The guest
Beth Shapiro: Evolutionary biologist and ancient-DNA pioneer who left academia to become Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences, the company that engineered the dire wolves. Author of the popular-science books How to Clone a Mammoth and Life as We Made It.
What this episode covers
Joe Rogan talks with paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro about the science of extracting and rebuilding DNA from long-dead animals and what it means to bring extinct species back. She recounts grueling Siberian fieldwork, explains how Colossal engineered dire wolves from gray-wolf DNA, and defends the work against critics who say it's just gene-edited wolves. The conversation ranges across Neanderthals and Denisovans, invasive-species disasters, ballot-box wolf reintroductions, and the limits of the fossil record. Throughout, Shapiro argues that humans have always shaped nature and should responsibly use gene-editing tools for conservation and medicine rather than refuse them out of fear.
Recommended on this episode
MediaRecommended
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Werner Herzog
“It's really good. It's really fascinating”
“Have you ever seen Werner Herzog's film Happy People, Life in the Taiga? It's really good. It's really fascinating.”— Joe Rogan
MediaRecommended
Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog
“Another great Werner Herzog film. It's a really funny movie”
“Have you seen the documentary Grizzly Man? Another great Werner Herzog film. It's one of the best unintentional comedies. It's a really funny movie.”— Joe Rogan
The guest's own work
BookBy the guestISBN verified
Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined and Redefined Nature
Beth Shapiro
“And your book, Life as We Made It. How 50,000 years of human innovation refined and redefined nature. Beth Shapiro.”— Joe Rogan
BookBy the guestISBN verified
How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction
Beth Shapiro
“my first book, How to Clone a Mammoth, I didn't read. And I heard the audio book.”— Beth Shapiro
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Lost City of Z
David Grann
“He's one of the main characters in that book, the lost city of Z. He's one of the people that went there.”— Joe Rogan
BookReferencedISBN verified
Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton
“Michael Crichton, when he wrote the book that became the movie, he credited a lab at Berkeley, Alan Wilson's group.”— Beth Shapiro
BookReferencedISBN verified
Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand
“We are as gods, as Stuart Brand wrote in the whole Earth Catalog, right? And we just better get good at it.”— Beth Shapiro
MediaReferenced
War Thunder
Gaijin Entertainment
“Or War Thunder. That's the game that my son is into. War Thunder. It's about like planes and things that you build and then fight.”— Joe Rogan
MediaReferenced
Call of Duty
Activision
“a kid that never leaves his parents' basement and plays Call of Duty till he's 35.”— Joe Rogan
MediaReferenced
Florida Man
Netflix
“there's a show that's called Florida Man. I was watching it on a flight the other day and it goes through interactions that Florida men have.”— Beth Shapiro
Big reveals from this episode
- The first published 'dinosaur DNA' was actually a chicken match, traced to the excavation team eating fried chicken at the dig.
- Shapiro states flatly that Colossal will NOT de-extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans because they are humans who can't consent.
- She compares herself to Jurassic Park's Dr. Henry Wu and jokes about her 'evil transition' to come.
- Reveals her team proved the famous '$2.5 million beefalo' and commercial 'buffalo' are genetically just cattle, no real bison.
- Argues humans have been 'playing God' for our entire existence and quotes Stewart Brand: 'We are as gods... we just better get good at it.'
- Confirms Colossal has announced the woolly mammoth, thylacine, and dodo, and holds DNA from many more species.
- Predicts humans won't edit toward uniform 'superhumans'; real germline editing will arrive only when a pandemic makes it the sole ethical option.
Worth remembering
- Shapiro once killed roughly 35 Arctic mosquitoes in a single clap; Siberian Arctic mosquitoes don't even need a blood meal to reproduce.
- Ancient mammoth-bone DNA survives only in fragments ~30-50 letters long, versus hundreds of millions of letters from a living cheek swab.
- The tiny 'Hobbit' people of Flores aren't genetically special; they're just at the extreme end of normal human size variation.
- In 1910 a serious U.S. plan proposed importing African hippos to Louisiana bayous as 'lake cow bacon' to solve a meat shortage.
- Polar bears and brown bears interbreed whenever ranges overlap, and all North American brown bears carry polar-bear ancestry.
- Collecting Neanderthal DNA from living people could reconstruct ~93% of the Neanderthal genome.
- Sediment DNA suggests mammoths and horses may have survived in mainland North America until ~4,000-5,000 years ago.
- Problem mountain lions in Northern California get about 50% of their diet from people's dogs and cats.
- 'Baby KJ' went home cured of a fatal metabolic disease after a custom CRISPR edit, an early personalized-medicine milestone.
More from Joe Rogan
All 6342 recommended