Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2338 - Beth Shapiro

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Joe Rogan Experience _2338 - Beth Shapiro · NO FILTER

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Hello, Beth.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Hello.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: It's very great to see you again.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: I am pleased to be here.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's been really interesting getting to talk to you and
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: communicating with you and all the stuff that you guys
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: have done at Colossal has been insane. So why don't
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: you just tell everybody what your background is and what
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: you do.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I'm a scientist. I work in a crazy field called
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics. It means we go out
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: DNA from it. And what is fantastic about that is
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: it's being a modern-day explorer. I get to go somewhere,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I get to find out something new that completely rewrites
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant. And I
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: get to fight with people a lot. And because I
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: love to fight, I recently quit my academic job and
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: company that has just made those direwolves.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Why do you like to fight with people?
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: I don't really like to fight with people. I just
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: felt like it was the right thing to say at
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: this minute. I end up fighting with people, though, not
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: because I want to, but because I feel like I
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: have to defend what I think is the way that
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: we should be doing science.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly a controversial subject and you guys are
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: certainly groundbreakers. So whenever there's a controversial subject and people
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: are groundbreakers, you're without doubt going to get a lot
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: of pushback. And a lot of people that just want attention,
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: a lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff going on.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a big I think in academia in particular,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: there's this big scarcity mindset. And this leads people to
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: be kind of negative about everything. That's going to be
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: too hard. If I say that that's good, then that
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: means that the thing that I want to do probably
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: isn't going to get that money. Or if you get attention,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: that means I can't get attention. And it leads to
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: this negativity that I think stifles innovation.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of gatekeeping, too. You know, we talked
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: about that. Recently, there's a lot of people that want
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: to be the only people that are allowed to either
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: discuss or work on things.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've spent my whole life working on this. Therefore,
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: I am the only expert. And if anybody says something
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: that disagrees with what I believe to be true, they're
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: just wrong. I'm not even going to think about it.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: They're just wrong.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: It's unfortunate. But fortunately, we live in a very unique
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: time where you can do podcasts and podcasts get extraordinary
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: amounts of attention. And so I think that's also one
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: of the reasons why people push back so much as well.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: It's because they don't like that. They don't like that
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: there's this unique distribution network.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: There are going to be people, there are going to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: be colleagues of mine that are angry with me that
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: I have come here to talk to you. And that
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: is part of the problem.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It just seems kind of silly. But the subject is...
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Without all that stuff, the subject is absolutely fascinating. So
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: how did you get started in this? Like, what did
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: you initially want to do when you first started your career?
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: I actually started in broadcast journalism.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: I was in high school. I was convinced that I
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: wanted to work in broadcast journalism. I got a job
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: working at the local TV station. I grew up in Rome, Georgia,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: northwest corner of Georgia. And I got a job at
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the TV station where I was first operating the cameras.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: and helping people write copy. And then I got to
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: be on air. I auditioned for a spot in the
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: in the, like, 24 and 54 after the hour. But
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I had to wake up really early in the morning
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: and go to work. I was in high school. Go
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: read the teleprompter. It was pretty fun. And eventually got,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: and I was convinced that this is what I wanted
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: to do with my career. I went to the University
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: of Georgia. They have a fantastic broadcast journalism school. I
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: started off as the news director at one of the
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: local radio stations. And this job, let's just say, wasn't
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: particularly compatible with being a freshman in college. There were
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: I had only been asleep for one and a half
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: hours after being out for too late at night doing
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: things that I shouldn't have been doing because I was
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: underage and had to go to work. to write the
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: news and then be on this broadcast radio station. It
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: was terrible. Anyway, how did I move from there to science?
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: I took this amazing class. It's similar to a class
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: where It was a field geology and archaeology program. And
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: we started off on the East Coast. We learned about
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: rocks and how to identify minerals. And then we drove
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: across the country and slept outside in national parks and
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: learned about the history of North America, the geological history,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: the human history, everything, while being there in person. Drove
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: up the West Coast, drove back around the country. It
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: was nine weeks. And I thought to myself while I
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: was there– this is the story that I want to tell.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: I want to show how people have changed this landscape
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: over and over and over again and about the opportunities
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: that we have to be able to become more creative
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: controllers of this landscape. So I thought, I'll get a
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: you know, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: expert in something. I know how to do that, so
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: I'll just do this other thing. And that's the history
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: of it. I just kind of got sucked into being
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the scientist. I've written a couple of popular books, which
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: is still me trying to reach back out. I want
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: to be a communicator, but I also want to be
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: a scientist because it's so much fun.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: So you just followed your fascination, which is the best
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: advice anyone could ever get. Yeah.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: How did I pick a field working in ancient DNA?
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: This is something I had no idea about. I ended
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: and not getting into the university that I wanted to
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: get into, but wandering around the halls of the university
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: that I did get into. And I met this guy
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: called Alan Cooper, who was one of the few people
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: who'd set up the special kind of lab that you
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: need to be able to extract DNA from bones. So
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: This DNA is in terrible condition. So we have to
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: have a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: because then your DNA, which is in great condition, will
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: be the thing that we amplify. So we had one
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: of these labs and I thought, well, that's kind of
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: cool because I was interested in geology. I was interested
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: in human history. Maybe I can use this as a
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: way of telling stories that haven't been told before or
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: rewriting the stories that we keep telling. This was a
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: time where we were learning a lot about human history
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: and human ancestry and there was a lot more And
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool. This
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: would be fun. Plus, if you join my lab, you
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: can go to Siberia. And I was in. I was like, yeah, sure.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: That's the deal for me. I'll go to Siberia.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: So you got sent to Siberia? That's usually what they
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I have had several experiences. Not amazing
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: experiences in Siberia, but overall, it's been fun. I've been
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: a couple of times.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: What time of year did you go?
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Summer.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: So the first time I went, it was for a meeting.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: And I spent some time in Moscow first as a
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: guest of one of my Russian collaborators. And then we
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: went out to this meeting in Yakutsk. And we got
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: on a boat. What I learned about Siberia is that
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: everything goes wrong. There's no bit of infrastructure that functions
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: the way it's supposed to function. And I learned that initially.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: We ended up on this. boat that was two hours late.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: It was warm and hot. And there are so many mosquitoes.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: I was going to ask you about that. I've heard
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: the mosquitoes are insane.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: So crazy. Like one of the times I was out
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: in Taimyr, the north central Taimyr Peninsula, and we had
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: so that we could go inside and take the masks,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: take the masks off of our face because you always
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: have to wear a hood. Otherwise you'll be breathing mosquitoes.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: And And we were going outside and playing this game
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: where we would just clap our hands in front of
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: our face and then count how many you killed. And
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: one time I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: And it's just awful. It's miserable.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: So they're trying to sting you through your clothes. They're
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: big too, right?
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Well, it depends the time of year. And early in
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the season, they're really big and you can catch them fast.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: And then they get different species come out that are
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: smaller and smaller. And toward the end of the season,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: they're really tiny. Once I was up in the north
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: of Alaska on the Ickpickpuck River, we were floating down
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: like that. And it had been windy for the first
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: few days, so it was fine. And this was my
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: first time out in the field, actually. It was northern Alaska.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: And I was like, these mosquitoes. People keep telling me
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: there's mosquitoes. They're full of shit. There's no mosquitoes out here.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: The wind is blowing. Then the wind dies down. And
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: then it's like, oh, fuck. Like, this is awful. There
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: was a moose that was ahead of us for a
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: while and this poor animal. We were following the river
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and he would, every few steps, he would just totally
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: submerge his body in this frozen water and then come
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: back up. Like the mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: I've only been to Anchorage. Well, I've been to a
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: couple spots of Alaska, but I was in Anchorage. And
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: when I was there, it was the summertime. We were
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: salmon fishing, my friend Ari and I. And we got
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: bug repellent because we heard you got to spray mosquito spray.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: We stepped out of the car. The moment we opened
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: up the car door, there was a cloud of mosquitoes.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: We're shrieking like little girls.
• 9:29
  Speaker 4: We're like, ah!
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: Like, what the hell? I'd never experienced anything like it
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: in my life. Like, where'd they come from? Right.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: You don't expect it.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: There was nothing there. It wasn't like we saw a
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: cloud of mosquitoes, but we opened up. There was an
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: impossible amount of mosquitoes that got into the car.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: It's terrible. In time era, I remember we would walk
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: along the grass. There's tall trees. Grass with little flowers
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: in it. Exactly the kind of place you can imagine
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: But as you were walking, you would kick up the
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: grass and they would just emerge. off of the needles
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: of grass. It was just really awful.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Well, they're so aggressive because they only have like three
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: months to live.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I learned actually because I was curious about this.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: How did they survive if there are so few Because
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: mosquitoes mostly, it's only the females that take a blood meal,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: and they only take a blood meal when they're making
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: eggs or making a brood. They take it to reproduce. Otherwise,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: they feed on nectar. So how do so many mosquitoes
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there?
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: and they don't need a blood meal to reproduce, but
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: they do better if they get one. So they're after you,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: but they don't need you.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: It kind of makes it worse, right?
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: It really is fascinating how aggressive they are.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: Because, you know, Texas has mosquitoes, but they can live
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: all year round, so they're kind of chill. They're not
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: that worried about you.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: My boss was so funny, too. Alan Cooper, the guy
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: I went to work with, he was all, oh, I'm
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: going to just wear this natural mosquito repellent, and you
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: don't need any of the stuff that actually has poisons
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: in it. Look at me and my natural. And we're
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: out there, and the wind dries down, and the mosquitoes come,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: and I'm with my deet. I'm like, you know, your
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: natural repellent.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: He's going.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Did you bring the deet? I'm like, yeah, yeah.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you give up on that natural stuff real quick.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: I was watching a documentary where they're using pine pitch.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's film, Happy People, Life
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: in the Taiga? It's really good. It's really fascinating. He
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: follows these people that live on the Taiga River in Siberia. Cool.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: And it's all these subsistence people that are like fishing
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: and trapping and they're living in these little cabins and
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: they bring dogs with them everywhere. They travel around on snowmobiles. Really,
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: what's amazing about it is the title is happy people.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: They're all happy. That's what's so weird. It's like these
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: people have a very hard life, but yet they're always
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: smiling and they're having a good time. And, you know,
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: living this subsistence lifestyle somehow or another is like very
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: fulfilling at like a, I don't want to say a
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: genetic level, but like an internal level. There's something about
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: it that like, This makes sense. Whereas society, like today,
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: I don't think it makes sense. Because I think we,
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: you know, you're a geneticist. You understand genes. We essentially
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: have the same genes that people of 10,000 years ago had.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: Very different world.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: Right. And we're not really designed for this world. Right.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Well, you can see that in the increased rates of obesity,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: increased rates of diabetes. We're not.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Also depression, anxiety. Right. All that stuff. And this is
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: what happy people is kind of all about. I mean,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Werner Herzog is this, you know, he's brilliant. And so
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: he's narrating this whole thing, too. You kind of get
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: this understanding of his appreciation for these people that are
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: living this very basic life. Yeah. But are very happy.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's impressive. When we were up there in Timer,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: we'd flown for a couple days in this really awful
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: to because, you know, infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia. It's
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: a repeated theme from.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: You got a Siberian helicopter.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: At a place. It was an MI-8, and it was
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: in a place called Khatanga, which is where we were
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: based while we were trying to get out into... And
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: they kept... loading all of our gear into this and
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: it's mostly these massive gas tanks and you load all
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: the gear into the gas tanks and then all of
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: the people, we had a dog, Pasha, who was with
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: us who did not want to get in that helicopter.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: I think the dog was the smartest person in our
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: expedition team. But they would load us up and they
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: would try to start the helicopter and it wouldn't start
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: and they would unload us. We would go back to
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: the places we were staying and then they would tinker
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: with it and fix it. Anyway, we flew out. We
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: got in the helicopter. Finally, we got up into the air.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: And then the Russian and French leaders of our expedition
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: team decided that they were going to celebrate finally having
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: taken off in this helicopter by smoking.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: We're sitting on the gas tanks in this helicopter that
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: we already think.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Fortunately, The helicopter had some missing windows. So, you know,
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: there was.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: There was airflow.
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: It's fine.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: No, this was insane.
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: This whole.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: of it.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: So.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Also, I'm going to get to this story eventually, but
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: also in part of this, we were traveling forever out
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: into this part of the time era where they had
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: and woolly rhino bones and all the bones of the
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: animals we're interested in. So we're flying out there, and
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: we start to land. And I'm thinking, great, we're there.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I get out of this crazy firebomb in the air
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: that I'm in. We're going to— we land. No, no, we
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: did not get off. Instead, we picked up a random
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: family that had been out there on their own. Parents,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: a child— Yeah, it was two parents and a child,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: and they had a backpack with their gear and a
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: massive cooler. Right, that's what they had. No words. They're French.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: They speak French to the team that's there. People are
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: having a conversation in Russian, and then we take off again.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: And I'm thinking— Was that planned to pick these people up,
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: or were they trapped?
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: I think it was planned. Just there was a lack
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: of communication. But whatever. The helicopter took off twice, and
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: then it landed. And everybody unloaded and we set up
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: the tent, the camp. And we discovered over the course
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: of the next few days, you know, we built these
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: cool boats, the Zodiacs. You blow them up and you
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: bring out the outboard and you put them on the
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: lake and we're looking around. And we discovered that we
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: had landed in a place where we were going to
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: be for six weeks that had been glaciated during the
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: last ice age, which meant that our chances of finding
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: what we wanted were really small.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, no.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: It was devastating. And the Russian, we had a cook
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: with us. The Russian cooks had brought medical ethanol because
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: it weighed less per unit of alcohol than vodka, which
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: they would normally bring on the helicopter. So they brought
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: medical ethanol to drink.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, you can only take so much stuff
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: with you.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Because it weighs less than alcohol. That's a crazy decision.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, they decided it was safe.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Anyway.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: By three days in, it's 24-hour sunlight. We're at 72
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: degrees latitude.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: Did you try it? The medical ethanol?
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: I tried the medical ethanol. I mean, obviously. You water
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: it down with a little bit of river water and
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: you have it with your freshly caught fish that you've filleted.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: And yeah, it's great.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: We had fish and rice for the whole time.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: That was So you had to catch your food.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: We had to catch our food, yes.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: Luckily, there's probably a lot of fish up there.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Fish, and there were some geese and some ducks that
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: they would try to shoot while we were on our zodiacs,
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: normally without telling us that they were about to shoot.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: It was a very logistic way.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: So you just hear boom, boom.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Or you'd be sitting there looking at something, and suddenly
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the zodiac would take off because whoever was in charge
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: had seen something he wanted to shoot at in the distance. Anyway,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Telling this story. Because it's fun. It's a fun story.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: So we were there. We're there for, I don't know,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: maybe it was two or three days looking around. And
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: it was about two o'clock in the morning. We were
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: inside this little tent that we'd built so that we
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: could eat in it, sort of the kitchen tent where
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: we were. And it was a big mesh tent to
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: keep the mosquitoes out so we didn't have to have anything.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: And everybody is just staring off into the distance glumly.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: The medical ethanol was gone. You know, everybody was sober.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: We were going to be for the next five weeks.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: We were going to be stuck in this place where
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: we weren't going to be able to find what we were.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden these three dudes show
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: up outside of our tent with machine guns.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, everybody's thinking, what the fuck? Like we
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: just flew forever in a helicopter over nothing at all.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Nothing except for this French family that we picked up
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: randomly along the way. And everybody's looking around and there's
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: this real moment of what the hell are we going
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: to do? And then the guy who was the expedition
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: leader recognizes these two dudes. And he's like, oh, friends. Oh,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: good to see you. Blah, blah, blah. And I'm thinking,
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: what's going to happen when they realize we don't have
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: any more vodka, medical ethanol? And it turns out that
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: they are, they were members of the Dolgon community, which
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: is an actual family of subsistence people that still live
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: up on the time era. They herd reindeer.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: And they had seen the helicopter and had wondered what
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: we were up to and just set out over the
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: landscape that they'd normally live on to try to find us.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Pretty cool, actually.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: That's cool. So did you hang out with those people?
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Well, we did. They were disappointed that we didn't have
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: any alcohol, obviously.
• 18:34
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• 19:39
  Speaker 4: That's join.whoop.com. That's a theme. It's a theme.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: It was Russia, so it's a fair theme. But the
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: French couple... This is just... You're not going to believe
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: me when I say this, right?
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: The French couple... Said, I got this. And they get
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: up and they go back to their little tent area
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: that they'd set up in the middle of nowhere. And
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: they bring back their cooler. And they open it up.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: And inside is cheese. Like a massive Gouda. And a
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: massive brie.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Right?
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: But they had cheese. And so we cut the cheese.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: and shared the cheese with our Dolgon friends, and they
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: were happy. And the next day, we took them back
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: with the Zodiacs to their community. And you know what
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: was most amazing about this experience? Everything about it was cool.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: We saw these people that were living in these tiny
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: little huts in part of the world where it goes
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: to 40 below. And it doesn't matter if it's Fahrenheit
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: or Celsius because they cross at that level, right? It's
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: 40 below during the winter for months and dark. And
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: they're herding reindeer. And they're living in these tiny little
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: things that they cut in half during the winter so
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: that half of it is used for heating and half
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: of it is used for the family to live in.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Everything that they own is on these things, on skids,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: in the snow or in the summer, trying to find
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: the land for the animals to graze and this is
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: how they live and that was the only time in
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: that experience where i could take off the head net
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: it was really impressive.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: They only wanted to attack the.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Animals they were after the animals and they really left.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Us alone but probably because that's their natural source.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, more natural than– there's more of them there. I mean,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe they're larger, but it was.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: They're probably accustomed to it, right? Though also, like, for
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: thousands of years, they've probably been just feeding off of reindeer.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think about that, though. But I think about
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: that poor moose from Alaska who was also clearly bothered
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: by the mosquitoes. I imagine the reindeer were as well.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: But it was pretty cool.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: Were these people riding the reindeer?
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: They did ride them. In fact, I got to– they
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: put me up there and showed me how I could
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: ride the reindeer.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: Is this their place? Yes, yes. Wow. So you were
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: in this area?
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: I was there during the summer though. So it wasn't,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: there wasn't snow on the ground. It was all just
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: a very grassy, wet, super wet grassy. And the moisture
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: It is so fascinating to me that people will live
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: like this generation after generation after generation. Yeah. And the
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: fact that you can somehow, these are one of the
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: weird animals, caribou are, that you can herd. Yeah. And
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: people ride them.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: And milk them.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: And then occasionally whack one. Yeah.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, they're great, right? Animals have always been a
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: really great storage mechanism. That's one of the hypotheses about
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: animal domestication. Why did this take place? If we had plants,
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: but there are going to be years where there's plenty
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: to eat and years where there's not enough to eat.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: But in those years where there's plenty, if you store
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: some of that nutrition in animals, then in the years
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: where there's less, you can eat those animals. So it's
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: a very safe way of storing what you can grow.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: That's a fascinating way to look at it, storing. I
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: just want to know how they ever figured out how
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: to herd those reindeer. What did you do? Who was
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: the first person to figure out how to get them
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: all to stay together? Right.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: I think that about a lot of domestic animals. I
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: also think that about milk. Who was the first person
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: who decided, I can have a go at that?
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: They're probably starving. They must have tried everything. That's how
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: we found out what mushrooms are edible, right? Because a
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: large percentage of them will just kill you immediately. But
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: people are so desperate for anything.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, some of them are trying to tell you, though,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: by being like bright red or bright purple.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Right, right, right.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: But we're dumb, so we're like, bright red, I'll lick that.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it might be an apple. It's confusing. Some bright
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: red things are delicious and really good for you. Wow.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: So these people that live up there, what was their history? Like,
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: had they been living up there their whole life?
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: Those particular individuals have, yeah, but I think they have
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: a long history. The culture has a long history there.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And we're still, I think, we're still learning about how
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: humans have dispersed around the world and how they got
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: to be the places where they are today. But I
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: really think it's impressive that there are people who are
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: hanging on to that culture.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: And really able to, you know, they're trying now to
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: relearn their native languages because during the communist era, they
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: were all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: same way as everyone else.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Even up there.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Even up there.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Wow. They sent an emissary to say, guys, it's time
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: to speak the mother tongue.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Maybe they had to go to the squares like you
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: see in Yakutsk and all these other places where they
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: have the big squares with the speakers on the top
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: where they would go for the daily admonishings or whatever
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: from the Communist Party.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: Who knows? Wow. What a weird way to live. It's
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: just it's so fascinating that there's pockets of these humans
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: that live like this all over the world. Obviously, the
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: people in the Amazon area. the uncontacted tribes of the world.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: It's just so interesting.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: And we have so much to learn from them. It
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: would be, I mean, obviously that's such a cool job,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: getting to go and actually try to communicate with people
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: who haven't been talked to before. But you kind of
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: don't want to because you don't want to ruin that.
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Isn't that an interesting perspective? Because I don't want to
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: live like that. I don't want to live in the
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: Amazon with a leaf over my private parts. But we
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: assume they do.
• 25:24
  Speaker 4: Not even for a week?
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: Nope. Don't want to do it. There's so many things
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: out there that'll eat you. There's so many bugs that
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: can kill you and snakes that can kill you. It's like, uh-uh.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: I'd rather watch a video. Right. David Attenborough documentary. I
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: don't want to go there. I have a good friend
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: who lives there, Paul Rosalie. He goes there all the time.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: He's been on the podcast a few times. And he
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: lives in the Amazon. And his whole thing is he's
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: there protecting the rainforest and What they do is they
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: take these people that are just poor people that have
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: no options and they're loggers. And so he pays them
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: more money to protect the rainforest. So they get to
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: quit the logging job and then protect the rainforest. And
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: then through funding, they buy up parcels of land and
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: protect it and save it. But he's had some gnarly
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: encounters with uncontacted people where at one point in time
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: they realized they were actually being hunted and they barely
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: escaped with their life. Holy shit. You start hearing weird
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: noises in the bushes and then you realize like, oh boy,
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: these are people. Like we're being stalked right now.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: By the most sophisticated hunting animal out there.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: Not only that, I would imagine at the stage that
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: these people are at, they've been living there for thousands
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: and thousands of years. They probably have incredible perception, incredible senses.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: Because they have to.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: They probably knew these people were coming a long time ago.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: They probably heard the boat coming down the river. They prepared.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: They got ready. They know where all the paths are.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: They know which way the people would go. You're utterly helpless.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: How did he get out of this?
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: They got out just in time. Just in time.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: They just escaped.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But one of his friends, one of the people
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: that he was working with, did not. They would have
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: these gifts. So they would take these rafts and try
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: to make contact with these people. They would float these
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: rafts towards them filled with food. And they were doing
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: this as like a peace gesture. And this guy had
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: done this several times. And then one time he didn't
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: come back and they found him full of arrows. Wow. Yeah,
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: they just killed him. They just decided, you know, maybe
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: they had a bad experience with some other person from
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: some other Westerner. And they decided, you know, we're done.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: But they're rightly terrified of humans because when these people
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: that come in, that want to extract resources, whether it's
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: the loggers or whatever it is. If there's some minerals
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: or anything else they find there, they just kill everybody.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: There's horrific human rights violations that occur there where they
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: just hire the worst people in the world to go
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: in and wipe out these tribes because these tribes are
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: resisting them taking over this land.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: We have a history of this.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we do. We have a deep history. Which is
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: really fascinating about the Amazon in particular, because we've had
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: a bunch of conversations on one of them recently with
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Luke Caverns, where we went over the LIDAR discoveries of
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: these sophisticated grids and all the stuff that's in the Amazon,
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: where they really thought that this was just rainforest forever.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: And then slowly over time, they really know there was
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: like a huge civilization here of millions of people. So
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: these people that are the uncontacted people, I mean, I
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: wonder how many of them were like the preppers of
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: the Amazon world from, you know, 4,000 years ago or
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: whatever it was. It wasn't even that long ago. The
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Percy Fawcett, Percy Fawcett, right? That's his name? The guy who,
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: one of the guys who, he's the main character in
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: that book, The Lost City of Z. He's one of
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: the people that went there. When the first settlers went there,
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: when the first explorers went there, They talked about these incredible,
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: like sophisticated civilizations. And then people went back 100 years
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: and there was none of that. So they thought that
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: they had just made it up. It turns out the
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: first people probably gave these folks horrible diseases and it
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: wiped out millions of people. And then the jungle just
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: consumed whatever structures and houses and stuff that they had.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: And all that's left is these grids that you can
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: see when you fly over in LIDAR.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: That's so cool. You can see those when you're flying
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: over any part of the world, really. I noticed it
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: recently I was flying over Europe, and you can see
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: the old trellises from old... I don't know how old,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: but it's just so cool how we can see remnants
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: of civilizations. It just makes you think, what happened? This
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: is some of the coolest mysteries. That's what's so cool
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: about working in ancient DNA, too, is we can just
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: go to places, get DNA from stuff, and learn something
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: that we never knew before.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: It's fun. So you... Get interested in DNA. You go
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: to Siberia, all that jazz. How do you get started
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: working with a company like Colossal? How does that take place?
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: All of us working in ancient DNA, we are constantly
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: answering the same question from the media, which is, when
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: are we going to bring dinosaurs back to life?
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Jurassic Park.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Great.
• 30:24
  Speaker 4: We're so simple.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: One great movie and everybody's like, when's that going to happen?
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: And people say, people actually say that my field was
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: spawned by Jurassic Park. The whole idea that we could
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: get DNA stuff, that's not true. It was actually the
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: other way around. And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: book that became the movie, he credited the a lab
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: which was the first group to show that you could
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: get DNA in something after it died. That was actually
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: from a quagga, which is a type of zebra. What
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: a cool name.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Well, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the quagga.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: Ooh, even better.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kind of bad
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: for the microphone, probably gross.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: Quagga.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: So they sound like that. I don't know. Who knows? Anyway,
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: they showed that you could get DNA from this skin.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: I've heard in a long time. That must mean we
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: can bring dinosaurs back to life. And everybody started racing
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: to get the oldest and coolest DNA. And so there
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: were papers in the best journals of science that never
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: published anything that's wrong ever, ever again. that said, look,
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: here's dinosaur DNA, and look, here's DNA from a Miocene-aged leaf,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: and look, here's this, and all of it is crap.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: We now know. In fact, the first dinosaur DNA sequences
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: that were published, if you took them at the time
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: and you typed them into the internet and you compared
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: them to the earliest of what is today this big
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequenced,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: what came back was a close match to a bird
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: We now know, because there's more DNA sequences there, that
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: And some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: been working on those bones had fried chicken for lunch
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: every day.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: So it's chicken contamination.
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: It's like greasy fingers on your dinosaur fossils. And look,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: now we have ancient DNA.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: That is hilarious. That's how little they knew about DNA.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: What year was this around?
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: That would be the early 90s.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: The early 90s. And when was DNA first discovered?
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: But it was really.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: The idea.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: What really helped this field along was the invention of PCR.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: It's an acronym for polymerase chain reaction.
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: It's a way of.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: Carey Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: was high on a road trip.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: On LSD.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
• 32:57
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: have your best ideas.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: When you're high. Some people have great ideas. Some people
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: go kooky. You know, some people lose their marbles and
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: never come back.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I probably would not have good ideas
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: on LSD, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: I like your scientific exploration mind.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: A good scientist always wants to know.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: You never know. Maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: A little piece of paper.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Probably not. Probably not. You never know. Anyway, he discovered
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: a way to photocopy DNA to make lots of copies
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: of the same thing, which then made it possible to
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: learn the sequence using the technologies of the day. And
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: that was what made it possible really for ancient DNA
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: to take off, was this ability to photocopy. Because when
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: an animal dies or a plant dies, the DNA in
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: the cell starts to get chopped up into smaller and
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: smaller pieces by things like UV, right? We go out
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: in the sun. we put sunscreen on and that stops
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: the UV from breaking our DNA. But it's not terrible
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: to get some sunlight, as you probably just saw. There
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: was an article out saying, hey, dummies, we need some
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: sunlight in order to make vitamin D. But we have
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: a repair mechanism so that when your DNA breaks, it
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: doesn't stay that way. We evolved this mechanism. But once
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: you're dead, you no longer have the energy for that
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: to work. And so these damaged parts of DNA accumulate.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: And also things like bacteria and microbes get in there
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: and chew up the DNA to recycle the animal to
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: the next generation or plant or whatever. And so the
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: DNA that we get in an old thing, like a
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: mammoth bone, is really short fragments, like maybe 30 or
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: 40 or 50 letters of DNA long. In comparison, if
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: I were to take a swab from my cheek and
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: sequence that, I could get strings that are hundreds of
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: millions of letters long. This is living DNA. So ancient
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: DNA is in really crap condition. And It's also mixed
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: with stuff. So if I extract DNA from a mammoth,
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: I'll probably get some of my DNA because I touched
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: that mammoth bone. I'll get DNA from whoever else touched
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: that thing. This has been a real problem in archaeology
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: because we're trying to get DNA from humans, but we're humans,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: and so we touch these things, and then I don't
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: know if it's my DNA or if that thing DNA.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog.
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• 37:03
  Speaker 2: new customers only. Even just breathing on it, right?
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or dropping an eyelash. In my lab at Santa
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world, we
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: have these really sophisticated... It's like working in a virus
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: lab where you're scared of everything, but we turn it around.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: So rather than having the air... being sucked in. We're
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: kind of trying to push the air out. We don't
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: want any air coming in. We wear these suits where
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: it looks like we're terrified, you know, with a face
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: mask and hair net and we're totally covered and we
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: bleach everything. It's not because we're afraid of those bones.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: We're afraid that we're going to get our DNA in
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: that bone and then we're not going to be able
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: to do our work.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: So it took that and the ability to amplify those
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: tiny little pieces of DNA for us to really figure
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: out that we could get DNA out of things. For
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: a long time, people thought we were never going to
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: You know, we touch a bone, we're just going to
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: get human DNA, and we're never going to be able
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: to know the difference. But then with PCR and with
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: probably one of the crowning achievements of my field. Ancient DNA.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize a few years ago
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: for this.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: What did they extract it from?
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Bones. different bones. The very first Neanderthal genome sequence was
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: actually a mixture of several bones because, you know, there
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: wasn't very much DNA in any of them and they
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: were able to pull it together. Actually, my husband, who
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: was on part of that team, who put together the
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: first Neanderthal genome sequence.
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was cool.
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: That's really cool.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: But then they, the Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: they had no idea was going to belong to a
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: totally new species of human, right? And they were able
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: to get a really high coverage whole genome out of
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: this tiny little finger bone that totally rewrote what we
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: thought we knew about evolutionary history.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: And that's pretty recently, right?
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: Within the last decade.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: Jamie and I, we did a podcast recently. We were
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: talking about the big head people. What are they called again?
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: Giuliani or something. I've seen this. This is really recent.
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: Super recent. It was like December of 2024. They released
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: this paper.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, super cool. And it just highlights how much we
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: don't know, right? How every, especially in paleoanthropology, and this
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: is a field where, you know, people will take like, yeah.
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: Jularen. Jularensis. That's it. Lost species of humans with an
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: abnormally large skull, which lived alongside Homo sapiens. So they
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: died off somewhere. They lived in China between 300,000 and 50,000
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: years ago. Yeah.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: And so if they were able to breed with humans,
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: they probably did. And they probably bred with Neanderthals and
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: they probably bred with Denisovans because, you know, that's what
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: we do.
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: Wild stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, the hobbit people,
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: the island of Flores people. Yeah. Flores. A little tiny.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: No one has still been able to get DNA from
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: those samples now. But, I mean, someday. So it's just bones?
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: Someday it'll happen. We've tried. Sponte's team has tried. A
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: lot of people have attempted. It's just they're too degraded.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: They're from a hot place. All of those things that
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: degrade DNA, it happens faster in hot places.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. There's probably a lot more
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: to be discovered too.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: So much.
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: They only really found it out of one location, right? Yes. Yeah.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: And one thing that people have tested, actually this again
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: was work that my husband did, was whether the people
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: who live there today, the Rampasasa people, are related to
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: them and they're not. It seems like, because they're small
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: as well. And the question is, is there something weird
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: about them? This is actually really cool. It was a
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: really cool result. There are, it's hard to know exactly
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: what bits of, changes in your DNA code for making
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: you big or small. But clearly, it's not just one
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: thing because there's not just people my size and people
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: normal size. I'm only five feet tall, right? We have
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: a big spectrum of help. So there's lots of different
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: genes that are involved with this. But we kind of
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: have an idea of where those genes are in a
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: genome and what they might be. And with these people
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: who are all small, the idea, the hypothesis was that
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: there was some new thing in their DNA that led
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: to them being small. But it wasn't. They just are
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: at the extreme of all the things we already know.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: Is it just island dwarfism?
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: It's just a small population on an island. Different alleles
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: go to fixation. And yes, I mean, weird things happen
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: on islands.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: Like elephants even.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: Elephants dwarfed. Yeah, but dodos, dodos got bigger.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: And so do lizards.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: They dwarf or they get bigger?
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: They get bigger. Yeah, like the Komodo.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. That's one of the scariest animals.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: Creepiest animals. I'm so embarrassed to tell you how many
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: times I've watched videos of them eating large animals whole.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Like cattle?
• 41:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: I've done this too. They eat sheep and monkeys.
• 41:46
  Speaker 4: It's horrific.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Why do we watch that?
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: I don't know. You're like, is this going to happen?
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: You open up Instagram. I'm like, oh, no. You see
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: this poor goat and you see this slobbery lizard.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: And you can't help. You're like, I'm going to watch.
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: They're so gross. Their mouth is filled with botulism. And ugh.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: Is that what kills them, the botulism?
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: I think there's a venom as well. They think there's
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: a lot of toxins in their mouth, and I think
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: there's also a venom. I think they used to think
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: it was just poison, just botulism and just various bacteria.
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: But now I believe they think it's a venom. I
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: watched another horrible video where they would bite this buffalo.
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: They just bite its hindquarters and then follow it while
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: the venom is slowly, like, taking its– running its toll
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: through the body. And then eventually the poor buffalo gets
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: to the point where it can't move and they start
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: eating it alive.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: I think I've seen that one. I do think I've
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: seen that one.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: Nature is so rough.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: Would you go?
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: It's so brutal. To Komodo Island? No chance.
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: I remember Sharon Stone's husband. I believe he was either
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: a journalist or someone who owned a newspaper or something
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: like that. And they went to see the Komodo dragons
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: at the zoo. I think it was in San Francisco.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: And they took their shoes off when they enter into
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: this Komodo dragon area to like not contaminate. And apparently
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: he had white socks on and they decided that his
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: foot looked delicious. And they bit him. Yeah. Yeah. I
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: don't know what happened with that. This was, you know.
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: An ex-husband of hers back in the Dizzee.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: I don't think she did. I think it was just
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: one of those things where this guy just didn't know
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: what he was getting into and should have had white
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: socks on. Or it's just doing what a Komodo dragon
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: does and biting whatever it can.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't have thought white socks.
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: Here it is. Bronstein underwent surgery to reattach several thousand
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: severed tendon sand. Severed tendon sand. To rebuild his big
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: toe that was crushed by the dragon's jaws.
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: Oh.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just missing his face.
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: Oh, tendons end. Okay. Oh, so he was able to
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: pry open the reptile's mouth and escape through a small
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: feeding door in the cage while the zookeeper distracted the dragon. Oh,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: my God.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: Wait, he was in the feeding cage?
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: Whoopsies.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, they mistook his white tennis shoes. That's what it was.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: It wasn't socks. So this story's old. This story is from...
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: They had him take it off. It was his shoeless foot. Oh,
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: they had him remove his white... Yeah. Oh, it was
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: a shoeless foot. Oh, so they thought that his tennis
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: shoes would look like the rats. So they told him,
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: take your shoes off so they don't look like the rats.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: And his foot looks like a rat.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: It looks like flesh.
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: Oh, my God.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: This sounds like someone did a dumb thing. Like, this is.
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. A lot of dumb things. What year is this, Jamie? 2001. 2001.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Well, bad decisions. Bad outcomes.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not going to Komodo Island.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: Fuck that place.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: No.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: No, I'm not going to any of those places.
• 44:54
  Speaker 4: No.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no. I get it. Like, I
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: know what they are. I can watch them through the cage.
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: I'm good. I don't need the additional thrill.
• 45:02
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: But there are places where there are big things, like dodos,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: that are amazing and probably not going to kill you.
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: Sure. There's some stuff that won't kill you. Like giraffes. Giraffes.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: I've been told that a giraffe is the dumbest animal.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: Really? Yeah.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: I didn't know this and I wouldn't have suspected it
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: because they're so gorgeous and you wouldn't think that something
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: that gorgeous would be so dumb. But I have friends
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: who are, Matt James, who's the chief animal officer at Colossal,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: he's worked with at lots of different zoos throughout his career.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: And he's told me that there are multiple occasions where
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: he has had to save a giraffe from accidentally killing
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: itself because it's so dumb.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: Wow. Well, they're so kind that they let babies feed them. Oh, Yeah.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: You know, there's nothing going on.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: When my kids were little, you could go to the
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: San Diego Zoo and you would give them lettuce and
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: little babies are allowed to hold up like a two
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: year old can hold up their arm. And this enormous
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: tongue comes wrapping around that piece of lettuce and they
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: giggle and everything. But they trust them so much that
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: they let little kids feed them like they set it
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: up so people can feed. And they seem so calm. Docile, yeah. Yeah,
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: like they're just happy they're not getting eaten by lions.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: Sounds a little dangerous to me, though. If they are
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: genuinely stupid, will they accidentally at some point take that
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: baby's hand? And then they have huge, strong necks.
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, they fight each other with their necks.
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: It says they're kind of smart.
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: But this is, I don't know.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: The ability to make inferences based on statistical information has
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: so far been tested only on animals having large brains
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: in relation to their body size, like primates and parrots.
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size,
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: could rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes. They
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quantities
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: of highly liked food and less preferred food. The experimenter
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: covertly drew one piece of food from each container and
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: let the giraffes choose between the two options. In the
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: first task, We varied the quantity and relative frequency of
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: the highly liked and less preferred food pieces. In the
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: second task, we inserted a physical barrier in both containers
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: so giraffes only had to take into account the upper
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: part of the container when predicting the outcome. In both tasks,
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: giraffes successfully selected the container more likely to provide highly
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: liked food, integrating physical information to correctly predict sampling information. Huh.
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, cool. But I also trust a person who
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: has tried to keep giraffes from killing themselves by doing
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: dumb things to tell me that a giraffe isn't always
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: making the best decisions.
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: Perhaps they're intelligent for the environment they belong in.
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that's true. I mean, otherwise, that's how evolution works.
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: But when you put them in the zoo, they're like, look,
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: we have all our food.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in.
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: You know, like a kid that never leaves his parents'
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: basement and plays Call of Duty till he's 35, you know,
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: probably doesn't have like the best social intelligence, probably like
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: the Probably going to be pretty awkward when you get
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: them out in the wild.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Probably.
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's probably the same thing with giraffes. Yeah.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Did you hear that, James? Talking to my 15-year-old.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, does he play a lot of video games? They're
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: very addictive. It's a real problem. And they're going to
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: get worse. They're going to get way better. You know,
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: as science makes things more and more addictive, one of
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: the things they're really good at These designers.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: And algorithms. Oh, yeah.
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: But they're just so good at making games that are
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: just incredibly compelling.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: And fun.
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, so fun. Way more fun than going outside and
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: getting bullied. Yeah. You know, that's the problem. You know,
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: you could be a badass in Call of Duty. All
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: you do is sit in there.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: Or War Thunder. That's the game that my son is into.
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: War Thunder? I don't know about that one. What's that one?
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: It's about planes and things that you build and then fight.
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty crazy stuff. Just imagine if you could take
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: one of those Denisovans and show them that.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: That is an interesting question. What would we do if
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: we could bring a Neanderthal or a Denisovan back? De-extinct
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: one of them. We are not doing that at Colossal.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: They're humans. We cannot ask them for consent to do this.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: We're not working on them.
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: You won't. China's like, tell me more. Maybe.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: I think it's a bad idea. But if they do,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: I would.
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: Like to know. Well, there's a lot of people that
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: think bringing dire wolves back is a bad idea.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, what did you think of the dire wolves?
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: Well, fortunately, after the last podcast I did with Ben,
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: I did actually. get to go visit them and I
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: was blown away. It's extraordinary. It's so wild. I mean,
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: it's one thing to see them in photographs, but it's
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: another thing to be close to them where you're outside.
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: There's no fence between you and them. And you look
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: in their eyes and you're like, that is a different animal.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: That is a totally different. I've seen wolves before. That
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: is a totally different animal. I've never seen a wolf
• 49:42
  Speaker 2: in the wild, though. I saw one, but it was
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: like running across the road at a distance and it
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: was dusk.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: That was in Alberta. There's a lot of wolves up there.
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: But that I've never seen. I've never like looked in
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: one's eyes. And it's like these aren't even that old. Right.
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: You know, they were more than six months old, but
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: they were almost 100 pounds already. And they have this
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: look in their eye.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: And you can see they're bigger. They're more muscular. And
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: you see that coat, the dire wolf coat.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: It's extraordinary. The mane that they have. It's really incredible.
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: And then there's the little female, Khaleesi. She's adorable.
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: And she is like a puppy right now. You were
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: able to hold her?
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: She's adorable. Yes. She nibbles on your fingers. She's a
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: little thing. But she's, you know, one day going to
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: be 140 pounds. You can't get anywhere near her. Right.
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: Which is really crazy.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm glad you got to see the boys before.
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: They were probably already a little bit standoffish.
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Especially compared to Khaleesi.
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They're standoffish. They get fairly close, though, within like
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: 20 feet of you, checking you out. They pee all
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: over the place, you know.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Marking their territory.
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: But it's just so strange to see an animal in
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: the flesh that didn't exist before. you know, for 10,000 years.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. I was there for Khaleesi's birth and I,
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: people were asking me afterward, how did that feel? And
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: I just, you can't even describe it. You know, this
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: moment when she was born and then she screamed, she
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: had this, this cry, this scream. I have it on
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: my phone. Actually, I can play it for you. But
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: it was just such a, I don't know. It's this awe.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: I think this is one of the best things about
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: the de-extinction work and the species preservation work that Colossal
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: is doing, is that we live in such a crazy time.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: People don't often have an opportunity to feel genuine awe
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: about something. And this is one of the things that
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: people get about going out, going hunting, going and spending
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: time in the woods, or going and experiencing something that
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: they wouldn't normally experience, is this... this way to feel
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: genuine wonder and excitement and enthusiasm. And Khaleesi's birth, I
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: wasn't there for the birth of the boys. I was
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: in the UK at a conference and it was very sad.
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: And I had COVID and I was asleep and trying
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: to recover. And the next morning I woke up and
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: there were like 150 text messages on my phone from
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: Ben going, what the fuck are you doing? Where are you?
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: Why are you not responding? And I'm like, oh my God,
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: I've missed this moment. So I made sure that I
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: was there, present for for Khaleesi. And I'm glad I
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: was because what a, what an amazing, I'm glad you
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: got to see them.
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: I'm glad I got to see them too. It's really
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: a crazy experience. I felt very fortunate just to be
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: in their presence and also very conflicted by it all. Like,
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: this is so odd. Like, is this the beginning? Like,
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: are we going to bring back everything? Like, is that
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: a good thing? Are things supposed to go extinct? Are
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: we supposed to just bring back everything that's ever lived?
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: At what point do we draw the line? You know,
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: all these thoughts in my head, like why are human
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: beings the deciders of what lives and dies? Do we
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: have an arrogance because of our relative intellect that we
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: think that we should be able to make these kind
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: of decisions and not understand the comprehensive effect that it
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: has on the entire ecosystem? And we know what happens
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: with invasive species. When invasive species come into new territories,
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: they destroy everything. It's like Florida is an amazing example
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: of that. Florida is so crazy. It is, I mean,
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: it is Florida. You know, I mean, like when you
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: think of Florida, you think like Florida man. So the
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: only state that you can say like the name of
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: the state and then a man and everybody's like, what
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: did he do?
• 53:24
  Speaker 4: But that's Florida ecologically.
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: Like the entire center of it, the Everglades, is infested
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: with Burmese pythons. Yeah.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: Did you see that there is a competition every year
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: to go out and kill as many as they can?
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: And there's a monetary reward for people who kill, I
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: think it's the most or maybe the The biggest, there's
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: something like this.
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: Even that's not going to put it down.
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: No, it doesn't at all. People kill, and during this competition,
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: they kill hundreds, maybe thousands of these snakes, and it
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: doesn't even touch them.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: There's an estimate of a half a million. They think
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: there might be a half a million there. And there's
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: a guy that's been on this podcast for, he calls
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: himself Python Cowboy. He's quite a character. And didn't he
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: give us a head? We got a head laying around here, right?
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: You got it over there? That python head? But that dude,
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: He has been catching them. He uses dogs. The dogs
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: find where the nests are. And the video of these things,
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: you know, you're pulling out this 15, 16, 17, I
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: think he's got as big as like an 18 foot
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: long snake.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: They're hundreds of pounds. They're enormous.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: They swallow deer.
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: They eat alligators. They're eating alligators.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: Thank goodness, because alligators are doing great. That's one thing
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: I don't mind them doing. We need something that's hunting alligators.
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: That's another problem in Florida. It's infested with alligators as well.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: And they used to be on the endangered species list.
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: When I lived there, they were on the endangered species list.
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: One of the class of 1967, the first species to.
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: Be Officially listed. Why did they list them?
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: Because they were almost gone at that point.
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: How did they do that? Like, I can't imagine that
• 54:52
  Speaker 2: you could do that now. That you could get them
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: to the point of extinction now. Because they're so hard
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: to find. And they're everywhere.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Maybe it was.
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: I don't want to say they're so hard to find,
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: but I mean, when they get in the water, you know, like,
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: you're not going to get all of them. Like, how
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: are you killing all of them?
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a show, I don't know where it's on,
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: but it's a show that's called Florida Man. I was
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: watching it on a flight the other day. Seriously. And
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: it goes through... interactions with that Florida men have. And
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: one of them is about a dude who was kind
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: of lost in his life. And he climbed over a
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: fence that he shouldn't have climbed over and went for
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: a swim in a lake and then had an alligator
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: bit off his arm. That is the that's the story.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: That's that particular.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, I saw that guy in the news. That's the
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: guy that like he had to walk like for a
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: whole day with like one arm.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I remember there was a guy who,
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: what I, I mean, I don't know. There's probably hundreds
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: of stories like this, but in this video, and I
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: was trying to sleep, so I'm probably wrong. In this video,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: he laid on the side of the lake, like probably
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: bleeding to death when an alligator that was in the
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: shape of his mom, I think, came up to him
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: and told him he had to get his ass up
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: and move or he was going to die. And he
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: was like, okay, mom, I'll do that. It was, I
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: don't know.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: Oh boy. He was probably not sober.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It was blood loss at that point.
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: Sure. And then also whatever contributed to making him climb
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: that fence in the first place.
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: I won't play the video, but there you go.
• 56:13
  Speaker 2: Is that the dude?
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is not. The show she's watching is
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: on Netflix, I think. This is a similar thing that
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: did happen a month ago. Here's the video of it.
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: The one that was the show that was about.
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: I don't want to see this dude lose his arm.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: The show was about something that happened years ago, years
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: enough ago for them to be able to make it. But, yeah,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, how many people in Florida?
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: I bet it happens all the time.
• 56:32
  Speaker 4: Yeah, right?
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's Florida.
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: They are huge. Yeah.
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: Now they're in Georgia, too, right?
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, they're in Texas. Yeah, Texas. They're here. Yeah. They
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: find them. And the golf courses in Florida are like,
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: good luck playing golf out there. Are you crazy? You're
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: playing golf in Jurassic Park. I'm sure you've seen the videos.
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: There's one amazing video of this huge alligator. It's like
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: a 14-footer. And it's walking across this golf course. And
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: it looks like a dinosaur. Because it's not walking like
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: with its dragging its belly on the ground like they
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: sometimes do. It's kind of puffed up. There it is.
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: Look at that.
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: Holy.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: That's wild.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: That is so big. Look at the size of that thing.
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: You're out there playing golf. You're like, you see that
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: guy and you know that they can run fast.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they run like 30 miles an hour. Yeah.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: And they run fast.
• 57:21
  Speaker 4: Look at this dork.
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: This dork can't run 10 miles an hour.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: Florida man.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's totally a Florida man. Let me get me
• 57:25
  Speaker 2: a selfie for the Facebook.
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: Get right up on that thing.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: And, you know, there's a lot of them there, too.
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, they say that pretty much any undisturbed body
• 57:36
  Speaker 2: of water likely has an alligator in it now.
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: So what ate them?
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: That's a good question. Back in the day, they probably
• 57:42
  Speaker 2: just ate each other. You know, they cannibalized each other.
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Maybe they're going to do that too.
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: I'm sure they probably do.
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: They probably have to at a certain point in time.
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, what are the snakes going to eat? Snakes
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: have wiped out 90% of the mammals in the Evergrades.
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: And they're terrible for birds too.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, for everything. Ground nesting birds, anything. Anything they
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: can get a hold of. I mean, and if there's
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: a half a million of them, that is a killing
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: population of extraordinary proportions. I mean, half a million things
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: that could eat a deer. You know, there's no skunks left.
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: There's everything. Raccoons, they're all gone. Everything's missing.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: But this is exactly why we need these technologies that
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: we're trying to develop a colossal. You know, we're not
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: just bringing species back to life, right?
• 58:23
  Speaker 4: This sounds like a sales pitch.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: We're a species preservation company. It is a sales pitch.
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: But birds, whenever I think about birds, I think of this, right?
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: We know that there are things that we can do
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat, right?
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: We can do things like like the Florida Panthers. You know,
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: one of the things that we did to save Florida
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: Panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced Panthers from Texas,
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: which are the closest genetically and geographically to Florida Panthers.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: They were probably connected at some point until humans created
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: And when Texas Panthers were introduced in the mid-1990s, that
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: population recovered. They stopped. They had a disorder called cryptorchidism
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: They had all sorts of heart problems.
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: Is that because there's a small breeding population?
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because there were very few of them.
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: No genetic diversity.
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: The choice was to mate with your family. That's it.
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: Oof.
• 59:24
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: Oof.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: And things want to survive, so they do. So you
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: get these highly inbred populations, and people fixed it by
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: genetic diversity. It's called genetic rescue, right? And that's a
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: great way of bringing diversity back into a population. It's
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: what we're trying to do with our Red Wolf Project.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: in the world. They're the only endemic American wolf species.
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: And they are nearly extinct. There's a successful captive breeding program.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: And a few years ago, some of the people that
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridget Von Holt,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: who's at Princeton, who's a friend of mine. She was
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: working and discovered because people were sending her photos. See,
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: this is why you have to pay attention to people
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: who you think might be crazy when they send you
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: pictures of things. You know, look at this cool, crazy
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: thing that I think I found. You shouldn't just discount it.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm the person who has tested insulation that
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: somebody told me Bigfoot peed on and participated in it.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: Because if it's real... I want to be the person
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: who finds it, right?
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: So Bridget says this guy who lives down in the
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: coast of Louisiana sent her a picture of an animal
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: that she's like, that is not a wolf and it
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: is not a coyote and I don't know what it
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: is and it's crazy. And she looked at it and
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: she goes, yeah, it's not. It's something else. It's something
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: in between those. And so she tested it and found
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes. Canids
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: are always hybridizing with each other. We know that because
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: there are wolves that are black because black gene for
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: had his way with a wolf in heat, right? That's
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: how that allele got into that population. So we know
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: canids do this all the time. And she was like,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: this is so cool because This captive breeding population was
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: established with just a few founder individuals. And the team
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: working with them are doing a great job trying to
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: maximize genetic diversity by picking who's going to pair with
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: who to keep all that diversity there. But it's still
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: just a few individuals. So they are going to lose
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: genetic diversity. It's just how it works. But if we
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: way of concentrating more diversity. better able to pick which
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: parts are red wolf either by breeding individuals or by
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: editing their dna which is technology that we developed on
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: the path to dire wolf right um and we can
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: actually help this population to survive so there are there
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: are ways that we can do this for for mammals
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: that are going to have really amazing consequences for the
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: way we can protect biodiversity well.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating for things like red wolves and things like
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: that but what you know what do you like When
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: you think of like the Python problem in Florida, I
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: heard the worst idea. The worst idea, they were talking
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: about introducing honey badgers. Honey badgers? Because they eat snakes.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: Because we have never, as a species, humans, introduced a
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: thing to try to control a thing. And that thing
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: that we introduced just went horribly wrong. We've never done
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: that before. Right, Australia?
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: Australia's a wreck. They have a terrible feral cat problem.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: And in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: I heard of those.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: That they introduced this thing called a rosy wolf snail
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: that they were going to get to eat the giant
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: African land snails. But instead, the rosy wolf snail prefers
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: the taste of Native endemic Hawaiian snails. And so the
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone. And
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: they're big. Have you seen one of those?
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: I don't think I have.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: A giant African land snail. It's worth looking at.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: Did they come over on cargo ships or something?
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: I think people introduced them for some reason that I
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: can't remember what it was. So we have a good
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: history of doing this kind of thing.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: Is it for giant escargot? Whoa!
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 4: Whoa.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: Can they eat those? Are those delicious?
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: I think people can eat them probably, but they eat
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: everything from all of the vegetation to the other snails.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: The size of that thing.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: To plaster. They'll eat their way through infrastructure that people
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: have built.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: Oh, great. Yeah. Oh, great. Yeah.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: So we introduced these little things, rosy wolf snails, to
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: try to control them, but instead they're killing all the
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: endemic snails.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 2: We never learn. Yeah, I hope they don't bring honey
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: badgers to Florida. I don't even know if this article
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 2: I was reading was a serious article. But it was
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: just like, that sounds like something that someone would, because,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: you know, they're really good at killing snakes. Like, that's
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: what they like to do. They kill cobras. And they
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 2: have an unbelievably resilient body. Like, they can tolerate getting
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: bit by lions. I mean, they're freaks. They're really weird animals,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: like honey badgers. They're cute, right?
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: I remember when my kids were little watching the Wild Kratts.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: There was a Wild Kratts episode about honey badgers, how
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: they were all cute when they were babies because they
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: were hiding in camouflage.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe when their babies are cute. They're pretty ferocious.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: Like a wolverine. Yeah, very similar to wolverines. I think
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 2: they're all in the same family, right? Yeah, there he is.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: Look at that face.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: I think they look very cute.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: Look at that face, just big old deadly snake, and
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: that's his lunch. And they get bit all the time
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: and they just like, they get sick, pass out for
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: a couple minutes and then recover and kill a snake.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're ferocious little animals.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: So have people been able to understand better anti-venom properties
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: from studying them?
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: That's a really good, look at that face. Yeah. Oh
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: my God.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: It looks vicious.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 2: That is such a crazy animal.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 2: Oh, they're wild looking. They're wild looking. I just hope
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: they don't bring them into Florida because it sounds like
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: someone's going to do it. You know, like. It sounds
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: like a Florida idea.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: Have you heard about the hippo solution in the early
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: 20th century?
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: This is a great sort of American history story because
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: our country is replete with people with brilliant ideas, right?
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: And in the early 20th century, when the land in
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: the West was not doing so well, it had been overgrazed,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: there were too many cattle, and there was this thing
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: called the meat question. It was the thing of the day,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: the meat question. People were talking about how are we
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: going to survive if there's not enough cattle? maybe we're
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: going to have to eat our dogs. And at the
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: other places where the, I think it was the World Fair.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: People had brought New Orleans, who was the host city
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: of the, I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: this water hyacinth, this water, little, tiny, beautiful flower as
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: a gift. And they loved it. And so they planted
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: it everywhere. And it just grew like absolute crazy and
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: was choking up the river. Like ships couldn't get through
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: because of this like matted river. People were like putting
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: oil on it to get it to sink and trying
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: to light it on fire and nothing would happen. And
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: this team of people that included a congressman from Louisiana
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: came up with a solution for both problems at once.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: And that was that they were going to import hippos
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: from Africa into Louisiana to live on the bayous. They
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: would eat the plant, this water hyacinth thing, and then
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: we could eat them. And that was going to be
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: the Perfect solution to both of these problems.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. How did that get stopped?
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: It was an accident. So it was it's actually a
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: fun story. You should you should look it up and
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: read the whole story because it involved these two guys.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: One one of them was the guy who was the
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America. And another guy
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: was like a con man who had worked as a
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: pimp and a journalist and all these other things. And
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: kill each other. But they came together on part of
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: this congressman's team. The scout thought it was a great idea.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: He wanted people to bring in all sorts of animals
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: from Africa and put them in national parks so that
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: people would want to go to national parks because they
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: could hunt them. And that would have more reason for
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: people to want to support the idea of national parks
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: at the time, which is great. you know, this utility
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: of nature. It seems weird compared to how we think
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: of it now, but I think this is really, it's
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: really important. And it was a really important part of
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: the way we got conservation legislation in the U.S. So
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: he was excited about this. And then the congressman, when
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: he was pulling together the team of people that he
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: wanted to be on his side for this, he went
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: to a show that this other guy, the sort of
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: con man, traveling salesman, pimp escape artist dude, was having
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: about how he was an intrepid explorer. And he was like,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: that guy is an expert as well. He can also
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: be on my team. And they testified in front of Congress,
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: and they asked questions like, you know, how do you
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: know that they're safe? How do you know that they're tamed?
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: This con man, he was like, well, you know, there's
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: a baby's bottle with no evidence whatsoever, right? And everybody
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: was like, yeah, awesome. Even the New York Times was
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: completely behind it. They published an editorial talking about, they
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: called the hippos lake cow bacon. What year was this?
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: This is the early 20th century. 1910.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 4: Lake Cow Bacon.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: Everybody was like, this is it. This is what's going.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: To solve the problem.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 3: Teddy Roosevelt was behind.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: It, too. Yeah.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt was behind it.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: It was a bill all the way in Congress. It
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: just didn't pass. Yeah.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: Well, it didn't go up for a.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: Vote is what happened. The U.S. almost became a nation
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: of hippo ranchers.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: Oh, my God.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Failed House bill sought to increase the availability of
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: low-cost meat by importing the hippopotamus that would be killed
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: to make lake cow bacon. Yes, brilliant.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is such a, it's so funny. But
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: it's not fair to call it failed because it didn't fail.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: It never came up for a vote. So they had
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: testified in front of Congress too late for it to
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: come up to a vote that year. And then just
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: other shit happened and people stopped paying attention.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: That's it? It just went away? Just went away. Wow.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: Near miss on the hippos.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: Well, they kill more people in Africa than any other mammal, right? Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: Well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: You saw there's hippos that live now in Colombia because
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: of Pablo Escobar. Nobody knew what to do with them.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: And they started off with just a handful of them.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: And now there's like dozens of them down there.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: What are they doing about that?
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: Nothing. I think they keep rounding them up and putting
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: them back on his property. What can you do?
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: How much property did he have up there?
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that, Pam.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: It's so crazy that you just have hippos and they
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: just get loose and now Columbia has hippos.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: He took them there on purpose, though, just like we
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: wanted to bring them here. Can you imagine how bad
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: that would be, though? Well, that's the wild.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: Boars in the United States. That's William Randolph Hearst. William
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: Randolph Hearst wanted wild pigs on his property. And so
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: he imported them from, I think, from, I don't remember,
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: it was Russia or somewhere in Europe. And then these
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: wild pigs have now populated all through California. I mean,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: they're all over the place now.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy. We did have wild pigs around the U.S.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: at some point. Probably not the same thing, right? Weren't
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: there wild pigs?
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: That's a good question. I think they came over on
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: boats with explorers, you know, and I know William Randolph Hearst.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: All the ones around like the northern California area. I
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: think all of those are the remnants of the William
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: Randolph Hearst pigs. Yeah. They think.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: We don't see them in Alaska, Yukon, where we find
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: all these big stashes of bones coming out of permafrost.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: So it's probably not that they came over like that.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: We find bison and horses and magnets.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: Mostly bison.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: Where did the wild boars emanate from? What's their original
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: country of origin?
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: I think, well, I have a friend who works on
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: domestication of pigs and they've published a bunch of different
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: papers that are always contradicting each other. He gave a
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: hilarious talk at a meeting I was at last week
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: about how he keeps saying something different as a way of,
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: you know, keeping to publish more papers. He was just
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: being nice about how he's open to changing his mind
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: with new data, which I think is a valued trait
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: in a scientist. But yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia,
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: I think is the origin, or at least the domestication.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: And normally things are domesticated around where they were.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: Well, they're the weirdest animal, right? Because the domestic ones
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: will become, they change, they morph when they go feral
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: really quickly. I think it's like they start within like
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: six weeks.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is the way evolution works, right? You know,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: something has a particular suite of traits.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 3: The testimony of the, when this was going on, this
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: is the guy who presented this.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: The hippo thing?
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: He's talking about pigs right here where they're going to
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: bring them from northern Manchuria because.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: Of, Were they the most delicious pigs?
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: They're also talking about bringing in rhinos. I think they
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: did bring in camels in like 1853.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: Well, we had camels. There were North American camels that
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: were here during the ice ages.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: This is a bad test or something.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: This is 1853?
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: They're talking about bringing antelopes in and they asked like,
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 3: are they easily tamed or domesticated? He's like, they're very
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: easily tamed.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: That's Erwin. So this is the guy who worked for,
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: I guess, what became the USDA. But he was in
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: charge of apples. But he was really dedicated to trying
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: to solve this meat problem. And he saw importing African
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: animals and animals from other places as the real solution
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: to this.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: Well, they've definitely done that in Texas. Texas is overrun
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: with African animals. All the private ranches are filled with
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: elands and neal guy and That's cool.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: We used to have so many cool animals here that
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: all went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: So why not? I mean, we had mammoths. Why shouldn't
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: we have elephants?
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: I know, but isn't it weird? But it's again, that's
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: the same argument. You bring in an invasive species.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: Is it invasive, though, if it used to live here?
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: Well, it's invasive in a sense that the wolves that
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: are in Colorado right now that are eating all the
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 2: cattle are kind of invasive.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, right. They're not invasive because they do live.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, there are wolves actually just have moved into
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: the San Juans. I think I think documented like natural
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: migration as opposed to the reintroduction. I think there was
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: something I read about that yesterday. But the wolves that
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: they've introduced to like outside of Aspen in particular, I
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: have a friend who has a ranch out there and
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: I posted about it on Instagram. He actually sent me
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: some more pictures yesterday. And I was going to post
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 2: about it, but so much crazy stuff was happening in L.A.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: I'm like, this is not the time to talk about
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: wolf problems. But they're just killing calves and eating their liver.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: They're not even that hungry. They're just eating the tasty
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: parts and leaving these calves alone. And these people are
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: on a 24-hour run ragged, you know, they have these
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: teams of guys that have to patrol the area 24
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 2: hours a day to try to scare off the wolves.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 2: And they're not allowed to shoot them. And, you know,
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: they spent millions of dollars bringing them there and they're
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: just eating cattle.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine it's really devastating to see something like
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: that happening and know that somebody else made this decision
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: and that you who actually experience it weren't. I mean,
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: I imagine the people who voted for that. I wonder
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: what what they imagined.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: Well, it's ballot box biology, right? You get a bunch
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: of people that live in the cities that don't have
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: a lot of experience in nature and wild ecosystems. And
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: then you introduce this idea, we're going to bring wolves
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 2: back to their native habitat. Oh, that sounds amazing. What
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: they're not telling you is like this, what this rancher
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: told me is that first of all, the original wolves
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 2: that were introduced into Colorado were wolves that were taken
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 2: from Oregon because these wolves were preying on cattle.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: So they already had a taste.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly. And they already had habits. And so then they
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: brought them into Colorado where they start preying on cattle.
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 2: And so then they moved them from this area where
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 2: they were preying on cattle and put them outside of Aspen.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: Where they.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: Pray on cattle.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: Start preying on cattle. Yeah. It's just stupid. Yeah. And again,
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: it's not biologists. It's not their idea. It's ballot box biology.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: This is why... And it's all being instigated by the
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: Colorado governor. Yeah.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: It's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, we can see from Yellowstone... how important having
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: this keystone predator is in ecosystems where they can be
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: and where there is space for them. But the land
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: is not the same as everywhere as it is in Yellowstone.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: And we need to be able to make, you know,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: when I was at Santa Cruz, I taught an introductory
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: biology class for non-majors where my goal was to give
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: the students tools to be able to think on their own,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: which is harder than you might imagine. And their midterm
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: exam was a debate. And the topic of the debate
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: was that wolves should be introduced into California.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: Why not New York City? Let's go. Put them everywhere
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: they used to be. I mean, this is where it
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: gets silly. It's like when you're dealing with people that
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 2: have cattle ranches and this is their entire livelihood. And
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: all they're doing now is just compensating them for the
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 2: calves that get killed. And then so you have less
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: output every year. So it's like the whole thing is crazy.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: They were already on their way to do a natural
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: migration into Colorado.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: And it would have been different wolves.
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 2: Yes. It would have been different size wolves too. Because
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: I think there's also like some of the wolves that
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 2: are being introduced, they're introduced from British Columbia or they're
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: being introduced from Alberta or somewhere up there. I think
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: those ones that came into Yellowstone. Like the Yellowstone thing
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: is cool, right? It's been a few decades now. People
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: have kind of like come to this sort of, Equilibrium,
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: you know, people recognize that there was an overpopulation of
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: elk for sure. I mean, they used to have these
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: hunting seasons where they would hunt them in the snow
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: in the winter because there were so many of them.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 2: They wanted to just be able to pick them out
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: and just shoot them for meat because they really didn't
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: have the resources because they didn't have the apex predators
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 2: because a lion can only eat so many of them.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: So mountain lions weren't really putting the dent in the
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: population that a pack of intelligent hunting animals cooperative animals
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 2: like wolves could do. So they brought it back and it's,
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 2: you know, it's relatively successful. They've knocked the population of
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 2: elk down more than 40%, but that's probably good. Yeah.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 2: I mean, not for the people that hunt elk, they're
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: really mad, but you know, wolves are cool. It's cool
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: to have them around, but Montana is very different than Aspen. Right.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: It's very different in you're in the mountains of Montana
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 2: and you see a wolf versus in someone's cattle ranch
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: in Aspen.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: This is stupid. Why did you do this?
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: But what's interesting, this class that I took, it was
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: a debate that I taught.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 2: Sorry.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: It was a debate. And what I made them do
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: was assume roles of a rancher, a politician, a conservationist.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: And I had several different roles. And then I randomly
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: assigned whether they were pro or con. And they had
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: a couple of weeks to figure out what their debate
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: was going to be. And I took a vote before
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: the debate. And as you might expect for 18-year-olds in California.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: You say at the beginning, should wills be introduced? 100% yes.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: They do this debate, and I did it four years
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: in a row, and every year after they had to
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: do this, after they had to put themselves in somebody
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: else's shoes and think about it from their perspective, it
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: would shift, and the majority of people would be like, yeah, no,
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: it's a bad idea. I think if you give people
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: the tools to be able to think, they can imagine
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: themselves in a different scenario, and we need to do that.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: We need to be arming people with thoughtfulness rather than
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: jumping to a conclusion.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And also ballot box biology.
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: But everybody's going to vote.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 2: Right. But you shouldn't be able to vote on things
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: that you're not educated in. It's like if you allow
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: people to vote on things that have tremendous consequences to
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 2: the ecosystem, like a reintroduction of an apex predator, and
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: they don't understand those consequences, they just have this very
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: utilitarian idea of what it means to bring back wolves. Look,
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: I love them. I think they're amazing animals. It's just
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 2: like putting them in Calabasas is probably not the best idea.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: Putting them where people live, they're going to eat pets.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: They're going to eat a lot of things that are
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: penned up. whether they're sheep or goats or whatever people
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: have that they can get at easily. They're not going
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: to chase down a herd of elk. That's hard.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: Well, they're biology, right? They're making decisions on where they
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: can find their next meal.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: We're not planning on rewilding dire wolves just to put
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: that out there.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 2: I like that.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: Plus, you've met Khaleesi. I don't think she would be.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: I bet she will in a couple of years.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe so. But right now.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 2: In a couple of years, she'll freak you out.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: She kind of freaks me out already when you look
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: at her.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: Those eyes are so intense. They're so intense. You know,
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: when you look into a predator's eyes, there's something about it.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: It's like you realize like, oh my God, I'm like
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: a water balloon. I'm so, you know, we're just like
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 2: so weak and soft.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: We've been putting together, not because we're not going to
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: release them. The next step for their lives is to
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: study them and see. how they're changed by their DNA
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: being modified, measure things like their gene expression, their growth,
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: their health span, their lifespan, learn the consequences of the
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: work that we're doing, learn how they interact with the habitat,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: introduce Khaleesi to her brothers and the next animals that
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: we make into that pack to make a small pack,
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: but they will stay on that secure, expansive ecological preserve.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 2: Yes, and you're not going to let them breed?
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: No, the plan is not to let them breed.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: How will you prevent them from breeding? Well.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: At the moment, they're separated.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: But we'll probably use subcutaneous, you know, you can put a...
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: hormonal contraceptive. There's been some ideas of maybe, so we
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: don't want to castrate them, which would obviously be a
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: way to stop it, but because we want them to
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: be able to reach their full size, because we want
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: to know what that would be. And we want them
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: to be able to have the hormones to be able
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: to do that. But they will be controlled. We track them.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: There's cameras on them all the time. There's three separate
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: layers of fencing to keep them in. We know exactly
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: where they are. They They couldn't get a splinter without
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: a camera somewhere seeing it. And we know exactly what's
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: going on with them. So, yeah.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: That sounds like a scene in Jurassic Park.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: We have it totally under control.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: I've seen that scene, yes.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: Don't worry. We have cameras upon cameras.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Do I sound like the scientist?
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 2: No, you don't.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: I kind of do, actually. I was in Mauritius.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: Which scientist? Jeff Goldblum was the scientist that got it.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: I'm Henry Wu, right? I'm the chief scientist, right? So
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: I'm a good guy for now.
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: But he becomes a bad guy in the future, right?
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: So I'm looking forward to my evil transition. I'm not.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: We're not making dinosaurs. But, you know, there were other
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: cool animals that we have DNA for. I heard you
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: talking about the American cheetah.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: So we have two high-quality genome sequences from American cheetah.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: We want them back to help with our population problems.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: So let's get to the criticisms. Because there's people that
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: are saying that these are not dire wolves, that what
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: you've done is just manipulate the DNA of a gray wolf.
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: They are dire wolves because we have manipulated the DNA
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: of gray wolves. We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals,
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: that lived 13,000 years ago, and we lined them up
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: next to each other and figured out what it is
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf. And then
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: we used the tools of genome engineering to bring those
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: traits back in Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, that are three
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: direwolves that are alive now. And that has created these
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: animals that you saw that are bigger and they're stronger
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: and they have that direwolf coat. And that's a cool
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: thing too. That coat, the light coat color that you see,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: was something that we absolutely could not have known without
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: the ancient DNA because no one has ever seen it.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 2: A dire wolf.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: When we published a paper before I joined Colossal many
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: years ago that was about dire wolf evolution, we had
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: a paleo artist reconstruct what dire wolves looked like, and
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: they made them red or reddy brown. And that's because
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: so many other animals seem to be reddy brown, like
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: mammoths or Neanderthals seem to have had red hair. And
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: so we thought, sure, why not? We didn't know because
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: could use to see what color their coats were. But
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: both of these two animals that we had higher coverage
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: DNA from had Gene variants in genes that are associated
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: with pigmentation, how our coats, the hair color and eye
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: color and things like that, that suggested they had light
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: colored coats. And so we thought that's cool. We'll have
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: that as one of our key dire wolf traits that
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: we're bringing back.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: Is it possible that it's like other wolves where there's
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: a variation, but you would only sequence the DNA of
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 2: ones that had white?
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: It's possible, yeah. And I'm sure there were different colors.
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: But it's interesting to me that two animals that lived
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: so far apart from each other in time and geography
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: would both have this light color coat. So maybe it
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: wasn't that every dire wolf had a light coat, but
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: it must have been a predominant color in the population.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: What was the environment in which they lived? So if
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: they lived 13,000 years ago, you're talking about the Ice Age, right? Yeah.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: Do you think that that's why they had white hair?
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: It's possible both of these animals were from northern part
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: of their range where it would have been colder. They
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: did live through previous interglacial periods. 125,000 years ago, it
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: was as warm as it is today or even warmer
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: with predicted to be no ice at the poles. And
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: also we know dire wolves were really common around the
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. We haven't been
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: able to get any DNA out of anything from La Brea.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: That would be an amazing... Because the tar just destroys everything?
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: Don't know if it destroys it or if it gets
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: into the bone in a way that we can't get
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: the DNA out. So somehow inhibiting the recovery of the DNA.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: We'll get there. Someday we'll figure it out and that's
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: going to open up a lot of really cool animals.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: It kind of makes sense that like polar bears, having
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: that white color would aid. Polar bears actually have, it's clear, right?
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they have, their hair is long and it's clear.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: That's why polar bears, have you seen those pictures of
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: bears in zoos where they look, polar bears in zoos
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: where they look green?
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: No. Oh, they get covered in moss?
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: It grows in the, the hair is hollow.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: And so if they're too wet and not cold enough,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: they can turn, this is like weird.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, they have mold.
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: Inside their hair.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 2: But it just makes sense that them being that color
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: would have an evolutionary advantage for hunting. Yeah. Because you're
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: in something that's completely white. And you don't see like
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: a grizzly bear. You'd see like, oh, look at that
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: dark blob that's moving towards us.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: We did some work in my academic lab where we
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: discovered that polar bears and brown bears hybridize with each other.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: This is one of those funny stories about academia with
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: a scarcity mindset there where we submit a grant proposal
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: and we say, hey, we have this really cool observation
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: that polar bears and brown bears hybridize. hybridized during the
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: last ice age when they overlap with each other and
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: it gets rejected because they're like that's dumb we know
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: that doesn't happen and then we found another hybrid polar
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: bear from the previous interglacial and then there's evidence that
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: they're hybridizing today yeah they find them to go out
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: and do this yeah so whenever they overlap geographically they
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: breed but what's interesting about this is that we always
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: find the hybrids living like brown bears and even though
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: it's probably that the mom is a polar bear. Because
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: a brown bear boy will wake up, you know, from
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: hibernation and go out onto polar bear territory to scavenge
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: for food. And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator,
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: whereas brown bear females are seasonal. So a polar bear
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: female will ovulate in the presence of a male. So
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: the male comes up to her. And we'll mate her.
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: The other way around, if a polar bear male had
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: encountered a brown bear female, he's probably more likely to
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: eat her than to mate her.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: But that's weird then. So why do we always find
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: the hybrids living with brown bears instead of living with
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: polar bears? And the polar bear biologists who we've worked with,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: I've worked a lot of time with Ian Sterling, who's
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: a fantastic polar bear biologist from Canadian Wildlife. And his
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: they don't have that white fur.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: Completely makes sense. It does, right? Because they have that
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: ability to swim and they dive under the water. And
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 2: they're also like really clever in how they use those
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 2: ice shelves and swim from one ice shelf to another.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But they hide in, I mean, they even have
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: those things where they cover their nose with their hand,
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: the black nose with their hand, because the black nose.
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: I know, it's insane, right?
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 2: That's nuts.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: Biology's cool.
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: It is cool. It's cool to think of how they
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: became successful doing that. Who figured that out? How do
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: they have the self-awareness to know that the end of
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: their nose is dark and that other animals can see it?
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: But they also hybridize just given the chance to do so, right?
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: Because biology doesn't recognize species concepts, right? Biology doesn't care
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: that that animal is called a brown bear by us
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: and that animal is called a polder bear. They run
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: into each other. They're like, cool, just like our Neanderthal ancestors.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 2: Are those hybrids, are they fertile? Can they have babies? Yes.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: This is actually how we discovered it because we found...
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: that the place where brown bears hybridized with polar bears
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: during the last ice age was probably the ABC Islands
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: off the coast of Alaska because the ice was that
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: far south at the peak of the last ice age.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: And brown bear boys would move onto the islands as
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: the habitat got better where they encountered these populations of
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: receded pretty much. And so they hybridized there. And all
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: brown bears in North America today have ancestry from that
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: admixture with polar bears.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: Jeez. Wow. That's so fascinating.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just like how we all have ancestry from
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: mixing with Neanderthals.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 2: Look at that.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: Is that from the German zoo? No. Because there's a
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: couple of bears at it.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: But that really looks like a hybrid, doesn't it? Yeah.
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: It looks like there's a lot of traits of both
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 2: of them.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's impressive.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 2: Bears are some of the most fascinating animals ever. Yeah.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: It's just an incredible animal. So I'm really glad you
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 2: said it that way, that nature doesn't know that there's
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: a polar bear and a brown bear.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: Why would it?
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 2: You're right. It's just our definitions. Is this part of
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: the problem with the criticism of the science? is that
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: we are being very specific about what we're calling these
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: things based on our own definitions that we've all agreed upon.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: But that the true nature of genes is that there's
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: this proliferation and fluctuation and all these animals breed with
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: each other.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: It's kind of that, but it's also that... We haven't agreed, right?
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: So there's this group of academic scientists who are trying
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: to say, trying to grasp so tightly to this very
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: precise definition of a species as having to do with DNA,
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: how much DNA matches something else. But that is... And
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: it's interesting. I think the reason that we keep having
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: species concepts. We have come up with dozens of different
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: species concepts, and they're all for a particular purpose. If
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: I am wanting to have a conversation about... dinosaur fossils
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: or anything that's a fossil, I'm going to use the
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: morphological species concept because that's all I've got. I'm going
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: to compare the shape of this bone with the shape
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: of this bone. And if they're similar enough to my
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: trained eye, I'm going to call that a species. I
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: saw you had a bison priscus, I'm going to say,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: skull out there. This is, that's from the, from Alaska?
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 2: That's from the boneyard. Yeah. Yeah. Step bison. Yeah.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: Step bison, bison priscus, or Bison crassicornis, bison occidentalis, bison alaskensis, bison,
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: I could go on forever, I, you know, this is,
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: the naming of bison was like sport in the, you know, 18th,
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: 19th centuries, mostly 19th century.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 2: Did you go to the bone lab, the boneyard?
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: I haven't, I don't think I've been to his, I
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: didn't go with Ben, but I've been working up in
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: that part of the world for 30 years. We spend
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of time working at gold mines outside of
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: Dawson City. Have you been to Dawson City?
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: It's It's an old-timey gold town. Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: The buildings are all crooked because the fire is burned
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: at one end and it melts the permafrost underneath. It's
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: where I learned what you're supposed to do when a
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: fight breaks out in the bar that you've gone into.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 2: What are you supposed to do?
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: Grab your beer.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 2: Back up. Right? No, get out of there.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: Otherwise your beer's going to get knocked over.
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 2: I'm not leaving. You're not leaving when a fight breaks out?
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: Not in Dawson City. There's mosquitoes outside.
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: No, it's... I would tell you to leave.
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: No, it's a weird place.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: Unless they're women. Women fighting don't scare me as much
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 2: as men fighting. But then women can pull out guns.
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: That's true. But this is, it's Canada, so less likely
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: for that to happen than in Alaska. But this is,
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: there have been weird things happen there. And, you know, there's,
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: you go out to the bars in Dawson City. Why
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: am I telling these stories? This is ridiculous. Go ahead.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: And they still have this thing where there's the bell.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: And if you ring the bell, the person who's rung
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: the bell is buying a round for everybody who's in
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: the bar. And you learn after you've been there for
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: a while that a person is only ringing that bell
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: because he wants the right to talk to everybody who's
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: in there because he wants to fight with somebody.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: This is somebody who's like a diamond driller who's just
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: got paid in cash for the first time. And he's like,
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: now I want to fuck somebody up.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: That's what they want to do when they get paid?
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: Rings the bell and then goes from table to table
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: sitting around with people. And we, the nerdy scientists, paleogeneticists
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: sitting in the corner are trying to just be super
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: nice Canadians like talking to these people. Like, I don't
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: want to fight.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: And he's just looking to fight with someone?
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: Just, yeah, just looking to fight.
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 2: Boy. Yeah.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: It's a weird part of the world. It's, it's, it's
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: a fun place to work. But anyway, I digress. There's
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: gold mines like that, like the site outside Fairbanks that
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: are super productive like this. And every one of the
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: miners out there has like this cool collection, not any,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: nearly as cool as his, but, but because he's got
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: so much land, they've been collecting it for such a
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: long time. Um, I heard those great stories about how
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: he donated material to the American Museum.
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: Well, it was previous owners of his property. Right. Right?
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 2: That's the case, right? And they dumped it in the
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 2: East River. And so they denied dumping it in the
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: East River. So then they hired these guys to go
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: and dive for it. And John Reeves told everybody where
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 2: it was. I don't know if he hired them or
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: just told them. So these guys dove in the East River.
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: They found step bison, bones, jaw fragments, all sorts of different.
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: You know what I think is great about that story?
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: I really like it, right? Because I'm sure it's true
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: because they have so much of that material at the
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: American Museum. When I started working on bison, and I've
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: worked on bison for 30 years, right? When I started
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: working on bison, getting back to the species concept, I
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: was trying to figure out if the DNA mapped to
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: these species names. And they've got a fantastic collection at
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: the AMNH. But a lot of it is crap. You know,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: there's so much bone there. broken pieces or other pieces.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: And you get to the point where you're like, what
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: the hell am I going to do with this? Now,
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: they shouldn't have dumped it in the river. Obviously, that's dumb.
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: But he is going to get the last laugh. He
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: won't know because he'll be long dead. But in 10,000 years,
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: when the paleontologists of the future are looking in that river,
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: they're going to be like, what the fuck?
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 2: Right. Because there's like tons of it out there.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: What happened here?
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: They found, what is that guy's name? Dirty Water Don.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: Is that his name? This one guy who's one of
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 2: the divers. He's found multiple pieces.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it's there. And they probably didn't mean
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: anything terrible by it. Well, who knows?
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: Those people aren't even around anymore. I think this was
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 2: in the 20s, wasn't it?
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: Probably around the 50s. That was when most of the
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: collection came from. There was a ton of gold mining
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: activity in the 50s and.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 3: 60s around Fairbanks.
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 2: So what they have found on John's property that's so
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 2: spectacular is that it's really only a few acres that
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 2: he's getting all this stuff from, which makes you question, like,
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 2: how did all these animals die off?
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 2: In mass in this very small area.
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 2: Where you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Near Dawson, it's called the Klondike region. You have
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: this really fine glacial silt and that settles in different
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: places in different quantities and it settles really quickly. So
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: you get this really fast, thick buildup of this really
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: fine silt that preserves the bones really well. So when
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: we go, the gold miners, they're placer mining. So they're
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: taking these high-pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: Then they let it thaw for a bit, and then
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: they wash away the next layer. They're trying to get
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: to the gold-bearing gravel that's underneath. But while they're doing that,
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: literally thousands, tens of thousands of bones come out of there.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: And in some places, it's more rich, more intense than others,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: but it's there. I've taken students up there, and they're
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: all mopey because of the mosquitoes, and they're mopey because
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: they're 19 years old. And they're like, oh, we're never
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: going to find anything. They jump out of the trucks
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: and they're like, holy shit, is that a mammoth tooth? Like, yeah,
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: that's a mammoth tooth.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 2: Is that what you brought?
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: That's what I brought to you.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: This is a... It's a fossil. This is from South Carolina. Wow.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 2: That's from South Carolina?
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: And it's a fossil. You can see it's fossilized.
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: I know they like knife handles out of this stuff,
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: which seems to me, it's kind of gross.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: That has.
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's your logo on it.
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: Of course it's branded. It's colossal, you know. Yeah, it's
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: our logo.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: But, yeah, mammoths, do you know the story about our
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: founding fathers and mammoths?
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: No. Yeah.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: So Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 2: How did he even know about them?
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: So they were probably mastodons because it was these teeth
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: that were melting out of the salt lakes and things
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: like that in the part of the United States. But
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: he was obsessed with them. He was getting his friends
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: to mail him teeth that he was finding. And he was,
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: this is a funny story. Let me see if I
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: can get it right. You should look this up too
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: because it's hilarious. how mammoths made America great before. And
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: now when we bring our mammoth back, we're going to
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: do it again. So there was a guy in France
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: who was writing a series of books. He was like
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: Comte Buffon. Comte Buffon, I think was his name. I'm
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong. But
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: he was writing a series of books about natural history.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: And the fifth, I think, of his books was called
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: The Theory of American Degeneracy. And when it was essentially
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: about how all American animals were more shit than than
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: animals from everywhere else in the world. And it was
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: during the War of Independence, and so it was really
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: popular to hate on American stuff, right?
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: And so he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: if he'd tried. He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson.
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: He was busy fighting with Linnaeus, and Linnaeus was busy
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: classifying things, and this guy was like, there's no more
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: than 200 species of animals anywhere, so why would you
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: bother with that sort of academic silliness rather than think about, like,
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: how the animals got this way in the first place.
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: In his mind, like discovering why American animals were so
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: shit was the right way to be spending your time
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: as a natural historian. But this pissed Teddy Roosevelt off.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: And so he was trying to figure out how he
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: could prove to this guy that American animals were actually better, bigger.
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: So he was getting his friends to compile lists of
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: things about how American bears are bigger than European bears.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: American wolves are... bigger than European wolves, that it isn't that,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: you know, you come to America, like this guy said,
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: and you suddenly get weaker and your blood gets watery.
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: That's what they thought? And it was really, it was
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: a bestseller, apparently.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 2: That's incredible. So they thought, like, living under oppression was
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: really good for you? It's like strength training.
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: they did, there were new diseases, they probably did get sick.
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, for sure.
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: And so there was probably something in it, but Jefferson
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: went so far as he had... He had a moose
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: was like partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: put the wrong antlers on its head. It was just
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: really dumb. But his main feature was mammoths that he
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: knew that this animal, he didn't think they were extinct
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: at the time. Nobody really knew about the idea of extinction.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: find them, that people were going to find these mammoths
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: still there.
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 2: Isn't that incredible?
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: And that was going to prove.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 2: Isn't that incredible when you just think that just a
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 2: few hundred years ago, that was the pinnacle of science.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: That was like the peak of understanding of all the
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 2: species that were still alive. We really didn't know.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: What I don't understand about this is how a person
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: who is a scientist can look at how everything has
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: changed in a couple hundred years or in decades. 20
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: years when it comes to genetics and still say, oh,
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: we know everything. Like, I'm right.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 2: I think it's what you were saying earlier. It's a
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: famine mentality.
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 2: It's just weak people's minds. And there's weak human beings
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: out there. The way they think is a very weak
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 2: way of thinking. And they want all the attention for themselves.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: And they're very egotistical. And it's also very supported by academia.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of bitchy infighting in academia. It's really gross.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 2: Late 18th century, the idea of extinction was only just
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: beginning to be popularized by some thinkers.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: Georges Cuvier.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: Cuvier. Yeah. Jefferson wasn't among the believers. In a pre-Darwinian age,
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: extinction was a violation of religious ideals. God would not
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: let animals go extinct. And secular ideas, the balance of
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: nature could never be so significantly upset. So for Jefferson
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 2: in particular, extinction was just an unusual theory. It's fine.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 2: The bones exist, he wrote. Therefore, the animal has existed,
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 2: the moon. Movements of nature are in a never-ending circle. Well,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: that's the real question. There have been animals that went
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: extinct and then came back, right?
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: The dire wolf?
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 2: Right, but that was because of you guys. Wasn't there
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: like a bird that they thought was extinct?
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: Then they didn't go extinct.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 2: Right. Sort of like the Tasmanian tiger.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: Or Bigfoot.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, no.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: The Tasmanian tiger was definitely real.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 2: But Bigfoot was real. It was Gigantopithecus. They think that
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 2: that was real.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: But Gigantopithecus is really old.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: And would have changed until today. I mean, I told you,
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: I have tested. People send me all kinds of crazy things.
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: The insulation was one of my favorites. This is something
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: that I got while I was still doing my PhD.
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: People would send us all sorts of crazy things.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 2: They sent you insulation? They said it's Bigfoot fur? Yeah.
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: It was from a guy somewhere.
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, no.
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: No, they didn't say it was fur. No, it was
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: better than that.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: Oh.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. He was from somewhere in the Carolinas. I can't
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: remember where. And he'd sent a letter, and it was
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: a handwritten letter on his personal stationery, which had a
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: naked girl dancing around a pole, which gave him, obviously,
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: more credibility.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's his stationery. He's emailing you from his trip club.
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: It was a written letter.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: A letter from his trip club. Sorry. Everything's an email
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: domain now.
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: It's a while ago. And he sent a couple of
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: cuttings of insulation from his basement telling me that the
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: family of Bigfoots that lived in his basement, he had
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: seen urinating on this insulation. And so if I was
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: going to get Bigfoot DNA, it was going to be
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: from that insulation.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 5: Oh, boy.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: Did you test it?
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: Of course I did.
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 2: You really did? I would have tested him for meth.
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 4: I said, I'll test something. Let me find out what
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 4: you're doing, dude. Bigfoot peas in your basement?
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: I didn't get any gigantopithecus DNA. There was some human
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: DNA on it.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 2: So what was the year that gigantopithecus, we believe, went extinct?
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 3: Oof.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: The bones were found in an apothecary shop in China
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 2: in the early 20th century, right?
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: I don't actually know. I think that's the story. I
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: think that's the story.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 2: I think the story is that an anthropologist was in
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 2: an apothecary shop in China and found the bones. I
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: think this was in the early 20th century. And I
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 2: think he said, where did you get this? He's got
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 2: giant primate teeth. And they took them to the place
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 2: and they found jaw bones that indicated it was bipedal.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: And then they started like digging and discovering. I don't
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 2: think they have a full skeleton.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's so cool. Well, most things from paleoanthropology are,
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm going to rewrite human history because I
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 2: Here's the problem, right? You could tell me whether this
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 2: is correct. Most things will never be fossils.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 3: Right. Right.
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 2: So we don't even know how many species existed and
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 2: never left a fossil.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: Because fossils are hard to make.
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 3: Right. Right.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: So we're essentially getting the tiniest little bits of information
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 2: and we're trying to piece together this understanding of millions
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: and millions and millions of years of creatures on this earth.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: And to do so arrogantly seems so crazy.
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: To be arrogant about something that has just by the
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 2: nature of its existence. How do you find it? It's
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: a very limited resource. Right.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA, right?
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: So I think, I don't know, remember who it was
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: who said this, but we don't have any idea if
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: your bone, you paleoanthropologist, if your bone has descendants. But
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: I know that my DNA has ancestors. So I can
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: that are around. And if I am lucky enough to
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: get it from these bones that I know is real
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: about human history and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in the beginning
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: of ancient DNA hated it because it was going in
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: and going, oh, no, turns out you were wrong about that.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't didn't interbreed. Oh, turns out
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: you were wrong about that.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 2: I remember them teaching us that in high school.
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: Based on what data?
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 2: I know, but that's the thing is they taught it
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: so arrogantly. Did people breed with Neanderthal? Nope, that was impossible.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: They would say it so arrogantly. This is just high
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 2: school teachers.
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: And now we know that they did. And we've been
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: able to learn so many cool things about humans from
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: studying this Neanderthal genome. I mean, I know people get
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: hung up on DNA and how you need lots of
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: DNA to define a species, but we have been able
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: now to look... I think one of the coolest things
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: that we've learned from the Neanderthal genome is that we
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: all know that we have somewhere between 2% and 5%
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: Neanderthal DNA in our genomes. We kind of get that now.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: You can get your DNA tested at one of these
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: DNA testing places, and they'll even tell you how much
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: Neanderthal you are so you can have a competition with
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: your brother and your cousins. I'm more Neanderthal than you.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: I'm amazing. Less well-known, though, is that we all have
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: a different DNA. 2 to 5% Neanderthal DNA. And if
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: you were to go around the world and collect all
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: of the Neanderthal DNA sequences that are in people alive today,
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: That's cool, right? That's crazy. Two questions then. Are they
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: actually extinct? If we can put together 93% of their
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: genome by pulling together people who are alive today? That's
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: just a fun philosophical question. Second is, What the hell
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: is going on in that other 7%, right? And if
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: we want to know what it is that makes us human,
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: that's where we look, right? That's where we ask, what
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: are the mutations that arose since we split from Neanderthals
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: that if a baby got that part of the Neanderthal DNA,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: it didn't survive. It couldn't make it as a human.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: That is the bit that is important to define us.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: We've actually been able to narrow that down. There's less
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: than 100 genes, we think, less than 100 mutations in
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: genes now that have evolved since that split that most
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: people that are alive today have. And that is what
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: makes us human.
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: I think I'm still fixated on what you said earlier,
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: because I think it's so important that we decided what
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 2: these animals were. We gave them these very specific names.
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 2: And that genes and nature don't, They don't care what
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: we're saying.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 2: There's this weird thing that's happening from the time we
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 2: were proto-hominids to what we are today.
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: It makes sense, though. We want to have a conversation.
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: And if we want to talk about something, we have
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: to call it something.
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: Right. Australopithecus.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: So we have species concepts that we designed that allow
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: us to have a conversation and know what we're talking about.
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: So when I talk about and I call this fossil
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: a name, you and I know that we're having the
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: same conversation. If I am in charge of delineating species
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: because I'm trying to figure out which agency is going
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: to care for this endangered species, I might use geography
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: to figure out what one species is and what another
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: species is. The species concept that we learn when we
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: take our introductory biology course is a species concept that
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: was developed in the middle part of the 20th century
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: called the biological species concept, which says you're a species
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: if you can breed and if your offspring are fertile.
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: But we know that lots of things violate that. Brown
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: bears and polar bears, we just talked about how they're hybrids.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: Humans and Neanderthals violate that. Cattle and bison violate that
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: to a way less of an extent than we thought
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: that they did. This is actually a cool story that
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: I think that I think. Do you know what a
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: beefalo is?
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah.
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 2: Is it the female cow and the male bison or
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 2: vice versa?
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: No, a beefalo is a breed of hybrid that That
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: is five-eighths cattle and three-eighths bison that supposedly has better meat.
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: Oh, do they do it on purpose? Yes.
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: It was one of these breeds that they tried to make.
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 2: But does it work both ways? Does it work with
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 2: a male bison and a female cow or a male
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: bull and a female bison? Does it work both ways?
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: Turns out it barely works at all.
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 3: Oh.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 2: Do they do it artificially or do they have them
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 2: party together?
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: No, they just lied.
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's fake?
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: It's not real.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 5: So I've spent a lot of time being interested in
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 5: this sort of admixture history. And so I was interested
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 5: in brown bears and polar bears and humans and Neanderthals.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 5: And what is it that suddenly makes a species? not
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 5: able to breed with another species? What is it that
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 5: causes that sort of last wall to go up and
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 5: then suddenly you're the biological species?
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: What exactly is it? Can we figure it out? And
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: so I wanted to look at these different species pairs.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: And we knew about beefalo because people have, you know,
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: beefalo ranches. There's a beefalo of the week. You should
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: look that up because this is going to be like
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these animals. Anyway.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: So People in the early 20th century decided that they
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: wanted to make hybrid cattle and bison because they wanted
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: animals that were as robust in the North American prairies
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: as bison, but as tame and easy to deal with
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: as cattle. So they started breeding them together. And we're
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: just like, this isn't working. You know, this is really hard.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: When we get the F1s, that's first generation hybrids, often
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: it's only the females and they're not reproductive. You know,
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: there's problems here. We can't do this. And, um, because the, yeah. And,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: and so then people kept trying to do it because
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: they really wanted to do this. And then there was
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: this guy called, uh, I can't remember the name of
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: the person who actually did it, uh, who claimed that
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: he had been able to create this animal that was
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: three eighths bison and five eighths cattle. And he sold
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: his animal to a guy called Bud Basolo in California
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: who created this herd of 5,000 beefalo. And it was
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: announced with great fanfare, like front pages of newspapers. He
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: sold one animal and to a farmer in Canada for $ 2. 5 million,
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: 1975 dollars. It's still the most expensive single animal that
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: has ever been sold, right? $ 2. 5 million, 1975 dollars for
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: this animal. And so we have this thing. I was like,
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: we're going to sample them. We were working with collaborators
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: from the USDA. We were reaching out to people, reaching
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: out to ranches and saying, can we have a piece
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: of your pieces, some of your stuff? And they were like,
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: not sure about research on this. And so we started
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: buying tongues. Because if you buy steak, you just get
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: the same animal over and over again, but they all
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: have one tongue. So you can just buy tongues and
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: then you get lots of different animals. We sequence their genomes.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: And then we got from the USDA their expired sperm
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: straws that they have for the animals that they give
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: away to start your beef. I think we sequenced their
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: genomes as well, including this $ 2. 5 million 1975 individual. And
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: throughout the last 30 years of my life. And so
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: we have this big plot that shows bison on one side,
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: and cattle on the other, and we had made a
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: hybrid so we could sequence their genomes. He wasn't born.
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: It was an aborted animal because, you know, it's very
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: hard to make a hybrid. He fell right in between them,
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: in the middle, where you expect him to be. So
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: now we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: You know, they're five-eighths cattle, three-eighths bison. They should fall
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: out closer to cattle, but still up here. And so
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: you plot them, and they're all just cattle.
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 5: 100%.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: They're just cattle.
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: It was fake. So did they use, like, highland cattle
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: or something like that that have those crazy furs?
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: There's some evidence that they used zebu. So that's a
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: different type of cattle. It's the one that came from Asia.
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: They have them in Brazil because they have a hump,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: so it makes it look a little bit more like bison.
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, dirty trick.
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: But if you look at it, if you look at
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: the pictures of the beefalo of the week, you look
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: at them and you're like, you know, those are cattle.
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: Let me see a beefalo, Jamie.
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 3: If I did the beefalo of the week, I was...
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 3: Went down a weird path.
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy. Wrong websites?
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 3: No, it didn't seem like I was on the same path.
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: When was this all discovered that these are just cattle?
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: Oh, just look up beefalo. Look at historic beefalo. You
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: can see the pictures of historical beefalo.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: When was it discovered that these are just cattle? We
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: just published the paper like a few months ago.
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 3: Oh, no.
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 2: So this poor dude from 1975 that spent two million bucks. Oh, yeah.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: And he sold it back to Basolo for some of
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: the money getting back. I mean, I think there was
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: a thing going on there.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: So these people are out here still selling beefalo like
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 2: it's real, like this is a website.
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: And they're hybrid with something. They're mixed with a little
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: bit of zebu. Some of them have a little bit
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: of bison in them. But this is a.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 2: They're just cows.
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 2: Interesting. Interesting.
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: I talked to Steve Rinella about this. I know that
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: he's a friend of his. He was like, that's hilarious.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: It is hilarious. It's very funny. It does look different
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 2: than a regular cow, though.
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: A little bit. I mean, they were trying to do that, right?
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: And we can engineer everything.
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 2: But that's not what they did.
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, a chihuahua looks different from a Great Dane,
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: but their DNA is a lot the same.
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 2: So in 1975, how much of an understanding of this
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 2: stuff did we have? Did these people think that they
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 2: were doing this or was it just a scam?
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: I think it, well, this is me speculating at this point.
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: I think he had to know, right? And there was,
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: at one point there was a test, a blood test
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: that they had done where they were looking for markers
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: in the blood. And there were five different markers and
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: they tested about 150 different animals. And they published a
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: paper saying, oh, look, we tested all these animals. None
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: of them have all of the markers. One of them
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: has one of the markers. And we just think the
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: test is bad.
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: Oh. No, just.
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 4: Boy.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, fun.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: Anyway, I digress. I don't remember what we were talking about.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 2: Well, we were just talking about a bunch of different
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 2: animals that used to exist. You know, we were talking
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 2: about Gigantopithecus at one point in time. You said it's
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 2: really old. Was it 100,000 years ago? They speculate the
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 2: age of them? Older. Older?
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 2: Maybe.
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 3: 2 million to approximately 3 to 200,000 years ago. Okay.
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 2: So... As recently as 200,000 years ago. So you're like
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 2: kind of.
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 2: Homo sapiens are like 300,000, 400,000 years?
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: Diverged from Neanderthals.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 2: Is that like around that time? Yeah. So it is
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: possible that at one point... And so this is just
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 2: a very limited amount of bones, right?
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: It's just limited, just like everything else in paleoanthropology.
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 2: So it's possible that they existed later than that. We
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: just haven't found those samples yet. Maybe. But it's just speculation.
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: There was a really cool... This is just about how
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: we don't know anything... We can actually get DNA directly
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: from sediments. And this has been a relatively recent revelation.
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: It's super cool because it means that you can take
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: a plug of dirt from the inside of a lake
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: and you can reconstruct the whole ecosystem as it changes
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: over time. Super cool, right?
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: But recently there was a paper that was published by
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: in Canada. They found mammoth DNA and horse DNA in
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: Canada in these really well-preserved parts of the world where
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: we've been working. that date to probably around 4,000, 5,000
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: years ago.
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 2: Horse DNA? Yes. That's weird, right? Because they're supposed to
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 2: be extinct in North America when? 10,000?
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: Around the last, but you know, there are a lot
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: of Native American cultures who believe that they have a
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: long history of the horse and that the horse has survived.
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: But until we find DNA directly in dirt, I mean,
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: this is just showing us how much we don't know,
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: how much we have to be really willing to You know, obviously,
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: we have a model of the way the world works.
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: And we don't just throw away the model with new data,
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: but we have to incorporate the new data.
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 2: Right. You can't be arrogant about the model. So the
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: model is, if you correct me if I'm wrong, that
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 2: horses evolved in North America, but it went to other continents,
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 2: but then eventually died off in North America.
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: But survived elsewhere.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: Eohippus, the very first horses, are from 50 million years ago.
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: They're found in Wyoming, in the fossil deposits in Wyoming.
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: Those are the little house cat-sized horses.
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 2: House cat-sized horses.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but this is early horses, around the same time
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: as we have the first primates and the first of
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: the other things that we know.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 2: That's so fascinating.
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: It's so cool.
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: It's so fascinating. We were talking about this the other day,
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: the big debate that happened with Clovis I. That they
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 2: used to think that human beings, they came over here
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 2: at a very specific time and then they found those
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. And they're like, okay,
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 2: we've got to rethink this. And we're being forced to
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 2: rethink this. And there was another time where archaeologists were
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 2: horrible to each other. These scientists were horrible to each
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 2: other because they attacked the guy who made the discovery.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 2: They said this is nonsense. This is impossible. We know.
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 2: We're very clear. Which is this arrogance.
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they did that to Jacques Saint-Germain who discovered the
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: bones in Alaska, northern Canada that had cut marks on
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: them that were older than the accepted time of when
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: humans could be there. And, you know, now everybody accepts
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: that as it's true.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 2: We know that. Yeah, it's so gross. It's so gross.
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 2: And they keep doing it over and over and over again.
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 2: So then the question is, OK, if we have 22,000
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 2: year old footprints, how many thousands of years were they
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: here before that? Like, have they always been here? How'd
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: they get here? Like, what's the earliest known humans? You know,
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: we know that there's no Neanderthals here so far. So far.
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 2: So far. There's no Denisovans. But imagine they found a
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 2: different kind of human. Wasn't there something that came up
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: where they found some human that lived? God, I want
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 2: to say 6,000 years ago. And his DNA is different.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 2: This is like very recent. Different than anybody that they've
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 2: ever discovered before. So they're like, okay.
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: Well, that would be interesting.
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 2: I think this is like super recent, like yesterday or
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 2: the day before. But it's just these things keep, they
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: keep finding new stuff. Here it is. 6,000 year old
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 2: skeletons with never before seen DNA rewrites human history. Yeah,
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 2: so this was just June 7th.
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know anything about this.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: They uncovered 6,000-year-old skeletons in Colombia that belonged to a
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 2: mysterious group of people that could rewrite human history.
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: It doesn't match any of the other known indigenous populations.
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: Their genetic signature reveals a distinct, now extinct lineage that
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 2: may have descended from the earliest humans to reach South America,
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 2: one that diverged early and remained genetically isolated for thousands
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: of years.
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is, I mean, I have no doubt that
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: this is true. I mean, how many of these Human
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: settlements are gone now. And so we don't have any
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: evidence of them. And they're all lineages that they all
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: go back to humans originating in Africa at some point.
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: But we haven't seen all of them. We haven't seen
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: all of the pattern. We don't know even what questions
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: we should be asking.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 2: You know what you guys really need to try to
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 2: bring back? Those little tridactyl skeletons they find in Peru.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 2: That's like when we had Luke Caverns on and Jesse,
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 2: when we had Jesse Michaels on the other day. who
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 2: has an amazing YouTube show, both of them great guys,
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 2: they were showing us these skeletons that they found in
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 2: Peru that are very bizarre. And people initially thought they
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: were hoax, but then they found these newer ones that
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 2: they've discovered that they have three fingers and three toes
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: and done CAT scans on these things and they seem
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 2: to be human or human-like, these things.
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen these.
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 2: They're amazing. Like I thought 100% horseshit when I first
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: saw them because I think some of them are horseshit. Yeah.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: But then when they've done like look at that image
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 2: below where they do like x-rays of them. Like, come on. Like,
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 2: what the hell is that? Like, what is that? That
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 2: seemed that there's no way if again, I'll say it again.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: But if that's art, let me buy it. Yeah. If
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: somebody made that.
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: So those x-rays are from the things themselves. I think
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: I've seen some of these before.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 2: The CAT scans are even weirder. Are they? Because the
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: CAT scans, when they show the 3D CAT scan of
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 2: the body, you're seeing all the areas where the cartilage is.
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 2: But it doesn't look totally human because this is it.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 2: So they have three fingers and three toes. It's really
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: weird stuff. Like there's layers of them as they go,
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: you know, as you go through a CAT scan.
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 1: How old are they?
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: I did hear these.
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: I've seen some of the reports. This is the thing
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: that was presented to the Mexican government at some point.
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 4: This is Peru.
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 2: The Mexican ones seem to be horseshit.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 2: It seems like, and the guy who discovered them, air quotes,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 2: seems to have a history of finding silly things. But
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: this seems real. This seems very real. Like look at
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: this thing.
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: What's that on the neck?
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly. What is that on the neck? Who the hell knows? Like,
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 2: who the hell knows? Why does it have so many ribs? Like,
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 2: look at it. Go back to that image where it
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 2: shows the back. Jamie, where it was like, yeah, like,
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: when you see this thing, this guy's not, like, showing
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 2: you the full body in this particular image. Whatever the
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 2: hell that thing is on the back of its head
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 2: is weird. The shape of its head is very weird.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: But it looks real. Like, if you guys could find
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 2: that that's real, I know you won't bring back Neanderthals.
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 2: But why don't you bring back one of them little
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 2: three-toed alien people?
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, you would still have to
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: ask their permission. It looks like a person.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 2: Listen, just talk to them.
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: Bring them back.
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 2: If they say no, shoot them in the head. Right. Easy.
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 2: I don't know what to tell you, but bring them back.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 2: Some things you just have to do. If we find
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 2: out that that thing was a real thing, what is that?
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 2: What's that thing in the back of its head?
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: Have people tried to do DNA work or protein work
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: on these things?
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: I think there's a small select group of people that
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 2: are even taking it seriously. But more people are taking
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 2: it seriously now because of the CAT scans.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 3: Oh, right.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 2: Because I think initially, have you seen the original ones,
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 2: the ones that look super fake?
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 2: The ones that look super fake look like something you'd
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: buy in like a roadside stand. They look totally bullshit.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 2: But then I was going back and forth with Jesse
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 2: Michaels and Luke Caverns, and they were sending me these
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 2: images of I think it was 800 B.C.? This is
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 2: how old these drawings are and these tapestries that show
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: these weird three-toed, three-fingered things that look like a little
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: one of those things. So was this another type of
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: human that lived with us at some point in time?
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: It's interesting. The three-toed and three-fingers thing is interesting. I
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: wonder if there's a genetic mutation that would lead to that.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: You've seen the tribe.
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: There's an isolated tribe.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 2: That has the two. Ostrich feet, they call them. Yeah.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: Very weird. Yeah. So maybe that was that. Maybe that's
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: what that was.
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, who knows? It would be fascinating to see
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: if there's any DNA that could be recovered or proteins.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So why don't you guys get down to Peru?
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll run it by Ben, see what he thinks.
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: He would be into it.
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: I know, I know.
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 2: Ben seems like he'd be like, let's go. Like, if
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 2: you could find gigantopithecus DNA, I think Ben would want
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 2: to bring back Bigfoot.
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, probably. Let's not tell him.
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 2: I think that's what Bigfoot is, don't you think?
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: Gigantopithecus? Yeah. Was it in Asia, though?
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: Like, Bigfoot is supposed to be in North America.
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 2: Well, they found the bones in China.
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it could have come across.
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 2: Make sure that story's right that I said. I'm pretty
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: sure that's true. Gigantopithecus bones found in an apothecary shop
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: in China.
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 3: I just didn't want to bring it up. That's a
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 3: guy named Ralph von Konigswald, 1935. They're being sold as
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 3: dragon bones. So they bought a bunch of stuff and
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 3: then they started looking at them and found out that
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 3: that's not what they were.
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 2: So it's 35.
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: Early to middle Pleistocene in China. That was super interesting.
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there,
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: they're there at the same time as Denisovans were there,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: Neanderthals were there. If they could have hybridized with humans,
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: they probably would.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 2: Jeez.
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: Who knows? Yeah. We know so little, right?
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 2: Well, it seems to, like, it coexisted with Homo sapiens. So,
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, but when did it start existing, right? How
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: long was it? I mean, we know that Neanderthals were
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 2: around for, what, 300,000 years or so? Yep. Which is
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: kind of crazy when you think that people... You know,
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: we've really only been running things for a small period
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 2: of time.
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 3: I don't know who added this.
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 2: Closely allied with orangutans.
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 3: Once thought to be a homonym, now thought to be
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 3: closely allied with orangutans.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 2: So once thought to be a member of the human line.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: Well, it was thought for a long time that orangutans
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: were our closest living relative as well.
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen them spearfishing? No. Yeah, they've learned
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 2: how to spearfish.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 2: They don't know whether it's from observing people. That's what
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 2: they assume. But there's this crazy photograph of this orangutan
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 2: hanging onto his branch. He's got a long stick in
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: his hand and he's like leaning into the river stabbing
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 2: a fish. You got to see it because it's so crazy.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: Did they learn from us?
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 2: We don't necessarily know.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's so cool.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: Isn't that crazy? Really crazy. Like he's figured out how
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: to catch fish.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: Really. Oh, it says after observing locals, which totally makes sense, right?
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's seen people catch a fish and he's like, whoa,
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: how did you do that? Which is probably how people learn.
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: Like some really smart ape guy was like, you know,
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 2: I think I can hit that bird with a rock.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: Learning and being able to communicate is one of the
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: ways that we got the advantage over everything else, right?
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: Because I don't have to evolve the ability to cook dinner.
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: I can learn from my mom.
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 2: Right, right, right. But that's what's so fascinating about living
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 2: today is you don't have to even learn from someone
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 2: who's anywhere near you. You're learning from things on your
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 2: phone instantaneously, on your laptop instantaneously.
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: And you don't have to learn because there's DoorDash.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 4: You can stay alive very easy.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 2: That's true too. But it's just, you know, when AI
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 2: gets involved in this stuff, when we have sentient AI
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 2: that you can use to try to, you know, figure
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 2: out what the consequences of bringing certain species back and
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 2: whether or not it would be a pro or a con. Like,
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: you know, that's where things get weird. Like if we decide, okay,
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: let's bring back the woolly mammoth. Okay, what's going to
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 2: be the negative impact of bringing back the woolly mammoth? Well,
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 2: they're going to eat a lot.
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: You don't need sentient AI to do that.
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 2: No, you don't. But humans will make decisions based on
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 2: biased evidence. We'll make decisions based on the potential for
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 2: a financial windfall. We'll gaslight people into thinking things are
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 2: really a good idea and it's safe for everyone. And
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 2: we'll do things if we know that we could profit.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 2: Whereas if you have AI that's going to be completely
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 2: objective and its only mission is to analyze the outcome. Yeah.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: Ooh, that world. You know, we're actually working with... teams
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: of people that are external to Colossal to put together
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: the rewilding plans and that sort of thing for each
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: of the different species. We're not planning to rewild the
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: dire wolves, but we still have done this. We've put
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: together a plan of what the potential impacts would be,
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: but we deliberately keep that outside and hire people to
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: put this together for us. And we haven't been delivered
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: this yet, so we'll see what it says when we
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: get it.
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, not good. They're going to kill everything.
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: They are not going to kill everything because they're not
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: going to be very wild.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: What animal do you think? Well, obviously, you guys are
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: working with the red wolves and you plan to use
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: which are normal native animals in North America that are threatened,
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: which most people would agree is a good idea to
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 2: give them a healthy population and release them. And that's
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 2: the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh,
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 2: this work could be used for conservation.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: It is being used for conservation.
• 2:07:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's so infuriating about some of these haters. It's
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 2: like they don't even bother looking it up or they
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 2: don't care because they just want attention and they just
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 2: want to be negative. And that's the best way to
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: get attention.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: They want the click, right?
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 2: Yes. And the best way to get that click is
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 2: to whine. Yeah. To whine and complain. It's annoying. Yeah,
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 2: it's gross. But they have to be themselves. That's their punishment.
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 2: You know, that's the life you've chose. You just want
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 2: to be this bitchy person.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: You're going to say that one thing forever.
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is going to be like, oh.
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: Congratulations. You get a lot of attention for just being
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: super negative all the time. But if you had to
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 2: look at their argument, so the argument of not doing
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 2: this and that you're not really creating a dire wolf
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: and this is just, you're just taking dire wolf genes
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: and adding them to Gray Wolves. Have you ever had
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: conversations with these people where they want to tell you
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 2: that what you're doing is wrong? And what is your
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: response to these people?
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: I think that this idea that the technology that we
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: it's wrong. Playing God. Somehow playing God, yes. I mean,
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 1: people have been playing God for as long as we've
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: existed as a lineage.
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: First by making species become extinct as we spread around
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: the world. Not intentionally, initially, but we changed the habitat.
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: We hunt things. Then we figured out that we didn't
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 1: have to make a species go extinct in order to
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: feed our families. And so we evolved domestication. We figured
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: out how to only take the males or leave the
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: juveniles or some way of maintaining that population so that
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: you knew you could go back to the hunt the
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 1: next year and they would be there again. And we
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: domesticated things. And then we transformed to really authority over everything.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: When we protect a species, people who think about conservation
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: often think of this as super hands-off. Like, I'm not
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: doing anything. Everything just gets to evolve the way that
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 1: it should be. That's bullshit. Like, we decide how many
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: animals live, where they get to live, what they get
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: to eat, how many they get to eat. We call
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: them when we want to. We protect them if we
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: want to. We don't if we want to. We are
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog, right?
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: We just better get good at it. These technologies are
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: had because we are directly changing DNA sequences. But they
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: fix some of the things that we have fucked up already.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: And I think the biggest challenge that I have is
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: to show people. that deciding not to allow ourselves the
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: space that we need to figure out what we can
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: do with these technologies, we're still operating within regulatory frameworks.
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality. There's
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: a long way to go here. But if we decide
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: that that's too scary, that we don't trust ourselves, that
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: we're always going to make the worst decision, first of all,
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: it's that attitude of negativity, right? It's the, I don't
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: want to do it because it's too scary because I'm
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: going to be bad. Second of all, It's a decision.
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: And to think that that decision has no consequences is naive.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: We know what the consequences are. The rate of extinction
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 1: today is thousands to tens of thousands times higher than
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: it is across the history of the fossil record. And
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of that is because of us. But we
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: have the capacity to slow that rate. We have the
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: the rapid changes in their habitat. What if we could
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: make Hawaiian honeycreepers resistant to avian malaria, which we introduced
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: by introducing mosquitoes into their habitat and save them from
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: becoming extinct? Or figure out how to transfer resistance to
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: bleaching to corals around the world? Or anything that we
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: could do to save some of these habitats that we
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: know are in trouble because of this combination of people
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 1: expanding and natural change to the ecosystem that we just
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 1: don't like. We don't want to see spruce forests disappearing
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: because it's getting drier, and that means that they can't
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: make enough resin to fight off the beetles, right?
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah.
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: We have the capacity to use these tools, or at
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: least to think about how we might develop and deploy
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: these tools, to have a future that is both filled
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: with people and biodiverse.
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 2: I think what people are concerned with is the crude
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: application of these techniques and this science when it's in
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 2: its infancy. And if you just take that and draw
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 2: it out to its natural conclusion with improvements over time
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: and innovation over time, it could be something that's of
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: enormous benefit to not just animal species but humans. Right.
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 2: To everyone. It's kind of like a test run. Like,
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: we can make a dire wolf. Can we make a
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 2: super person? You know what I mean? Like, it's probably
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 2: the future. I mean, having regular children, like, just rolling
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: the dice on seeing what your kid turns out will
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 2: probably be super novel, like, 100 years from now.
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about, right? And
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: I think we're getting gradually more accustomed to using these
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 1: technologies to cure genetic diseases like the baby virus. That
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: was in the news over the last couple of weeks.
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 1: Baby KJ, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease,
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 1: he had a genetic change, just a single mutation that
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: meant that he couldn't digest protein. And people came together
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: and mounted this incredible collaborative effort to find a cure
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: using the tools of genome engineering for this child. And
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing,
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: having gone into his own body, to cure this particular disease. Now,
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 1: it's amazing. And it was such a, it was a rush,
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: you know, and it's a, but it's a, it's a
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: really great example of personalized medicine that right now, obviously
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 1: this is slow, but we start somewhere and we always
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 1: have to start somewhere. Like, yes, it took six months
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: and it's one baby and it took a lot of
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: people to do this, but this is the beginning of
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: how we can use these tools to cure your cancer,
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: to figure out how we can engineer fix for a
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: baby who's born with cystic fibrosis? Or if you get
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: blood cancer, can we edit the blood cells to make
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: that cancer mutation just go away? This is the beginning
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 1: of these tools. And for de-extinction and conservation, this is
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: also just the beginning. We've figured out how to learn
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: DNA sequences from the past and actually transform that into
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 1: an animal that's bigger than a gray wolf and it's
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 1: more muscular than a gray wolf. We've made dire wolves
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 1: using dire wolf DNA and these amazing tools that we
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 1: will have the potential to use to stop other species
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: from becoming extinct. I love it. I think it is Obviously,
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 1: there are risks associated with using technologies that we don't
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 1: fully understand, but we're not taking those risks. We're very
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: carefully evaluating every single one of the edits that we make.
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: We are, in every case, interested in making the fewest
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: number of changes possible to still bring those animals back.
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 2: What other animals are you going to bring back? Well...
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 2: What's the plan? What's the plan, Beth?
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 1: Well, we have announced, obviously, the mammoth and the thylacine.
• 2:15:19
  Speaker 1: That's the Tasmanian tiger. And the dodo, which is my favorite.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 1: I see my dodo.
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's cool.
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 1: But we have DNA from lots of different animals. So,
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: you know, you never know.
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 2: So you've announced the woolly mammoth. That's right. And where
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 2: will that be?
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 1: Where are we going to put mammoths?
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 2: Are you going to? reintroduce them into areas?
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 1: Eventually, that is the goal, to have animals that live
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: in wild habitats. But this will be a very long process.
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 2: But not dire wolves?
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: No, we won't be reintroducing dire wolves.
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 2: Okay, so not predators, but you would consider.
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: Well, not dire wolves.
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, so you weren't joking about the cheetah?
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we don't currently have any plans to
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: bring cheetahs or saber-toothed cats back to life.
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 2: But you might. I don't like how you said that.
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 2: But if you did that, like that would be where
• 2:16:10
  Speaker 2: it would get sketchy. If you reintroduce an animal that
• 2:16:13
  Speaker 2: can run 60 miles an hour to the plains, those
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 2: poor antelopes who've been like living it up because they evolved.
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 2: You know that pronghorn antelopes, the reason why they're so fast.
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 2: They evolved to get away from these cheetahs that don't
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 2: exist anymore.
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 3: It's true.
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: But we know also from looking at the cheetahs that
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: we have that they didn't only eat pronghorns. They were
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 1: eating lots of things in their habitat to them.
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 2: Because pronghorns are fast.
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: They had to eat something else, otherwise they would die.
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 2: They had to eat some slow stuff because the pronghorns
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 2: are like, let's get out of here. Yeah.
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, for every species, there will be different work
• 2:16:47
  Speaker 1: that has to be done to figure out whether and
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: where is a good idea to reintroduce them. And for
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: each of the species that we're working with, we have
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 1: councils that we've put together in the part of the
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: world where we would bring them back together to have
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 1: conversations about where they should go, whether they should go,
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 1: how many there should be, and who is willing to
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: be the long-term stewards for these animals.
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 2: Now, I know that they've talked about releasing woolly mammoths
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 2: if they ever do make them in Siberia, right?
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: Well, right now we're not focusing on Russia because issues.
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 2: Obviously.
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: So probably it would be somewhere in North America.
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's why Trump wants Greenland.
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: For mammoths. Isn't Greenland filled with ice? I mean, mammoths
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: really need a lot of lush.
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 2: The vegetation.
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 1: So I think maybe not.
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 1: But, you know, there's plenty of space in Alaska, right?
• 2:17:36
  Speaker 1: Or northern Canada or even around the plains. I mean,
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 1: mammoths lived through warm periods and cold periods. They're cold
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: adapted because they're big and furry.
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: Alaska would be the move, right? Because it's. like the
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 2: size of one-third of the United States. And they lived there. Right. And,
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 2: you know. Right.
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 1: And I'm not worried about the mammoth population getting out
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 1: of control. I mean, these are animals that take 10
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: to 14 years to reach reproductive maturity. They have a
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 1: two-year pregnancy. It's not like they're suddenly going to be
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: a thousand mammoths.
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: And like with the dire wolves, there will be a
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: stage in between the first calf being born and understanding
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: how they're able to thrive in whatever habitat they're in.
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: And these are really important parts of the de-extinction process.
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 2: I was blown away when I heard that mammoths lived
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 2: up till about 4,000 years ago on an island.
• 2:18:29
  Speaker 1: Yes, Wrangell Island off the coast of Siberia, but now
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 1: maybe even in mainland North America based on that environmental
• 2:18:36
  Speaker 1: DNA data. Isn't that Crazy?
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, the horses were 4,000 years, right?
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 2: Horses and mammoths. And mammoths? That was 4,000 years old too? Yeah. Wow.
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: Right, because we're not going to find the last fossils
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 1: of something.
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 2: Of course, because fossils are so difficult to make.
• 2:18:53
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:18:53
  Speaker 2: Most of the things don't leave fossils when they die.
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 2: What percentage of the entire fossil record, bad pun, bad
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 2: word to use there, but in record of animals... have
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 2: been fossilized?
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: It's really hard to know, right? And because the taphonomy,
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: which means like how things are going to preserve, differs
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 1: so much depending on where you are in the world.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: Like when things die in Alaska and you have this
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: glacial silt that preserves things really quickly, we're probably finding
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of things, right? But we've never found woolly
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: rhinos in North America. So the hypothesis is they never
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 1: made it across the Bering Sea. When the sea level
• 2:19:29
  Speaker 1: was lower, The Bering Strait was not a sea level.
• 2:19:33
  Speaker 1: They called it Beringia. It was a land bridge. Animals
• 2:19:36
  Speaker 1: walked across that land bridge, including people walked across the
• 2:19:39
  Speaker 1: land bridge to come into North America.
• 2:19:41
  Speaker 2: Which brings me to the short-faced bear. Oh, I don't
• 2:19:45
  Speaker 2: like how you giggled. Are you guys going to try
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: to bring that thing back?
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: I don't know. We do have its DNA.
• 2:19:50
  Speaker 2: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 1: I love the short-faced bear. You know what I like
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: the most about it is because... I think it's so
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 1: dumb that it's called the short-faced bear.
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 2:20:00
  Speaker 1: Who was giving it that common name? And they're like, oh,
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 1: here's a bear that if it stands up, it's 12
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 1: feet tall. I'm going to call it the short-faced bear.
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 2: Right. It's such an innocuous name for such a terrifying animal.
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 2: One of my favorite photos on the Internet is a
• 2:20:15
  Speaker 2: photo of the short-faced bear standing up next to these scientists.
• 2:20:19
  Speaker 2: They're standing there and you realize the size of it.
• 2:20:20
  Speaker 2: You're like, that one.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 2: Like, what in the hell?
• 2:20:24
  Speaker 1: Have you seen the long-horned bison, this bison that lived 120, 150,000
• 2:20:30
  Speaker 1: years ago?
• 2:20:30
  Speaker 2: I think I have.
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: There's a great photo that's somewhere on the internet of
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: one of a skull on the ground and a scientist
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 1: laying that one.
• 2:20:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's crazy.
• 2:20:41
  Speaker 1: We have DNA from him.
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 2: He might bring that back.
• 2:20:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 2: What about the Irish elk?
• 2:20:47
  Speaker 1: Yep, we could do that one. We have DNA from them.
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 2: That thing's nuts. When did that thing go extinct?
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: I think that's also... The end of the ice age.
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 1: It wasn't in North America.
• 2:20:55
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah. Super cool. That thing's nuts.
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 2: It's like a moose slash elk. I love it. Looking thing.
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 1: There were also camels in North America. There is a
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: camel called Camelops. That was pretty cool.
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: And a giant beaver, like a five foot tall beaver, which.
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's right. I forgot about the giant beaver. Beavers
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 2: scare me.
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 1: Especially a five-foot beaver.
• 2:21:16
  Speaker 2: A five-foot beaver? Think about what a little beaver could
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 2: do with its teeth.
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 1: People have found logs that have been chewed on by
• 2:21:22
  Speaker 1: this thing. Just imagine.
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 2: Did that die out in the Ice Age as well?
• 2:21:27
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 2:21:27
  Speaker 2: So that's like 65% of all the megafauna in North America, right?
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: So many big things. We lost so many big things.
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson thought he had discovered a giant lion.
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 1: But it was a sloth.
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 2: It turns out it was a sloth. Yeah.
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 3: Giant sloth.
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 1: They were just a couple different species of giant sloths.
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 2: It's named after him.
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 3: Megalonyx jeffersoni.
• 2:21:45
  Speaker 2: Well, when you look at its face, it kind of
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: looks like it could be a cat, if you don't
• 2:21:50
  Speaker 2: know that much. Like, if you don't know what we
• 2:21:52
  Speaker 2: know now, look at the bones. That bone right there.
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 2: Make that, the head, like, look at that thing. That
• 2:21:59
  Speaker 2: looks like some crazy cat. Oh, what a weird animal.
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: Sloths. I wonder if they moved as slowly as the
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: small ones did. I can't imagine that they could have,
• 2:22:08
  Speaker 1: or they would have been really easily eaten by the
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: giant short-faced bear.
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's why they're not around.
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: Or the American cheetah, or the Smilodon.
• 2:22:16
  Speaker 2: Well, the cheese is probably too little. You know, it
• 2:22:18
  Speaker 2: would get smashed.
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but if that thing was moving super slowly, you
• 2:22:21
  Speaker 1: could just hack at it for a while.
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 2: Well, have you ever seen sloths, even little slow-moving ones,
• 2:22:25
  Speaker 2: swing at leopards? Or jaguars, rather? No. Yeah. There's a
• 2:22:29
  Speaker 2: video of a sloth, a regular one, that is crawling
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 2: on this vine, and this jaguar is trying to get
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 2: at it. It's swinging at it pretty fast. I was like, well,
• 2:22:39
  Speaker 2: I didn't know they could swing that fast. But it
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 2: moves really slow, which is like, I wonder if it knew.
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 2: Why does nature want you to die so easy?
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: Don't they move so slowly that stuff grows on them? Yes.
• 2:22:49
  Speaker 2: Mold grows on them. There's a rescue place. So this, see,
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 2: look at that. Look how beautiful those jaguars are. God,
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 2: they're so beautiful.
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: Big cats.
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: So would you want the big cats that were here
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 1: to come back?
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I don't know. It's like the jaguars
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 2: are reemerging in the southwest, right? They've spotted at least
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 2: a couple of them in Arizona, which I think is great.
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think they're awesome, but I wouldn't want
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 2: to run into one. You know what I mean? Like
• 2:23:19
  Speaker 2: if you're out there camping and you see a jaguar,
• 2:23:21
  Speaker 2: you're in a lot of trouble. That's a giant mountain lion. Yeah.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: And I think about mountain lions, too. When I go running,
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 1: you know, in the woods, in the red woods, I
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: live in Santa Cruz. I go running and I'm thinking, oh,
• 2:23:33
  Speaker 1: mountain lions. Bring my dog, right?
• 2:23:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the dog's going to get eaten, I guess.
• 2:23:38
  Speaker 1: I think they're afraid of dogs.
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 2: A little bit. Yeah, it depends on the dog. They
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: eat a lot of dogs.
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 1: I have a 75-pound Labrador retriever. He would probably want
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 1: to be its friend.
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like my dog, my golden retriever.
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, friend, can we play?
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 2: Or he would just, like, tuck his tail and run. Yeah.
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 2: And just leave me there to defend myself. But, you know,
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 2: they know that like the ones that they get, the
• 2:24:00
  Speaker 2: ones that are problem cats in Northern California, when they
• 2:24:03
  Speaker 2: found them and they do these depredation tags, they found
• 2:24:05
  Speaker 2: that 50% of their diet is dogs and cats. Wow.
• 2:24:09
  Speaker 1: 50%.
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 2: That's nuts.
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: That's nuts. They're just eating people's dogs and cats.
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 1: Yikes.
• 2:24:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know. They're spooky. They're cool, but they're spooky.
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 2: You know, I don't know how many you want around.
• 2:24:22
  Speaker 1: And there are a lot of cats. Maybe it's because
• 2:24:24
  Speaker 1: we don't have any of the other predators that used
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 1: to be there. I mean, the California golden bear. There's
• 2:24:29
  Speaker 1: another one that Hearst, I think Hearst collected one of
• 2:24:31
  Speaker 1: the last ones of the California golden bear in Southern California,
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: had him shipped up to San Francisco and he became
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 1: the bear that's the inspiration for the flag.
• 2:24:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 2:24:39
  Speaker 1: His name is Monarch. We actually sequenced his genome too.
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 2: The last guy that got killed by a grizzly bear
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 2: or a brown bear, whatever it was, in California, they
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 2: have a town named after him, LaBec, California.
• 2:24:51
  Speaker 1: Named after the guy.
• 2:24:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Named after the last guy to get killed by
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 2: a bear.
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 1: I wonder if it's worth it to him.
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 3: Nope.
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 2: Nope.
• 2:24:59
  Speaker 4: Nope.
• 2:24:59
  Speaker 2: Nope. It's kind of funny, though, that the bear is
• 2:25:02
  Speaker 2: on the flag and then they killed all of them.
• 2:25:04
  Speaker 2: There's none of them. Yeah.
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 1: Well, by the time I think it was on the flag,
• 2:25:07
  Speaker 1: it was already on their way out.
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, probably. Well, people are probably wanting to bring them back, too,
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 2: you know?
• 2:25:12
  Speaker 1: You know, we showed recently using DNA that they're really
• 2:25:15
  Speaker 1: closely related to the bears that are in Yellowstone right now.
• 2:25:17
  Speaker 1: So if we really want bears in California, you could
• 2:25:20
  Speaker 1: just bring this guy there.
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 2: Don't do it, people. Because the thing about it is
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 2: once you have them in your area, you can't manage
• 2:25:29
  Speaker 2: them because then people have decided that they're precious. So
• 2:25:33
  Speaker 2: once they become problems and once they become overpopulated, like
• 2:25:37
  Speaker 2: Montana has a bit of an issue with that now.
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 2: They would like to list them.
• 2:25:41
  Speaker 1: With bears?
• 2:25:42
  Speaker 2: Yes, with grizzly bears. They would like people to be
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 2: able to hunt them. That's Monarch.
• 2:25:46
  Speaker 3: They put a smile on his face.
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, hi, guys. Only you can prevent forest fires.
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 1: Monarch had a miserable life, though. He was mostly in
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 1: a cage. He was being fed the wrong diet for
• 2:25:56
  Speaker 1: a brown bear, just mostly meat. So right now he's
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 1: on display. He's not on display, actually. He is in
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 1: the basement in a fridge at the Cal Academy of
• 2:26:05
  Speaker 1: Sciences in San Francisco. But his post-cranial skeleton, everything except
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 1: his head, is at Berkeley in the museum. We've sampled
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 1: it for DNA.
• 2:26:13
  Speaker 2: So his diet should have been fruit and vegetables and meat.
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 1: But they were just giving him meat. I imagine he
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 1: was just really uncomfortable all the time.
• 2:26:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 2:26:22
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?
• 2:26:23
  Speaker 2: That's all I eat. I mostly just eat meat. I'm
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 2: not uncomfortable at all. I think meat is.
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 1: You need a little bit of fiber to help your
• 2:26:31
  Speaker 1: digestive system.
• 2:26:32
  Speaker 2: But I bet if you had like a plate... Well,
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 2: actually not true. I was saying if you had a
• 2:26:35
  Speaker 2: plate of meat and a plate of fruit, the bear
• 2:26:37
  Speaker 2: would just eat the meat. But the bear would probably
• 2:26:38
  Speaker 2: eat the fruit too.
• 2:26:39
  Speaker 1: Bear would eat everything.
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 2: They eat everything. They eat cars. When I lived in Colorado...
• 2:26:43
  Speaker 2: They're involved in this.
• 2:26:44
  Speaker 1: Just like... people, not us, would have been. They're involved
• 2:26:47
  Speaker 1: in the world of scarcity where you eat the stuff
• 2:26:49
  Speaker 1: that's in front of you.
• 2:26:50
  Speaker 2: Also, they really have to get fat because they're going
• 2:26:52
  Speaker 2: to chill out and just take naps for three months.
• 2:26:55
  Speaker 1: I love the Fat Bear Week competition. I love that.
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 1: Do you know that? No, what is that? It's around
• 2:27:01
  Speaker 1: the time when they come out, they're eating all the
• 2:27:03
  Speaker 1: salmon because they have a competition between which is the
• 2:27:06
  Speaker 1: best fat bear, and you get to vote for them,
• 2:27:08
  Speaker 1: and then there's a fat bear that wins.
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good fun.
• 2:27:11
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 2:27:11
  Speaker 2: To me, that's the most fascinating thing species of bears
• 2:27:15
  Speaker 2: is the bears that live on those salmon rivers because
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 2: they don't care about people at all like there's this
• 2:27:20
  Speaker 2: crazy video of this guy that's sitting in a lawn
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 2: chair and this bear comes up beside him and this
• 2:27:25
  Speaker 2: bear or the it's not in the lawn chair right
• 2:27:27
  Speaker 2: he's beside the lawn chair but the lawn chair is
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 2: great for perspective when you see how big the bear
• 2:27:30
  Speaker 2: is this bear is huge it's like 10 11 feet
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 2: tall long whatever and it doesn't care about the person
• 2:27:38
  Speaker 2: at all it just is been eating salmon. So this
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 2: is it. Look at this.
• 2:27:42
  Speaker 1: And salmon are so much better.
• 2:27:44
  Speaker 2: Look at the size of that thing. Imagine, give me
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 2: some volume so you hear this guy talking because it's
• 2:27:49
  Speaker 2: so crazy. Bear's not interested in them. There's meat right
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 2: to his right. He just lays down. I'm going to chill.
• 2:27:58
  Speaker 2: I'm going to chill.
• 2:28:00
  Speaker 1: Humans probably make a terrible snack, though, right?
• 2:28:02
  Speaker 3: You think?
• 2:28:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, we're bony or fatty. That salmon is absolutely
• 2:28:08
  Speaker 1: a delicious source of protein, right?
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 2: Also, it's, you know, just flopping around in there. It's
• 2:28:12
  Speaker 2: easy to catch. And he's probably full, which is also
• 2:28:16
  Speaker 2: why they're so big, right?
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 1: He looks full.
• 2:28:19
  Speaker 2: I like him.
• 2:28:20
  Speaker 1: He looks chilled. That's the bear that I would want
• 2:28:22
  Speaker 1: to run into.
• 2:28:23
  Speaker 2: In the field.
• 2:28:24
  Speaker 1: He's going, hey, hey, hey.
• 2:28:25
  Speaker 2: Hey, hey, hey.
• 2:28:26
  Speaker 4: That's crazy.
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 1: Like it's a dog. Like, get out of here.
• 2:28:29
  Speaker 2: You're going to convince him? Hey, man, this is my space.
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 2: Don't invade it. Yeah. They just, all those Kodiak bears,
• 2:28:36
  Speaker 2: that's why they're so huge. They get so much protein.
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 1: I've never been out there.
• 2:28:40
  Speaker 2: Oh, I want to watch them. I want to watch
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 2: them eat salmon with a high-powered rifle right next to me.
• 2:28:46
  Speaker 2: And maybe in a giant bulletproof hamster wheel or something.
• 2:28:49
  Speaker 2: I'm so scared of those things. Have you seen the
• 2:28:51
  Speaker 2: documentary Grizzly Man? Yes. Another great Werner Herzog film.
• 2:28:56
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 2:28:56
  Speaker 1: I have to look at that.
• 2:28:58
  Speaker 2: Werner's actually in that film. He's interviewing the people in
• 2:29:00
  Speaker 2: that film. It's one of the best unintentional comedies. It's
• 2:29:05
  Speaker 2: a really funny movie. I don't even think it's unintentional
• 2:29:08
  Speaker 2: because Werner Herzog's a genius. I think he made it
• 2:29:10
  Speaker 2: funny on purpose because there's some smash cuts where you're
• 2:29:13
  Speaker 2: just like, oh my God, where you're just laughing. And
• 2:29:15
  Speaker 2: the guy was so nuts. And he just decided to,
• 2:29:18
  Speaker 2: I think, in my eyes, I think it was like
• 2:29:21
  Speaker 2: suicide by bear. I think he just decided to stay
• 2:29:23
  Speaker 2: long enough where eventually they just got him. He was
• 2:29:25
  Speaker 2: like super depressed and wanted to be an actor and
• 2:29:28
  Speaker 2: it never made it. So he decided he was going
• 2:29:30
  Speaker 2: to save the bears. And the bears like didn't even
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 2: care that he was alive. Like they're not used to
• 2:29:35
  Speaker 2: people being around at all. They didn't even know what
• 2:29:36
  Speaker 2: he was. And then one of them eventually decided to
• 2:29:39
  Speaker 2: eat him.
• 2:29:39
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine that as a good way to go.
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 2: It's not a good way to go. But if you're
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 2: completely obsessed with bears and you're, you know.
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:29:47
  Speaker 1: There's a woman who's worked in my lab for a
• 2:29:48
  Speaker 1: long time. She works on mountain lions. We're on mountain
• 2:29:50
  Speaker 1: lion genetics. And she said when it's her time, she
• 2:29:52
  Speaker 1: wants to go.
• 2:29:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, God, lady. Don't say that. Don't say that. The
• 2:29:56
  Speaker 2: one thing better about getting killed by a cat than
• 2:29:59
  Speaker 2: a bear is a cat will kill you and then
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 2: eat you. A bear will just hold you down.
• 2:30:04
  Speaker 1: And eat you while you're still alive.
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They don't care at all.
• 2:30:06
  Speaker 1: You just have to hope that you die of shock.
• 2:30:07
  Speaker 2: Before and after photos of these.
• 2:30:09
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 2:30:09
  Speaker 2: Found bears before they got fat.
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 2: Like that one looks.
• 2:30:13
  Speaker 3: Wildly skinny like a dog.
• 2:30:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they look real weird when they get skinny
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 2: and they look real long legged. That's one of the
• 2:30:19
  Speaker 2: things that freaks hunters out is when they see them
• 2:30:23
  Speaker 2: skinned and they're hanging, they look like humans. It's like
• 2:30:27
  Speaker 2: very weird. Or Bigfoot. No. Well, that's probably what Bigfoot is, honestly.
• 2:30:33
  Speaker 2: When people are seeing Bigfoot, have you ever seen a
• 2:30:35
  Speaker 2: bear walk on two legs before?
• 2:30:36
  Speaker 1: No.
• 2:30:37
  Speaker 2: They walk on two legs all the time.
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 2:30:39
  Speaker 2: All the time. They walk on two legs to present
• 2:30:41
  Speaker 2: themselves as larger, to scare the other males.
• 2:30:43
  Speaker 1: Makes sense.
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 2: And sometimes they have injuries. Like there was a famous
• 2:30:46
  Speaker 2: bear in New Jersey that was missing a paw. And
• 2:30:50
  Speaker 2: so he always walked on two legs.
• 2:30:52
  Speaker 1: And it just looked like a man. Like a man
• 2:30:53
  Speaker 1: walking on two legs.
• 2:30:54
  Speaker 2: Just like a Bigfoot. Like if you see him through
• 2:30:56
  Speaker 2: the woods, right? If it's dusk and you're going on
• 2:30:59
  Speaker 2: a hike and you're already like heightened senses, you're a
• 2:31:01
  Speaker 2: little weirded out already. And you see this thing, it's
• 2:31:04
  Speaker 2: a black bear that's walking on two legs through the woods.
• 2:31:07
  Speaker 2: You would be convinced that you saw a Bigfoot. Don't
• 2:31:10
  Speaker 2: you think? Yeah.
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 1: There was a paper that was published maybe a decade
• 2:31:14
  Speaker 1: ago or so where people had done niche modeling, environmental
• 2:31:17
  Speaker 1: niche modeling based on Bigfoot sightings.
• 2:31:19
  Speaker 2: Isn't that crazy?
• 2:31:21
  Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:31:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Isn't that nuts? So if you saw that walking
• 2:31:24
  Speaker 2: through the woods, 100% you'd think it's Bigfoot. Oh, my God.
• 2:31:27
  Speaker 2: I found it.
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 4: He's real.
• 2:31:29
  Speaker 2: He's real.
• 2:31:30
  Speaker 1: If that picture was just a little bit blurrier, it
• 2:31:32
  Speaker 1: would be Bigfoot.
• 2:31:33
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 2: A little blurrier and then a little more distance and
• 2:31:36
  Speaker 2: in between trees. Yeah. I talked to a lady once.
• 2:31:39
  Speaker 2: We did this television show. Look at him. That's amazing.
• 2:31:42
  Speaker 2: I know. It's nuts. And that's a small one. We
• 2:31:46
  Speaker 2: did this television show a long time ago. Me and
• 2:31:49
  Speaker 2: my friend Duncan, we went to go look for Bigfoot.
• 2:31:51
  Speaker 2: It was part of the show. It was called Joe
• 2:31:53
  Speaker 2: Rogan Questions Everything. And I met this one lady who
• 2:31:56
  Speaker 2: was so convincing. And she told me she saw Bigfoot.
• 2:32:01
  Speaker 2: The Pacific Northwest where we were at outside of Seattle,
• 2:32:04
  Speaker 2: like up in those mountains, it's so different. dense because
• 2:32:06
  Speaker 2: it's a rainforest and it's like the way i describe
• 2:32:09
  Speaker 2: it it's like a box of q-tips that's what the
• 2:32:11
  Speaker 2: trees are like you know you get a box of
• 2:32:13
  Speaker 2: q-tips you can't see in between those q-tips super dense
• 2:32:15
  Speaker 2: super dense and she said she saw something that was
• 2:32:18
  Speaker 2: like 100 yards away that was moving through the trees
• 2:32:20
  Speaker 2: that she is sure was a she goes i saw
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 2: a giant ape and i was like what is that
• 2:32:26
  Speaker 2: an ape like oh my god it's bigfoot and my
• 2:32:30
  Speaker 2: brain was going i think it.
• 2:32:31
  Speaker 1: Was a bear yeah Well, that's what this niche modeling
• 2:32:35
  Speaker 1: or environmental modeling study found is they looked at all
• 2:32:37
  Speaker 1: the reported sightings of Bigfoot and then created what would
• 2:32:40
  Speaker 1: be the environmental niche for a Bigfoot. And it pretty
• 2:32:43
  Speaker 1: much just overlapped the niche for bears, for brown bears.
• 2:32:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. I mean, it's the only thing that
• 2:32:48
  Speaker 2: makes sense. But the weird thing about it is the
• 2:32:50
  Speaker 2: Native Americans, because Native Americans have a name for that creature.
• 2:32:56
  Speaker 2: And they have many names for it in different tribes.
• 2:32:58
  Speaker 2: So it's not like an isolated thing. But they don't
• 2:33:01
  Speaker 2: have a lot of mythical animals. They don't have fake
• 2:33:03
  Speaker 2: animals other than Sasquatch. That's weird. It is weird. Because
• 2:33:08
  Speaker 2: if Beringa, as I always called the Bering land bridge.
• 2:33:10
  Speaker 1: Beringia.
• 2:33:11
  Speaker 2: Beringia. Beringia existed. And we know that it did. And
• 2:33:14
  Speaker 2: we know that people during that time made their way across.
• 2:33:18
  Speaker 2: If Gigantopithecus lived alongside people, we don't know if it did.
• 2:33:21
  Speaker 2: But it could have.
• 2:33:23
  Speaker 4: And if it did, it would be in the same area.
• 2:33:26
  Speaker 2: It would be in the same area of Asia, and
• 2:33:27
  Speaker 2: perhaps it would have... It would have.
• 2:33:28
  Speaker 1: To come really far north, though, to get across the
• 2:33:31
  Speaker 1: Bering Land Bridge, because that was really far. That was
• 2:33:34
  Speaker 1: all glaciated and cold. So it would have to be
• 2:33:36
  Speaker 1: something that was adapted to living in warmer climates, like
• 2:33:39
  Speaker 1: where it was found, as well as being able to survive.
• 2:33:41
  Speaker 1: It's not like a week of a walk across.
• 2:33:43
  Speaker 4: The Bering Land Bridge, right?
• 2:33:44
  Speaker 2: Also, we don't find primates in cold climates like that,
• 2:33:47
  Speaker 2: other than humans.
• 2:33:48
  Speaker 1: Right, yeah. You have to have the ability to keep
• 2:33:50
  Speaker 1: yourself warm.
• 2:33:51
  Speaker 2: We're like, let's just keep walking north. We've got to
• 2:33:54
  Speaker 2: get away from these other assholes.
• 2:33:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, really love mosquitoes. I think this is what I'm
• 2:33:57
  Speaker 1: going for. Like more mosquitoes, the better.
• 2:33:59
  Speaker 2: I think they're probably just chasing animals, right?
• 2:34:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 2:34:02
  Speaker 2: That's probably what they were doing. Bison. Bison mostly. Following
• 2:34:05
  Speaker 2: the herds.
• 2:34:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:34:06
  Speaker 2: And then eventually they had to learn to adapt to
• 2:34:07
  Speaker 2: these colder climates. Yeah.
• 2:34:08
  Speaker 1: It's funny. We talk about it as like people are
• 2:34:11
  Speaker 1: moving deliberately through this landscape when clearly they weren't. They're
• 2:34:15
  Speaker 1: just trying to find food like the Dolgon people. They're
• 2:34:18
  Speaker 1: going to places where there's still grass that their reindeer
• 2:34:21
  Speaker 1: can graze on.
• 2:34:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:34:22
  Speaker 2: They just want to eat. And it's just so weird
• 2:34:25
  Speaker 2: to think that, you know, we live in houses and
• 2:34:28
  Speaker 2: we have Internet and we drive an electric car to
• 2:34:31
  Speaker 2: work and live in this sophisticated world. But not all
• 2:34:35
  Speaker 2: the people are living in this world. And there's indigenous
• 2:34:38
  Speaker 2: people that are living the same way they've lived for.
• 2:34:41
  Speaker 2: But now they have a snowmobile. Now they have a rifle.
• 2:34:44
  Speaker 3: Right. Right.
• 2:34:45
  Speaker 2: But they're still like if you had to live there,
• 2:34:47
  Speaker 2: you'd be like, oh, my God. Like, what am I doing? Like,
• 2:34:50
  Speaker 2: where is Starbucks? Right.
• 2:34:53
  Speaker 1: But somehow they're happier than us.
• 2:34:54
  Speaker 2: That's so weird. It's really weird. Out of all the
• 2:34:59
  Speaker 2: animals that you guys might potentially. What's the word? rebirth.
• 2:35:05
  Speaker 2: What's the word?
• 2:35:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, I mean, people have used the word de-extinction, which
• 2:35:09
  Speaker 1: I kind of hate because I can't figure out how
• 2:35:11
  Speaker 1: to conjugate it in a way that doesn't make me cringe.
• 2:35:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:35:14
  Speaker 1: If you've done it successfully, do you say you de-extincted something?
• 2:35:19
  Speaker 2: So what would be the word? Do we need a
• 2:35:21
  Speaker 2: new word? Because it's never happened before.
• 2:35:22
  Speaker 1: Bring back, resurrect.
• 2:35:24
  Speaker 2: Resurrect. I think resurrect's probably, but that has biblical implications.
• 2:35:27
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:35:27
  Speaker 1: So that's why we try to stay away from that.
• 2:35:29
  Speaker 2: But you're kind of playing God, so let's go with that.
• 2:35:32
  Speaker 1: Okay, cool.
• 2:35:33
  Speaker 2: I'm in. Is there one that gives you pause? Like
• 2:35:35
  Speaker 2: maybe the short-faced bear?
• 2:35:37
  Speaker 1: Pause?
• 2:35:38
  Speaker 2: Like maybe this isn't the best idea. The host eagle?
• 2:35:41
  Speaker 1: Well, humans. I've already had pause at this. Like Neanderthals
• 2:35:46
  Speaker 1: and Denisovans, they were people. And so I feel like
• 2:35:49
  Speaker 1: that's not really a thing. That's not somewhere we should go.
• 2:35:52
  Speaker 1: Host eagle, that's a cool one.
• 2:35:53
  Speaker 2: That's a cool one.
• 2:35:54
  Speaker 1: That's a really, this is a massive thing. Massive giant
• 2:35:57
  Speaker 1: eagle that ate moa, which was a bird, an extinct bird.
• 2:36:00
  Speaker 2: And ate people too. Probably. They were huge. No, they
• 2:36:02
  Speaker 2: think that they found the markings on human skulls there
• 2:36:06
  Speaker 2: that indicate talons of raptors. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Right. Which
• 2:36:12
  Speaker 2: makes sense that that's how they went extinct. Like the
• 2:36:14
  Speaker 2: New Zealands are like, enough of this shit.
• 2:36:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the moa went extinct, and so they couldn't
• 2:36:18
  Speaker 1: eat any moa anymore. But maybe it was both, right?
• 2:36:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, why did short-faced bears go extinct? Probably because
• 2:36:24
  Speaker 1: nobody wanted a bear that stood 12 feet high.
• 2:36:27
  Speaker 2: What are you going to do about it, though? Imagine,
• 2:36:30
  Speaker 2: would you imagine the daunting task of getting a group
• 2:36:33
  Speaker 2: of guys together with spears to go after a short-faced
• 2:36:36
  Speaker 2: bear when you know at least four or five of
• 2:36:39
  Speaker 2: you are getting whacked before you can get a spear
• 2:36:41
  Speaker 2: tip into one of them?
• 2:36:41
  Speaker 1: Maybe, doesn't it depend? I mean, maybe what they were
• 2:36:43
  Speaker 1: doing is... You know, they would ambush mammoths and things
• 2:36:47
  Speaker 1: like that. So you hide around bluffs and you can
• 2:36:48
  Speaker 1: have a group of people in different places and hit
• 2:36:50
  Speaker 1: them all at once. Maybe you wait until that bear
• 2:36:53
  Speaker 1: is eating something else.
• 2:36:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, sure.
• 2:36:56
  Speaker 1: And then it's paused and you have time to.
• 2:36:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, how much did they even understand the wind
• 2:37:01
  Speaker 2: back then?
• 2:37:02
  Speaker 1: Like they probably understood it really well right because these
• 2:37:06
  Speaker 1: are people who relied on that they probably understand it
• 2:37:08
  Speaker 1: better than people who aren't hunters today right so.
• 2:37:11
  Speaker 2: They probably knew that these animals had a greater sense
• 2:37:13
  Speaker 2: of smell than we do they probably had a greater
• 2:37:15
  Speaker 2: sense of smell.
• 2:37:16
  Speaker 1: Than we do or more attuned oh.
• 2:37:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah for sure they probably could smell it because you
• 2:37:20
  Speaker 2: can smell certain animals when you're like you if you
• 2:37:22
  Speaker 2: go into the elk woods you 100 can smell elk.
• 2:37:25
  Speaker 1: And is that something that you've been able to develop.
• 2:37:28
  Speaker 2: Well i was taught it you would smell something, and
• 2:37:32
  Speaker 2: then the guys that I'd be hunting with, you smell that.
• 2:37:36
  Speaker 2: That's elk. Because they urinate everywhere, and you get this sense.
• 2:37:41
  Speaker 2: They have this really musty smell during the rut, too,
• 2:37:44
  Speaker 2: and you can smell them.
• 2:37:45
  Speaker 1: Could you smell the direwolves?
• 2:37:47
  Speaker 2: Well, they were stinky. I don't think you guys are
• 2:37:50
  Speaker 2: bathing them.
• 2:37:50
  Speaker 1: Why would we bathe a dire wolf?
• 2:37:53
  Speaker 2: I know. My wife would be like, take him to
• 2:37:55
  Speaker 2: the groomer. Because she hates when my dog gets stinky.
• 2:38:00
  Speaker 2: She hates when I take him out into the dirt
• 2:38:03
  Speaker 2: and play around with him. And he comes back covered
• 2:38:04
  Speaker 2: in burrs and stinky. Got to brush him down.
• 2:38:06
  Speaker 1: Did they smell different?
• 2:38:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they did smell different. But I don't. I
• 2:38:11
  Speaker 2: don't smell a lot of dogs that are never bathed. Right. Right.
• 2:38:13
  Speaker 2: You know, most of the dogs that I've ever smelled.
• 2:38:15
  Speaker 1: These aren't dogs.
• 2:38:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Bright wolves. Right. Right. Sorry. But what is really,
• 2:38:20
  Speaker 2: which is really weird. Those are the other conversations that
• 2:38:21
  Speaker 2: we had that they all come from wolves. Like even
• 2:38:24
  Speaker 2: a French, Jamie has a French bulldog. He's adorable. That
• 2:38:28
  Speaker 2: was a wolf. Yeah. At one point in time. And.
• 2:38:31
  Speaker 1: We don't know which wolf.
• 2:38:32
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:38:33
  Speaker 1: Right. I mean, this is, I think dog domestication is
• 2:38:36
  Speaker 1: one of those places where.
• 2:38:38
  Speaker 2: Both.
• 2:38:39
  Speaker 1: We come to terms with what we don't know and
• 2:38:41
  Speaker 1: the opportunity to discover new things. The very first scientific
• 2:38:46
  Speaker 1: paper that said when dogs were domesticated looked at a
• 2:38:50
  Speaker 1: type of DNA that's only inherited from your mom called
• 2:38:52
  Speaker 1: mitochondrial DNA. Our cells have a nucleus that has the
• 2:38:55
  Speaker 1: DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act
• 2:38:57
  Speaker 1: the way we do. And then it has little cells
• 2:39:00
  Speaker 1: that were once bacteria that we co-opted that make energy.
• 2:39:03
  Speaker 1: And you're only inheriting them from your mom. And there's
• 2:39:05
  Speaker 1: a ton of them. Like there's thousands of mitochondrial genomes
• 2:39:08
  Speaker 1: in every cell and only one of your nuclear genome.
• 2:39:11
  Speaker 1: So in ancient DNA, because there's way more, we started
• 2:39:14
  Speaker 1: just with that. It was the only thing we could recover.
• 2:39:16
  Speaker 1: And the first dog mitochondrial genomes that were recovered, people
• 2:39:19
  Speaker 1: were like, dogs were domesticated in Asia 150,000 years ago.
• 2:39:24
  Speaker 1: Which is clearly wrong, right? There weren't human populations, societies,
• 2:39:28
  Speaker 1: which is kind of what you need for dog domestication
• 2:39:31
  Speaker 1: because they're attracted to the garbage or the living around
• 2:39:34
  Speaker 1: where people were. So you need communities of people that
• 2:39:36
  Speaker 1: are staying in place together for some time before you
• 2:39:39
  Speaker 1: can have dog domestication.
• 2:39:40
  Speaker 2: Do we know for sure there weren't human populations like
• 2:39:43
  Speaker 2: that 150,000 years ago?
• 2:39:44
  Speaker 1: We don't. But we do know now that dogs probably
• 2:39:47
  Speaker 1: aren't that old.
• 2:39:47
  Speaker 2: I think what I read was 36,000.
• 2:39:49
  Speaker 1: I think it changes all the time. which is because
• 2:39:53
  Speaker 1: we don't know everything. And also probably because the first
• 2:39:57
  Speaker 1: dogs were in warm parts of the world. And so
• 2:39:59
  Speaker 1: we don't have the fossils. We don't have the DNA
• 2:40:02
  Speaker 1: and the fossils just didn't preserve. I think right now
• 2:40:05
  Speaker 1: what people are happiest with is that it was probably
• 2:40:09
  Speaker 1: sometime after the peak of the last ice age, sometime
• 2:40:12
  Speaker 1: 15 to 20,000 years ago. And I'm not sure where,
• 2:40:16
  Speaker 1: because again, probably in a warmer spot, there's been lots
• 2:40:19
  Speaker 1: of Gene flow, lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and
• 2:40:22
  Speaker 1: wolves that have made this a really hard problem.
• 2:40:24
  Speaker 2: Like you were talking about with the black wolves. Right.
• 2:40:27
  Speaker 1: Exactly like that. But what's cool about this date, 15
• 2:40:30
  Speaker 1: to 20,000 years ago, is that most of these people
• 2:40:32
  Speaker 1: are like, yeah, that's probably the date for dogs. Which
• 2:40:35
  Speaker 1: means if dogs only form when there are human communities
• 2:40:40
  Speaker 1: that are together, groups of people that are living together
• 2:40:43
  Speaker 1: in the same place for a long time, that they
• 2:40:45
  Speaker 1: were around 15 to 20,000 years ago. That is not
• 2:40:48
  Speaker 1: what archaeologists.
• 2:40:49
  Speaker 2: Think, right?
• 2:40:50
  Speaker 1: So these two weights of evidence are saying, you know,
• 2:40:54
  Speaker 1: we still don't know.
• 2:40:56
  Speaker 2: Sort of, right? But they do believe hunter-gatherers existed in
• 2:40:58
  Speaker 2: small tribes 15,000 years ago.
• 2:41:00
  Speaker 1: And maybe that was enough. But, you know, if you
• 2:41:02
  Speaker 1: think of domestication and scientists like to have names, we
• 2:41:06
  Speaker 1: like to have ways of classifying things. And so there
• 2:41:09
  Speaker 1: was recently a couple of friends of mine have published
• 2:41:12
  Speaker 1: a paper which they've redefined how you consider something domestic.
• 2:41:16
  Speaker 1: And they say a domestic population is something that can
• 2:41:18
  Speaker 1: only survive within a human environment, within a human niche.
• 2:41:22
  Speaker 1: And if you think of that as what our dogs are, right,
• 2:41:25
  Speaker 1: they can only really survive and breed as dogs within
• 2:41:27
  Speaker 1: this human niche, then you need a lot of humans
• 2:41:31
  Speaker 1: around and you need a sort of steady stream of
• 2:41:33
  Speaker 1: the crap that humans produce to do this. That's still
• 2:41:36
  Speaker 1: kind of early. Like it's still, yeah, maybe there were
• 2:41:39
  Speaker 1: hunter-gatherer populations that were more you know, established somewhere in
• 2:41:44
  Speaker 1: the South where we don't have dog bones.
• 2:41:46
  Speaker 2: Right, right. That's what's weird.
• 2:41:48
  Speaker 1: Stuff we don't know, right?
• 2:41:51
  Speaker 2: And then wolves don't, are most wolves from warmer climates? No, right?
• 2:41:55
  Speaker 2: They're from colder climates, aren't they?
• 2:41:57
  Speaker 1: All over the place.
• 2:41:58
  Speaker 2: All over the place? Well, Mexican wolves, right? There's Mexican wolves.
• 2:42:00
  Speaker 2: There's Mexican wolves.
• 2:42:02
  Speaker 1: There's, but we think that the closest living relative of
• 2:42:06
  Speaker 1: dogs is gray wolves. It's this gray wolf lineage. But
• 2:42:09
  Speaker 1: we don't know if dogs are outside of the diversity
• 2:42:12
  Speaker 1: of gray wolves, so it's an extinct type of gray
• 2:42:14
  Speaker 1: wolf that was the progenitor of dogs, or if they
• 2:42:17
  Speaker 1: fall within the diversity of all the lineages of gray
• 2:42:20
  Speaker 1: wolves that are around. And that's just because there's been
• 2:42:22
  Speaker 1: so much movement of DNA around that part of the tree.
• 2:42:27
  Speaker 1: I think it's a fascinating story that as we get
• 2:42:30
  Speaker 1: more information, we're going to learn more about people as well.
• 2:42:33
  Speaker 2: I just love that. Well, dogs are the most fascinating
• 2:42:36
  Speaker 2: to me because it's so obvious that there is manipulation involved.
• 2:42:41
  Speaker 2: It's so obvious that through selective breeding and also getting
• 2:42:46
  Speaker 2: these animals to get accustomed to people, getting close to
• 2:42:48
  Speaker 2: the fire, feeding them so they don't have to hunt anymore.
• 2:42:50
  Speaker 2: And then they bark when intruders come. And, you know,
• 2:42:53
  Speaker 2: we developed this sort of relationship where we work together.
• 2:42:57
  Speaker 2: It's so interesting that we see the genes change into
• 2:43:02
  Speaker 2: a poodle. We see this weirdness, or now it's a
• 2:43:05
  Speaker 2: border collie. Like, what? And then the variety?
• 2:43:07
  Speaker 1: Well, all of those, too, are probably Victorian, right? All
• 2:43:11
  Speaker 1: of the breeds that we think of today, whether it's
• 2:43:12
  Speaker 1: cattle or bison, they're, you know, within the last couple
• 2:43:15
  Speaker 1: hundred years. That is really fast selection by humans. So
• 2:43:20
  Speaker 1: we are manipulating the DNA of the species that we
• 2:43:24
  Speaker 1: surround ourselves with. And we have been for decades. 15
• 2:43:27
  Speaker 1: to 20,000 years and probably longer.
• 2:43:29
  Speaker 2: Just not in a laboratory.
• 2:43:30
  Speaker 1: Just not in a laboratory. But, you know, is our
• 2:43:33
  Speaker 1: backyard a laboratory? If I say, I like the way
• 2:43:35
  Speaker 1: that dog looks, but I like the way that that
• 2:43:38
  Speaker 1: one can swim in water. And I bet if I
• 2:43:39
  Speaker 1: breed them together, I can make one that has this
• 2:43:41
  Speaker 1: double layer coat so they can go get in that
• 2:43:43
  Speaker 1: frozen water, but they'll still have that like cute look
• 2:43:46
  Speaker 1: or something.
• 2:43:46
  Speaker 2: That's interesting, right? Because we're thinking about science as only
• 2:43:49
  Speaker 2: being done in a laboratory or manipulation only being done
• 2:43:54
  Speaker 2: in a laboratory. What's clearly done I mean, it was
• 2:43:57
  Speaker 2: done with plants forever.
• 2:43:58
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:43:59
  Speaker 2: Selective breeding of plants, splicing two plants together. Right.
• 2:44:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, when we graft plants together, I mean, that
• 2:44:05
  Speaker 1: is like all of the vineyards in France, which are
• 2:44:08
  Speaker 1: grafted onto American rootstocks because of the introduction of phylloxera,
• 2:44:12
  Speaker 1: this aphid that came from North America that was going
• 2:44:15
  Speaker 1: to completely devastate the wine industry. Now they're all spliced
• 2:44:19
  Speaker 1: onto American rootstocks that can survive this aphid.
• 2:44:21
  Speaker 2: Isn't that wild?
• 2:44:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:44:24
  Speaker 2: I talked to a rancher in California and they were
• 2:44:27
  Speaker 2: telling me that I think it was either the avocado
• 2:44:31
  Speaker 2: trees were spliced onto the pistachio trees or vice versa.
• 2:44:36
  Speaker 1: It's amazing that the plants can survive that, that they
• 2:44:38
  Speaker 1: don't go like, yo, that's not me.
• 2:44:40
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:44:40
  Speaker 2: We can't do that. We can't take a pig liver
• 2:44:43
  Speaker 2: and shove it in your. Yeah. Your body would fight
• 2:44:46
  Speaker 2: it off. Your immune system would fight it off.
• 2:44:47
  Speaker 1: Well, we're trying. Again, that's another cool thing that we
• 2:44:49
  Speaker 1: can do with this gene editing technology is we can
• 2:44:52
  Speaker 1: turn off the genes that would cause that rejection to happen.
• 2:44:55
  Speaker 1: So maybe someday we can use pig organs in the
• 2:44:58
  Speaker 1: lives of humans and save people from dying.
• 2:45:01
  Speaker 2: Or we can just re-engineer a new version of your organs. Yeah.
• 2:45:05
  Speaker 1: So that is really cool science, this thing called organoids,
• 2:45:08
  Speaker 1: where you can actually grow in a dish in a
• 2:45:11
  Speaker 1: lab organoids. version of a little brain, something that approximates
• 2:45:15
  Speaker 1: a brain or that approximates a heart or a kidney
• 2:45:18
  Speaker 1: or something else. We're using this at Colossal, for example,
• 2:45:20
  Speaker 1: to test hypotheses about what changes we might make to
• 2:45:25
  Speaker 1: bring about, to resurrect, to de-extinct the phenotypes that we're
• 2:45:28
  Speaker 1: interested in. If we grow an organoid that grows hair,
• 2:45:32
  Speaker 1: can we see what that hair looks like without having
• 2:45:34
  Speaker 1: to make a mammoth in order to see what that
• 2:45:36
  Speaker 1: change is going to do? But it has really amazing
• 2:45:39
  Speaker 1: potential for personalized medicine. So I can take some of
• 2:45:43
  Speaker 1: your cells. If you get a tumor, I can grow
• 2:45:45
  Speaker 1: them in this dish and I can challenge those cells
• 2:45:47
  Speaker 1: with different drug cocktails to see what works before I
• 2:45:49
  Speaker 1: put them in you. You know, this is, this technology
• 2:45:52
  Speaker 1: is so cool and really just beginning.
• 2:45:55
  Speaker 2: Well, it is, it's amazing when you think about this
• 2:45:58
  Speaker 2: technology and you think about what we had just a
• 2:46:01
  Speaker 2: few hundred years ago, and then you push a few
• 2:46:04
  Speaker 2: hundred years from now and you think, what are the possibilities?
• 2:46:08
  Speaker 2: And The only way to find out is to do
• 2:46:10
  Speaker 2: experiments like what you guys are doing. And so that's
• 2:46:13
  Speaker 2: one of the reasons why some of this pushback is
• 2:46:15
  Speaker 2: so silly. Like, would you rather no one ever do
• 2:46:18
  Speaker 2: this work? Or would you like to be the one
• 2:46:21
  Speaker 2: who does the work? Or is it just that you
• 2:46:24
  Speaker 2: think the work should never be done? Like, what is
• 2:46:27
  Speaker 2: the thought process?
• 2:46:28
  Speaker 1: Again, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity
• 2:46:31
  Speaker 1: mindset that if they do this, then we can't do this,
• 2:46:35
  Speaker 1: which is just it's not. It's not the way we innovate.
• 2:46:38
  Speaker 1: It's not the way we make progress.
• 2:46:40
  Speaker 2: But is this the nature of academia? Because it's very
• 2:46:44
  Speaker 2: gatekeeped even inside of academia, right? You work for a
• 2:46:49
  Speaker 2: university and you have to get the approval of all
• 2:46:51
  Speaker 2: the other people and you have to be politically aligned
• 2:46:54
  Speaker 2: with them and everyone has to say the right things
• 2:46:56
  Speaker 2: on Twitter. It's like there's a lot of weirdness, a
• 2:46:58
  Speaker 2: lot of groupthink that comes along with all that stuff.
• 2:47:00
  Speaker 2: And then You have to play politics in order to
• 2:47:03
  Speaker 2: get funding. You can't be ostracized. If you're ostracized, even
• 2:47:07
  Speaker 2: if you have tenure, when you see this with certain
• 2:47:10
  Speaker 2: scientists that have very outside-the-box ideas, they get pushed out
• 2:47:16
  Speaker 2: and they can't get funding anymore. Or if they don't
• 2:47:18
  Speaker 2: agree with a certain narrative, what's being pushed out? whether
• 2:47:21
  Speaker 2: it's public health or the environment or anything, they get ostracized,
• 2:47:24
  Speaker 2: even if they're actually talking about real data and science.
• 2:47:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, you know... We can agree that it's
• 2:47:31
  Speaker 1: a mess, right? It's a hot mess. But there is genuine,
• 2:47:36
  Speaker 1: real science that comes out of the university system, of
• 2:47:39
  Speaker 1: the academic system that we need. You know, all the
• 2:47:41
  Speaker 1: technology that led to MRIs, the early technology that gave
• 2:47:44
  Speaker 1: us CRISPR, this gene editing platform, was developed using funding
• 2:47:50
  Speaker 1: from the government in scientific labs by people who are
• 2:47:53
  Speaker 1: willing to take risks and step outside of that box.
• 2:47:56
  Speaker 1: And then it's taken outside of there and it's turned
• 2:47:58
  Speaker 1: into all of these cool things. I mean, there has
• 2:48:00
  Speaker 1: to be a place where we get both of these things.
• 2:48:03
  Speaker 1: Because there's some things that no one is ever going
• 2:48:05
  Speaker 1: to build a business around until it exists. And we
• 2:48:08
  Speaker 1: need this public system in order to do that.
• 2:48:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's what's so scary about what's going on
• 2:48:15
  Speaker 2: with politics and funding. And research, you know, because it's
• 2:48:21
  Speaker 2: like as soon as you stop defunding research, you start
• 2:48:23
  Speaker 2: making it more scarce and then making people... It's.
• 2:48:26
  Speaker 1: Just going to get worse.
• 2:48:27
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:48:27
  Speaker 2: It'll get worse.
• 2:48:27
  Speaker 1: It's going to get harder and we're going to fall
• 2:48:29
  Speaker 1: behind and we are going to lose the place that
• 2:48:32
  Speaker 1: we have had as innovators. And by we, I mean
• 2:48:35
  Speaker 1: this country. We are going to lose the place we
• 2:48:37
  Speaker 1: have has had innovators in biotechnology, innovators in physics, innovators
• 2:48:41
  Speaker 1: in all of these technologies because we've had such a
• 2:48:43
  Speaker 1: robust system. It's a balance. You know, we clearly need
• 2:48:46
  Speaker 1: both of these things. And right now... It's broken.
• 2:48:50
  Speaker 2: And there's a lot of weirdness that's going on with
• 2:48:54
  Speaker 2: biology in general in the world right now. And one
• 2:48:58
  Speaker 2: of them is, I think there was a third scientist
• 2:49:01
  Speaker 2: that was arrested for trying to bring in toxic mold
• 2:49:06
  Speaker 2: from China. We know that this one scientist was arrested.
• 2:49:10
  Speaker 2: And then I think there's been two more. So they're
• 2:49:12
  Speaker 2: trying to introduce this toxic mold into our food supply.
• 2:49:16
  Speaker 1: The same toxic mold?
• 2:49:17
  Speaker 2: I think... I think so. It might have been a
• 2:49:20
  Speaker 2: different one, but I know it's the same kind of thing.
• 2:49:23
  Speaker 2: See if you can find it, Jamie.
• 2:49:24
  Speaker 1: When I heard this the first time, and I've only
• 2:49:26
  Speaker 1: heard about the first one, my first thought was, you know,
• 2:49:29
  Speaker 1: is this deliberate or is this super naivete on the
• 2:49:33
  Speaker 1: part of the student?
• 2:49:33
  Speaker 2: It's coming from China, which scares the shit out of me.
• 2:49:35
  Speaker 2: Because if China wanted to cripple America's food supply, there'd
• 2:49:38
  Speaker 2: be a great way to compromise basically everything.
• 2:49:41
  Speaker 1: There is a country that is investing in science.
• 2:49:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God. Yeah, just their drone technologies off the charts.
• 2:49:47
  Speaker 2: I was watching a documentary yesterday on the autonomous production
• 2:49:51
  Speaker 2: of coal. And so they have these coal mines now
• 2:49:54
  Speaker 2: that are done entirely with electric trucks, and everything's done
• 2:49:58
  Speaker 2: with AI, and humans aren't involved at all. So these
• 2:50:02
  Speaker 2: trucks go, they dig, they mine, they fill the trucks,
• 2:50:06
  Speaker 2: they bring the coal back, and then when they're low
• 2:50:08
  Speaker 2: on batteries, they charge themselves.
• 2:50:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:50:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And they're running 24 hours a day around the clock. Yeah.
• 2:50:15
  Speaker 2: And we don't have anything like that.
• 2:50:17
  Speaker 3: No.
• 2:50:17
  Speaker 2: We're not even close to doing that.
• 2:50:19
  Speaker 1: And we're fighting about the amount of money that we
• 2:50:21
  Speaker 1: should invest into very basic infrastructure.
• 2:50:23
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 2:50:24
  Speaker 1: It's terrifying.
• 2:50:25
  Speaker 2: It is terrifying. It's terrifying because we always hope that
• 2:50:30
  Speaker 2: with every administration, there'll be positive changes. And it just
• 2:50:33
  Speaker 2: never seems to be the case. It's just like more
• 2:50:36
  Speaker 2: and more of the same and more short-sightedness.
• 2:50:39
  Speaker 1: Like, is it also this scarcity mindset? Like, I can't
• 2:50:43
  Speaker 1: agree with this person because they once said this thing.
• 2:50:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, why can't we have just a normal conversation
• 2:50:50
  Speaker 1: like you and I are having right now?
• 2:50:51
  Speaker 2: Well, I think it's because it's kind of engineered into
• 2:50:55
  Speaker 2: our social media structure that human beings are going to
• 2:50:58
  Speaker 2: fight with each other. The algorithm favors you looking and
• 2:51:02
  Speaker 2: interacting with things that upset you. You know, this is
• 2:51:05
  Speaker 2: just natural human nature. If you look at Like some
• 2:51:08
  Speaker 2: of the people that we were talking about earlier, negative scientists.
• 2:51:10
  Speaker 2: You see them online. They're tweeting negative things like all
• 2:51:13
  Speaker 2: day long.
• 2:51:14
  Speaker 1: It's probably because they don't have any funding. So they
• 2:51:18
  Speaker 1: can't actually do any science.
• 2:51:19
  Speaker 2: Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the U.S. at
• 2:51:21
  Speaker 2: Detroit airport. A second case in days involving the alleged
• 2:51:24
  Speaker 2: smuggling of biological material.
• 2:51:26
  Speaker 1: But is it the same biological?
• 2:51:28
  Speaker 2: No. Different stuff? What is this stuff? Worms.
• 2:51:32
  Speaker 3: Worms? Described as worms.
• 2:51:34
  Speaker 2: Certain worms require a government permit. I had heard that
• 2:51:38
  Speaker 2: there was a third one. This is the third. This
• 2:51:40
  Speaker 2: is the third. So there's a second one. And this
• 2:51:42
  Speaker 2: one happened. Oh, second case in days.
• 2:51:44
  Speaker 3: I will say they were going to the same place.
• 2:51:46
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
• 2:51:47
  Speaker 4: That's weird.
• 2:51:49
  Speaker 2: Another Chinese scientist also going to the University of Michigan. Boy,
• 2:51:54
  Speaker 2: that's also really crazy because the thing about China and
• 2:51:57
  Speaker 2: their scientists that come over to America is they all
• 2:51:59
  Speaker 2: have to check in with the CCP. Like if you
• 2:52:02
  Speaker 2: are a Chinese scientist and you're from China and you're
• 2:52:05
  Speaker 2: working in America, you got to check in. Which means
• 2:52:08
  Speaker 2: like how much of this research is just getting shared
• 2:52:11
  Speaker 2: with China? And it's all weird.
• 2:52:13
  Speaker 1: And we're focused on something else. We're focused on, yeah.
• 2:52:17
  Speaker 2: They play a very long game. And I think their
• 2:52:19
  Speaker 2: game involves raptors and T-Rexes. They're going to release all
• 2:52:23
  Speaker 2: the stuff you won't do.
• 2:52:23
  Speaker 1: I've seen that movie.
• 2:52:26
  Speaker 4: I wonder, like I worry about that.
• 2:52:28
  Speaker 2: Like your information, the stuff that you guys are working on,
• 2:52:32
  Speaker 2: if that stuff can be shared. compromised if someone can
• 2:52:35
  Speaker 2: get a hold of it. And then they start doing
• 2:52:37
  Speaker 2: that stuff over there.
• 2:52:37
  Speaker 1: The thing is the foundation for what we're doing, all
• 2:52:40
  Speaker 1: of the stuff from sequencing ancient DNA to gene editing technologies,
• 2:52:44
  Speaker 1: to learning how do we link certain DNA sequence changes
• 2:52:47
  Speaker 1: to the way something looks, this stuff is all out
• 2:52:50
  Speaker 1: there anyway, right? Like CRISPR technology exists. We're not working
• 2:52:54
  Speaker 1: on humans, but other companies are openly, right? It's not
• 2:52:57
  Speaker 1: like there's a.
• 2:52:58
  Speaker 2: Big scary- Well, you know the story from China where
• 2:53:00
  Speaker 2: the one doctor got in trouble and wound up going
• 2:53:02
  Speaker 2: to jail because they had supposedly inoculated these babies from HIV,
• 2:53:06
  Speaker 2: but in fact were making them more intelligent.
• 2:53:09
  Speaker 1: I think maybe that was two separate stories because I
• 2:53:12
  Speaker 1: know the story about Jiang Ke, that's He Jiang Ke
• 2:53:15
  Speaker 1: was the name of that scientist, and he went to
• 2:53:16
  Speaker 1: jail for three years. He actually did some training in
• 2:53:19
  Speaker 1: the U.S. His name is He. But he was trying
• 2:53:26
  Speaker 1: to make, trying to use gene editing tools to make
• 2:53:31
  Speaker 1: these babies have A particular mutation that we know is
• 2:53:34
  Speaker 1: protective against HIV. It's the one that stops the HIV
• 2:53:37
  Speaker 1: from entering the cells where it then kills the cells.
• 2:53:41
  Speaker 1: And I think this was a story that was broken
• 2:53:43
  Speaker 1: by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of
• 2:53:45
  Speaker 1: days before it was announced. But he thought that he
• 2:53:48
  Speaker 1: was going to be able to announce this to great
• 2:53:49
  Speaker 1: fanfare in front of a community that was going to
• 2:53:52
  Speaker 1: celebrate him for having done this. And the story broke
• 2:53:54
  Speaker 1: a few days early. But he had set this up,
• 2:53:57
  Speaker 1: a whole PR thing. He had... like YouTube videos that
• 2:54:00
  Speaker 1: were ready to go to explain what he had done.
• 2:54:02
  Speaker 1: He wasn't trying to do it in secret. He thought
• 2:54:04
  Speaker 1: he was going to be a hero, right? But people
• 2:54:07
  Speaker 1: were like, holy shit, dude, what the fuck? Like, no,
• 2:54:11
  Speaker 1: we're not editing human germlines, the cells that will be
• 2:54:14
  Speaker 1: passed on to the next generation. There's still a moratorium
• 2:54:17
  Speaker 1: against doing that work. The baby that was just born,
• 2:54:20
  Speaker 1: for example, they didn't edit any of his cells that
• 2:54:22
  Speaker 1: would get passed on to the next generation. It's only
• 2:54:24
  Speaker 1: the cells in his body. So those edits will only
• 2:54:27
  Speaker 1: ever live in him. And there's a difference between doing
• 2:54:30
  Speaker 1: that and it's the second one that we're uncomfortable with.
• 2:54:33
  Speaker 2: I thought they were editing it to make the children
• 2:54:37
  Speaker 2: have a potential for higher intelligence.
• 2:54:39
  Speaker 3: I think that's maybe an unintended consequence of the gene
• 2:54:44
  Speaker 3: that they were editing because in mice it did something
• 2:54:48
  Speaker 3: like that. And so I think they just assumed. They're
• 2:54:51
  Speaker 3: going to be smarter, but I don't think that they're
• 2:54:52
  Speaker 3: old enough to even test that yet.
• 2:54:54
  Speaker 2: Interesting. Maybe. But if they knew that, wouldn't they do that?
• 2:54:57
  Speaker 1: But it didn't end up even being the right mutation.
• 2:54:59
  Speaker 2: Because is HIV a real issue today? It's not really.
• 2:55:02
  Speaker 1: So the reason that he got whatever ethical permission he
• 2:55:05
  Speaker 1: did in China to do this is because they were
• 2:55:07
  Speaker 1: children that were born by... because the dad had AIDS.
• 2:55:12
  Speaker 1: And so what they were trying to do was create,
• 2:55:15
  Speaker 1: what he claimed he was trying to do was create
• 2:55:16
  Speaker 1: an environment where they would never accidentally get it. I
• 2:55:19
  Speaker 1: guess if there's blood.
• 2:55:20
  Speaker 2: And it also makes them smarter.
• 2:55:22
  Speaker 1: I don't know if they knew that at the time.
• 2:55:24
  Speaker 1: I would have seen if they did.
• 2:55:26
  Speaker 2: China's played a long game.
• 2:55:27
  Speaker 3: It definitely affected their brains is what they just keep
• 2:55:29
  Speaker 3: saying sort of.
• 2:55:30
  Speaker 2: In this article.
• 2:55:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they don't know because they haven't been able
• 2:55:33
  Speaker 1: to measure anything with these. I mean, they're guessing that
• 2:55:35
  Speaker 1: would have affected their brains at this point.
• 2:55:36
  Speaker 2: Well, when they're the leaders of the world in 20 years,
• 2:55:39
  Speaker 2: we'll know.
• 2:55:40
  Speaker 1: We'll know for sure.
• 2:55:41
  Speaker 2: We'll know.
• 2:55:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. This is, I mean, what makes us smart has
• 2:55:44
  Speaker 1: been a thing that people have been trying to solve
• 2:55:47
  Speaker 1: for a long time. And we're always looking for like,
• 2:55:49
  Speaker 1: The one or two genes that figure out this. Very
• 2:55:52
  Speaker 1: few traits are encoded by one or two genes. There
• 2:55:55
  Speaker 1: are some hair traits. Whether your lobes are attached or not,
• 2:55:58
  Speaker 1: that's one gene that you can change.
• 2:56:00
  Speaker 2: But it is quite fascinating to think that in the future,
• 2:56:03
  Speaker 2: dumb people will not exist.
• 2:56:05
  Speaker 1: I doubt that's true.
• 2:56:06
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 2:56:07
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 2:56:07
  Speaker 2: It may be relatively dumb compared to everyone else that's
• 2:56:10
  Speaker 2: alive then, but maybe far more intelligent than people that
• 2:56:13
  Speaker 2: are alive today.
• 2:56:13
  Speaker 1: Do you know what's interesting about the efforts that have
• 2:56:17
  Speaker 1: gone on to try to figure out genes that make
• 2:56:19
  Speaker 1: people smart? is that they can find associations between what
• 2:56:22
  Speaker 1: we're classifying as smart. And this is hard. Like when
• 2:56:25
  Speaker 1: you're saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have
• 2:56:28
  Speaker 1: a conversation with another person and shut up so that
• 2:56:30
  Speaker 1: you're actually listening to the other person?
• 2:56:32
  Speaker 2: Emotional intelligence.
• 2:56:33
  Speaker 1: Do you mean somebody who can solve a shitload of
• 2:56:35
  Speaker 1: math problems and be a physicist or whatever?
• 2:56:37
  Speaker 2: And be awkward socially.
• 2:56:38
  Speaker 1: Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good looking, right?
• 2:56:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, what do you mean when you say is
• 2:56:43
  Speaker 1: this thing? And so you have to define that first.
• 2:56:46
  Speaker 1: And then once it's defined... If you look for associations
• 2:56:50
  Speaker 1: between genes at high frequency with people who rank high
• 2:56:54
  Speaker 1: on whatever your thing is that you're ranking them on,
• 2:56:57
  Speaker 1: it's different depending on which human population you're studying. So it's,
• 2:57:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, and this makes total evolutionary sense. Different things
• 2:57:07
  Speaker 1: were under selection in different habitats at different times. times.
• 2:57:10
  Speaker 1: And that made different people smarter in different ways for
• 2:57:14
  Speaker 1: whatever that was. I actually think this is not how
• 2:57:17
  Speaker 1: we start editing ourselves because that's not how evolution works.
• 2:57:22
  Speaker 1: As soon as we edit everybody to be smart in
• 2:57:25
  Speaker 1: that particular way, And to be five foot ten, blonde
• 2:57:29
  Speaker 1: with blue eyes and perfect and never going to have diabetes.
• 2:57:32
  Speaker 1: The most attractive thing out there is going to be
• 2:57:34
  Speaker 1: the opposite of that.
• 2:57:35
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:57:36
  Speaker 1: So there will be. I just don't think people are
• 2:57:40
  Speaker 1: always thinking about we're going to get superhumans, but they
• 2:57:42
  Speaker 1: have a specific picture in their mind of what that means.
• 2:57:46
  Speaker 1: That's not the same picture that the Chinese government has
• 2:57:49
  Speaker 1: in mind. It's not the same picture that I have
• 2:57:51
  Speaker 1: in mind. Right. And that's. That's why I don't fear
• 2:57:55
  Speaker 1: it as much, I think, just because that's not how
• 2:57:59
  Speaker 1: it's going to happen. How it will happen is there
• 2:58:02
  Speaker 1: will be some massive pandemic and we discover that there
• 2:58:05
  Speaker 1: is a particular mutation that means you're going to die.
• 2:58:08
  Speaker 1: And then suddenly this most unethical thing that is like
• 2:58:11
  Speaker 1: completely abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be
• 2:58:14
  Speaker 1: the only ethical solution. That is how we get there.
• 2:58:18
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:58:19
  Speaker 1: In my imagination.
• 2:58:21
  Speaker 2: Wow. Well... I would love to have you back on
• 2:58:24
  Speaker 2: when you get more information and more breakthroughs and more
• 2:58:29
  Speaker 2: stuff that you're doing.
• 2:58:29
  Speaker 1: I would love to come back on.
• 2:58:30
  Speaker 2: I really, really enjoyed our conversation.
• 2:58:31
  Speaker 1: You should come to the lab. I know you got
• 2:58:32
  Speaker 1: to see.
• 2:58:32
  Speaker 2: I would love to come to the lab. I will
• 2:58:34
  Speaker 2: definitely do that. I promise you.
• 2:58:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 2:58:35
  Speaker 2: I promise. Thank you so much for being here. It
• 2:58:37
  Speaker 2: was really great. Thank you. I really, really enjoyed it.
• 2:58:39
  Speaker 2: And your book, Life As We Made It. how 50,000
• 2:58:44
  Speaker 2: years of human innovation refined and redefined nature, Beth Shapiro.
• 2:58:49
  Speaker 1: I think the rest of my Siberia story is in there,
• 2:58:51
  Speaker 1: including the part at the end.
• 2:58:52
  Speaker 2: Where I got arrested. Did you do an audio book?
• 2:58:54
  Speaker 1: I did. I read the audio book for that.
• 2:58:55
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 2:58:56
  Speaker 2: Yes. I love it. I'm so glad you read it.
• 2:58:58
  Speaker 2: I hate when other people have to read people's work.
• 2:59:01
  Speaker 1: Well, I asked if I could read it because my
• 2:59:04
  Speaker 1: first book, How to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read.
• 2:59:06
  Speaker 1: And I heard the audio book and I write in
• 2:59:08
  Speaker 1: first person and I tell stories and I try to
• 2:59:09
  Speaker 1: make it funny. And I was like, That's not how
• 2:59:11
  Speaker 1: it should be read. So I wrote to them and
• 2:59:13
  Speaker 1: I said, can I can I read this book? And
• 2:59:15
  Speaker 1: they said, oh, you're going to have to audition.
• 2:59:17
  Speaker 2: And I was like, audition for your own book.
• 2:59:20
  Speaker 1: What if I am not good enough to read my
• 2:59:23
  Speaker 1: own audio book?
• 2:59:24
  Speaker 2: Well, you clearly are. Well, luckily, you're a great talker.
• 2:59:27
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Thank you really for being here.
• 2:59:29
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it. It's really fun. Thank you. All right.
• 2:59:32
  Speaker 3: Bye, everybody.