YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Goldfarb

lines on the record: 56
first: 2022-02-19
most recent: 2022-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I also think a lot of it is like just the saying 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To believe it. I'm also captured by this question of how when you have these really esoteric science projects that are tied into questions of human meaning in all kinds of different ways. And sometimes cultural.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just to close, I think the most striking thing about this piece 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, there's an element of marketing that has to happen in this idea. Like for someone to convince other people.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grants paperwork his official permission had not come in on time. And so we had to go get, we went and got questioned at the military base by these Russian soldiers who are 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 at the airport and the shirt he was wearing during our interrogation was a shirt that said in Russian. Russia is a great power.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind the story. 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 kind of worked 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 a filmmaker because like he has things he needs to get things i need yeah”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So, yeah, their geoengineering projects or proposals. Also, the American Prairie Reserve is another large grassland 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”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so it's really striking when you do think about this question of who funds it. There's a lot of science and money that goes into this And there's just a lot of trade offs 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?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Know from these tests and make some money for yourself to survive your family.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interact with and make peace with the human world on 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 what the wild in general is.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And one thing that did strike me in your piece is. We kind of left unanswered is who's paying for all this?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Bolasinor. 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 vosilized in the rock.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They really go all in on it too. The town that's close to Pleistocene Park is like a really depressed mining town. And so I was wondering, 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, when the leader of the local mafia died, you know, I gave the opening remarks at his funeral.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 are taking into that context 10, 20, 30, millions of years into the past and perhaps tens, 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought it was really interesting how 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 celestial, right? Like this yearning. What once was that's kind of part of the human condition”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the animals poop them out and they pooped, you know, the great thing about poop while we're talking about things that we didn't know were so great, like grass, is that it's really sort of warm and kind of seeps into the earth very quickly. And it's been processed by microbes. It's like kind of, you know. You see, yeah,”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grass is like kind of the newest big plant based biome on the planet. Like forests have been around for three, four hundred million years and grasses like less, well, big grasslands are less than, you know, 60, 70 million years old. And they're really neat, like grow really fast. They just 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, well 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, eat me.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, totally fair, 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 they're in a cave and they hold up to the light this amber and there's an ancient mosquito trapped in it. And I thought, 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, here it is. That's my zipline 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 Sergei's talking about grass and its importance in 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went down deep in this ice cave with Nikita, the son, in this story, like walking around in a geode. Almost every surface is covered with sparkling ice. And we get to 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Pleistocene Age. I actually didn't connect, all three of those things are actually the same thing.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's completely lovely. But just to put that in context and to illuminate the challenge, if you make it analogous to human beings, women have like a 40 week gestational period. These were like premiums. Like they were born at like the equivalent of 22 human weeks and they stuck them in these artificial wombs and they were able to go to term.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hear you when you say it's the most science fiction of this whole piece When I heard the recent news about the artificial wom It actually gives me great hope because you think about all the collateral good things that come out of this kind of science and work. Like, will we be able to have True artificial wombs for human beings as a result of this work Other things 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two years, yeah, yeah, yeah. Two years. That's right. And it's 200 pounds at the end of it, and you're going to do all that 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 genetically within five years. 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 and actual elephant, a furry elephant in a tank. 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Eventually, we'll get there. Growing an embryo, especially this is the animal with the longest gestation period.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He actually was saying even in 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's break down some more of the science and 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, because 15 that were completed, 30 that are being tweaked. And he says George Church was guessing that we need maybe 50 more.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 mega fauna from the surface of the earth. We have natural human biases around things like gene editing. That like get us all prickled and like, oh, we're playing God. But in fact”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside, and we're not doing any of that, and when you're describing all the complexity of like, you know, the biology of the gut to eat the tundra. Like all that complicated, you know, and then we're just like shaping this stuff out the exteriors and then plopping them down.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. In fact, even the language you use in the piece. Actually, I was a little taken aback. You have this language and it's beautiful as editors. I'm like, oh, gorgeous. Addiction. You talk about how we sculpt them to survive the winter, but let natural selection do the polishing. You felt more like playing God just bluntly. Like creating the Galatea Clay.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view is that it's worth what will probably be some considerable suffering on the part of those, 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. 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 they're dead. They have like a really rich communication with like, you know, these low rumbling sounds, many of which are inaudible to the human ear. Some of the most social animals on the planet. How did...”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it sounds like you're sort of saying it almost doesn't matter as long as an elephant can live there, it's okay if it's But once we start giving them these different and we're introducing a new animal into this very complicated ecosystem environment, does it maybe matter that they're not exactly the woolly mammoths?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 as a scene that lives on for ages and eons But in fact, as DNA is decompose and not really available even to draw from.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. Well, like, imagine, you know, in the Arctic, you get, you know, 70 below during the winters. The African elephant has these huge ears in those monopolies You said cold resistant hemoglobin, and I wanted to call it antifreeze blood”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have used several DNA fragments to sequence the entire William Mammoth genome. However, we are 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 we are actually going to do is manufacture a furry, fatty Asian elephant. Like we are not aiming The original genome for the exact genome, the original mammoth. We're just looking to remodify Asian elephants”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love when you say you realize the idea isn't how crazy this is to do it. It's 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?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yeah, they want to take 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. Kind of has his hands on any number of sort of eccentric 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. He's out there like he's crazy. George is the really the forefront of this. I mean, like he has the right approach, which is to make, again, as few tweaks to this genome as possible, just so you get these basic features and then let nature do the rest, get five, ten generations of these and they'll refine it”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got it, it's a furry elephant, and that's actually quite central to this piece because. You do want to manufacture Woolly Mammoth, 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, his father and son in the Siberian Arctic and the 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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your piece in the Atlantic reading it is you usually you're used to 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 brass 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”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the running hypotheses Is that the mega fauna of other continents where what's called naive prey? Because like humans show a harmless little thing. Whereas in Africa, the megafauna there had grown up alongside us evolutionaries. They saw like, oh, these guys appear to be quite dangerous. Yeah.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ice age, there's this period of warming and these animals didn't adapt. And then as time went on, it's like, well, glaciations 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”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, one of the things that struck me, and 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 mega fauna, both on land and in water from huge woolly mammoths to whales in the ocean, and that everywhere humans move, you can immediately see a decline. Drastically in the number of large mammals that would walk the earth.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one theory is that trees took over in that. First of all, you had the end of the ice age, which created a whole bunch of warming, 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 spring up. 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 made that paved the way for these forests.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we could just like knock down trees ourselves. Like, why do we need the animals to do this? Like, why don't we just raise a shit ton of forest trees, you know, pine trees, whatever, and just create grassland. Why do we need these woolly mammoths to be there?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like it was like one of their favorite things to do.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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?”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, okay. So most in that part of the world up in the Arctic is covered with tundra. You might think of it as Arctic Desert. 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 and having grasslands out there. And in the winter, shade, boom.”
2022-02-19 · a16z Podcast · Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source