#2338 - Beth Shapiro

Beth Shapiro, Ph. D., is an evolutionary molecular biologist and Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences. She’s also the author of “Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined―and Redefined―Nature.”https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/beth-shapiro/life-as-we-made-it/9781541644151https://colossal.com/team/beth-shapiro-ph-d/ Unlock yourself at https://join. WHOOP.com/jre for one month free 50% off your first box at https://www.thefarmersdog.com/rogan! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Hello Beth.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  It's very great to see you again.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  I am pleased to be here.

• 0:17Joe Rogan?

  It's been really interesting getting to talk to you and communicating with you and all the stuff that you guys have done at Colossal's been insane. So why don't you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do?

• 0:29Speaker 02

  I'm a scientist. I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics. It means we go out into the world, we dig shit up, and we extract DNA from it. And what is fantastic about that is it's being a modern day explorer. I get to go somewhere, I get to find out something new that completely rewrites what we thought we knew, and it's brilliant. And I get to fight with people a lot. And because I love to fight, I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those dire wolves.

• 1:02Joe Rogan?

  Why do you like to fight with people?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I don't really like to fight with people. I just felt like it was the right thing to say at this minute. I end up fighting with people, though, not because I want to, but because I feel like I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.

• 1:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's certainly a controversial subject, and you guys are certainly groundbreakers. So whenever there's a controversial subject and people are groundbreakers, you're without doubt going to get a lot of pushback. And a lot of people, they just want attention. A lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention. There's a lot of stuff going on.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a big, I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset. And this leads people to be kind of negative about everything. Like, that's going to be too hard. If I say that that's good, then that means that the thing that I want to do probably isn't going to get that money. Or if you get attention, that means I can't get attention. And it leads to this negativity that I think stifles innovation.

• 1:59Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of gatekeeping, too. You know, we talked about that recently. There's a lot of people that want to be the only people that are allowed to either discuss or work on things.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've spent my whole life working on this, therefore I am the only expert. And if anybody says something that disagrees with what I believe to be true, they're just wrong. I'm not even going to think about it. They're just wrong.

• 2:20Joe Rogan?

  It's unfortunate, but fortunately, we live in a very unique time where you can do podcasts, and podcasts get extraordinary amounts of attention. And so I think that's also one of the reasons why people push back so much as well. It's because they don't like that. They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. There are going to be people, there are going to be colleagues of mine, that are angry with me that I have come here to talk to you. And that is part of the problem.

• 2:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It just seems kind of silly, you know. But the subject, without all that stuff, the subject is absolutely fascinating. So how did you get started in this? Like, what did you initially want to do when you first started your career?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I actually started in broadcast journalism.

• 3:07Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was in high school. I was convinced that I wanted to work in broadcast journalism. I got a job working at the local TV station. I grew up in Rome, Georgia, northwest corner of Georgia. And I got a job at the TV station where I was first operating the camera and helping people write copy. And then I got to be on air. I auditioned for a spot in the morning where I would do local cut-ins on headline news in the like 24 and 54 after the hour. But I had to wake up really early in the morning and go to work. I was in high school. Go to work, write the script, go on TV, learn to read the teleprompter. It was pretty fun. And eventually got, and I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career. I went to the University of Georgia. They have a fantastic broadcast

• 3:50Speaker 02

  journalism school. I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations. And this job... Let's just say it wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college. There was, there were mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but I had only been asleep for one and a half hours after being out for too late at night, doing things that I shouldn't have been doing because I was underage, right? And had to go to work to write the news and then be on this broadcast radio station. It was terrible. Anyway, how did I move from there to science?

• 4:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I took this, took this amazing class. It's similar to a class that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently, where it was a field geology and archaeology program. And we started off on the East Coast. We learned about rocks and how to identify minerals. And then we drove across the country and slept outside in national parks and learned about the history of North America, the geological history, the human history, everything, while being there in person. Drove up the West Coast, drove back around the country. It was nine weeks. And I thought to myself while I was there, this is the story that I want to tell. I, I want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again,

• 5:06Speaker 02

  and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape. So I thought, I'll get a degree in science because I know how to do broadcast journalism. You know, the, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something. I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing. And that's, that's the history of it. I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist. I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out. I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist because it's so much fun.

• 5:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. How did I pick a field, working in ancient DNA? This is something I had no idea about. I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into, but wandering around the halls of the university that I did get into. And I met this guy called Alan Cooper, who was one of the few people in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab. That you need to be able to extract DNA from bones. So this DNA is in terrible condition. So we have to have a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something because then your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify. So we had one of these labs and I thought, well, that's kind of cool because I was interested

• 6:25Speaker 02

  in geology, I was interested in human history. Maybe I can use this as a way of telling stories that haven't been told before or rewriting the stories that we keep telling. This was a time where we were learning a lot about human history and human ancestry and there was a lot more to be learned. And so I thought this would be cool, but I wasn't sure. And Alan said, well, you know, it'd be cool. This would be fun. Plus, if you join my lab, you can go to Siberia. And I was in. I was like, yeah, sure. That's the deal for me. I'll go to Siberia.

• 6:53Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. So you got sent to Siberia? That's usually what they do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I have had several not amazing experiences in Siberia, but overall it's been, it's been fun. I've been a couple of times. Yeah.

• 7:09Joe Rogan?

  What time of year did you go?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Summer.

• 7:11Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the first time I went, it was for a meeting and I spent some time in Moscow first as a guest of one of my Russian collaborators. And then we went out to this meeting in Yakutsk and we got on a boat. What I learned about Siberia is that everything goes wrong. There's no bit of infrastructure that functions the way it's supposed to function. And I learned that initially. We ended up on this boat that was two hours late. It was warm and hot and there are so many mosquitoes.

• 7:37Joe Rogan?

  I was going to ask you about that. I've heard the mosquitoes are insane.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  It's so crazy. Like, one of the times I was out in Taimir, the north central Taimir Peninsula, and we had brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up so that we could go inside and take the masks, take the masks off of our face because you always have to wear a hood, otherwise you'll be breathing mosquitoes. And we were going outside and playing this game where we would just clap our hands in front of our face and then count how many you killed. And one time I killed something like 35 mosquitoes in one clap.

• 8:08Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And it's just awful. It's miserable.

• 8:12Joe Rogan?

  So they're trying to sting you through your clothes. They're just...

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:14Joe Rogan?

  And they're big too, right?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Depends the time of year. And early in the season, they're really big and you can catch them fast. And then they get different species come out that are smaller and smaller. And toward the end of the season, they're really tiny. Once I was up in the north of Alaska on the Ick-Pick-Puck River, we were floating down the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things like that. And it had been windy for the first few days, so it was fine. And I was, this was my first time out in the field, actually. It was northern Alaska. And I was like, these mosquitoes, people keep telling me there's mosquitoes. They're full of shit. There's no mosquitoes out here. Right? The wind is blowing. Then the wind dies down and then it's like, oh, fuck. Like, this is awful. There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while. And this poor animal, we were following the river, and he would, every few steps, he would just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come

• 9:01Speaker 02

  back up. Like, the mosquitoes are just, yeah.

• 9:04Joe Rogan?

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• 10:30Joe Rogan?

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• 11:49Speaker 02

  Something else.

• 11:49Joe Rogan?

  I've only been to Anchorage. Well, I've been to a couple of spots of Alaska, but I was in Anchorage and when I was there, it was the summertime. We were salmon fishing, my friend Ari and I, and we got bug repellent because we heard you got to spray mosquito spray. We stepped out of the car. The moment we opened up the car door, there was a cloud of mosquitoes. We're shrieking like little girls. We're like, ah, like what the hell? It was, I'd never experienced anything like it in my life. Like, where'd they come from?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Right. You don't expect it.

• 12:21Joe Rogan?

  There was nothing there. Like, it wasn't like we saw a cloud of mosquitoes, but we opened up, there was an impossible amount of mosquitoes that got into the car.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  It's terrible. In Time Air, I remember we would walk along the grass, this sort of tall grass with little flowers in it. Exactly the kind of place you can imagine mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there. But as you were walking, you would kick up the grass and they would just emerge off of the, off of the needles of grass. It was just... Really awful.

• 12:49Joe Rogan?

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

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I learned actually, because I was curious about this. How do they survive if there are so few red blood? Because mosquitoes mostly, they take a, they only take a, it's only the females that take a blood meal. And they only take a blood meal when they're making eggs or making a brood. They take it to reproduce, otherwise they feed on nectar. So how do these, how do so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there? And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate. And they don't need a blood meal to reproduce, but they do better if they get one. So they're after you, but they don't need you.

• 13:24Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Kind of makes it worse, right?

• 13:26Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. It's, it really is fascinating how aggressive they are.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:30Joe Rogan?

  Because, you know, Texas has mosquitoes, but they can live all year round, so they're kind of chill. They're not that worried about you.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  My boss was so funny too, Alan Cooper, the guy I went to work with. He was all, oh, I'm going to just wear this natural mosquito repellent. And you don't need any of this stuff that actually has poisons in it. Look at me and my natural. And we're out there and the, the wind dries down, the mosquitoes come and I'm with my deet. I'm like, you know, your natural repellent. He's going, shit, you, did you bring the deet? I'm like, yeah, yeah.

• 13:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you give up on that natural stuff real quick. I was watching a documentary, they're using Pine Pitch. There's a, have you ever seen Werner Herzog's film, Happy People? Life in the Taiga? It's really good. It's really fascinating. He follows these people that live on the Taiga River in Siberia.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 14:15Joe Rogan?

  And it's all these subsistence people that are like fishing and trapping. And they're living in these little cabins and they bring dogs with them everywhere. They travel around on snowmobiles. Really, well, it's, what's amazing about it is the title is Happy People. They're all happy. That's what's so weird. It's like, these people have a very hard life, but yet they're always smiling and they're having a good time and. You know, living this subsistence lifestyle somehow or another is like very fulfilling at like a, I don't want to say a genetic level, but like an internal level. There's something about it that like, this makes sense. Whereas society, like today, I don't think it makes sense. Because I think we, you know, you're a geneticist, you understand

• 14:59Joe Rogan?

  genes. We essentially have the same genes that people who lived 10,000 years ago had. Very different world.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:06Joe Rogan?

  And we're not really designed for this world.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Right. Well, you can see that in the increased rates of obesity, increased rates of diabetes, we're not.

• 15:14Joe Rogan?

  Also depression, anxiety.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:16Joe Rogan?

  All that stuff. And this is what happy people is kind of all about. I mean, Werner Herzog is, you know, he's brilliant. And so, he's narrating this whole thing too. You kind of get this understanding of his appreciation for these people that are living this very basic life.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:33Joe Rogan?

  But are very happy.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's impressive. When we were up there in Time Air, we'd flown for a couple days in this really awful Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried to, because, you know, infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia. It's a repeated theme from...

• 15:47Joe Rogan?

  You got a Siberian helicopter.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  It was an MI-8. And it was, it was in, it was in a place called Khatanga, which is where we were based while we were trying to get out into, into, and they kept loading all of our gear into this. And it's mostly these massive gas tanks. And you load all the gear into the gas tanks, and then all of the people, we had a dog, Pasha, who was with us, who did not want to get in that helicopter. I think the dog was the smartest person in our expedition team. But they would load us up, and they would try to start the helicopter, and it wouldn't start. And they would unload us. We would go back to the places we were staying. And then they would tinker with it and fix it. Anyway, we flew out, we got in the helicopter finally. We got up into the air. And then the Russian and French leaders of our expedition team decided that they were going to celebrate

• 16:33Speaker 02

  finally having taken off in this helicopter by smoking, right? We're sitting on the gas tanks, right? In this helicopter that we already think. Right. Fortunately, the helicopter had some missing windows. So, you know, there was

• 16:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  airflow. It's fine. No, this was insane. This whole, this, this particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things of it. So also, in the, I'm going to get to the story and eventually, but also in, in part of this, we were traveling forever out into this part of the time era where they had predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones and woolly rhino bones and all the bones of the animals we're interested in. So we're flying out there and we start to land and I'm thinking, great, we're there. I get out of this crazy firebomb in the air that I'm in. We're gonna, we land. No, no, we did not get off. Instead, we picked up a random family that had been out there on their own. Parents, a child. Yeah, it was two parents and a child and they had backpack

• 17:29Speaker 02

  with their gear and a massive cooler. Right, that's what they had. No words. They're French. They speak French to the team that's there. People are having a conversation in Russian and then we take off again. And I'm thinking-

• 17:42Joe Rogan?

  Was that planned to pick these people up or were they trapped?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I think it was planned, just there was a lack of communication. But whatever, the helicopter took off twice and then it landed and everybody unloaded and we set up the, the tent, the camp. And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs. You blow them up and you bring out the outboard and you put them on the lake and we're looking around and we discovered that we had landed in a place where we were going to be for six weeks that had been glaciated during the last ice age, which, which meant that our chances of finding what we wanted were really small.

• 18:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  I know. It was devastating. And the, the Russian, we had a cook with us. The Russian cooks had brought medical ethanol because it weighed less per unit of alcohol than vodka, which they would normally bring on the helicopters. So they brought medical ethanol to drink.

• 18:35Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you, you can only take so much stuff with you.

• 18:39Joe Rogan?

  Because it weighs less than alcohol. That's a crazy decision.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Well, you know, they, they decided it was safe. Anyway, by three days in, it's 24 hour sunlight. We're at 72 degrees latitude.

• 18:53Joe Rogan?

  Did you try it? The medical ethanol?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  I tried the medical ethanol. I mean, obviously.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  You water it down with a little bit of river water and you have it with your freshly caught fish that you've laid and yeah, it's great. Yeah. We had fish and rice for the whole time. That was-

• 19:11Joe Rogan?

  So you had to catch your food?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  We had to catch our food, yes.

• 19:13Joe Rogan?

  Luckily, it's probably a lot of fish up there.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Fish and there were some geese and some ducks that they would try to shoot while we were on our zodiacs, normally without telling us that they were about to shoot. It was a very-

• 19:22Joe Rogan?

  So you just hear boom, boom-

• 19:24Speaker 02

  And then the thing would, or you'd be sitting there looking at something and suddenly the zodiac would take off because whoever was in charge had seen something he wanted to shoot at in the distance.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling this story.

• 19:37Joe Rogan?

  Because it's fun. It's a fun story.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  So we were there. We're there for, I don't know, maybe it was two or three days looking around and it was about two o'clock in the morning. The, we were inside this little tent that we'd built so that we could eat in it, sort of the kitchen tent where we were. And it was a big mesh tent to keep the mosquitoes out so that we didn't have to have everything. And everybody is just staring off into the distance glumly. The medical ethanol was gone. You know, everybody was sober. We were gonna be for the next five weeks. We were gonna be stuck in this place where we weren't gonna be able to find what we were. And then all of a sudden, these three dudes show up outside of our tent with machine guns. Right. And I'm thinking, everybody's thinking, what the fuck? Like, we just flew forever in a helicopter over nothing at all. Nothing, except for this French family that

• 20:24Speaker 02

  we picked up randomly along the way. And everybody's looking around and there's this real moment of, what the hell are we gonna do? And then the guy who was the expedition leader recognizes these two dudes and he's like, "Oh, friends. Oh, good to see you", blah, blah, blah. And I'm thinking, what's gonna happen when they realize we don't have any more vodka, medical ethanol?

• 20:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And it turns out that they are, they were, members of the Dolgon community, which is an actual family of subsistence people that still live up on the time air. They herd reindeer. And they had seen the helicopter and had wondered what we were up to and just set out over the landscape that they'd normally live on to try to find us. Yeah, pretty cool, actually.

• 21:11Joe Rogan?

  That's cool. So did you hang out with those people?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Well, we did. They were disappointed that we didn't have any alcohol, obviously.

• 21:19Joe Rogan?

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• 22:05Joe Rogan?

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• 22:35Speaker 02

  It's a theme. It was Russia, so it's a fair theme. But the French couple, this is just, you're not going to believe me when I say this, right? Okay, the French couple said, "I got this." And they get up and they go back to their little tent area that they'd set up in the middle of nowhere, and they bring back their cooler, and they open it up, and inside is cheese.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Like a massive gouda?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  And a massive brie? Why? I don't know. I don't know. Right? But they had cheese. And so we cut the cheese and shared the cheese with our Dolgon friends and they were happy. And the next day, we took them back with the Zodiacs to their, to their community. And you know what was most amazing about this experience? And it, everything about it was cool. We saw these people that were living in these tiny little huts in part of the world where it goes to forty below. And it doesn't matter if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius because they cross at that level. Right? It's forty below. And during the winter for months and dark. And they're herding reindeer and they're living in these tiny little things that they cut in half during the winter. So that half of it is used for heating and half of it is used for the family to live in.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Everything that they own is on these things on skids that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost in, in the snow. Or in the summer, trying to find the land for the animals to graze. And this is how they live. And that was the only time in that experience where I could take off the headnet. Because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals.

• 24:14Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  It was really impressive.

• 24:17Joe Rogan?

  They only wanted to attack the animals?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  They were after the animals and they really left us alone.

• 24:21Joe Rogan?

  Probably because that's their natural source.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, more natural than, there's more of them there. I mean, I don't know, maybe they're larger, but it's, it was.

• 24:29Joe Rogan?

  They're probably accustomed to it, right? Though also like for thousands of years, they've probably been just feeding off of reindeer.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think about that though, but I think about those poor, that poor moose from Alaska who was also clearly bothered by the mosquitoes. I imagine the reindeer were as well, but, and it was, it was pretty cool.

• 24:44Joe Rogan?

  Were these people riding the reindeer?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  They did ride them. In fact, I got to, they put me up there and showed me how I could ride the reindeer.

• 24:50Joe Rogan?

  Is this their place?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 24:52Joe Rogan?

  Wow, so you were in this area?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, I was there during the summer though, so it wasn't, there wasn't snow on the ground. It was all just a very grassy, wet, super wet, grassy, and the, the moisture in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.

• 25:06Joe Rogan?

  It is so fascinating to me that people will live like this, generation after generation after generation.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:12Joe Rogan?

  And the fact that you can somehow, these are one of the weird animals, caribou are, that you can herd.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:18Joe Rogan?

  And people ride them.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And milk them, yeah, yeah.

• 25:22Joe Rogan?

  And then occasionally whack one.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're great, right? It's, it's, uh, animals are, have always been a really great storage mechanism. That's one of the hypotheses about animal domestication. Why did this take place? If we had plants, but there are going to be years where there's plenty to eat and years where there's not enough to eat. But if you, in those years where there's plenty, if you store some of that nutrition in animals, then in the years where there's less, you can eat those animals. So it's a very safe way of storing what you can grow.

• 25:48Joe Rogan?

  That's a fascinating way to look at storing. I just want to know how they ever figured out how to herd those reindeer? Like, what did you do? Like, how did, who was the first person to figure out how to get them all to stay together?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Right, I think that about a lot of domestic animals. Like, who was the, I also think that about milk. Like, who was the first person who decided, I can have a go at that, you know?

• 26:10Joe Rogan?

  I mean, they're probably starving. They probably, I mean, they must have tried everything. I mean, that's how we found out what mushrooms are edible, right? Because a large percentage of them will just kill you immediately. But people are so desperate for anything.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of them are trying to tell you though by being like bright red or bright purple and saying.

• 26:25Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  But we're dumb, so we're like, bright red, I'll lick that.

• 26:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it might be an apple. It's confusing. Some bright red things are delicious, it's really good for you. Wow, so these people that live up there, what, what was their history? Like, had they been living up there their whole life?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Those particular individuals have, yeah, but I think they're, they have a long history. The, the culture has a long history there. And, I mean, we're, we're still, I think, we're still learning about how humans have dispersed around the world and how they got to be the places where they are today. But I really think it's impressive that there are people who are hanging on to that culture.

• 27:01Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  And really able to, you know, they're, they're trying now to relearn their native languages because during the communist era, they were all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the same way as everyone else, but.

• 27:13Joe Rogan?

  Even up there?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Even up there.

• 27:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow, like they sent an emissary and said, guys. It's time to speak the mother tongue.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Maybe they had to go to the squares like you see in Yakutsk and all these other places where they have the big squares with the speakers on the top where they would go for the daily admonishings or whatever from the Communist Party, who knows.

• 27:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow, what a weird way to live. It's just, it's so fascinating that there's pockets of these humans that live like this all over the world. Obviously, the people in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes of the world. It's just so interesting.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  And we have so much to learn from them.

• 27:49Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  I think any, it would be, I mean, obviously, that's such a cool job, how getting to go and actually try to communicate with people who haven't been talked to before, but you kind of don't want to because you don't want to ruin that.

• 28:00Joe Rogan?

  Right. Isn't that an interesting perspective because I don't want to live like that. Like, I don't want to live in the Amazon with a leaf over my private parts. But we assume they do.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Not even for a week?

• 28:09Joe Rogan?

  Nope, nope, don't want to do it. There's so many things out there that'll eat you. And there's so many bugs that can kill you and snakes that can kill you. It's like, uh uh. I'd like, rather watch a video.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:21Joe Rogan?

  David Attenborough documentary. I don't want to go there. I have a good friend who lives there, Paul Rosely. He goes there all the time. He's been on the podcast a few times. And he lives in the Amazon. And his whole thing is, he's there protecting the rainforest. And what they do is they take these people that are, they're just poor people that have no options and they're loggers. And so he pays them more money to protect the rainforest. So they get to quit the logging job and then protect the rainforest. And then through funding, they, they buy up parcel of land and protect it and save it. But he's had some gnarly encounters with uncontacted people where at one point in time, they realized they were, they were actually being hunted and they barely escaped with their life.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 29:04Joe Rogan?

  And you start hearing weird noises in the bushes and then you realize like, oh, boy, these are people. Like, we're being stalked right now.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  By the most sophisticated hunting animal out there.

• 29:15Joe Rogan?

  But not only that, I would imagine, at the stage that these people are at, they've been living there for thousands and thousands of years. They probably have incredible perception, incredible senses.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Because they have to.

• 29:28Joe Rogan?

  Right. They probably knew these people were coming a long time ago. They, you know, they probably heard the boat coming down the river. They prepared, they got ready, they, they know where all the paths are. They know which way the people would go. Like, you're utterly helpless.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  How did he get out of this?

• 29:46Joe Rogan?

  They got out just in time, just in time.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  They just escaped?

• 29:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but one of his friends, one of the people that he was working with, did not. He, he, they would have these gifts, like, so they would take these rafts and to try to make contact with these people, they would float these rafts towards them filled with food. And they were doing this as like a peace gesture. And this guy had done this several times, and then one time he didn't come back, and they found him filled with arrows.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they just killed him. They just decided, you know, maybe they had a bad experience with some other person from some, some other Westerner, and they decided, you know, we're done. But they're rightly terrified of humans, because when these people that come in that want to extract resources, whether it's the loggers, or whether, whatever it is, if there's some minerals or anything else they find there, they just kill everybody. It's, there's horrific human rights violations that occur there. Where these, they just hire the worst people in the world to go in and wipe out these tribes, because these tribes are resisting them taking over this land.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  We have a history of this.

• 30:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we, we do. We have a deep history. Which is really fascinating about the Amazon in particular, because, you know, we've had a bunch of conversations on, one of them recently, with Luke Caverns, where we went over the LIDAR discoveries of these sophisticated grids and all the stuff that's in the Amazon, where they really thought that this was just rainforest forever. And then slowly over time, they're like, no, there was like a huge civilization here of millions of people. So these people that are the uncontacted people, I mean, I wonder how many of them were like the preppers of the Amazon world from, you know, 4,000 years ago, or whatever it was.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:30Joe Rogan?

  Or it wasn't even that long ago. The Percy Fawcett, Percy Fawcett, right? That's his name? The guy who, one of the guys who, that's, he's the main character in that book, The Lost City of Zee, he's one of the people that went there. When they, when the first settlers went there, or when the first explorers went there, they talked about these incredible, like sophisticated civilizations. And then people went back a hundred years and there was none of that, so they thought that they had just made it up. It turns out, the first people probably gave these folks horrible diseases, and it wiped out millions of people, and then the jungle just consumed whatever structures and houses and stuff that they had, and all that's left is these grids that you can see when you fly over in LIDAR.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so cool. You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really. I noticed it recently, I was flying over Europe, and you can see the old trellises from old, you know, I don't know how old, but it's just so cool how we can see remnants of civilizations, and it just makes you think, what happened? Like, this is some of the coolest mysteries. That's what's so cool about working in ancient DNA, too, is we can just go to places, get DNA from stuff, and learn something that we never knew before. It's fun.

• 32:42Joe Rogan?

  So, you get interested in DNA, you go to Siberia, all that jazz. How do you get started working with a company like Colossal? How does that take place?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  All of us working in ancient DNA, we are constantly answering the same question from the media, which is, when are we gonna bring dinosaurs back to life?

• 33:04Joe Rogan?

  Because Jurassic Park?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right.

• 33:07Joe Rogan?

  We're so simple. One great movie, and everybody's like, when's that gonna happen?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  And people say, people actually say that my field was spawned by Jurassic Park. The whole idea that we could get DNA stuff, that's not true. It was actually the other way around. And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group, which was the first group to show that you could get DNA in something after it died. That was actually from a kwaga, which is a type of zebra. They had gotten...

• 33:41Joe Rogan?

  What a cool name.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, well, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the kwacha.

• 33:47Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, even better.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kinda bad for the microphone, probably, gross. I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?

• 33:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  So they sound like that. I don't know. Who knows?

• 33:59Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Anyway, they showed that you could get DNA from this skin. And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that I've heard in a long time. That must mean we can bring dinosaurs back to life. And everybody started racing to get the oldest and coolest DNA. And so there were papers in the best journals of science that never published anything that's wrong ever, ever, that said, look, here's dinosaur DNA. And look, here's DNA from a Miocene aged leaf. And look, here's this. And all of it is crap. We now know. In fact, the first dinosaur DNA sequences that were published, if you took them at the time and you typed them into the internet and you compared them to the earliest of the, what is today this big repository of all DNA sequences

• 34:44Speaker 02

  of everything that's ever been sequenced. What came back was a close match to a bird. We now know, because there's more DNA sequences there, that it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken. And some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd been working on those bones had fried chicken for lunch every day.

• 35:05Joe Rogan?

  So it's chicken contamination?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like greasy fingers on your dinosaur fossils. And look, now we have ancient DNA.

• 35:12Joe Rogan?

  That is hilarious. That's how little they knew about DNA. What year was this around?

• 35:17Speaker 02

  That would be the early 90s.

• 35:19Joe Rogan?

  The early 90s. And when was DNA first discovered?

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that. But it was really, the idea, what really helped this field along was the invention of PCR. It's an acronym for polymerase chain reaction. It's a way of, Carey Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip.

• 35:40Joe Rogan?

  On LSD.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you have your best ideas when you're high.

• 35:46Joe Rogan?

  Some people have great ideas. Some people go kooky. You know, some people lose their marbles and never come back.

• 35:52Speaker 02

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

• 35:57Joe Rogan?

  I like your scientific exploration mind.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  A good scientist always wants to know.

• 36:02Joe Rogan?

  You never know.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:03Joe Rogan?

  Maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that little piece of paper.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Probably not, but.

• 36:08Joe Rogan?

  Probably not.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  You never know. Anyway, he discovered a way to photocopy DNA, to make lots of copies of the same thing, which then made it possible to learn the sequence using the technologies of the day. And that was what made it possible, really, for ancient DNA to take off, was this ability to photo. Because there's, when an animal dies, or a plant dies, the DNA in the cell starts to get chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces by things like UV, right? We go out in the sun, we put sunscreen on, and that stops the UV from breaking our DNA. But it's not terrible to get some sunlight. As you probably just saw, there was an article out saying, "Hey, dummies, you know, we need some sunlight in order to make vitamin D." But we have a repair mechanism so that when your DNA breaks, it doesn't stay that way. We evolved this mechan- but once you're dead, you no longer have the energy for that to work.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  And so these damaged parts of DNA accumulate. And also things like bacteria and microbes get in there and chew up the DNA to recycle the animal to the next generation, or plant, or whatever. And so the DNA that we get in an old thing, like a mammoth bone, is really short fragments, like maybe thirty, or forty, or fifty letters of DNA long. In comparison, if I were to take a swab from my cheek and sequence that, I could get strings that are hundreds of millions of letters long. This is living DNA. So ancient DNA is in really crap condition. And it's also mixed with stuff. So if I extract DNA from a mammoth, I'll get some mammoth DNA, but I'll get a lot of those microbes that are in there chewing up DNA.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  I'll probably get some of my DNA, because I touched that mammoth bone. Get DNA from whoever else touched that thing. This has been a real problem in archaeology, because we're trying to get DNA from humans. But we're humans, and so we touch these things, and then, I don't know if it's my DNA, or if that thing DNA.

• 37:54Joe Rogan?

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• 39:14Joe Rogan?

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• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, or dropping an eyelash. In my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world, we have these really sophisticated... It's like working in a virus lab where you're scared of everything, but we turn it around. So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out. We don't want any air coming in. We wear these suits where it looks like we're terrified, you know, with a face mask and hairnet, and we're totally covered, and we bleach everything. It's not because we're afraid of those bones. We're afraid that we're going to get our DNA in that bone, and then we're not going to be able to do our work.

• 40:24Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it took that and the ability to amplify those tiny little pieces of DNA for us to really figure out that we could get DNA out of things. For a long time, people thought we were never going to get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem. You know, we touch a bone, we're just going to get human DNA and we're never going to be able to know the difference. But then with PCR and with the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish, we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is probably one of the crowning achievements of my field, ancient DNA. Svante Paba won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for this.

• 40:57Joe Rogan?

  What did they extract it from?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Bones, different bones. The very first Neanderthal genome sequence was actually a mixture of several bones because, you know, there wasn't very much DNA in any of them and they were able to pull it together. Actually, my husband, who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence.

• 41:14Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was cool.

• 41:16Joe Rogan?

  That's really cool.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  But then they, the Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that they had no idea was going to belong to a totally new species of human, right? And they were able to get a really high-coverage, whole genome out of this tiny little finger bone that totally rewrote what we thought we knew about evolutionary history.

• 41:38Joe Rogan?

  And that's pretty recently, right?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, within the last decade.

• 41:42Joe Rogan?

  Jamie and I, we did a podcast recently, we were talking about the big head people. What are they called again?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Ju- what was it? This Giuliani or something?

• 41:50Joe Rogan?

  Julians?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  I've seen this, this is really recently.

• 41:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, super recent. It was like December of 2024, they released this paper.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was super cool. And it just highlights how much we don't know, right? How every, especially in paleoanthropology, and this is a field where, you know, people will take like, yeah.

• 42:09Joe Rogan?

  Jularen.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Jularen.

• 42:11Joe Rogan?

  That's it. Lost species of humans with an abnormally large skull, which lived alongside Homo sapiens. So they died off somewhere, they lived in China between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so if they were able to breed with humans, they probably did. And they probably bred with Neanderthals and they probably bred with Denisovans because, you know, that's what we do.

• 42:33Joe Rogan?

  Wild stuff.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:35Joe Rogan?

  And then, of course, the Hobbit people, the Island of Flores people.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Flores.

• 42:39Joe Rogan?

  A little tiny.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  No one has still been able to get DNA from those samples now, but, I mean, someday. Someday it'll happen. We've tried, Sponti's team has tried, a lot of people have attempted. It's just they're too degraded. They're from a hot place. All of those things that degrade DNA, they, it happens faster in hot places.

• 42:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's probably a lot more to be discovered, too.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  So much.

• 43:03Joe Rogan?

  They only really found it at a one location, right?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. And one thing that people have tested, actually, this again was work that my husband did, was whether the people who live there today, the Ramfasasa people, are related to them, and they're not. It seems like, because they're small as well, and the question is, is there something weird about them? This is actually really cool. It was a really cool result. There are, it's hard to know exactly what bits of changes in your DNA code for making you big or small, but clearly, it's not just one thing, because there's not just people my size and people normal size. I'm only five feet tall, right? It's, we have a big spectrum of, so there's lots of different genes that are involved with this. But we, we kind of have an idea of where those genes are in a genome and what they might be. And

• 43:48Speaker 02

  with these people who are all small, the idea, the hypothesis, was that there was some new thing in their DNA that led to them being small. But it wasn't. They just are at the extreme of all the things we already know.

• 44:01Joe Rogan?

  Is it just island dwarfism?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  It's just, you know, a small population on an island.

• 44:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Different alleles go to fixation. And yes, I mean, weird things happen on islands.

• 44:10Joe Rogan?

  Like elephants even.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Elephants dwarf, yeah, but dodos, dodos got bigger.

• 44:14Joe Rogan?

  And so do lizards.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  They dwarf or they get bigger?

• 44:17Joe Rogan?

  They get bigger, yeah, like the komodo.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That's one of the scariest animals.

• 44:21Joe Rogan?

  Creepiest animals. I can't, I'm so embarrassed to tell you how many times I've watched videos of them eating large animals whole.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Like cattle?

• 44:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they eat like sheep and monkeys. It's horrific.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Why do we watch that?

• 44:33Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. You're like, is this gonna happen? You know, you open up Instagram, like, oh, no. You see this poor goat, and you see this slobbery lizard.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And you can't help, you're like, I'm, I'm gonna watch.

• 44:43Joe Rogan?

  They're so gross. Their mouth is filled with Botulism and ugh.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Is that what kills them, the botulism?

• 44:48Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a venom as well. They think there's a lot of toxins in their mouth and I think there's also a venom. I think they used to think it was just poison, just botulism and just various bacteria. But now I believe they think it's a venom. I watched another horrible video where they would bite this buffalo. They just bite its hindquarters and then follow it while the venom is slowly like taking its, running its toll through the body. And then eventually the poor buffalo gets to the point where it can't move and they just start eating it alive.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  I think I've seen that one. I think I've seen that one.

• 45:25Joe Rogan?

  Nature is so rough.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Would you go?

• 45:28Joe Rogan?

  It's so brutal. To Komodo Island, no chance.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Really?

• 45:31Joe Rogan?

  No, I remember Sharon Stone's husband. I believe he was either a journalist or someone who owned a newspaper or something like that. And they went to see the Komodo dragons at the zoo. I think it was in San Francisco. And they took their shoes off when they enter into this Komodo dragon area to like not contaminate. And apparently he had white socks on and they decided that his foot looked delicious. And they bit him. Yeah, yeah, it bit him. I don't know what happened with that. This was, you know, an ex-husband of hers back in the dizzay.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.

• 46:06Joe Rogan?

  I don't think she did. I think it was just one of those things where this guy just didn't know what he was getting into. And should have had white socks on or just, it's just doing what a Komodo dragon does and biting whatever it can.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I wouldn't have thought white socks.

• 46:19Joe Rogan?

  Here it is. Bronstein underwent surgery to reattach several thousand severed tendon sand. Oh, severed tendon sand to rebuild his big toe that was crushed by the dragon's jaws. Oh.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just missing his face.

• 46:35Joe Rogan?

  Oh, tendon sand, okay. Oh, so he was done, was able to pry open the reptile's mouth and escape through a small feeding door in the cage while the zookeeper distracted the dragon. Oh my god.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Wait, he was in the feeding cage?

• 46:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, whoopsies. Oh, they mistook his, his white tennis shoes. That's what it was. It wasn't socks. So this story's old. This story is from.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  They had him taken off. It was his shoeless foot.

• 47:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they had him remove his white socks. Oh, it was a shoeless foot.

• 47:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so they thought that his tennis shoes would look like the rats.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Um.

• 47:09Joe Rogan?

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

• 47:12Speaker 02

  And his foot looks like a rat.

• 47:14Joe Rogan?

  Instead it looks like flesh. Oh, my god.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  This sounds like someone did a dumb thing. Like, this is...

• 47:20Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely. A lot of dumb things. What year is this, Jamie? Twenty... 2001. Yeah. Ugh.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Well, bad decisions, bad outcomes.

• 47:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not going to Komodo Island.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.

• 47:36Joe Rogan?

  No, no, I'm not going to any of those places. No. No, no, no, no, no. I get it. I like, I know what they are. I can watch them through the cage. I'm good. I don't need the additional thrill.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Right. But there are places where there are big things, like dodos, that are amazing and probably not going to kill you, so...

• 47:53Joe Rogan?

  Sure, there's some stuff that won't kill you, like giraffes.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Giraffes. I've been told that a giraffe is the dumbest animal, but...

• 48:00Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know this, and I wouldn't have suspected it, because they're so gorgeous, and you wouldn't think that something that gorgeous would be so dumb. But I have friends who... Matt James, who's the chief animal officer at Colossal, he's worked with at lots of different zoos throughout his career, and he's told me that there are multiple occasions where he has had to save a giraffe from accidentally killing itself because it's so dumb.

• 48:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, they're so kind that they let babies feed them. Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Maybe they're just... There's nothing going on in there.

• 48:27Joe Rogan?

  When my kids were little, you could go to the San Diego Zoo, and you would give them lettuce. And little babies are allowed to hold up, like a two-year-old can hold up their arm, and this enormous tongue comes wrapping around that piece of lettuce, and they giggle and everything. But they trust them so much that they let little kids feed them. Like, they set it up so people can feed these... And they seem so calm.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Dossile, yeah.

• 48:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like, they're just happy they're not getting eaten by lions.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Sounds a little dangerous to me, though. If they're... If they are genuinely stupid, will they accidentally, at some point, take that baby's hand? And then they have huge, strong necks, right?

• 49:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, they fight each other with their necks.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  This is they're kind of smart.

• 49:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 49:05Speaker 02

  But this is, I don't know...

• 49:07Joe Rogan?

  The ability to make inferences based on statistical information has so far been tested only on animals having large brains in relation to their body size, like primates and parrots. They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, can rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes. They presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quantities of highly liked food and less preferred food. The experimenter covertly drew one piece of food from each container and let the giraffes choose between the two options. In the first task, we varied the quantity and relative frequency of the highly liked and less preferred food pieces. In the second task, we inserted a physical barrier in both containers so giraffes only had to take into account the upper part of the container when predicting the outcome.

• 49:51Joe Rogan?

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

• 50:02Speaker 02

  I mean, cool. But I also trust a person who has tried to keep giraffes from killing themselves by doing dumb things to tell me that a giraffe isn't always making the best decisions.

• 50:13Joe Rogan?

  Perhaps they're intelligent for the environment they belong in.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  I'm sure that's true. I mean, otherwise, that's how evolution works.

• 50:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but when you put them in the zoo, they're like, "Look, we have all our food."

• 50:23Speaker 02

  There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in.

• 50:26Joe Rogan?

  You know, like a kid that never leaves his parents' basement and plays Call of Duty till he's 35, you know, probably doesn't have like the best social intelligence, probably like the, probably gonna be pretty awkward when you get him out in the wild.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Probably, yes.

• 50:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's probably the same thing with giraffes.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did you hear that, James? Talking to my 15-year-old.

• 50:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's played a lot of video games. They're very addictive. It's a real problem, and they're gonna get worse. They're gonna get way better, you know? As science makes things more and more addictive.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:57Joe Rogan?

  One of the things they're really good at, these designers...

• 50:59Speaker 02

  And algorithms.

• 51:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. But they're just so good at making games that are just incredibly compelling.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And fun, yeah.

• 51:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so fun. Way more fun than going outside and getting bullied.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:09Joe Rogan?

  You know, that's the problem. And, you know, you could be a badass in Call of Duty, all you do is sit in there.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Or War Thunder. That's the game that my son is into.

• 51:17Joe Rogan?

  War Thunder? I don't know about that one. What's that one?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  It's about like planes and things that you build and then fight. I don't know what's it.

• 51:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, pretty crazy stuff. Yeah, just imagine if you could take one of those Dennis Ovens and show them that.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  That is an interesting question. What would we do if we could bring a Neanderthal or a Denisovan back? De-extinct one of them? We are not doing that at Colossal. They're humans. We cannot ask them for consent to do this. We're not working on them.

• 51:43Joe Rogan?

  You won't. China's like, "Tell me more."

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Maybe. I think it's a bad idea, but if they do, I would like to know.

• 51:54Joe Rogan?

  There's a lot of people that think bringing dire wolves back is a bad idea.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, what did you think of the dire wolves?

• 51:59Joe Rogan?

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• 52:44Joe Rogan?

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• 53:29Joe Rogan?

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• 54:14Joe Rogan?

  Terms apply. Well, fortunately, after the last podcast I did with Ben, I did actually get to go visit them, and I was blown away. It's extraordinary. It's so wild. I mean, it's one thing to see them in photographs, but it's another thing to be close to them, where you're outside, there's no fence between you and them, and you look in their eyes, and like, that is a different animal.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:38Joe Rogan?

  That is a totally different...I've seen wolves before. That is a totally different animal than a...I've never seen a wolf in the wild, though. I did...well, I saw one, but it was like running across the road at a distance, and it was dusk.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:49Joe Rogan?

  That was in Alberta. There's a lot of wolves up there. But that...I've never seen...I've never like looked in one's eyes, and it's like, these aren't even that old.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:59Joe Rogan?

  You know, they were more than six months old.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:02Joe Rogan?

  But they were almost 100 pounds already.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:05Joe Rogan?

  And they have this look in their eye.

• 55:06Speaker 02

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

• 55:12Joe Rogan?

  It's extraordinary, the mane that they have. It's very...it's really incredible. And then there's the little female, Khaleesi.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:20Joe Rogan?

  She's adorable.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  And she is like a puppy right now. You were able to hold her?

• 55:23Joe Rogan?

  She's adorable, yes. She nibbles on your fingers, she's a little thing. But she's, you know, one day gonna be 140 pounds, you can't get anywhere near her.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:33Joe Rogan?

  Which is really crazy.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm glad you got to see the boys before. They were probably already a little bit standoffish.

• 55:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Especially compared to Khaleesi.

• 55:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're standoffish. They get fairly close, though, within like 20 feet of you, checking you out, they pee all over the place, you know?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Marking their territory.

• 55:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's just so strange to see an animal in the flesh that didn't exist. Uh, you know, for 10,000 years.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  It's amazing. I was there for Khaleesi's birth and I'd, people were asking me afterward, how did that feel? And I just, you can't even describe it. You know, this moment when she was born and then she screamed, she had this, this cry, this scream. I have it on my phone, actually, I can play it for you. But it was just such a, I don't know, it's, it's this awe, this, um, I think this is one of the best things about the de-extinction work and the species preservation work that Colossal is doing, is that we live in such a crazy time. People don't often have an opportunity to feel genuine awe about something.

• 56:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting, go, get out and, you know, going and spending time in the woods, or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience, is, is this, this way to feel genuine wonder and excitement and enthusiasm. And Khaleesi's birth, I wasn't there for the birth of the boys. I was in the UK at a conference and it was very sad. And I had COVID and I was asleep and trying to recover. And the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, what the fuck are you doing? Where are you? Why are you not responding? And I'm like, oh my God, I've missed this moment. So I made sure that I was there, present for, for Khaleesi. And I'm glad I was, cause what a, what an amazing, I'm glad you got to see them.

• 57:22Joe Rogan?

  I'm glad I got to see them too. It's, it's really a crazy experience. I felt very fortunate just to be in their presence and, and also very conflicted by it all. Like, this is so odd. Like, is this the beginning? Like, are we gonna bring back everything? Like, would, is that a good thing? Are things supposed to go extinct? Are we supposed to just bring back everything that's ever lived? At what point do we draw the line? You know, all these thoughts in my head, like, why are human beings the deciders of what lives and dies? Like, what, are we, do we have an arrogance because of our relative intellect that we think that we should be able to make these kind of decisions and not understand the comprehensive effect that it has on the entire ecosystem? And we know what happens with invasive species. When invasive species come into new territories, they destroy everything. It's

• 58:07Joe Rogan?

  like, Florida is amazing example of that.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:10Joe Rogan?

  Florida is so crazy. It is, I mean, it is Florida. You know, I mean, like, when you think of Florida, you think, like, Florida man. So the only state that you can say, like, the name of the state and then a man, and everybody's like, what did he do? You know, like, but that's Florida ecologically.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:28Joe Rogan?

  Like, the entire center of it, the Everglades, is infested with Burmese pythons.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, did you see that there is a competition every year to go out and kill as many as they can, and there's a, there's a monetary reward for the people who kill, I think it's the most, or maybe the, the biggest, or some, something like this.

• 58:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, even that's not gonna put it down.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't at all. People kill, and during this competition, they kill hundreds, maybe thousands of these snakes, and it doesn't even touch them.

• 58:52Joe Rogan?

  There's an estimate of a half a million. They think there might be a half a million there. And there's a guy that's been on this podcast before, he calls himself Python Cowboy. He's quite a character. And didn't he give us a head? We got a head laying around here, right? You got it over there? That python head? But that dude, he has been catching them, he uses dogs, the dogs find where the nests are, and the video of these things, you know, you're pulling out this 15, 16, 17, I think he's got as big as like an 18-foot-long snake.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 59:23Joe Rogan?

  They're hundreds of pounds, they're enormous.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  They swallowed deer.

• 59:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they eat alligators. They're eating alligators.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Thank goodness, because alligators are doing great. Like, that's one thing I don't mind them doing.

• 59:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  We need something that's hunting alligators.

• 59:35Joe Rogan?

  That's another problem in Florida. It's infested with alligators as well.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  And they used to be on the endangered species list.

• 59:40Joe Rogan?

  When I lived there, they were on the endangered species list.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  One of the class of 1967, right? The first species to be officially listed.

• 59:47Joe Rogan?

  I wonder, why did they list them?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Because they were almost gone at that point.

• 59:50Joe Rogan?

  How did they do that? Like, I can't imagine that you could do that now. That you could get them to the point of extinction now. Because they're so hard to find, and they're everywhere.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Maybe it was just...

• 1:00:00Joe Rogan?

  I don't want to say they're so hard to find, but I mean, when they get in the water, you know, like, you're not gonna get all of them. Like, how are you killing all of them?

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  I was, you know, there's a show, I don't know where it's on, but it's a show that's called Florida Man? I was watching it on the flight the other day, and, seriously, and it goes through interactions that Florida men have, and one of them is about a dude who was kind of lost in his life, and he climbed over a fence that he shouldn't have climbed over and went for a swim in a lake, and then had an alligator bit off his arm, and that is the, that's the story, that's that particular.

• 1:00:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I saw that guy in the news. That's the guy that, like, he had to walk, like, for a whole day with, like, one arm?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. I remember there was a guy who... What I, I mean, I don't know. There's probably hundreds of stories like this.

• 1:00:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  In this video, and I was trying to sleep, so I'm probably wrong. In this video, he laid on the side of the lake, like probably bleeding to death, when an alligator that was in the shape of his mom, I think, came up to him and told him he had to get his ass up and move or he was gonna die. And he was like, "Okay, mom, I'll do that." It was, I don't know.

• 1:01:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. He was probably not sober. I imagine that-

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  It was blood loss at that point.

• 1:01:06Joe Rogan?

  Sure. And then also whatever contributed to making him climb that fence in the first place.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  I won't play the video, but there you go.

• 1:01:13Joe Rogan?

  Is that the dude?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, this is not, the show she's watching is on Netflix, I think.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  This is a similar thing that did happen a month ago. Here's the video of it.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yes, the one that was the show that was about-

• 1:01:24Joe Rogan?

  I don't want to see this dude lose his arm.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  The show was about something that happened years ago, years enough ago for them to be able to make it. But, yeah, I mean, how many people in Florida-

• 1:01:31Joe Rogan?

  I bet it happens all the time.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? I mean, it's Florida.

• 1:01:34Joe Rogan?

  They are huge.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And now they're in Georgia, too, right?

• 1:01:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're in Texas.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Texas.

• 1:01:39Joe Rogan?

  They're here. Yeah. They, they, they find them. And the golf courses in Florida, like, "Good luck playing golf out there. Are you crazy? You're playing golf in Jurassic Park." There's, I'm sure you've seen the videos. There's one amazing video of this huge alligator. It's like a 14 footer, and it's walking across this golf course, and it looks like a dinosaur. Because it's not walking like with its, dragging its belly on the ground like they sometimes do. It's kinda puffed up. There it is. Look at that.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Holy, oh my god, that's wild.

• 1:02:09Joe Rogan?

  That is so big. Look at the size of that thing.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  And you're out there playing golf, you're like, you see that guy, and you know that they can run fast.

• 1:02:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they run like 30 miles an hour.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they run faster than you-

• 1:02:21Joe Rogan?

  Look at this dork. This dork can't run 10 miles an hour.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Florida man.

• 1:02:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's totally a Florida man. "Give me a selfie for the Facebook." Get right up on that thing. And, you know, there's a lot of them there, too. I mean, they say that pretty much any undisturbed body of water likely has an alligator in it now.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  So what ate them?

• 1:02:40Joe Rogan?

  That's a good question. Back in the day, they probably just ate each other. You know, they cannibalized each other.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Maybe they're gonna do that, too.

• 1:02:46Joe Rogan?

  I mean.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  I'm sure they probably do.

• 1:02:48Joe Rogan?

  They probably have to at a certain point in time. I mean, what are the snakes gonna eat? Snakes have wiped out ninety percent of the mammals in the Evergrades.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  And they're terrible for birds, too.

• 1:02:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, for everything. Ground nesting birds, anything, anything they can get a hold of. I mean, and if there's a half a million of them, that is a killing population of extraordinary proportions. I mean, half a million things that could eat a deer. You know, they, they, there's no skunks left. There's everything, raccoons, they're all gone.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Joe Rogan?

  Everything's missing.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  But this is exactly why we need these technologies, that we're trying to develop a colossal. You know, we're, we're not just bringing species back to life, right? We're, we're.

• 1:03:24Joe Rogan?

  This sounds like a sales pitch.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Species preservation company. It is a sales pitch, but birds, whenever I think about birds, I think of this, right? We know that there are things that we can do to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat, right? We, we can do things like, like the Florida Panthers. You know, one of the things that we did to save Florida Panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced Panthers from Texas, which are the closest genetically and geographically to Florida Panthers. They were probably connected at some point until humans created stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth. And when Texas Panthers were introduced in the mid nineteen nineties, that population recovered.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  They stopped, they had a disorder called cryptorchidism, where their testicles wouldn't descend, or only one would descend. They had all sorts of heart problems. They had.

• 1:04:15Joe Rogan?

  Because there's a small breeding population?

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there were very few of them, and so.

• 1:04:18Joe Rogan?

  No genetic diversity.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  The choice was to mate with your family, and that's it.

• 1:04:23Joe Rogan?

  Oof.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Right? And things want to survive, so they do. So you get these highly inbred populations, and people fixed it by moving an animal from one population to another, introducing new genetic diversity. It's called genetic rescue, right? And that's a great way of bringing diversity back into a population. It's what we're trying to do with our Red Wolf Project. Red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world, are the only endemic American wolf. And they are nearly extinct. There's a successful captive breeding program. And a few years ago, some of the people that we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridget von Holt, who's at Princeton, who's a friend of mine, she was working and discovered, because people were sending her photos, see, this is why you have to pay attention to people who you think might be crazy when they send you pictures of things.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  You know, look at this cool, crazy thing that I think I found. You shouldn't just discount it. I mean, I'm the person who has tested insulation that somebody told me Bigfoot peed on and participated in it. Because if it's real, I want to be the person who finds it, right?

• 1:05:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Bridget says this guy, who lives down in the coast of Louisiana, sent her a picture of an animal that she's like, that is not a wolf, and it is not a coyote, and I don't know what it is, and it's crazy. And she looked at it and she goes, yeah, it's not. It's something else. It's something in between those. And so she tested it and found that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves. And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes. Canids are always hybridizing with each other. We know that because, you know, there are wolves that are black because black gene for wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog had his way with a wolf in heat, right?

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  And that's how that allele got into that population. So we know canids do this all the time. And she was like, this is so cool because this captive breeding population was established with just a few founder individuals. And the team working with them are doing a great job trying to maximize genetic diversity by picking who's going to pair with who to keep all that diversity there. But it's still just a few individuals, so they are going to lose genetic diversity. It's just how it works. But if we can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a way of concentrating more diversity, better able to pick which parts are red wolf, either by breeding individuals or by editing their DNA, which is technology that we developed on the path to dire wolf, right?

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  And we can actually help this population to survive. So there are ways that we can do this for mammals that are going to have really amazing consequences for the way we can protect biodiversity.

• 1:07:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's fascinating for things like red wolves and things like that, but. What, you know, what do you, like, when you think of like the Python problem in Florida, I heard the worst idea, the worst idea they were talking about introducing honey badgers.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Honey badgers?

• 1:07:19Joe Rogan?

  Cause they eat snakes. I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Because we have never, as a species, humans, introduced a thing to try to control a thing, and that thing that we introduced just went horribly wrong. We've never done that before. Right, Australia?

• 1:07:34Joe Rogan?

  Right. Australia's a wreck. They have a terrible feral cat problem.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  And in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails that-

• 1:07:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, I've heard of those, yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  That they introduced this thing called a rosy wolf snail, that they were going to get to eat the giant African land snails, but instead the rosy wolf snail prefers the taste of native endemic Hawaiian snails. And so the rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone. And they're big. Have you seen one of those?

• 1:08:04Joe Rogan?

  I don't think I have.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  A giant African land snail? It's worth looking at it.

• 1:08:08Joe Rogan?

  Did they come over on cargo ships or something?

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  I think we, I think people introduced them for some reason that I can't remember what it was. Yeah, so we have a good history of doing this kind of thing.

• 1:08:17Joe Rogan?

  For giant escargot? Whoa!

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:21Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. Can they eat those? Are those delicious?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  I think people can eat them, probably, but they eat everything, from all of the vegetation to the other snails-

• 1:08:29Joe Rogan?

  How big is that thing?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  To plaster, you know, they'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built.

• 1:08:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, great.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Oh, great.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we introduced these little things, rosy wolf snails, to try to control them, but instead they're killing all the endemic snails, so.

• 1:08:43Joe Rogan?

  We never learn. Yeah, I hope they don't bring honey badgers to Florida, but I, you know, I don't even know if this article I was reading was a serious article, but it was just like, that sounds like something that someone would, because, you know, they have, they're really good at killing snakes. Like, that's what they like to do. They kill cobras. And they have, and- Unbelievably resilient body.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Joe Rogan?

  Like, they can tolerate getting bit by lions. I mean, they're freaks. They're really weird animals, like honey badgers, and they just really do-

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  They're cute, right? I remember when my kids were little, watching the Wildcrats. There was a Wildcrats episode about honey badgers, how they were all cute when they were babies, because they were hiding in camouflage, yeah.

• 1:09:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, maybe when they're babies are cute. They're pretty ferocious.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of-

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Like a Wolverine.

• 1:09:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, very similar to Wolverines, yeah. Like, I think they're all in the same family, right? Yeah, there he is. Look at that face.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  I think they look very cute.

• 1:09:35Joe Rogan?

  Look at that face, just big ol' deadly snake, and that's his lunch. And they get bit all the time, and they just like, they get sick, pass out for a couple minutes, and then recover and kill a snake.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:09:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're ferocious little animals.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  So have people been able to understand better antivenom properties from studying them?

• 1:09:53Joe Rogan?

  That's a really good- look at that face.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  He looks vicious.

• 1:09:58Joe Rogan?

  That is such a crazy animal.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.

• 1:10:02Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're wild-looking. They're wild-looking. I just hope they don't bring them to Florida. Because it sounds like someone's gonna do it, you know, like, it sounds like a Florida idea.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  Have you heard about the hippo solution, in the early 20th century?

• 1:10:15Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  So, this is, this is a great sort of American history story, because, you know, this is, our country is replete with people with brilliant ideas, right? And in the early 20th century, when the, the land in the West was not doing so well, had been overgrazed, there were too many cattle, and there was this, this thing called the meat question. It was the thing of the day, the meat question. People were talking about, how are we gonna survive? There's not enough cattle. Um, how, maybe we're gonna have to eat our dogs. And at the same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and other places where the, I think it was the World Fair, people had the, brought New Orleans, who was the host city of the, I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans, this, um, water hyacinth, this water, little tiny beautiful flower, to, as a gift.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  And they loved it, and so they planted it everywhere, and it just grew like, absolute crazy, and was choking up the, the river. Like, ships couldn't get through because of this, like, matted river. People were, like, putting oil on it to get it to sink, and trying to light it on fire, and nothing would happen. And this team of people, that included a congressman from Louisiana, came up with a solution for both problems at once, and that was that they were going to import hippos from Africa.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Into Louisiana, to live on the bayous. They would eat the plant, this water hyacinth thing, and then we could eat them. And that was going to be the perfect solution to both of these problems.

• 1:11:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. How did that get stopped?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  It was an accident. So it was, it's actually a fun story. You should, you should look it up and read the whole story because it involved these two guys. One, one of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America. Another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things. And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other, but they came together on part of this congressman's team. The scout thought it was a great idea. He wanted people to bring in all sorts of animals from Africa and put them in national parks so that people would want to go to national parks because they could hunt them and they could, and that would, you know, have more reason for people to want to support the idea of national parks at the time, which is great, like, you know, this utility of nature. It seems weird compared to how we think of it now, but I think this is really, it's

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  really important and it was a really important part of the way we, we got conservation legislation in the US. So he was excited about this. And then the congressman, when he was pulling together the team of people that he wanted to be on his side for this, he went to a show that this other guy, the sort of con man, traveling salesman, pimp, escape artist dude, was having about how he was an intrepid explorer. And he was like, that guy is an expert as well. He can also be on my team. And they testified in front of Congress and they asked questions like, you know, how do you know that they're safe? How do you know that they're tame? This con man, he was like, well, you know, there's plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from a baby's bottle with no evidence whatsoever. Right? Just, and everybody was like, yeah, awesome. Even the New York Times was completely behind it.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  They published an editorial talking about, they called the hippos "lake cow bacon." Yeah.

• 1:13:13Joe Rogan?

  What year was this?

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  This is the early 20th century.

• 1:13:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Lake cow bacon.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody was like, this is it.

• 1:13:22Joe Rogan?

  All in.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  This is what's gonna solve the problem.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Teddy Roosevelt was behind it, too.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt was behind it, yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  It was a bill all the way in Congress, it just didn't pass.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it didn't, it didn't go up for a vote.

• 1:13:32Joe Rogan?

  Look at that, how the US almost became a nation of hippo ranchers. Oh, my god.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:13:36Joe Rogan?

  Failed House bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing the hippopotamus that would be killed to make lake cow bacon.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Yes, brilliant. This is, I mean, this is such a, it's so funny. But it's not fair to call it failed, because it didn't fail. It never came up for a vote. So they had testified in front of Congress too late for it to come up to a vote that year, and then just other shit happened, and people stopped paying attention.

• 1:13:58Joe Rogan?

  That's it? It just went away?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, near miss on the hippos.

• 1:14:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, they kill more people in Africa than any other mammal, right?

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive. You saw there's hippos that live now in Colombia.

• 1:14:11Joe Rogan?

  Colombia, yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Because of Pablo Escobar. Nobody knew what to do with them. Yeah, and they started off with just a, just a handful of them, and now there's like dozens of them down there, and yeah.

• 1:14:20Joe Rogan?

  What are they doing about that?

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Um, nothing? I think they keep rounding them up and putting them back on his property. Like, what can you do?

• 1:14:27Joe Rogan?

  How much property did he have up there?

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  I don't know the answer to that, yeah.

• 1:14:32Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:17Joe Rogan?

  Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details.

• 1:15:32Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. It's so crazy that you just have hippos and then they just get loose and now Columbia has hippos.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  He took them there on purpose, though, just like we wanted to bring them here. Can you imagine how bad that would be, though? And, I mean, do people eat hippos?

• 1:16:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the wild boars in the United States. That's William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst wanted wild pigs on his property. And so he imported them from, I think, from, I don't remember, it was Russia or somewhere in Europe. And then these wild pigs have now populated all through California. I mean, they're all over the place now.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy. We did have wild pigs around the US at some point, probably not the same thing, right? Were there wild pigs? There was all sorts of things.

• 1:16:52Joe Rogan?

  That's a good question. I think they came over on boats with explorers, you know, and I know William Randolph Hearst, all the ones around like the northern California area, I think all of those are the remnants of the William Randolph Hearst pigs.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Joe Rogan?

  They think.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  We don't see them in Alaska, Yukon, where we find all these big stashes of bones coming out in permafrost. So it's probably not that they came over like that. We find bison and horses and mammoths.

• 1:17:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Mostly bison.

• 1:17:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, where did the wild boars emanate from? Like, what's their original country of origin?

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  I think, well, I have a friend who works on domestication of pigs and they've published a bunch of different papers that are always contradicting each other. He gave a hilarious talk at a meeting I was at last week about how he keeps saying something different as a way of, you know, keeping to publish more papers. He was just being nice about how he's open to changing his mind with new data, which I think is a valued trait in a scientist.

• 1:17:45Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  But, yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia, I think, is the origin, or at least the domestication. And normally, things are domesticated around where they were needed.

• 1:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Well, they're the weirdest animal, right? Because the domestic ones will become, they change, they move. Morph when they go feral really quickly. I think it's like they start within like six weeks.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  I mean, this is the way evolution works, right? You know, something has a particular suite of traits.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  I'm reading through the testimony of the, when this was going on, this is the guy who presented this.

• 1:18:13Joe Rogan?

  The hippo thing?

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  He's talking about pigs right here where they were going to bring them from northern Manchuria because of.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Were they the most delicious pigs?

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  They're also talking about bringing in rhinos. I think they did bring in camels in like 1853.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Well, we had camels. There were North American camels that were here during the Ice Ages.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  It's a bad test or something. This is all, this is like.

• 1:18:33Joe Rogan?

  This is 1853?

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  They're talking about bringing antelopes in and they asked like, are they easily tamed or domesticated? He's like, they're very easily tamed.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  That's Erwin. So this is a guy who worked for the, I guess what became the USDA, but he was in charge of apples. But he was really dedicated to trying to solve this meat problem and he saw importing African animals and animals from other places as the real solution to this. Yeah.

• 1:18:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, they've definitely done that in Texas. Texas is overrun with African animals.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:19:01Joe Rogan?

  All the private ranches, they're filled with elands and nilghai and wildebeest and.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  We used to have so many cool animals here that all went extinct at the end of the Ice Age. So why not? I mean, we had mammoths. Why shouldn't we have elephants?

• 1:19:14Joe Rogan?

  I know, but isn't it weird? But it's again, that's the same argument. You're like, you're bringing in an invasive species.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Is it invasive though, if it used to live here?

• 1:19:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's invasive in a sense that the wolves that are in Colorado right now that are eating all the cattle are kind of invasive.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:19:30Joe Rogan?

  Right? They're not invasive because they do live. I mean, there are, wolves actually just have moved into the San Juans. I think, I think documented, like natural migration as opposed to the reintroduction. I think there was something I read about that yesterday, but the wolves that they've introduced to like outside of Aspen in particular. I have a friend who has a ranch out there and I posted about it on Instagram. He actually sent me some more pictures yesterday. And I was gonna post about it, but so much crazy stuff was happening in LA. I'm like, this is not the time to talk about like wolf problems. But they, they're just killing calves and eating their liver. They're not even that hungry. They're just eating the tasty parts and leaving these calves alone.

• 1:20:10Joe Rogan?

  And these people are on a 24-hour, run, ragged, you know, they, they, these, they have these teams of guys that have to patrol the area 24 hours a day to try to scare off the wolves. And they, they're not allowed to shoot them. And, you know, they spent millions of dollars bringing them there and they're just eating cattle.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I imagine it's really devastating to see something like that happening and know that somebody else made this decision.

• 1:20:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  And that you, who actually experience it, weren't. I mean, I, I imagine the people who voted for that, I, I wonder what, what they imagined.

• 1:20:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's ballot box biology, right? You get a bunch of people that live in the cities that don't have a lot of experience in, in nature and wild ecosystems. And then you introduce this idea, we're gonna bring wolves back to their native habitat. Oh, that sounds amazing. What they're not telling you is like this, what this rancher told me is that first of all, the original wolves that were introduced into Colorado were wolves that were taken from Oregon because these wolves were preying on cattle.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Oh, so they already had a taste for it.

• 1:21:17Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. And they already had habits. And so then they brought them into Colorado where they start preying on cattle. And so then they moved them from this area where they were preying on cattle and put them outside of Aspen, where they...

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Prey on cattle.

• 1:21:30Joe Rogan?

  Start preying on cattle. It's, it's just stupid.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Joe Rogan?

  And it's, again, it's not biologist, it's not their idea. It's ballot box biology. And it's all being instigated by the Colorado governor.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so important to actually talk to wildlife biologists and ecologists. I mean, we can see from Yellowstone how important having this keystone predator is in ecosystems where they can be and where there is space for them. But the land is not the same as everywhere as it is in Yellowstone. And we need to be able to make, you know, when I was at Santa Cruz, I taught an introductory biology class for non-majors where my goal was to give the students tools to be able to think on their own, which is harder than you might imagine. And their midterm exam was a debate and the topic of the debate was that wolves should be introduced into California.

• 1:22:20Joe Rogan?

  Why not New York City? Let's go. Put them everywhere they used to be. I mean, this is where it gets silly. It's like when you're dealing with people that have cattle ranches and this is their entire livelihood. And all they're doing now is just compensating them for the calves that get killed. And then, so you have less output every year. So it's like, the whole thing is crazy. They were already on their way to do a natural migration into Colorado.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Right, and it would have been different wolves.

• 1:22:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes, it would have been different sized wolves, too. Because I think there's also, like, some of the wolves that are being introduced, they're introduced from British Columbia. Or they're being, you know, introduced from Alberta or somewhere up there. Like, I think those are the ones that came into Yellowstone. Like, the Yellowstone thing is cool, right? There's, it's been a few decades now. People have kind of like come to this sort of equilibrium, you know? Where it's, people recognize that there was an overpopulation of elk, for sure. I mean, they, they used to have these hunting seasons where they would hunt them in the snow in the winter. Because there were so many of them, they wanted you to just be able to pick them out and just, just shoot them for meat. Because they really didn't have the resources, because they didn't have the apex predators.

• 1:23:29Joe Rogan?

  Because a lion can only eat so many of them. So mountain lions weren't really putting the dent in the population that a pack of intelligent, hunting, cooperative animals like wolves could do. So they brought it back and it's, you know, it's relatively successful. They've knocked the population of elk down more than forty percent, but

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:23:48Joe Rogan?

  that's probably good.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Joe Rogan?

  I mean, not for the people that hunt elk, they're really mad. But, you know, wolves are cool. It's cool to have them around. But Montana is very different than Aspen.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:59Joe Rogan?

  It's very different in, you're in the mountains of Montana and you see a wolf versus in someone's cattle ranch in Aspen.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:06Joe Rogan?

  It's just like, this is stupid. Like, why did you do this?

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  But what's interesting, this, this class that I took, so, it was a debate that I taught, sorry. It was a debate. And what I made them do was assume roles of a rancher, a politician, a conservationist. And I had several different roles. And then I randomly assigned whether they were pro or con. And they had a couple of weeks to figure out what their, what their debate was going to be. And I took a vote before. The debate. And as you might expect, for eighteen year olds in California, you say at the beginning, should wolves be introduced? Hundred percent yes.

• 1:24:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  They do this debate, and I did it four years in a row. And every year after they had to do this, after they had to put themselves in somebody else's shoes and think about it from their perspective, it would shift. And the majority of people would be like, yeah, no, it's a bad idea. I think if you give people the tools to be able to think, they can imagine themselves in a different scenario. And we need to do that. We need to be arming people with thoughtfulness rather than jumping to a conclusion.

• 1:25:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And also ballot box biology. It's like if you.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  But everybody's gonna vote, so.

• 1:25:12Joe Rogan?

  Right. But you shouldn't be able to vote on things that you're not educated in.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Joe Rogan?

  It's like if you allow people to vote on things that have tremendous consequences to the ecosystem, like a reintroduction of an apex predator, and they don't understand those consequences. They just have this very utopian idea of what it means to bring back wolves. Look, I love them. I think they're amazing animals. It's just like putting them in, you know, Calabasas is probably not the best idea.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:39Joe Rogan?

  Putting them where people live, they're gonna eat pets. They're gonna, they're gonna eat a lot of things that are penned up, whether they're sheep or goats or whatever, whatever people have that they can get at easily. They're not gonna chase down a herd of elk. That's hard.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Well, their biology, right? They're not, they're making decisions on where they can find their next meal.

• 1:25:56Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  We're not planning on rewilding dire wolves, just to.

• 1:25:59Joe Rogan?

  That's great.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Put that out there.

• 1:26:00Joe Rogan?

  I like that.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  Plus, you've met Kalizi. I don't think she would be.

• 1:26:04Joe Rogan?

  I bet she will in a couple of years.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, but right now.

• 1:26:07Joe Rogan?

  In a couple of years, she'll freak you out.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  She kinda freaks me out already when you look at her, but yeah.

• 1:26:13Joe Rogan?

  Those eyes are so intense. They're so intense. You know, when you look into a predator's eyes, there's something about it. It's like you realize like, oh, my God, I'm like a water balloon. I'm so, you know, we're just like so weak and soft and.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've been putting together, not because we're not going to release them, the next step for their lives is to study them and see how they're changed by their DNA being modified, measure things like their gene expression, their growth, their health span, their lifespan, learn the consequences of the work that we're doing, learn how they interact with the habitat, introduce Khaleesi to her brothers and the next animals that we make into that pack, to make a small pack, but they will stay on that secure expansive ecological preserve.

• 1:26:54Joe Rogan?

  Yes, and you're not going to let them breed?

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  No, the plan is not to let them breed.

• 1:27:00Joe Rogan?

  How will you prevent them from breeding?

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Well, at the moment, they're separated, but we'll probably use subcutaneous, you know, you can put a hormonal contraceptive.

• 1:27:13Joe Rogan?

  Like a birth control patch?

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  There's been some ideas of maybe, so we don't want to castrate them, which would obviously be a way to stop it, but because we want them to be able to reach their full size, because we want to know what that would be.

• 1:27:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  And we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that. But they will be controlled. We track them, there's cameras on them all the time, there's three separate layers of fencing to keep them in, we know exactly where they are. They couldn't get a splinter without a camera somewhere seeing it, and we know exactly what's going on with them. So, yeah, we'll...

• 1:27:45Joe Rogan?

  That sounds like a scene in Jurassic Park. We have it totally under control.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  I've seen that scene, yes.

• 1:27:50Joe Rogan?

  Don't worry, we have cameras upon cameras.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  I was, do I sound like the scientist?

• 1:27:55Joe Rogan?

  No, you don't.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  I kind of do, actually. I was in Mauritius.

• 1:28:00Joe Rogan?

  Which scientist? Jeff Goldblum was the scientist that got it.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  I'm Henry Wu, right? I'm the chief scientist, right? So I'm a good guy for now.

• 1:28:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  But he becomes a bad guy in the future, right? So I'm looking forward to my evil transition. I'm not, we're not making dinosaurs. But, you know, there were other cool animals that we have DNA for. We have, I heard you talking about the American cheetah.

• 1:28:24Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  So I have, we have two high-quality genome sequences from American cheetah.

• 1:28:29Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  We want them back to help with our, with our population problems.

• 1:28:36Joe Rogan?

  So let's get to the criticisms because there's people that are saying that these are not dire wolves, that what you've done is just manipulate the DNA of a gray wolf.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  They are dire wolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves. We took dire wolf genome sequences from animals, one animal that lived 72,000 years ago and one animal that lived 13,000 years ago, and we lined them up next to each other and figured out what it is that makes a dire wolf a dire wolf. And then we used the tools of genome engineering to bring those traits back in Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, that are three dire wolves that are alive now. And that has created these animals that you saw, that are bigger and they're stronger and they have that dire wolf coat. And that's a cool thing, too. That coat, the light coat color that you see, was something that we absolutely could not

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  have known without the ancient DNA, because no one has ever seen a dire wolf. When we published a paper before I joined Colossal many years ago, that was about dire wolf evolution, we had a paleo artist reconstruct what dire wolves looked like, and they made them red and or reddy brown. And that's because so many other animals seem to be reddy brown, like Bamas, our Neanderthals seem to have had red hair, and so we thought, sure, why not? We didn't know, because we hadn't sequenced the part of their genome that we could use to see what color their coats were. But both of these two animals that we had higher coverage DNA from had a gene variance in genes that are associated with pigmentation, how our coats, the hair color and eye color and things like that, that suggested they had light colored coats.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  And so we thought, that's cool. We'll have that as one of our key dire wolf traits that we're bringing back.

• 1:30:20Joe Rogan?

  Is it possible that it's like other wolves, where there's a variation, but you would only sequence the DNA of ones that had white?

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  It's possible, yeah. And I'm sure there were different colors, but it's interesting to me that two animals that lived so far apart from each other in time and geography would both have this light color coat. So maybe it wasn't that every dire wolf had a light coat, but it must have been a predominant color in the population.

• 1:30:44Joe Rogan?

  What was the environment in which they lived? So if they lived 13,000 years ago, you're talking about the Ice Age, right?

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:51Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that that's why they had white hair?

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  It's possible. Both of these animals were from northern part of their range where it would have been colder. They did live through previous interglacial periods. 125,000 years ago, it was as warm as it is today, or even warmer with predicted to be no ice at the poles. And also, we know dire wolves were really common around La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. We haven't been able to get any DNA out of anything from La Brea. That would be an amazing discovery.

• 1:31:17Joe Rogan?

  Does the tar just destroys everything?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Don't know if it destroys it, or if it gets into the bone in a way that we can't get the DNA out. So somehow inhibiting the recover of the DNA. We'll get there. I mean, someday we'll, we'll figure it out and that's going to open up a lot of really cool.

• 1:31:32Joe Rogan?

  It kind of makes sense that like polar bears, having that white color would, polar bears actually have, it's clear, right?

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have, their hair is long and it's clear and that's why polar bears and, have you seen those pictures of bears in zoos where they look, polar bears in zoos where they look green?

• 1:31:47Joe Rogan?

  No. Are they covered in moss?

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  The, it grows in the, the hair is hollow.

• 1:31:52Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  And so if they're too wet and not cold enough, they can turn, it's this like weird.

• 1:31:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they have mold?

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Inside their hair.

• 1:31:59Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow. But it just makes sense that them being that color would have an evolutionary advantage for hunting. Cause you're in something that's completely white.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Joe Rogan?

  And you don't see like a grizzly bear, you'd see like, oh, look at that dark blob.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Joe Rogan?

  That's moving towards us.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  We did some work in my academic lab where we discovered that polar bears and brown bears hybridized with each other. This is one of those funny stories about academia with a scarcity mindset there where we publish, we submit a grant proposal and we say, hey, we have this really cool observation that polar bears and brown bears hybridized during the last Ice Age when they overlap with each other. And it gets rejected because they're like, that's dumb. We know that doesn't happen. And then we found another hybrid polar bear from the previous interglacial. And then there's evidence that they're hybridizing today.

• 1:32:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they find them today.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  And do this, yeah. So whenever they overlap geographically, they breed. But what's interesting about this is that we always find the hybrids living like brown bears, even though it's probably that the mom is a polar bear. Because a brown bear boy will wake up, you know, from hibernation and go out onto polar bear territory to scavenge for food. And a polar bear female is an induced ovulator, whereas brown bear females are seasonal. So a polar bear female will ovulate in the presence of a male. So the male comes up to her and will mate her. The other way around, if a polar bear bear, brown male, had encountered a brown bear

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  female, he's probably more likely to eat her than to mate her.

• 1:33:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  And so, but that's weird then. So why do we always find the hybrids living with brown bears instead of living with polar bears? And the polar bear biologists who we've worked with, I've worked a lot of time with Ian Sterling, who's a fantastic polar bear biologist from Canadian Wildlife. And he, his hypothesis is straightforward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.

• 1:33:55Joe Rogan?

  Ah, completely makes sense.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  It does, right?

• 1:33:59Joe Rogan?

  Because they, they have that ability to swim and they dive under the water. And they're also like really clever and how they use those ice shelves and swim from one ice shelf to another.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. But they hide in, I mean, they even have those things where they cover their nose with their hand, the black nose with their hand, because the black nose. I know, it's insane, right? Biology's cool.

• 1:34:20Joe Rogan?

  It is cool. It's cool to think of like how they became successful doing that. Who figured that out? How do they have the self-awareness to know that the end of their nose is dark and that other animals can see it?

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  But they also hybridize, just given the chance to do so, right? Because biology doesn't recognize species concepts, right? Biology doesn't care that that animal's called a brown bear by us and that animal's called a polar bear. They run into each other, they're like, cool, just like our Neanderthal ancestors.

• 1:34:47Joe Rogan?

  Are those hybrids, are they... This episode is brought to you by Noco. You're miles from home, you turn the key, nothing. Dead battery. Normally that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing with old jumper cables. But what if you didn't need any of that? Keep a Noco portable jump starter in your glove box and jump start your car yourself. No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight. No co, the end of jumper cables. Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off. Select jump starters at NO.co.

• 1:35:30Joe Rogan?

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• 1:36:11Joe Rogan?

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• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. This is actually how we discovered it, because we found that the place where brown bears hybridized with polar bears during the last ice age was probably the ABC Islands off the coast of Alaska, because the ice was that far south at the peak of the last ice age. And brown bear boys would move on to the islands as the habitat got better, where they encountered these populations of polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice receded, pretty much. And so, they hybridized there, and all brown bears in North America today have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears.

• 1:37:18Joe Rogan?

  Jeez, wow. That's so fascinating.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like how we all have ancestry from mixing with Neanderthals. Is that from the German zoo?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Because there's a couple of bears at it.

• 1:37:32Joe Rogan?

  But that really looks like a hybrid, doesn't it?

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Joe Rogan?

  It looks like there's a lot of traits of both of them.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's impressive.

• 1:37:37Joe Rogan?

  Bears are some of the most fascinating animals ever.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  Claws.

• 1:37:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  So impressive.

• 1:37:41Joe Rogan?

  It's just an incredible animal. So that's, it's really, I'm really glad you said it that way, that nature doesn't know that there's a polar bear and a brown bear.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't?

• 1:37:53Joe Rogan?

  You're right. It's just our definitions.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Joe Rogan?

  Is this part of the problem with the criticism of the science? Is that we are being very specific about what we're calling these things based on our own definitions that we've all agreed upon?

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Joe Rogan?

  But that the true nature of genes is that there's this like proliferation and fluctuation and all these animals breed with each other and it's like...

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  It's kind of that, but it's also that we haven't agreed, right? So there's this group of academic scientists who are trying to say, trying to grasp so tightly to this very precise definition of a species as having to do with DNA, how much DNA matches something else. But that is, and it's interesting, I think the reason that we keep having this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about species concepts.

• 1:38:47Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  We have come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts and they're all for a particular purpose. You know, if I am wanting to have a conversation about dinosaur fossils or anything that's a fossil, I'm going to use the morphological species concept because that's all I've got. I'm going to compare the shape of this bone with the shape of this bone and if they're similar enough to my trained eye, I'm going to call that a species. I saw you had a bison prisgus.

• 1:39:17Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  I'm going to say skull out there. This is, that's from Alaska?

• 1:39:21Joe Rogan?

  That's from the boneyard, yeah.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Joe Rogan?

  Step bison.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, step bison, bison prisgus or bison crasicornis, bison occidentalis, bison ellusgensis, bison... I could go on forever. I, you know, this is there. The naming of bison was like sport in the 18th, 19th centuries, mostly 19th.

• 1:39:40Joe Rogan?

  Did you go to the bone lab, the bone yard?

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  I haven't, I've, I don't think I've been to his. I didn't go with Ben, but I've been working up in that part of the world for 30 years. We spend a lot of time working at gold mines outside of Dawson City. And have you been to Dawson City?

• 1:39:55Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  It's amazing. It's an old timey gold town, dirt roads, wooden sidewalks. Like the buildings are all crooked because the, the fire is burned at one end and it melts the permafrost underneath. And it goes, it's where I learned what you're supposed to do when a fight breaks out in the bar that you've gone into.

• 1:40:11Joe Rogan?

  What are you supposed to do?

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  Grab your beer. Back up, right?

• 1:40:15Joe Rogan?

  No, get out of there.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Otherwise your beer's gonna get knocked over. I'm not leaving.

• 1:40:18Joe Rogan?

  You're not leaving when a fight breaks out?

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Not in Dawson City. There's mosquitoes outside. No, it's.

• 1:40:24Joe Rogan?

  I would tell you to leave.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  No, it's a weird place. They still have these.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  Women, women fighting, don't scare me as much as men fighting. But then women can pull out guns.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  That's true, but this is, it's Canada, so less likely for that to happen than in Alaska. But this is, there have been weird things happen there and, you know, there's, um. You go out to the bars in Dawson City. I'm good. Why am I telling these stories? This is ridiculous. You go to the bars in Dawson City and they still have this thing where there's the bell. And if you ring the bell, the person who's rung the bell is buying a round for everybody who's in the bar. And you learn after you've been there for a while that a person is only ringing that bell because he wants the right to talk to everybody who's in there because he wants to fight with somebody, right? This is somebody who's like a diamond driller who's just got paid in cash for the first time. And he's like, now I want to fuck somebody up, right? So he comes in.

• 1:41:13Joe Rogan?

  Really? That's what they want to do when they get paid?

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  Rings the bell and then goes from table to table, sitting around with people. And we, they're like nerdy scientists, paleo geneticists, sitting in the corner are trying to just be super nice Canadians, like talking to these people, like, I don't want to fight.

• 1:41:29Joe Rogan?

  And he's just looking to fight him with someone?

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  Just, yeah, just looking to fight.

• 1:41:33Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a weird part of the world. It's, it's, it's a fun place to work. But anyway, I, I digress. There's gold mines like that, like the site outside Fairbanks that are super productive like this. And every one of the miners out there has like this cool collection. Not any nearly as cool as his, but, but because he's got so much land, they've been collecting it for such a long time. And I heard these, those great stories about how he donated material to the American Museum.

• 1:41:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, it was previous owners of his property.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:00Joe Rogan?

  Uh, cause I, right? That's the case, right? And they dumped it in the East River. And so they denied dumping it in the East River. So then they hired these guys to go and dive for it. And John Reeves told everybody where it was.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if he hired them or just told them. But so these guys dove in the East River. They found step bison, bones, jaw fragments, all sorts of different.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Do you know what I think is great about that story? I really like it, right? Because I'm sure it's true. Because they have so much of that material at the American Museum. When I started working on bison, and I've worked on bison for 30 years, right? When I started working on bison, getting back to the species concept, I was trying to figure out if the DNA mapped to these species names. And they've got a fantastic collection at the AMNH, but a lot of it is crap, you know? There's so much bone there, broken pieces or other pieces. And you get to the point where you're like, what the hell am I going to do with this?

• 1:42:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  They shouldn't have dumped it in the river, obviously. That's dumb.

• 1:42:53Joe Rogan?

  Obviously.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  But he is going to get the last laugh. He won't know because he'll be long dead. But 10,000 years, when the paleontologists of the future are looking in that river, they're going to be like, what the fuck?

• 1:43:04Joe Rogan?

  Right, because there's like tons of it out there, apparently.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  What happened here?

• 1:43:08Joe Rogan?

  They found, what is that guy's name? Dirty Water Dawn? Is that his name? This one guy who's one of the divers, he's found multiple pieces.

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure it's there.

• 1:43:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  And they probably didn't mean anything terrible by it. They were just like.

• 1:43:20Joe Rogan?

  Well, who knows? Those people aren't even around anymore.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Joe Rogan?

  I think this was in the 20s, wasn't it?

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  Probably around the 50s. That was when the, most of the collection came from. There was a ton of gold mining activity in the 50s and 60s around Fairbanks.

• 1:43:32Joe Rogan?

  So what they have found on John's property that's so spectacular is that it's really only a few acres that he's getting all this stuff from.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Joe Rogan?

  Which makes you question, like, how did all these animals die off?

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Joe Rogan?

  In mass, in this very small area?

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Joe Rogan?

  Where you, you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks and.

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Near Dawson, it's called the Klondike region, you have this really fine glacial silt. And that settles in different places, in, in different quantities. And it settles really quickly. So you get this. Really fast, thick buildup of this really fine silt that preserves the bones really well. So when we go, the gold miners are, they're plaster mining, so they're taking these high-pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt, and they let it thaw for a bit, and then they wash away the next layer. They're trying to get to the gold-bearing gravel that's underneath. But while they're doing that, literally thousands, tens of thousands of bones come out of there. And in some places, it's more rich, more intense than others, but it's there. I've taken students up there, and they're all mopey because of the mosquitoes, and, you know,

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  they're mopey because they're nineteen, and they're like, "Oh, we're never gonna find anything." They jump out of the trucks, and they're like, "Holy shit, is that a mammoth tooth?" Like, "Yeah, that's a mammoth tooth."

• 1:44:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, is that what you brought?

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  That's what I brought you, yeah. This is a, it's a fossil. This is from South Carolina.

• 1:44:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that's from South Carolina?

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  And it's a fossil. You can see it's fossilized.

• 1:44:52Joe Rogan?

  I know they like knife handles out of this stuff, which seems to me, it's kind of gross.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that has, um...

• 1:44:58Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's your logo on it?

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Of course, it's branded, and it's colossal, you know? Um, yeah, it's our logo.

• 1:45:03Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  Um, but, yeah, mammoths, do you know the story about our founding fathers and mammoths?

• 1:45:11Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.

• 1:45:19Joe Rogan?

  How did he even know about them?

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  So they were, they were, it was probably mastodons, because it was these teeth that were melting out of the salt lakes and things like that in the other part of the United States. But he was, he was obsessed with them. He was getting his friends to mail him teeth that he was finding. And he was, um, this is, this is a funny story. Let me see if I can get it right. You should look this up too, because it's hilarious. Um, "How Mammoths Made America Great Before, and Now When We Bring Our Mammoth Back, We're Gonna Do It Again." So, uh, there was a guy in, in France who was writing a series of books. He was like Comte de Buffon, Comte de Buffon, I think was his name. I'm terrible with French, so I probably did it wrong. But he was writing a series of books about natural history. And the fifth, I think, of his books was called, uh, "The Theory of American Degeneracy."

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  And what it was essentially about how all American animals were more shit than animals from everywhere else in the world. And it was during the War of Independence, and so it was really popular to hate on American stuff, right?

• 1:46:17Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  And so, he couldn't have pissed off Thomas Jefferson more if he'd tried. He didn't know anything about Thomas Jefferson. He was busy fighting with Linnaeus, and Linnaeus was busy classifying things, and this guy was like, "There's no more than 200 species of animals anywhere, so why would you bother with that sort of academic silliness, rather than think about like, how the animals got this way in the first place?" In his mind, like, discovering why American animals were so shit was the right way to be spending your time as a natural historian. But this pissed Teddy Roosevelt off, and so he was trying to figure out how he could prove to this guy that American animals were actually better, bigger. So he was getting his friends to compile lists of things about like, how American bears

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  are bigger than European bears, American wolves are bigger than European wolves, that it isn't that, you know, you come to America, like this guy said, and you suddenly get weaker and your blood gets watery. That was what he was...

• 1:47:12Joe Rogan?

  That's what they thought?

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  And it was really, it was a bestseller, apparently.

• 1:47:15Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible. So they thought like, living under oppression was really good for you? It's like strength training.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, they did, there were new diseases, they probably did get sick.

• 1:47:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  And so there was probably something in it, but Jefferson went so far as he had, he had a moose sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it was like, partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody put the wrong, you know, antlers on its head. It was just like, really dumb. But his, his main feature was mammoths, that he knew that this animal, he didn't think they were extinct at the time.

• 1:47:50Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  And nobody really knew about the idea of extinction. He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to find them, that people were going to find these mammoths still there.

• 1:47:58Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that incredible?

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  And that was going to prove.

• 1:48:00Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that incredible, when you just think that just a few hundred years ago... That was the pinnacle of science. That was like the peak of understanding of all the species that were still alive. We really didn't know.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  What I don't understand about this is how a person who is a scientist can look at how everything has changed in a couple hundred years, or in 20 years when it comes to genetics, and still say, "Oh, we know everything." Like, I'm right.

• 1:48:28Joe Rogan?

  I think it's what you were saying earlier. It's a famine mentality.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Joe Rogan?

  It's just weak people's minds. And there's weak human beings out there. The way they think is a very weak way of thinking. And they want all the attention for themselves, and they're very egotistical. And it's also very supported by academia. There's a lot of bitchy infighting in academia. It's really gross. Late 18th century, the idea of extinction was only just beginning to be popularized by some thinkers.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Georges Cuvier.

• 1:48:55Joe Rogan?

  Cuvier.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Joe Rogan?

  Jefferson wasn't among the believers. In a pre-Darwinian age, extinction was a violation of religious ideals. "God would not let animals go extinct." And secular ideas, the balance of nature, could never be so significantly upset. So for Jefferson in particular, extinction was just an unusual theory. "It's fine, the bones exist," he wrote. "Therefore, the animal has existed. The movements of nature are in a never-ending circle." Well, that's the real question. Like, there have been animals that went extinct and then came back, right?

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  The dire wolf?

• 1:49:29Joe Rogan?

  Right. But that was because of you guys. Wasn't there like a bird that they thought was extinct?

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  That's not...

• 1:49:35Joe Rogan?

  And then returned?

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  Then they didn't go extinct, right?

• 1:49:37Joe Rogan?

  Right. Right. Like, sort of like the Tasmanian tiger.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  They just became... Or Bigfoot. Oh, no, the Tasmanian tiger was definitely real.

• 1:49:43Joe Rogan?

  But some... The Thylacine. But Bigfoot was real? It was Gigantopithecus. They think that that was real.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  But Gigantopithecus is really old.

• 1:49:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  But, and would have changed until today. I mean, I told you, I have tested... People send me all kind of crazy things. The insulation was one of my favorites. This is something that I got while I was still doing my PhD. People would send us all sorts of crazy things.

• 1:50:04Joe Rogan?

  Is that your insulation? They said it's Bigfoot fur?

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was from a guy somewhere... No, no, no, no. No, they didn't say it was fur. No, it was better than that. It was...

• 1:50:11Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was from somewhere in the Carolinas. I can't remember where. And he'd sent a letter, and it was a handwritten letter on his personal stationery, which had a naked girl dancing around a pole, which gave him, obviously, more credibility.

• 1:50:24Joe Rogan?

  That's his stationery. He's emailing you from his trip club.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  It was a written letter.

• 1:50:29Joe Rogan?

  A letter from his trip club, sorry. Everything's an email domain, yeah.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  So a while ago, and he sent a couple of cuttings of insulation from his basement, telling me that the family of Bigfoots that lived in his basement, he had seen urinating on this insulation. And so if I was gonna get Bigfoot DNA, it was gonna be from that insulation.

• 1:50:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Did you test it?

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  Course I did.

• 1:50:49Joe Rogan?

  You really did?

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Well, I mean-

• 1:50:51Joe Rogan?

  I would've tested him for meth. I said, "I'll test something." Let me find out what you're doing, dude. You're Bigfoot peas in your basement?

• 1:51:00Speaker 02

  I didn't get any Gigantopithecus DNA. There was some human DNA on it.

• 1:51:05Joe Rogan?

  So what was the year that Gigantopithecus, we believe, went extinct? Like, so the bones were found in an apothecary shop in China in the early 20th century, right?

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  I don't actually know. I think Gigantopithecus is millions of years old.

• 1:51:20Joe Rogan?

  I think the story is that an anthropologist was in an apothecary shop in China and found the bones. I think this was in, I think it was in the early 20th century. And I think he said, "Uh, where'd you get this?" Like, he's got giant primate teeth. And they took him to the place, and they found jaw bones that indicated it was bipedal. And then they started, like, digging and discovering. I don't think they have a full skeleton.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so cool. Well, most things from paleoanthropology are, you know, "I'm gonna rewrite human history because I found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth."

• 1:51:51Joe Rogan?

  Here's the problem, right? You could tell me whether this is correct. Most things will never be fossils.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:58Joe Rogan?

  Right. So we don't even know how many species existed and never left a fossil, because fossils are hard to make.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:05Joe Rogan?

  So we're essentially getting the tiniest little bits of information, and we're trying to piece together this understanding of millions and millions and millions of years of creatures on this earth. And to do so arrogantly seems so crazy.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:23Joe Rogan?

  To be arrogant about something that has, just by the nature of its existence, how do you find it? It's a very limited resource.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  Right. This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA. DNA, right?

• 1:52:34Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  So I think, I don't know, remember who it was who said this, but we don't have any idea if your bone, you paleoanthropologist, if your bone has descendants, but I know that my DNA has ancestors.

• 1:52:48Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  So I can learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people that are around. And if I am lucky enough to get it from these bones that I know is real about human history, and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in the beginning of ancient DNA hated it because it was going in and going, oh, no, turns out you were wrong about that. Yeah.

• 1:53:07Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't, didn't interbreed? Oh, turns out you were wrong about that.

• 1:53:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I remember them teaching us that in high school.

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  Based on what data?

• 1:53:16Joe Rogan?

  I know, but that's the thing is they taught it so arrogantly. Did people breed with Neanderthals? Nope, that was impossible. They would say it so arrogantly. This is just high school teachers.

• 1:53:25Speaker 02

  And now we know that they did, and we've been able to learn so many cool things about humans from studying this Neanderthal genome.

• 1:53:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  I mean, I know people get hung up on DNA and how you need lots of DNA to define a species, but we have been able now to look, I think one of the coolest things that we've learned from the Neanderthal genome is that we all know that we have somewhere between, you know, two and 5% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes. We kind of get that now. You can get your DNA tested at one of these DNA testing places and they'll even tell you how much Neanderthal you are so you can have a competition with your brother and your cousins, right? I'm more Neanderthal than you, I'm amazing. Have you seen that for him? Less well-known, though, is that we all have a different 2 to 5% Neanderthal DNA. And if you were to go around the world and collect all of the Neanderthal DNA sequences

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  that are in people alive today, we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome.

• 1:54:25Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  That's cool, right?

• 1:54:28Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  So, two questions then. Are they actually extinct? If we can put together ninety-three percent of their genome by pulling together people who are alive today? That's just a fun philosophical question. Second is, what the hell is going on in that other seven percent? Right? And if we want to know what it is that makes us human, that's where we look. Right? That's where we ask. What are the mutations that arose since we split from Neanderthals? That if a baby got that part of the Neanderthal DNA, it didn't survive. It couldn't make it as a human.

• 1:55:01Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  That is the bit that is important to define us. We've actually been able to narrow that down. There's less than a hundred genes, we think. Less than a hundred mutations in genes now that have evolved since that split that most people that are alive today have. And that is what makes us human.

• 1:55:20Joe Rogan?

  I think, I'm still fixated on what you said earlier because I think it's so important that we decided what these animals were. We gave them these very specific names.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:55:31Joe Rogan?

  And that genes and nature don't, they don't care what we're saying.

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:55:37Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't, there's this weird thing that's happening from the time we were proto-hominids to what we are today.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  It makes sense, though. We want to have a conversation.

• 1:55:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  And if we want to talk about something, we have to call it something.

• 1:55:50Joe Rogan?

  Right, Australopithecus.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Right, so we have species concepts that we designed that allow us to have a conversation and know what we're talking about. So, when I talk about, and I call this fossil a name, you and I know that we're having the same conversation. If I am in charge of delineating species because I'm trying to figure out which, which agency has, you know, is going to care for this endangered species, I might use geography to figure out what one species is and what another species is. The species concept that we learn when we take our introductory biology course is a species concept that was developed in the middle part of the twentieth century, called the biological species concept, which says you're a species if you can breed and if your offspring are fertile.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  But we know that lots of things violate that. Brown bears and polar bears. And we just talked about how they're hybrids. Humans and Neanderthals violate that. Cattle and bison violate that to a way less of an extent than we thought that they did. This is actually a cool story that I think. Do you know what a beefalo is?

• 1:56:56Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Joe Rogan?

  Is it the female cow and the male bison or vice versa?

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  No, a beefalo is a breed of hybrid that is five eighths cattle and three eighths bison that supposedly has better meat.

• 1:57:12Joe Rogan?

  Do they do it on purpose?

• 1:57:13Speaker 02

  Yes, it was one of these breeds that they tried to make.

• 1:57:15Joe Rogan?

  But does it work both ways? Does it work with a male bison and a female cow or a male bull and a female bison?

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Turns out it barely works at all.

• 1:57:24Joe Rogan?

  Oh. Do they do it artificially or do they have them party together?

• 1:57:28Speaker 02

  No, they just lied.

• 1:57:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:57:32Joe Rogan?

  It's fake?

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  It's not real.

• 1:57:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  So I've always, I've spent a lot of time being interested in this

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  admixture history. And so I was interested in brown bears and polar bears and humans and Neanderthals. And what is it that suddenly makes a species not able to breed with another species? What is it that causes that sort of last wall to go up?

• 1:57:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  And then suddenly you're the biological species. Yeah. What exactly is it? Can we figure it out? And so I wanted to look at these different species pairs. And we knew about beefalo because people have, you know, beefalo ranches that you, there's a beefalo of the week. You should look that up because this is going to be like, there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these animals. Anyway, so people in the early 20th century decided that they wanted to make hybrid cattle and bison because they wanted animals that were as robust in the North American prairies as bison, but as tame and easy to deal with as cattle. So they started breeding them together. And we're just like, this isn't working. You know, this is really hard. When we get the F1s, that's first generation hybrids, often it's only the females and

• 1:58:39Speaker 02

  they're not reproductive. You know, there's problems here. We can't, can't do this. And because the, yeah. And, and so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this. And then there was this guy called, uh... I can't remember the name of the person who actually did it, who claimed that he had been able to create this animal that was three eighths bison and five eighths cattle. And he sold his animal to a guy called Bud Basolo in California, who created this herd of 5,000 beefalo. And it was announced with great fanfare, like, front pages of newspapers. He sold one animal to a farmer in Canada for $2.5 million, $19.75. It's still the most expensive single animal that has ever been sold, right?

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  $2.5 million, $19.75 for this animal. And so, we have this thing, I was like, we're gonna sample them. We were working with collaborators from the USDA. We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranches and saying, can we have a piece of your, pieces, some of your stuff? And they were like, nah, not sure about research on this. And so, we started buying tongues, because if you buy steak, you just get the same animal over and over again, but they all have one tongue, so you can just buy tongues and then you get lots of different animals. We sequenced their genomes. And then, we got from the USDA, their expired sperm straws that they have for the animals that they, they give away to start your beefalo thing. We sequenced their genomes as well, including this $2.5 million, $19.75 individual.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last, you know, 30 years of my life. And so, we have this big plot that shows bison on one side and cattle on the other. And we had made a hybrid, so we could sequence their genomes. He wasn't born, it was an aborted animal, because, you know, it's very hard to make a hybrid. He fell right in between them, in the middle, where you would expect him to be. So, now, we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be. You know, they're five eighths cattle, three eighths bison, they should fall out closer to cattle, but still up here. And so, you plot them, and they're all just cattle.

• 2:00:36Joe Rogan?

  100%.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  They're just cattle.

• 2:00:38Joe Rogan?

  It was fake. So, did they use, like, Highland cattle or something like that, that have those crazy furs?

• 2:00:42Speaker 02

  There's some evidence that they used Zebu. So, it's a, that's a different type of cattle, it's the one that came from Asia, they have them in Brazil, because they have a hump, so it makes it look a little bit more like bison.

• 2:00:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, dirt trip.

• 2:00:52Speaker 02

  But if you look at it, if you look at the pictures of the beefalo of the week, you look at them and you're like, you know, those are cattle.

• 2:00:58Joe Rogan?

  Let me see a beefalo, Jamie.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  When I did the Beefalo of the Week, I was, I went down a weird path, so I just kinda came

• 2:01:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Wrong websites?

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  No, I just, it didn't, it didn't seem like I was on the same path.

• 2:01:11Joe Rogan?

  When was this all discovered, that these are just cattle?

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  Oh, just look up Beefalo, and then you, to look at historic Beefalo, you can see the pictures of historical Beefalo. Yeah. When was it discovered?

• 2:01:21Joe Rogan?

  That, that these are just cattle?

• 2:01:23Speaker 02

  Um, we just published the paper, like, a few months ago.

• 2:01:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no. So, this poor dude from 1975, that spent 2 million bucks?

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and he sold it back to Basolo for some of the money getting back. I mean, I think there was a thing going on there.

• 2:01:37Joe Rogan?

  So, these people are out here still selling Beefalo, like, it's real, like, this is a website?

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  And they're hybrid with something, they're mixed with a little bit of zebu, um, some of them have a little bit of bison in them, but this is a...

• 2:01:49Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, they're just cows. Interesting.

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. I talked to Steve Vrenella about this, I know that he's, he's a friend of his, he was like, "That's hilarious."

• 2:01:58Joe Rogan?

  It is hilarious. It's very funny. It does look different than a regular cow, though.

• 2:02:04Speaker 02

  A, a little bit. I mean, they were trying to do that, right?

• 2:02:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:02:06Speaker 02

  And we can, we can engineer everything, it doesn't...

• 2:02:08Joe Rogan?

  But that's not what they did.

• 2:02:09Speaker 02

  I mean, a, a chihuahua looks different from a Great Dane, but their DNA has a lot to say.

• 2:02:13Joe Rogan?

  So, in 1975, how much of an understanding of this stuff did we have? Did these people think that they were doing this, or was it just a scam?

• 2:02:19Speaker 02

  I think it, well, this is me speculating at this point.

• 2:02:23Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:23Speaker 02

  I think he had to know, right?

• 2:02:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  And there was, at one point, there was a test, a blood test that they had done, where they were looking for markers in the blood, and there were five different markers, and they tested about 150 different animals, and they published a paper, saying, "Oh, look, we tested all these animals." None of them have all of the markers, one of them has one of the markers, and we just think the test is bad.

• 2:02:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  No, just...

• 2:02:49Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, fun. Anyway, I digress. I don't remember what we were talking about.

• 2:02:53Joe Rogan?

  Well, we're just talking about a bunch of different animals that used to exist. You know, we were talking about, uh, Gigantopithecus at one point in time, you said it's really old. Was it 100,000 years ago? They speculate the age of them?

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  I think it's older.

• 2:03:05Joe Rogan?

  Older?

• 2:03:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't know. Maybe you...

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Two, 2 million to approximately 3 to 200,000 years ago.

• 2:03:12Joe Rogan?

  Okay. So, th, as recently as 200,000 years ago, so you, like, kind of...

• 2:03:19Joe Rogan?

  Homo sapiens are like 300, 400,000 years?

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  Diverged from Neanderthals.

• 2:03:23Joe Rogan?

  Is that like around that time?

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:25Joe Rogan?

  So it is possible that at one point, and so this is just a very limited amount of bones, right?

• 2:03:30Speaker 02

  It's just limited, just like everything else in paleoanthropology.

• 2:03:33Joe Rogan?

  So it's possible that they existed later than that, we just haven't found those samples yet.

• 2:03:36Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:03:37Joe Rogan?

  But it's just speculation.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  There was a really cool, this is just about how we don't know anything. We can actually get DNA directly from sediments. And this has been a relatively recent revelation. It's super cool because it means that you can take a plug of dirt from the inside of a lake and you can reconstruct the whole ecosystem as it changes over time.

• 2:03:56Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  Super cool, right?

• 2:03:58Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  But recently, there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada. And they found mammoth DNA and horse DNA in Canada, in these really well-preserved parts of the world where we've been working, that date to probably around 4,000, 5,000 years ago.

• 2:04:15Joe Rogan?

  Horse DNA?

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:04:16Joe Rogan?

  That's weird, right? Because they're supposed to be extinct in North America when, 10,000?

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  Around the last, but you know, there are a lot of Native American cultures who believe that they have a long history of the horse and that the horse has survived. And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.

• 2:04:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  But until we find DNA directly in dirt, I mean, this is just showing us how much we don't know. How much we have to be really willing to, you know, obviously, we have a model of the way the world works. And we don't just throw away the model with new data, but we have to incorporate the new data.

• 2:04:47Joe Rogan?

  Right, you can't be arrogant about the model. So the model is, if you correct me if I'm wrong, that horses evolved in North America, but it went to other continents, but then eventually died off in North America.

• 2:04:59Speaker 02

  But survived elsewhere, yeah. Eohippus, the very first horses are from 50 million years ago. They're found in Wyoming, in the fossil deposits in Wyoming. Those are the little cat, house cat sized horses.

• 2:05:09Joe Rogan?

  House cat sized horses.

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, this is early horses, around the same time as we have the first primates and the first of the other things that we know.

• 2:05:17Joe Rogan?

  Ah, that's so fascinating.

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  It's so cool.

• 2:05:18Joe Rogan?

  So fascinating.

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Joe Rogan?

  Well, this, we were talking about this the other day, the, the, the big debate that happened with Clovis first, that they used to think that human beings, they came over here at a very specific time, and then they found those footprints in white sands in New Mexico. And they're like, okay. We've got to rethink this, and we're being forced to rethink this. And there was another time where archaeologists were horrible to each other. These scientists were horrible to each other because they attacked the guy who made the discovery. They said, "This is nonsense. This is impossible. We know. We're very clear." Which is this arrogance.

• 2:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did that to Jacques Saint-Maurice, who discovered the bones in Alaska, northern Canada, that had cut marks on them that were older than the accepted time of when humans could be there. And now, everybody accepts that as it's true. We know that.

• 2:06:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's so gross. It's so gross, and they keep doing it over and over and over again. So then, the question is, okay, if we have 22,000-year-old footprints, how many thousands of years were they here before that? Have they always been here? How'd they get here? What's the earliest known humans? We know that there's no Neanderthals here so far.

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  So far.

• 2:06:26Joe Rogan?

  So far, there's no Denisovans, but you imagine they found a different kind of human. Wasn't there something that came up where they found some human that lived, oh, God, I want to say 6,000 years ago, and his DNA is different? This is like, very recent. Different than anybody that they've ever discovered before? So they're like, okay.

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  Well, that would be interesting.

• 2:06:46Joe Rogan?

  I think this is like, super recent, like, yesterday or the day before. But it's just, these things keep, they keep finding new stuff. Here it is. 6,000-year-old skeletons with never-before-seen DNA rewrites human history.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 2:07:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so this was just June 7th.

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know anything about this.

• 2:07:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. They uncovered 6,000-year-old skeletons in Colombia that belonged to a mysterious group of people that could rewrite human history.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  It doesn't match any of the other known indigenous populations.

• 2:07:12Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that wild? "Their genetic signature reveals a distinct, now-extinct lineage that may have descended from the earliest humans to reach South America, one that diverged early and remained genetically isolated for thousands of years."

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is, I mean, I have no doubt that this is true. I mean, how many of these human settlements are gone now? And so, we don't have any evidence of them. And they're all lineages that, they all go back to humans originating in Africa at some point, but we haven't seen all of them. We haven't seen all of the pattern. We don't know. Even what questions we should be asking.

• 2:07:46Joe Rogan?

  You know what you guys really need to try to bring back? Those little tridactyl skeletons they find in Peru. That's like when we had Luke Caverns on and Jesse, when we had Jesse Michaels on the other day, who has an amazing YouTube show, both of them great guys. They were showing us these skeletons that they found in Peru that are very bizarre. And people initially thought they were a hoax, but then they found these newer ones that they've discovered that they have three fingers and three toes and done CAT scans on these things and they seem to be human or human-like, these things.

• 2:08:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen of these, they're amazing.

• 2:08:23Joe Rogan?

  Like, I thought 100% horseshit when I first saw them, because I think some of them are horseshit. But then when they've done, like, look at that image below where they do like X-rays of them. Like, come on, like, what the hell is that? Like, what is that? That seemed, that, there's no way, if, again, I'll say it again, but if that's art, let me buy it. Like, if somebody made that.

• 2:08:44Speaker 02

  So those, those X-rays are from the, the, the things themselves. I think I've seen some of these before.

• 2:08:49Joe Rogan?

  The CAT scans are even weirder.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  Are they?

• 2:08:51Joe Rogan?

  Because the CAT scans, when they show like these, the 3D CAT scan of the body, you're seeing all the, the areas where the cartilage is and it just, but it doesn't look totally human. Because this is it. So they have three fingers and three toes. It's really weird stuff, like, there's layers of them as, as they go, you know, as you go through a CAT scan.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  And how old are they? I, I do hear these. I've seen some of the reports. This is the thing that was presented to the Mexican government at some point.

• 2:09:18Joe Rogan?

  This is Peru. The Mexican ones seem to be horseshit. It seems like, and the guy who discovered them, air quotes, seems to have a history of finding silly things. But this seems real. This seems very real. Like, look at this thing.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  What's that on the neck?

• 2:09:33Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. What is that on the neck? Who the hell knows? Like, who the hell knows? Why does it have so many ribs? Like, look at it, go, go back to that image where it shows the back. Jamie, where it was like, yeah, like, when you see this thing, this guy's not like showing you the full body in this particular image. Whatever the hell that thing is on the back of his head is weird. The shape of its head is very weird, but it looks real. Like, whatever, if, if you guys could find that that's real, I know you won't bring back Neanderthal dolls. But why don't you bring back one of them little three-toed alien people?

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, you would still have to ask their permission. It looks like a person.

• 2:10:08Joe Rogan?

  Listen, just talk to them.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  Bring them back.

• 2:10:11Joe Rogan?

  If they say no, shoot them in the head.

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  Right, easy.

• 2:10:14Joe Rogan?

  I don't know what to tell you, but bring them back. Like, some things you just have to do. Like, if we find out that that thing was a real thing, like, what is that?

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:22Joe Rogan?

  What's that thing in the back of its head?

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  Have people tried to do DNA work or protein work on these things?

• 2:10:26Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a, there's a small, select group of people that are even taking it seriously. But more people are taking it seriously now because of the CAT scans. Because I think initially, have you seen the original ones, the ones that look super fake?

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:10:40Joe Rogan?

  The ones that look super fake, it looked like something you'd buy in like a roadside, roadside stand. They look totally bullshit. But then, um, I, I was going back and forth with Jesse Michaels and Luke Caverns, and they were sending me these images of, I think it was 800 B.C.? This is how old these drawings are, in these tapestries, that show these weird, three-toed, uh, three-fingered things. That look like a, like a little one of those things, like, so was this another type of human that lived with us at some point in time?

• 2:11:18Speaker 02

  It's interesting. There are, the three-toed and three-fingered thing is interesting. I wonder if there's a genetic mutation that would lead to that. You've seen the, the tribe, there's an isolated tribe that has the two.

• 2:11:28Joe Rogan?

  Ostrich feet, they call them.

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:11:29Joe Rogan?

  Very weird, yeah. So maybe that was that. Maybe that's what that was.

• 2:11:33Speaker 02

  I mean, who knows? It'd be fascinating to see if there's any DNA that could be recovered or proteins, yeah.

• 2:11:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so why don't you guys get down to Peru?

• 2:11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll run it by Ben, see what he thinks.

• 2:11:45Joe Rogan?

  He would be into it. Ben seems like he'd be like, "Let's go." Like, if you could find Giganto Pithecus DNA, I think Ben would want to bring back Bigfoot.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  Yes, probably. Let's not tell him.

• 2:11:55Joe Rogan?

  I think that's what Bigfoot is, don't you think?

• 2:11:57Speaker 02

  Gigantopithecus?

• 2:11:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:59Speaker 02

  Was it in Asia, though? Like, Bigfoot is supposed to be in North America.

• 2:12:02Joe Rogan?

  Well, they found the bones in China.

• 2:12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it could have come across.

• 2:12:05Joe Rogan?

  Is it, make sure that story is right, that I said, I'm pretty sure it's true, Giganto Pithecus bones found in an apothecary shop in China?

• 2:12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just didn't want to bring it up. That's a guy named Ralph von Konigswald, 1935. They're being sold as dragon bones.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  So they bought a bunch of stuff, and then they started looking at them and found out that that's not what they were.

• 2:12:27Joe Rogan?

  So it's 35.

• 2:12:30Speaker 02

  Early to middle Pleistocene.

• 2:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  In China. That was super interesting. And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there, they're there at the same time as Denisovans were there, Neanderthals were there, then they would have, if they could have hybridized with humans, they probably would have. Who knows?

• 2:12:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 02

  We know so little, right?

• 2:12:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, it seems to like it coexisted with Homo sapiens, so, I mean, but when did it start existing? Right? How long was it? I mean, we know that Neanderthals were around for, what, 300,000 years or so?

• 2:13:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:13:00Joe Rogan?

  Which is kind of crazy, when you think that people, you know, we've really only been running things for a small period of time.

• 2:13:08Speaker 03

  I don't know who added this.

• 2:13:09Joe Rogan?

  Closely allied with orangutans.

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  Once thought to be a hominim, now thought to be closely allied with orangutans.

• 2:13:15Joe Rogan?

  So once thought to be a member of the human line, woo.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  Well, it was thought for a long time that orangutans were our closest living relative as well.

• 2:13:25Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever seen them spearfishing?

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:13:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they've learned how to spearfish.

• 2:13:29Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 2:13:30Joe Rogan?

  They don't know whether it's from observing people, that's what they assume, but there's this crazy photograph of this orangutan, it's hanging on to this branch, and he's got a long stick in his hand, and he's like leaning into the river stabbing a fish. You gotta see it, because it's so crazy.

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  Did they learn from us?

• 2:13:44Joe Rogan?

  We don't necessarily know.

• 2:13:46Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 2:13:47Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy? Really crazy. Like, he's figured out how to catch fish. Really? Oh, says after observing locals. Which totally makes sense, right?

• 2:13:57Speaker 02

  You're smart.

• 2:13:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he's seen people catch a fish and he's like, whoa, how did you do that? Which is probably how people learned, like some really smart ape guy was like, you know, I think I can hit that bird with a rock.

• 2:14:11Speaker 02

  Learning and being able to communicate is one of the ways that we got the advantage over everything else, right? Because I don't have to evolve the ability to cook dinner. I can learn from my mom.

• 2:14:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right. But that's what's so fascinating about living today is you don't have to even learn from someone who's anywhere near you. You're learning from things on your phone instantaneously, on your laptop.

• 2:14:31Speaker 02

  And you don't have to learn because there's DoorDash.

• 2:14:33Joe Rogan?

  Right. You can stay alive very easy. That's true too. But it's just, you know, when AI gets involved in this stuff, when we have sentient AI that you can use to try to, you know, figure out what the consequences of bringing certain species back and whether or not it would be a pro or a con, like what, you know, that's, that's where things get weird. Like if we decide, okay, let's bring back the woolly mammoth. Okay, what's going to be the negative impact of bringing back the woolly mammoth? Well, they're going to eat a lot, so they're going to push out.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  You don't need sentient AI to do that. I mean, we have.

• 2:15:08Joe Rogan?

  No, you don't, but, but humans will make decisions based on biased evidence. We'll, we'll make decisions based on our, the, the potential for a financial windfall. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll gaslight people into thinking things are really a good idea and it's safe for everyone. And we'll, we'll do things if we know that we could profit. Whereas if you have AI that's going to be completely objective and its only mission is to analyze the outcome.

• 2:15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ooh, that world. You know, we're, we're actually working with teams of people that are external to colossal to put together the rewilding plans and that sort of thing for each of the different species. We're not planning to rewild the dire wolves, but we still have done this. We've put together a plan of what the potential impacts would be. But we deliberately keep that outside and hire people to put this together for us. And we haven't been delivered this yet, so we'll see what it says when we get it, like.

• 2:16:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, not good. They're going to kill everything.

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  They are not going to kill everything because they're not going to be wild.

• 2:16:09Joe Rogan?

  What animal do you think, well, obviously, you guys are working with the red wolves and you plan to use which are normal native animals in North America that are threatened, which most people would agree is a good idea to give them a healthy population and release them. And that's the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh, this work could be used for conservation.

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  It is being used for conservation, yes.

• 2:16:31Joe Rogan?

  That's so infuriating about some of these haters. It's like they don't even bother looking it up, or they don't care because they just want attention and they just want to be negative and that's the best way to get attention.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  They want the click, right?

• 2:16:40Joe Rogan?

  Yes, and the best way to get that click is to whine, to whine and complain.

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  It's annoying.

• 2:16:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's gross. But they have to be themselves, that's their punishment, you know? That's the life you've chose, you just want to be this bitchy person for the rest of your life.

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  You're going to say that one thing forever and people are going to be like, oh.

• 2:16:56Joe Rogan?

  Congratulations, you get a lot of attention for just being super negative all the time. But if you had to like look at their argument, like, so the argument of like not doing this and that you're not really creating a dire wolf and this is just, you're just taking dire wolf genes and adding them to gray wolves. Have you ever had conversations with these people where they want to tell you that what you're doing is wrong? And what is your response to these people?

• 2:17:24Speaker 02

  I think that this idea that the technology that we are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because it's wrong, it's somehow playing God, yes. I mean, people have been playing God for as long as we've existed as a lineage. First by making species become extinct as we spread around the world. Not intentionally initially, but we changed the habitat, we hunt things. Then we figured out that we didn't have to make a species go extinct in order to feed our families and so we evolved domestication. We figured out how to only take the males or leave the juveniles or some way of maintaining that population so that you knew you could go back to the hunt the next year and they would be there again. And we domesticated things.

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  And then we transformed to really authority over everything. When we protect a species, people Who think about conservation often think of this as super hands off. Like, I'm not doing anything. Everything just gets to evolve the way that it should be. That's bullshit. Like, we decide how many animals live, where they get to live, what they get to eat, how many they get to eat. We cull them when we want to. We protect them if we want to. We don't if we want to. We are as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog, right? And we just better get good at it. These technologies are not exactly the same as the technologies that our ancestors had, because we are directly changing DNA sequences.

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  But they are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to fix some of the things that we have fucked up already. Hmm. And I think the biggest challenge that I have is to show people that deciding not to allow ourselves the space that we need to figure out what we can do with these technologies. We're still operating within regulatory frameworks. We're still operating within the bounds of biological reality. There's a long way to go here. But if we decide that that's too scary, that we don't trust ourselves, that we're always going to make the worst decision, first of all, it's that attitude of negativity, right? It's the, it's the, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad.

• 2:19:32Speaker 02

  Second of all, it's a decision. And to think that that decision has no consequences is naive. We know what the consequences are. The rate of extinction today is thousands to tens of thousands times higher than it is across the fossil, across the history of the fossil record. And a lot of that is because of us. But we have the capacity to slow that rate. We have the capacity to help species that are alive today adapt to the rapid changes in their habitat. What if we could make Hawaiian honey creepers resistant to avian malaria, which we introduced by introducing mosquitoes into their habitat and save them from becoming extinct? Or figure out how to transfer resistance to bleaching, to corals around the world?

• 2:20:16Speaker 02

  Or anything that we could do to save some of these habitats that we know are in trouble because of this combination of people expanding and natural change? Change to the ecosystem that we just don't like. You know, we don't want to see spruce forests disappearing because it's getting drier. And that means that they can't make enough resin to fight off the beetles, right?

• 2:20:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  We have the capacity to use these tools, or at least to think about how we might develop and deploy these tools, to have a future that is both filled with people and biodiverse.

• 2:20:46Joe Rogan?

  I think what people are concerned with is the crude application of this, this, these techniques and this science when it's in its infancy. And if you just take that and draw it out to its natural conclusion with improvements over time and innovation over time, it could be something that's of an enormous benefit to not just animal species, but humans.

• 2:21:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:11Joe Rogan?

  To everyone. It's a, it's kind of like a test run. Like what's, we can make a dire wolf, can we make a super person? Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's probably the future.

• 2:21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:22Joe Rogan?

  I mean, having regular children, like just rolling the dice on seeing what your kid turns out will probably be super novel, like a hundred years from now.

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting thing to think about, right? And I think we're getting gradually more accustomed to using these technologies to cure genetic diseases, like the baby that was in the news over the last couple of weeks, baby KJ, the, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease. He couldn't, he had a genetic change, just a single mutation that meant that he couldn't digest protein. And people came together and mounted this incredible, like collaborative effort to find a cure using the tools of genome engineering for this child. And he went home from the hospital last week with CRISPR editing having gone into his own body to cure this particular disease.

• 2:22:11Joe Rogan?

  Wild.

• 2:22:12Speaker 02

  It's, it's amazing.

• 2:22:14Joe Rogan?

  Wild.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  And it was such, it was a rush, you know? And it's a, but it's a, it's a really great example of personalized medicine that right now, obviously, this is slow. But we start somewhere and we always have to start somewhere. Like, yes, it took six months and it's one baby and it took a lot of people to do this. But this is the beginning of how we can use these tools to cure your cancer. To figure out how we can engineer a fix for a baby who's born with cystic fibrosis. Or if you get blood cancer, can we edit the blood cells to make sure, make that cancer mutation just go away? Or this is the beginning of these tools. And for de-extinction and conservation, this is also just the beginning.

• 2:22:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  We've figured out how to learn DNA sequences from the past and actually transform that into an animal that has, that's bigger than a gray wolf and it's more muscular than a gray wolf. We've, we've made dire wolves using dire wolf DNA and these amazing tools that we will have the potential to use to stop other species from becoming extinct. I love it. I think it is, obviously, there are risks associated with using technologies that we don't fully understand, but we're not taking those risks. We're very carefully evaluating every single one of the edits that we make. We are, in every case, interested in making the fewest number of changes possible to still bring those animals back.

• 2:23:37Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:23:39Joe Rogan?

  What other animals are you gonna bring back?

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  Well...

• 2:23:42Joe Rogan?

  What's the plan? What's the plan, Beth?

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  Well, we have announced, obviously, the mammoth and the thylacine, that's the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo, which is my favorite, I see my dodo.

• 2:23:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:23:57Speaker 02

  But we have DNA from, from lots of different animals, so, you know, you never know.

• 2:24:02Joe Rogan?

  So, but is there like, so you've announced the woolly mammoth?

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:24:06Joe Rogan?

  And where will that be?

• 2:24:09Speaker 02

  Where are we going to put mammoths?

• 2:24:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, are you gonna reintroduce them area, into areas?

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  Eventually, that is the goal, to have animals that live in wild habitats. But this will be a very long process.

• 2:24:19Joe Rogan?

  But not dire wolves?

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  No, we won't be reintroducing dire wolves.

• 2:24:22Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so not predators, but you would consider...

• 2:24:24Speaker 02

  Well, not dire wolves.

• 2:24:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so you, you weren't joking about the cheetah?

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we don't currently have any plans to, to bring cheetahs or saber-toothed cats back to life.

• 2:24:35Joe Rogan?

  But you might. I don't like how you said that. But if you did that, like, that would be where it would get sketchy. If you reintroduce an animal that can run 60 miles an hour to the plains, those poor antelopes who've been, like, living it up, because they evolved, you know that, pronghorn antelopes, the reason why they're so fast, they evolved to get away from these cheetahs that don't exist anymore.

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  That's true. But we know also from looking at the cheetahs that we have, that they didn't only eat pronghorns, they were eating lots of things in their habitat.

• 2:25:06Joe Rogan?

  It's because pronghorns are fast.

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  They had to eat something else, otherwise they would die.

• 2:25:10Joe Rogan?

  They had to eat some slow stuff, because the pronghorns are like, "Let's get out of here."

• 2:25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, for every species, there will be different work that has to be done to figure out whether and where is a good idea to reintroduce them. And for each of the species that we're working with, we have councils that we've put together in the part of the world where we would bring them back together to have conversations about where they should go, whether they should go, how many there should be, and who is willing to be the long-term stewards for these animals.

• 2:25:37Joe Rogan?

  Now, I know that they've talked about releasing woolly mammoths, if they ever do make them, in Siberia, right?

• 2:25:43Speaker 02

  Well, right now, we're not focusing on Russia, because issues.

• 2:25:47Joe Rogan?

  Obviously.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  Right. So probably it would be somewhere in North America.

• 2:25:51Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's why Trump wants Greenland.

• 2:25:53Speaker 02

  For mammoths. Isn't Greenland filled with ice? I mean, mammoths really need a lot of lush.

• 2:25:59Joe Rogan?

  The vegetation.

• 2:26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so I think maybe not, yeah.

• 2:26:02Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 2:26:03Speaker 02

  But, you know, there's plenty of space in Alaska, right? Or northern Canada, or even around the plains. I mean, mammoths lived through warm periods and cold periods. Obviously, they're cold-adapted, because they're big and furry.

• 2:26:15Joe Rogan?

  Alaska would be the move, right? Because it's like the size of one-third of the United States. And they lived there.

• 2:26:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:26:23Joe Rogan?

  And, you know.

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  Right. And I'm not worried about the mammoth population getting out of control. I mean, these are animals that take 10 to 14 years to reach reproductive maturity. They have a two-year pregnancy. It's not like they're suddenly going to be 1,000 mammoths. This will be a very slow and deliberate and careful process. And like with the dire wolves, there will be a stage in between the first calf being born and understanding how they're able to thrive in whatever habitat they're in. And these are really important parts of the de-extinction process.

• 2:26:54Joe Rogan?

  I was blown away when I heard that mammoths lived up till about 4,000 years ago on an island.

• 2:26:59Speaker 02

  Yes, Wrangell Island, off the coast of Siberia. But now, maybe even, maybe even in mainland North America, based on that environmental DNA data. Isn't that crazy?

• 2:27:09Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. Well, the horses were 4,000 years, right? And that data.

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  Horses and mammoths.

• 2:27:15Joe Rogan?

  And mammoths, that was 4,000 years old too?

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  Right, because we're not going to find the last fossils of something.

• 2:27:21Joe Rogan?

  Of course, because fossils are so difficult to make. Most of the things don't leave fossils when they die.

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:27:27Joe Rogan?

  Like, what percentage of the entire fossil record, bad pun, bad word to use there, but in record of animals, have been fossilized?

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  It's really hard to know, right? And because the taphonomy, which means like how things are going to preserve, differs so much depending on where you are in the world. Like, when things die in Alaska and you have this glacial silt that preserves things really quickly, we're probably finding a lot of things, right? But we've never found woolly rhinos in North America. So the hypothesis is they never made it across the Bering, the, there was a, you know, when the sea level was lower, the Bering Strait was not a sea level. And instead it was, they called beringia, it was a land bridge. Animals walked across that land bridge, including people walked across the land bridge to come into, into North America.

• 2:28:12Joe Rogan?

  Which brings me to the short-faced bear. Oh, I don't like how you giggled. Are you guys going to try to bring that thing back?

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  I don't know. We do have its DNA.

• 2:28:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:28:23Speaker 02

  I love the short-faced bear. You know what I like the most about it is because I think it's so dumb that it's called the short-faced bear. Like, why? Who was, who was giving it that common name? And they're like, oh, here's a bear that if it stands up, it's 12 feet tall. I'm going to call it the short-faced bear.

• 2:28:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, it's such an innocuous name for such a terrifying animal.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:44Joe Rogan?

  One of my favorite photos on the internet is a photo of the short-faced bear standing up next to these scientists that are standing there. And you realize the size of it, you're like, that one.

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Joe Rogan?

  Like, what in the hell?

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  Have you seen the long-horned bison, this bison that lived 120, 150,000 years ago?

• 2:29:01Joe Rogan?

  I think I have.

• 2:29:02Speaker 02

  This is, there's a great photo that's somewhere on the internet of one of a skull on the ground and a scientist like laying that one.

• 2:29:09Joe Rogan?

  There it is. Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:29:11Speaker 02

  We have DNA from him.

• 2:29:13Joe Rogan?

  You might bring that back?

• 2:29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?

• 2:29:15Joe Rogan?

  What about the Irish elk?

• 2:29:17Speaker 02

  Yep, we could do that one. We have DNA from Megalosaurus.

• 2:29:20Joe Rogan?

  When did that thing go extinct?

• 2:29:22Speaker 02

  I think that's also the end of the Ice Age. It wasn't in North America, but yeah, super cool.

• 2:29:27Joe Rogan?

  That thing's nuts. It's like a moose slash elk.

• 2:29:31Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 2:29:32Joe Rogan?

  Looking thing.

• 2:29:32Speaker 02

  There were also camels in North America. There's a camel called Camelops. That was pretty cool, yeah. And a giant beaver, like a five-foot-tall beaver, which.

• 2:29:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's right. I forgot about the giant beaver. Beavers scare me.

• 2:29:45Speaker 02

  Especially a five-foot beaver.

• 2:29:47Joe Rogan?

  A five-foot beaver? Think about what a little beaver could do with its teeth.

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  People have found logs that have been chewed on by this thing. Like, just, yeah, just imagine.

• 2:29:55Joe Rogan?

  What, did that die out in the Ice Age as well?

• 2:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:58Joe Rogan?

  So that's like 65% of all the megafauna in North America, right?

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  So many big things. We lost so many big things.

• 2:30:04Speaker 03

  Thomas Jefferson thought he had discovered a giant lion, but it turns out it was a sloth.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  Giant sloth.

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  There were a couple different species of giant sloths.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  Megalonyx jeffersoni.

• 2:30:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, when you look at its face, it kind of looks like it could be a cat, if you don't know that much. Like, if you don't know what we know now.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  From the fossil, yeah.

• 2:30:25Joe Rogan?

  That bone right there. Make that, the head, like, look at that thing. That looks like some crazy cat. Oh, what a weird animal.

• 2:30:33Speaker 02

  Sloths. I wonder if they moved as slowly as the small ones did. I can't imagine that they could have, or they would have been really easily eaten by the giant short-faced bear.

• 2:30:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:30:43Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's why they're not around.

• 2:30:44Speaker 02

  Or the American cheetah, or the Smilodon.

• 2:30:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, the cheetah's probably too little. You know, it'd get smashed.

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if that thing was moving super slowly, you could just hack at it for a while.

• 2:30:53Joe Rogan?

  Well, have you ever seen sloths, even little slow-moving ones, swing at leopards? Or jaguars, rather?

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:30:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a video of a sloth, a regular one, that is crawling on this vine and this jaguar's trying to get at it. And it's swinging at it pretty fast. I was like, wow, I didn't know they could swing that fast. But it moves really slow, which is like...

• 2:31:13Speaker 02

  I wonder if it knew.

• 2:31:14Joe Rogan?

  Why does nature want you to die so easy?

• 2:31:17Speaker 02

  Don't they move so slowly that stuff grows on them?

• 2:31:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes, mold grows on them. There's a rescue place. So this... See, look at that. Look how beautiful these jaguars are. God, they're so beautiful.

• 2:31:29Speaker 02

  Big cats, yeah. So would you want the big cats that were here to come back?

• 2:31:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, I mean, I don't know. It's like jaguars are reemerging in the southwest, right? They've spotted at least a couple of them in Arizona, which I think is great. I mean, I think they're awesome, but I wouldn't want to run into one, you know what I mean? Like, if you're out there camping and you see a jaguar, you're in a lot of trouble. That's a giant mountain lion.

• 2:31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think about mountain lions, too. When I go running, you know, in the woods, in the redwoods, I live in Santa Cruz. I go running and I'm thinking, oh, mountain lions, bring my dog, right?

• 2:32:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, the dog's gonna get eaten, I guess.

• 2:32:08Speaker 02

  I think they're afraid of dogs.

• 2:32:10Joe Rogan?

  A little bit. Yeah, it depends on the dog. They eat a lot of dogs.

• 2:32:14Speaker 02

  I have a 75-pound Labrador Retriever. He would probably want to be its friend.

• 2:32:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's like my dog, my golden retriever.

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  Ooh, friend, can we play?

• 2:32:22Joe Rogan?

  Or he would just like tuck his tail and run, and just leave me there to defend myself. But, you know, they know that, like, the ones that they get, the ones that are problem cats in northern California, when they've found them and they do these depredation tags, they've found that 50% of their diet is dogs and cats.

• 2:32:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:32:40Joe Rogan?

  50%. That's nuts.

• 2:32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts. They're just eating people's dogs and cats.

• 2:32:46Speaker 02

  Yikes, yeah.

• 2:32:47Joe Rogan?

  I don't know, they're spooky. They're cool, but they're spooky. You know, I don't know how many you want around.

• 2:32:53Speaker 02

  And there are a lot of cats. Maybe it's because we don't have any of the other predators that used to be there. I mean, the California golden bear, that's another one that Hearst, I think Hearst collected one of the last ones of the California golden bear in Southern California, had him shipped up to San Francisco and he became the bear that's the inspiration for the flag.

• 2:33:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  His name is Monarch. We actually sequenced his genome, too.

• 2:33:13Joe Rogan?

  The last guy that got killed by a grizzly bear in, or brown bear, whatever it was, in California, they have a town named after him, La Bex, California.

• 2:33:21Speaker 02

  It's named after the guy?

• 2:33:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, named after the last guy to get killed by a bear.

• 2:33:25Speaker 02

  I wonder if it's worth it to his, him?

• 2:33:27Joe Rogan?

  Nope. Nope, nope, nope. It's kind of funny, though, that the bear is on the flag and then they killed all of them. There's, there's none of them.

• 2:33:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, by the time, I think it was on the flag, it was already on their way out.

• 2:33:39Joe Rogan?

  Probably. Well, people are probably wanting to bring them back, too, you know?

• 2:33:43Speaker 02

  You know, we showed recently, using DNA, that they're really closely related to the bears that are in Yellowstone right now. So if we really want bears in California, you could just bring those guys over.

• 2:33:52Joe Rogan?

  Don't do it, people. Because the thing about it is, once you have them in your area, you can't manage them, because then people have decided that they're precious. So, once they become problems, and once they become overpopulated, like Montana has a bit of an issue with that now, they would like to list them.

• 2:34:12Speaker 02

  With bears?

• 2:34:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes, with grizzly bears. They would like people to be able to hunt them.

• 2:34:16Speaker 03

  That's Monarch. They put a smile on his face.

• 2:34:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, hi, guys. Only you can prevent forest fires.

• 2:34:21Speaker 02

  Monarch had a miserable life, though. He was mostly in a cage. He was being fed the wrong diet for a brown bear, just mostly meat. And, yeah, so right now, he's on, he's on display. He's not on display, actually. He is in the basement, in a fridge, at the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. But his post-cranial skeleton, everything except his head, is at Berkeley in the museum. We've, we've sampled it for DNA.

• 2:34:44Joe Rogan?

  So, his diet should have been fruit and vegetables and meat?

• 2:34:48Speaker 02

  But they were just giving him meat. I imagine he was just really uncomfortable all the time.

• 2:34:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?

• 2:34:54Joe Rogan?

  That's all I eat. And mostly just eat meat. I'm not uncomfortable at all. I think meat is...

• 2:35:00Speaker 02

  Need a little bit of fiber to help your digestive system.

• 2:35:02Joe Rogan?

  But I bet if you had like a plate, well, actually not true. I was saying if you had a plate of meat and a plate of fruit, the bear would just eat the meat, but the bear would probably eat the fruit too.

• 2:35:10Speaker 02

  Bear would eat everything.

• 2:35:11Joe Rogan?

  Eat everything. They eat cars. When I lived in Colorado...

• 2:35:14Speaker 02

  Just like people, not us, would have been. Like, they're evolved in the world of scarcity where you eat the stuff that's in front of you.

• 2:35:21Joe Rogan?

  Also, they really have to get fat because they're gonna chill out and just take naps for three months.

• 2:35:25Speaker 02

  I love the Fat Bear Week competition. I love that. Do you know that?

• 2:35:29Joe Rogan?

  No, what is that?

• 2:35:30Speaker 02

  It's like, it's around the time when they come out there, they're eating all the salmon because they gotta get... And they have a competition between which is the best fat bear and you get to vote for them and then there's a fat bear that wins. Yeah, it's good fun. I love it.

• 2:35:41Joe Rogan?

  To me, that's the most fascinating species of bears, is the bears that live on those salmon rivers. Because they don't care about people at all. Like, there's this crazy video of this guy that's sitting in a lawn chair and this bear comes up beside him. And this bear, or the, he's not in the lawn chair, right? He's beside the lawn chair, but the lawn chair is great for perspective when you see how big the bear is. This bear is huge. It's like 10, 11 feet tall, long, whatever. And it doesn't care about the person at all. It just has been eating salmon. So, this is it. Look at this.

• 2:36:13Speaker 02

  And salmon are so much better.

• 2:36:14Joe Rogan?

  Look at the size of that thing. Imagine, give me some volume so you hear this guy talking, because it's so crazy.

• 2:36:24Joe Rogan?

  Bear's not interested in them. There's meat right to his right. He just lays down, I'm gonna chill.

• 2:36:30Speaker 02

  Humans probably make a terrible snack, though, right?

• 2:36:33Joe Rogan?

  Do you think?

• 2:36:33Speaker 02

  I mean, we're bony, we're, or fatty. That salmon is absolutely delicious source of protein, right?

• 2:36:40Joe Rogan?

  Also, it's, you know, just flopping around in there, it's easy to catch. And he's probably full, which is also why they're so big, right?

• 2:36:48Speaker 02

  He looks full. He's, I like him. He looks chilled. That's the bear that I would want to run into in the field.

• 2:36:55Joe Rogan?

  Now they're talking to it, hey, hey, hey, that's crazy.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Like it's a dog, like, get out of here.

• 2:37:00Joe Rogan?

  You're gonna convince him, hey, man, this is my space, don't invade it. Yeah, they just, they, all those Kodiak bears, they're, that's why they're so huge, they get so much protein.

• 2:37:09Speaker 02

  I've never been out there.

• 2:37:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I wanna watch them, I wanna watch them eat salmon with a high-powered rifle right next to me. And maybe in a giant bulletproof hamster wheel or something, I don't, I'm so scared of those things. Have you seen the documentary Grizzly Man?

• 2:37:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:24Joe Rogan?

  Another great Werner Herzog film.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Okay, I have to look at the.

• 2:37:28Joe Rogan?

  Werner Herzog's actually in that film, and he's interviewing the people in that film, which is, it's one of the best unintentional comedies. It's a really funny movie, like, I think, I don't even think it's unintentional, because Werner Herzog's a genius, I think he made it funny on purpose. Because there's some, like, smash cuts where you're just like, oh, my god, where you're just laughing, and the guy was so nuts. And he just decided to, I think, in my eyes, I think he was like suicide by bear. I think he just decided to stay long enough where eventually they just got him, he was like super depressed and wanted to be an actor and it never made it, so he decided he's gonna save the bears. And the bears like didn't even care that he was alive, like, they're not used to people being around at all, they didn't even know what he was. And then one of them eventually decided to eat him.

• 2:38:10Speaker 02

  I can't imagine that is a good way to go.

• 2:38:12Joe Rogan?

  It's not a good way to go, but if you're completely obsessed with bears and you're, you know.

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a woman who's worked in my lab for a long time, she works on mountain lions, we're on mountain lion genetics, and she said when it's her time, she wants to go.

• 2:38:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, god, lady, don't say that, don't say that. The one thing better about getting killed by a cat than a bear is a cat will kill you and then eat you. A bear will just hold you down.

• 2:38:34Speaker 02

  And eat you while you're still alive.

• 2:38:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they don't care at all.

• 2:38:37Speaker 02

  You die of shock.

• 2:38:38Speaker 03

  Four and after photos of these.

• 2:38:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:38:40Speaker 03

  Bears before they got fat, like, that one looks wildly skinny, like a dog almost.

• 2:38:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, they look real weird when they get skinny, and they look real long-legged. That's one of the things that freaks hunters out, um, is when they see them skinned and they're hanging, they look like humans. It's like very weird.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

  Or Bigfoot.

• 2:38:59Joe Rogan?

  No. Well, that's probably what Bigfoot is, honestly. When people are seeing Bigfoot, have you ever seen a bear walk on two legs before?

• 2:39:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:39:08Joe Rogan?

  They walk on two legs all the time.

• 2:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:09Joe Rogan?

  All the time. They walk on two legs to present themselves as larger, to scare the other males.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 2:39:15Joe Rogan?

  And sometimes they have injuries. Like, there was a famous bear in New Jersey that was missing a paw. And so he always walked on two legs.

• 2:39:22Speaker 02

  And it just looked like a man, like a man.

• 2:39:24Joe Rogan?

  It was just like a Bigfoot. Like, if you see him through the woods, right? If it's dusk and you're going on a hike and you're already like heightened senses, just a little weirded out already, and you see this thing, it's a black bear that's walking on two legs through the woods, like, huh! You would be convinced that you saw Bigfoot, don't you think?

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. There was a paper that was published, maybe a decade ago or so, where people had done niche modeling, environmental niche modeling, based on Bigfoot sightings.

• 2:39:51Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 2:39:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness, yeah.

• 2:39:52Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that nuts? So if you saw that walking through the woods, 100% you'd think it's Bigfoot. Oh, my god, I found it. He's real. He's real.

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  If that picture was just a little bit blurrier, it would be Bigfoot.

• 2:40:04Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah. A little blurrier and then a little more distance and in between trees.

• 2:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:09Joe Rogan?

  I talked to a lady once, we did this television show.

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  Look at him. That's amazing.

• 2:40:14Joe Rogan?

  I know, it's nuts. And that's a small one. We did this television show a long time ago. Me and my friend Duncan, we went to go look for Bigfoot. It was part of the show, it was called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and we went to the... And I met this one lady who was so convincing, and she told me she saw Bigfoot. She's in the Pacific Northwest where we were at, outside of Seattle, like up in those mountains, it's so dense because it's a rainforest. And it's like, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips. That's what the trees are like. You know, you get a box of Q-tips, you can't see in between those Q-tips.

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  Super dense, yeah.

• 2:40:46Joe Rogan?

  Super dense. And she said she saw something that was like 100 yards away that was moving through the trees that she is sure was a... She goes, "I saw a giant ape." And I was like, "What is that, an ape?" Like, "Oh, my god, it's Bigfoot." And my brain was going, "I think it was a bear."

• 2:41:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's what this niche modeling or environmental modeling study found is they looked at all the reported sightings of Bigfoot and then created what would be the environmental niche for a Bigfoot and it pretty much just overlapped the niche for bears, for brown bears.

• 2:41:16Joe Rogan?

  Of course. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense. But what the weird thing about it is the Native Americans, because Native Americans have a name for that creature and they have many names for it, different tribes. So it's not like an isolated thing, but they don't have a lot of mythical animals. They don't have fake animals other than Sasquatch.

• 2:41:35Speaker 02

  That's weird.

• 2:41:36Joe Rogan?

  It is weird, because if Baringa, as I was called, the Baring Land Bridge?

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

  Baringia.

• 2:41:42Joe Rogan?

  Baringia. Baringia existed and we know that it did and we know that people during that time made their way across. If Gigantopithecus lived alongside people, we don't know if it did, but it could have. And if it did, it would be in the same area. It would be in the same area of Asia and perhaps it would have-

• 2:41:59Speaker 02

  It would have to come really far north, though, to get across the Baring Land Bridge, because that was really far. That was all glaciated and cold. So it would have to be something that was adapted to living in warmer climates, like where it was found, as well as being able to survive. It's not like a week of a walk across the Baring Land Bridge, right?

• 2:42:16Joe Rogan?

  Also, we don't find primates in cold climates like that, right? Other than humans.

• 2:42:19Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. You have to have the ability to keep yourself warm.

• 2:42:22Joe Rogan?

  Because we're so dumb. We're like, let's just keep walking north. We've got to get away from these other assholes.

• 2:42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really love mosquitoes. I think this is what I'm going for. Like, more mosquitoes, the better.

• 2:42:30Joe Rogan?

  I think they're probably just chasing animals, right?

• 2:42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:33Joe Rogan?

  That's probably what they were doing.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  Bison. Bison, mostly.

• 2:42:35Joe Rogan?

  Following the herds.

• 2:42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Joe Rogan?

  And then eventually they had to learn to adapt to these colder climates.

• 2:42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny, we talk about it as like people are moving deliberately through this landscape, when clearly they weren't. You know, they're just, they're just trying to find food, like the Dogon peoples, where they're going to places where there's still grass that their reindeer can graze on.

• 2:42:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they just want to eat. And it's just so weird to think that, you know, we live in houses and we have internet and we, you know, you drive an electric car to work and, oh, living in this sophisticated world. But not all the people are living in this world. And there's indigenous people that are living the same way they've lived, but that now they have a snowmobile, now they have a rifle.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:43:16Joe Rogan?

  But they're still, like, if you had to live there, you'd be like, oh, my god. Like, what am I doing? Like, where is Starbucks?

• 2:43:22Speaker 02

  Right. But somehow they're happier than us, right?

• 2:43:25Joe Rogan?

  That's so weird. It's really weird. Out of all the animals that you guys might potentially, what's the word? Rebirth? What's the word?

• 2:43:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, people have used the word de-extinction, which I kinda hate because I can't figure out how to conjugate it in a way that doesn't make me cringe.

• 2:43:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:43:45Speaker 02

  If you've done it successfully, do you say you de-extincted?

• 2:43:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:43:49Speaker 02

  Something?

• 2:43:50Joe Rogan?

  So what would be the word? Do we need a new word? Because it's never happened before.

• 2:43:53Speaker 02

  Bring back, resurrect.

• 2:43:55Joe Rogan?

  Resurrect. I think resurrect's probably right, but that has biblical implications.

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Right, so that's why we try to stay away from that.

• 2:43:59Joe Rogan?

  But you're kinda playing God, so let's go with that.

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  Okay, cool, I'm in.

• 2:44:04Joe Rogan?

  Is there one that gives you pause? Like, maybe the short-faced bear?

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  Pause?

• 2:44:08Joe Rogan?

  Like, maybe like, maybe this isn't the best idea. The host eagle?

• 2:44:12Speaker 02

  Well, humans, I've already had pause at this. Like, Neanderthals and Denisovans, they were people, and so I feel like that's not really the thing. That's not somewhere we should go. Host eagle, that's a cool one.

• 2:44:24Joe Rogan?

  That's a cool one, yeah.

• 2:44:25Speaker 02

  That's a really, this was a massive, massive giant eagle that ate moa, which was a bird, an extinct bird.

• 2:44:31Joe Rogan?

  And ate people, too.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  Probably, they were huge.

• 2:44:33Joe Rogan?

  No, they think that they found the markings on human skulls there that indicate talons of raptors.

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:44:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:44:41Joe Rogan?

  Right. Which makes sense that that's how they went extinct. Like, the New Zealanders are like, enough of this shit.

• 2:44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the moa went extinct, and so they couldn't eat any moa anymore. But maybe it was both, right?

• 2:44:52Joe Rogan?

  So they ate them all?

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  I mean, why did short-faced bears go extinct? Probably because nobody wanted a bear that stood 12 feet high.

• 2:44:58Joe Rogan?

  What are you gonna do about it, though?

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  You're gonna kill it.

• 2:45:01Joe Rogan?

  Imagine, would you imagine the daunting task of getting a group of guys together with spears to go after a short-faced bear when you know at least four or five of you are getting whacked before you can get a spear tip into one of them?

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Maybe, doesn't it depend? I mean, maybe what they were doing is, you know, they would ambush mammoths and things like that. So you hide around bluffs, and you can have a group of people in different places and hit them all at once. Maybe you wait until that bear is eating something else, right?

• 2:45:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:45:26Speaker 02

  And then it's paused, and you have time to...

• 2:45:29Joe Rogan?

  I mean, how much did they even understand the wind back then? Like, the scent?

• 2:45:34Speaker 02

  They probably understood it really well, right? Because these are people who relied on that. They probably understand it better than people who aren't hunters today, right?

• 2:45:41Joe Rogan?

  They probably knew that these animals had a greater sense of smell than we do. They probably had a greater sense of smell than we do.

• 2:45:47Speaker 02

  Or more attuned.

• 2:45:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. They probably could smell it. Because you can smell certain animals when you're like, if you go into the elk woods, you 100% can smell elk.

• 2:45:56Speaker 02

  And is that something that you've been able to develop?

• 2:45:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, I was taught it, you know, I would smell something and then, you know, like the guys that I'd be hunting with, like, you smell that? Like, that's elk. Because you could, because they urinate everywhere and, you know, you get this sense. They have like this really musty smell during the rut, too, and you could smell them.

• 2:46:16Speaker 02

  Could you smell the dire wolf?

• 2:46:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, they were stinky. I don't think you guys are bathing them.

• 2:46:22Speaker 02

  Why would we bathe a dire wolf?

• 2:46:24Joe Rogan?

  I know. My wife would be like, take him to the groomer.

• 2:46:29Joe Rogan?

  She hates when my dog gets stinky. She hates when I take him out into the dirt and play around with him and he comes back covered in burrs and stinky. Got to brush him down.

• 2:46:37Speaker 02

  Did they smell different?

• 2:46:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they did smell different. But I don't smell a lot of dogs that are never bathed, right? You know, most of the dogs that I've ever smelled.

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  These aren't dogs.

• 2:46:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right, wolves. Right, right, sorry. But what is really, which is really weird, that was the other conversation that we had, that they all come from wolves, like even a French, Jamie has a French bulldog. He's adorable. That was a wolf at one point in time and...

• 2:47:01Speaker 02

  We don't know which wolf.

• 2:47:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:47:03Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, this is, I think, dog domestication is one of those places where both, we come to terms with what we don't know and the opportunity to discover new things. You know, the very first scientific paper that said when dogs were domesticated, looked at a type of DNA that's only inherited from your mom called mitochondrial DNA. Our cells have a nucleus that has the DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act the way we do, and then it has little cells that were once bacteria that we co-opted that make energy, and you're only inherited from your mom. And there's a ton of them, like there's thousands of mitochondrial genomes in every cell and only one of your nuclear genome. So in ancient DNA, because there's way more, we started just with that. It was the only thing we could recover. And the first dog...

• 2:47:47Speaker 02

  Mitochondrial genomes that were recovered, people were like, dogs were domesticated in Asia 150,000 years ago, which is clearly wrong, right? There weren't human populations, societies, which is kind of what you need for dog domestication because they're attracted to the garbage or the living around where people were. So you need communities of people that are staying in place together for some time before you can have dog domestication.

• 2:48:11Joe Rogan?

  Do we know for sure there weren't human populations like that 150,000 years ago?

• 2:48:15Speaker 02

  We don't, but we do know now that dogs probably aren't that old.

• 2:48:18Joe Rogan?

  I think what I read was 36,000.

• 2:48:21Speaker 02

  I think it changes all the time, which is because we don't know everything. And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils. We don't have the DNA and the fossils just didn't preserve. I think right now what people are happiest with is that it was probably sometime after the peak of the last ice age, sometime 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. And not sure where, because again, probably in a warmer spot, there's been lots of gene flow, lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves that have made this a really hard problem.

• 2:48:55Joe Rogan?

  Like you were talking about with the black wolves.

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  Right, exactly like that. But what's cool about this date, 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, is that most of these people are like, yeah, that's probably the date for dogs, which means if dogs only form when there are human, like, communities that are together, groups of people that are living together in the same place for a long time, that they were around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. That is not what archaeologists think, right? So these two, these two weights of evidence are saying, you know, we still don't know.

• 2:49:26Joe Rogan?

  Sort of, right? But they do believe hunter-gatherers existed in small tribes 15,000 years ago.

• 2:49:31Speaker 02

  And maybe that was enough, but, you know, if you think of domestication, and scientists like to have names, we like to have ways of classifying things. And so there was recently, a couple of friends of mine have published a paper in which they've redefined how you consider something domestic, and they say a domestic population is something that can only survive within a human environment, within a human niche. And if you think of that as what our dogs are, right, they can only really survive and breed as dogs within this human niche, then you need a lot of humans around and you need a sort of steady stream of the crap that humans produce to do this. That's still kind of early, like, it's still, yeah, maybe there were hunter-gatherer populations that were more, you know, established somewhere in the South where we don't have dog bones.

• 2:50:17Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, that's what's weird.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  Stuff we don't know, right?

• 2:50:21Joe Rogan?

  And then wolves, are most wolves from warmer climates? No, right? They're from colder climates, aren't they?

• 2:50:27Speaker 02

  All over the place.

• 2:50:28Joe Rogan?

  All over the place? Well, Mexican wolves, right? There's Mexican wolves.

• 2:50:31Speaker 02

  There's Mexican wolves. But we think that the closest living relative of dogs is gray wolves. It's this gray wolf lineage. But we don't know if dogs are outside of the diversity of gray wolves. So it's an extinct type of gray wolf that was the progenitor of dogs. Or if they fall within the diversity of all the lineages of gray wolves that are around. And that's just because there's been so much movement of DNA around that part of the tree. I think it's a fascinating story that as we get more information, we're going to learn more about people as well. I just, I love that.

• 2:51:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, dogs are the most fascinating to me because it's so obvious that there's manipulation involved. It's so obvious that through selective breeding and also getting these animals to get accustomed to people, getting close to the fire, feeding them so they don't have to hunt anymore, and then they bark when intruders come. And we develop this sort of relationship where we work together. It's so interesting that we see the genes change into a poodle. We see this weirdness, or now it's a border collie. Like, what?

• 2:51:37Speaker 02

  Well, all of those, too, are probably Victorian, right? All of the breeds that we think of today, whether it's cattle or bison, they're, you know, within the last couple hundred years. That is really fast selection by humans. So we are manipulating the DNA of the species that we surround ourselves with. And we have been for 15,000 to 20,000 years, and probably longer.

• 2:52:00Joe Rogan?

  Just not in a laboratory.

• 2:52:01Speaker 02

  Just not in a laboratory. But, you know, is our backyard a laboratory? If I say, "I like the way that dog looks, but I like the way that that one can swim in water," and I bet if I breed them together, I can make one that has this double-layer coat so they can go get in that frozen water, but they'll still have that, like, cute look or something.

• 2:52:17Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting, right? Because we're thinking about science as only being done in a laboratory. Or manipulation only being done in a laboratory. It's clearly done with food. I mean, it was done with plants forever.

• 2:52:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:52:30Joe Rogan?

  Selective breeding of plants, splicing two plants together.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, when we graft plants together, I mean, that is like all of the vineyards in France, which are grafted onto American rootstocks because of the introduction of phloxera, this aphid that came from North America that was going to completely devastate the wine industry. Now they're all spliced onto American rootstocks that can survive this aphid.

• 2:52:53Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that wild?

• 2:52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:54Joe Rogan?

  I talked to a rancher in California and they were telling me that I think it was either the avocado trees were spliced on to the pistachio trees or vice versa.

• 2:53:06Speaker 02

  It's amazing that the plants can survive that, that they don't go like, yo, that's not me.

• 2:53:10Joe Rogan?

  Right. Like, we can't do that. We can't take a pig liver and shove it in your... Yeah. Your body would fight it off. Your immune system would fight it off.

• 2:53:18Speaker 02

  Well, we're trying. Again, that's another cool thing that we can do with this gene editing technology, is there are... We can turn off the genes that would cause that rejection to happen. So, maybe someday we can use pig organs in the place of humans and save people from dying.

• 2:53:31Joe Rogan?

  Or we can just re-engineer a new version of your organs.

• 2:53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, that is really cool science, this thing called organoids, where you can actually grow in a dish in a lab, a version of a little brain, something that approximates a brain or that approximates a heart or a kidney or something else. We're using this at Colossal, for example, to test hypotheses about what changes we might make to bring about, to resurrect, to de-extinct the phenotypes that we're interested in. If we grow an organoid that grows hair, can we see what that hair looks like without having to make a mammoth in order to see what that change is going to do? But it has really amazing potential for personalized medicine. So, I can take some of your cells, if you get a tumor, I can grow them in this dish and I can challenge those cells with different drug cocktails to see what works before I

• 2:54:20Speaker 02

  put them in you. Now, this is... This technology is so cool and really just beginning.

• 2:54:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, it is... It's amazing when you think about this technology and you think about what we had just a few hundred years ago, and then you push a few hundred years from now. And you think, what are the possibilities? And the only way to find out is to do experiments like what you guys are doing. And so that's one of the reasons why some of this pushback is so silly. Like, would you rather no one ever do this work? Or would you like to be the one who does the work? Or is it just that you think the work should never be done? Like, what is the thought process?

• 2:54:58Speaker 02

  Again, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if they do this, then we can't do this, which is just, it's not, it's not the way we innovate. It's not the way we make progress.

• 2:55:10Joe Rogan?

  But is this the nature of academia? Where, you know, because it's very gatekeep, even inside of academia, right? You work for a university and you have to get the approval of all the other people and you have to be politically aligned with them and everyone has to say the right things on Twitter. You know, it's like, there's a lot of weirdness, a lot of group think that comes along with all that stuff. And then you have to play politics in order to get funding. You know, you can't be ostracized. If you're ostracized, even if you have tenure, you know, when you see this with certain scientists that have very outside the box ideas, they get pushed out and they can't get funding anymore. Or if they don't agree with a certain narrative, what's being pushed with, whether it's public health

• 2:55:52Joe Rogan?

  or the environment or anything, they get ostracized, even if they're actually talking about real data and science.

• 2:55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, we can agree that it's a mess, right? It's a hot mess. But there is genuine, real science that comes out of the university system, of the academic system that we need. You know, all the technology that led to MRIs, the early technology that gave us CRISPR, this gene editing platform, was developed using, you know, funding from the government in scientific labs by people who are willing to take risks and step outside of that box. And then it's taken outside of there and it's turned into all of these cool things. I mean, there has to be a place where we get both of these things. Because there's some things that no one is ever going to build a business around until it exists. And we need this, you know, public system in order to do that.

• 2:56:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and that's what's so scary about what's going on with. With politics and funding and and research, you know, it's because it's like if as soon as you stop defunding research, you start making it more scarce and then making people.

• 2:56:56Speaker 02

  It's just gonna get worse.

• 2:56:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:56:58Speaker 02

  It's gonna get harder and we're gonna fall behind and we are going to lose the place that we have had as innovators and by we, I mean this country. We are gonna lose the place we have has had innovators in biotechnology, innovators in physics, innovators in all of these technologies because we've had such a robust system. It's a balance, you know, we clearly need both of these things and right now it's broken.

• 2:57:20Joe Rogan?

  And there's, there's a lot of weirdness that's going on with with biology in general in the world right now. And one of them is, I think there was a third scientist that was arrested for trying to bring in toxic mold from China. We know that this one scientist was arrested and then I think there's been two more. So they're trying to introduce this toxic mold into our food supply.

• 2:57:46Speaker 02

  The same toxic mold?

• 2:57:48Joe Rogan?

  I think, I think so. It might have been a different one, but I know it's also, it's the same kind of thing. See if you can find it, Jamie.

• 2:57:55Speaker 02

  When I heard this the first time and I've only heard about the first one, my, my first thought was, you know, is this, is this deliberate? Or is this super naivete on the part of this student?

• 2:58:05Joe Rogan?

  Which scares the shit out of me because if China wanted to cripple America's food supply, there'd be a great way to compromise basically everything.

• 2:58:11Speaker 02

  There is a country that is investing in science.

• 2:58:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, just their drone technologies off the charts. I was watching a documentary yesterday on the autonomous production of coal. And so they have these coal mines now that are done entirely with electric trucks and everything's done with AI. And humans aren't involved at all. So these trucks go, they dig, they mine, they fill the trucks. They bring the coal back and then when they're low on batteries, they charge themselves. Yeah, and they're running twenty-four hours a day around the clock.

• 2:58:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and.

• 2:58:47Joe Rogan?

  We don't have anything like that.

• 2:58:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:58:48Joe Rogan?

  We're not even close to doing that.

• 2:58:49Speaker 02

  And we're fighting about the amount of money that we should invest into very basic infrastructure.

• 2:58:53Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:58:55Speaker 02

  It's terrifying.

• 2:58:56Joe Rogan?

  It is terrifying. It's terrifying because we always hope that with every administration, there'll be positive changes and it just never seems to be the case. It's just like more and more of the same and more shortsightedness, like.

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Is it also this scarcity mindset? Like, I can't agree with this person because they once said this thing. I mean, why can't we have just a normal conversation like you and I are having right now?

• 2:59:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's because it's kind of engineered into our social media structure that human beings are going to fight with each other. The algorithm favors you looking and interacting with things that upset you. You know, this is just natural human nature. If you look at like some of the people that we were talking about earlier, negative scientists, you see them online. They're tweeting negative things like all day long, like.

• 2:59:46Speaker 02

  It's probably because they don't have any funding, so they can't actually do any science.

• 2:59:50Joe Rogan?

  Chinese scientist was arrested while driving in the US at Detroit Airport. A second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material.

• 2:59:57Speaker 02

  But is it the same biological?

• 2:59:59Joe Rogan?

  No, different stuff. What is this stuff?

• 3:00:01Speaker 03

  Worms.

• 3:00:03Speaker 02

  Warms?

• 3:00:04Speaker 03

  Described as worms.

• 3:00:04Joe Rogan?

  Certain worms require government permit. Um, I had heard that there was a third one.

• 3:00:10Speaker 03

  This is the third.

• 3:00:11Joe Rogan?

  This is the third? So there's a second one?

• 3:00:13Speaker 03

  And this one happened.

• 3:00:13Joe Rogan?

  Oh, second case in days.

• 3:00:15Speaker 03

  But I will say, they were going to the same place.

• 3:00:17Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:00:18Speaker 02

  That's weird.

• 3:00:20Joe Rogan?

  Another Chinese scientist also going to the University of Michigan. Boy, it's a, that's also really crazy because the thing about China and their scientists that come over to America is they all have to check in with the CCP. Like, if you are a Chinese scientist and you're from China and you're working in America, you gotta check in, which means like, how much of this research is just getting shared with China? And it's all weird.

• 3:00:44Speaker 02

  And we're focused on something else. We're focused on, yeah.

• 3:00:47Joe Rogan?

  They play a very long game, and I think their game involves raptors and T-Rexes. They're gonna release all the stuff that you won't do.

• 3:00:54Speaker 02

  I've seen that movie.

• 3:00:57Joe Rogan?

  I wonder, like, I worry about that, like, your information, the stuff that you guys are working on, if that stuff can be compromised, if someone can get a hold of it, and then they start doing that stuff over there.

• 3:01:08Speaker 02

  The thing is, the foundation for what we're doing, all of the stuff, from sequencing ancient DNA to gene editing technologies, to learning how do we link certain DNA sequence changes to the way something looks, this stuff is all out there anyway, right? Like, CRISPR technology exists.

• 3:01:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:01:24Speaker 02

  We're not working on humans, but other companies are openly, right? It's not like there's a big scary...

• 3:01:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know the story from China where the one doctor got in trouble and wound up going to jail because they had supposedly inoculated these babies from HIV, but in fact were making them more intelligent.

• 3:01:39Speaker 02

  I, I think maybe that was two separate stories, because I know the story about Jiang He, that He Jiang He was the name of that scientist, and he went to jail for three years. He actually did some training in the US. His, his name is He.

• 3:01:52Joe Rogan?

  Of course he did.

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  He, but he, he was trying to make, trying to use gene editing tools to, to, to, to make these babies have a particular mutation that we know is protective against HIV.

• 3:02:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:02:06Speaker 02

  It's the one that stops the HIV from entering the, the cells, where it then kills the cells. And I think this was a story that was broken by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of days before it was announced, but he thought that he was going to be able to announce this to great fanfare in front of a community that was going to celebrate him for having done this. And the story broke a few days early, but he had set this up, the whole PR thing, he had, like, YouTube videos that were ready to go to explain what he had done. He wasn't trying to do it in secret. He thought he was going to be a hero.

• 3:02:36Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 3:02:37Speaker 02

  Right? But, but people were like, "Holy shit, dude. What the fuck? Like, no. We're not editing human germ lines. It's the cells that will be passed on to the next generation." There's still a moratorium against doing that work. The baby that was just born, for example, they didn't edit any of his cells that would get passed on to the next generation. It's only the cells in his body, so those edits will only ever live in him, right?

• 3:02:59Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 3:02:59Speaker 02

  And there's a difference between doing that, and it's the, the second one that we're uncomfortable with.

• 3:03:03Joe Rogan?

  I thought they were editing it to make the, the children have a potential for higher intelligence.

• 3:03:10Speaker 02

  I think...

• 3:03:11Speaker 03

  I think that's maybe an unintended consequence of the gene that they were editing, because in mice, it did something like that, and so I think they just assumed... They're gonna be smarter, but I don't think that they're old enough to even test that yet.

• 3:03:25Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:03:25Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 3:03:26Joe Rogan?

  But, but if they knew that, wouldn't they do that?

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  But it wasn't, it didn't end up even being the right gene, the right mutation.

• 3:03:31Joe Rogan?

  Because is HIV a real issue today? It's not really.

• 3:03:32Speaker 02

  So the reason that this, that he got whatever ethical permission he did in China to do this is because they were children that were born by IVF because the dad had AIDS.

• 3:03:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 3:03:43Speaker 02

  And so what they were trying to do was create, what he claimed he was trying to do was create an environment where they would never accidentally get it, I guess if there's blood.

• 3:03:50Joe Rogan?

  And it also makes them smarter.

• 3:03:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if they knew that at the time, but I mean, they're, they're...

• 3:03:56Joe Rogan?

  China's played a long game.

• 3:03:58Speaker 03

  It definitely affected their brains, is what they just keep saying, sort of in this article.

• 3:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they don't, they don't know because they haven't been able to measure anything with these. I mean, they're guessing that would have affected their brains at this point, because these scientists...

• 3:04:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, when they're the leaders of the world in 20 years, we'll know.

• 3:04:11Speaker 02

  We'll know, for sure.

• 3:04:12Joe Rogan?

  We'll know.

• 3:04:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. This is, I mean, what makes us smart has been a, a thing that people have been trying to solve for a long time. And we're always looking for like, the one or two genes that cure, that figure out this. Very few traits are, are encoded by one or two genes. There are some hair traits. Whether your, your lobes are attached or not, that's one gene that you can change.

• 3:04:31Joe Rogan?

  But it is quite fascinating to think that in the future dumb people will not exist.

• 3:04:36Speaker 02

  I doubt that's true.

• 3:04:37Joe Rogan?

  Why? It may be relatively dumb compared to everyone else that's alive then, but maybe far more intelligent than people that are alive today.

• 3:04:44Speaker 02

  Do you know what's interesting about the efforts that have gone on to try to figure out genes that make people smart, is that they can find associations between what we're classifying as smart, and this is hard. Like, when you're, when you're saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have a conversation with another person and shut up so that you're actually listening to the other person?

• 3:05:02Joe Rogan?

  Emotional intelligence.

• 3:05:04Speaker 02

  Do you mean, do you mean somebody who can solve shitload of math problems and be a physicist or whatever?

• 3:05:08Joe Rogan?

  And be awkward socially.

• 3:05:09Speaker 02

  Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good-looking, right? I mean, what do you mean when you say, uh, is this thing? And so you have to define that first, and then, once it's defined, if you look for associations between genes at high frequency with people who rank high on whatever your thing is that you're, you're ranking them on, it's different depending on which, you know, human... Population you're you're studying. So it's, I mean, and this makes total evolutionary sense. Different things were under selection in different habitats at different times. And that made different people smarter in different ways for whatever that was.

• 3:05:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:46Speaker 02

  I actually think this is not how we start editing ourselves because that's not how evolution works. As soon as we edit everybody to be smart in that particular way and to be five foot ten, blonde with blue eyes and perfect and never going to have diabetes, the most attractive thing out there is going to be the opposite of that.

• 3:06:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:06:07Speaker 02

  So there will be, I just don't think, I, I, people are always thinking about, we're going to get superhumans, but they have a specific picture in their mind of what that means. That's not the same picture that the Chinese government has in mind. It's not the same picture that I have in mind, right?

• 3:06:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:06:24Speaker 02

  And that's, that's why I don't fear it as much, I think, just because that's not, that's not how it's going to happen. How it will happen is there will be some massive pandemic and we discover that there is a particular mutation that means you're going to die. And then suddenly this most unethical thing that is like completely abortant and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution. That is how we get there.

• 3:06:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  In, in my imagination.

• 3:06:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, I would love to have you back on when you get more information and more breakthroughs and more stuff that you're doing.

• 3:07:00Speaker 02

  I would love to come back on.

• 3:07:01Joe Rogan?

  I really, really enjoyed our conversation.

• 3:07:02Speaker 02

  You should come to the lab. I know you got to see.

• 3:07:03Joe Rogan?

  I would love to come to the lab. I will definitely do that. I promise you.

• 3:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:06Joe Rogan?

  I promise. Thank you so much for being here. It was really great.

• 3:07:09Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:07:09Joe Rogan?

  I really, really enjoyed it. And your book, Life as We Made It, um, How Fifty Thousand Years of Human Innovation Refined and Redefined Nature, Beth Shapiro.

• 3:07:19Speaker 02

  I think the rest of my Siberia story is in there, including the part at the end where I got arrested. I did, I read the audio book for that, yes.

• 3:07:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes, I love it. I'm so glad you read it. I hate when other people have to read people's work.

• 3:07:32Speaker 02

  Well, I, I asked if I could read it because my first book, How to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read. And I heard the audio book and I write in first person and I tell stories and I try to make it funny. And I was like, that's not how it should be read. So I wrote to them and I said, can I, can I read this book? And they said, oh, you're going to have to audition. And I was like.

• 3:07:48Joe Rogan?

  Audition for your own book.

• 3:07:51Speaker 02

  What if I am not good enough to read my own audio book?

• 3:07:54Joe Rogan?

  Well, you clearly are.

• 3:07:55Speaker 02

  Well, luckily.

• 3:07:56Joe Rogan?

  You're a great talker. Thank you so much. Thank you really for being here. I really appreciate it. It was really fun. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.

• 3:08:17Speaker 04

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