His book does such a wonderful gob of weaving together the narratives. The process in the life experience. The penultimate example of that. I was particularly thinking of elon, alito case of malaria. Foster child is a young man. But those types of things command you talk about similar problems, butbut i want to give you both in conversation about the process. The importance of passion. Difficult passionate about something superficial. Youre probably not passionate about the drapes, passionate about your children or your family are some higher purpose. What you see with creative people, they are passionate about something very meaningful. One of the most important innovators alive today. It is a very good job of explaining this. He kind of gets it. We depend on technology for survival as a species. It made us a successful species. They will come a point when this planet is not big enough for the human race anymore. Probably not that far from now we have to live on another planet. If wewere going to continue to thrive and grow. So you have to become an interplanetary species. Thats why he wants to go colonize mars. That sounds incredibly unbelievable but it is also incredibly predictable. The ability to overcome terrible because they are passionate about something greater. Musk epitomizes that. He may die very young because he is working incredibly hard. But the reason he is doing at his because he has higher purpose. That is motivating them to work longer hours, work harder, is one of the reasons he gets mad and matted employees who want to take one sunday your offer something. That is what i see able to suffer the terrible experience. Rebound from a bad illness. Theres something more important. There are things that are both refreshing and sort of probably would be disturbing the most people. I dont think most people would want to live their life completely like he does. As a kid he by the time he was 14 he may have read every sciencefiction book ever penned. Where some kids would sort of revel in the fantasies committee took this as his lifes calling and internalized it and decided, im the guy who will do this. Ellipsis life really a lowlevela lowlevel like know when i have ever seen, very utilitarian. Have aa finite amount of time on this earth and going to maximize my time going after my goals. If that means i have to be rough on my employees, family life will implode, i have to lose every dollar and so be it. When he sold paypal he made 220 million. I dont think there is anyone near here who would sacrifice every last penny, which is what he did, burned through the entire 220 Million Building rockets and electric cars, like taking all your money and lighting it on fire, the two worst things you could possibly do. And he in 2008 both companies are going bankrupt. Is going through divorce, lost a child, and he basically through sheer force of we will and chicanery gets through this period, and there are a few people that would have walked out of that let alone end up with ten of 13 billion a few years later that is why i wrote the book. He is passionate, level you rarely experience. There was a chapter in your book. Rockets. It takes you on a tour de force. Almost 50 years of a remarkable rise to future shape. The last question, some of you may know, is part of a group called the long now foundation. Many others are involved, jeff basis one of them. But one of the projects which will sound strange is a 10,000 year clock that will be self winding up perpetuating, something to remind us we need to think more longterm and think more into the future. It will be housed in west texas in the cave. Where do you see the future of innovation . It is in the story, but of themes or evolution. How they foster the creativity. One of the really interesting things about the human propensity to create is how it keeps accelerating. If you look at the 1st 50,000 years of Human History and it was like about 10,000 years ago only that we started looking out for animals are domesticating animals. 5,000 years before we got agriculture, writing emerged about that time. And now ive gone through seven models the last four years. Elon musk has self driving cars all over the world and is flying rockets to space in that. What is driving the acceleration . There are far more of this now. Everybody is created. The more people created more things could created. They are building on the knowledge of previous generations, taking advantage of the innovation. If you take that to the future were going to be had about 10 billion people and 2100. That is more than twice what we have now. They are benefiting. Were able to communicate with each other globally. So we have unprecedented creative ability. The tremendous social progress weve seen. The ability of more and more different people. Thats going to accelerate. And were waiting in parts of the world where people are not been able to create much before. It is an incredibly bright future, which you dont get to hear very often. It is so much easier to be pessimistic. That is not the whole story. Please help me in thanking the two of them. [applause] i like to turn it to the audience. Theres a microphone here in the center. Please direct your question to either of the two authors or both of them and we will try to keep on schedule. My question is when you look at people that have had all moments do you see any pattern that goes around that, what might lead them up to that momentfor what they do when they have that moment . Great question. They dont actually have those moments. If you are not familiar, the idea that when we mentioned mozart, mozart is alone in a good mood and suddenly as symphony appears in his head and he writes it down is done. One of the things from the book, that is a myth based on a letter that is a forgery. We have known its a forgery for about hundred 50 years but you still see it enacted papers about creativity as if it were true. People like the myth. The reality is stepbystep process, someone with a lot of skill and experience trying and failing until they come to this wonderful feeling of finally finishing something. The 10,000 peace may be the one that feels the best but you have to put the others in 1st. That is the truth. It is a great feeling that comes at the end of a very long series. This is a question for both authors. I want to go see the new steve jobs movie. It was brilliant, but there is a theme for people like steve jobs, try to change the world. They seem to be a hassles. This is public television. Is there a way to change the World Without being an acyl . We get it. By the way, thats the only time. I get asked this question a lot. He seems to rub people the wrong way. He has what i describe in the book is a strange sort of empathy. He is not very empathetic for what is going on in his employees daily lives. They come down and say, they have to miss some function because the kid is going to go to a soccer game. He really doesnt care about that at all. They get fired because of it. We would talk he was sort of honestly breakdown almost completely in tears when he would Start Talking about building a colony on mars and how important this was for mankind. I mean, he seems to viscerally feel the peril of the human species from some kind of unforeseen event. Such a different way that it is hard to draw the shoot parallels. Since steve jobs theyre have been a tendency to glorify people that are jerks. Although i have interviewed most of these guys and there does seem to be a propensity to be really hard on people. There are plenty of examples of people who change the world have had a great charm and grace social skill. The 2nd thing assays am sadly talking about a bunch of privileged white men. Noncharming people. And many of them were not changing the world in any way. So i would say its a coincidence. Well put. Very diplomatic. Another question for both of you. Can you talk a little bit about how he put together his team for tesla, specifically how many people he actually hired himself, interview and hire and then just a following question, after you get these emails from them having read the manuscript, did you make any changes . I can answer the 2nd one quickly. It was already printed by the time you read it. There is nothing factually that i would correct. I dont know if its going to be as fulfilling because is a different story for tesla. He was founded by two other gentlemen. He was the original money men. They were responsible for hiring the initial team. What was remarkable about that, it was a small group of people on the over 40 engineers in Silicon Valley who had never done that before. They dug in. At space x that is his baby. He gets full credit. He interviewed every single employee after about the 1st 2,000. He would cold call, call people at stanfords in the aerospace visit i get no space company. I want you to come join. He was already pretty famous from paypal. No one believed in. He went to space race of the desert. He would chat of these kids and whoever seem interested, what you come by and do an interview. Anger through some of these things. And so he was very good at finding. He does not like to pay people much money. He doesnt go to harvard or yale. He tries to find people a technical universities, engineering schools the bill something in high school or college. Most of what i know i got from ashes book which is excellent. And from reading his emails. Last question. How important do you feel when you get into the study of Psychedelic Experiences in terms of his impetus. You know, i know steve jobs experimented with psychedelics. He loves to go to burning man. As far as i know, i never found any conclusive proof, is not much of a drinker. He likes to go for the experience of it all. He is to burning and every year. He pay someone to build your accidents. But i would just be making something up. I have the idea to commemorate the 21st anniversary of21st anniversary of the art of the deal by the great donald trump but he was busy. These are engrossing and engulfing books. Almost makes you feel like fiction world. You realize these are real stories and you imagine these are the folks crafting your future. Please join us a table 21 f you grab a copy. Please thank you again. A lot there on the stage. Anybody who wants one feel free. [inaudible conversations] three days of feature programming this new years weekend. Friday night at 8 00 oclock eastern Law Enforcement officials activists and journalists examine the prison system. The 1st and primary reason the first and primary reasons we have people is to punish people from ethical behavior if we remove that correct then they can rehabilitate or deter future cry and those are secondaryn concerns. The primary purpose of the prison system is for people who are not interested toy n keep society safe from those folks. Rac with elected officials and Law Enforcement from areas experiencing racial tension with police. That is where it begins. They get the job say i am that is where it begins because they get the job to say i am protecting the public. This idea for those that gave marching orders soon neck but to look at transparency and looked at they have as they started using with our community. This issue is so muchth more. That people really in dissolution and. Does a child i could not wait to experience. Well leave or if we can afford the books for school tomorrow. Up next we will hear from evolutionary biologist. Her book is how to clone the mammoth, the science of the extinction. She talks about Climate Change and extinct species being introduced to the world. May or may not be able to hear me. Hello. Thank you for joining us. I am so delighted to welcome you to this evenings event. This evening stock is one of the many. Events. This friday David Roberts will join us with his new book, discoveries in the ancient southwest. Tickets are still available, preventing the Wright Brothers later this month. To learn more visit us online. Denies talk will conclude with questions after which we will have a book signing. We haveif copies of how to clone the mammoth at the registers. As always tonights book is 20 percent off for part of how we say thank you. Finally, quick reminder to silence your cell phones. We are pleased to have cspan book tv here typing this evenings event. When asking questions please no that he will be recorded and maybe wait a moment for the microphone. And so now i am pleased to introduce tonights author, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the university of california santa cruz. In 2,009 a recipient of the macarthur award. Scientific articles have appeared in many. Tonight she will be presenting her new book. National geographic call that a sharp, witty, and impeccably argued book and Scientific American rights in this lucid roadmap for the nations discipline of the extinction shapiro examines not only how we can resurrect long vanished species but when we cannot and should not. Pleased to host you. Please join me in welcoming. [applause] thank you. All right. Thank you for inviting me thank you for coming. It is a Beautiful Day out there. What is going to be a wonderful spring and summer. Thank you for spending an hour or so in here. Anyway, one of the many hats i wear is as a National Geographic emerging explorer which is a silly thing. A silly thing. I am not sure how i am emerging all i am emerging from but i would like to start with a video that describes the work that i do just to give you a taste of where we are so far. This is really cool. Two, three, four pieces. Still frozen. Cant dig it out at all. The big splash of water back theyre. That i get out of here. Okay. The last part is a little bit silly. In my defense that water is really gross. What it is is there a lot of active plaster mining. A type of gold mining the snow melts the waters collected and big Holding Ponds and pumped up using highpressure water hoses. The minors wash away the permafrost. And then they wait a little bit, the sun heats it up and then they wash those inches down. Their goal is to get rid of all the frozen dirt and get to the gold bearing gravel underneath. While they are doing at hundreds if not thousands of these impeccably preserved frozen bones are covered. We come along and collect them. I am a biologist, evolutionary biologist paleontologist, geneticist. I have been called lots of different things. What does a biologist wall with frozen mammoth bones . Well, my research is about Climate Change and as species and communities adapt and respond to Climate Change. What we hear about Climate Change we often hear about things like changes in precipitation patterns, largescale changes in the distribution of plants and animals, changes in storm pattern that leave some people in dire straits in different parts of the world and species are potentially at the brink of extinction. When we read about this often what we get our incredible doomsday scenarios. One might wonder what we can do to stop this. If you are comfortable at all, Climate Change literature, one of the plots you are accustomed to seeing is this it looks a little bit like a hockey stick. What this is is the big line across the middle, average global temperature and then Everything Else is kind of relative to that. The temperature was pretty stable, maybe declining a little bit in the last couple hundred it increased by about one half degrees. People are predicting much more rapid and extensive increases in global climate. This is not the 1st time in its history that we have seen a very rapid and largescale change in global temperature. Temperature. If we extend this back to about 50,000 years ago we see this right here, 20,000 years ago, the peak of the last ice age and here is a transition, the interval we are in today. This particular transition this rapid increase probably happened over a century or less. So this is actually equally rapid equally potentially tumultuous Climate Change. So my Research Trust to go back in time, sample dna sequences and asked how did species and communities respond . So the field i work and is called ancient dna. Pretty selfexplanatory. Mammoth bones preserved in permafrost. The part of the world here that you can see spanning from canadas Yukon Territory here across alaska and into siberia. You see the coloration under here and during ice ages is taken the sea level was a lot lower than it yesterday and those areas were exposed. They were incredibly rich and supported an enormous ecosystem. It was also an important corridor from movement. And information and north america. Today this part of the world looks like this. And that helicopter. Ill show you an image of that. But in the ice age it looks more like this. We have things like mammoths and mastodons and camels and giant bears, 16 feet16 feet tall as they were on their hind legs. Regular like you see today and kind of weird things. The 5foot tall be. So this is the helicopter be used to fly out, particular expedition one out into the northcentral part. You can see there are some windows missing in this helicopter. That was particularly useful. After we got off the french and russian decided that this might be a celebratory success. It might happen. They fly out there and incredible machines and staying fivestar accommodations. John focusing my so you can see the depth of mosquitoes that we have to deal with. And we wonder along places where the permafrost is melting back in the Yukon Territory. Washing down the permafrost with water hoses and people are kind of standing around wandering around. So a typical day we will pick up somewhere between five and maybe two dozen bags like this for bones that we have collected. There are lots of horses and mammoths and caribou. We get lucky and find carnivores, giant bears in different types of lyons, take a chunk out of the bones just a regular journal tool, take a chunk out and take it back to the lab and grind it up into a fine powder and extract. Weve learned a lot of the past few months. Weve seen bison and other animals that seem to peek around 40,000 years ago and start to decline after that. This is. This is interesting because the two hypotheses about what caused mammoths to go thanked his they did not like the peak of the ice age that humans turned up and killed them all. If the decline began 45000 years ago those like 15,000 years years before the peak of the last ice age in 20000 years before there is a lot of people in north america. That puts us off the hook for the early stages decline but not off the hook for the ultimate. We watch carnivores increase and decrease and move across the landscape. We have started to learn things like caribou have survived to the present day. They like to live where people dont, which is a good trick. And white cave lines went extinct. We give a lot of attention to the things that its a published. We get lots of phone calls from the press and im super excited to tell them what we have learned and how it can apply to current problems. How can we use it in the present day. But they only ask me one thing. Its kind of annoying to be honest i decided to write this book. So the phrase that is being given are used to describe this type of work right now is d extinction. I dont think its a great word but i think were stuck with it at this point. The seem to the taken over in the world of twitter. We are kind of familiar with it, we remember how that went, it all went particularly well, but were not talking about dinosaurs now, we all know that we cannot get the dna from dinosaurs. Dont believe what you read in journals, dna and bones is all rock. Theres no dna and rock. Were going to talk about the mammoth. Why why the mammoth because people kept asking me about it. I think the reason they keep asking about it is because we cannot clone dinosaurs. Thats where we are. How are we going to bring the mammoth back to life . The first way that people think about is to clone a man myth. The problem is cloning is not an ambiguous thing. Its called Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer. Its a science word for cloning. We basically have two to three types of cells in our body which is germ cells and somatic cells. Normally what happens is a sperm and an egg come together, fertilize to get as i go, the zygote is a special kind to sell that can become every type of cell in the body. A somatic cell are it has a specific job and thats the only job it knows how to do, the trick to that is to convince the somatic cell to forget all of the instructions necessary to be the type of cell it is program to be and go back to some early state where it has the capacity to become every type of cell in the body and creates the whole organism. The first example a most famous example is experiment that was done by the rosslyn institute in scotland where they wrought and dolly the sheep. Dally was clothed cloned using a mammary tissue cell. At the same time, they got an egg cell from a different type, a different breed and remove the nuclear material, including all the dna from that xl. So they had some empty xl and put these things together, the memory and cells break open a material from that stressed out cell dumps into the egg. The protein in that xl can actually do some magic and cause that sell to regress, to go back to that early state where it has the capacity to become every type of cell in the body. Then you have a different type and eventually dolly was born. This technology does work, its not particularly efficient. Dolly was one of nearly 300 different eggs they attempted to use in the process. It has been shown to work in different sequences. Dogs, cats, rabbits, pigs and things like that. So how would it work with the mammoth . We find a wellpreserved mammoth remover cell, then insert into an cell, does its magical thing and then we implanted in a circuit host and we release it into the environment. Pretty easy right . So we run into a stumbling block. We find some incredibly wellpreserved things in the arctic. This is a horse straw that we found 50 or 60000 years old. We havent nicely preserved mummies, a few summers ago this mommy was found and this had a liquid substance with it they dont not think that it was proven that it was blood but despite how wellpreserved these things are, none have any living cells and no one is ever going to find summary mains to have living cells. When an organism dies, the cell and dna within them begins to dna. If its a mommy, it heats up, lots of microbes and then that starts breaking down, dead cells cannot fix mistakes made by solar radiation. Things like water, oxygen, hydrolysis, these are all chemical bombardments of the dna that breaks it down into smaller pieces until eventually theres nothing left. Youll never find a mammoth that has a living cell. If we never find a living cell of a mammoth, will never be able to clone a mammoth. Thank you for coming. [laughter] so last week, a team of International Researchers announced they had sequenced the complete genome of two different mammoths. Plan b should be sequencing a mammoth and start there. So we have no a list that make up the genome. This provides us an instruction manual for making the gene and the proteins that make a man myth looking at like a mammoth. So lets get these into chromosomes and get the chromosomes into the cell, then then we can do this whole thing but the cell and go around here and then we have a mammoth right, done. Straightforward. The problem, several problems, they reported that they had a complete genome sequence. Thats kind of true. But its not really complete in a way that means we could synthesize it in a lab. In fact, there is no vertebrate that can carry an organism that we have a complete genome sequence four. We have most of the human genome sequence. There are parts of the human genome that are made of these really tightly condensed repeatedly, mostly near the center and the ends of the chromosome is called hetero chromosome. There is no existing sequencing technology that allows us to get through that. So we could not actually go into the lab in sequence from one into the other even if we wanted to because we dont actually know the sequence. We dont know how important it is we dont know if it has any jeans, we dont know what it does. We do we do think it has some important Regulatory Information but we dont know. So, there you go. Its even worse for mammoths. There are a few reasons why its really bad, really hard to generate complete genome sequences for something that is been extinct for a long time like a mammoth. First, goes back to something i just talked about, the sequences themselves are very short and very fragmented. Just because of all that bombardment of uv light and enzymes that are breaking it down they get into these bones and chop it up into smaller and smaller pieces, so if i were to extract dna for something modern i would get a lot on lovely strand but were talking about agent dna, its more like confetti. But not confetti that looks as good as this. Like if you can find confetti at in the gutter the day after the parade after it rains. Its a bit bad. This is is not a good way. The dna is in terrible condition also, the samples are full of all sorts of stuff and not just mammoth dna. If. If i were to take a piece of my hair pretty much all of the dna sequences be able to get out there where my own dna because a modern im alive, theres not much contamination if i was involved with one of the teen that first use next Generation Sequencing technology, the ability to extract dna from something in sequence everything in that extract and we extracted dna from a mammoth bone those 40000 years old, i can imagine how old it was. We did shotgun sequencing. What we ended up with was 50 was mammoth dna. The rest was soil dna, environmental dna, unknown stuff that is more soil microbes some contamination, human and dog in there, domestic cat, all sorts of stuff gets in her sequences despite that we try really hard to keep them super clean. 50 was mammoth we were pretty bummed at the time, without this is not very good. How are we ever going to sequencing for all we ever get is 50 mammoth. It turns out this was a really wellpreserved. The majority have five or 10 dna and thats from good places, the first neanderthal gino that was assembled from a few different bones and none of those had more than 1 neanderthal dna. The the rest were contaminants that had to be thrown away. So imagine that we have this confetti mix, this this dirty confetti mix of horrible dna. What we want to do is just fine like the purple one. How do we actually go about doing that. Fortunately we do have several complete sequences from living species. We look at these as a map. If we want to map a broken damaged then we we use different genomes. What we end up as a partial genome that we met partial stop but it still can have some holes. Another slight problem and challenge with this is that if there have been some big exchange like a duplication of the chromosome, what its going to be like is having a book with missing pages. If we have the sequences in our nest of broken confetti and we map them against the elephant gino but there from a part that does not match well just assume that their microbial dna. As one might think we are really interested in finding the parts of the genome that are different between mammoth that these might be an important place to look. Another problem is having a sequence even if we could generate the whole long sequence is not the same as having a living cell. Were Getting Better at stringing together the fragments but we dont how to turn them into chromosomes yet in a way that would turn genes on and off. We dont how to put those into cells. So plan b is where were at. And were probably stuck at that first step. Fortunately there is another way. This is the way that probably is going to be the path that people follow for going to do something that is to engineer ourselves a map. By engineer i mean something that is simple conceptually. Like finding a place in a genome that we want to change cutting it and pasting in the bit that we want to change it to. Pretty straightforward. We have the genome sequence of an asian elephant and some other mammals so we can start looking through and find out where asian elephants look at one thing and those are potential targets that we might want to change and an elephant gino if we want to use that elephant to create a mammoth. So imagine we had a machine that we could Program Identify a specific thing we wanted to change and we can get that machine a synthesized bit a mammoth dna. That matches the part of the genome that we want to swap out. We can insert this machine in this package into a cell, will go around and find the place that youre going to do, and it will stick the mammoth jerk version in place. We have that machine, its not a machine, its actually just an enzyme. Protein complex that bacteria are use to combat disease and prevent cells from getting sick. This is a machine that you have probably heard about, there is a chinese team that uses particular system to edit embryos and caused a bit of a stir. This is an incredibly powerful and easytouse technology. It will be used, is is being developed for human genome engineering with genetic diseases and mine it is a type of technology that we could use. So this is our Little Machine in this blue thing is the part that recognizes the part of the mammoth dna that we wanted change. Change. We put the elephant dna and the mammoth dna we make the cut. Now cells dont like it when their dna is broken we want to harness cells own repair machinery to stick that elephant version, and getting my species confused here. But the mammoth version in place of where the elephant was and well and up with an elephant that is a little bit mammoth. So what do we change . We know mammoths and asian elephants have been converging for 6 million years. They are almost 99 identical. So theres probably around a million or so differences between them, we cant target all million, probably what well do is hone in on a few things that we think are really important. One of the first things that anyone found to be different between elephant was a hemoglobin gene. Responsible for caring oxygen to the body. This was work done in a lab a few years ago. He found comparing the sequence between asian elephants and mammoths, their only three differences so he took cells in a culture and he made the three changes and measured what the purpose of the three