#2338 - Beth Shapiro

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro

Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal
Release Date: June 17, 2025
Description: In this episode, comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan converses with Beth Shapiro, a leading scientist in the field of ancient DNA and de-extinction projects. They delve into Beth's fascinating journey from broadcast journalism to pioneering genetic research, her adventures in Siberia, and the ethical implications of bringing extinct species back to life.

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1. Introduction to Beth Shapiro

Joe Rogan welcomes Beth Shapiro, expressing his admiration for her work at Colossal, particularly the creation of direwolves.

[00:17] Beth Shapiro: "I'm a scientist. I work in a crazy field called ancient DNA, sometimes called paleogenomics."

2. Transition from Journalism to Science

Beth shares her unconventional career path, initially aspiring to be a broadcast journalist before discovering her passion for science through a geology and archaeology program.

[03:05] Beth Shapiro: "I was convinced that this is what I wanted to do with my career... And I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist."

3. Exploring Ancient DNA

She explains the complexities of working with ancient DNA, highlighting the challenges of extracting degraded genetic material and the significance of modern technologies like PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) in advancing her research.

[32:55] Beth Shapiro: "He discovered a way to photocopy DNA, 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."

4. Field Expeditions in Siberia

Beth recounts her expeditions to Siberia, detailing the harsh conditions, relentless mosquitoes, and the cultural encounters with indigenous communities like the Dolgon people.

[07:10] Beth Shapiro: "So the first time I went, it was for a meeting, and I spent some time in Moscow first... There are so many mosquitoes."

5. De-extinction Projects at Colossal

The conversation shifts to Colossal's ambitious projects, including the creation of direwolves using ancient DNA. Beth describes the meticulous process of identifying genetic traits that define extinct species and engineering them into living counterparts.

[32:27] Beth Shapiro: "But they are dire wolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves... What makes a dire wolf a dire wolf."

6. Ethical and Conservation Implications

Beth addresses the ethical considerations of de-extinction, emphasizing Colossal's commitment to conservation rather than indiscriminate rewilding. She discusses the importance of controlled environments and the potential benefits for biodiversity.

[81:07] Beth Shapiro: "So it was really cool, because this captive breeding population was established with just a few founder individuals... It's what we're trying to do with our red wolf project."

7. Species Concepts and Hybridization

The discussion delves into the fluidity of species definitions, using examples like the interbreeding of polar bears and brown bears, as well as domestic dogs and wolves. Beth highlights how ancient DNA has reshaped our understanding of human evolution and species boundaries.

[83:42] Joe Rogan: "But it is quite fascinating to think that in the future dumb people will not exist."
[85:02] Beth Shapiro: "But all of the contamination. So. We're in a way drawing back on the species concept and what we should think about species going forward."

8. Human Impact on Ecosystems

Beth and Joe discuss the unintended consequences of human interventions, such as the introduction of Burmese pythons in Florida and the historical near-miss of introducing hippos to Louisiana. They explore how these actions disrupt existing ecosystems.

[53:32] Beth Shapiro: "What are they doing about that?"
[54:22] Joe Rogan: "There’s an estimate of a half a million. They think there might be a half a million there."

9. Academic Gatekeeping and Innovation

Beth criticizes the gatekeeping within academia, arguing that negativity and scarcity mindsets stifle scientific innovation. She emphasizes the need for open-mindedness to fully harness genetic technologies for conservation and de-extinction.

[100:01] Beth Shapiro: "It's the negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if, if they do this, then we can't do this... It's not the way we innovate."

10. Future of De-extinction and Conservation

Looking ahead, Beth outlines Colossal's future projects, including plans to resurrect species like the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. She underscores the importance of responsible genetic editing and the potential for these technologies to aid in biodiversity preservation.

[135:05] Beth Shapiro: "We have DNA from, from lots of different animals. So you know, you never know."

11. Addressing Criticisms and Skepticism

Joe brings up common criticisms of de-extinction, such as the notion that engineered direwolves are mere hybrids rather than true replicas. Beth counters by explaining the precision of their genetic engineering and the distinct traits that define the resurrected species.

[82:09] Beth Shapiro: "They are dire wolves because we have manipulated the DNA of gray wolves... And that coat, the light coat color that you see was something that we absolutely could not have known without the ancient DNA."

12. Closing Remarks

Joe and Beth wrap up the discussion by reflecting on the broader implications of genetic technologies, the importance of thoughtful conservation efforts, and the exciting future of biotechnology in shaping ecosystems.

[174:21] Beth Shapiro: "We've figured out how to learn DNA sequences from the past and actually transform that into an animal that's bigger than a gray wolf."

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Notable Quotes

• Beth Shapiro [00:29]: "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."

• Beth Shapiro [06:53]: "We ended up on this boat that was two hours late. It was warm and hot, and there are so many mosquitoes."

• Joe Rogan [03:05]: "Beth, you just followed your fascination, which is the best advice anyone could ever get."

• Beth Shapiro [37:39]: "So far, there are 2-5% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes. If you could put together all the Neanderthal DNA sequences from people alive today, we could reconstruct about 93% of the Neanderthal genome."

• Beth Shapiro [100:25]: "We're just trying to do things in a way that leverages our ability to fix things that we've already messed up, using these biotechnologies responsibly."

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Key Takeaways

1. Pioneering Work in Ancient DNA: Beth Shapiro has significantly advanced the field of paleogenomics, overcoming challenges related to degraded and contaminated DNA to unlock the secrets of extinct species.

2. De-extinction for Conservation: Colossal's approach to de-extinction is rooted in conservation, aiming to restore biodiversity and ecological balance rather than simply recreating extinct species for novelty.

3. Ethical Responsibilities: The responsibility of wielding powerful genetic technologies is emphasized, with careful consideration given to the ecological impacts and ethical implications of reintroducing species to the wild.

4. Redefining Species and Hybridization: Traditional species concepts are being reevaluated in light of genetic evidence, revealing complex interbreeding patterns that blur the lines between distinct species.

5. Overcoming Academic Gatekeeping: Beth advocates for a more open and innovative scientific community, free from the negativity and gatekeeping that often hinder groundbreaking research.

6. Future Prospects: The future holds immense possibilities in biotechnology, from resurrecting mammoths and direwolves to engineering genetically resilient species that can thrive amidst changing ecosystems.

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Book Mentioned:
Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined and Redefined Nature by Beth Shapiro. Beth also performed the audiobook version, offering a personal and engaging narration of her experiences and insights.

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Note: This summary captures the essence of the conversation between Joe Rogan and Beth Shapiro, highlighting the transformative potential of ancient DNA research and de-extinction projects in shaping our understanding of biology and conservation.

Transcript

[Joe Rogan]

Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out.

[Beth Shapiro]

The Joe Rogan Experience.

[Joe Rogan]

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Hello, Beth.

[Beth Shapiro]

Hello.

[Joe Rogan]

It's very great to see you again.

[Beth Shapiro]

I am pleased to be here.

[Joe 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 has been insane. So why don't just tell everybody what your background is and what you do.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 direwolves.

[Joe Rogan]

Why do you like to fight with people?

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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 that just want attention, a lot of people that are angry that you're getting attention, There's a lot of stuff going on.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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, they don't like that. They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

I actually started in broadcast journalism. Really. 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 journalism school. I started off as the news director at one of the local radio stations. And this job, let's just say, wasn't particularly compatible with being a freshman in college. 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 underaged. 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? 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 archeology 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 want to show how people have changed this landscape over and over and over again, and about the opportunities that we have to be able to become more creative controllers of this landscape. 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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, 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

What time of year did you go?

[Beth Shapiro]

Summer. Oh, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

So they're trying to sting you through your clothes. They're just. Yeah, they're big too, right?

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, it 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 Ikpikbuck 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. 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 back up. Like, the mosquitoes are just. Yeah. Something else.

[Joe Rogan]

I've only been to Anchorage. Well, I've been to a couple parts 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 open up the car door, there was a cloud of mosquitoes. We're shrieking like little girls. We're like. Like, what the hell? It was. I'd never experienced anything like it in my life. Like, where'd they come from?

[Beth Shapiro]

Right. You don't expect it.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's terrible. In time era, I remember, we would walk along the grass, this 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 needles of grass. It was just really awful.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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. It's only the females that take a blood meal, and they only take a blood meal when they're making a. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Beth Shapiro]

Kind of makes it worse, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. It really is fascinating how aggressive they are because if, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

You give up on that natural stuff real quick. I was watching a documentary where 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. Cool. 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 genes. We essentially have the same genes that people lived 10,000 years ago had very different world. And we're not really designed for this world.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Also depression, anxiety, all that stuff. And this is what Happy People is kind of all about. I mean, Werner Herzog is this. 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, but are very happy.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. It's impressive. When we were up there in Taimir, 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 was a repeated theme from.

[Joe Rogan]

You got a Siberian helicopter.

[Beth Shapiro]

It was an Mi8. And it was in. It was in a place called Hatanga, which is where we were based, while we were trying to get out 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, boy.

[Beth Shapiro]

There was airflow. It was fine. No, this was insane. This particular expedition was particularly insane compared to other things that. So also in the. I'm going to get to the story eventually, but also in part of this, we were traveling forever out into this part of the time air where they had predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones and woolly rhino bones and all the bones of the animals were 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 going to. 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 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, was that planned to.

[Joe Rogan]

Pick these people up or were they trapped?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 tent, the camp, and we discovered over the course of the next few days, 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 meant that our chances of finding what we Wanted were really small.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, no, no.

[Beth Shapiro]

It was devastating. And 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 helicopter. So they brought medical ethanol to drink and.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

I guess it weighs less than alcohol. That sucks. Crazy decision.

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, you know, they decided it was safe anyway. By three days in it's 24 hour sunlight, we're at 72 degrees latitude.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you try it? The medical ethanol?

[Beth Shapiro]

I tried the medical ethanol. I mean, obviously, right, you water it down with a little bit of river water and you have it with your freshly caught fish that you've filleted and. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, we had fish and rice for the whole time. That was.

[Joe Rogan]

So you had to catch your food?

[Beth Shapiro]

We had to catch our food, yes.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

So you just hear boom, boom.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 anyway. I don't know why I'm telling you, because it's fun.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a fun story.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 2 o' clock in the morning. 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 we didn't have to have anything. 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 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, 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, right? 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 normally live on to try to find us.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Pretty cool, actually.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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[Beth Shapiro]

It's a theme. It was Russia, so it's a fair theme. But the French couple, this is just. You're not gonna 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. Like a massive Gouda 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 community. And you know what was most amazing about this experience? And it was. 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 40 below. And it doesn't matter if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, because they cross at that level. Right. It's 40 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. Everything that they own is on these things on skids that the reindeer drag across the tundra, across the permafrost 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 head net because the mosquitoes didn't care about me around those animals, really. It was really impressive.

[Joe Rogan]

They only wanted to attack the animals.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

But probably because that's their natural source.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Were these people riding the reindeer?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Is this their place?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So you were in this area?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 moisture in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And people ride them and milk them. Yeah. And then occasionally whack one.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. I mean, they're great, Right. Animals 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.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

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?

[Joe Rogan]

You know, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Some of them are trying to tell you, though, by being like, bright red or bright purple, saying, Right, right, right. But we're dumb, so we're like, bright red. I'll lick that.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Those particular individuals have. Yeah. But I think they have a long history. The culture has a long history there. And I mean, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Absolutely.

[Beth Shapiro]

And really able to. You know, they're trying now to relearn their native languages because during the Communist era, they were all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the same way as everyone else. But even up there. Even up there.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. They sent an emissary to say, guys, it's time to speak the mother tongue.

[Beth Shapiro]

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?

[Joe 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. The people in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes of the world. It's just so interesting and we have.

[Beth Shapiro]

So much to learn from them. 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.

[Joe 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 that not even for a week. Nope, don't want to do it. There's so many things out there that leaf you. There's so many bugs that can kill you and snakes that can kill you. It's like, I'd like rather watch a video, right. David Attenborough documentary. I don't want to go there. I have a good friend who lives there, Paul Rosalie. 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 parcels of land and protect it and save it. But he's had some gnarly encounters with uncontacted people. Or at one point in time, they realized they were. They were actually being hunted and they barely escaped with their life.

[Beth Shapiro]

Holy shit.

[Joe 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 by.

[Beth Shapiro]

The most sophisticated hunting animal out there.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Because they have to.

[Joe Rogan]

Right? They probably knew these people were coming a long time ago. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

How did he get out of this?

[Joe Rogan]

They got out just in time. Just in time.

[Beth Shapiro]

They just escaped.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, but one of his friends, one of the people that he was working with, did not. They would have these gifts. 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. Phil of arrows.

[Beth Shapiro]

Whoa.

[Joe 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 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

We have a history of this.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, 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 realized, 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 4000 years ago or whatever it was, or it wasn't even that long ago. The Percy Fawcett. Percy Fawcett, right. That's his name. The guy who won. One of the guys who. That's. He's the main character in that book, the Lost City of Z. He's one of the people that went there when they. When the first settlers went there, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Up.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 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 was fun.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 Earth? Cause Jurassic park, yeah, great.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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 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 quagga, which is a type of zebra they had. Yeah, right. Well, in, in Dutch in South Africa, they actually say the quagga.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, even better.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, it's better that way, but it's kind of bad for the microphone, probably gross. I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right? Oh, so they sound like the. I don't know, who knows? 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 myosine 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 what is today, this big repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequen, 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 had been working on those bones had fried chicken for lunch every day.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's chicken contamination.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

That would be the early 90s.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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. Kari Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, on lsd.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

I like your scientific exploration mind.

[Beth Shapiro]

A good scientist always wants to know.

[Joe Rogan]

Never know. Maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that little piece of paper.

[Beth Shapiro]

Probably not. But probably not. You never know. Anyway, he discovered a way to photocopy DNA, 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 plant dies, the DNA in the cells 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. We 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 mechanism, but once you're dead, you no longer have the energy for that to work. And so these, 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 30 or 40 or 50 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. 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 are humans and so we touch these things and then I don't know if it's my DNA or if that thing. DNA, right?

[Joe Rogan]

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[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, or dropping an eyelash. In my lab at Santa Cruz and in Ancient DNA labs around the world. We have these really, 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 hair net, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Of course.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. 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. Svantipabo won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for this.

[Joe Rogan]

What did they extract it from?

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, it's cool.

[Joe Rogan]

That's really cool.

[Beth Shapiro]

But then they. The Denisovans, the Denisova people, that was just. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

And that's pretty recently, right?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, yeah. Within the last decade.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie and I were. We did a podcast recently. We were talking about the Big Head people. What are they called again?

[Beth Shapiro]

George Giuliani or something?

[Joe Rogan]

Julianne's.

[Beth Shapiro]

I've seen this. This is really recent.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, Jularen, lost species of humans with an abnormally large skull which lived alongside Homo sapiens. So they died off somewhere. They lived in China between three hundred and thousand and fifty thousand years ago.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Wild stuff. Yeah, yeah. And then of course, the Hobbit people, the island of Flores people.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yep, Flores.

[Joe Rogan]

Little, tiny.

[Beth Shapiro]

No one has still been able to get DNA from those samples now. But I mean, so it's just 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, it happens faster.

[Joe Rogan]

That makes sense. Yeah. There's probably a lot more to be discovered too.

[Beth Shapiro]

So much.

[Joe Rogan]

They only really found it out of one location. Right?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes. 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 Rampassassa people, are related to them. And they're 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 with these 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Is it just island dwarfism?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

Different alleles go to fixation and. Yes. I mean, weird things happen on islands. Things. Elephants, even elephants dwarfed. Yeah. But dodos. Dodos got bigger.

[Joe Rogan]

And so do lizards.

[Beth Shapiro]

They dwarf or they get bigger.

[Joe Rogan]

Bigger. Yeah. Like the Komodo.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Like cattle. Yeah, they've done this too.

[Joe Rogan]

Sheep and monkeys. It's horrific.

[Beth Shapiro]

Why do we watch that?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Be like, I'm like, I'm gonna watch.

[Joe Rogan]

They're so gross. Their mouth is filled with botulism.

[Beth Shapiro]

And is that what kills them?

[Joe 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. 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 start eating it alive.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Nature is so rough. Would you go brutal to Komodo Island? No chance, really. 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 kimono 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. That. This was, you know, an ex husband of hers back in the Dizzy.

[Beth Shapiro]

Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

I wouldn't have thought white socks.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's just missing.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, oh. Tendons and. Okay. Oh. He. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Wait, he was in the feeding cage?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Whoopsies. Oh, they mistook his. His white tennis shoes. That's what it was. It wasn't something. Socks. So this story's old. This story is from. They had him take it off.

[C]

It was.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, they had him remove his white sock? Yeah. Oh, it's a shoeless foot. Oh. So they thought that his tennis shoes would look like the rats, so they told him, take your shoes off so they don't look like they're rats.

[Beth Shapiro]

And his foot looks like flesh.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow. Sorry.

[Beth Shapiro]

This. This sounds like someone did a dumb thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, this is absolutely a lot of dumb things. What year was this, J. Jamie? 2001.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, well, bad decisions, bad outcomes.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not going to Komodo island.

[Beth Shapiro]

Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Sure. There's some stuff that won't kill you. Like giraffes.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Really?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 are. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

You know, there's nothing going on.

[Joe Rogan]

When my kids were little, you. You could go to the San Diego Zoo and you would give them lettuce and little babies are allowed to hold up. Like a 2 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, docile.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like they're just happy they're not getting eaten by lions.

[Beth Shapiro]

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?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[C]

It says they're kind of smart.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, really?

[Beth Shapiro]

But this is. I don't know.

[Joe 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 parents. They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, could 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. In both tasks, giraffes successfully selected the container more likely to provide highly liked food. Integrating physical information to correctly predict sampling information. Huh?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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 going to be pretty awkward when you get them out in the wild.

[Beth Shapiro]

Probably.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's probably the same thing with giraffes.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, does he play a lot of video games? They're very addictive. It's a real problem. And they're going to get worse, they're going to get way better, you know, as science makes things more and more addictive.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

One of the things they're really good at, these designers and algorithms, but they're just so good at making games. Games that are just incredibly compelling and fun.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Pretty crazy stuff. Yeah. Just imagine if you could take one of those Denisovans and show them that.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

You won't, But China's like, tell me more.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, I mean, what did you think of the direwolves?

[Joe Rogan]

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. You're outside. There's no fence between you and them, and you look in their eyes and, like, that is a different animal. Yeah, that is a totally different. I've seen wolves before. That is a totally different animal than. 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. Yeah, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, they were more than six months old. They were almost £100 already.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And they have this look in their.

[Beth Shapiro]

Eye, and you can see they're bigger, they're more muscular. And you see that. That coat.

[Joe Rogan]

The dire wolf co extraordinary. The mane that they have, it's very. It's really incredible. And then there's a little female Khaleesi.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

She's adorable.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is really crazy.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yep.

[Beth Shapiro]

Especially compared to Khaleesi.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Know, marking their territory.

[Joe Rogan]

It's just so strange to see an animal in the flesh that didn't exist for 10,000 years.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's amazing. I was there for Khaleesi's birth and people were asking me afterward, how did that feel? And I just. You can't even describe it. This moment when she was born. And then. And she screamed. She had 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 this awe. 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 awkward about something. And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting, get out, and, you know, going and spending time in the woods or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience. 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 be going, what the fuck are you doing? Where are you? Why are you not responding? I'm like, oh, my God, I've missed this moment. So I made sure that I was there present for Khaleesi, and I'm glad I was, because what an amazing. I'm glad you got to see them.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm glad I got to see them too. It's really a crazy experience. I felt very fortunate just to be in their presence and also very conflicted by it all. Like, this is so odd. Is this the beginning? Are we going to bring back everything? Is that a good thing? Are things supposed to go extinct? Are we supposed to just bring back everything that's ever live? 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, 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 like, Florida is amazing example of that, right? 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Did you see that? There's a competition every year to go out and kill as many as they can. And there's a. There's a monetary reward for people who kill. I think it's the most or maybe the. The biggest. There's some. Something like this and even that's not.

[Joe Rogan]

Going to put a dent.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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 for. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

They swallowed deer.

[Joe Rogan]

They eat alligators. They're eating alligators.

[Beth Shapiro]

Thank goodness. Because alligators are doing great. Like, that's one thing I don't mind them doing. We need to. We need something that's hunting alligators.

[Joe Rogan]

That's another problem in Florida. It's a.

[Beth Shapiro]

And they used to be on the endangered species list.

[Joe Rogan]

When I lived there. They were on the endangered species list.

[Beth Shapiro]

One of the class of 1967. Right. The first species to be officially listed.

[Joe Rogan]

Why did they list them and how.

[Beth Shapiro]

Because they were almost gone at that point.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Maybe it was.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't want to. I don't want to say they're so hard to find, but, I mean, when they get in the water.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, like, you don't want. You're not going to get all of them. Like, how are you killing all of them?

[Beth Shapiro]

I was. You know, there's a. Shit. I don't know where it's on, but it's a show that's called Florida, Man. I was watching it on a 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. That's that particular.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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, but 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 going to die. And he was like, okay, Mom, I'll do that. It was. I don't know. Oh, boy.

[Joe Rogan]

He was probably not sober.

[Beth Shapiro]

I imagine it was blood loss at point.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[C]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Is that the dude?

[C]

I mean, this is. This is not. The show She's Watching is on Netflix. I think this is a similar thing that did happen a month ago. Here's the video of it, the one.

[Beth Shapiro]

That was the show that was about.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

They are huge.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Now they're in Georgia, too, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, they're in Texas.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, they're here.

[Joe Rogan]

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 kind of puffed up. There it is. Look at that.

[Beth Shapiro]

Holy. Oh my God. That's wild.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they run like 30 miles an hour.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. And they really. Look at this dork.

[Joe Rogan]

This dork can't run 10 miles.

[Beth Shapiro]

Florida man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's totally a Florida man. Let me 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

So what ate them?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Maybe they're gonna do that too. I mean, I'm sure they probably do.

[Joe Rogan]

They probably have to at a certain point in time. And what are the snakes gonna eat? Snakes have wiped out 90% of the mammals in the Everglades.

[Beth Shapiro]

And they're terrible for birds too.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh yeah, for everything. Ground nesting birds, anything. Anything they can get 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. Yeah, everything's missing.

[Beth Shapiro]

But this is exactly why we need these technologies that we're trying to develop at Colossal. You know, we're, we're not just bringing species back to life, right? We're, we're, we're 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 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 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-1990s, that population recovered. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Because there's a small breeding population, because.

[Beth Shapiro]

There were very few of them.

[Joe Rogan]

And so no genetic diversity.

[Beth Shapiro]

The choice was to mate with your family. That. That's it. 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. They're the only endemic American wolf. And the. 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, 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. 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?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. 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? That's how that allele got into that population. So we know Canids do this all the time. And she. He 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 diverse 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. 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.

[Joe 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. Honey badger, because they eat snakes. I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea because we have.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

And in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah, I heard of those. Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. They're. And they're big. Have you seen one of those? I don't think I have a giant African land snail. It's worth looking at.

[Joe Rogan]

Did they come over on cargo ships or something?

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Doing this kind of thing for giant escargot.

[Beth Shapiro]

Whoa. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa. Can they eat those? Are those delicious?

[Beth Shapiro]

I think people can eat them, probably, but they eat everything from all of the vegetation to the other snails to plaster. You know, they'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built yet.

[Joe Rogan]

They're great.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, great.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

So 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 an, an unbelievably resilient body. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right. I remember when my kids were little watching the wild Kratts, there was a Wildcats episode about honey badgers. How they were all cute when they were babies because they were hiding in camouflage. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Maybe when their babies are cute, they're pretty ferocious.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a lot of wolverine. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

I think they look very.

[Joe Rogan]

Look at that face. Just big old 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

That's amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they're ferocious little animals.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

That's a really good look at that face.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Oh my God, it looks vicious.

[Joe Rogan]

That is such a crazy animal.

[Beth Shapiro]

That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. In the early 20th century, when the land in the west was not doing so well, been overgrazed, there were too many cattle. And there was this thing called the meat question. It was the thing of the day, the meat question. People were talking about how are we going to survive? There's not enough cattle. Maybe we're going to 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 brought New Orleans, who was the hosted of the. I think in Japan they brought New Orleans. This Water hyacinth. This water. Little, tiny, beautiful flower as a gift. And they loved it, and so they planted it everywhere. And it just grew, like, absolute crazy and was choking up 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 hit hippos from Africa 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. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

How did that get stopped?

[Beth Shapiro]

It was an accident. So it's actually a fun story. You should look it up and read the whole story, because it involved these two guys. One of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America. And 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. This is really. It's really important. And it was a really important part of the way 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 everybody Was like, yeah, awesome. Even the New York Times was completely behind it. They published an editorial talking about they called hippos lake cow bacon. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

What year was this?

[Beth Shapiro]

This is the early 20th century. Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Lake cow bacon.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Everybody was like, this is it. This is what's going to solve the problem.

[C]

Teddy Roosevelt was behind it too.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Teddy Roosevelt was behind it. Yeah.

[C]

There's a bill all the way in Congress just didn't pass.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

How this House almost became a nation of hippo ranchers. Oh, my God.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

That's it. It just went away.

[Beth Shapiro]

Just went away.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. So near miss on the hippos.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive. You saw there's hippos that live now in Colombia because of Pablo Escobar. Nobody knew what to do with them. Yeah. And they started off with just a handful of them, and now there's like dozens of them down there.

[Joe Rogan]

What are they doing about that?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

How much property did he have up there?

[Beth Shapiro]

I don't know the answer to that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's so crazy that you just have hippos and then they just get loose. And now Colombia has hippos.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. That's crazy. We did have wild pigs around the US at some point. Probably not the same thing. Right? Weren't there wild pigs? There was also.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a good question. I think they came over on boats with explorers, you know, and maybe they weren't 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they're the weirdest animal, right, because the domestic ones will become. They change, they morph. When they go feral really quickly, I think it's like they start within, like, six weeks.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[C]

The testimony of the. When this was going on, this is the guy who presented this, the hippo thing. He's talking about pigs right here, where they were going to bring them from northern Manchuria because of.

[Beth Shapiro]

Were they the most delicious pigs.

[C]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[C]

It was a bad test or something. This is like.

[Joe Rogan]

This is 1853.

[C]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

That's Irwin. So this is a guy who worked for the. I guess what became the usda, but he was in charge of. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, they've definitely done that in Texas. Texas is overrun with African animals. Well, all the private ranches.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Filled with elands and Neil Guy and wildebeest.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 have mammoths, why shouldn't we have elephants?

[Joe Rogan]

I know, but isn't it weird? But it's. Again, that's the same argument. You bring in an invasive species.

[Beth Shapiro]

Is it invasive though if it used to live here?

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. I mean, right.

[Joe Rogan]

They're not invasive because they do live. I mean there are wolves actually just have moved into the San Juans. I think documents 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 the. They, they're just killing calves and eating their liver. This, they were not even that hungry. They're just eating the tasty parts and leaving these calves alone. And these people are on a 24 hour run ragged. You know, 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. Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

I imagine it's really devastating to see something like that happening and know that somebody else made this decision and that you who actually experience it weren't. I mean I imagine the people who voted for that, I wonder what, what they imagined.

[Joe 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 nature and wild ecosystems and then you introduce this idea. Idea we're going to bring wolves back to their native habitat. Oh, that sounds amazing. What they're not telling you is like this with 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

So they already had a taste.

[Joe 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 the of, of Aspen where they prey on cattle. Start preying on cattle. It's just stupid.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right. And it would have been different wolves.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes, it would have been different size wolves. 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 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, 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 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 40%. But that's probably good. Yeah, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

This, like, this is stupid. Like, why did you do this?

[Beth Shapiro]

But what's interesting, this, this class that I took. So before, 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 debate was going to be. And I took a vote before the debate. And as you might expect for 18 year olds in California, you say at the beginning, should wolves be introduced? 100%, yes. Right, right. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

But everybody's going to vote, so. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

But you shouldn't be able to vote on things that you're not educated in. 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. I think just like putting them in Calabasas is probably not the best idea, putting them where people live. They're gonna eat pets. They're gonna eat a lot of things that are penned up, whether they're sheep or goats or whatever people have that they can get at easily. They're not gonna chase down a herd of elk. That's hard.

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, they're biology. Right. They're making decisions on where they can find their next meal we're not planning on rewilding dire wolves just to put that out there.

[Joe Rogan]

I like that.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

I bet she will in a couple of years.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, but right now, couple of years.

[Joe Rogan]

She'Ll freak you out.

[Beth Shapiro]

It kind of freaks me out already when you look at her, but. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 that you were.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. And you're not going to let them breed?

[Beth Shapiro]

No, the plan is not to let them breed.

[Joe Rogan]

How will you prevent them from breeding?

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, at the moment, they're separated, but we'll probably use subcutaneous. You know, you can put a hormonal. Like a birthright. Yeah, right. 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. Want to know what that would be, and we want them to be able to have the hormones to be able to do that, so. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

That sounds like a scene in Jurassic Park. We have a.

[Beth Shapiro]

Totally seen that scene. Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Don't worry. We have cameras upon cameras.

[Beth Shapiro]

I was. Do I sound like the scientist?

[Joe Rogan]

No, you don't.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

You know, Jeff Goldblum was the scientist that got.

[Beth Shapiro]

I'm Henry Wu. Right. I'm the chief scientist. Right. So I. I'm a good guy. For now.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

Maybe we want them back to help with our population problems.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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 research, Remus and Khaleesi, that are three direwolves 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 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 direwolves looked like, and they made them red or reddy brown. And that's because so many other animals seem to be ready brown, like mammoths or 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 gene variants 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. And so we thought, that's cool. We'll have that as one of our key dire wolf traits that we're bringing back.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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 warmer 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 the 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.

[Joe Rogan]

The tar just destroys everything.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 recovery of the DNA. We'll get there someday, we'll figure it out, and that's going to open up a lot of really cool.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, they have. Their hair is long and it's clear in the end. 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?

[Joe Rogan]

No. Are they covered in moss?

[Beth Shapiro]

It grows in. The hair is hollow.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Beth Shapiro]

And so if they're too wet and not cold enough, they can turn this, like, weird. Oh, they have mold inside their hair.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow. But it just makes sense that them being that color would have an evolutionary advantage for hunting because you're in something that's completely white and you don't see, like, a grizzly bear. You'd see, like, oh, look at that dark blob that's moving towards us.

[Beth Shapiro]

We did some work in my academic lab where we discovered that polar bears and brown bears hybridize with each other. This is one of those funny stories about academia with a scarcity mindset there, where 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they found them today.

[Beth Shapiro]

Go out 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 the other way around. If a polar bear b bear brown male had encountered a brown bear female, he's probably more likely to eat her than to mate her.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 forward that they can't successfully hunt seals if they don't have that white fur.

[Joe Rogan]

Completely makes sense.

[Beth Shapiro]

It does. Right?

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

It is cool. It's cool to think of 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Can see it, 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 is called a brown bear by us. And that animal is called a polar bear. They run into each other. They're like, like cool. Just like our Neanderthal ancestors.

[Joe Rogan]

Are those hybrids, are they fertile? Can they have babies?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 onto the islands as the habitat got better, where they encountered these populations of polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice receded, pretty much. And so they hybridized there. And all brown bears in North America today have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears.

[Joe Rogan]

Jeez. Wow. That's so fascinating.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, it's just like how we all have ancestry from mixing with Neanderthals. Is that from the German zoo? Because there's a couple of bears at it.

[Joe Rogan]

But that really looks like. Like a hybrid, doesn't it? Yeah, it looks like there's a lot of traits of both of them.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, it's impressive.

[Joe Rogan]

Bears are some of the most fascinating animals ever. Yeah, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Why would it.

[Joe Rogan]

You're right. It's just our definitions. Is this part of the problem with the criticism of this 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's kind of that, but it's also that we haven't agreed. Right. So. 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 context.

[Joe Rogan]

Sure.

[Beth Shapiro]

We have come up with dozens of different species, these 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 priscus. I'm going to say skull out there. This is. That's from the.

[Joe Rogan]

That's from the boneyard. Yeah. Step bison.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Steppe bison. Bison priscus or bison Crassicornis, Bison occidentalis, Bison alaskensis. Bison. I could go on forever. I, you know, this is. The naming of bison was like sport in the, you know, 18th, 19th centuries. Mostly 19th century.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you go to the bone lab? The boneyard?

[Beth Shapiro]

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. Have you been to Dawson City?

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's amazing. It's an old timey gold town. Dirt roads, wooden sidewalks, the buildings are all crooked because the fire is burned at one end and it melts the permafrost underneath and it goes.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's where I learned what you're supposed to do when a fight breaks out in the bar that you've gone into.

[Joe Rogan]

What are you supposed to do?

[Beth Shapiro]

Grab your beer back up, right?

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Beth Shapiro]

Get out of there, otherwise your beer's gonna get knocked over. I'm not leaving.

[Joe Rogan]

You're not leaving when a pipe breaks out.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

I would tell you to leave.

[Beth Shapiro]

No, it's a weird place.

[Joe Rogan]

They still have women. Women fighting don't scare me as much as men fighting, but then women can pull out guns.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. You go out to the bars in Dawson City. I'm gonna. 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, really?

[Joe Rogan]

That's what they want to do when they get paid.

[Beth Shapiro]

Rings the bell and then goes from table to table sitting around with people. And we, the nerdy scientist paleogeneticists sitting in the corner are trying to do just Be super nice. Canadians like talking to these people. Like, I don't want to fight.

[Joe Rogan]

And he's just looking to fight with someone.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

American Museum, well, it was previous owners of his property.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Because. 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 die for it. And John Reeves told everybody where it was.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't know if he hired him or just told them, but. So these guys dove in the east river, they found steppe bison bones, jaw fragments, all sorts of different.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. There's so much but 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 Now? They shouldn't have dumped it in the river. Obviously, that's dumb. But he is going to get the last laugh. He won't know because he'll be long dead. But in 10,000 years, when the paleontologists of the future are looking in that river, they're going to be like, what the fuck?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

What happened here?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, I'm sure it's there.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, who knows? Those people aren't even around anymore. I think this was in the 20s, wasn't it?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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. Which makes you question like how did all these animals do die off in mass in this very small area where you've got warehouses filled with bones and tusks.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Near Dawson. It's called the Klondike region. You have this really fine glacial silt and that settles in different places 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 placer mining. So they, they're taking these high pressure water hoses and washing away this frozen dirt. Then 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, they're mopey because they're 19 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 man mammoth tooth? Like yeah, that's a mammoth tooth. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that what you brought?

[Beth Shapiro]

That's what I brought you. Yeah. This is a. It's a fossil. This is from South Carolina.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. That's from South Carolina.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. That has.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that's your logo.

[Beth Shapiro]

Of course it's branded. It's colossal, you know. Yeah. It's our logo.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

But yeah, mammoth. Do you know the story about our founding fathers and mammoths?

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. So Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mammoths.

[Joe Rogan]

How did he even know about them?

[Beth Shapiro]

So they were. There were probably mastodons because it was these teeth that were melting out of the salt licks and things like that in the part of the United States. But he was obsessed with them. He was getting his friends to mail him teachers teeth that he was finding. And he was. 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 how mammoths made America great before. And now when we bring our mammoth back, we're going to do it again. So there was a guy in France who was writing a series of books. He was like Comte du Buffon. Comte du 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. Called the Theory of American Degeneracy. 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?

[Joe Rogan]

Really.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. 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 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 reading.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what they thought.

[Beth Shapiro]

And it was really. It was a best seller, apparently.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

It's like strength. They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, they did. There were new diseases, they probably did get sick. And so there was probably something in it, but. So Jefferson went so far as he had a moose sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it was, like, partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody put the wrong antlers on its head. It was just really dumb. But his main feature was mammoths, that he knew that this animal, he didn't think they were, were extinct at the time. And nobody really knew about the idea of extinction. He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were gonna find them, that people were gonna find these mammoths still there. And that was going to prove.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

What I don't understand about this is how a person, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Georges Cuvier.

[Joe Rogan]

Cuvier. 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 would. That's the real question. Like there have been animals that went extinct and then came back. Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

The dire wolf.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Thought was extinct that's returned then they didn't go extinct.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right. Like sort of like the Tasmanian tiger they just became.

[Beth Shapiro]

Or Bigfoot? Oh, no, the Tasmanian tiger was definitely realistic.

[Joe Rogan]

But some of the thylacine. But Bigfoot was real. It was dark. Gigantopithecus, they think that that was real.

[Beth Shapiro]

But Gigantopithecus is really old.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Insulation. They said it's Bigfoot fur.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. Yeah, he, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a stationary. He's emailing you from his trip club.

[Beth Shapiro]

It was a written letter.

[Joe Rogan]

Letter from his trip club. Sorry, everything's an email to me.

[Beth Shapiro]

It was 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 going to get Bigfoot DNA, it was going to be from that insulation.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, boy. Did you test it?

[Beth Shapiro]

Of course I did.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

I don't. I don't actually know. I think the Ganopithecus, millions of years old.

[Joe Rogan]

I think the story is that an anthropologist was in an apothecary shop in China and found the bones. I think this is in. I think it was in the early 20th century. And I think he said, where'd you get this? Like, he's got giant prime primate teeth. And they took them 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Oh, that's so cool. Well, most things from paleoanthropology are. I'm going to rewrite human history because I found a partial jawbone with three worn teeth.

[Joe Rogan]

Here's the problem. Right. You could tell me whether this is correct. Most things will never be fossils, Right? Right. So we don't even know how many species existed and never left a fossil. Because fossils are hard to make.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right. This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA. Right. So I think. I don't 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, 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, ancient DNA hated it because it was going in and going, oh, no. Turns out you were wrong about that. Yeah. Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't. Didn't interbreed. Oh, turns out you were wrong about that.

[Joe Rogan]

I remember them teaching us that in high school.

[Beth Shapiro]

Based on what data?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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. 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 2 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 beforehand? 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 that are in people alive to today, we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome. Wow, that's cool, right?

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy.

[Beth Shapiro]

Two questions then. Are they actually extinct? If we can put together 93% 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 7%? Right? And if we want to know what it is that makes us human. 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. That is the bit that is important to define us. We've actually been able to narrow that down. There's less than 100 genes, we think less than 100 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.

[Joe 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, and that genes in nature don't care what we're saying. There's this weird thing that's happening from the time we were proto homies, hominids, to what we are today.

[Beth Shapiro]

It makes sense, though. We want to have a conversation, right? And if we want to talk about something, we have to call it something, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Australopithecus, right.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. To figure out which agency 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 20th century, called the biological species concept, which says you're a species if you can breed and if your offspring are fertile. 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 can. That I. Do you know what a beefalo is?

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

No, a beefalo is a breed of hybrid that is 5, 8 cattle and 3, 8 bison that supposedly has better meat.

[Joe Rogan]

Do they do it on purpose?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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? Does it work both ways?

[Beth Shapiro]

Does that barely works at all?

[Joe Rogan]

Do they do it artificially or they have them party Together?

[Beth Shapiro]

No. This. No. They just lied.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's fake.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's not real.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh my goodness.

[Beth Shapiro]

So I've always, I've spent a lot of time being interested in this sort of 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 and then humans and monkeys. You're the biological, 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 they're not reproductive. You know, there's problems here. We can't, can't do this. And because the. Yeah. And so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this. And then there was this guy called, 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, eight bison and five, eight 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 two and a half million $1975. It's still the most expensive single animal that has ever been sold. Right. Two and a half million nineteen $75 for this animal. And so we have this thing. I was like, we're going to sample them. We were working with collaborators from the usda. We were reaching out to people, reaching out to ranchers and saying, can we have a piece of your pieces, some of your stuff? And they were like, 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 sequence their genomes and then we got from the USDA their expired sperm straws that they have for the animals that they give away to start your beef lure thing. We sequence their genomes as well, including this two and a half million dollar 1975 individual. And we've done a lot of work on bison and cattle throughout the last 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 expect him to be. So now we know exactly where we think our beefalo should be. They're five, eight 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.

[Joe Rogan]

100%, they're just cattle. It was fake. So did they use like Highland cattle or something like that that have those crazy furs?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Let me see a beefalo. Jamie.

[C]

I did the beefalo the week I was went down a weird. I just.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, boy. Wrong websites. No, I just didn't.

[C]

It didn't seem like I was on the same path.

[Joe Rogan]

When was this all discovered that these are just cattle?

[Beth Shapiro]

Oh, just look up Beefalo. And then you look at historic Beefalo. You can see the pictures of historic Beefalo. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

When was it discovered that these are just cattle?

[Beth Shapiro]

We just published the paper like a few months ago.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

So these people are out here still selling beefalo like it's real.

[Beth Shapiro]

Like this is a website and they're hybrid with something. They're mixed with a little bit of zebu. Some of them have a little bit of bison in Them, but this is a.

[Joe Rogan]

They're just cows.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

It is hilarious. It's very funny. It does look different than a rare.

[Beth Shapiro]

Cow though, a little bit. I mean they were trying to do that. Right. And we can engineer everything, but that's.

[Joe Rogan]

Not what they did.

[Beth Shapiro]

A Chihuahua looks different from a Great Dane, but their DNA is a lot the same.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

I think it. Well, this is me speculating at this point. I think he had to know. Right. 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. Oh, no, just boy. Yeah, fun. Anyway, I digress. I don't remember what we were talking about.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Older.

[Joe Rogan]

Older?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, I, I don't know, maybe so.

[C]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Are like 300, 400,000 years diverge from Neanderthals.

[Joe Rogan]

Is that like around that time?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So it is possible that at one point. And so this is just a very limited amount of bones. Right?

[Beth Shapiro]

It's just limited. Just like everything else in paleoanthropod.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Maybe 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 of ecosystem as it changes over time. Super cool, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

But recently there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Horse DNA?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

But you know, they're. There are a lot of Native American cultures who believe that they have a long history of the horse and that the horses survived. And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it. 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. 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.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

In North America, 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 house cat sized horses.

[Joe Rogan]

House cat sized horses, yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

That's so fascinating.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's so cool.

[Joe Rogan]

So fascinating. Well, we were talking about this the other day, the big debate that happened with Clovis first, that they used to think that human beings, they came over here at a very specific time and then they found those footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. And they're like, okay, we 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. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. They did that to Jacques Maris, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's so gross. It's so gross. And they keep doing it over and over and, 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? Like have they always been here? How'd they get here? Like what's the earliest known humans? You know, we, we know that there's no Neanderthals here so far.

[Beth Shapiro]

So far?

[Joe 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, 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 like.

[Beth Shapiro]

Okay, well that would be interesting.

[Joe Rogan]

The thing 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. Yeah, so this was just June 7th?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, I don't know anything about this.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe 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 they've done CAT scans on these things and they seem to be human or human. Like these things.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, I've seen these. They're amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

Like I thought 100% horseshit when I first saw them because I think some of them are horseshit.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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. Yeah, like somebody made that.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

CAT scans are even weirder.

[Beth Shapiro]

Are they?

[Joe 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 look. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

How old are they? I've dig these. I've seen some of the reports. This is the thing that was presented to the Mexican government at some point.

[Joe Rogan]

This is Peru. The Mexican ones seem to be horseshit. Okay, it seems like. And the guy who discovered it. Air quotes.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Seems to have a history of finding silly things. But this seems real. This seems very real. Like, look at this thing.

[Beth Shapiro]

What's that on the neck?

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly. What is that on the neck? Who the hell knows? Like, who the hell know? 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 or whatever the hell that thing is. On the back of its 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 Neanderthals, but why don't you bring back one of them little three toed alien people?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

They say no, shoot them in the head.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right? Easy.

[Joe 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, a real thing, like what is that? Yeah, what's that thing in the back of its head?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

The ones that look super fake look like something you'd buy in like a roadside. Roadside stand. They look totally bullshit. But then 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 BC. This is how old these drawings are. And these tapestries that show these weird three toed, three fingered things that look like a little one of those things. Like so was this another type of human that lived with us at some point in time?

[Beth Shapiro]

It's interesting. There are the three toed and three fingers thing is interesting. I wonder if there's a genetic mutation that will lead to that. You've seen that the tribe. There's an isolated tribe. Ostrich feet.

[Joe Rogan]

Very weird.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, but that.

[Joe Rogan]

So maybe that was that. Maybe that's what that was.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. So why don't you guys get down to Peru?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes, probably. Let's not tell him.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they found the bones in China.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. So it could have come across.

[Joe Rogan]

Make sure that story's right. That I said I'm pretty sure that's true. Gigantopithecus bones found in apothecary shop in China.

[C]

Yeah, I just didn't want to bring it up. That's a guy named Ralph von Koenigswald, 1935. They're being sold as dragon bones. So they bought a bunch of stuff and then they started looking at them and found out that that's not what they were.

[Beth Shapiro]

So it's 35 early to middle Pleistocene in China. That was super interesting. And I wonder, you know, if these populations were there. They're there at the same time as Denisovan were there. Neanderthals were there. They would have if they could have hybridized with humans. They probably, who knows?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Beth Shapiro]

We know so little. Right.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yep.

[Joe 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.

[C]

I don't know who added this.

[Joe Rogan]

Closely allied with orangutans, once thought to.

[C]

Be a hominy, now thought to be.

[Joe Rogan]

Closely allied with orangutans, once thought to be a member of the human line.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Have you ever seen them spearfishing?

[Beth Shapiro]

No.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they've learned how to spearfish.

[Beth Shapiro]

That's amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Did they learn from us?

[Joe Rogan]

We don't not necessarily know that. Crazy. Really crazy. Like, he's figured out how to catch fish. Really? Oh, says after observing locals, which totally makes sense, right?

[Beth Shapiro]

Smart.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I mean, he's seen people catch a fish and like, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

You know, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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. Species back and whether or not it'll be a pro or a con. Like what? You know, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

No, you don't. But humans will make decisions based on biased evidence. We'll make decisions based on our. The potential for a financial weapon 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Ooh, that world. You know, 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. We. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, yeah, they're gonna say they're kill everything.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

What animal do you think? Well, obviously you guys are working with the red wolves and you plan to use which, 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, that's the, the best argument because there's a lot of people saying, oh, this work could be used for conservation.

[Beth Shapiro]

It is being used for conservation.

[Joe Rogan]

That's so infuriating about some of these haters. 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 it.

[Beth Shapiro]

They want the click. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

And the best way to get that click is to whine. To whine and complain.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's annoying.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

You're gonna say that one thing forever. Yeah, congratulations.

[Joe Rogan]

You get a lot of attention for just being super negative all the time. But the, the. If you had to, like, look at their argument like the. So the argument of, like, not just doing this and that, you're not really creating a dire wolf and this is just. You're just taking direwolf genes and adding them to gray wolves. Have you ever have 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

I think that the. This idea that the technology that we are developing is something that we shouldn't be developing because it's wrong 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, back to the hunt the next year and they would be there again. And we domesticated things 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 Brandt 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, but they are technologies that we can deploy to hopefully try to fix some of the things that we have fucked up already. And I think the. 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, I don't want to do it because it's too scary because I'm going to be bad. 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 history of the fossil record. And a lot of that is because of us. But we have the capacity to sleep 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 honeycreepers 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? Or anything that we could do to save some of these habitats that we know are in trouble because of this combination of people expanding and natural change to the ecosystem that we just don't like. You know, we don't want to see spruce forest disappearing because it's getting drier, and that means that they can't make enough resin to fight off the Beatles. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

You know, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

I think what people are concerned with is the crude application of 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, to everyone. It's kind of like a test run. Like, let's we can make a direwolf. Can we make a super person? You know what I mean? Like, it's probably the future. I mean, having regular children, like, just rolling the dice on seeing what your kid turns out will probably be super novel, like 100 years from now.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. 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, this boy who was born with a metabolic disease. 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Wild.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's amazing.

[Joe Rogan]

Wild.

[Beth Shapiro]

And it was such. It was a rush, you know, but 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 end 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. This is the beginning of these tools. And for de extinction and conservation, this is also just the beginning. 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 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 edges that we make. We are in every case interested in making the fewest number of changes possible to still bring those animals back.

[Joe Rogan]

What other animals are you going to bring back? Well, what's the plan? What's the plan, Beth?

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that's cool.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

So, but is there like a. So you've announced the woolly mammoth.

[Beth Shapiro]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

And where will that be?

[Beth Shapiro]

Where are we going to put mammoths?

[Joe Rogan]

Are you gonna reintroduce them area into areas?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Dire wolves?

[Beth Shapiro]

No, we won't be reintroduced. Introducing dire wolves.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, so not predators. But you would.

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, not dire wolves.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

It'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.

[Joe Rogan]

Because pronghorns are fast.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, right now we're not focusing on Russia because issues, obviously. Right. So probably it would be somewhere in North America. Maybe that's why Trump wants Greenland for mammoths. Greenland filled with ice. I mean, mammoths really need a lot of the vegetation. Yeah, yeah. So I think maybe, maybe not. Yeah, that's right. 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Alaska would be the move. Right. Because it's like the size of one third of the United States and they lived there.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And you know.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 there's suddenly going to be a thousand 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.

[Joe Rogan]

I was blown away when I heard that mammoths lived up till about 4000 years ago on an island.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

Horses for 4,000 years. Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

And that data, horses and mammoths.

[Joe Rogan]

And mammoths. That was 4,000 years old too.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

Like what percentage of the entire fossil. Fossil record. Bad pun, bad word to use there. But in record of animals have been.

[Beth Shapiro]

Fossilized, 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. It was that 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Brings me to the Short Face Bear. Oh, I don't like how you giggled. Are you guys going to try to bring that thing back?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh my goodness.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 giving it that common name? Then they're like, oh, here's a bear that if it stands up, it's 12ft tall. I'm gonna call it the Short Faced bear.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, what in the hell?

[Beth Shapiro]

Have you seen the longhorned bison? This bison that lived 120, 150,000 years ago.

[Joe Rogan]

I think I have.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 there.

[Joe Rogan]

It is. Yeah. That's crazy.

[Beth Shapiro]

We have DNA from him.

[Joe Rogan]

He might bring that back.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. Wouldn't that be cool?

[Joe Rogan]

What about the, the Irish elk?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

When did that thing go extinct.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

That thing's nuts. It's like a moose slash elk. I love it looking thing.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Beavers scare me, especially a five foot beaver.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

People have found logs that have been chewed on by this thing. Like just. Yeah, just imagine what did that die.

[Joe Rogan]

Out in the Ice Age as well?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So that's like 65% of all the megafauna in North America. Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[C]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, Giant sloth species named after him.

[C]

Megalonyx jeffersoni.

[Joe 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 from the, from the fossils. Yeah, that bone right there, make that the head. Like look at that thing. That looks like some crazy cat. What a weird animal.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right. Maybe that's why.

[Beth Shapiro]

Or the American cheetah or the Smilodon.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the cheese is probably too little, you know, it get smashed.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, have you ever seen sloths, even little slow moving ones, swing at leopards or jaguars rather? Yeah. There's a video of a sloth, a regular one, that is crawling on this vine and this jaguar is trying to get at it and it's swinging at it pretty fast. I was like, whoa. I didn't know they could swing that fast. But it moves really slow, which is.

[Beth Shapiro]

Like I wonder if it.

[Joe Rogan]

Why does nature want you to die so easy?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I mean, I don't know. It's like the jaguars are re emerging in the Southwest, Right. They've, 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. Trouble. That's a giant mountain lion.

[Beth Shapiro]

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, I'm thinking, oh, mountain lions bring my dog, right?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

I think they're afraid of dogs. I've a little bit, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It depends on the dog. They eat a lot of dogs.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Can we play?

[Joe 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, the ones that are problem cats in Northern California, when they found them and they do these depredation tags, they found that 50% of their diet is dogs and cats. Wow, 50%, that's nuts. Yeah, that's nuts. They're just eating people's dogs and cats.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yikes.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

You want around 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, there's another one that Hearst. I think Hearst collected one of the last ones of the California golden bear in Southern California, had him shipped up to San Francisco and he became the bear that's the inspiration for the flag.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh really?

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

It's named after the guy?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

I wonder if it's worth it to his him.

[Joe 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 none of them.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, well, by the time I think it was on the flag, it was.

[Joe Rogan]

Already on their way out probably. Well, people are probably wanting to bring them back too.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Don't do it, people. I guess 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 with bears. Yes, with grizzly, grizzly bears, they would like people to be able to hunt them.

[C]

They put a smile on his face.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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 and the museum. We've, we've sampled it for DNA.

[Joe Rogan]

So his diet should have been fruit and vegetables and meat.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Oh really?

[Beth Shapiro]

Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Eat a little bit of fiber to help your digestion.

[Joe 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. Eat everything. They eat cars.

[Beth Shapiro]

When I lived in Colorado, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

No. What is that?

[Beth Shapiro]

It's like it's around the time when they come out, they're eating all the salmon because they gotta get suit 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, that's good fun. I love it.

[Joe 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, 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, bear is huge. It's like 10, 11ft tall, long, whatever. And it doesn't care about the person at all. It just has been eaten salmon. So this is it. Look at this.

[Beth Shapiro]

And salmon are so much better.

[Joe Rogan]

Look at the size of that thing. Imagine. Give me some volume. So you hear this guy talking because it's so crazy. Bear's not interested in them. There's meat right to his right. He just lays down imma chill.

[Beth Shapiro]

Humans probably make a terrible snack though, right? I mean we're bony, we're. Or fatty. That salmon is absolutely delicious source of protein also.

[Joe Rogan]

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?

[Beth Shapiro]

He looks full. He's. I like him. He looks chill. That's the bear that I would want to replace. Run into in the field. That's a crazy, like it's a dog. Like get out of here.

[Joe Rogan]

You get to 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Never been out there.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I want to watch them. I want to watch them eat the salmon with a high powered rifle right next to me. And maybe in a giant bulletproof hamster wheel or something. I'm so scared. Scared of those things that. Have you seen the documentary Grizzly Man?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Another great Werner Herzog film.

[Beth Shapiro]

Okay, I, I have to look at.

[Joe Rogan]

The Werner's actually in that film. He's interviewing the people in that film which is like that. 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 he just like oh my God, we just laughing and the guy was so nuts and he just decided to. I think in my eyes, I think it 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 going to 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah. There's a woman who's worked in my lab for a long time. She works on mountain lions for mountain lion genetics. And she said when it's her time.

[Joe Rogan]

She wants to go, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

And eat you while you're still alive.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they don't care at all.

[Beth Shapiro]

You die of shock 4 and after.

[Joe Rogan]

Photos of these before they got fat, like, wow.

[C]

Wildly skinny like a dog.

[Joe 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 is when they see them skinned and they're hanging, they look like humans. It's like very weird.

[Beth Shapiro]

Or Bigfoot.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

No.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Legs and it just looked like a man. Like a man, like a Bigfoot.

[Joe Rogan]

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 a little weird it out already. And you see this thing, it's a black bear that's walking on two legs through the woods, you would be convinced that you saw Bigfoot, don't you think?

[Beth Shapiro]

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 sightings.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy?

[Beth Shapiro]

Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

[Joe 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 him. He's real. He's real.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Would.

[Beth Shapiro]

Would be Bigfoot, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. A little blurrier and then a little more distance and in between trees.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I talked to a lady once. We did this television show.

[Beth Shapiro]

Look at him. That's amazing.

[Joe 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. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Super dense.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 grandmasters.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, of course. I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense. But the weird thing about it is the Native Americans, because Native American have a name for that creature, and they have many names for it in 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

That's weird.

[Joe Rogan]

It is weird, because if Beringa. Is that what it's called? The Bering Land Bridge? Beringia 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. 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

It would have to come really far north, though, to get across the Bering 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 Bering Land Bridge. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Also, we don't find primates in cold climates like that.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Other than humans.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Let's just keep walking north. We gotta get away from these other assholes.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That's probably what they were doing.

[Beth Shapiro]

Bison.

[Joe Rogan]

Bison mostly following the herds. And then eventually they had to learn to adapt to these colder climates.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 trying to find food. Like the Dolgon people with. They're going to places where there's still grass that their reindeer can graze on.

[Joe 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 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 for. But that now they have a snowmobile. Now they have a Right. 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Right. But somehow they're happier than us.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Oh, I mean, people have used the word de extinction, which I kind of hate because I can't figure out how to conjugate it in a way that doesn't make me cringe. If you've done it successfully. Deep. Do you say you de. Extincted something?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Bring back Resurrect.

[Joe Rogan]

Resurrect. I think resurrects probably, but that has Biblical.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

But you're kind of playing God, so let's Go with that.

[Beth Shapiro]

Okay, cool, I'm in.

[Joe Rogan]

Is there one that gives you pause? Like maybe the short faced bear. Pause, like maybe, like maybe this isn't the best idea. The host eagle.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

That's a cool one.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Ate people too probably.

[Beth Shapiro]

They were.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, wow, right? Which makes sense that that's how they went extinct. Like the New Zealands are like enough of this shit.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, well the moa went extinct and so they couldn't eat moa anymore. But maybe it was both, right? I mean, why did short faced bears go extinct? Probably because nobody wanted a bear that stood 12ft high.

[Joe Rogan]

What do you do about it though? Like kill it? 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh sure.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Like they probably understood it really well because these are people who relied on that. They probably understand it better than people who aren't hunters today. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Smell than we do or more attuned.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I was taught it, you know, I, I would smell something and then, you know, like the guys that I'd be hunting with, like you smell that. Like that's, 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 rock rut too. And you could smell them.

[Beth Shapiro]

Could you smell the direwolves?

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Why would we bathe a dire wolf?

[Joe Rogan]

I know my wife would be like, take him to the grimmer because she hates when my dog gets stinky. She hates when I like, take him out into the. The dirt and play around with them and he comes back covered in burrs and stinky. Got to brush them down.

[Beth Shapiro]

Did they smell different?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, they did smell different, but I. I don't smell a lot of dogs that are never bathed. Right, right. You know, most of the dogs that.

[Beth Shapiro]

I've ever smelled, these aren't dogs.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Bright 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 French bulldog. He's adorable. That was a wolf at one point in time.

[Beth Shapiro]

And we don't know which wolf. Right, 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 inheriting them 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 genomes. 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

I think what I read was 36,000.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Like you were talking about with the black wolves, right?

[Beth Shapiro]

Exactly like that. But what's cool about this date 15 to 20,000 years ago is that most. 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 to 20,000 years ago. That is not what archaeologists think. Right. So these two weights of evidence are saying, you know, we still don't know, sort of.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. But they do believe hunter gatherers existed in small tribes 15,000 years ago.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 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. Right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what's.

[Beth Shapiro]

We don't know. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's. And then wolves don't. Are most wolves from warmer climates? No. Right. They're from colder climates.

[Beth Shapiro]

All over the place.

[Joe Rogan]

All over the place.

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, Mexican wolves, Right, There's Mexican wolves, Mexican wolves, there's. But we think that the closest living relative of dogs is. 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, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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, 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, you know, we develop this sort of relationship where we work together that it's. It's so interesting that they. We see the genes change into a poodle, we see this weirdness, or now it's a border collie. Like what?

[Beth Shapiro]

And then the variety 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 to 20,000 years and probably longer.

[Joe Rogan]

Just not in a laboratory.

[Beth Shapiro]

Just not in a laboratory. But, you know, is our backyard a laboratory? And 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.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

Right?

[Joe Rogan]

Selective breeding of plants, splicing two plants together.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

And isn't that wild?

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 some day we can use pig organs in the case of humans and save people from dying.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, so that is really cool science. This thing called the 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 hypothesis 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 put them in you. This is, this technology is so cool and really just beginning.

[Joe 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?

[Beth Shapiro]

Again, it's, I think it's this negativity and it's this scarcity mindset that if, 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.

[Joe Rogan]

But it's just, is this the nature of academia where, you know, because it's very gatekeeped 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. It's like there's a lot of weirdness, a lot of groupthink that comes along with all that stuff. And then you have to play politics in order to get funding. You can't be ostracized. If you're ostracized, even if you have tenure. When you see this with certain sides, the of 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, whether it's public health or the environment or anything, they get ostracized. Even if they're actually talking about real data and science.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, I think 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. All the technology that led to mri, the early technology that gave us crispr, this gene editing platform was developed using funding from the government in scientific labs by people who are willing to take risks and step outside of that box. And then it's taken outside of there and 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, we need this public system in order to do that.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

It'S just going to get worse.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's going to get harder and we're going to fall behind and we are going to lose the place that we have had as innovators. But by we, I mean this country. We are going to 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 and there's.

[Joe Rogan]

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, 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

The same toxic mold, I think, I think so.

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Beth Shapiro]

There is a country that is investing in science.

[Joe 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 electrical, 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 24 hours a day around the clock.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And we don't have anything like that. No, we're not even close to doing that.

[Beth Shapiro]

No. And we're fighting about the amount of money that we should invest into very basic infrastructure.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly.

[Beth Shapiro]

It's terrifying.

[Joe 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 short sightedness.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe 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 in.

[Beth Shapiro]

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

[Joe Rogan]

Chinese scientist was arrested While arriving in the US at Detroit airport. A second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material.

[Beth Shapiro]

But is it the same biological.

[Joe Rogan]

No, different stuff. What is this stuff?

[C]

This was worms, described as worms.

[Joe Rogan]

Certain worms require government permit. I had heard that there was a third one.

[C]

This is the third.

[Joe Rogan]

This is the third. So there's a second one.

[C]

And this one happened.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, second case in days.

[C]

I will say they were going to the same place.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh boy, that's Michigan. Another Chinese scientist also going to the University of Michigan. Boy, that's also really crazy because the thing about China and their scientists that come over to America is they all have to check in with the ccp. Like if you are a Chinese scientist and you're from China and you're working in America, you got to check in. Which means like how much of this research is just getting shared with China?

[Beth Shapiro]

And it's all weird and we're focused on something else. We're focused on.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they play a very long game and I think their game involves Raptors and T Rexes. They're going to release all the stuff that you want.

[Beth Shapiro]

I've seen that movie.

[Joe 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.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. We're not working on humans, but other companies are openly. Right. It's not like there's.

[Joe 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 enough inoculated these babies from hiv, but in fact we're making them more intelligent.

[Beth Shapiro]

I think maybe that was two separate stories because I know the story about Jiang ke that He Jiang KE was the name of that scientist and he went to jail for three years. He actually did some training in the U.S. his name is He. He. But he was trying to make. Trying to use gene editing tools to make. Make these babies have a particular mutation that we know is protective against hiv. It's the one that stops the HIV from entering 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, a whole PR thing. He had 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. Right? But. But people were like, holy shit, dude, what the fuck? Like, no, we're not editing human germlines, 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. And there's a difference between doing that and. It's the second one that we're uncomfortable with.

[Joe Rogan]

I thought they were editing it to make the children have a potential for higher intelligence.

[C]

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 assume they're going to be smarter, but I don't think that they're old. Old enough to even test that yet.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting. Maybe. But. But if they knew that.

[Beth Shapiro]

But it wasn't. It didn't end up even being the right.

[Joe Rogan]

Because. Is HIV a real issue today? It's not really.

[Beth Shapiro]

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. 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 mentally get it, I guess, if there's blood.

[Joe Rogan]

And it also makes them smarter.

[Beth Shapiro]

I don't know if they knew that at the time, but I mean, they're. They're.

[Joe Rogan]

China's played a long game.

[C]

It definitely affected their brains is what they just keep saying, sort of in this article.

[Beth Shapiro]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

When they're the leaders of the world in 20 years, we'll know.

[Beth Shapiro]

We'll know for sure.

[Joe Rogan]

We'll know.

[Beth Shapiro]

Yeah, yeah. This is. I mean, what makes us. Has been a thing that people have been trying to solve for a long time. We're always looking for like the one or two genes that cure that. Figure out this. Very few traits are encoded by one or two genes. There are some hair traits, whether your earlobes are attached or not. That's one gene that you can.

[Joe Rogan]

But it is quite fascinating to think that in the future dumb people will not exist.

[Beth Shapiro]

I doubt that's true.

[Joe Rogan]

Why? Maybe relatively dumb compared to everyone else that's alive then, but maybe far more intelligent than people that are alive today.

[Beth Shapiro]

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 saying smart, do you mean somebody who can have a conversation with another person and shut up so that you're actually listening to other person? Emotional intelligence, do you mean somebody who can solve shitload of math problems and be a physicist or whatever and be awkward socially? Do you mean somebody who's just really fucking good looking? Right. I mean, what do you mean when you say 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 ranking them on, it's different depending on which human population you're studying. So it's. I mean, and this makes total evolutionary sense. Different things were understood. Selection in different habitats at different times. And that made different people smarter in different ways for whatever that was. 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 5 foot 10, blonde with blue eyes and perfect and never going to have diabetes, the most attractive thing out there is going to be the, the opposite of that.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Beth Shapiro]

So there will be. I just don't think people are always thinking about we're going to get superhumans, but they have a specific picture in their mind of what that means. 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. And that's why I don't fear it as much. I think, just because 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 Abhorrent and you absolutely can't do it will be the only ethical solution. That is how we get there.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Beth Shapiro]

In my imagination.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Well, I would love to have you back on when you get more information and more breakthroughs and more stuff.

[Beth Shapiro]

I would love to come back on.

[Joe Rogan]

I really, really enjoy.

[Beth Shapiro]

You should come to the lab. I. You got to see.

[Joe Rogan]

I would love to come to the lab. I will definitely do that. I promise you. Yeah, I promise. Thank you so much for being here. It was really great.

[Beth Shapiro]

Thank you.

[Joe Rogan]

Really enjoyed it and your book, Life as We made it. How 50,000 years of human Innovation Refined and Redefined Nature. Beth Shapiro.

[Beth Shapiro]

I think the rest of my Siberia story is in there, including the part at the end where I.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you do an audiobook?

[Beth Shapiro]

I did. I read the audiobook for that. Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. I love it. I'm so glad you read it. I hate when other people have to read people's work.

[Beth Shapiro]

Well, I asked if I could read it because my first book, how to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read. And I heard the audiobook, 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 gonna have to audition.

[Joe Rogan]

And I was like, audition for your own book?

[Beth Shapiro]

What if I am not good enough to read my own audiobook?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you clearly are. Well, luckily, you're a great talker. Thank you so much. Thank you, really, for being here. I really appreciate it. It's really fun. Thank you. All right, bye, everybody.