The a16z Show - Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

original episode notes and transcript here: https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-iceagebiome/Longtime podcast showrunner (2014-2022), primary host, and editor Sonal Chokshi shares three best-of episodes as she shifts gears and the show goes on hiatus until relaunched with a new host. The first of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in summer 2017, but both the work discussed in here – on making a really wild (quite literally wild;) geo-engineering idea at massive scale real – is still actively, relevant, and frequently discussed today (it’s on bringing back lab-grown woolly mammoths, which was also discussed in the 2020 documentary with Stewart Brand, We Are As Gods). But it's also all about how we humans can and do use the power of narrative to drive great feats of change, including engineering. This has been a signature theme in forming the identity of the a16z Podcast, and the conversation that follows is one that takes place among three tech & science editors, including one of our former colleagues (who also was a host on this podcast for 4 years).links: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/https://www.weareasgods.film/   Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and as your primary host, editor and showrunner here of the past seven years, I wanted to share some of my very favorite, just a few selected episodes for you on this feed as I get ready to make a change and as we get ready to relaunch this show with a new host. The first of these three episodes is a conversation that originally took place in summer 2017, but both the work discussed in here on making a really wild, quite literally wild, geoengineering idea at massive scale real is still actively being discussed, relevant, and at play today. It's on Bringing Back Labgrown Woolly Mammats, which was also discussed in the 2020 documentary, with Stewart brand, We Are as Gods. But I'm sharing this episode as a personal all-time favorite, also because the meta-theme is all about how we humans can and do use the power of narrative to drive great feats of change, including engineering. This has been a signature theme for me informing the identity of the A6 and Z podcast, and the conversation that follows is one that takes place among three tech and science editors, including our former colleague Hannah,

who is also a host on this podcast for four years. Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today, Hannah and I are doing another one of our On the Road shows from Washington, D.C., and today's guest is Ross Anderson, senior editor for the Atlantic's science, health, and technology coverage. And he wrote a story earlier this year in the April issue called Welcome to Pleistocene Park, which you don't have to have read to follow this conversation.

But here's what you do need to know. A small group, a very small group, in fact, of Russian scientists in Arctic Siberia are trying to resurrect an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths through a scheme for rewilding grassland instead of forest. And while we focus on the particulars of all that in this episode, in a hallway-style riff beginning with the connection to climate change

and then moving to gene editing to discussing the science of paleontology and the sociocultural and economic aspects of radical geoengineering, this episode is really more broadly about what motivates seemingly crazy ideas, moving them from the lab to the field, quite literally in this case, through marketing and narrative, which is where we end and begin the conversation. So when I landed on the website and I see that these guys are trying to rewild all or a great part of northern Siberia and Alaska and the Canadian Yukon with this Ice Age grassland

biome and that they want to put woolly mammoths there. You know, I had the same reaction that everyone listening to this has, right? Which is like, what? Jurassic Park. Yeah, Jurassic Park. Yeah, you say it's crazy people. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was excited to write the piece.

And then the other thing about this project that was really compelling is that it's not that these guys were only just romantic about bringing the ice age back to this huge stretch of the earth. Their primary motivation for doing it is to as a climate change mitigation strategy, which is to say that the Arctic is warming very fast and under the surface in the Arctic is what's called the permafrost, this ice that has been there for in some cases tens of thousands of years. And in fact, very deep. I read in your article like, up to like a mile deep in some places. That part of the world was so rich in grass and in large animals at that time. It's got lots of sort of organic matter, which has lots of carbon in it. In fact, more than like the entire output of the United States right now.

Let's take a step back for a minute. First of all, what's a connection between the permafrost and climate change? Like, how can a grassland step with some fluffy, furry animals stop climate change? bluntly. Totally. Okay. So most of that part of the world up in the Arctic is covered with tundra, you might think of it as Arctic desert. Okay.

Like very little grows on it. It's kind of like scrub. And what's neat about grasslands is they actually keep the earth underneath them colder. First of all, they reflect away more sunlight than the darker kind of tree regions. You're already hedging against the warming. Right. By having grasslands out there. Shade.

In the winter, shade. Boom. Like wearing white on a hot day. Yeah. And then in the winter, you have the snow cover is like on the grass is really thin, such that like the Arctic cold in the winter when it's really dark and it's just the auroras up there can really penetrate the ground deep and keep the permafrost even more frozen. Well, you actually use the language that it's like locked in some thermodynamic vault.

I did. I don't want to roll that out. I'm rolling it out for you. That's a really good way of describing it. And so what happens when those, because isn't that a good thing to have all that organic matter? I mean, that creates oil. It creates, you know, this rich ecosystem that fertilizes our ground. And what's wrong with that melting?

What's wrong with that melting is that bacteria will get at it. And through the process, they will decompose it and release carbon as part of that process. And it's melting not just because of the warming, but isn't there an ecological contribution to the grass going away? What's so important about the animals being there is that the animals help to maintain that grassland ecosystem. And the woolly mammoth is involved because woolly mammoths, like many of their elephant cousins, are really good at knocking down trees.

In fact, they were excited about it. It was one of their favorite things to do. But we could just knock down trees ourselves. Like, why do we need the animals to do this? Like, why don't we just, like, raise a shit ton of forest trees, you know, pine trees, whatever? And just create, like, grassland. Why do we need these woolly mammoths to be there?

In the absence of mammoths, they've just had like a huge Russian military transporter out on the planes that they're literally just like slamming into trees with. They're weeding. They're walking down. Yeah. With their like military vehicles. As you'd imagine, um, uh, throwing out like a fleet of tractors that can knock down

the trees of the taiga and like the entire Arctic region would be a pretty carbon intensive. Yeah. So it's like actually making the problem. Yeah. Like we need all the world's oil. I mean, I back up and ask the question. Like what I was trying to get?

Why are there trees, why do trees grow up that now are a problem? You know what I mean? That we need to like, if you book, why is the problem starting? Well, one theory is that trees took over. First of all, you had the end of the Ice Age, which created a whole bunch of warming, right? Right. And so the trees kind of, that helped them spring up out there. But also, in the absence of large herbivores, like the woolly mammoth, it's easier for trees to like spring up.

Right. And so lots of people think that when these animals went extinct and we can talk about how they went extinct and some of the really interesting debates around that that paved the way for these forests. Actually, one of the things that struck me, I feel like I referenced Sapiens a lot on this podcast. The thing that just blew my mind is Yval Harari paints this picture of how humans are basically the worst predators in Earth's history. And we're so tiny relative to these huge megafauna, both on land and in water, from like

huge woolly mammoths to whales in the ocean. And that everywhere humans moved, you can immediately see a decline. drastically in the number of large mammals that would walk the earth. Yeah, it was so interesting when you talk about this birth period. And also like, and in quick succession, right, just ravaging. That's the word, yeah. Absolutely. Like the wildlife and, you know, what?

Yeah, it's really interesting. A lot of that science has crystallized as our timelines for where humans have showed up in the world, have gotten more refined. So from very early on in paleontology, the consensus was everyone noticed these large animals had died out at the end of the ice age and they thought, well, the end of the age age, there was this period of warming and these animals didn't adapt. And then as time went on, it's like, well, glaciation, like the ice age was not three million years of glacial cold. It was like 10,000 year bursts of glacial cold and then interglacials, they're called where things

would warm again. And these animals had weathered like 30 of those. These tsunamis. You called them like ice tsunami. Yes. And it had been fine coming out of the other side of them. So why this one did all of these megafauna died, you can show up everything that Well, not everything, a specific kind of thing. Yes. Right. Grassland played a big role because you no longer had this advantage where big animals could hide behind trees or rocks or big things. And so humans had to adapt by becoming very good at hunting, like shooting with spears or fire in order to attack these animals and essentially learn coordination as they got out of trees.

Well, one interesting question around there that I didn't get to in the early 14,000 word draft that was around this. But is that it's always a mystery in. why Africa has kept a lot of its megafauna. Why is that? So one of the running hypotheses is that the megafauna of other continents were what's called naive prey. Because like humans show up, harmless little thing. Whereas in Africa, the megafauna there had grown up alongside us, evolutionarily. Right.

They saw like, oh, these guys appear to be quite dangerous. Yeah. Well, so back to your piece in the Atlantic reading it is you usually are your use of this form of narrative journalism. that gets you attached to the characters, the human characters. And I was actually more fascinated by the scientific characters. That is the grass, the mammoths, the role of, you know, elephants. And so we could, let's break each of those down and talk about, you know, what they are and how they connect to this. Oh, interesting. That's interesting.

I never even thought about it that way. I mean, I obviously thought about the human characters. Sergei and Nikita, it's these two guys, you know, this father and son in the Siberian Arctic and they're very far east. and they're trying to rewild that part of the world into an ice-aged grassland with extinct woolly mammoths to fight climate change. Okay, so let's break down on the first character that I think is the most obvious and important one is this idea of manufacturing mammoths and specifically the woolly mammoth. Talk to us about that. First of all, one of the other things that really attracted me to this story was the woolly mammoth, when you talk about animals that are no longer with us, short of the dinosaurs, the woolly mammoth is the most romantic one, right? It's so tied to this idea of like the first man kind of.

Like it's like how we have this idea of a codependent on, codependence on this animal from a very early age, even popular culture. If you think of things like Clan of the Cave Bear. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's like a huge, I say mythology. Yeah, yeah. The Clan of the Cave Bear, exactly.

Yeah, they show up in cave paintings. Yeah. They're so resonant with like this kind of emergence of humans. And the Willie Mammitt just to give us a visual picture, It basically is a big fat snuffelophagus with tusks. You got it. It's a furry elephant. And that's actually quite central to this piece because if you do want to manufacture Willie Mammis,

which is a crazy phrase, you want to do it the same way nature did, which is, you know, elephants were in Asia in the temperate parts of Asia before they were up north in the Arctic. As they slowly moved, nature modified their genomes through natural selection so that they had longer fur and smaller ears and, you know, an extra layer of fat so they could stay warm in the Arctic. It's nothing more complicated than that. Except in this case, it's happening through CRISPR and scientists are manually modifying the genes to essentially edit in these characteristics from elephants, which are in the same family. That's right. Yeah, they want to take, you know, basically an Asian elephant genome and just make really a small number of tweaks.

The guy who's really at the forefront of this is George Church, who is a geneticist at Harvard and kind of has his hands on any number of sort of essential. centric schemes like this. But I mean, when I first heard about this, I thought, you know, really. But then I started talking to people in the field and they were like, look, he's out there. Not he's out there like he's crazy. George is really the forefront of this. I mean, like he's, he has the right approach, which is to make like, again, as few tweaks to this genome as possible, just so you get these basic features and then let nature do the rest. Get a, you know, five, ten generations of these and they'll refine it. I love when you say that you realize the idea isn't why, how crazy this is to do it is actually like, well, it's actually not that, you know, it's actually not

that crazy. The reason is like, why wouldn't it work? Right. Like, yeah. Do we know exactly what the woolly mammoth was? Are we, do we know exactly what we're aiming for or are we guessing? We have used several DNA fragments to sequence like the entire willy mammoth genome. However, we're not trying to make so I'm speaking out of two corners of my mouth here because I'm saying we're going to manufacture mammoths but what we are actually going to do is manufacture a furry fatty

Asian elephant like we are not aiming a mammoth for the original genome for the exact genome of the original mammoth we're just looking to remodify Asian elephants and Asian elephant with the characteristics of a woolly mammoth in certain key areas just gives some textural feel you describe that church and his group are adding cold resistant hemoglobin, a full body layer of insulating fat,

they're shrinking the ears. Why are they shrinking the ears? Good question. Well, like, imagine, you know, in the Arctic you get, you know, 70 below during the winters. Frostbite. The African elephant has these huge ears in those when I'm not in the Arctic. Yeah. You said cold resistant hemoglobin. I wanted to call it antifreeze blood. Like a new version of true blood, like drink this antifree of blood. That's right. And they wouldn't let me get away with it. Hannah, you have an amazing question about, you know,

is it actually doing it from truth or not? But is there a truth? Because you also point out, we have this dead DNA problem. Like you think of DNA is a thing that lives on for ages and eons. Yeah. But in fact, this DNA is decomposed and not really available even to draw from. That's right. One reason that we're looking to just modify Asian elephant genomes

instead of like doing the Jurassic Park style, like, oh, we found it in the amber. Yeah. Is that, look, even after a few thousand years, DNA gets really decayed. And by cosmic rays and by microbes and by any number of nature is a really, you know, the universe is a really harsh place. So it sounds like you're sort of saying like it almost doesn't matter. As long as an elephant can live there, it's okay. But once we start giving them these different, and we're introducing a new animal

into this very complicated ecosystem environment, like does it maybe matter that they're not exactly the woolly mammoths? My view is that it's worth what will probably be some considerable suffering on the part of the first few, if not more, generations of these mammoths. And like, I am alive to that and I actually try to talk about, in particular, the social suffering. Yeah. I mean, elephants are really social animals. They hang out in matriarchal herds. Their grandmothers are around, like, teaching them, you know, all of these behaviors. They grieve their dead. They have like a really rich communication. Yeah. With like, you know, these low rumbling sounds, many of which are inaudible to the human ear.

They're some of the most social animals on the planet. How do they even know, you know, these unformed, untaught, these poor, difficult, new, new things dropped into this new land. It's all at the same age. How do we even know to do what we want them to do? I suspect that you've ever seen the zoo like the like the guy who gets in the mama tiger suit? Yeah. Yeah. I think there might be something like that happening early on.

I mean, I can't imagine. We think of these as purely biological things and we forget that there's a transmission of culture that has to happen as part of it. it. In fact, even the language you use in the piece, I actually was a little taking it back. You have this language and it's beautiful. As editors, I'm like, oh, gorgeous diction. You talk about how we sculpt them to survive the winter, but let natural selection do the polishing. It's more like playing God just bluntly. Like it's like creating the galatea clay, I don't know, Pygallian galatea, like, you know, whatever. Well, I think, yeah, it feels to me like making a gallum kind of, right?

Because we're shaping the outside and we're not doing any of the, and when you're describing all the complexity of like, you know, the biology of the gut to eat the tundra. And like all that complicated, you know, and then we're just like shaping this stuff at the exteriors and then plopping them down. Well, the other thing, I mean, I think this really gets to one of the philosophical tensions that I wanted to confront your point about playing God. Another thing that's like playing God is removing 95% of the megafauna from the surface of the earth.

We have natural human biases around things like gene editing that are, that like get us all prickled and like, oh, we're playing God. But in fact, we've been editing a tremendous effect on the earth. So let's break down some more of the science on playing God. So we talked about CRISPR, the gene editing tool. And let's talk about the genes. So we describe some of the characters, characteristics and features that we want to add. But by my account, there are 95 genes to do the job.

15 that were completed, 30 that are being tweaked. And he says George Church was guessing that we need maybe 50 more. He actually was saying even a total of 50. Beth Shapiro, who I regard as sort of the world expert on this stuff, she was like, you know, not so fast. You have to see what those changes do to the rest of the body and how they interact with each other. So like, sure, maybe 50, but it's too soon to say. Right. Well, the other thing that I found very fascinating, especially in the tales of that recent news about the artificial womb and an animal being able to be incubated is that you essentially grow these mammids in an artificial womb. So what's that process? Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up because actually that is the most science fictional aspect of this whole thing. That's the biggest leap. Yeah. Gene editing,

you know, it's a known technology. It's a matter of trial and error. It's like, let's, you know, keep spitting out embryos with like different changes. And eventually we'll get there.

Growing an embryo, especially in where this is the animal with the longest gestation period. Which is what? 22 months or something? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

That's right. And it's, you know, 200 pounds at the end of it. And you're going to do all that like really complex fine tuning, maternal fine-tuning, like hormonal work in the huge closet-sized tank. Like that is, that's more than 10 years away. George Church thinks that you can make a mammoth, like genetically within five years.

And he said to me, just like there's uncertainties on the pessimistic side, like, oh, actually it'll take 20. He's like, it could take shorter, you know, but the growing an actual elephant, a furry elephant in a tank that we just don't we're not there yet technologically that is a thing that it's like no one is working on even as hard as these guys are with the gene itself i hear you when you say it's the most science fiction of this whole piece but when i heard the recent news about the artificial womb it actually gives me great hope because you think about all the you know the um collateral good things that come out of this kind of science and work like will we be able to have

true artificial wounds for human beings as a result of this work or other things that that we can essentially let women have kids with no... Like, that's just a beautiful idea to me that we can actually manipulate that in some level. It's completely lovely. But just to put that in context and to illuminate the challenge, if you would make it analogous to human beings,

women have like a 40-week gestational period. These were like preemie lambs. Like they were born at like the equivalent of 22 human weeks and they stuck them in these artificial wounds and they were able to go to term. Let's go back to breaking down the characters one by one. We need to talk about grass. You mentioned that Ice Age is actually really a grass age.

And by the way, that the formal name of Ice Age is a plicidicine age. I actually didn't connect. All three of those things are actually the same thing. Is it exactly what we think of as the Ice Age? It is the Ice Age. So it's three million years. And the really interesting thing about it is it's kind of like the nursery period for human beings. Like this is where we sort of discovered fire, learned to harness fire, developed language, developed advanced tool use.

And then all of a sudden we kind of pop up. History starts what? Like, you know. Accelerates that is there. Five, six thousand years ago where you have kind of genuine writing. But all those behaviors were really incubated in the ice age. So I've always been kind of fascinated with that. And time scale wise, that ended 12,000 years ago.

Yes. Can I just have a moment of fan mail here? And I love when you looked at one blade as like this little soldier fighting this grand army, you know, of the wages of like the planet. I went down deep in this ice cave with Nikita, the sun in the story, like walking around in a geode, like almost every, almost every surface. is like covered, you know, with like sparkling ice. And we get to like the bottom in this little chamber and, you know, he sort of like scratches at the ice wall and he pulls out this, you know, pale, dead blade of grass from the ice age from 30,000 years ago.

And at the time, I was, I will confess to you guys a little sort of writerly craft. I thought you're going to confess fear because I was thinking about the whole thing. And I was like, holy, that's your phone. Yeah. Caves. Freak out. Cold. Totally.

Totally. Fair. So going into the piece, I really thought that the kind of reigning mythology that people will have in their mind reading this article is Jurassic Park. And so how can I kind of subvert that? Right. When they're like when they're kind of explaining how they do the resurrection of these dinosaurs, there's a moment where like they're in a cave and they like they hold up to the light this amber and there's an ancient mosquito trapped in it. And I thought like, is there a way I can get an image like that. And so then at the bottom when he pulls out this piece of grass, I was like, that's my zip line into the deep path.

I have to admit, I had always been much. more romantic about forests than grass going into this piece. It was Serrageta is talking about grass and its importance and the rise of humans in particular that really captured my imagination and was an idea that I felt like was not out there in the world. And what is that? What is the connection between grass and humans? Well, grass is like kind of the newest big plant-based biome on the planet. Like forests have been around for, you know, three, four hundred million years. And grass is like less, well, big grasslands are less than, you know, 60, 70 million years old. they're really neat. They grow really fast. They just like erupt out of the earth and they make food very

easily for animals and they're not a lot of them are not afraid of being eaten. They love to be eaten. So you have trees, you know, will like, or other plants will invest all this energy into thorns and into poisons because they're like, get away from me into it. And grass is like, eat me, eat me, eat me. They're sweet. And just put me back out. So then I can grow even more. You can eat me again. And they just Go, go, go, go. You have this wine, actually, has so much packed into it. By allowing themselves to be eaten, they partner with their own grazers to enhance their ecosystems' nutrient flows.

Yeah, the animals pooped them out. And they poop, you know, the great thing about poop while we're, you know, talking about things that we didn't know we're so great, like grass, is that it's really sort of warm and kind of seeps into the earth very quickly. Like it's, and it's been processed by microbes. It's like kind of, you know. It's juicy. Yeah, it's just fertilizer, right?

We know, right? What do we use for fertilizer? And so it makes these grasslands just like cycle, cycle, cycle really quickly. I agree. This idea of the grass is so counterintuitive. And I first came across it in Sapiens. And one of the things he says is that humans tamed, it created humanity because it allowed us to use wheat to drive our lives.

And there's all these different forms of grass that exists now. You describe it nice wheat, corn, sugar cane. I thought it was really interesting how like this is a portrait of all these, you know, cutting edge sort of science. and tech discoveries and capabilities, and we're using it to, like, reach deep into our, like, no longer accessible past. Like, you described this moment of solostalgia, right? Like, this yearning for what once was, that's kind of part of the human condition.

And by the way, solostalgia as in an existential grief for a vanished landscape, because I was the first time I ever heard that word. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know what the hell that was. No, me too. Yeah. It's a very high.

I was hoping you would define it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm really drawn to stories that. that show humans interacting on long time scales, which is a thing that I think we're doing more and more now. By long time scales, you mean like Cleodynamics or just anything that's like the arc of history? What is that?

Yeah, I mean like when we think about what it's going to mean to be human beings now and in the future that we're taking into that context, 10, 20, 30, 4 millions of years into the past and perhaps 10, 20, 30,000 years into the future. And this is, I should again, give a shout out to Stuart Brand, who obviously has had many fertile thoughts along this path. Stuart Brand, who is a father of the whole earth catalog and now runs the Lungat Foundation. But this idea of looking at our existence in a way that really zooms out from our current moment, which is certainly a relief in this particular historical moment we find ourselves in.

There's this interesting juxtaposition between past and present that's so fascinating, but mechanically and then historically. But even down to some other random details, and you mentioned the first most popular station, Arctic Station, besides this one is the one in Alaska. And that's the one place that Amazon Prime delivers to. I know. I know. I was struck by that too.

It was like, wow. Doesn't that sound awesome? Yeah. That is so awesome. And it's so funny because the other Arctic Station is like, okay, we don't have Amazon Brian, but we have Alpacall. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're like a little competitive. They really go all in on it to. The town that's close to Placisicine Park is like a really depressed mining town. And so I was wondering, like, you must have poachers. And he said, well, no, you know, they hunt in all the forests around it. But they don't hunt in the park. And I was like, well, why not? And he said like, you know, personal relationships. And then he says to me, like,

you know, when the leader of the local mafia died, you know, I gave the opening remarks at this funeral. I mean, it is an interesting thing about science meeting society. Like in, when you have science, not in a lab and playing out in the physical environment, you are going to bump into things like cultural realities, poachers. One of my favorite things I've ever done in my life was go to this Jurassic Park of India. It was just a few years ago that I went. It's called Balasinor. And it's a world's most ancient enclave of dinosaur eggs. Whoa. Yeah.

And I found it by accident because I was doing like some local research. And I rented a special truck. It took us forever to get there even though it's so close because it's on these downwindy roads. And the thing that was so amazing is you see these dinosaur eggs fossilize in the rock. Yeah. But all the dinosaur pieces, the whole way that Balasunar was found is because some local women in and huts nearby were using it for plates and bowls. Oh my gosh.

I had no idea of the value. And they actually then put it on the market. some scientists came across it and then all these scientists descended. But you have the government, you have the locals, you have the scientists, and you have all these characters. One thing that did strike me in your piece is that we kind of left unanswered is who's paying for all this? They've got NSF funding and funding from the Russian government at the moment. And they do that partly because if you want to study the permafrost or the Arctic in general, you need to have these various outposts. And so it's worth our money to do that. The more interesting

question, even than the funding to me, which you were kind of getting to when you're talking about this lovely story about the dinosaur eggs in India was that for this to expand, like Yellowstone, right, now, which is a thing that everyone loves, right? Like, you can't get people to say bad things about Yellowstone. People that universally acknowledge it as being an amazing thing in the world. But, like, its expansion impinges on real people's lives, you know, because all of a sudden big predators are showing up in their backyard, et cetera. And so for something like Pleistocene Park to be successful, it's going to have to interact with and make peace with the human world on like quite a grand scale if they are going to do all of northern Siberia and Alaska and the

Yukon, et cetera, et cetera. And that as being representative of the larger tension we have of trying to figure out how we coexist with wild animals and with the wild in general. There's a socioeconomic component too because you think of these towns that don't have a lot of money to survive. They don't have a lot of economic opportunity. Why wouldn't you want to sell like ivory? Yeah. You know, from these tuss and make some money for yourself to support your family. Or dinosaur egg, China. Right. And so it's really It's striking when you do think about this question of who funds it because there's a lot of science and money that goes into this. And there's just a lot of tradeoffs that people have to make. And I just, anyway, another open question is like this project is so radical in scheme and scope that is anyone else doing anything this ambitious in the world anywhere? Well, you compared it to one other major climate project, right?

Oh, yeah. So, yeah, they're geoengineering projects or proposals. Also, the American Prairie Reserve is another large grass flame. Rewilding project. It doesn't have sort of sexy extinct creatures to sell it. Right. Or like a major climate change mitigation strategy to sell it. But it's really interesting and it's like part of Montana. Tell us, I would love to hear the story behind the stories. Funny, funny story is going up there, this is like a protected area.

And so you have to get official Russian permission, not just like a regular visa, just to actually go to this region. So we get there. And I had a really good friend of mine, Grant Slater, who's an amazingly talented documentary filmmaker. We'd kind of work together. I knew that he would have this sort of deep time

sensibility alongside me. And so I was really excited to see what he would do with it. And it was also a really interesting creative tension being out with the filmmaker because he has things he needs to get things I need.

Yeah. Anyway, but Grant's paperwork, his like official permission had not come in on time. And so we had to like go get, we went and got questioned at the military base

by, you know, these Russian soldiers who were like in full fatigues, pretty big dudes. And what was funny about it was Grant had lost one of his suitcases in Moscow. He had to buy clothes like that at the airport. And the shirt he was wearing during our interrogation was the shirt that said in Russian, Russia is a great power.

No. It's like a scene out of a comedy movie. I was devastated when I got kind. They thought he was a spy, right? They were like, you're obviously and he's wearing this t-shirt that says Russia. Even worse, they asked him if he was a spy. That's right. A spy is going to say, yes, I'm a spy.

This is crazy. So just to close, I think the most striking thing about this piece, that this idea sounds so crazy at first. The thing that really struck me is that the region that you were in was once famous for beaming propaganda throughout the country of Russia. And at the same time, like, there's an element of marketing that has to happen in this idea, like, for someone to convince other people, to, like, drive people towards their vision, to get them to believe it.

I'm also captured by this question. of how, you know, when you have these really esoteric science projects that are tied into questions of human meaning in all kinds of different ways. And sometimes cults of personality as well. And cults are personalities. And how do you kind of make that pack? I mean, something that Elon Musk is really adept at. I remember you did that Q&A with them in Eon a long time ago.

Yeah, like he's really good at packaging crazy sounding ideas and like getting lots of governments, investors to throw lots of money into them. and while managing to keep control of them. Part of that is the narrative, right? He does hook it into like larger questions and existential concerns in a way that I don't think is just manipulative. I think he sincerely believes those things. And I also think a lot of it is like just the saying like,

this is happening now, like sort of making us realize like actually this is happening now. You know, that's a lot of turning it around to feel possible. Yeah. People are working on it. It's a thing. It's a thing. Yeah. Well, and also that it takes time because one of the most telling anecdotes in your piece

because there's, you know, there's all debate. we don't have to go into this podcast, nor do we have time about climate change deniers, climate change science, what's legit, what's not, whole other conversation. But what I found fascinating was that science initially rejected the paper about the dangers, you know, in the warming. Right. And in 2006, the journal then asked him. He didn't have to approach them again to resubmit it.

And it was published later that year. And that just goes to sure there's also a right time for them of this. Like, there's a readiness that has to happen. Thank you for joining the A-Sys and Z podcast. Well, thank you for having me on. Thank you.