious little animals.

01:04:48.000 So have people been able to understand better anti-venom properties from studying them?

01:04:54.000 Yeah.

01:04:54.000 Oh, my.

01:04:55.000 It looks vicious.

01:04:57.000 That is such a crazy animal.

01:04:59.000 That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.

01:05:02.000 Oh, they're wild looking.

01:05:03.000 They're wild looking.

01:05:04.000 I just hope they don't bring them into Florida. 0.74

01:05:05.000 Because it sounds like someone's going to do it.

01:05:07.000 It sounds like a Florida idea.

01:05:10.000 Have you heard about the hippo solution in the early 20th century?

01:05:14.000 No.

01:05:16.000 This is a great sort of American history story.

01:05:20.000 Our country is replete with people with brilliant ideas.

01:05:23.000 And in the early 20th century, when the land in the West was not doing so well, Well, I've been overgrazed.

01:05:30.000 There are too many cattle.

01:05:31.000 And there was this thing called the meat question.

01:05:32.000 It was the thing of the day, the meat question.

01:05:34.000 People were talking about, how are we going to survive?

01:05:36.000 There's not enough cattle.

01:05:38.000 Maybe we're going to have to eat our dogs. 0.92

01:05:39.000 And at the same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and other places where the, I think it was the World Fair.

01:05:47.000 People had brought New Orleans, who was the host city of the, I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans this.

01:05:54.000 Water hyacinth, this water, little tiny beautiful flower as a gift.

01:05:58.000 And they loved it.

01:05:59.000 And so they planted it everywhere.

01:06:00.000 And it just grew like absolute crazy and was choking up the river.

01:06:04.000 Like ships couldn't get through because of this like matted river.

01:06:06.000 People were like putting oil on it to get it to sink and trying to light it on fire and nothing would happen.

01:06:12.000 And this team of people that included a congressman from Louisiana came up with a solution for both problems at once.

01:06:18.000 And that was that they were going to import hippos from Africa.

01:06:25.000 Into Louisiana to live on the bayous.

01:06:28.000 They would eat the plant, this water hyacinth thing, and then we could eat them.

01:06:33.000 And that was going to be the perfect solution to both of these problems.

01:06:37.000 How did that get stopped?

01:06:39.000 It was an accident.

01:06:40.000 So it's actually a fun story.

01:06:42.000 You should look it up and read the whole story because it involved these two guys.

01:06:47.000 One of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America.

01:06:50.000 And another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things.

01:06:54.000 And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other.

01:06:57.000 But they came together on part of this congressman's team.

01:07:00.000 The scout thought it was a great idea.

01:07:02.000 He 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.

01:07:09.000 And that would, you know, have more reason for people to want to support the idea of national parks at the time, which is great.

01:07:15.000 like, you know, this utility of nature.

01:07:17.000 It seems weird compared to how we think of it now, but I think this is really interesting.

01:07:27.000 And 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.

01:07:42.000 And he was like, that guy is an expert as well.

01:07:44.000 He can also be on my team.

01:07:46.000 And they testified in front of Congress, and they asked questions like, You know, how do you know that they're safe?

01:07:52.000 How do you know that they're tame?

01:07:53.000 This 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?

01:08:02.000 And everybody was like, yeah, awesome.

01:08:03.000 Even the New York Times was completely behind it.

01:08:06.000 They published an editorial talking about, they called hippos lake cow bacon.

01:08:12.000 What year was this?

01:08:13.000 This is the early 20th century.

01:08:16.000 Wow!

01:08:18.000 Lake Cow Bacon.

01:08:20.000 Yeah, everybody was like, this is it.

01:08:22.000 This is what's going to solve the problem.

01:08:23.000 Teddy Roosevelt was behind it, too.

01:08:25.000 Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt was behind it.

01:08:26.000 There was a bill all the way in Congress.

01:08:28.000 It just didn't pass.

01:08:29.000 Yeah, well, it didn't go up for a vote.

01:08:31.000 How the U.S. almost became a nation of hippo ranchers. 0.55

01:08:34.000 Oh, my God.

01:08:36.000 Failed House Bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing the hippopotamus that would be killed to make lake cow bacon.

01:08:43.000 brilliant.

01:08:44.000 This is, I mean, But it's not fair to call it failed, because it didn't fail.

01:08:49.000 It never came up for a vote.

01:08:50.000 So 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.

01:08:57.000 That's it?

01:08:58.000 It just went away?

01:08:58.000 It just went away.

01:09:01.000 Near miss on the hippos.

01:09:02.000 Well, they kill more people in Africa than any other mammal, right? 0.99

01:09:05.000 Yeah, well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive.

01:09:09.000 You saw there's hippos that live now in Colombia because of Pablo Escobar.

01:09:13.000 Nobody knew what to do with them.

01:09:14.000 Yeah, and they started off with just a handful of them, and now there's like dozens of them down there.

01:09:19.000 What are they doing about that?

01:09:22.000 Nothing.

01:09:22.000 I think they keep rounding them up and putting them back on his...

01:09:26.000 What can you do?

01:09:26.000 How much property did he have up there?

01:09:29.000 I don't know the answer to that.

01:09:33.000 It's so crazy that you just have hippos and they just get loose and now Columbia has hippos.

01:09:40.000 He took them there on purpose, though, just like we wanted to bring them here.

01:09:43.000 Can you imagine how bad that would be, though?

01:09:45.000 Well, that's the wild boars in the United States.

01:09:49.000 That's William Randolph Hearst.

01:09:51.000 William Randolph Hearst wanted wild pigs on his property.

01:09:54.000 And so he imported them from, I think, from...

01:10:01.000 And then these wild pigs have now populated all through California.

01:10:05.000 I mean, they're all over the place now.

01:10:07.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

01:10:08.000 We did have wild pigs around the U.S. at some point.

01:10:11.000 Probably not the same thing, right?

01:10:12.000 Weren't there wild pigs?

01:10:13.000 That's a good question.

01:10:15.000 I think they came over on boats with explorers, you know, and I know William Randolph Hearst.

01:10:21.000 All the ones around like the northern California area. 0.97

01:10:25.000 I think all of those are the remnants of the William Randolph Hearst pigs. 0.96

01:10:30.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:10:30.000 They think. 0.99

01:10:31.000 We don't see them in Alaska, Yukon, where we find all these big stashes of bones coming out of permafrost.

01:10:36.000 So it's probably not that they came over like that.

01:10:38.000 We find bison and horses and mammals.

01:10:40.000 Mostly bison.

01:10:42.000 Where did the wild boars emanate from?

01:10:44.000 What's their original country of origin?

01:10:46.000 I 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.

01:10:53.000 He 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.

01:11:00.000 He 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.

01:11:07.000 But yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia, I think is the origin, or at least the domestication.

01:11:12.000 And normally things are domesticated around where they were.

01:11:15.000 They're the weirdest animal, right?

01:11:16.000 Because the domestic ones will become, they change, they morph when they go feral really quickly.

01:11:22.000 I think it's like they start within like six weeks.

01:11:25.000 I mean, this is the way evolution works, right?

01:11:27.000 Something has a particular suite of traits.

01:11:30.000 The testimony of when this was going on, this is the guy who presented this.

01:11:35.000 The hippo thing?

01:11:36.000 He's talking about pigs right here where they were going to bring them from northern Manchuria.

01:11:41.000 Were they the most delicious pigs?

01:11:43.000 They're also talking about bringing in rhinos.

01:11:45.000 I think they did bring in camels in like 1853.

01:11:48.000 Well, we had camels.

01:11:49.000 There were North American camels.

01:11:51.000 We're here during the ice ages.

01:11:53.000 This is a bad test or something.

01:11:55.000 This is 1853?

01:11:56.000 They're talking about bringing antelopes in, and they ask, like, are they easily tamed or domesticated?

01:12:01.000 He's like, they're very easily tamed.

01:12:03.000 That's Irwin.

01:12:04.000 So this is a guy who worked for, I guess, what became the USDA.

01:12:08.000 But he was in charge of apples.

01:12:10.000 But he was really dedicated to trying to solve this meat problem.

01:12:13.000 And he saw importing African animals and animals from other places as the real solution to this.

01:12:17.000 Well, they've definitely done that in Texas.

01:12:20.000 Texas is overrun with African animals. 1.00

01:12:23.000 All the private ranches are filled with elands and neil guy and wildebeest.

01:12:29.000 We used to have so many cool animals here that all went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.

01:12:33.000 So why not?

01:12:34.000 I mean, we had mammoths.

01:12:35.000 Why shouldn't we have elephants? 1.00

01:12:36.000 I know, but isn't it weird?

01:12:38.000 But again, that's the same argument.

01:12:40.000 You bring in an invasive species.

01:12:42.000 Is it invasive, though, if it used to live here?

01:12:44.000 Well, it's invasive in a sense that the wolves that are in Colorado right now that are eating all the cattle are kind of invasive.

01:12:50.000 Yeah, I mean...

01:12:52.000 They're not invasive because they do live.

01:13:04.000 I think there was something I read about that yesterday.

01:13:07.000 But 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.

01:13:15.000 He actually sent me some more pictures yesterday.

01:13:18.000 And I was going to post about it, but so much crazy stuff was happening in LA.

01:13:21.000 I'm like, this is not the time to talk about, like, wolf problems.

01:13:24.000 But they're just killing calves and eating their liver. 0.92

01:13:28.000 They're not even that hungry.

01:13:29.000 They're just eating the tasty parts and leaving these calves alone. 0.92

01:13:32.000 And 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.

01:13:54.000 Yeah, 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.

01:14:05.000 I mean, I imagine the people who voted for that, I wonder what they imagined.

01:14:10.000 Well, it's ballot box biology, right?

01:14:12.000 You 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.

01:14:22.000 Oh, that sounds amazing.

01:14:24.000 What 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.

01:14:37.000 Oh, so they already had a taste for it.

01:14:39.000 Exactly.

01:14:40.000 Exactly.

01:14:41.000 And they already had habits.

01:14:41.000 And 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.

01:14:53.000 It's just stupid. 0.99

01:14:55.000 And again, it's not biologists. 1.00

01:14:57.000 It's not their idea.

01:14:58.000 It's ballot box biology.

01:15:00.000 And it's all being instigated by the Colorado governor.

01:15:04.000 It's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists.

01:15:08.000 I 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.

01:15:17.000 But the land is not the same as everywhere as it is in Yellowstone.

01:15:20.000 And 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. 0.93

01:15:35.000 And their midterm exam was a debate, and the topic of the debate was that wolves should be introduced into California.

01:15:42.000 Why not New York City?

01:15:44.000 Let's go.

01:15:45.000 Put them everywhere they used to be. 0.82

01:15:46.000 I mean, this is where it gets silly.

01:15:47.000 It'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.

01:15:59.000 So it's like the whole thing is crazy.

01:16:01.000 They were already on their way to do a natural migration into Colorado.

01:16:06.000 Right.

01:16:06.000 And it would have been different wolves.

01:16:08.000 Yes.

01:16:08.000 It would have been different sized wolves too.

01:16:10.000 Because I think there's also like some of the wolves that are being introduced.

01:16:14.000 They're introduced from British Columbia or they're being introduced from Alberta or somewhere up there.

01:16:20.000 I think that was the ones that came into Yellowstone.

01:16:23.000 Like the Yellowstone thing is cool, right?

01:16:25.000 It's been a few decades now.

01:16:27.000 People have kind of like come to this sort of – People recognize that there was an overpopulation of elk for sure.

01:16:36.000 They used to have these hunting seasons where they would hunt them in the snow in the winter because there were so many of them.

01:16:43.000 They 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.

01:16:53.000 So mountain lions weren't really putting the dent in the population that a pack of intelligent hunting Cooperative animals like wolves could do.

01:17:02.000 So they brought it back, and it's relatively successful.

01:17:06.000 They've knocked the population of elk down more than 40%, but that's probably good. 1.00

01:17:12.000 I mean, not for the people that hunt elk.

01:17:14.000 They're really mad.

01:17:16.000 You know, wolves are cool.

01:17:17.000 It's cool to have them around.

01:17:18.000 But Montana is very different than Aspen.

01:17:20.000 Right.

01:17:21.000 It's very different when you're in the mountains of Montana and you see a wolf versus in someone's cattle ranch in Aspen.

01:17:27.000 Right. 1.00

01:17:28.000 This is stupid. 1.00

01:17:30.000 Why did you do this? 1.00

01:17:31.000 But what's interesting, this class that I took, it was a debate that I taught.

01:17:37.000 Sorry.

01:17:37.000 It was a debate.

01:17:38.000 And what I made them do was assume roles of a rancher, a politician, a conservationist.

01:17:43.000 And I had several different roles.

01:17:44.000 And then I randomly assigned whether they were pro or con.

01:17:47.000 And they had a couple of weeks to figure out what their debate was going to be.

01:17:51.000 And I took a vote before the debate.

01:17:54.000 And as you might expect for...

01:17:56.000 18-year-olds in California.

01:17:58.000 You say at the beginning, "Should wolves be introduced?" 100% yes.

01:18:01.000 Right.

01:18:02.000 They 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.

01:18:14.000 And the majority of people would be like, yeah, no, it's a bad idea.

01:18:17.000 I think if you give people the tools to be able to think, they can imagine themselves in a different scenario.

01:18:22.000 And we need to do that.

01:18:24.000 We need to be arming people with thoughtfulness rather than jumping to a conclusion.

01:18:29.000 Yeah, and also...

01:18:32.000 But everybody's going to vote.

01:18:34.000 Right, but you shouldn't be able to vote on things that you're not educated in.

01:18:38.000 It'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.

01:18:52.000 Look, I love them.

01:18:53.000 I think they're amazing animals.

01:18:55.000 It's just like...

01:19:00.000 Putting them where people live.

01:19:02.000 They're going to eat pets. 1.00

01:19:03.000 They'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.

01:19:11.000 They're not going to chase down a herd of elk.

01:19:13.000 That's hard.

01:19:14.000 Well, they're biology, right?

01:19:15.000 They're making decisions on where they can find their next meal.

01:19:18.000 Exactly.

01:19:18.000 We're not planning on rewilding dire wolves, just to put that out there.

01:19:22.000 That's great.

01:19:22.000 I like that.

01:19:23.000 Plus, you've met Khaleesi.

01:19:24.000 I don't think she would be.

01:19:26.000 I bet she will in a couple of years.

01:19:28.000 Yeah, maybe so.

01:19:29.000 Yeah, but right now.

01:19:30.000 In a couple of years, she'll freak you out.

01:19:32.000 She kind of freaks me out already when you look at her.

01:19:35.000 Those eyes are so intense.

01:19:37.000 They're so intense.

01:19:38.000 You know, when you look into a predator's eyes, there's something about it.

01:19:41.000 It's like you realize, like, oh my god, I'm like a water balloon.

01:19:44.000 I'm so, you know, we're just like so weak and soft.

01:19:48.000 Yeah, 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.

01:20:17.000 Yes.

01:20:18.000 And you're not going to let them breed?

01:20:20.000 No.

01:20:20.000 The plan is not to let them breed.

01:20:22.000 How will you prevent them from breeding?

01:20:24.000 Well, at the moment, they're separated.

01:20:28.000 But 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.

01:20:48.000 And we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that. 0.98

01:20:51.000 But they will be controlled.

01:20:53.000 We track them.

01:20:54.000 There's cameras on them all the time.

01:20:56.000 There's three separate layers of fencing to keep them in.

01:20:59.000 We know exactly where they are.

01:21:00.000 They couldn't get a splinter without a camera somewhere seeing it.

01:21:03.000 We know exactly what's going on with them.

01:21:05.000 So, yeah.

01:21:07.000 That sounds like a scene in Jurassic Park.

01:21:10.000 We have it totally under control.

01:21:11.000 I've seen that scene, yes.

01:21:12.000 Don't worry.

01:21:13.000 We have cameras upon cameras.

01:21:14.000 Do I sound like the scientist?

01:21:17.000 No, you don't.

01:21:18.000 I kind of do, actually.

01:21:21.000 I was in Mauritius.

01:21:22.000 Which scientist?

01:21:24.000 Jeff Goldblum was the scientist that got it.

01:21:26.000 I'm Henry Wu, right?

01:21:27.000 I'm the chief scientist, right?

01:21:28.000 So I'm a good guy for now.

01:21:30.000 Right.

01:21:31.000 But he becomes a bad guy in the future, right?

01:21:33.000 So I'm looking forward to my evil transition.

01:21:35.000 I'm not.

01:21:35.000 We're not making dinosaurs.

01:21:38.000 But, you know, there were other cool animals that we have DNA for.

01:21:42.000 I heard you talking about the American cheetah.

01:21:46.000 Yes.

01:21:47.000 So we have two high-quality genome sequences from American cheetah.

01:21:51.000 Wow.

01:21:51.000 We want them back to help with our population problems.

01:21:57.000 So 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.

01:22:09.000 They are direwolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves.

01:22:14.000 We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals, one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal that lived 13,000 years ago.

01:22:22.000 And we lined them up next to each other and figured out what it is that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf.

01:22:28.000 And then we used the tools of genome engineering to...

01:22:39.000 And that has created these animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that direwolf coat.

01:22:46.000 And that's a cool thing too.

01:22:47.000 That 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.

01:22:56.000 A dire wolf.

01:22:57.000 When 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.

01:23:09.000 And 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?

01:23:16.000 We didn't know because we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we could use to see what color their coats were.

01:23:21.000 But 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.

01:23:34.000 That suggested they had light colored coats.

01:23:36.000 And so we thought that's cool.

01:23:38.000 We'll have that as one of our key dire wolf traits that we're bringing back.

01:23:42.000 Is it possible that it's like other wolves where there's a variation but you would only sequence the DNA of ones that had white?

01:23:49.000 It's possible, yeah.

01:23:50.000 And 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.

01:24:00.000 So maybe it wasn't that every dire wolf had a light.

01:24:09.000 So if they lived 13,000 years ago, you're talking about the Ice Age, right?

01:24:13.000 Yeah.

01:24:13.000 Do you think that that's why they had white hair?

01:24:15.000 It's possible.

01:24:16.000 Both of these animals were from northern part of their range where it would have been colder.

01:24:21.000 They did live through previous interglacial periods.

01:24:23.000 125,000 years ago, it was as warm as it is today or even warmer with predicted to be no ice at the poles.

01:24:29.000 And also we know dire wolves were really common around the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.

01:24:33.000 We haven't been able to get any DNA out of anything from La Brea.

01:24:37.000 That would be an amazing discovery.

01:24:38.000 Does the tar just destroys everything?

01:24:40.000 Don't know if it destroys it or if it...

01:24:50.000 We'll get there.

01:24:50.000 I mean, someday we'll figure it out, and that's going to open up a lot of really cool animals.

01:24:54.000 It kind of makes sense that, like polar bears, having that white color would—polar bears actually have—it's clear, right?

01:25:01.000 Yeah, their hair is long and it's clear.

01:25:03.000 That's why polar bears, have you seen those pictures of bears in zoos where they look, No.

01:25:10.000 Oh, they get covered in moss?

01:25:11.000 It grows in the...

01:25:14.000 Whoa.

01:25:15.000 And so if they're too wet and not cold enough, they can turn this weird...

01:25:20.000 Inside their hair.

01:25:21.000 Oh, wow.

01:25:22.000 Yeah.

01:25:23.000 But it just makes sense that them being that color would have an evolutionary advantage for hunting.

01:25:28.000 Yeah.

01:25:28.000 Because you're in something that's completely white.

01:25:31.000 Yeah.

01:25:31.000 And you don't see like a grizzly bear.

01:25:32.000 You'd see like, oh, look at that dark blob that's moving towards it.

01:26:00.000 We know that doesn't happen.

01:26:01.000 And then we found another hybrid polar bear from the previous interglacial.

01:26:04.000 And then there's evidence that they're hybridizing today.

01:26:07.000 Yeah, they find them today.

01:26:07.000 And the hot bears go out and do this, yeah.

01:26:09.000 So 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.

01:26:23.000 Because a brown bear boy will wake up from hibernation and go out onto polar bear.

01:26:29.000 to scavenge for food.

01:26:31.000 And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator, whereas brown bear females are seasonal.

01:26:38.000 So a polar bear female will ovulate in the presence of a male. 1.00

01:26:42.000 So the male comes up to her and will mate her.

01:26:45.000 The 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.

01:26:54.000 Oh, wow.

01:26:54.000 But that's weird then.

01:26:56.000 So why do we always find the hybrids living with brown bears instead of living with polar bears?

01:27:01.000 And 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.

01:27:10.000 And his hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.

01:27:19.000 Completely makes sense.

01:27:20.000 It does, right?

01:27:21.000 Because they have that ability to swim and they dive under the water.

01:27:25.000 And they're also, like, really clever in how they use those ice shelves and swim from one ice shelf to another.

01:27:30.000 Yeah.

01:27:31.000 But 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.

01:27:39.000 I know.

01:27:40.000 It's insane, right?

01:27:41.000 That's nuts.

01:27:41.000 Biology's cool.

01:27:42.000 It is cool.

01:27:43.000 It's cool to think of, like, how they became successful doing that.

01:27:46.000 Who figured that out?

01:27:47.000 How do they have the self-awareness to know that the end of their nose is dark and that other animals can see it?

01:27:52.000 But they also hybridize, just given the chance to do so, right?

01:27:56.000 Because biology doesn't recognize species concepts, right?

01:28:00.000 Biology doesn't care that that animal is called a brown bear by us and that animal is called a polar bear.

01:28:05.000 They run into each other.

01:28:06.000 They're like, cool, just like our Neanderthal ancestors.

01:28:09.000 Are those hybrids?

01:28:12.000 Are they fertile? 0.91

01:28:14.000 Can they have babies? 1.00

01:28:15.000 Yes.

01:28:15.000 This 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.

01:28:30.000 And 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.

01:28:39.000 And so they hybridized there and all brown bears.

01:28:42.000 Polar bears in North America today have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears.

01:28:47.000 Jeez.

01:28:48.000 Wow.

01:28:49.000 That's so fascinating.

01:28:50.000 Yeah, it's just like how we all have ancestry from mixing with Neanderthals.

01:28:55.000 Look at that.

01:28:55.000 Is that from the German zoo?

01:28:59.000 Because there's a couple of bears at it.

01:29:01.000 But that really looks like a hybrid, doesn't it?

01:29:03.000 Yeah.

01:29:03.000 It looks like there's a lot of traits of both of them.

01:29:05.000 Yeah, it's impressive.

01:29:07.000 Bears are some of the most fascinating animals ever.

01:29:10.000 It's just an incredible animal.

01:29:15.000 I'm really glad you said it that way, that nature doesn't know that there's a polar bear and a brown bear.

01:29:22.000 Why would it?

01:29:23.000 You're right.

01:29:23.000 It's just our definitions.

01:29:25.000 Is 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?

01:29:38.000 Yeah.

01:29:38.000 But that the true nature of genes is that there's just like proliferation and fluctuation and all these animals breed with each other.

01:29:48.000 And it's like.

01:29:50.000 It's kind of that, but it's also that...

01:29:55.000 So 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.

01:30:09.000 And it's interesting.

01:30:11.000 I think the reason that we keep having this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about species concepts.

01:30:18.000 Come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts.

01:30:22.000 And they're all for a particular purpose.

01:30:24.000 You 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.

01:30:35.000 I'm going to compare the shape of this bone with the shape of this bone.

01:30:38.000 And if they're similar enough to my trained eye, I'm going to call that a species.

01:30:43.000 I saw you had a bison.

01:30:46.000 Priscus, I'm going to say, skull out there.

01:30:49.000 That's from the Alaska?

01:30:51.000 That's from the boneyard, yeah.

01:30:52.000 Step bison.

01:30:53.000 Yeah, step bison.

01:30:54.000 Bison Priscus or Bison Crassicornis, Bison Occidentalis, Bison Elascensis, Bison...

01:31:02.000 The naming of bison was like sport in the 18th, 19th century.

01:31:09.000 It's mostly 19th century.

01:31:09.000 Did you go to the bone lab?

01:31:11.000 The boneyard?

01:31:12.000 I haven't.

01:31:12.000 I don't think I've been to his.

01:31:15.000 I didn't go with Ben.

01:31:16.000 But I've been working up in that part of the world for 30 years.

01:31:19.000 We spend a lot of time working at gold mines outside of Dawson City.

01:31:23.000 Have you been to Dawson City?

01:31:24.000 No.

01:31:25.000 It's amazing.

01:31:26.000 It's an old-timey gold town.

01:31:28.000 Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks.

01:31:30.000 The buildings are all crooked because the fire is burned at one end and it melts the permafrost underneath.

01:31:35.000 It's where I learned what you're supposed to do when a fight breaks out in the bar that you've gone into.

01:31:40.000 What are you supposed to do?

01:31:41.000 Grab your beer.

01:31:43.000 Back up.

01:31:44.000 Right?

01:31:44.000 No, get out of there.

01:31:45.000 Otherwise your beer's going to get knocked over.

01:31:46.000 I'm not leaving.

01:31:47.000 You're not leaving when a fight breaks out?

01:31:50.000 Not in Dawson City.

01:31:51.000 There's mosquitoes outside.

01:31:56.000 No, it's a weird place.

01:31:57.000 Unless they're women. 1.00

01:31:59.000 Women fighting, don't scare me as much as men fighting. 1.00

01:32:01.000 But then women can pull out guns. 1.00

01:32:03.000 That's true.

01:32:04.000 But this is, it's Canada, so less likely for that to happen than in Alaska.

01:32:08.000 But this is there have been weird things happen there.

01:32:10.000 And, you know, there's.

01:32:13.000 And...

01:32:16.000 Why am I telling these stories? 0.96

01:32:17.000 This is ridiculous. 0.85

01:32:18.000 You go to the bars in Dawson City, and they still have this thing where there's the bell. 0.88

01:32:22.000 And if you ring the bell, the person who's rung the bell is buying a round for everybody who's in the bar.

01:32:27.000 And you learn, after you've been there for a while, that a person is only ringing that bell.

01:32:31.000 Because he wants the right to talk to everybody who's in there because he wants to fight with somebody, right? 0.98

01:32:36.000 This 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? 0.97

01:32:42.000 Really? 0.98

01:32:42.000 That's what they want to do when they get paid? 0.98

01:32:44.000 Rings 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.

01:32:57.000 I don't want to fight.

01:32:58.000 And he's just looking to fight with someone?

01:33:01.000 Yeah, just looking to fight.

01:33:02.000 Boy.

01:33:03.000 Yeah, it's a weird part of the world.

01:33:04.000 It's a fun place to work.

01:33:06.000 But anyway, I digress.

01:33:07.000 There'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.

01:33:15.000 Not any nearly as cool as his, but because he's got so much land, they've been collecting it for such a long time.

01:33:22.000 Oh, and I heard those great stories about how he donated material to the American Museum.

01:33:26.000 Well, it was previous owners of his property.

01:33:29.000 Right.

01:33:30.000 Right?

01:33:30.000 That's the case, right?

01:33:32.000 And they dumped it in the East River.

01:33:34.000 And so they denied dumping it in the East River.

01:33:37.000 So then they hired these guys to go and die for it.

01:33:40.000 And John Reeves told everybody where it was.

01:33:43.000 I don't know if he hired him or just told him.

01:33:44.000 So these guys dove in the East River.

01:33:47.000 They found step bison, bones, jaw fragments, all sorts of different...

01:33:54.000 I really like it, right?

01:33:55.000 Because I'm sure it's true, because they have so much of that material at the American Museum.

01:34:00.000 When I started working on bison, and I've worked on bison for 30 years, right?

01:34:03.000 When 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?

01:34:20.000 Now, they shouldn't have dumped it in the river, obviously. 0.98

01:34:22.000 That's dumb. 0.98

01:34:22.000 But he is going to get He won't know because he'll be long dead. 0.98

01:34:27.000 But in 10,000 years, when the paleontologists of the future are looking in that river, they're going to be like, what the fuck? 0.98

01:34:33.000 Right, because there's like tons of it out there. 0.95

01:34:36.000 What happened here?

01:34:38.000 What is that guy's name?

01:34:39.000 Dirty Water Dawn?

01:34:40.000 Is that his name?

01:34:41.000 This one guy who's one of the divers, he's found multiple pieces.

01:34:45.000 Yeah, I'm sure it's there.

01:34:46.000 And they probably didn't mean anything terrible by it.

01:34:50.000 Well, who knows?

01:34:50.000 Those people aren't even around anymore.

01:34:52.000 I think this was in the 20s, wasn't it?

01:34:54.000 Probably around the 50s.

01:34:56.000 That was when most of the collection came from.

01:34:58.000 There was a ton of gold mining activity in the 50s and 60s around Fairbanks.

01:35:01.000 So 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?

01:35:16.000 Where you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks.

01:35:20.000 Yeah.

01:35:21.000 Near Dawson, it's called the Klondike region, you have this really fine glacial silt.

01:35:26.000 And that settles in different places in different quantities.

01:35:29.000 And it settles really quickly.

01:35:31.000 So you get this really fast, thick buildup of this really fine silt that preserves the bones really well.

01:35:36.000 So when we go, the gold miners, they're placer mining.

01:35:39.000 So they're taking these high-pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt.

01:35:43.000 Then they let it thaw for a bit, and then they wash away the next layer.

01:35:46.000 They're trying to get to the gold-bearing gravel that's underneath.

01:35:49.000 But while they're doing that, literally thousands, tens of thousands of bones come out of there.

01:35:53.000 And in some places, it's more rich, more intense than others, but it's there.

01:35:57.000 I'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.

01:36:07.000 They jump out of the trucks, and they're like, holy shit, is that a mammoth tooth? 0.98

01:36:11.000 Like, yeah. 0.99

01:36:11.000 That's a mammoth tooth, yeah. 0.99

01:36:13.000 Is that what you brought?

01:36:14.000 That's what I brought to you, yeah.

01:36:15.000 It's a fossil.

01:36:16.000 This is from South Carolina.

01:36:17.000 Wow.

01:36:18.000 That's from South Carolina?

01:36:20.000 And it's a fossil.

01:36:20.000 You can see it's a fossil.

01:36:21.000 I know they like knife handles out of this stuff, which seems to me it's kind of gross.

01:36:26.000 That has...

01:36:29.000 Of course it's branded and it's colossal, you know.

01:36:32.000 Yeah, it's our logo.

01:36:33.000 Wow.

01:36:33.000 But, yeah, mammoths...

01:36:41.000 No.

01:36:42.000 Yeah.

01:36:44.000 So Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.

01:36:48.000 How did he even know about them?

01:36:49.000 It 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.

01:36:57.000 But he was obsessed with them.

01:36:58.000 He was getting his friends to mail him teeth that he was finding.

01:37:04.000 This is a funny story.

01:37:06.000 Let me see if I can get it right.

01:37:07.000 You should look this up, too, because it's hilarious.

01:37:10.000 how mammoths made America great before, and now when we bring our mammoth back, we're going to do it again.

01:37:14.000 So there was a guy in France who...

01:37:19.000 He was like, Comte de Buffon, Comte de Buffon, I think was his name.

01:37:22.000 I'm terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong.

01:37:24.000 But he was writing a series of books about natural history.

01:37:27.000 And the fifth, I think, of his books was called The Theory of American Degeneracy.

01:37:33.000 And 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?

01:37:47.000 And so he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more if he'd tried.

01:37:51.000 He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson.

01:37:53.000 He was busy fighting with Linnaeus, and Linnaeus was busy classifying things.

01:37:58.000 And this guy was like, there's no more than 200 species of animals anywhere.

01:38:01.000 So why would you bother with that sort of academic silliness?

01:38:05.000 Rather than think about how the animals got this way in the first place. 0.99

01:38:09.000 In his mind, discovering why American animals were so shit was the right way to be spending your time as a natural historian. 0.99

01:38:17.000 But this pissed Teddy Roosevelt off. 0.99

01:38:19.000 And so he was trying to figure out how he could prove to this guy that American animals were actually better.

01:38:25.000 So he was getting his friends to compile lists of things about how American bears are bigger than European bears.

01:38:31.000 American wolves are bigger than European wolves.

01:38:33.000 That it isn't that you come to America, like this guy said, and you suddenly get weaker and your blood gets watery.

01:38:41.000 That's what they thought.

01:38:42.000 And it was a bestseller, apparently.

01:38:45.000 That's incredible.

01:38:45.000 So they thought living under oppression was really good for you?

01:38:50.000 It's like strength training.

01:38:51.000 They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, they did.

01:38:54.000 There were new diseases.

01:38:55.000 They probably did get sick. 0.72

01:38:56.000 And so there was probably something in it.

01:38:59.000 So 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. 0.98

01:39:10.000 It was just really dumb.

01:39:12.000 But his main feature was mammoths, that he knew that this animal, he didn't think they were extinct at the time. 0.96

01:39:19.000 And nobody really knew about the idea of extinction.

01:39:22.000 He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to find them, that people were going to find these mammoths still there.

01:39:27.000 Isn't that incredible?

01:39:29.000 To prove.

01:39:30.000 Isn't that incredible when you just think that just a few hundred years ago, that was the pinnacle of science.

01:39:36.000 That was like the peak of understanding of all the species that were still alive.

01:39:41.000 We really didn't know.

01:39:42.000 What 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...

01:39:57.000 Like, I'm right.

01:39:58.000 I think it's what you were saying earlier.

01:39:59.000 It's a famine mentality.

01:40:01.000 It's just weak people's minds.

01:40:04.000 And there's weak human beings out there.

01:40:06.000 The way they think is a very weak way of thinking.

01:40:10.000 Want all the attention for themselves, and they're very egotistical, and it's also very supported by academia.

01:40:15.000 There's a lot of bitchy infighting in academia. 1.00

01:40:18.000 It's really gross.

01:40:19.000 Late 18th century, the idea of extinction was only just beginning to be popularized by some thinkers.

01:40:24.000 Georges Cuvier.

01:40:25.000 Cuvier.

01:40:26.000 Jefferson wasn't among the believers.

01:40:28.000 In a pre-Darwinian age, extinction was a violation of religious ideals.

01:40:32.000 God would not let animals go extinct.

01:40:34.000 And secular ideas, the balance of nature, could never be so significantly upset.

01:40:38.000 So for Jefferson in particular, Well, that's the real question.

01:40:54.000 Like, there have been animals that went extinct and then came back, right?

01:40:58.000 The dire wolf?

01:40:59.000 Right, but that was because of you guys.

01:41:01.000 Wasn't there like a bird that they thought was extinct?

01:41:04.000 Then they didn't go extinct.

01:41:06.000 Right, sort of like the Tasmanian tiger.

01:41:09.000 Or Bigfoot.

01:41:10.000 Oh no, the Tasmanian tiger was definitely real.

01:41:14.000 But Bigfoot was real.

01:41:15.000 It was Gigantopithecus.

01:41:16.000 They think that that was real.

01:41:17.000 But Gigantopithecus is really old.

01:41:19.000 Right.

01:41:20.000 But and would have changed until today.

01:41:22.000 I mean, I told you I have tested...

01:41:27.000 The insulation was one of my favorites.

01:41:30.000 This is something that I got while I was still doing my PhD.

01:41:32.000 People would send us all sorts of crazy things.

01:41:34.000 They sent you insulation?

01:41:34.000 They said it's Bigfoot fur?

01:41:35.000 Yeah, it was from a guy somewhere.

01:41:37.000 No, no, no, no.

01:41:37.000 No, they didn't say it was fur.

01:41:39.000 No, it was better than that.

01:41:41.000 He was from somewhere in the Carolinas.

01:41:44.000 I can't remember where.

01:41:45.000 And 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.

01:41:54.000 That's his station.

01:41:55.000 He's emailing you from his trip club.

01:41:57.000 It was a written letter.

01:41:58.000 A letter from his trip club.

01:41:59.000 Sorry.

01:42:00.000 Everything's an email to me.

01:42:01.000 It's a while ago.

01:42:02.000 And 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.

01:42:12.000 And so if I was going to get Bigfoot DNA, it was going to be from that insulation.

01:42:16.000 Oh, boy.

01:42:17.000 Did you test it?

01:42:18.000 Of course I did.

01:42:18.000 You really did?

01:42:19.000 I would have tested him for meth.

01:42:22.000 I said, I'll test something.

01:42:25.000 Let me find out what you're doing, dude.

01:42:28.000 Bigfoot pees in your basement.

01:42:29.000 I didn't get any.

01:42:31.000 Gigantopithecus DNA.

01:42:32.000 There was some human DNA on it.

01:42:34.000 So what was the year that Gigantopithecus, we believe, went extinct?

01:42:37.000 So the bones were found in an apothecary shop in China in the early 20th century, right?

01:42:44.000 I don't actually know.

01:42:46.000 I think Gigantopithecus is millions of years old.

01:42:49.000 I think the story is that an anthropologist was in an apothecary shop in China and found the bones.

01:42:56.000 I think this was in the early 20th century.

01:43:01.000 He's got giant primate teeth.

01:43:03.000 And they took him to the place and they found jawbones that indicated it was bipedal.

01:43:08.000 And then they started digging and discovering.

01:43:10.000 I don't think they have a full skeleton.

01:43:13.000 Oh, it's so cool.

01:43:13.000 Well, most things from paleoanthropology are, you know, I'm going to rewrite human history because I found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth.

01:43:20.000 Here's the problem, right?

01:43:22.000 You could tell me whether this is correct.

01:43:24.000 Most things will never be fossils.

01:43:27.000 Right.

01:43:28.000 So we don't even know how many species existed and never left a fossil.

01:43:32.000 Right.

01:43:33.000 Because fossils are hard to make.

01:43:34.000 Right.

01:43:35.000 So 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.

01:43:48.000 And to do so arrogantly seems so crazy.

01:43:51.000 Right.

01:43:52.000 To be arrogant about something that has, just by the nature of its existence, how do you find it?

01:43:57.000 It's a very limited resource.

01:43:59.000 Right.

01:43:59.000 This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA, right?

01:44:03.000 So I think...

01:44:17.000 So I can learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people that are around.

01:44:22.000 And 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.

01:44:35.000 Turns out you were wrong about that.

01:44:37.000 Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't interbreed.

01:44:40.000 Oh, turns out you were wrong about that.

01:44:42.000 I remember them teaching us that in high school.

01:44:44.000 Based on what data?

01:44:46.000 I know, but that's the thing is they taught it so arrogantly.

01:44:48.000 Did people breed with Neanderthals?

01:44:50.000 Nope, that was impossible.

01:44:51.000 They would say it so arrogantly.

01:44:54.000 This is just high school teachers.

01:44:55.000 And now we know that they did.

01:44:56.000 And we've been able to learn so many things.

01:45:03.000 I 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.

01:45:13.000 I 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.

01:45:25.000 You 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? 0.81

01:45:33.000 I'm more Neanderthal than you.

01:45:34.000 I'm amazing.

01:45:38.000 Less well-known, though, is that we all have a different 2% to 5% Neanderthal DNA.

01:45:43.000 And 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.

01:45:55.000 Wow.

01:45:56.000 That's cool, right?

01:45:57.000 That's crazy.

01:45:58.000 Two questions then.

01:45:59.000 Are they actually extinct, if we can put together 93% of their genome by...

01:46:06.000 That's just a fun philosophical question.

01:46:08.000 Second is, what the hell is going on in that other 7%, right? 0.91

01:46:13.000 And if we want to know what it is that makes us human, that's where we look, right?

01:46:18.000 That'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.

01:46:29.000 It couldn't make it as a human.

01:46:31.000 That is the bit that is important to define us.

01:46:33.000 We've actually been able to narrow that down.

01:46:35.000 There's less than 100 I think I'm still fixated on what you said earlier because I think it's so important that we decided.

01:46:55.000 What these animals were.

01:46:57.000 We gave them these very specific names.

01:47:00.000 Right.

01:47:00.000 And that genes in nature, they don't care what we're saying.

01:47:06.000 Right.

01:47:07.000 There's this weird thing that's happening from the time we were proto-hominids to what we are today.

01:47:13.000 It makes sense, though.

01:47:14.000 We want to have a conversation.

01:47:16.000 Right.

01:47:16.000 And if we want to talk about something, we have to call it something.

01:47:19.000 Right.

01:47:20.000 Australopithecus.

01:47:21.000 Right.

01:47:21.000 So we have species concepts that we designed that allow us to have a conversation and know what we're talking about.

01:47:28.000 So when I talk about, and I call this fossil a name, you and I know that we're having that same conversation.

01:47:33.000 If I am in charge of I might use geography to figure out what one species is and what another species is.

01:47:49.000 The 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.

01:48:10.000 Brown bears and polar bears.

01:48:11.000 We just talked about how they're hybrids.

01:48:13.000 Humans and Neanderthals violate that. 0.99

01:48:15.000 Cattle and bison.

01:48:17.000 Violate that to way less of an extent than we thought that they did.

01:48:21.000 This is actually a cool story.

01:48:23.000 Do you know what a beefalo is?

01:48:25.000 Yes.

01:48:26.000 Yeah.

01:48:27.000 Is it the female cow and the male bison or vice versa?

01:48:30.000 No, a beefalo is a breed of...

01:48:41.000 Do they do it on purpose?

01:48:42.000 Yes, it was one of these breeds that they tried to make.

01:48:44.000 But does it work both ways?

01:48:46.000 Does it work with a male bison and a female cow or a male bull and a female bison?

01:48:50.000 Turns out it barely works at all.

01:48:54.000 Do they do it artificially or do they have them party together?

01:48:57.000 No, they just lied.

01:49:01.000 Oh! 0.60

01:49:02.000 It's fake?

01:49:03.000 It's not real.

01:49:04.000 Oh my goodness.

01:49:05.000 So I've spent a lot of time being interested in this.

01:49:11.000 Admixture history.

01:49:12.000 And so I was interested in brown bears and polar bears and humans and Neanderthals.

01:49:15.000 And what is it that suddenly makes a species not able to breed with another species?

01:49:21.000 What is it that causes that sort of last wall to go up and then suddenly you're the biological species?

01:49:26.000 Yeah.

01:49:26.000 What exactly is it?

01:49:27.000 Can we figure it out?

01:49:28.000 And so I wanted to look at these different species pairs.

01:49:30.000 And we knew about beefalo because people have, you know, beefalo ranches.

01:49:34.000 There's a beefalo of the week.

01:49:36.000 You should look that up because this is going to be like there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these.

01:49:40.000 Anyway, 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.

01:49:56.000 So they started breeding them together.

01:49:57.000 And we're just like, this isn't working.

01:50:00.000 You know, this is really hard.

01:50:02.000 When we get the F1s, that's first generation hybrids. 1.00

01:50:06.000 Often it's only the females and they're not reproductive. 0.65

01:50:10.000 No, there's problems here.

01:50:11.000 We can't do this.

01:50:13.000 And because the, yeah.

01:50:16.000 And so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this.

01:50:20.000 And then there was this guy called, That was three-eighths bison and five-eighths cattle.

01:50:31.000 And he sold his animal to a guy called Bud Basolo in California, who created this herd of 5,000 beefalo.

01:50:37.000 And it was announced with great fanfare, like front pages of newspapers.

01:50:41.000 He sold one animal to a farmer in Canada for $2.5 million, $1975.

01:50:47.000 It's still the most expensive single.

01:50:52.000 2.5 million, 1975 dollars for this animal.

01:50:56.000 And so we have this thing.

01:50:57.000 I was like, we're going to sample them.

01:50:59.000 We were working with collaborators from the USDA.

01:51:02.000 We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranches and saying, can we have some of your stuff?

01:51:08.000 And they were like, not sure about research on this.

01:51:10.000 And so we started buying tongues.

01:51:12.000 Because if you buy steak, you just get the same animal over and over again.

01:51:15.000 But they all have one tongue.

01:51:16.000 So you can just buy tongues and then you get lots of different animals.

01:51:19.000 We sequence their genomes.

01:51:21.000 And then we got from the USDA their expired sperm straws that they have for the animals that they give away to start your beef.

01:51:28.000 I think we sequenced their genomes as well, including this $2.5 million 1975 individual.

01:51:34.000 And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last, you know.

01:51:39.000 30 years of my life.

01:51:40.000 And so we have this big plot that shows bison on one side and cattle on the other.

01:51:45.000 And we had made a hybrid so we could sequence their genomes.

01:51:48.000 He wasn't born.

01:51:49.000 It was an aborted animal because, you know, it's very hard to make a hybrid.

01:51:52.000 He fell right in between them, in the middle, where you expect them to be.

01:51:55.000 So now we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be.

01:51:58.000 You know, they're five-eighths cattle, three-eighths bison.

01:52:00.000 They should fall out closer to cattle, but still up here.

01:52:02.000 And so you plot them and they're all just cattle.

01:52:06.000 100%.

01:52:07.000 They're just cattle.

01:52:08.000 It was fake.

01:52:08.000 So did they use, like, Highland cattle or something like that that have those crazy furs?

01:52:12.000 There's some evidence that they used zebu.

01:52:14.000 So that's a different type of cattle.

01:52:16.000 It's the one that came from Asia. 1.00

01:52:17.000 They have them in Brazil because they have a hump, so it makes it look a little bit more like bison. 0.98

01:52:21.000 Oh, dirty trick.

01:52:21.000 But if you look at it, if you look at the pictures of the beefalo of the week, you look at them and you're like, yeah, those are cattle.

01:52:28.000 Let me see a beefalo, Jamie.

01:52:29.000 If I did the beefalo the week, I was...

01:52:34.000 Oh, boy.

01:52:36.000 Wrong websites?

01:52:37.000 No, it didn't seem like I was on the same path.

01:52:40.000 When was this all discovered that these are just cattle?

01:52:42.000 Oh, just look up beefalo.

01:52:44.000 Look at historic beefalo.

01:52:45.000 You can see the pictures of historic beefalo.

01:52:48.000 Yeah.

01:52:49.000 When was it discovered that these are just cattle?

01:52:53.000 We just published the paper like a few months ago.

01:52:56.000 Oh, no.

01:52:57.000 So this poor dude from 1975 that spent two million bucks.

01:53:01.000 Yeah, and he sold it back to Posolo for some of the money getting back.

01:53:05.000 I mean, I think there was a thing going on there.

01:53:07.000 So these people are out here still selling beefalo.

01:53:09.000 Like, it's real.

01:53:10.000 Like, this is a website.

01:53:11.000 And they're hybrid with something.

01:53:13.000 They're mixed with a little bit of zebu.

01:53:15.000 Some of them have a little bit of bison in them, but this is a...

01:53:21.000 Interesting.

01:53:22.000 I talked to Steve Rinello about this.

01:53:24.000 I know that he's a friend.

01:53:26.000 He was like, that's hilarious.

01:53:28.000 It is hilarious.

01:53:29.000 It's very funny.

01:53:30.000 It does look different than a regular cow, though.

01:53:33.000 A little bit?

01:53:34.000 I mean, they were trying to do that, right?

01:53:35.000 And we can engineer everything.

01:53:37.000 But that's not what they did.

01:53:38.000 I mean, a chihuahua looks different from a Great Dane, but their DNA is a lot the same.

01:53:42.000 So in 1975, how much of an understanding of this stuff did we have?

01:53:46.000 Did these people think that they were doing this, or was it just a scam?

01:53:49.000 I think it, well, this is me speculating at this point.

01:53:52.000 I think he had to know, right?

01:53:54.000 And there was, at one point, there was a test, a blood test that they had done, where they were looking for markers in the blood.

01:53:59.000 And there were five different markers, and they tested about 150 different animals.

01:54:03.000 And they published a paper saying, oh, look, we tested all these animals.

01:54:07.000 None of them have all of the markers.

01:54:10.000 One of them has one of the markers.

01:54:12.000 And we just think the test is bad.

01:54:15.000 Oh.

01:54:15.000 No, just...

01:54:20.000 Yeah, fun.

01:54:20.000 Anyway, I digress.

01:54:21.000 I don't remember what we were talking about.

01:54:22.000 Well, we're just talking about a bunch of different animals that used to exist.

01:54:26.000 You know, we were talking about Gigantopithecus at one point in time.

01:54:29.000 You said it's really old.

01:54:30.000 Was it 100,000 years ago?

01:54:34.000 Older.

01:54:34.000 Older?

01:54:35.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:54:36.000 Maybe you...

01:54:42.000 Okay.

01:54:42.000 So, as recently as 200,000 years ago.

01:54:46.000 So you kind of...

01:54:51.000 Diverged from Neanderthals. 0.93

01:54:52.000 Is that like around that time?

01:54:54.000 So it is possible that at one point...

01:54:59.000 It's just limited, just like everything else in paleoanthropology.

01:55:02.000 So it's possible that they existed later than that.

01:55:04.000 We just haven't found those samples yet.

01:55:06.000 Maybe.

01:55:06.000 There was a really cool...

01:55:11.000 We can actually get DNA directly from sediments.

01:55:14.000 And this has been a relatively recent revelation.

01:55:17.000 Super 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.

01:55:25.000 Super cool, right?

01:55:27.000 Wow.

01:55:28.000 But recently there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada.

01:55:34.000 They 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.

01:55:44.000 Horse DNA?

01:55:45.000 Yes.

01:55:46.000 That's weird, right?

01:55:47.000 Because they're supposed to be extinct in North America when?

01:55:50.000 10,000?

01:55:51.000 Around the last...

01:55:58.000 And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.

01:56:01.000 But 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...

01:56:12.000 And we don't just throw away the model with new data, but we have to incorporate the new data.

01:56:16.000 Right.

01:56:16.000 You can't be arrogant about the model.

01:56:18.000 So 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.

01:56:28.000 But survived elsewhere.

01:56:29.000 Yeah.

01:56:30.000 Eohippus, the very first horses, are from 50 million years ago.

01:56:33.000 They're found in Wyoming, in the fossil deposits in Wyoming.

01:56:36.000 Those are the little house-cat-sized horses.

01:56:38.000 House-cat-sized horses.

01:56:40.000 Yeah, but this is early horses, around the same time as we have the first primates and the first of the other things that we know.

01:56:46.000 God, that's so fascinating.

01:56:47.000 It's so cool.

01:56:48.000 It's so fascinating.

01:56:50.000 We 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.

01:57:04.000 And we're being forced to rethink this.

01:57:06.000 And there was another time where archaeologists were horrible to each other.

01:57:10.000 These scientists were horrible to each other because they attacked the guy who made the discovery.

01:57:15.000 They said, this is nonsense.

01:57:16.000 This is impossible.

01:57:17.000 We know.

01:57:18.000 We're very clear.

01:57:19.000 Which is this arrogance of these people.

01:57:21.000 Yeah, 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.

01:57:30.000 And now everybody accepts that as it's true.

01:57:34.000 It's so gross. 0.88

01:57:35.000 It's so gross, and they keep doing it over and over and over again.

01:57:37.000 So then the question is, okay, if we have 22,000-year-old footprints, how many thousands of years were they here before that?

01:57:45.000 Like, have they always been here?

01:57:47.000 How'd they get here?

01:57:47.000 Like, what's the earliest known humans, you know?

01:57:50.000 We know that there's no Neanderthals here so far.

01:57:54.000 So far, right?

01:57:55.000 So far, there's no Denisovans, but imagine they found a different kind of human.

01:57:58.000 Wasn't there something that came up where they found some human that lived...

01:58:09.000 This is very recent.

01:58:10.000 Different than anybody that they've ever discovered before.

01:58:13.000 So they're like, okay.

01:58:14.000 Well, that would be interesting.

01:58:16.000 I think this was super recent, like yesterday or the day before.

01:58:19.000 But it's just these things keep finding new stuff.

01:58:23.000 Here it is.

01:58:24.000 6,000-year-old skeletons.

01:58:27.000 With never-before-seen DNA rewrites human history.

01:58:30.000 Huh.

01:58:30.000 Yeah, so this was just June 7th.

01:58:32.000 Yeah, I don't know anything about this.

01:58:33.000 Yeah, they uncovered 6,000-year-old skeletons in Colombia that belonged to a mysterious group of people that could rewrite human history.

01:58:39.000 It doesn't match any of the other known indigenous populations.

01:58:42.000 Their 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.

01:58:55.000 Yeah, this is, I mean, I have no doubt that this is true.

01:58:57.000 I mean, how many of these human settlements are gone now?

01:59:02.000 And so we don't have any evidence of them.

01:59:03.000 And they're all lineages that they all go back to humans originating in Africa at some point.

01:59:09.000 But we haven't seen all of them.

01:59:11.000 We haven't seen all of them.

01:59:12.000 We don't know even what questions we should be asking.

01:59:15.000 You know what you guys really need to try to bring back?

01:59:18.000 Those little tridactyl skeletons they find in Peru.

01:59:22.000 That's like when we had Luke Caverns on and Jesse, when we had Jesse Michaels on the other day, who has an amazing YouTube show.

01:59:30.000 Both of them, great guys.

01:59:32.000 They were showing us these skeletons that they found in Peru that are very bizarre.

01:59:36.000 And 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.

01:59:50.000 Yeah, I've seen these.

01:59:52.000 They're amazing. 0.89

01:59:53.000 Like, I thought 100% horseshit when I first saw them. 0.99

01:59:56.000 Because I think some of them are horseshit. 0.78

01:59:58.000 But then when they've done, like, look at that image below where they do, like, x-rays of them. 0.95

02:00:02.000 Like, come on.

02:00:03.000 Like, what the hell is that?

02:00:05.000 What is that?

02:00:07.000 There's no way.

02:00:08.000 Again, I'll say it again, but if that's art, let me buy it.

02:00:11.000 Yeah.

02:00:17.000 I think I've seen some of these before.

02:00:18.000 The CAT scans are even weirder.

02:00:20.000 Are they?

02:00:20.000 Because 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.

02:00:34.000 They have three fingers and three toes.

02:00:36.000 It's really weird stuff.

02:00:38.000 There's layers of them as you go through a CAT scan.

02:00:42.000 How old are they?

02:00:42.000 I did hear these.

02:00:44.000 I've seen some of the reports.

02:00:45.000 This is the thing that was presented to the Mexican government at some point.

02:00:48.000 This is Peru. 1.00

02:00:48.000 The Mexican ones seem to be horseshit. 1.00

02:00:50.000 And the guy who discovered them, air quotes, seems to have a history of finding silly things. 0.99

02:00:57.000 But this seems real.

02:00:59.000 This seems very real.

02:01:00.000 Look at this thing.

02:01:02.000 What's that on the neck?

02:01:03.000 Exactly.

02:01:04.000 What is that on the neck?

02:01:05.000 Who the hell knows? 0.63

02:01:06.000 Like, who the hell knows? 0.78

02:01:07.000 Why does it have so many ribs?

02:01:08.000 Like, look at it.

02:01:09.000 Go back to that image where it shows the back.

02:01:13.000 Jamie, 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.

02:01:20.000 Whatever the hell that thing is on the back of his head is weird.

02:01:22.000 The shape of its head is very weird, but it looks real.

02:01:27.000 Like, 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? 0.95

02:01:35.000 I don't know.

02:01:35.000 I mean, you would still have to ask their permission.

02:01:37.000 It looks like a person.

02:01:38.000 Listen, just talk to them.

02:01:40.000 Bring them back. 1.00

02:01:41.000 If they say no, shoot them in the head. 1.00

02:01:42.000 Right. 1.00

02:01:43.000 I don't know what to tell you, but bring them back.

02:01:45.000 Like, some things you just have to do.

02:01:47.000 Like, if we find out that that thing was a real thing, like, what is that?

02:01:51.000 What's that thing in the back of its head? 0.75

02:01:53.000 Have people tried to do DNA work or protein work on these things?

02:01:56.000 I think there's a small select group of people that are even taking it seriously.

02:02:02.000 But more people are taking it seriously now because of the CAT scans.

02:02:05.000 Because I think initially...

02:02:08.000 The ones that look super fake?

02:02:09.000 Yes.

02:02:09.000 The ones that look super fake look like something you'd buy in like a roadside stand.

02:02:13.000 They look totally bullshit. 0.98

02:02:29.000 This 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. 0.99

02:02:42.000 So was this another type of human that lived with us at some point in time?

02:02:47.000 It's interesting.

02:02:49.000 The three-toed and three-fingers thing is interesting.

02:02:51.000 I wonder if there's a genetic mutation that will lead to that.

02:02:54.000 You've seen the tribe.

02:02:55.000 There's an isolated tribe.

02:02:57.000 Ostrich feet.

02:02:57.000 The two, yeah.

02:02:59.000 Very weird, yeah.

02:03:00.000 So maybe that was that.

02:03:01.000 Maybe that's what that was.

02:03:02.000 I mean, who knows?

02:03:03.000 It'd be fascinating to see if there's any DNA that could be recovered or proteins, yeah.

02:03:08.000 Yeah, so why don't you guys get down to Peru?

02:03:12.000 Yeah, I'll run it by Ben and see what he thinks.

02:03:14.000 He would be into it.

02:03:15.000 I know, I know.

02:03:16.000 Ben seems like he'd be like, let's go.

02:03:17.000 Like, if you could find Gigantopithecus DNA, I think Ben would want to bring back Bigfoot.

02:03:22.000 Yes, probably.

02:03:23.000 Let's not tell him.

02:03:25.000 I think that's what Bigfoot is, don't you think?

02:03:27.000 Gigantopithecus?

02:03:27.000 Yeah.

02:03:28.000 Was it in Asia, though?

02:03:30.000 Yes.

02:03:30.000 Bigfoot is supposed to be in North America.

02:03:31.000 Well, they found the bones in China.

02:03:33.000 Yeah, so it could have come across.

02:03:35.000 Make sure that story's right that I said.

02:03:36.000 I'm pretty sure that's true.

02:03:38.000 Gigantopithecus bones found in an apothecary shop in China.

02:03:41.000 I just didn't want to bring it up.

02:03:43.000 That's a guy named Ralph von Konigswald, 1935.

02:03:49.000 They're being sold as dragon bones.

02:03:52.000 So they bought a bunch of stuff and then they started looking at them and found out that that's not what they were.

02:03:57.000 So it's 35. Early to middle Pleistocene.

02:04:01.000 In China.

02:04:03.000 That was super interesting.

02:04:04.000 And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there, they're there at the same time as Denisovans were there and Neanderthals were there.

02:04:10.000 They would have, if they could have hybridized with humans, they probably would have. 0.54

02:04:13.000 Jeez.

02:04:14.000 Who knows?

02:04:16.000 Yeah.

02:04:16.000 We know so little.

02:04:18.000 Well, it seems to like it coexisted with Homo sapiens.

02:04:21.000 So, I mean, but when did it start existing?

02:04:24.000 Right?

02:04:25.000 How long was it?

02:04:25.000 I mean, we know that Neanderthals were around for, what, 300,000 years or so?

02:04:29.000 Yep.

02:04:30.000 Which is kind of crazy when you think that people, you know, we've really only been running things for a small period of time.

02:04:37.000 I don't know who added this.

02:04:38.000 Closely allied with orangutans.

02:04:40.000 Once thought to be a homonym.

02:04:42.000 Now thought to be closely allied with orangutans.

02:04:44.000 So once thought to be a member of the human line.

02:04:49.000 Well, it was thought for a long time that orangutans were our closest living relative as well.

02:04:55.000 Have you ever seen them spearfishing?

02:04:56.000 No.

02:04:57.000 Yeah, they've learned that.

02:04:58.000 Spearfish.

02:04:58.000 That's amazing.

02:04:59.000 They don't know whether it's from observing people.

02:05:01.000 That's what they assume.

02:05:02.000 But there's this crazy photograph of this orangutan hanging onto his branch.

02:05:06.000 He's got a long stick in his hand and he's like leaning into the river stabbing a fish.

02:05:11.000 You got to see it because it's so crazy.

02:05:13.000 Did they learn from us?

02:05:14.000 We don't necessarily know.

02:05:16.000 Oh, that's so cool.

02:05:16.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:05:17.000 Really crazy.

02:05:19.000 Like he's figured out how to catch fish.

02:05:22.000 Really?

02:05:22.000 Oh, says after observing locals.

02:05:25.000 Which totally makes sense, right?

02:05:26.000 Smart.

02:05:27.000 Yeah, I mean, he's seen people catch a fish and he's like, whoa, how did you do that?

02:05:31.000 Which is probably how people learned.

02:05:34.000 Like some really smart ape guy was like, you know, I think I can hit that bird with a rock. 1.00

02:05:40.000 Learning and being able to communicate is one of the ways that we got the advantage over everything else, right?

02:05:45.000 because I don't have to evolve the ability to cook dinner.

02:05:48.000 I can learn from my mom.

02:05:51.000 But that's what's so fascinating about living today is you don't have to even learn from someone who's anywhere near you.

02:05:56.000 You're learning from things on your phone instantaneously, on your laptop.

02:06:00.000 And you don't have to learn because there's DoorDash.

02:06:03.000 Right.

02:06:03.000 You can stay alive very easy.

02:06:05.000 That's true, too.

02:06:06.000 But 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.

02:06:26.000 Like if we decide, okay, let's bring back the woolly mammoth.

02:06:29.000 Okay, what's going to be the negative impact of bringing back the woolly mammoth?

02:06:32.000 Well, they're going to eat a lot.

02:06:34.000 You don't need sentient AI to do that.

02:06:37.000 No, you don't.

02:06:38.000 But humans will make decisions based on biased evidence.

02:06:42.000 We'll make decisions based on our...

02:06:48.000 We'll gaslight people into thinking things are really a good idea.

02:06:53.000 It's safe for everyone.

02:06:54.000 And we'll do things if we know that we could profit.

02:06:57.000 Whereas if you have AI that's going to be completely objective and its only mission is to analyze the outcome.

02:07:06.000 Yeah.

02:07:07.000 Ooh, that world.

02:07:08.000 You know, we're actually working with We're not planning to rewild the direwolves, but we still have done this.

02:07:20.000 We've put together a plan of what the potential impacts would be.

02:07:22.000 But we deliberately keep that outside and hire people to put this together for us.

02:07:27.000 And we haven't been delivered this yet, so we'll see what it says when we get it.

02:07:31.000 Yeah, not good. 0.70

02:07:32.000 They're going to kill everything.

02:07:35.000 They are not going to kill everything because they're not going to be really wild.

02:07:38.000 What animal do you think?

02:07:40.000 Well, 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.

02:07:52.000 And that's the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh, this work could be used for conservation.

02:07:58.000 It is being used for conservation, yes.

02:08:00.000 That's so infuriating about some of these haters.

02:08:02.000 It's like they don't even bother looking it up.

02:08:04.000 Or 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.

02:08:09.000 They want to click, right?

02:08:10.000 Yes, and the best way to get that click is to whine.

02:08:12.000 To whine and complain.

02:08:13.000 It's annoying.

02:08:14.000 Yeah, it's gross.

02:08:15.000 But they have to be themselves. 0.96

02:08:17.000 That's their punishment.

02:08:18.000 You know, that's the life you've chose. 0.99

02:08:20.000 You just want to be this bitchy person for the rest of your life. 1.00

02:08:22.000 You're going to say that one thing forever and people are going to be like, oh. 0.97

02:08:26.000 Congratulations, you get a lot of attention for just being super negative all the time.

02:08:29.000 But the...

02:08:46.000 Have you ever had conversations with these people where they want to tell you that what you're doing is wrong?

02:08:51.000 And what is your response to these people?

02:08:53.000 I think that this idea that the technology that we are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because it's wrong.

02:09:02.000 It's somehow playing God, yes.

02:09:05.000 I mean, people have been playing God for as long as we've existed as a lineage.

02:09:11.000 First by making species become extinct as we spread around the world.

02:09:15.000 Not intentionally initially, but we change the habitat.

02:09:18.000 We hunt things.

02:09:19.000 Then we figured out that we didn't have to make a species go extinct in order to feed our families.

02:09:24.000 And so we evolved domestication.

02:09:26.000 We figured out how to only take...

02:09:37.000 And we domesticated things.

02:09:39.000 And then we transformed to really authority over everything.

02:09:42.000 When we protect a species, people who think about conservation often think of this as super hands-off.

02:09:48.000 Like, I'm not doing anything.

02:09:49.000 Everything just gets to... 1.00

02:09:53.000 That's bullshit. 0.99

02:09:53.000 We decide how many animals live, where they get to live, what they get to eat, how many they get to eat. 0.99

02:09:59.000 We cull them when we want to.

02:10:01.000 We protect them if we want to.

02:10:03.000 We don't if we want to.

02:10:04.000 We are as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the whole Earth Catalog, right?

02:10:09.000 and we just better get good at it.

02:10:11.000 These 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.

02:10:27.000 And I think the biggest challenge that I have is to show people that deciding not We're still operating within regulatory frameworks.

02:10:45.000 We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality.

02:10:48.000 There's a long way to go here.

02:10:50.000 But 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?

02:10:58.000 It's the, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad.

02:11:02.000 Second of all, it's a decision.

02:11:04.000 And to think that that decision has no consequences is naive.

02:11:08.000 We know what the consequences are.

02:11:10.000 The rate of extinction today is thousands to tens of thousands times higher than it is across the history of the fossil record.

02:11:19.000 And a lot of that is because of us.

02:11:20.000 But we have the capacity to slow that rate.

02:11:23.000 We have the capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to the rapid changes in their habitat.

02:11:30.000 What if we could make Hawaiian honeycreepers resilient?

02:11:39.000 Or figure out how to transfer resistance to bleaching to corals around the world.

02:11:45.000 Or 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.

02:11:57.000 We 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?

02:12:05.000 Right, yeah.

02:12:06.000 We 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.

02:12:15.000 I think what people are concerned with is the crude application of these techniques and this science when it's in its infancy.

02:12:26.000 And 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.

02:12:40.000 Right.

02:12:41.000 To everyone.

02:12:42.000 It's kind of like a test run.

02:12:44.000 Like, we can make a dire wolf.

02:12:46.000 Can we make a super person?

02:12:48.000 You know what I mean?

02:12:48.000 Like it's probably the future.

02:12:51.000 Yeah.

02:12:52.000 I 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.

02:13:18.000 He had a genetic change, just a single mutation that meant that he couldn't digest protein.

02:13:24.000 And people came together and mounted this incredible collaborative effort to find a cure using the tools of genome engineering for this child.

02:13:33.000 And he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing, having gone into his own body to cure this particular disease.

02:13:41.000 Wild.

02:13:41.000 It's amazing.

02:13:43.000 It's a really great example of personalized medicine that right now, obviously, this is slow.

02:13:54.000 But we start somewhere.

02:13:55.000 And we always have to start somewhere.

02:13:56.000 Like, yes, it took six months, and it's one baby, and it took a lot of people to do this.

02:14:00.000 But 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.

02:14:10.000 Or if you get blood cancer, can we edit the blood cells to make that cancer mutation just go away?

02:14:17.000 This is the beginning of these tools.

02:14:19.000 And for de-extinction and conservation, this is also just the beginning.

02:14:23.000 We'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.

02:14:35.000 We'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.

02:14:46.000 I love it.

02:14:54.000 We're very carefully evaluating every single one of the edits that we make.

02:15:08.000 What other animals are you going to bring back?

02:15:12.000 What's the plan, Beth?

02:15:14.000 Well, we have announced, obviously, the mammoth and the thylacine.

02:15:19.000 That's the Tasmanian tiger.

02:15:20.000 And the dodo, which is my favorite.

02:15:22.000 I see my dodo.

02:15:23.000 Oh, that's cool.

02:15:26.000 But we have DNA from lots of different animals.

02:15:29.000 So, you know, you never know.

02:15:31.000 So you've announced the woolly mammoth.

02:15:35.000 That's right.

02:15:36.000 And where will that be?

02:15:38.000 Where are we going to put mammoths? 0.99

02:15:40.000 Are you going to reintroduce them into areas?

02:15:43.000 Eventually, that is the goal, to have animals that live in wild habitats.

02:15:46.000 But this will be a very long process.

02:15:49.000 But not direwolves?

02:15:49.000 No, we won't be reintroducing dire wolves.

02:15:51.000 Okay, so not predators, but you would consider...

02:15:55.000 Oh, so you weren't joking about the cheetah?

02:15:58.000 Well, I mean, we don't currently have any plans to bring cheetahs or saber-toothed cats back to life.

02:16:05.000 But you might.

02:16:06.000 I don't like how you said that.

02:16:08.000 But if you did that, that would be where it would get sketchy.

02:16:11.000 If you reintroduce an animal that can run 60 miles an hour to the plains, those poor antelopes who've been living it up. 0.97

02:16:19.000 Because 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.

02:16:27.000 It's true.

02:16:27.000 But we know also from looking at the cheetahs that we have that they didn't only eat pronghorns.

02:16:33.000 They were eating lots of things in their habitat.

02:16:35.000 Because pronghorns are fast.

02:16:37.000 They had to eat something else, otherwise they would die, right?

02:16:40.000 They had to eat some slow stuff because the pronghorns are like, let's get out of here! 1.00

02:16:43.000 Yeah.

02:16:44.000 I 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.

02:16:51.000 And 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.

02:17:05.000 Now, I know that they've talked about releasing woolly mammoths if they ever do make them in Siberia, right? 0.83

02:17:16.000 Obviously.

02:17:17.000 Right.

02:17:17.000 So probably it would be somewhere in North America.

02:17:20.000 Maybe that's why Trump wants Greenland.

02:17:22.000 For mammoths.

02:17:25.000 Isn't Grinland filled with ice?

02:17:27.000 I mean, mammoths really need a lot of...

02:17:29.000 Yeah.

02:17:30.000 So I think maybe not.

02:17:31.000 That's right.

02:17:32.000 But, you know, there's plenty of space in Alaska, right?

02:17:36.000 or northern Canada, or even around the plains.

02:17:38.000 I mean, mammoths lived They're cold adapted because they're big and furry.

02:17:44.000 Alaska would be the move, right?

02:17:46.000 Because it's like the size of one-third of the United States.

02:17:49.000 And they lived there.

02:17:51.000 Right.

02:17:52.000 And, you know.

02:17:53.000 Right.

02:17:54.000 And I'm not worried about the mammoth population getting out of control.

02:17:58.000 I mean, these are animals that take 10 to 14 years to reach reproductive maturity.

02:18:03.000 They have a two-year pregnancy.

02:18:05.000 It's not like...

02:18:06.000 There's suddenly going to be a thousand mammoths.

02:18:09.000 Right.

02:18:09.000 This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process.

02:18:13.000 And 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.

02:18:21.000 And these are really important parts of the de-extinction process.

02:18:24.000 I was blown away when I heard that mammoths lived up till about 4,000 years ago on an island.

02:18:29.000 Yes, Wrangell Island off the coast of Siberia, but now maybe even...

02:18:37.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:18:38.000 That's crazy.

02:18:39.000 Yeah.

02:18:39.000 That's crazy.

02:18:40.000 Well, the horses were 4,000 years, right?

02:18:42.000 Horses and mammoths.

02:18:44.000 That was 4,000 years old, too?

02:18:46.000 Wow.

02:18:47.000 Right, because we're not going to find the last fossils of something.

02:18:50.000 Of course, because fossils are so difficult to make.

02:18:53.000 Most of the things don't leave fossils when they die.

02:18:55.000 That's right.

02:18:56.000 What percentage of the entire fossil record, bad pun, bad word to use there, but in record of animals?

02:19:02.000 Have been fossilized.

02:19:03.000 It's really hard to know, right?

02:19:06.000 And because the taphonomy, which means like how things are going to preserve, differs so much depending on where you are in the world.

02:19:13.000 Like 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?

02:19:20.000 But we've never found woolly rhinos in North America.

02:19:23.000 So the hypothesis is they never made it across.

02:19:28.000 When the sea level was lower, the Bering Strait was not a sea level.

02:19:33.000 They called it Beringia.

02:19:34.000 It was a land bridge.

02:19:35.000 Animals walked across that land bridge, including people, walked across the land bridge to come into North America.

02:19:41.000 Which brings me to the short-faced bear.

02:19:45.000 Oh, I don't like how you giggled.

02:19:46.000 Are you guys going to try to bring that thing back?

02:19:48.000 I don't know.

02:19:49.000 We do have its DNA.

02:19:51.000 Oh, my goodness.

02:19:52.000 I love the short-faced bear. 0.98

02:19:53.000 You know what I like the most about it is because I think it's so dumb that it's called the short-faced bear. 0.96

02:20:00.000 Who was giving it that common name? 0.96

02:20:02.000 And they're like, oh, here's a bear that if it stands up, it's 12 feet tall.

02:20:06.000 I'm going to call it the short-faced bear.

02:20:09.000 Right.

02:20:09.000 It's such an innocuous name for such a terrifying animal.

02:20:12.000 Yeah.

02:20:13.000 One of my favorite photos on the internet is a photo of the short-faced bear standing up next to these scientists.

02:20:18.000 They're standing there and you realize the size of it.

02:20:21.000 You're like, that one.

02:20:21.000 Yeah.

02:20:22.000 Like, what in the hell?

02:20:23.000 Have you seen the long-horned bison?

02:20:26.000 This bison that lived 120, 150,000 years ago? 0.99

02:20:30.000 I think I have.

02:20:31.000 There's a great photo that's somewhere on the internet of one of a skull on the ground and a scientist laying that one.

02:20:38.000 Yeah, there it is.

02:20:39.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

02:20:41.000 We have DNA from him.

02:20:42.000 You might bring that back?

02:20:43.000 Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?

02:20:44.000 What about the Irish elk?

02:20:46.000 Yep, we could do that one.

02:20:48.000 We have DNA from Megaloceros.

02:20:50.000 When did that thing go extinct?

02:20:51.000 I think that's also the end of the Ice Age.

02:20:53.000 It wasn't in North America.

02:20:55.000 Right.

02:20:55.000 Yeah, super cool.

02:20:57.000 That thing's nuts. 0.99

02:20:58.000 It's like a moose slash elk.

02:21:01.000 I love it.

02:21:01.000 Looking thing.

02:21:02.000 There were also camels in North America.

02:21:04.000 There's a camel called Camelops.

02:21:06.000 That was pretty cool.

02:21:06.000 Yeah.

02:21:07.000 And a giant beaver, like a five foot tall beaver.

02:21:11.000 Oh, that's right.

02:21:12.000 I forgot about the giant beaver.

02:21:13.000 Beavers scare me.

02:21:15.000 Especially a five-foot beaver. 0.80

02:21:16.000 A five-foot beaver?

02:21:17.000 Think about what a little beaver can do with its teeth.

02:21:19.000 People have found logs that have been chewed on by this thing.

02:21:24.000 Just imagine.

02:21:25.000 Did that die out in the Ice Age as well?

02:21:27.000 So that's like 65% of all the megafauna in North America, right?

02:21:30.000 So many big things.

02:21:32.000 We lost so many big things.

02:21:33.000 Thomas Jefferson thought he had discovered a giant lion, but it turns out it was a sloth.

02:21:39.000 Yeah.

02:21:39.000 Giant sloth.

02:21:40.000 They were a couple different species of giant sloths.

02:21:42.000 It's named after him, Megalonyx Jeffersoni.

02:21:45.000 Wow.

02:21:45.000 Well, when you look at its face, it kind of looks like it could be a cat, if you don't know that much.

02:21:51.000 Like, if you don't know what we know now.

02:21:53.000 From the fossils, yeah.

02:21:54.000 Look at the bones.

02:21:54.000 That bone right there.

02:21:56.000 Make that, the head, like, look at that thing. 0.87

02:21:58.000 That looks like some crazy cat. 0.68

02:22:00.000 What a weird animal. 0.77

02:22:03.000 Sloths.

02:22:03.000 I wonder if they moved as slowly as the small ones did.

02:22:06.000 I can't imagine that they could have or they would have been really easily eaten by the giant short-faced bear.

02:22:11.000 Right.

02:22:12.000 Right.

02:22:12.000 Maybe that's why they're not around.

02:22:13.000 Or the American cheetah or the Smilodon.

02:22:16.000 Well, the cheetah's probably too little.

02:22:18.000 You know, it would get smashed.

02:22:19.000 Yeah, but if that thing was moving super slowly, you could just hack at it for a while.

02:22:22.000 Well, have you ever seen sloths, even little slow-moving ones, swing at leopards?

02:22:27.000 Or jaguars, rather?

02:22:28.000 Yeah.

02:22:28.000 There's a video of a sloth, a regular one, that is crawling on this vine, and this jaguar is trying to get at it.

02:22:37.000 It's swinging at it pretty fast.

02:22:38.000 I was like, whoa, I didn't know they could swing that fast.

02:22:40.000 But it moves really slow, which is like, why does nature want you to die so easy?

02:22:46.000 Don't they move so slowly that stuff grows on them?

02:22:48.000 Yes, mold grows on them.

02:22:50.000 There's a rescue place.

02:22:52.000 So this, see, look at that.

02:22:54.000 Look how beautiful these jaguars are. 0.90

02:22:55.000 God, they're so beautiful.

02:22:58.000 Big cats, yeah?

02:23:00.000 So would you want the big cats that were here to come back?

02:23:02.000 Well, I mean, I don't know.

02:23:10.000 They've spotted at least a couple of them in Arizona, which I think is great.

02:23:15.000 I mean, I think they're awesome, but I wouldn't want to run into one.

02:23:18.000 You know what I mean?

02:23:19.000 Like, if you're out there camping and you see a jaguar, you're in a lot of trouble.

02:23:23.000 That's a giant mountain lion.

02:23:25.000 Yeah.

02:23:26.000 And I think about mountain lions, too.

02:23:27.000 When I go running, you know, in the woods, in the red woods, I live in Santa Cruz.

02:23:31.000 I go running and I'm thinking, oh, mountain lions.

02:23:34.000 Bring my dog, right?

02:23:35.000 Yeah, well, the dog's going to get eaten, I guess.

02:23:37.000 I think they're afraid of dogs.

02:23:39.000 A little bit.

02:23:40.000 Yeah, it depends on the dog.

02:23:42.000 They eat a lot of dogs.

02:23:43.000 I have a 75-pound Labrador retriever.

02:23:45.000 He would probably want to be its friend.

02:23:47.000 Yeah, that's like my dog, my golden retriever.

02:23:50.000 Ooh, friend.

02:23:51.000 Can we play?

02:23:51.000 Or he would just like tuck his tail and run, and just leave me there to defend myself.

02:23:56.000 But, 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.

02:24:08.000 Wow.

02:24:09.000 50%.

02:24:10.000 That's nuts.

02:24:12.000 Yeah.

02:24:12.000 It's nuts.

02:24:12.000 They're just eating people's dogs and cats.

02:24:15.000 Yikes.

02:24:16.000 Yeah.

02:24:16.000 I don't know.

02:24:17.000 They're spooky.

02:24:17.000 They're cool, but they're spooky.

02:24:20.000 I don't know how many you want.

02:24:21.000 Around.

02:24:22.000 And there are a lot of cats.

02:24:24.000 Maybe it's because we don't have any of the other predators that used to be there.

02:24:26.000 I mean, the California golden bear.

02:24:28.000 There'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.

02:24:39.000 Oh, really?

02:24:39.000 His name is Monarch.

02:24:40.000 We actually sequenced his genome, too.

02:24:42.000 The 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.

02:24:51.000 Named after the guy.

02:24:52.000 Yeah, named after the last guy to get killed by a bear.

02:24:54.000 I wonder if it's worth it to him.

02:24:56.000 Nope.

02:24:59.000 Nope. 0.56

02:25:00.000 It's kind of funny, though, that the bear is on the flag and then they killed all of them.

02:25:04.000 There's none of them.

02:25:05.000 Yeah, well, by the time I think it was on the flag, it was already on their way out.

02:25:08.000 Yeah, probably.

02:25:09.000 Well, people are probably wanting to bring them back, too, you know?

02:25:12.000 You know, we showed recently using DNA that they're really closely related to the bears that are in Yellowstone right now.

02:25:17.000 So if we really want bears in California, you can just bring those guys over.

02:25:21.000 Boy, don't do it, people.

02:25:23.000 Because the thing about it is, once you have them in your area, you can't manage them.

02:25:30.000 because then people have decided that they're precious.

02:25:32.000 So 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.

02:25:45.000 That's Monarch.

02:25:46.000 They put a smile on his face.

02:25:47.000 Oh, hi, guys.

02:25:48.000 Only you can prevent forest fires.

02:25:51.000 Monarch had a miserable life, though.

02:25:53.000 He was mostly in a cage.

02:25:55.000 He was being fed the wrong diet for a brown bear, just mostly meat.

02:25:59.000 So right now he's on display.

02:26:01.000 He's not on display, actually.

02:26:02.000 He is in the basement in a fridge at the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

02:26:06.000 But his post-cranial skeleton, everything except his head, is at Berkeley in the museum.

02:26:11.000 We've sampled it for DNA.

02:26:13.000 So his diet should have been fruit and vegetables and meat.

02:26:17.000 But they were just giving him meat.

02:26:19.000 I imagine he was just really uncomfortable all the time.

02:26:21.000 Oh, really?

02:26:22.000 Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?

02:26:23.000 That's all I eat.

02:26:24.000 I mostly just eat meat.

02:26:26.000 I'm not uncomfortable at all.

02:26:27.000 I think meat is...

02:26:30.000 You need a little bit of fiber to help your digestive system.

02:26:32.000 But I bet if you had like a plate, I was saying if you had a plate of meat and a plate of fruit, the bear would just eat the meat.

02:26:38.000 But the bear would probably eat the fruit, too.

02:26:39.000 They just eat everything.

02:26:41.000 They eat cars.

02:26:42.000 When I lived in Colorado- They're involved in the world of scarcity, where you eat the stuff that's in front of you.

02:26:50.000 Also, they really have to get fat, because they're going to chill out and just take naps for three months.

02:26:55.000 I love the Fat Bear Week competition.

02:26:57.000 I love that.

02:26:58.000 Do you know that?

02:26:59.000 No, what is that?

02:27:01.000 It'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.

02:27:10.000 Yeah, that's good fun.

02:27:11.000 I love it.

02:27:11.000 To 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.

02:27:19.000 There's this crazy video of this guy that's sitting in a lawn chair, and this bear comes up beside him, and this bear...

02:27:27.000 He's beside the lawn chair.

02:27:28.000 But the lawn chair is great for perspective when you see how big the bear is.

02:27:30.000 This bear is huge.

02:27:33.000 It's like 10, 11 feet tall, long, whatever.

02:27:36.000 And it doesn't care about the person at all.

02:27:39.000 It just has been eating salmon.

02:27:41.000 So this is it.

02:27:42.000 Look at this.

02:27:42.000 And salmon are so much better.

02:27:44.000 Look at the size of that thing.

02:27:46.000 Give me some volume so you hear this guy talking.

02:27:48.000 Because it's so crazy.

02:27:53.000 Bear's not interested in them.

02:27:54.000 There's meat right to his right.

02:27:57.000 And he just lays down.

02:27:58.000 I'm going to chill.

02:27:59.000 Humans probably make a terrible snack, though, right? 0.76

02:28:02.000 I mean, we're bony or fatty.

02:28:05.000 That salmon is an absolutely delicious source of protein.

02:28:09.000 Also, it's just flopping around in there.

02:28:12.000 It's easy to catch.

02:28:13.000 And he's probably full, which is also why they're so big, right?

02:28:17.000 He looks full.

02:28:19.000 I like him.

02:28:20.000 He looks chill.

02:28:21.000 That's the bear that I would want to run into in the field.

02:28:24.000 Now they're talking to him.

02:28:25.000 Hey, hey, hey.

02:28:26.000 That's crazy.

02:28:27.000 Like it's a dog.

02:28:28.000 Like, get out of here.

02:28:29.000 You're going to convince him?

02:28:30.000 Hey, man, this is my space.

02:28:32.000 Don't invade it.

02:28:34.000 All those Kodiak bears, that's why they're so huge.

02:28:37.000 They get so much protein.

02:28:38.000 I've never been out there.

02:28:39.000 Oh, I want to watch them.

02:28:40.000 I want to watch them eat salmon with a high-powered rifle right next to me.

02:28:45.000 And maybe in a giant bulletproof hamster wheel or something.

02:28:49.000 I'm so scared of those things.

02:28:51.000 Have you seen the documentary Grizzly Man?

02:28:52.000 Yes.

02:28:53.000 Another great Werner Herzog film.

02:28:56.000 Okay, I have to look at the...

02:28:59.000 He's interviewing the people in that film.

02:29:01.000 It's one of the best unintentional comedies.

02:29:05.000 It's a really funny movie.

02:29:07.000 I don't even think it's unintentional because Werner Herzog's a genius.

02:29:10.000 I think he made it funny on purpose because there's some smash cuts where you're just like, oh my god, we're just laughing. 0.90

02:29:15.000 And the guy was so nuts. 0.90

02:29:17.000 And he just decided to, I think, in my eyes, I think it was like suicide by bear. 0.98

02:29:22.000 I think he just decided to stay long enough where eventually they just got So he decided he was going to save the bears.

02:29:31.000 And the bears didn't even care that he was alive.

02:29:34.000 They're not used to people being around at all.

02:29:36.000 They didn't even know what he was.

02:29:37.000 And then one of them eventually decided to eat him.

02:29:39.000 I can't imagine that is a good way to go.

02:29:41.000 It's not a good way to go, but if you're completely obsessed with bears and you're, you know.

02:29:46.000 Yeah.

02:29:46.000 There's a woman who's worked in my lab for a long time.

02:29:49.000 She works on mountain lions or mountain lion genetics.

02:29:51.000 And she said when it's her time, she wants to go.

02:29:52.000 Oh, God, lady. 0.97

02:29:54.000 Don't say that.

02:29:55.000 Don't say that.

02:29:56.000 The one thing better about getting killed by a cat than a bear is a cat will kill you and then eat you.

02:30:01.000 A bear will just hold you down. 0.98

02:30:03.000 And eat you while you're still alive.

02:30:05.000 Yeah.

02:30:05.000 They don't care at all.

02:30:06.000 You just have to hope that you die of shock.

02:30:07.000 Before and after photos of these.

02:30:09.000 Wow.

02:30:10.000 Before they got fat.

02:30:11.000 Wow. 0.93

02:30:13.000 Wildly skinny like a dog almost.

02:30:15.000 Yeah, well they look real weird when they get skinny.

02:30:17.000 And they look real long-legged.

02:30:19.000 That's one of the things that freaks hunters out is when they see them skinned and they're hanging, they look like humans. 0.99

02:30:26.000 It's like very weird.

02:30:28.000 Or Bigfoot.

02:30:28.000 No.

02:30:30.000 Well, that's probably what Bigfoot is, honestly.

02:30:32.000 When people are seeing Bigfoot, have you ever seen a bear walk on two legs before?

02:30:36.000 No.

02:30:37.000 They walk on two legs all the time.

02:30:38.000 Yeah.

02:30:39.000 All the time.

02:30:39.000 They walk on two legs to present themselves as larger, to scare the other males.

02:30:44.000 Makes sense.

02:30:44.000 And sometimes they have injuries.

02:30:46.000 Like there was a famous bear in New Jersey that was missing a paw.

02:30:50.000 And so he always walked on two legs.

02:30:52.000 And it just looked like a man.

02:30:53.000 Like a man walking on two legs.

02:30:54.000 Just like a Bigfoot.

02:30:55.000 Like if you see him through the woods, right?

02:30:57.000 If it's dusty.

02:30:58.000 Yeah.

02:30:59.000 There 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.

02:31:20.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:31:21.000 Oh my goodness, yeah.

02:31:22.000 Isn't that nuts?

02:31:23.000 So if you saw that walking through the woods, 100% you'd think it's Bigfoot.

02:31:26.000 Oh my god, I found it.

02:31:28.000 He's real.

02:31:29.000 He's real.

02:31:30.000 If that picture was just a little bit blurrier, it would be Bigfoot.

02:31:33.000 Right, yeah.

02:31:34.000 A little blurrier and then a little more distance and in between trees.

02:31:37.000 Yeah.

02:31:38.000 I talked to a lady once. 0.98

02:31:39.000 We did this television show.

02:31:41.000 Look at him.

02:31:41.000 That's amazing.

02:31:43.000 I know, it's nuts.

02:31:44.000 And that's a small one.

02:31:45.000 We did this television show a long time ago.

02:31:49.000 Me and my friend Duncan, we went to go look for Bigfoot.

02:31:51.000 It was part of the show.

02:31:52.000 It was called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.

02:31:54.000 And I met this one lady who was so convincing.

02:31:58.000 And she told me she saw Bigfoot.

02:32:00.000 She's in the Pacific Northwest where we were at outside of Seattle, like up in those mountains, it's so dense.

02:32:07.000 And it's like, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.

02:32:11.000 That's what the trees are like.

02:32:12.000 You know, you get a box of Q-tips.

02:32:13.000 You can't see in between those Q-tips. 0.93

02:32:14.000 Super dense.

02:32:15.000 Super dense.

02:32:16.000 And she said she saw something that was like 100 yards away that was moving through the trees that she is sure was a giant.

02:32:22.000 She goes, I saw a giant ape.

02:32:24.000 And I was like, what is that, an ape?

02:32:26.000 I'm like, oh my god, it's Bigfoot.

02:32:29.000 And my brain was going, I think it was a bear.

02:32:32.000 Well, 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.

02:32:46.000 Yeah, of course.

02:32:47.000 I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense.

02:32:49.000 But 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.

02:32:59.000 It's not like an isolated thing, but they don't have a lot of mythical animals.

02:33:03.000 have fake animals other than Sasquatch.

02:33:05.000 It's weird.

02:33:06.000 It is weird because if Beringa, as I was called, the Bering Land Bridge.

02:33:10.000 Beringia.

02:33:11.000 Beringia existed and we know that it did and we know that people during that time made their way across.

02:33:18.000 If Gigantopithecus lived alongside people, we don't know if it did, but it could have and if it did.

02:33:24.000 it would be in the same area.

02:33:25.000 It would be in the same area of Asia, and perhaps it would have been...

02:33:33.000 That was all glaciated and cold.

02:33:35.000 So it would have to be something that was adapted to living in warmer climates, like where it was found, as well as being able to survive.

02:33:41.000 It's not like a week of a walk across the Bering Land Bridge, right?

02:33:44.000 Also, we don't find primates in cold climates like that, other than humans.

02:33:48.000 Right, yeah.

02:33:49.000 You have to have the ability to keep yourself warm.

02:33:51.000 We're like, let's just keep walking north. 1.00

02:33:53.000 We've got to get away from these other assholes. 1.00

02:33:55.000 Yeah, really love mosquitoes. 1.00

02:33:56.000 I think this is what I'm going for.

02:33:58.000 The more mosquitoes, the better.

02:33:59.000 I think they're probably just chasing animals, right?

02:34:01.000 Yeah.

02:34:01.000 That's probably what they were doing.

02:34:03.000 Bison.

02:34:03.000 Bison mostly.

02:34:04.000 Following the herds.

02:34:05.000 Yeah.

02:34:06.000 And then eventually they had to learn to adapt to these colder climates.

02:34:08.000 Yeah, it's funny.

02:34:09.000 We talk about it as people are moving deliberately through this landscape, when clearly they weren't.

02:34:14.000 They're just trying to find food, like the doggone people. 1.00

02:34:17.000 They're going to places where there's still grass that their reindeer can graze on.

02:34:21.000 Yeah, they just want to eat.

02:34:23.000 And 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.

02:34:34.000 But not all the people are living in this world.

02:34:37.000 And there's indigenous people that are living the same way they've lived, but now they have a snowmobile. 0.94

02:34:43.000 Now they have a rifle.

02:34:44.000 Right.

02:34:44.000 But if you had to live there, you'd be like, oh my God, what am I doing?

02:34:50.000 Where is Starbucks?

02:34:52.000 Right.

02:34:52.000 But somehow they're happier than us.

02:34:54.000 That's so weird.

02:34:55.000 It's really weird.

02:34:57.000 Out of all the animals that you guys might potentially, what's the word?

02:35:04.000 Rebirth?

02:35:05.000 What's the word?

02:35:06.000 I 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.

02:35:13.000 Right.

02:35:14.000 If you've done it successfully, do you say you...

02:35:18.000 Right.

02:35:18.000 Something?

02:35:19.000 So what would be the word?

02:35:20.000 I don't know.

02:35:20.000 Do we need a new word?

02:35:21.000 Because it's never happened before.

02:35:22.000 Bring back.

02:35:23.000 Resurrect.

02:35:24.000 Resurrect.

02:35:25.000 I think resurrect's probably right.

02:35:26.000 But that has biblical implications.

02:35:27.000 Right.

02:35:27.000 So that's why we try to stay away from that.

02:35:29.000 But you're kind of playing God, so let's go with that.

02:35:32.000 Okay, cool.

02:35:33.000 I'm in.

02:35:34.000 Is there one that gives you pause?

02:35:35.000 Like maybe the short-faced bear?

02:35:37.000 Pause?

02:35:37.000 Like maybe this isn't the best idea.

02:35:40.000 The host eagle?

02:35:41.000 Well, humans.

02:35:42.000 I've already had pause at this.

02:35:45.000 Neanderthals and Denisovans, they were people.

02:35:47.000 And so I feel like that's not really a thing.

02:35:50.000 That's not somewhere we should go.

02:35:51.000 Host eagle, that's a cool one.

02:35:53.000 That's a cool one, yeah.

02:35:54.000 This was a massive, massive giant eagle that ate moa, which was a bird, an extinct bird.

02:36:00.000 It ate people, too.

02:36:01.000 Probably.

02:36:02.000 They were huge.

02:36:02.000 No, they think that they found the markings on human skulls there that indicate talons of raptors.

02:36:09.000 Wow.

02:36:10.000 Yeah.

02:36:10.000 Wow.

02:36:11.000 Right.

02:36:11.000 Which makes sense that that's how they went extinct.

02:36:14.000 Like, the New Zealands are like, enough of this shit. 1.00

02:36:16.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:36:16.000 Well, the MOA went extinct, and so they couldn't eat any MOA anymore. 1.00

02:36:19.000 But maybe it was both, right?

02:36:21.000 I mean, why did short-faced bears go extinct?

02:36:23.000 Probably because nobody wanted a bear that stood 12 feet high.

02:36:27.000 What are you going to do about it, though?

02:36:29.000 Imagine, 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...

02:36:42.000 Maybe.

02:36:42.000 Doesn't it depend?

02:36:42.000 I mean, maybe what they were doing is, you know, they would ambush mammoths and things like that.

02:36:47.000 So you hide around bluffs and you can have a group of people in different places and hit them all at once.

02:36:51.000 Maybe you wait until that bear is eating something else.

02:36:55.000 Oh, sure.

02:36:56.000 And then it's paused and you have time to...

02:37:02.000 They probably understood it really well, right?

02:37:05.000 Because these are people who relied on that.

02:37:07.000 They probably understand it better than people who aren't hunters today, right?

02:37:10.000 They probably knew that these animals had a greater sense of smell than we do.

02:37:14.000 They probably had a greater sense of smell than we do.

02:37:16.000 Or more attuned.

02:37:18.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

02:37:19.000 They probably could smell it.

02:37:20.000 Because you can smell certain animals.

02:37:21.000 If you go into the elk woods, you 100% can smell elk.

02:37:25.000 And is that something that you've been able to develop?

02:37:27.000 Well, I was taught it.

02:37:29.000 You know, I would smell something, and then, you know, like, the guys that I'd be hunting with, like, you smell that?

02:37:35.000 Like, that's elk.

02:37:37.000 Because they urinate everywhere, and, you know, you get this sense.

02:37:41.000 They have, like, this really musty smell during the rut, too, and you could smell them.

02:37:45.000 Could you smell the dire wolves?

02:37:47.000 Well, they were stinky.

02:37:49.000 I don't think you guys are bathing them.

02:37:51.000 Why would we bathe a dire wolf? 0.94

02:37:53.000 I know.

02:37:54.000 My wife would be like, take him to the groomer. 1.00

02:37:58.000 She hates when my dog gets stinky. 0.53

02:38:00.000 She hates when I take him out into the dirt and play around with him and he comes back covered in burrs and stinky.

02:38:05.000 Gotta brush him down.

02:38:06.000 Did they smell different?

02:38:08.000 Yeah.

02:38:08.000 They did smell different.

02:38:10.000 But I don't smell a lot of dogs that are never bathed.

02:38:13.000 Right.

02:38:13.000 Most of the dogs that I've ever smelled.

02:38:15.000 These aren't dogs.

02:38:16.000 Yeah.

02:38:17.000 Bright wolves.

02:38:17.000 Right.

02:38:18.000 Right.

02:38:18.000 Sorry.

02:38:19.000 Which is really weird.

02:38:20.000 That was the other conversation that we had that they all come from wolves.

02:38:23.000 Like even a French. 0.99

02:38:24.000 Jamie has a French bulldog.

02:38:26.000 He's adorable.

02:38:28.000 It's a wolf at one point in time.

02:38:31.000 We don't know which wolf, right?

02:38:33.000 I 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.

02:38:43.000 The 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.

02:38:53.000 Our cells have a nucleus that has the DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act.

02:38:57.000 The way we do.

02:38:58.000 And then it has little cells that were once bacteria that we co-opted that make energy.

02:39:03.000 And you're only inherited them from your mom.

02:39:05.000 And there's a ton of them.

02:39:06.000 Like there's thousands of mitochondrial genomes in every cell and only one of your nuclear genomes.

02:39:11.000 So in ancient DNA, because there's way more, we started just with that.

02:39:15.000 It was the only thing we could recover.

02:39:16.000 And the first dog mitochondrial genomes that were recovered, people were like, dogs were domesticated in Asia 150,000 years ago.

02:39:24.000 Which is clearly wrong, right?

02:39:25.000 There 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.

02:39:35.000 So you need communities of people that are staying in place together for some time before you can have dog domestication.

02:39:40.000 Do we know for sure there weren't human populations like that 150,000 years ago?

02:39:44.000 We don't, but we do know now that dogs probably aren't that old.

02:39:47.000 I think what I read was 36,000.

02:39:50.000 I think it changes all the time.

02:39:52.000 Which is because we don't know everything.

02:39:54.000 And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils.

02:40:00.000 We don't have the DNA, and the fossils just didn't preserve.

02:40:04.000 I 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.

02:40:14.000 And I'm not sure where, because again, probably in a warmer spot.

02:40:18.000 There's been lots of...

02:40:20.000 Lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves that have made this a really hard problem.

02:40:24.000 Like you were talking about with the black wolves.

02:40:26.000 Right.

02:40:26.000 Exactly like that.

02:40:28.000 But 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.

02:40:34.000 Which 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.

02:40:47.000 That is not what archaeologists think, right?

02:40:50.000 So these two weights of evidence are saying, you know, we still don't know.

02:40:55.000 Sort of, right?

02:40:56.000 But they do believe hunter-gatherers existed in small tribes 15,000 years ago.

02:41:00.000 And maybe that was enough.

02:41:04.000 Scientists like to have names.

02:41:06.000 We like to have ways of classifying things.

02:41:08.000 And so there was recently, a couple of friends of mine have published a paper in which they've redefined how you consider something domestic.

02:41:16.000 And they say a domestic population is something that can only survive within a human environment, within a human niche.

02:41:22.000 And 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. 0.95

02:41:30.000 Of humans around, and you need a sort of steady stream of the crap that humans produce to do this. 0.89

02:41:36.000 That's still kind of early. 0.95

02:41:37.000 Like, 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.

02:41:46.000 Right, right.

02:41:48.000 Stuff we don't know, right?

02:41:50.000 And then wolves, are most wolves from warmer climates?

02:41:54.000 No, right?

02:41:55.000 They're from colder climates, aren't they?

02:41:57.000 All over the place.

02:41:58.000 All over the place? 0.97

02:41:58.000 Well, Mexican wolves, right? 0.97

02:41:59.000 There's Mexican wolves. 1.00

02:42:00.000 There's Mexican wolves. 0.59

02:42:03.000 But we think that the closest living relative of dogs is gray wolves.

02:42:07.000 It's this gray wolf lineage.

02:42:08.000 But 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.

02:42:19.000 Grey wolves that are around.

02:42:21.000 And that's just because there's been so much movement of DNA around that part of the tree.

02:42:26.000 I think it's a fascinating story that as we get more information, we're going to learn more about people as well.

02:42:33.000 Yeah.

02:42:34.000 Well, dogs are the most fascinating to me.

02:42:37.000 Because it's so obvious that there's manipulation involved.

02:42:41.000 It'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.

02:42:52.000 And we developed this sort of relationship where we worked together.

02:42:56.000 It's so interesting that they...

02:43:02.000 We see this weirdness, or now it's a border collie.

02:43:06.000 Like, what?

02:43:07.000 Well, all of those, too, are probably Victorian, right?

02:43:10.000 All of the breeds that we think of today, whether it's cattle or bison, they're, you know, within the last couple hundred years.

02:43:16.000 That is really fast.

02:43:18.000 Selection by humans.

02:43:19.000 So we are manipulating the DNA of the species that we surround ourselves with.

02:43:25.000 And we have been for 15,000 to 20,000 years and probably longer.

02:43:29.000 Just not in a laboratory.

02:43:30.000 Just not in a laboratory.

02:43:31.000 But, you know, is our backyard a laboratory?

02:43:34.000 If I say, I like the way that dog looks, but I like the way that that one can swim in water.

02:43:39.000 And 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.

02:43:46.000 That's interesting.

02:43:47.000 Right, because we're thinking about science as only being done in a laboratory, or manipulation only being done in a laboratory.

02:43:54.000 It's clearly done with food.

02:43:57.000 I mean, it was done with plants forever.

02:43:58.000 Right.

02:43:59.000 Selective breeding of plants, splicing two plants together.

02:44:02.000 Right.

02:44:03.000 I 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.

02:44:17.000 Now they're all spliced onto American rootstocks that can survive this aphid.

02:44:22.000 Isn't that wild?

02:44:23.000 Yeah.

02:44:23.000 I 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.

02:44:39.000 Right.

02:44:40.000 We can't do that.

02:44:41.000 We can't take a pig liver and shove it in your... 0.65

02:44:44.000 Your body would fight it off.

02:44:46.000 Your immune system would fight it off.

02:44:47.000 Well, we're trying.

02:44:48.000 Again, 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.

02:44:55.000 So maybe someday we can use pig organs in the place of humans and save people from dying.

02:45:01.000 Or we can just re-engineer a new version of your organs.

02:45:05.000 Yeah.

02:45:05.000 So that is really cool science.

02:45:06.000 This thing called the organoids where you can actually grow in a dish in a lab a version of a little brain. 0.51

02:45:13.000 Something that approximates a brain or that approximates a heart or a kidney or something else.

02:45:19.000 We'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.

02:45:29.000 If 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?

02:45:37.000 But it has really amazing potential for personalized medicine.

02:45:41.000 So 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.

02:45:50.000 This technology is so cool and really just beginning.

02:46:08.000 And the only way to find out is to do experiments like what you guys are doing. 0.69

02:46:12.000 And so that's one of the reasons why some of this pushback is so silly.

02:46:16.000 Like, would you rather no one ever do this work?

02:46:19.000 Or would you like to be the one who does the work?

02:46:22.000 Or is it just that you think the work should never be done?

02:46:26.000 Like, what is the thought process?

02:46:28.000 Again, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if they do this, then we can't do this, which is just, it's not...

02:46:38.000 It's not the way we make progress.

02:46:40.000 But is this the nature of academia?

02:46:43.000 Because it's very gate-keeped even inside of academia, right?

02:46:47.000 You 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.

02:46:56.000 You know, it's like there's a lot of weirdness, a lot of groupthink that comes along with all that stuff.

02:47:00.000 And then you have to play politics in order to get funding.

02:47:04.000 You know, you can't be ostracized.

02:47:06.000 Even 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.

02:47:17.000 Or 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.

02:47:27.000 Yeah, I think, you know, we can agree that it's a mess, right?

02:47:32.000 It's a hot mess.

02:47:34.000 Is genuine, real science that comes out of the university system, of the academic system, that we need?

02:47:41.000 All 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.

02:47:55.000 And then it's taken outside of there and it's turned into all of these cool things.

02:47:59.000 I mean, there has to be a place where we get both of these things.

02:48:03.000 There's some things that no one is ever going to build a business around until it exists.

02:48:07.000 And we need this public system in order to do that.

02:48:12.000 Yeah, and that's what's so scary about what's going on with politics and funding and research.

02:48:20.000 It's because it's like as soon as you stop defunding research, you start making it more scarce and then making people – Right.

02:48:27.000 It'll get worse.

02:48:28.000 It's going to get harder, and we're going to fall behind, and we are going to lose the place that we have had as innovators.

02:48:34.000 And by we, I mean this country.

02:48:36.000 We 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.

02:48:44.000 It's a balance.

02:48:45.000 You know, we clearly need both of these things, and right now, it's broken.

02:48:50.000 And there's a lot of weirdness that's going on with biology in general in the world right now.

02:48:57.000 And one of them is, I think there was a third scientist that was arrested for trying to bring in toxic mold from China.

02:49:06.000 We know that this one scientist was arrested, and then I think there's been two more.

02:49:12.000 So they're trying to introduce this toxic mold into our food supply. 0.50

02:49:16.000 The same toxic mold?

02:49:17.000 I think so.

02:49:23.000 See if you can find it, Jamie.

02:49:24.000 When 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? 0.97

02:49:34.000 It's coming from China, which scares the shit out of me. 1.00

02:49:35.000 Because if China wanted to cripple America's food supply, there'd be a great way to compromise basically everything. 0.96

02:49:41.000 There is a country that is investing in science.

02:49:43.000 Oh my God.

02:49:44.000 Yeah, just their drone technologies off the charts.

02:49:47.000 I 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.

02:50:01.000 So 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.

02:50:10.000 Yeah, and they're running 24 hours a day around the clock.

02:50:16.000 We don't have anything like that.

02:50:17.000 No.

02:50:17.000 We're not even close to doing that.

02:50:18.000 And we're fighting about the amount of money that we should invest into very basic infrastructure.

02:50:23.000 Exactly.

02:50:23.000 It's terrifying.

02:50:25.000 It is terrifying.

02:50:26.000 It's terrifying because we always hope that With every administration, there will be positive changes.

02:50:33.000 And it just never seems to be the case.

02:50:35.000 It's just like more and more of the same and more short-sightedness.

02:50:40.000 Is it also this scarcity mindset?

02:50:42.000 Like, I can't agree with this person because they once said this thing.

02:50:45.000 I mean, why can't we have just a normal conversation like you and I are having right now?

02:50:51.000 Well, I think it's because...

02:50:59.000 The algorithm favors you looking and interacting with things that upset you.

02:51:05.000 This is just natural human nature.

02:51:07.000 If you look at some of the people that we were talking about earlier, negative scientists, you see them online.

02:51:11.000 They're tweeting negative things all day long.

02:51:15.000 It's probably because they don't have any funding, so they can't actually do any science.

02:51:19.000 Chinese scientists were arrested while arriving in the U.S. at Detroit Airport.

02:51:23.000 Second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material.

02:51:26.000 But is it the same biological?

02:51:28.000 No?

02:51:29.000 Different stuff?

02:51:29.000 What is this stuff?

02:51:31.000 Worms?

02:51:32.000 Ascribed as worms.

02:51:34.000 Certain worms require a government permit.

02:51:37.000 I had heard that there was a third one.

02:51:39.000 This is the third.

02:51:40.000 This is the third?

02:51:41.000 So there's a second one?

02:51:42.000 And this one happened.

02:51:43.000 Oh, second case in days.

02:51:44.000 I will say, they were going to the same place.

02:51:46.000 Oh, boy.

02:51:48.000 That's weird.

02:51:49.000 Another Chinese scientist also going to the University of Michigan.

02:51:53.000 Boy, 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. 0.86

02:52:01.000 Like, if you are a Chinese scientist and you're from China and you're working in America, you got to check in.

02:52:07.000 Which means, like, how much of this research is just getting shared with China?

02:52:12.000 And it's all weird.

02:52:13.000 We're focused on something else.

02:52:15.000 We're focused on...

02:52:19.000 And I think their game involves raptors and T-Rexes.

02:52:22.000 They're going to release all the stuff that you won't do.

02:52:23.000 I've seen that movie.

02:52:24.000 I wonder the...

02:52:27.000 I 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?

02:52:51.000 Like CRISPR technology exists.

02:52:53.000 We're not working on humans.

02:52:55.000 But other companies are openly, right?

02:52:57.000 It's not like there's a big scary thing.

02:53:08.000 I think maybe that was two separate stories because I know the story about Jiang Ke.

02:53:14.000 That's He Jiang Ke was the name of that scientist.

02:53:16.000 And he went to jail for three years.

02:53:17.000 He actually did some training in the U.S. His name is He.

02:53:21.000 But he was trying to use gene editing tools to...

02:53:36.000 It's the one that stops the HIV from entering the cells where it then kills the cells.

02:53:40.000 And I think this was a story that was broken by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of days before it was announced.

02:53:46.000 But 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.

02:53:53.000 And the story broke a few days early.

02:53:55.000 But he had set this up, a whole PR thing.

02:53:59.000 YouTube videos that were ready to go to explain what he had done.

02:54:02.000 He wasn't trying to do it in secret.

02:54:04.000 He thought he was going to be a hero. 0.99

02:54:07.000 People were like, holy shit, dude. 1.00

02:54:09.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:54:10.000 Like, no. 1.00

02:54:11.000 We're not editing human germlines, the cells that will be passed on to the next generation.

02:54:16.000 There's still a moratorium against doing that work.

02:54:18.000 The baby that was just born, for example, they didn't edit any of his cells that would get passed on to the next generation.

02:54:24.000 It's only the cells in his body.

02:54:25.000 So those edits will only ever live in him.

02:54:28.000 And there's a difference between doing that.

02:54:30.000 And it's the second one that we're uncomfortable with.

02:54:33.000 I thought they were editing it.

02:54:35.000 to make the children have a potential for higher intelligence.

02:54:39.000 I think that's maybe an unintended consequence of the gene that they were editing because in mice it did something like that.

02:54:48.000 And so I think they just assume Interesting.

02:54:55.000 Maybe.

02:54:55.000 But if they knew that, wouldn't they do that?

02:54:57.000 But it didn't end up even being the right mutation.

02:54:58.000 Because is HIV a real issue today?

02:55:01.000 It's not really.

02:55:01.000 So 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.

02:55:12.000 And 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.

02:55:19.000 And it also makes them smarter.

02:55:21.000 I don't know if they knew that at the time.

02:55:23.000 I was just saying they did!

02:55:26.000 China's played a long game.

02:55:27.000 It definitely affected their brains is what they just keep saying sort of in this article.

02:55:31.000 Yeah, but they don't know because they haven't been able to measure anything with these.

02:55:34.000 I mean, they're guessing that would have affected their brains at this point.

02:55:37.000 Well, when they're the leaders of the world in 20 years, we'll know.

02:55:40.000 We'll know for sure.

02:55:41.000 We'll know.

02:55:42.000 This is what makes us smart.

02:55:44.000 It's been a thing that people have been trying to solve for a long time.

02:55:48.000 We're always looking for the one or two genes that figure out this.

02:55:52.000 Very few traits are encoded by one or two genes.

02:55:55.000 There are some hair traits.

02:55:56.000 Whether your lobes are attached or not, that's one gene that you can change. 0.98

02:56:00.000 But it is quite fascinating to think that in the future, dumb people will not exist. 0.99

02:56:05.000 I doubt that's true. 0.99

02:56:06.000 Why? 0.96

02:56:07.000 It may be relatively dumb compared to everyone else that's alive then, but maybe far more intelligent than people that are alive today. 0.90

02:56:13.000 Do you know what's interesting about the FDF? 0.95

02:56:24.000 And this is hard.

02:56:25.000 When 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?

02:56:32.000 Emotional intelligence.

02:56:33.000 Do you mean somebody who can solve a shitload of math problems and be a physicist or whatever?

02:56:37.000 And be awkward socially. 0.95

02:56:38.000 Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good looking, right? 0.95

02:56:41.000 I mean, what do you mean when you say, is this thing? 0.92

02:56:44.000 And so you have to define that.

02:56:45.000 And 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.

02:57:03.000 And this makes total evolutionary sense.

02:57:06.000 Different things were under selection in different habitats at different times, and that made different people smarter in different ways for whatever that was.

02:57:14.000 I actually think this is not how we start editing ourselves because that's not how evolution works.

02:57:22.000 As 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.

02:57:35.000 Right.

02:57:36.000 So 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.

02:57:45.000 That's not the same picture that the Chinese government has in mind.

02:57:51.000 I have in mind, right?

02:57:52.000 And that's why I don't fear it as much, I think, because that's not how it's going to happen.

02:57:59.000 How 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.

02:58:07.000 And then suddenly this most unethical thing that is completely abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution.

02:58:16.000 That is how we get there.

02:58:18.000 Wow.

02:58:19.000 In my imagination.

02:58:21.000 Wow.

02:58:22.000 Well, I would love to have you back on when you get more information and more breakthroughs and more stuff that you're doing.

02:58:29.000 I would love to come back on.

02:58:30.000 I really, really enjoyed our conversation.

02:58:31.000 I know you got to see...

02:58:33.000 I will definitely do that.

02:58:34.000 I promise you.

02:58:35.000 Yeah.

02:58:35.000 I promise.

02:58:36.000 Thank you so much for being here.

02:58:37.000 It was really great.

02:58:38.000 Thank you.

02:58:38.000 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:58:39.000 And your book, Life As We Made It.

02:58:42.000 How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined and Redefined Nature, Beth Shapiro.

02:58:48.000 I think the rest of my Siberia story is in there, including the part at the end where I got arrested.

02:58:53.000 I did.

02:58:54.000 I read the audiobook for that.

02:58:55.000 Yes!

02:58:56.000 Yes!

02:58:56.000 I love it.

02:58:57.000 I'm so glad you read it.

02:58:58.000 I hate when other people have to read people's work.

02:59:01.000 Well, I asked if I could read it because my first book, How to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read.

02:59:06.000 And I heard the audiobook and I write in first person and I tell stories and I try to make it funny.

02:59:10.000 And I was like, that's not how it should be read.

02:59:12.000 So I wrote to them and I said, can I read this book?

02:59:15.000 And they said, oh, you're going to have to audition.

02:59:20.000 What if I am not good enough to read?

02:59:22.000 My own audiobook.

02:59:24.000 Well, you clearly are.

02:59:25.000 You're a great talker.

02:59:27.000 Thank you so much.

02:59:28.000 Thank you really for being here.

02:59:29.000 I really appreciate it.

02:59:30.000 It's really fun.

02:59:31.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 17, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro

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Transcript