Joe Rogan Experience #2338 - Beth Shapiro

Speaker 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Beth Shapiro 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Hello, Beth.

Beth Shapiro 0:14 Hello.

Joe Rogan 0:14 It's very great to see you again.

Beth Shapiro 0:16 I am pleased to be here.

Joe Rogan 0:17 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?

Beth Shapiro 0:29 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-

Joe Rogan 0:53 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 0:53 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02 Why do you like to fight with people?

Beth Shapiro 1:04 (laughs) Oh, I don't really like to fight with people.

Joe Rogan 1:06 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:06 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-

Joe Rogan 1:13 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:13 ... I have to defend what I think is the way that we should be doing science.

Joe Rogan 1:17 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.

Beth Shapiro 1:37 Yeah. There's a big... I think in academia in particular, there's this big scarcity mindset.

Joe Rogan 1:41 Mm.

Beth Shapiro 1:42 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.

Joe Rogan 1:59 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.

Beth Shapiro 2:10 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."

Joe Rogan 2:20 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.

Beth Shapiro 2:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:38 They don't like that there's this unique distribution network.

Beth Shapiro 2:42 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.

Joe Rogan 2:50 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 2:51 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:51 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 3:05 I (laughs) actually started in broadcast journalism. I-

Joe Rogan 3:08 Really?

Beth Shapiro 3:08 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?

Joe Rogan 4:22 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 4:23 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.

Joe Rogan 5:37 So you just followed your fascination, which is the best advice anyone could ever get.

Beth Shapiro 5:42 Yeah. (laughs) Yes. How did I pick a field w- working in ancient DNA?

Joe Rogan 5:45 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 5:45 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)

Joe Rogan 6:53 Whoa. So you got sent to Siberia?

Beth Shapiro 6:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 6:55 That's usually what they do to you in the Soviet Union when you're bad.

Beth Shapiro 6:59 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-

Joe Rogan 7:09 What time of year did you go?

Beth Shapiro 7:11 Summer.

Joe Rogan 7:11 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 7:12 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)

Joe Rogan 7:37 I was gonna ask you about that.

Beth Shapiro 7:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:38 I've heard the mosquitoes are insane.

Beth Shapiro 7:40 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-

Joe Rogan 8:08 Whoa.

Beth Shapiro 8:08 ... it's just (laughs) awful. It's, it's miserable.

Joe Rogan 8:12 So they're trying to sting you through your clothes. They're just-

Beth Shapiro 8:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:15 And they're big too, right?

Beth Shapiro 8:16 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-

Joe Rogan 8:24 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 8:24 ... 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."

Joe Rogan 8:44 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 8:44 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.

Joe Rogan 9:05 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.

Beth Shapiro 9:22 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 9:22 The moment we opened up the car door there was a cloud of mosquitoes. We're shrieking like little girls. We're like, "Ah!"

Beth Shapiro 9:30 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 9:30 Like, "What the hell?" It was, it was... I'd never experienced anything like it in my life. Like, where'd they come from?

Beth Shapiro 9:35 Right.

Joe Rogan 9:35 It was-

Beth Shapiro 9:36 You don't expect it.

Joe Rogan 9:37 There was nothing there. Like, it didn't... It wasn't like we saw a cloud of mosquitoes but we opened up the... There was an impossible amount of mosquitoes that got into the car.

Beth Shapiro 9:44 (laughs) It's terrible. In Taymyr I remember we would lo- walk along the grass, this sort of tall grass with little flowers in it, exactly the kind of place you could imagine mammoths roaming and being like the kings of the universe there. But as you were walking you would kick up the grass and they would just emerge off of the, off of the needles of grass. It was just really awful. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 10:04 Well, they're so aggressive 'cause they only have like three months to live.

Beth Shapiro 10:07 Yeah. And I learned actually, 'cause I was curious about this, how do they survive if there are so few b- red blood? 'Cause mosquitoes mostly they take a, they only take a... It's only the females that take a blood meal and they only take a blood meal when they're making eggs or making a brood. They take it to reproduce. Otherwise, they feed on nectar. So how do these, how do so many mosquitoes survive in the Arctic if there's so few animals there? And it turns out those mosquitoes are adapted to this climate and they don't need a blood meal to reproduce, but they do better if they get one. So they're after you, but they don't need you.

Joe Rogan 10:40 Whoa.

Beth Shapiro 10:40 Kinda makes it worse, right?

Joe Rogan 10:42 Whoa. It's, it really is fascinating how aggressive they are.

Beth Shapiro 10:45 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:45 'Cause, you know, Texas has mosquitoes but they can live all year round so they're kinda chill.

Beth Shapiro 10:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:51 They're not that worried about you.

Beth Shapiro 10:53 And 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 this stuff-

Joe Rogan 11:01 Hilarious.

Beth Shapiro 11:01 ... that actually has poisons in it. Look at me at and my natural." And we're out there and the, the wind dies down, the mosquitoes come and I'm with my DEET. I'm like, you know- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 11:07 Right.

Beth Shapiro 11:07 ... "Your natural repellent." He's going, "Shit, do you, did you bring the DEET?" (laughs) I'm like, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:13 Yeah. You give up on that natural stuff real quick.

Beth Shapiro 11:15 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 11:15 I was watching a documentary where they're using pine pitch. There's a... Have you ever seen, uh, Werner Herzog's film, uh, Happy People?

Beth Shapiro 11:23 No.

Joe Rogan 11:23 Life in the Taiga? It's really good. It's really fascinating. He follows these people that live on the Taiga River in Siberia.

Beth Shapiro 11:30 Cool.

Joe Rogan 11:30 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, what's amazing about it is the title, is Happy People. They're all happy.

Beth Shapiro 11:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:47 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 wanna say genetic level, but like an internal level. Like 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 of 10,000 years ago had.

Beth Shapiro 12:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:19 Very different world.

Beth Shapiro 12:20 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:21 Right? And we're not really designed for this world.

Beth Shapiro 12:24 Right, right. Well, you can see that in the increased rates of obesity, increased rates of diabetes, you know, we're not-

Joe Rogan 12:29 Also depression, anxiety-

Beth Shapiro 12:30 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:31 ... 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, but you kinda get this understanding of his appreciation for these people that are living this very basic life-

Beth Shapiro 12:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:47 ... but are very happy.

Beth Shapiro 12:49 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-

Joe Rogan 13:03 You got on a Siberian helicopter to play.

Beth Shapiro 13:05 It was an-

Joe Rogan 13:06 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 13:06 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-

Joe Rogan 13:26 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 13:28 ... (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?

Joe Rogan 13:54 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 13:54 In this helicopter that we already think... Right. Fortunately, the helicopter had some missing windows, so, you know, there was-

Joe Rogan 14:03 Oh, boy.

Beth Shapiro 14:03 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 14:58 W- was that planned, to pick these people up, or were they trapped?

Beth Shapiro 15:01 I think it was planned, just there was a lack of communication, (laughs) as we know.

Joe Rogan 15:07 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 15:07 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.

Joe Rogan 15:32 Oh, no.

Beth Shapiro 15:33 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-

Joe Rogan 15:51 Whoa.

Beth Shapiro 15:52 Well, you know, you, you can only take so much stuff with you.

Joe Rogan 15:54 Because it weighs less than alcohol? That's a-

Beth Shapiro 15:57 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:58 ... crazy decision.

Beth Shapiro 16:00 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?

Joe Rogan 16:08 Did you try it?

Beth Shapiro 16:09 Um-

Joe Rogan 16:10 The medical ethanol?

Beth Shapiro 16:10 I tried the medical ethanol.

Joe Rogan 16:12 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 16:12 I mean, obviously, right?

Joe Rogan 16:14 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 16:16 (laughs) 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, uh, it's great. Yeah. We had fish and rice for the whole time that was up there.

Joe Rogan 16:26 So you had to catch your food.

Beth Shapiro 16:27 We had to catch our food, yes.

Joe Rogan 16:28 Luckily, there's probably a lot of fish up there.

Beth Shapiro 16:30 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 (laughs) logistically-

Joe Rogan 16:38 So you just hear boom, boom.

Beth Shapiro 16:39 Yeah, 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, like... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 16:48 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 16:51 Anyway, this... I don't know why I'm telling this story.

Joe Rogan 16:52 Well, it's because it's fun.

Beth Shapiro 16:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 16:54 It's a fun story.

Beth Shapiro 16:55 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 2:00 in the morning. The... We were inside this little tent that we'd built so that we could eat in it, sort of the kitchen tent where we were, and it was a big mesh tent to keep the mosquitoes out so that we didn't have to have 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.

Joe Rogan 17:16 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 17:16 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, "Oh, friends. Oh, good to see you," blah, blah, blah. And we're th- I'm thinking, "What's gonna happen when they realize we don't have any more vodka?" Medical ethanol, right? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:02 Right.

Beth Shapiro 18:02 Because that's... And it turns out that they are, they were, um, members of the Dolgan community, which is a, an actual family of subsistence people that still live up on the Taymyr. 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.

Speaker 18:23 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 18:25 Yeah. Pretty cool, actually.

Speaker 18:26 That's cool.

Beth Shapiro 18:27 Yeah.

Speaker 18:27 So did you hang out with those people?

Beth Shapiro 18:29 Well, we did. They were disappointed that we didn't have any, any alcohol-

Speaker 18:33 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 18:33 ... obviously.

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Beth Shapiro 19:49 Um-

Speaker 19:49 (laughs) That's a theme.

Beth Shapiro 19:50 It's a theme.

Speaker 19:51 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 19:51 It was Russia, so it's a fair theme. Uh, but the French couple (laughs) , the, I, 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 (laughs) is cheese (laughs) , like, a massive Gouda (laughs) and a massive brie. Like, why? I don't know. (laughs) I don't know, right? But they had cheese, and so we cut the cheese and shared the cheese with our Dolgans friends, and they were happy. And the next day, we took them back with the Zodiacs to their, to their community. And you know what was most amazing about this experience? And it, it, uh, 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 'cause they cross at that level, right?

Speaker 20:54 Right.

Beth Shapiro 20:54 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, 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.

Speaker 21:29 Really?

Beth Shapiro 21:30 It was really impressive. Yeah.

Speaker 21:32 They only wanted to attack the animals?

Beth Shapiro 21:34 They were after the animals, and they really left us alone, but-

Speaker 21:37 Probably because that's their natural source.

Beth Shapiro 21:39 Yeah, more natural than... There's more of them there. Uh, I mean, I don't know, maybe they're larger, but it's, it was, uh-

Speaker 21:45 They're probably accustomed to it, right? They'll also, like, for thousands of years, they've probably been just feeding off of reindeer.

Beth Shapiro 21:50 Yeah, I think about that though, but I think about those poor, that poor moose from Alaska who was-

Speaker 21:54 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 21:54 ... also clearly bothered by the mosquitoes. I imagine the reindeer were as well, but, and it was, it was pretty cool, so-

Speaker 21:59 Were these people riding the reindeer?

Beth Shapiro 22:01 They did ride them. In fact, I got to-

Speaker 22:03 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 22:03 ... they put me up there and showed me how I could ride the reindeer, yes.

Speaker 22:05 Is this their place?

Beth Shapiro 22:06 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 22:07 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 22:07 (laughs)

Speaker 22:08 So you were in this area?

Beth Shapiro 22:10 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 22:11 Oh.

Beth Shapiro 22:11 I was there during the summer though, so it wasn't, there wasn't snow on the ground. It was all just a very grassy, wet, super wet grassy, and the, the moisture in the ground is probably why there are so many mosquitoes.

Speaker 22:21 It is so fascinating to me that people live like this generation after generation after generation.

Beth Shapiro 22:27 Yup.

Speaker 22:28 And the fact that you can someho- these are one of the weird animals, caribou are, that you can herd.

Beth Shapiro 22:33 Yeah.

Speaker 22:34 And people ride them.

Beth Shapiro 22:35 And milk them.

Speaker 22:36 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 22:37 Yeah.

Speaker 22:37 And then occasionally whack one.

Beth Shapiro 22:39 Yeah. I mean, they're great, right? This is, uh-

Speaker 22:42 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 22:42 Animals are, have always been a really great storage mechanism. That's one of the hypotheses about animal domestication. Why did this take place if we had plants? But there are gonna 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-

Speaker 23:01 Hmm.

Beth Shapiro 23:02 ... safe way of storing what you can grow.

Speaker 23:04 That's a fascinating way to look at it, 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 23:15 Right. (laughs) I think that about a lot of domestic animals.

Speaker 23:18 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 23:18 Like, who was the fir- I also think that about milk. Like, who was the first person who decided, "I can have a go at that," you know? (laughs)

Speaker 23:25 Ah, I mean, they're probably starving. They're probably, I mean, they must've tried everything. I mean, that's how we found out what mushrooms are edible, right? 'Cause a large percentage of them will just kill you immediately, but people are so desperate for anything.

Beth Shapiro 23:36 Yeah, some of them are trying to tell you though by being, like, bright red or-

Speaker 23:39 Right.

Beth Shapiro 23:40 ... bright purple and saying-

Speaker 23:40 Right, right, right.

Beth Shapiro 23:42 But we're dumb, so we're like, "Bright red, I'll lick that." See what happens.

Speaker 23:44 Yeah, it might be an apple.

Beth Shapiro 23:46 (laughs)

Speaker 23:46 (laughs) Like, that, that's confusing.

Beth Shapiro 23:48 (laughs)

Speaker 23:48 Some bright red things are delicious and really good for you. Wow. So these people that live up there, wha- uh, what was their history like? Had they been living up there their whole life?

Beth Shapiro 23:59 Those particular individuals have, yeah, but I think they're, they have a long history. The, the culture has a long history there. And I mean, we're, we're still, I think we're still learning about how humans have dispersed around the world and how they got to be the places where they are today. But I really think it's impressive that there are people who are hanging on to that culture-

Speaker 24:16 Absolutely.

Beth Shapiro 24:17 ... and, and really able to... You know, they're, they're trying now to relearn their native languages because during the communist era, they were f- all forced to learn Russian and speak Russian the same way-

Speaker 24:27 Oh.

Beth Shapiro 24:27 ... as everyone else, but, um-

Speaker 24:28 Even up there.

Beth Shapiro 24:29 Even up there.

Speaker 24:30 Wow. Think they sent an emissary to say, "Guys."

Beth Shapiro 24:33 (laughs)

Speaker 24:34 (laughs) "It's time to speak the mother tongue."

Beth Shapiro 24:37 Maybe they had to go to the squares like you see in Yakutsk and, 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 24:48 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 24:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:49 What a weird way to live. It just, it's- 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.

Beth Shapiro 25:03 And we have so much to learn from them.

Joe Rogan 25:05 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 25:05 Yeah. And, uh, and it, 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 25:16 Right.

Beth Shapiro 25:16 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:16 Isn't that an interesting perspective? Because I don't want to live like that. Like, I don't want to live in the Amazon with a leaf over my private parts. But we assume they do.

Beth Shapiro 25:24 Not even for a week, like? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:25 Nope, nope, don't want to do it. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 25:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:27 There's so many things out there that'll eat you.

Beth Shapiro 25:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:29 And there's so many bugs that can kill you and snakes that could kill you.

Beth Shapiro 25:32 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:33 It's like uh-uh. I'd like rather watch a video.

Beth Shapiro 25:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 25:36 A- a David Attenborough documentary.

Beth Shapiro 25:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:38 Yeah, I don't want to go there. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 25:40 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:40 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.

Beth Shapiro 26:19 Holy shit.

Joe Rogan 26:20 And you start hearing weird noises in the bushes and then you realize like, "Oh boy, these are people."

Beth Shapiro 26:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 26:25 Like we're be- we're being stalked right now.

Beth Shapiro 26:28 By the most sophisticated hunting animal out there, yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 26:30 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.

Beth Shapiro 26:42 Right.

Joe Rogan 26:42 Incredible senses.

Beth Shapiro 26:43 Because they have to.

Joe Rogan 26:44 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-

Beth Shapiro 27:00 How did he get out of this?

Joe Rogan 27:01 He got out just in time. Just in time.

Beth Shapiro 27:03 Oh. They just escaped.

Joe Rogan 27:04 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.

Beth Shapiro 27:27 Whoa.

Joe Rogan 27:28 Yeah, they just killed him. They just decided, you know, maybe they had a bad experience with some other person-

Beth Shapiro 27:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:34 ... 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-

Beth Shapiro 27:48 Right.

Joe Rogan 27:48 ... 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.

Beth Shapiro 27:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:53 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 28:05 We have a history of this.

Joe Rogan 28:07 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 28:07 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 28:07 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.

Beth Shapiro 28:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:46 Or it wasn't even that long ago that Percy Fawcett, Percy Fawcett, right? That's his name?

Narrator 28:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:51 The guy who, one of, one of the guys who, that's, he's the- the main character in that book, The Lost City of Z. He's one of the people that went there. When they fir- 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 100 years and there was none of that. So they thought that they had just made it up. It turns out the first people probably gave these folks horrible diseases-

Beth Shapiro 29:18 Right.

Joe Rogan 29:18 ... 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 29:30 Yeah, it's so cool. You can see those when you're flying over any part of the world, really. I've, 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.

Joe Rogan 29:40 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 29:40 But it's just so cool how we can see remnants of civilizations. It just makes you think, "What happened?"

Joe Rogan 29:46 I know.

Beth Shapiro 29:46 Like, this is the, some of the coolest mysteries. That's what's so cool about working in ancient DNA too, is we can just go to places, get DNA from stuff, and learn something that we never knew before. It's fun.

Joe Rogan 29:58 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?

Beth Shapiro 30:09 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?

Joe Rogan 30:20 (laughs) 'Cause Jurassic Park?

Beth Shapiro 30:21 Yeah. Well, and- and- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:22 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 30:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:24 We're so simple.

Beth Shapiro 30:25 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:25 But one great movie and everybody's like, "When's that gonna happen?"

Beth Shapiro 30:29 (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-

Joe Rogan 30:49 Oh.

Beth Shapiro 30:49 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 30:55 Ooh.

Beth Shapiro 30:55 They had gotten-

Joe Rogan 30:57 What a cool name.

Beth Shapiro 30:57 Yeah, right. Well, and-

Joe Rogan 30:58 Quagga.

Beth Shapiro 30:59 ... in, in Dutch, in South Africa, they actually say the ʔᵉˈxʼɑxʼa.

Speaker 31:03 Ooh, even better.

Beth Shapiro 31:04 Yeah. It's better that way, but-

Speaker 31:05 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 31:06 ... it's kind of bad for the microphone probably, gross.

Speaker 31:08 ʔXaxa.

Beth Shapiro 31:09 (laughs) Yeah.

Speaker 31:10 Um, s-

Beth Shapiro 31:10 I think it's the sound they're supposed to make, right?

Speaker 31:13 Oh.

Beth Shapiro 31:13 So they sound like that. I don't know. Who knows?

Speaker 31:15 Hmm.

Beth Shapiro 31:15 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-

Speaker 31:37 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 31:37 ... "Look, here's dinosaur DNA. And look, here's DNA from a Miocene-aged leaf. And look, here's this." And all of it is crap, we now know. In fact, the first dinosaur DNA sequences that were published, um, if you took them at the time and you typed them into the internet and you compared them to the earliest of the, what is today this big repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequenced, what came back was a close match to a bird. Um, we now know because there's more DNA sequences there, that it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken. And some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd been working on those bones had fried chicken for lunch every day.

Speaker 32:18 (laughs) So it's chicken contamination.

Beth Shapiro 32:21 Yeah. (laughs) It's like greasy fingers-

Speaker 32:23 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 32:23 ... on your dinosaur fossils.

Speaker 32:25 Oh my God.

Beth Shapiro 32:25 And look, now we have ancient DNA. Yeah. (laughs)

Speaker 32:27 That is hilarious.

Beth Shapiro 32:29 So, yeah.

Speaker 32:29 That's how little they knew about DNA. What year was this around?

Beth Shapiro 32:32 That would be the early '90s. Yeah.

Speaker 32:34 The early '90s. And when was DNA first discovered?

Beth Shapiro 32:38 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-

Speaker 32:52 Kary Mullis.

Beth Shapiro 32:52 Kary Mullis, who discovered the idea of PCR while he was high on a road trip, right?

Speaker 32:56 On LSD.

Beth Shapiro 32:56 Yeah, that's right. (laughs)

Speaker 32:57 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 32:58 We should all do LSD, I think, because clearly you have your best ideas when you're high, right?

Speaker 33:02 Some people have great ideas. Some people go kooky.

Beth Shapiro 33:04 (laughs)

Speaker 33:05 You know, some people lose their marbles-

Beth Shapiro 33:06 Yeah.

Speaker 33:06 ... and never come back.

Beth Shapiro 33:08 Yeah, I think I probably would not have good ideas on LSD, but I'm willing to give it a shot. (laughs)

Speaker 33:12 (laughs) Well, I like your scientific exploration mind.

Beth Shapiro 33:15 (laughs) A good scientist always wants to know how-

Speaker 33:17 Yeah, you never know.

Beth Shapiro 33:18 Yeah.

Speaker 33:18 I mean, maybe there's a breakthrough waiting behind that-

Beth Shapiro 33:20 (laughs)

Speaker 33:21 ... little piece of paper.

Beth Shapiro 33:22 Probably not, but, uh-

Speaker 33:23 Probably not.

Beth Shapiro 33:24 (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-"

Speaker 33:58 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 33:58 "... 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-

Speaker 34:38 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 34:38 ... 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-

Speaker 35:03 Mmm.

Beth Shapiro 35:03 ... but we are humans and so we touch these things and then-

Speaker 35:06 Mmm.

Beth Shapiro 35:07 ... I don't know if it's my DNA or if that thing DNA and...

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Joe Rogan 37:05 ... even just breathing on it, right?

Beth Shapiro 37:07 Yeah. Or, or dropping an eyelash. When in my lab at Santa Cruz and in ancient DNA labs around the world, we have these really s- it's like working in a virus lab where you're scared of everything.

Joe Rogan 37:17 Mm.

Beth Shapiro 37:17 But we turn, turn it around. So rather than having the air being sucked in, we're kind of trying to push the air out. Um, we don't want-

Joe Rogan 37:24 Hm.

Beth Shapiro 37:24 ... any air coming in. Um, we're, we're not... 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 gonna get our DNA in that bone, and then we're not gonna be able to do the work.

Joe Rogan 37:39 Of course.

Beth Shapiro 37:40 Yeah. So it took that, um, and b- 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 gonna get DNA out of Neanderthal bones because of this problem. You know, we, we touch a bone, we're just gonna get human DNA, and we're never gonna be able to know the difference. But then with PCR and with the ability to work in these clean labs and distinguish, we eventually got whole Neanderthal genomes, which I think is probably one of the crowning achievements of my field, ancient DNA. Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for this, so-

Joe Rogan 38:13 What did they extract it from?

Beth Shapiro 38:15 Bones. Um, different bones. The, 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. It's actually my husband who was on part of that team, who put together the first Neanderthal genome sequence. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 38:30 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 38:30 Yeah. It was cool. Um-

Joe Rogan 38:32 That's really cool.

Beth Shapiro 38:32 But then they, uh, the Denisovans, the Denisova people.

Joe Rogan 38:36 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 38:37 That was just a tiny little piece of a finger bone that they had no idea was gonna 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 38:53 And that's pretty recently, right?

Beth Shapiro 38:55 Yeah. Yeah. Within the last decade. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:58 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?

Beth Shapiro 39:04 Gi- uh, the-

Joe Rogan 39:04 Julie-

Beth Shapiro 39:05 ... Giuliani or something. Julie-

Joe Rogan 39:06 Juliens.

Beth Shapiro 39:07 I've seen this. This is really recently.

Joe Rogan 39:08 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 39:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:08 Super recent. It was like December of 2024, they released this paper.

Beth Shapiro 39:13 Yeah. It was super cool.

Joe Rogan 39:14 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 39:14 And it just highlights how much we don't know, right?

Joe Rogan 39:17 Right.

Beth Shapiro 39:18 How every... Especially in paleoanthropology, and this is a field where, you know, people-

Joe Rogan 39:23 Here it is.

Beth Shapiro 39:23 ... will take like... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:24 Jularren.

Beth Shapiro 39:25 Jularrenesis.

Joe Rogan 39:27 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.

Beth Shapiro 39:39 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.

Joe Rogan 39:49 Wild stuff.

Beth Shapiro 39:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:50 Yeah. And then of course, the Hobbit people, the island of Flores people.

Beth Shapiro 39:54 Yeah. Flores.

Joe Rogan 39:55 The little, the little tiny...

Beth Shapiro 39:56 No one has still been able to get DNA from those-

Joe Rogan 39:58 Oh, no?

Beth Shapiro 39:58 ... samples. No. But I mean, someday.

Joe Rogan 40:00 So it's just bones?

Beth Shapiro 40:01 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-

Joe Rogan 40:09 Mm.

Beth Shapiro 40:09 ... degrade DNA, they-

Joe Rogan 40:11 Right.

Beth Shapiro 40:11 It happens faster in hot places.

Joe Rogan 40:12 That makes sense. Yeah. Um, there's probably a lot more to be discovered too.

Beth Shapiro 40:17 So much.

Joe Rogan 40:18 I mean, they only really found it out of one location, right?

Beth Shapiro 40:21 Yes. Yeah. And one thing that, um, people have tested, actually this again was work that my husband did, was whether the people who live there today, the Ramposasa people, are related to them, and they're not.

Joe Rogan 40:32 Ooh.

Beth Shapiro 40:32 It seems like, because they're small as well.

Joe Rogan 40:35 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 40:35 And the question is, is there something weird about them? This is actually really cool. It was a really cool result. Um, 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 how-

Joe Rogan 40:55 Right.

Beth Shapiro 40:55 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 people who are all small, the idea, the hypothesis was that there was some new thing in their DNA that led to them being small.

Joe Rogan 41:12 Mm.

Beth Shapiro 41:12 But it wasn't. They just are at the extreme of all the things we already know. If you-

Joe Rogan 41:16 Is it just island dwarfism?

Beth Shapiro 41:18 It's just, um, you know, a small population on an island.

Joe Rogan 41:21 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 41:21 Different alleles go to fixation. And yes, I mean, weird things happen on islands. Things sometimes-

Joe Rogan 41:26 Like elephants, even, right?

Beth Shapiro 41:26 Elephants, dwarfed, yeah. But dodos, dodos got bigger.

Joe Rogan 41:29 And so do lizards.

Beth Shapiro 41:31 They dwarf or they get bigger?

Joe Rogan 41:32 They get bigger, yeah.

Beth Shapiro 41:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:33 Like the Komodo.

Beth Shapiro 41:34 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:34 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 41:35 Ooh, that's one of the scariest animals.

Joe Rogan 41:36 Creepiest animals.

Beth Shapiro 41:37 (laughs) Right?

Joe Rogan 41:38 I, 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 41:42 Yeah. Like cattle?

Joe Rogan 41:43 Yeah. They eat like-

Beth Shapiro 41:44 I've done this too.

Joe Rogan 41:44 ... sheep and monkeys. It's horrific.

Beth Shapiro 41:47 Why do we watch that? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:48 I don't know. You're like, "Is this gonna happen?" You know, you open up Instagram like, "Oh, no."

Beth Shapiro 41:53 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:53 You see this poor goat and you see this slobbery lizard.

Beth Shapiro 41:55 And you can't help, you're like, "I'm... Like I'm gonna watch."

Joe Rogan 41:58 Ugh. They're so gross.

Beth Shapiro 41:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 41:59 Their mouth is filled with botulism and ugh.

Beth Shapiro 42:02 Is that what kills them? The botulism?

Joe Rogan 42:04 I think there's a venom as well. They, I 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. (scoffs) I watched another horrible video where they would bite this buffalo, they just bite its hindquarters and then follow it-

Beth Shapiro 42:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:27 ... while this, the, the venom is slowly like taking its... Running its toll through the body. And then eventually the poor buffalo gets to the point where it can't move and they just start eating it alive.

Beth Shapiro 42:37 I think I've seen that one.

Joe Rogan 42:38 Oh. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 42:39 (Laughs) I do, I think I've seen that one.

Joe Rogan 42:40 Nature is so rough.

Beth Shapiro 42:43 Would you go?

Joe Rogan 42:43 It's so brutal. To Komodo Island? No chance.

Beth Shapiro 42:46 Really?

Joe Rogan 42:47 No. I remember, um, Sharon Stone's husband. I believe he was either a journalist or someone who owned a newspaper or something like that, and they went to see the Komodo dragons at the zoo. I think it was in San Francisco. And they took their shoes off when they enter into this Komodo dragon area to like not contaminate, and apparently he had white socks on, and they decided that his foot looked delicious.

Beth Shapiro 43:12 No.

Joe Rogan 43:12 And they bit him. Yeah. Yeah, it bit him. I don't even know what happened with that. This was, you know-... an ex-husband of hers back in the dizz-e.

Beth Shapiro 43:20 (laughs) Maybe that's what she planned, the ex.

Joe Rogan 43:21 I don't think she did.

Beth Shapiro 43:23 Okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:23 I, I think it was just one of those things where this guy just didn't know what he was getting into-

Beth Shapiro 43:26 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:27 ... 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 43:33 I wouldn't have thought white socks.

Joe Rogan 43:34 Here it is. Bronstein underwent surgery to reattach several thousand-

Narrator 43:40 No, it says tendons. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:40 ... severed tendons and-

Beth Shapiro 43:42 Okay, tendon.

Joe Rogan 43:42 Oh, severed tendons and, to rebuild his big toe that was crushed by the dragon's jaws. Oh.

Narrator 43:48 It's just missing a space.

Beth Shapiro 43:49 Yeah, it's just missing a space.

Joe Rogan 43:50 Oh. Oh, tendons and... Okay.

Narrator 43:52 Yeah, space is

43:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 43:53 Oh, he, so, he was done, uh, 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 44:03 Wait, he was in the feeding cage?

Joe Rogan 44:05 Yeah, whoopsies. Oh, they mistook his, his white tennis shoes. That's what it was. It wasn't socks. So this story's old.

Narrator 44:13 No, no, uh-

Joe Rogan 44:13 This story is from-

Narrator 44:14 They had him take it off. It was his shoeless foot.

Beth Shapiro 44:15 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:15 Oh, they had him remove his white so-

Narrator 44:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:17 Oh, it was a shoeless foot.

Beth Shapiro 44:19 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:20 Oh, so they thought that his tennis shoes would look like the rats.

Narrator 44:24 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 44:24 Um-

Joe Rogan 44:24 So they told him to take your f- shoes off so they don't look like the rats.

Beth Shapiro 44:28 And his foot looked like rat. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:29 So it looks like flesh. Oh my God.

Beth Shapiro 44:31 Sorry, this, this sounds like someone did a dumb thing. Like, this is... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:35 Absolutely, a lot of dumb things. What year was this, Jamie?

Narrator 44:39 Uh, 2001. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:41 20- 2001. Yeah. Oof.

Beth Shapiro 44:43 Well, bad decisions, bad outcomes.

Joe Rogan 44:45 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 44:46 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:46 Yeah. No, I'm not going to Komodo Island.

Beth Shapiro 44:49 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:49 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 44:49 Or in the feeding cage at a zoo.

Joe Rogan 44:51 Fuck that place.

Beth Shapiro 44:51 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:51 No, no, I'm not going to any of those places.

Beth Shapiro 44:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:54 No. No, no, no, no, no. I get it. I, like, I know what they are. I, I can watch them through the cage. I'm good. I don't need the additional thrill.

Beth Shapiro 45:02 Right. But there are places where there are big things, like dodos-

Joe Rogan 45:05 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 45:05 ... that are amazing and probably not going to kill you, so...

Joe Rogan 45:09 Sure, there's some stuff that won't kill you.

Beth Shapiro 45:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:11 Like giraffes.

Beth Shapiro 45:12 Giraffes. I've been told that a giraffe is the dumbest animal, that-

Joe Rogan 45:15 Really?

Beth Shapiro 45:16 Yeah. I, 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 45:35 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 45:36 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:37 Well, they're so kind that they let babies feed them.

Beth Shapiro 45:39 Oh, really? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:40 Yeah, you know?

Beth Shapiro 45:41 Just, there's nothing going on in there.

Joe Rogan 45:42 When my kids were little, you would, you could go to the San Diego Zoo and you would give them lettuce. And little babies are allowed to hold up, like, a two-year-old can hold up their arm and this enormous tongue comes wrapping around that piece of lettuce and they giggle and everything. But they trust them so much that they let little kids feed them.

Beth Shapiro 45:59 Huh.

Joe Rogan 45:59 Like, they set it up so people can feed these... And they seem so calm. They're like-

Beth Shapiro 46:05 Docile, yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:05 Yeah, like, they're just happy they're not getting eaten by lions.

Beth Shapiro 46:08 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 46:16 Right?

Narrator 46:16 Raptors.

Beth Shapiro 46:16 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:17 Oh, yeah. They fight each other with their necks.

Narrator 46:18 It says they're kinda smart.

Joe Rogan 46:20 Oh, really?

Beth Shapiro 46:20 Hmm. But this is... I don't know.

Joe Rogan 46:22 "The ability to make inferences-"

Beth Shapiro 46:23 This-

Joe Rogan 46:23 "... based on statistical information has so far been tested only on animals having large brains in relation to their body size, like primates and parrots. They tested giraffes, despite having a smaller relative brain size, can rely on relative frequencies to predict sampling outcomes. They presented them with two transparent containers filled with different quali- 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 47:18 I, I mean, cool.

Narrator 47:19 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 47:20 But I also trust a person who has tried to keep giraffes from killing themselves-

Joe Rogan 47:24 Right.

Beth Shapiro 47:24 ... by doing dumb things to-

Joe Rogan 47:26 But perhap-

Beth Shapiro 47:26 ... tell me that a giraffe isn't always making the best decisions.

Joe Rogan 47:29 Perhaps they're intelligent for the environment they belong in.

Beth Shapiro 47:32 (laughs) I'm sure that's true. I mean, otherwise-

Joe Rogan 47:34 Right.

Beth Shapiro 47:34 ... that's how evolution works, you know, so...

Joe Rogan 47:36 Yeah, but when you put them in the zoo, they're like, "Look, where's all our food? What's this?"

Beth Shapiro 47:39 There's a wire I can get my neck stuck in. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:41 You know, like a, a kid that never leaves his parents' basement and plays Call of Duty til he's 35, you know, probably doesn't have, like, the best social intelligence. Probably not the... Probably gonna be pretty awkward when you get him out in the wild.

Beth Shapiro 47:55 Probably, yes.

Joe Rogan 47:56 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 47:56 Yes.

Joe Rogan 47:56 It's probably the same thing with giraffes.

Beth Shapiro 47:57 Yeah. Did you hear that, James? Talking to my 15-year-old.

Joe Rogan 48:00 Oh, is he playing a lot of video games?

Beth Shapiro 48:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:02 They're very addictive. It's a real problem. And they're gonna get worse. They're gonna get way better.

Beth Shapiro 48:06 There you go.

Joe Rogan 48:06 You know? As, uh, science makes things more and more addictive-

Beth Shapiro 48:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:12 ... one of the things they're really good at, these designers, they're like-

Beth Shapiro 48:15 And algorithms, right?

Joe Rogan 48:16 Oh, yeah.

Beth Shapiro 48:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:16 But they're just so good at making games that are just incredibly compelling.

Beth Shapiro 48:20 And fun, yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:21 Oh, so fun.

Beth Shapiro 48:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:21 Way more fun than going outside and getting bullied.

Beth Shapiro 48:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:24 You know? That's the problem. And, you know, you could be a badass in Call of Duty.

Beth Shapiro 48:29 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:29 All you do is sit there.

Beth Shapiro 48:30 Or War Thunder.

Joe Rogan 48:31 Or-

Beth Shapiro 48:31 That's the game that my son is into.

Joe Rogan 48:33 Oh. War Thunder? I don't know about that one.

Beth Shapiro 48:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:34 What's that one?

Beth Shapiro 48:35 It's about, like, planes and things that you build and then fight.

Joe Rogan 48:38 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 48:38 I don't know, it's... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:39 Yeah, pretty crazy stuff.

Beth Shapiro 48:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:41 Yeah, you, just imagine if you could take one of those Denisovans and show them that.

Beth Shapiro 48:45 (laughs) That is a, an interesting question.

Joe Rogan 48:47 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 48:47 What would we do, eh, 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, on them.

Joe Rogan 48:58 You won't.

Beth Shapiro 48:59 But... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:00 China's like, "Tell me more."

Beth Shapiro 49:04 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:04 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 49:06 Maybe. I think it's a bad idea. But if they do, I would like to know-

Joe Rogan 49:09 Well, there's a lot of people that think bringing dire wolves back is a bad idea.

Beth Shapiro 49:12 Well, I mean, what did you think of the dire wolves?

Joe Rogan 49:15 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."

Beth Shapiro 49:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:37 "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.

Beth Shapiro 49:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:48 It was, that was in Alberta.

Beth Shapiro 49:49 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:49 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.

Beth Shapiro 49:58 Right.

Joe Rogan 49:58 You know? They, they were more than six months old.

Beth Shapiro 50:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:01 But they were almost 100 pounds already.

Beth Shapiro 50:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:04 And they have this look in their eye, like-

Beth Shapiro 50:06 And you can see they're bigger-

Joe Rogan 50:08 ... that's a wolf.

Beth Shapiro 50:08 ... they're more muscular. And you see that-

Joe Rogan 50:09 Yes.

Beth Shapiro 50:09 ... that coat.

Joe Rogan 50:10 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 50:10 The dire wolf coat. That-

Joe Rogan 50:12 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.

Beth Shapiro 50:18 Yes.

Joe Rogan 50:19 She's adorable.

Beth Shapiro 50:19 And she is like a puppy right now.

Joe Rogan 50:21 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 50:21 Di- you were able to hold her?

Joe Rogan 50:23 She's adorable. Yes.

Beth Shapiro 50:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 50:25 She nibbles on your fingers. She's a l- 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 50:32 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 50:32 Which is really crazy.

Beth Shapiro 50:33 Yeah. I'm glad you got to see the boys before. They were probably already a little bit standoffish.

Joe Rogan 50:38 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 50:38 Especially compared to-

Joe Rogan 50:39 Yes.

Beth Shapiro 50:39 ... Khaleesi.

Joe Rogan 50:40 Yeah. They're standoffish.

Beth Shapiro 50:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:41 They, they, they get fairly close though, within like 20 feet of you, checking you out. They pee all over the place.

Beth Shapiro 50:48 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 50:48 You know?

Beth Shapiro 50:48 Marking their territory.

Joe Rogan 50:49 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 50:49 They're nice.

Joe Rogan 50:50 It's just so strange to see an animal in the flesh that didn't exist, uh, you know, for 10,000 years.

Beth Shapiro 50:58 It's amazing.

Joe Rogan 50:59 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 50:59 I was there for Khaleesi's birth and I... People were asking me afterward, "How did that feel?" And I just, uh, you can't even describe it. Y'know, th- this moment when she was born and then she screamed. She had this, this cry, this scream. I have it on my phone actually-

Joe Rogan 51:15 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 51:15 ... I can play it for you. But it was just such a, I don't know, it's, it, it... It's this awe. This, um... I think this is one of the best things about the de-extinction work and the species preservation work that Colossal is doing, is that we live in such a crazy time. People don't often have an opportunity to feel genuine awe about something.

Joe Rogan 51:38 Right.

Beth Shapiro 51:38 And this is one of the things that people get about going out, going hunting. Go, get out and, you know, going and spending time in the woods, or going and experiencing something that they wouldn't normally experience, is, is this, this way to feel genuine wonder.

Joe Rogan 51:51 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 51:52 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 (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 52:03 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 52:03 ... trying to recover. And the next morning I woke up and there were like 150 text messages on my phone from Ben going, "What the fuck are you doing? Where are you? Why are you not responding?" (laughs)

Joe Rogan 52:12 Oh, wow.

Beth Shapiro 52:12 I'm like, "Oh my God, I've missed this moment." So I made sure that I was there (laughs) , present for, for Khaleesi, and I'm glad I was 'cause what a, what an amazing... I'm glad you got to see them. I'm-

Joe Rogan 52:22 I'm glad I got to see them too. It's-

Beth Shapiro 52:24 Good.

Joe Rogan 52:24 ... it's really a crazy experience. I felt very fortunate just to be in their presence and, and also very conflicted by it all. Like, this is so odd. Like, is this the beginning? Like, are we gonna bring back everything? Like, would, is that a good thing? Are things supposed to go extinct? Are we supposed to just bring back everything that's ever lived? At what point do we draw the line? You know, all these thoughts in my head, like, "Why are human beings the deciders of what lives and dies?" Like, what, are we, do we have an arrogance because of our relative intellect that we think that we should be able to make these kind of decisions and not understand the comprehensive effect that it has on the entire ecosystem? And we know what happens with invasive species, when invasive species come into new territories, they destroy everything. It's like, Florida is an amazing example of that.

Beth Shapiro 53:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 53:10 Fl- Florida is so crazy. It is, I mean, it is Florida.

Beth Shapiro 53:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:15 You know, I mean, like, when you think of Florida you think, like, Florida Man. It's like 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?"

Beth Shapiro 53:23 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:23 (laughs) You know, like, but that's Florida ecologically.

Beth Shapiro 53:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:27 Like, the entire center of it, the Everglades, is infested with Burmese pythons.

Beth Shapiro 53:32 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 m- monetary reward for people who kill... I think it's the most, or maybe the, the biggest, there's some- something like this. I-

Joe Rogan 53:43 And even that's not gonna put a dent in it.

Beth Shapiro 53:44 No, it doesn't at all. People kill the, and in, during this competition they kill hundreds, maybe thousands of these snakes, and it doesn't even touch 'em. Like, they're-

Joe Rogan 53:52 There's an estimate of a half a million. They think there might be a half a million there. And there's a guy that's been on this podcast before, he calls himself Python Cowboy.

Beth Shapiro 53:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:00 He's, uh, 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? Um, 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 54:22 Wow.

Joe Rogan 54:22 They're hundreds of pounds. They're enormous. And-

Beth Shapiro 54:24 They swallow the deer.

Joe Rogan 54:26 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 54:27 And, yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:27 They eat alligators.

Beth Shapiro 54:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:28 They're eating alligators.

Beth Shapiro 54:29 Thank goodness, 'cause alligators are doing great. Like that's one thing I don't mind them doing. Like, we need the-

Joe Rogan 54:33 Right.

Beth Shapiro 54:33 ... we need something that's hunting alligators, right? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:34 That's another problem in Florida. It's infested with alligators as well.

Beth Shapiro 54:37 And they used to be on the endangered species list.

Joe Rogan 54:39 When I lived there, they were on the endangered species list.

Beth Shapiro 54:41 Yeah. One of the class of 1967, right? The first species to be-

Joe Rogan 54:45 I wonder-

Beth Shapiro 54:45 ... officially listed.

Joe Rogan 54:46 ... why did they list them? And how did-

Beth Shapiro 54:47 Because they were almost gone at that point.

Joe Rogan 54:49 How did they do that?

Beth Shapiro 54:50 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 54:50 Like, I can't imagine that you could do that now. That you could get them to the point of extinction now. 'Cause they're so hard to find and they're everywhere.

Beth Shapiro 54:58 Maybe it was just-

Joe Rogan 54:59 And I don't wanna, I don't wanna say they're so hard to find, but I mean, when they get in the water-

Beth Shapiro 55:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:02 ... you know, like-

Beth Shapiro 55:03 You don't wanna be-

Joe Rogan 55:03 ... you're not gonna get all of 'em.

Beth Shapiro 55:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:05 Like, how are you killing all of 'em?

Beth Shapiro 55:06 I was wa- You know there's a show, I don't remember where it's on, but it's a show that's called Florida Man. I was watching it-

Joe Rogan 55:11 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 55:11 ... on the flight here today. And (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 55:13 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 55:13 Seriously. And it goes through interactions with, 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 (laughs) bite off his arm.

Joe Rogan 55:27 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 55:27 And that is the...That's the story. That's that particular-

Joe Rogan 55:30 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 55:37 (laughs) I don't know.

Joe Rogan 55:38 No.

Beth Shapiro 55:38 I remember there was a guy who... What I... I mean, I don't know. There's probably hundreds of stories like this.

Joe Rogan 55:43 Oh, yeah.

Beth Shapiro 55:43 But in, in this video, and I was trying to sleep so I'm probably wrong, in this video, he laid on the side of the lake, like probably bleeding to death when an alligator that was in the shape of his mom, I think, came up to him and told him he had to get his ass up and move or he was gonna die. And he was like, "Okay, mom, I'll do that." It was... (laughs) I don't know.

Joe Rogan 56:00 Oh, boy.

Beth Shapiro 56:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:02 He was probably not sober.

Beth Shapiro 56:04 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:04 I'd imagine that-

Beth Shapiro 56:04 I mean, it was blood loss at that point. He was-

Joe Rogan 56:06 Sure.

Beth Shapiro 56:06 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:06 And then also whatever contributed to making him climb that fence in the first place.

Beth Shapiro 56:10 Right. Yeah.

Narrator 56:11 I won't play the video, but there you go.

Joe Rogan 56:13 Is that the dude?

Narrator 56:13 I mean, this is, this is nu-... The show she's watching is on Netflix, I think.

Beth Shapiro 56:17 Is it?

Joe Rogan 56:17 Oh.

Narrator 56:17 This is a similar thing that did happen a month ago. Here's the video of it.

Joe Rogan 56:21 I don't-

Beth Shapiro 56:21 Yes.

Narrator 56:21 But, but yes, it's-

Joe Rogan 56:22 I don't want to see this dude.

Beth Shapiro 56:22 The one that was the show that was about-

Joe Rogan 56:24 I don't want to see this dude.

Beth Shapiro 56:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:24 I don't want to see this dude lose his arm.

Beth Shapiro 56:25 The show was about something that happened years ago.

Joe Rogan 56:27 Oh.

Beth Shapiro 56:27 Years enough ago for them to be able to make it. But yeah, I mean, how many people in Florida-

Joe Rogan 56:31 I bet it happens all the time.

Beth Shapiro 56:31 Yeah. Right?

Joe Rogan 56:32 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 56:32 I mean, it's Florida.

Joe Rogan 56:33 They are huge.

Beth Shapiro 56:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:35 They're so-

Beth Shapiro 56:35 And now they're in Georgia too, right? That's where I grew up.

Joe Rogan 56:37 Oh, they're in Texas.

Beth Shapiro 56:37 Yeah, Texas.

Joe Rogan 56:38 They're here. Yeah. They, they s-... They find them. And the golf courses in Florida, like, go-... Good luck playing golf out there. Are you crazy? You're playing golf in Jurassic Park.

Beth Shapiro 56:47 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:47 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 57:06 Holy... Oh, my God, that's wild.

Joe Rogan 57:08 That is so big. Look at the size of that thing.

Beth Shapiro 57:12 (laughs) You're out there playing golf, you're like... (laughs) You see that guy and you know that they can run fast.

Joe Rogan 57:18 Yeah, they run, like, 30 miles an hour.

Beth Shapiro 57:20 Yeah. And they run faster than you.

Joe Rogan 57:20 Look at this dork. This dork can't run 10 miles an hour.

Beth Shapiro 57:23 Florida man.

Joe Rogan 57:23 Yeah. That's totally a Florida man.

Beth Shapiro 57:25 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 57:25 "Let me get me a selfie for the Facebook."

Beth Shapiro 57:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 57:27 He's gonna get right up on that thing. And, you know, there's a lot-

Beth Shapiro 57:32 Yeah. No thanks.

Joe Rogan 57:32 ... of them there too. I mean, they say that, uh, pretty much any undisturbed body of water likely has an alligator in it now.

Beth Shapiro 57:38 So what ate them?

Joe Rogan 57:40 That's a good question. Well, back in the day, they probably just ate each other. You know, they cannibalize each other.

Beth Shapiro 57:45 Maybe they're gonna do that too.

Joe Rogan 57:46 I mean-

Beth Shapiro 57:46 I'm sure they probably do.

Joe Rogan 57:47 ... they probably have to at a certain point in time. I mean, what are the snakes gonna eat? Snakes have wiped out 90% of the mammals in the Everglades.

Beth Shapiro 57:54 And they're terrible for birds too.

Joe Rogan 57:55 Oh, yeah. For everything. Ground-nesting birds, anything. Anything they can get ahold of. I mean, and if there's a half a million of them, that is a killing population-

Beth Shapiro 58:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:04 ... of extraordinary proportions.

Beth Shapiro 58:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:06 I mean, half a million things that could eat a deer. You know, they could... They... There's no skunks left, there's... Everything. Raccoons, they're all gone.

Beth Shapiro 58:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:14 Everything's missing.

Beth Shapiro 58:15 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-

Joe Rogan 58:23 This sounds like a sales pitch.

Narrator 58:24 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 58:24 ... species preservation company. Uh, it is a sales pitch, but birds, it... Whenever I think about birds, I think of this.

Joe Rogan 58:30 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 58:30 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-

Joe Rogan 58:43 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 58:43 ... one of the things that we did to save Florida panthers from becoming extinct was we introduced panthers from Texas.

Joe Rogan 58:49 Right.

Beth Shapiro 58:49 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.

Joe Rogan 59:11 Hmm.

Beth Shapiro 59:11 They had all sorts of heart problems. They had-

Joe Rogan 59:14 Is that true because there's a small breeding population?

Beth Shapiro 59:16 Yeah, because there were very few of them and so-

Joe Rogan 59:18 No genetic diversity?

Beth Shapiro 59:19 ... the choice was to mate with your family, uh, that's it.

Joe Rogan 59:23 Oof.

Beth Shapiro 59:24 Right?

Joe Rogan 59:25 Oof.

Beth Shapiro 59:25 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?

Joe Rogan 59:37 Right.

Beth Shapiro 59:37 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.

Joe Rogan 59:44 Mm-hmm.

Beth Shapiro 59:44 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:20 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:00:20 Because if it's real, I want to be the person who finds it. Right?

Joe Rogan 1:00:24 Right. Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:00:25 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?

Joe Rogan 1:01:09 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 1:01:09 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:48 Hmm.

Beth Shapiro 1:01:48 ... which is technology that we developed on the path to dire wolf, right? Um, and we can actually help this population to survive. So there, there are ways that we can do this for, for mammals that are gonna have really amazing consequences for the way we can protect biodiversity.

Joe Rogan 1:02:03 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.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:18 (laughs) Honey badgers?

Joe Rogan 1:02:19 Because they, because they eat snakes. I mean, I don't know if this was a serious idea.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:23 Because we have never, as a species, humans-

Joe Rogan 1:02:26 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:02:26 ... 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)

Joe Rogan 1:02:34 Right. Australia's a wreck.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:35 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 They have a terrible feral cat problem.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:39 Yeah. And-

Beth Shapiro 1:02:39 And in, in Hawaii, they have these giant African land snails that-

Joe Rogan 1:02:43 Oh, yeah, I've heard of those.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:45 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:45 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:45 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-

Joe Rogan 1:02:58 Oh, boy.

Beth Shapiro 1:02:59 ... rosy wolf snail is leaving the giant snails alone. They're... And they're big. Have you seen one of those?

Joe Rogan 1:03:03 I don't think I have.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:04 A giant African land snail. It's worth looking at it. It's-

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 Did they come over on cargo ships or something?

Beth Shapiro 1:03:09 I think we... I think people introduced them for some reason that I can't remember-

Joe Rogan 1:03:13 Oh, great.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:14 ... what it was. Yeah. So we have a good history of doing this kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 1:03:16 This is for giant escargot. Whoa.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:03:20 Whoa. Uh, can they eat those? Are those delicious?

Beth Shapiro 1:03:23 I think people can eat them probably, but they eat everything from all of the vegetation to the other snails-

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 The size of that thing.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:29 ... to plaster, you know? They, they'll eat their way through infrastructure that people have built. Yeah, they're-

Joe Rogan 1:03:33 Oh, great.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:34 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 Oh, great.

Beth Shapiro 1:03:35 Yeah. So we introduced these little things, rosy wolf snails, to try to control them, but instead, they're killing all the, the endemic snails. So, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:03:43 (exhales)

Beth Shapiro 1:03:43 ... we should do that again.

Joe Rogan 1:03:43 We never learn. Yeah, I hope they don't bring honey badgers to Florida, but I, 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... 'Cause, 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, uh, an unbelievably resilient body.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 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 1:04:12 They're cute, right?

Joe Rogan 1:04:13 Kinda.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:13 I remember when my kids were little watching the Wild Kratts. There was a Wild Kratts-

Joe Rogan 1:04:17 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:17 ... episode about honey badgers.

Joe Rogan 1:04:19 (laughs) Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:19 How they were all cute when they were babies because they were hiding in camouflage. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:23 Yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:23 Maybe when they're babies, they're cute. They're pretty ferocious.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:25 Yeah?

Joe Rogan 1:04:26 Yeah. There's a lot of-

Beth Shapiro 1:04:27 Like a wolverine.

Joe Rogan 1:04:28 Yeah, yeah.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:28 Wolverine.

Joe Rogan 1:04:28 Very similar to wolverines.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:30 Yeah. Like, I think they're all in the same family, right? Yeah, there he is. Look at that face. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:04:34 I think they look very cute.

Joe Rogan 1:04:35 Look at that face. Just big old deadly snake, and that's his lunch.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:39 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:04:39 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 the snake.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:45 That's amazing.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 Yeah. They're ferocious little animals.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:48 So have people been able to understand better antivenom properties from studying them?

Joe Rogan 1:04:52 That's a really good... Look at that face.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:54 Oh, my God.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:55 He looks vicious.

Joe Rogan 1:04:57 That is such a crazy animal.

Beth Shapiro 1:04:59 Is... That pattern on the coat is really beautiful.

Joe Rogan 1:05:02 Oh, they're wild looking.

Beth Shapiro 1:05:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:03 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, it sounds like a Florida idea.

Beth Shapiro 1:05:10 (laughs) We... Have you heard about the hippo solution, the, in the early 20th century?

Joe Rogan 1:05:14 (laughs) No, no, no.

Beth Shapiro 1:05:15 So in... This is, this is a great sort of American history story because, you know, this is, our country is replete with people with brilliant ideas, right? And in the e- early 20th century, when the, the land in the West was not doing so well, been overgrazed, there were too many cattle, and there was this, this thing called the meat question. It was the thing of the day, the meat question. People were talking about, "How are we gonna survive? There's not enough cattle. Um, how are... Maybe we're gonna have to eat our dogs." And at the same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and other places where the, um, I think it was the World Fair. People had the, brought New Orleans, who was the host city of the... I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans this, um, water hyacinth, this water, little tiny beautiful flower to, as a gift. And they loved it. And so, they planted it everywhere and it just grew like absolute crazy and was choking up the, the river. Like ships couldn't get through because of this like matted river. People were like putting oil on it to get it to sink-

Joe Rogan 1:06:09 Whoa.

Beth Shapiro 1:06:09 ... and trying to light it on fire and nothing would happen. And this team of people that included a congressman from Louisiana came up with a solution for both problems at once. And that was that they were going to import hippos-

Joe Rogan 1:06:21 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:06:22 ... from Africa (laughs) into Louisiana-

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 Ugh.

Beth Shapiro 1:06:26 Yeah. To live on the bayous. They would eat the plant, the, this water hyacinth thing, and then we could eat them, and that was gonna be the perfect solution to both of these problems. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:37 How did that get stopped?

Beth Shapiro 1:06:39 It was an accident. So it was... It's actually a fun story. You should, you should look it up and read the, the whole story because it, it involved these two guys. Um, one, 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 is really, is really important and it was a really important part of the way we, we got conservation legislation in the US. So he was excited about this. And then the congressman, when he was pulling together the team of people that he wanted to be on his side for this, he went to a show that this other guy, the sort of con man, traveling salesman, pimp, escape artist dude was having about how he was an intrepid explorer and he was like, "That guy is an, an expert as well. He can also be on my team." And they testified in front of Congress and they asked questions like, um-... 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, um, there's plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from a baby's bottle," with no evidence whatsoever.

Joe Rogan 1:08:01 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:08:01 Right? (laughs) Just... And everybody was like, "Yeah, awesome." Even the New York Times was completely behind it. They published an editorial talking about... They called the hippos "lake cow bacon." Yeah. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:08:12 What year was this?

Beth Shapiro 1:08:13 This was, like, early 20th century.

Speaker 1:08:15 1910.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:16 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:16 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:18 Lake cow bacon.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:20 Yeah. Everybody was like, "This is it."

Joe Rogan 1:08:22 All in.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:22 "This is what's gonna solve the problem."

Joe Rogan 1:08:23 We're gonna have hippos.

Speaker 1:08:23 Teddy Roosevelt was behind it too, right?

Beth Shapiro 1:08:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:25 Wow. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:08:25 Teddy Roosevelt was behind it. Yeah.

Speaker 1:08:27 There was a bill all the way in Congress.

Joe Rogan 1:08:28 (sighs)

Speaker 1:08:28 It just didn't pass.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:29 Yeah. Well, it didn't, it didn't go up for a vote-

Joe Rogan 1:08:31 Look at that.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:31 ... is what happened.

Speaker 1:08:31 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:08:31 How the US almost became a nation of hippo ranchers. Oh my God.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:36 "Failed House Bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing the hippopotamus that would be killed to make l- lake cow bacon."

Beth Shapiro 1:08:43 Yeah, it's brilliant. This is, I mean, this is such a... It's so funny.

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 1:08:46 But it, it's not fair to call it failed 'cause 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. Who knows?

Joe Rogan 1:08:57 That's it?

Beth Shapiro 1:08:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:58 It just went away?

Beth Shapiro 1:08:59 Just went away.

Joe Rogan 1:09:00 Wow.

Beth Shapiro 1:09:00 Yeah. So, near miss on the hippos, but-

Joe Rogan 1:09:02 Well, they kill more people in Africa than any other mammal, right?

Beth Shapiro 1:09:05 Yeah. Yeah. Well, and now we know that they're good at becoming invasive. You saw there's hippos that live now in-

Joe Rogan 1:09:10 Columbia, yeah. (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:09:11 ... Columbia because of Pablo Escobar. Nobody knew what to do with them.

Joe Rogan 1:09:14 (laughs)

Beth Shapiro 1:09:14 Yeah. And they started off with just a, just a handful of them.

Joe Rogan 1:09:17 Uh-huh.

Beth Shapiro 1:09:17 And now there's, like, dozens of them down there. And, yeah, it's like-

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 What are they doing about that?

Beth Shapiro 1:09:21 Um, nothing. I think they keep rounding them up and putting them back on his property. Like, what can you do? Sometimes they just get-

Joe Rogan 1:09:27 How much property did, did he have up there?

Beth Shapiro 1:09:29 I don't know the answer to that, yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:33 (exhales)

Beth Shapiro 1:09:33 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:33 It's so crazy that you could just have hippos and then they just get loose.

Beth Shapiro 1:09:37 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:37 And now Colombia has hippos.

Beth Shapiro 1:09:39 (laughs) He took them there on purpose, though, just like we wanted to bring them here. Can you imagine how bad that would be, though? And I mean, do people eat hippos?

Joe Rogan 1:09:46 Well, that's the wild boars in the United States.

Beth Shapiro 1:09:49 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:09:49 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 if it was Russia or somewhere in Europe.