EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,040 words- 0:00 – 1:37
Beth Shapiro’s work in ancient DNA and her move to Colossal
- SPSpeaker
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- BSBeth Shapiro
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Hello, Beth.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Hello.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's very great to see you again.
- BSBeth Shapiro
I am pleased to be here.
- JRJoe 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 you just tell everybody what your background is and what you do?
- BSBeth 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
... I recently quit my academic job and moved to become the chief science officer at Colossal, the company that has just made those dire wolves.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why do you like to fight with people?
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) Oh, I don't really like to fight with people.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
I just felt (laughs) like it was the right thing to say at this minute. I end up fighting with people, though, m- not because I want to, but because I feel like-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
... I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.
- JRJoe 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, uh, 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. It's, there's a lot of stuff going on.
- 1:37 – 2:51
Academia’s scarcity mindset, gatekeeping, and why public communication matters
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. There's a big... I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
And this leads people to be kind of negative about everything. Like, "That's gonna be too hard. If I say that that's good, then that means that the thing that I want to do probably isn't gonna 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, there's a lot of gatekeeping, too. You know, we talked about that recently. Uh, there's a lot of people that want to be the only people that are allowed to either discuss or work on things.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. Like, "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 gonna think about it, they're just wrong."
- JRJoe 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, uh, I think that's also one of the reasons why people push back so much as well is 'cause they, they don't like that.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. There are gonna be people, there are gonna 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- 2:51 – 5:42
From broadcast journalism to field science: the pivot that changed her life
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- BSBeth Shapiro
I (laughs) actually started in broadcast journalism. I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. (laughs) When 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 with a 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 (laughs) in college. (laughs) There was, there were mornings when I was locked out of the bathroom, but I had only been asleep for one and a half hours after being out for too late at night doing things that I shouldn't have been doing 'cause I was underaged, right, and had to go to work to "write" the news and then be on this broadcast radio station. (laughs) It was terrible. Anyway, how did I move from there to science?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
I took this, uh, took this amazing class, similar to a class that I ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz recently, where, um, 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, 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 my, I know how to do broadcast journalism." You know, the, the ignorance of somebody who thinks they're an expert in something, right? "I know how to do that, so I'll just do this other thing." Um, and that's, that's the history of it. I just kind of got sucked into being the scientist. I've written a couple of popular books, which is still me trying to reach back out. I want to be a communicator, but I also want to be a scientist 'cause it's so much fun.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you just followed your fascination, which is the best advice anyone could ever get.
- 5:42 – 6:53
How she got into ancient DNA: clean labs, contamination, and ‘go to Siberia’
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. (laughs) Yes. How did I pick a field w- working in ancient DNA?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
This is something I had no idea about. I ended up not getting the scholarship that I wanted to get and not getting into the university that I wanted to get into, but wandering around the halls of the university that I did get into, and I met this guy called Alan Cooper.... who was one of the few people in the world at the time, this was the late 1990s, who'd set up the special kind of lab that you need to be able to extract DNA from bones. So this DNA is in terrible condition, so we have to have a, a purpose-built clean room to make sure that we don't spit in something or drop an eyelash in something, 'cause then your DNA, which is in great condition, will be the thing that we amplify. So he had one of these labs and I thought, "Well, that's kinda 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. Uh, 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, um, "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, that's, that's the deal for me. I'll go to Siberia." (laughs)
- 6:53 – 12:49
Siberia and Arctic fieldwork stories: mosquitoes, boats, and survival logistics
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa. So you got sent to Siberia?
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's usually what they do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. Well, I mean, (laughs) I have had several not amazing experiences in Siberia, but overall it's been, it's been fun. I've been a couple of times. Uh, yeah. It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
What time of year did you go?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Summer.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. So the first time I went it was for a meeting, uh, 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, uh, on a boat. Uh, 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. Like- (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I was gonna ask you about that.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I've heard the mosquitoes are insane.
- BSBeth Shapiro
So crazy. Like, o- one of the times I was out in Taymyr, the north central, Taymyr Peninsula, and we had brought with us this weird tent that we'd set up so that we could go inside and take the masks, take the masks off of our face, 'cause 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... it's just (laughs) awful. It's, it's miserable.
- JRJoe Rogan
So they're trying to sting you through your clothes. They're just-
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they're big too, right?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Well, it depends the time of year. In early in the season they're really big and you can catch 'em fast and then they get... Different species come out that are smaller and smaller and toward the end of the season-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... they're really tiny. Once I was up in the north of Alaska on the Ikpikpok River, we were floating down the river looking for mammoth bones and tusks and things like that. And, um, 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, uh, 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right? The wind is blowing, then the wind dies down and then it's like, "Oh, fuck." (laughs) Like, like, "This is awful." There was a moose that was ahead of us for a while and this poor animal, we were following the river and he would... Every few steps he would just totally submerge his body in this frozen water and then come back up. Like, the mosquitoes are just, yeah, something else.
- JRJoe Rogan
I've only been to Anchorage. Uh, well, I've been to a couple spots of, uh, 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 'cause we heard you got to spray mosquito spray. We stepped out of the car.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
The moment we opened up the car door there was a cloud of mosquitoes. We're shrieking like little girls. We're like, "Ah!"
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, "What the hell?" It was, it was... I'd never experienced anything like it in my life. Like, where'd they come from?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was-
- BSBeth Shapiro
You don't expect it.
- 12:49 – 1:10:07
Taymyr expedition madness: helicopters, medical ethanol, and armed visitors
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. It's impressive. When we were up there in Taymyr, we'd flown for a couple days in this really awful Russian helicopter that took off the third time it tried to because, you know, infrastructure doesn't work in Siberia. It's a repeated theme from-
- JRJoe Rogan
You got on a Siberian helicopter to play.
- BSBeth Shapiro
It was an-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
It was an Mi-8 and it was, it was in, it was in a place called Khatanga, which is where we were based while we were trying to get out into, into... And they kept loading all of our gear into this, and it's mostly these massive gas tanks. And you load all the gear into the gas tanks and then all of the people... We had a dog, Pasha, who was with us, who did not want to get in that helicopter. I think the dog was the smartest person-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
... (laughs) in our expedition, 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, we flew out. We got in the helicopter finally. We got up into the air, and then the Russian and, um, 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?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
In this helicopter that we already think... Right. Fortunately, the helicopter had some missing windows, so, you know, there was-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... there was airflow. It's fine. No, this was insane. This whole, this, this particular ex- (laughs) expedition was particularly insane compared to other things I've done. So also in the... I'm gonna get to the story e- eventually, but also in, in part of this, we were traveling forever out into this part of the Taymyr where they had predicted that we would be able to find mammoth bones and wooly rhino bones and all the bones of the animals we're interested in. So we're flying out there, and we start to land, and I'm thinking, "Great, we're there." I get out of this crazy fire bomb in the air that I'm in. We're gonna... We land. No, no, we did not get off. Instead we picked up a random family that had been out there on their own, parents, a child. Yeah, it was two parents and a child. And they had a 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 con- con- having a conversation in Russian, and then we take off again. And I'm thinking-
- JRJoe Rogan
W- was that planned, to pick these people up, or were they trapped?
- BSBeth Shapiro
I think it was planned, just there was a lack of communication, (laughs) as we know.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
But whatever, the helicopter took off twice and then it landed, and everybody unloaded and we set up the, the, the tent, the camp. And we discovered over the course of the next few days, you know, we built these cool boats, the Zodiacs, you blow them up and you bring out the outboard and you put them on the lake. And we're looking around and we discovered that we had landed in a place where we were gonna be for six weeks that had been glaciated during the last Ice Age, whi- which meant that our chances of finding what we wanted were really small.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no.
- BSBeth Shapiro
I know. It was devastating. And the (laughs) the Russian... We had a cook with us. The Russian cooks had brought, um, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Well, you know, you, you can only take so much stuff with you.
- JRJoe Rogan
Because it weighs less than alcohol? That's a-
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... crazy decision.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Well, you know, they, they decided it was safe. Anyway, by three days in, it's 24-hour sunlight, we're at 72 degrees latitude, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you try it?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
The medical ethanol?
- BSBeth Shapiro
I tried the medical ethanol.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
I mean, obviously, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 25:40 – 29:58
Uncontacted tribes, Amazon archaeology, and disease-driven collapses
- JRJoe Rogan
I have a good friend who lives there, Paul Rosolie. 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, uh, 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 s- and protect it and save it. But he's had some gnarly encounters with uncontacted people where at one point in time they realized they were, they were actually being hunted and they barely escaped with their life.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Holy shit.
- JRJoe Rogan
And you start hearing weird noises in the bushes and then you realize like, "Oh boy, these are people."
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Like we're be- we're being stalked right now.
- BSBeth Shapiro
By the most sophisticated hunting animal out there, yes. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
By the... 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.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Incredible senses.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Because they have to.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. They probably knew these people were coming a long time ago. They pro- you know, they probably heard the boat coming down the river. They prepared, they got ready, they- they know where all the paths are. They know which way the people would go. Like, you're utterly helpless. And-
- BSBeth Shapiro
How did he get out of this?
- JRJoe Rogan
He got out just in time. Just in time.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Oh. They just escaped.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but one of his friends, one of the people that he was working with, did not. He- he, they would g- have these gifts like so they would take these rafts and t- 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 d- a peace gesture. And this guy had done this several times. And then one time he didn't come back and they found him filled with arrows.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Whoa.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, they just killed him. They just decided, you know, maybe they had a bad experience with some other person-
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... from some- some other Westerner and they decided, "You know, we're done." But it, they're rightly terrified of humans because when these, uh, people that come in that want to extract resources-
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... whether it's the loggers or whether, whatever it is, if there's some minerals or anything else they find there, they just kill everybody.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BSBeth Shapiro
We have a history of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
We- we do. We have a deep history, which is really fascinating about the Amazon in particular, because, you know, we've had a bunch of conversations on, uh, one of them recently with, uh, Luke Tavrens, 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 were like, "No, there was like a huge civilization here of millions of people." So these people that are the uncontacted people, I mean, I wonder how many of them were like the preppers of the Amazon world from, you know, 4,000 years ago or whatever it was.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or it wasn't even that long ago that Percy Fawcett, Percy Fawcett, right? That's his name?
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- 29:58 – 32:38
Jurassic Park questions and the real origins of ancient DNA science
- JRJoe Rogan
So you get interested in DNA, you go to Siberia, all that jazz. How do you get started working with s- a company like Colossal? How does that take place?
- BSBeth Shapiro
All of us working in ancient DNA, we are constantly answering the same question from the media, which is, when are we going to bring dinosaurs back to life?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) 'Cause Jurassic Park?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. Well, and- and- (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
We're so simple.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
But one great movie and everybody's like, "When's that gonna happen?"
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) And people say, people actually say that my field, um, was spawned by Jurassic Park, the- the whole idea that we could get DNA stuff. That's not true. It was actually the other way around. And Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group, the Extinct Species Study Group, which was-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ooh.
- BSBeth Shapiro
They had gotten-
- JRJoe Rogan
What a cool name.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah, right. Well, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Quagga.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... in, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the ʔᵉˈxʼɑxʼa.
- SPSpeaker
Ooh, even better.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. It's better that way, but-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... it's kind of bad for the microphone probably, gross.
- SPSpeaker
ʔXaxa.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, s-
- BSBeth Shapiro
I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?
- SPSpeaker
Oh.
- BSBeth Shapiro
So they sound like that. I don't know. Who knows?
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
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. Um, 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 publish anything that's wrong ever, ever that said-
- 32:38 – 38:58
PCR, DNA decay, and how clean labs made Neanderthal/Denisovan genomes possible
- BSBeth Shapiro
Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that. But it, it was really, um, the idea... What, what really helped this field along was the invention of PCR. It's an acronym for polymerase chain reaction. It's a way of-
- SPSpeaker
Kary Mullis.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Kary Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip, right?
- SPSpeaker
On LSD.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah, that's right. (laughs)
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you have your best ideas when you're high, right?
- SPSpeaker
Some people have great ideas. Some people go kooky.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- SPSpeaker
You know, some people lose their marbles-
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
... and never come back.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah, I think I probably would not have good ideas on LSD, but I'm willing to give it a shot. (laughs)
- SPSpeaker
(laughs) Well, I like your scientific exploration mind.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) A good scientist always wants to know how-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, you never know.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
I mean, maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that-
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- SPSpeaker
... little piece of paper.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Probably not, but, uh-
- SPSpeaker
Probably not.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) But you never know. Anyway, he discovered a way to photocopy DNA to make lots of copies of the same thing, which then made it possible to learn the sequence using the technologies of the day. And that was what made it possible really for ancient DNA to take off, was this ability to, to photo... 'Cause there's, when an animal dies or plant dies, the DNA in the cell starts to get chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces by things like UV, right? We go out in the sun, we put sunscreen on, and that stops the UV from breaking our DNA. But it's not terrible to get some sunlight, as you probably just saw. There was an article out saying, "Hey, dummies, you know, we need-"
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
"... 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 mechanis- 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-
- SPSpeaker
Wow.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... 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 archeology because we're trying to get DNA from humans-
- SPSpeaker
Mmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... but we are humans and so we touch these things and then-
- SPSpeaker
Mmm.
- 38:58 – 49:09
New human species finds, island dwarfism, and nature’s brutality (Komodo detour)
- JRJoe Rogan
Jaime and I we, we did a podcast recently where we were talking about the big head people. What are they called again? Ju- what was it?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Gi- uh, the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Julie-
- BSBeth Shapiro
... Giuliani or something. Julie-
- JRJoe Rogan
Juliens.
- BSBeth Shapiro
I've seen this. This is really recently.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Super recent. It was like December of 2024, they released this paper.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. It was super cool.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
And it just highlights how much we don't know, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BSBeth Shapiro
How every... Especially in paleoanthropology, and this is a field where, you know, people-
- JRJoe Rogan
Here it is.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... will take like... Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jularren.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Jularrenesis.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's it. Lost species of humans with an abnormally large skull, which lived alongside homo sapiens. So they died off somewhere... They lived in China between 300,000 and 50,000 years ago.
- BSBeth 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. I would say.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wild stuff.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And then of course, the Hobbit people, the island of Flores people.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. Flores.
- JRJoe Rogan
The little, the little tiny...
- BSBeth Shapiro
No one has still been able to get DNA from those-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no?
- BSBeth Shapiro
... samples. No. But I mean, someday.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it's just bones?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Someday it'll happen. Um, we've tried, um, Svante'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-
- 49:09 – 58:15
Dire wolves up close: awe, ethics, and the ‘are we playing God?’ reaction
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's a lot of people that think bringing dire wolves back is a bad idea.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Well, I mean, what did you think of the dire wolves?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, uh, fortunately, after the last podcast I did with Ben, I did actually get to go visit them and I was blown away. It, it's extraordinary. It's so wi- 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."
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"That is a totally different... " I've seen wolves before. That is a totally different animal than a... I've never seen a wolf in the wild, though. I did, well, I, I saw one, but it was, like, running across the road at a distance and it was dusk.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was, that was in Alberta.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a lot of wolves up there. But that, I've never seen, well, I've never, like, looked in one's eyes and it's like, these aren't even that old.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? They, they were more than six months old.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But they were almost 100 pounds already.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they have this look in their eye, like-
- BSBeth Shapiro
And you can see they're bigger-
- JRJoe Rogan
... that's a wolf.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... they're more muscular. And you see that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... that coat.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
The dire wolf coat. That-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's inc- extraordinary. The mane that they have. It's very, it's, it's really incredible. And then there's the little female, Khaleesi.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
She's adorable.
- BSBeth Shapiro
And she is like a puppy right now.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Di- you were able to hold her?
- JRJoe Rogan
She's adorable. Yes.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- 58:15 – 1:02:03
From de-extinction to conservation: genetic rescue, red wolves, and fixing human-caused problems
- BSBeth 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 a-
- JRJoe Rogan
This sounds like a sales pitch.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
... species preservation company. Uh, it is a sales pitch, but birds, it... Whenever I think about birds, I think of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right? We know that there are things that we can do to help mammals to adapt to rapid changes in their habitat, right? We, we can do things like, um, like the, uh, Florida panthers. You know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... one of the things that we did to save Florida panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced panthers from Texas.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Which are the closest, genetically and geographically, to Florida panthers. They were probably connected at some point until humans created stuff that meant that they couldn't go back and forth. And when Texas panthers were introduced in the mid-1990s, that population recovered. They stopped... They had, uh, um, a disorder called cryptorchidism where their testicles wouldn't descend or only one would descend.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
They had all sorts of heart problems. They had-
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that true because there's a small breeding population?
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah, because there were very few of them and so-
- JRJoe Rogan
No genetic diversity?
- BSBeth Shapiro
... the choice was to mate with your family, uh, that's it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- BSBeth Shapiro
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BSBeth Shapiro
And that's a, a great way of bringing diversity back into a population. It's what we're trying to do with our Red Wolf Project.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BSBeth Shapiro
So red wolves are one of the most endangered wolf species in the world. They're the only endemic American wolf, and they are nearly extinct. There's a successful captive breeding program, and a few years ago, um, some of the people that we work with at Colossal, a woman called Bridgette VonHoldt 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've 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 that.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
Because if it's real, I want to be the person who finds it. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah. So Bridgette says this guy who lives down in the, uh, the, 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, it's not. It's something else. It's something in between those." And so she tested it and found that it has a ton of DNA ancestry from red wolves. And they're hybridized a little bit with coyotes, but all red wolves are hybridized a little bit with coyotes. Canids are always hybridizing with each other. We know that because, you know, there are wolves that are black because black gene for wolves got into the wolf population because a domestic dog had his way with a wolf in heat. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BSBeth Shapiro
And that's how that allele got into that population. So we know canids do this all the time. And she was like, "This is so cool." Because this captive breeding popu- 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 gonna pair with who to keep all that diversity there. But it's still just a few individuals, so they are going to lose genetic diversity. It's just how it works. But if we can bring other individuals in from this population, that's a way of concentrating more diversity-... better able to pick which parts are red wolf, either by breeding individuals or by editing their DNA-
- 1:02:03 – 1:21:58
Invasive-species ‘solutions’ gone wrong: honey badgers, snails, and the hippo plan
- JRJoe 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.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs) Honey badgers?
- JRJoe Rogan
Because they, because they eat snakes. I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Because we have never, as a species, humans-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BSBeth Shapiro
... introduced a thing to try to control a thing, and that thing that we introduced just went horribly wrong. We, we've never done that before, right, Australia? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Australia's a wreck.
- BSBeth Shapiro
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
They have a terrible feral cat problem.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And-
- BSBeth Shapiro
And in, in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, yeah, I've heard of those.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BSBeth Shapiro
That they introduced this thing called a, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone. They're... And they're big. Have you seen one of those?
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think I have.
- BSBeth Shapiro
A giant African land snail. It's worth looking at it. It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did they come over on cargo ships or something?
- BSBeth Shapiro
I think we... I think people introduced them for some reason that I can't remember-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, great.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... what it was. Yeah. So we have a good history of doing this kind of thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is for giant escargot. Whoa.
- BSBeth Shapiro
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa. Uh, can they eat those? Are those delicious?
- BSBeth Shapiro
I think people can eat them probably, but they eat everything from all of the vegetation to the other snails-
- JRJoe Rogan
The size of that thing.
- BSBeth Shapiro
... to plaster, you know? They, they'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built. Yeah, they're-
Episode duration: 2:59:47
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