S3E12 - The Virtuous Cycle (Pleistocene Park)

0:00 Chris: Yeah, we're started. Okay. Yeah, let's. Let's start talking here. Do you have anything you want to talk about? You don't want to banter about how you beat Animal Crossing? I didn't even know that was. I didn't even know that was possible. Kayla: It's not that you beat it. It's that you can't beat it. So they just have to shove a point and win. Chris: Jam the credits in there somewhere. Kayla: It's like, oh, a thing happened. This is a good time. I need to show you who made this game, which. Yeah, you should show me who made the game. Chris: Yeah. No, the credits are important. I was always excited to see my credit on all of our Blizzard games. Kayla: The real problem with video games these days, not enough of them still say and you at the end of the credits. Chris: That's true. I think that would actually probably turn our whole civilization around.

0:43 Kayla: I like the acknowledgement. Chris: I'm excited about today's topic. I have been for a while. This is one I've been wanting to do for a long time. Are you excited? Kayla: I'm excited because this is the big. Chris: Grin on my face. Kayla: No, that doesn't make me excited. What makes me excited is that our Patreon patrons voted for this. Chris: Oh, yeah. Kayla: Topic. Correct. Chris: I forgot about that. Kayla: I did. Chris: Yes. Well, it was tied, so I forget my other two options that didn't make the cut, but the top two tied were what we're gonna be talking about today. Kayla: Okay. Chris: And objectivism, which is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. And I chose this one. Yeah, I flipped a coin, picked this one, and it's. I've just. I've been excited about this one for a long time, even before the poll. So I'm like, I'm really glad that it won or died. But thank you, Patreon followers, for helping us decide. They have also decided your next topic.

1:41 Kayla: They have. Chris: So that's pretty cool. And just while we're talking about Patreon, I really liked your bonus content for the last episode. I thought that was really cool. Kayla: You liked my guided meditation? Chris: Yeah, it was good. Kayla: It was pretty good. Chris: I meditated to it. Kayla: Nobody used it. Nobody gained superpowers, though, which is kind of the bummer. Chris: Well, I stopped breathing. Kayla: That's. You probably shouldn't have done that. Yeah, that's not good for you. Chris: Remember the emergency room visit? Kayla: Actually, I did, kind of. I was thinking of something the other day when I was thinking about the episode about Kriya yoga and the self realization fellowship. First of all, I texted you today because I drove by another location. Chris: You texted me. Kayla: I texted you. Chris: I did not get that text.

2:21 Kayla: Well, I texted you. Maybe I didn't. I don't know. Maybe I thought to text you and then I didn't. I drove. I was driving by. I was with some friends and we drove by the famed Scientology center in Los Angeles that happens to be on a street called L. Ron Harper Drive. Apparently no coincidence. You can't go more than 5ft without hitting Scientology in this town. But apparently one of the friends I'd with had never seen this location before and was freaking out about like, there's a street named after a cult leader. There's a cult right here. And I was like, yep, this is how it is. Drove. Maybe two more seconds passed right by a self realization fellowship center. Chris: Perfect.

3:01 Kayla: Right next door. Right next door. Chris: The thing is, Los Angeles has a very high cult density, clearly, as cities go. Also, there's probably a lot of streets named after cult leaders, now that I. Kayla: Think about it, maybe most. Who knows? Anyway, what I was going to say, last two episodes, we talked about Kriya Yoga and how, you know, whether or not it is or is not a science. And I think something that I wanted to say is like, I maybe didn't give enough benefit of the doubt in that this group is calling this practice a science when we very much know that it is not a science. Maybe there was just not as much of an understanding of that term. And then I kind of think that, no, we have a very. We have a very serious understanding of the term science at the turn of the century, the turn of the 19 hundreds. So I was like, maybe I should say something on the podcast about like, I should have been less of a jerk.

3:59 Kayla: And then I went, nah. So this is me saying I shouldn't have been less of a jerk. Chris: I feel like I have that thought for every episode, that I should be less than a jerk. A huge jerk. And no, actually, no, that was fine. Yeah, you just should be less of a jerk in general. Kayla: This is true. Chris: We're gonna change gears a bit for this episode. Kayla: How so? Chris: But I did want to say that our just bringing up Patreon again real quick. Our patron, Anna Krasner, had a really great answer because we asked a poll of our patrons, what is science? And I put like a lot of crazy stuff in there. And she had like a really good explanation for what it is. Chris: Sort of like a.

4:40 Chris: It's a process for removing or identifying, like, bad information and discarding it. It's not necessarily a process for, like, approaching some platonic ideal of truth. Kayla: Right. Chris: It's a way of. So anyway, just want to say that I really like that. Before I get to the topic, I also had to address the fact that several episodes ago now was the one I did about throw Aliena. Kayla: Correct. Chris: And I did promise that I would sort of keep track of what's going on with those communities. So just a real quick update of what's going on with throw alien and the successor community r, we come in peace. Kayla: Did the aliens make themselves known on it?

5:21 Chris: For people who haven't listened to that episode, that's July 18. Did you not. Are you not still here on Earth? Did you see any aliens? Kayla: You're here to give the update? I'm just asking questions. Chris: The update is on the community. Obviously, aliens didn't land on July 18. I think we all pretty much know that based on our continued existence here on Earth. Throwawalien has. It's kind of died down. Like, it hasn't really gotten, like, toxic or anything. There's just, like, a lot fewer posts, fewer and far between. There's definitely some weird stuff that I've seen get posted there, but in general, it's just. It's more of like a. It's simmered down rather than toxified, I guess, if that makes sense to you. On we come in peace. For the most part, I've seen.

6:05 Kayla: Which is the new. Chris: That's the new one. My understanding is that they're mostly running on their own now. Lemuffin is not as involved as he was, but he put some moderators in charge there that are. That he trusts a lot. So I've seen, like, that is active. Like, the last post there was a few hours ago. Kayla: I'm in there. I see it all the time. Chris: Yeah. And it's a lot of the same sort of vibes. Right. Which is good. It's like, there's a lot of, like, just, like, meme sharing and, like, hey, I heard this thing. One thing I did want to bring up is that I had, like, right after July 18 and nothing happened. I did see some memes that were, like, sort of, like, addicted to the date thing. Chris: Like, people were like, they were sad. Chris: That they didn't have the date thing going forward towards. Right. So there was, like, a meme, for example, that was like that Dave Chappelle meme where he's, like, playing the crackhead, and he's like, y'all got any more of those? And the fill in here was dates.

6:54 Kayla: Right? Chris: So it's, you know, just to sort of illustrate the fact that, like, people were like, man, I really liked having the date to look forward to. I'm sad now. Which, again, that makes sense. A lot of what we talked about in that episode was, you know, having that date sort of, like, provides hope, and hope really fuels people. I do want to say that there was also a post that I saw that was just a few days ago that I really liked and gave me some good vibes for their subreddit, which was a user, a Reddit user by the name grapefruitfizzies made a post that says, my love letter to the sub. And the post is just a picture of Scully and Mulder and says, you're the Scully to my Mulder.

7:37 Kayla: Aw. Chris: And then the second part of the post was grapefruit fizzy, saying that some days on the sub are just scully looking at Mulder and saying, Mulder says aliens. And Scully says, no. But then every day on the sub is that whole. I don't know if you saw that meme that's like the, you know, the perfect love story wasn't twilight, it was this. And it's just a picture of Mulder and Scully, which when that's used as a reference for this particular subreddit, tells me that there's like the. That the love story is between, like, skeptics and believers, which I think is kind of nice. Kayla: Yeah, it is nice. That's really nice. Chris: So that's my update for throw alien. Since I promised it, if anything crazy comes up on either of these subreddits, I will bring it up in the shell. You know, if there's like an alien qanon or something.

8:23 Kayla: Perfect. I will hold you to it. Chris: But we should probably get today's topic. Kayla: Yes, please. Chris: Before we do, I haven't introduced ourselves yet, so I'm Chris and I am a game designer and a data scientist. Kayla: I'm Kayla. Chris: I'm a tv writer and we're both interested in cults. Kayla: And this is cult or just weird? Chris: All right, my esteemed co host. Kayla: I don't think I'm very esteemed. Ow. Chris: Ooh. What was that? Kayla: Don't do that again. Chris: What was that awful sound? Kayla: Horrible. Chris: Do you know what that was? Kayla: No. I really didn't like it. Chris: We must have been having a problem with the microphone. That's weird that I'm like, nothing. Editing that out of the final cut of the episode.

9:08 Kayla: What are you doing? Chris: Normally, I would be very diligent about editing stuff out, but, like, specifically, what was that sound? Kayla: It's microphone feedback. Chris: Yes, that was microphone feedback. Do you know what causes that sound? Kayla: Tell me so that I can make it stop. Because if I never hear that again, it'll be a good day. Chris: Well, obviously, that was, like, false, because we don't really have a system set up here that would cause microphone feedback. Kayla: Oh, no, you're duping audience. Chris: I know. So the reason that's not what happened here is because we don't have any sort of output. Right. There's no speaker that's playing what I'm saying. If you've ever heard that sound, say when, like watching a band warm up on stage.

9:53 Kayla: I hate that sound. Chris: Yeah. And, you know, that's what happens on the microphone. Input receives output from its own speakers. The microphone's input gets amplified, becomes the speaker's output, and then inputs back into the microphone, where it gets amplified again, out to the speakers again, and so on and on. Kayla: Horrible. Chris: That cycle can rapidly turn even the tiniest disturbance into a loud and high pitched whine. Don't point your microphones at your speakers. Microphone feedback, though, is only one example of a type of feedback. It appears actually kind of everywhere. The only ingredient necessary for a feedback system is for the output of the system to be fed back into the input, like with the microphone and the speaker, because that system amplifies the input to the output. We call it a positive feedback system. Colloquially, we also say things like positive feedback loop or vicious cycle, but it's all the same thing. For what it's worth, there are also negative feedback systems, and that's where the output is reduced from the input. So instead of, like, the microphone, you know, amplifying out to the speakers and then getting worse and worse.

11:05 Chris: If it reduced the sound, then it would actually get lower and lower. Kayla: That sounds like a nice kind of. I like that kind. Sounds like it would be quiet. Chris: So those types of systems stabilize. So, yeah, they may make things more quiet, but that's, like, also not as fun as a positive feedback loop. Positive feedback loops, well, explode, actually. Kayla: What? Chris: That's literally what happens when you see a chemical explosion, for example. Roughly speaking, the speed of the chemical reaction happening there depends on heat, and then it also gives off more heat, so it gives off more heat, which makes the reaction faster, which gives off even more heat, and then it runs away. Feedback loop and explosion. Anywhere you see something you might call explosive, actually, you can pretty much be assured that there's a feedback loop lurking somewhere. Covid's explosive growth feedback loop. The more cases there are today, the faster the case count will grow tomorrow. The faster the case count grows tomorrow, the more cases there are the next day, and so on and so forth. The output case count feeds back into how fast the virus will spread. Formula.

12:11 Chris: There's even feedback loops and things like software development which can blow things up with your programming if they're not accounted for. So feedback loops sound shitty, I know, but hear me out. Their power works both ways. Covid may grow explosively, but that also means that blocking only a single transmission could prevent dozens, hundreds, even thousands of downstream infections. So if you've been vaccinated and masking. Yeah, literally. You may have saved a large number of lives. Kayla: Are you doing another vaccine episode here? Chris: We've already done the vaccine episode. Kayla: We did. We did. Two of them. Chris: This isn't that. That's right. 5 hours. This isn't that episode. Fun aside because we have a tradition on cult or just weird talking about Jurassic park every episode, we haven't done.

12:58 Kayla: It in a minute. Chris: Feedback loops are also the hallmarks of mathematically chaotic systems. The feedback is what gives rise to the sensitivity to initial conditions in those systems. The butterfly effect is what we usually call that. Like sensitivity to initial conditions. The butterfly effect is real because the end state of today's weather feeds into the initial state of tomorrow's weather. So small effects can become large quickly. And Doctor Ian Malcolm was a mathematician studying chaos theory. Kayla: Yeah. What the hell does that have to do with Jurassic. Why did they bring him along? Chris: So there you go, JP reference. Like, why did they bring him along? Or why was he in the book?

13:39 Kayla: Not why he was in the book? Because the book is different. Why the hell was he. Why did they talk about chaos theory in the movie at all? Did it really? Chris: It was much more evident in the book. Yes, we'll get to that. Kayla: Okay. Wait, really? We're gonna talk more about Jurassic park later? Chris: I mean, if you want. Kayla: I always wanna talk about Jurassic park. Chris: Maybe we'll get to that. Kayla: Okay. Chris: Anyway, there you go. JP reference. Nice. So, vaccines and Jurassic park aside, why am I starting today's episode talking about feedback loops? Kayla: Yes. Why? Chris: You see, our topic for today has to do with one of, if not the most important issue of our time. Something I've been wanting to talk about on the show for a while now, as I mentioned. And that's the climate crisis. Kayla: Oh, no.

14:20 Chris: Hooray. Kayla: Are we sure we have to do that? Chris: I already did a lot of research and work on this, so. Kayla: Yes, thank you for taking that bullet. Chris: More accurately, it's about one very specific part of the climate crisis. You see, our planet's ecosphere and climate also involve plenty of feedback mechanisms. In climate science, they frequently refer to them as like breakpoints to reflect the fact that they have the potential to sort of explosively accelerate the warming of the planet if those things come to pass. You may have heard of some, like the frequently cited Gulf stream problem. It's thought that melting glaciers could disrupt the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents, which would further contribute to planetary warming, which would melt glaciers faster and disrupt the currents further. You kind of see where we're going with that.

15:10 Kayla: Yes. Chris: You and I have actually physically witnessed another one of these break points. Kayla: Oh, we have. Chris: Remember our trip to Alaska? It was like five or six years ago. Kayla: I do. Chris: Well, in Denali National park, we got to see some areas of permafrost. Permafrost is basically what it says, permanent frost in the ground layer. Permafrost covers vast tracts of the earth's colder land masses, and by vast tracts, I mean, like 24% of the total surface of Earth's landmass. Kayla: Wow. Chris: Yeah. So that's one fourth of all the land on Earth is permafrost in some way. Permafrost is super cool. Get it?

15:51 Kayla: Okay, I'm out. Get me out of here. Chris: And we're done. Cancel the podcast. I deserve to be canceled for that. I have a few more cancelable jokes coming up. But it's super cool because, among other things, it traps greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide or methane. When plants and animals die, if they get trapped under a layer of something, in this case, whatever, makes soil typically more dead plant and animal matter, then that actually reduces the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, because all of that matter gets locked away underground. And specifically in the case of permafrost, the fact that the ground is frozen permanently means that all of that trapped carbon, methane and material that can decay into both of those things, all of that is trapped by being, again, literally frozen. However, here's where the feedback mechanism exists in all of this.

16:44 Chris: Once the climate warms enough to where permafrost melts, now those greenhouse gases get released, which warm the planet further, which melts more permafrost, which releases more greenhouse gas. You get the picture. Kayla: I'm sensing a feedback loop. Chris: It is, as we say, not good. Kayla: Not good. Chris: Permafrost is a ticking time bomb, and the clock has started. Permafrost is already melting, and there's little we can do about it. Or is there? Ooh, Kayla. And dear listeners, I know I painted a chilling picture about permafrost. Kayla: Very, yeah, bleak. Chris: Bleak is f. You didn't get the chilling vint.

17:24 Kayla: I'm choosing to ignore you, is the thing. Chris: I know I painted a chilling picture of permafrost here in the cold open of our show. Kayla: Come out. Chris: But now that you're aware of the stakes, you know how scary the villain of the story is. Now that all hope seems lost, it's time to talk about the heroes. Welcome to Pleistocene park. Actually, I have you scooped me. I was gonna do that. What I literally see next thing in the script says, jurassic park. Humming. Can we do that? We can hum music. Right. Without. Without paying a license for it.

18:15 Kayla: You just said the words fair use. Any idea? Chris: I know. I know law things. Kayla: What's fair use? Law. Chris: I know law thing. Kayla: What is fair use? Chris: It's you can use things fairly. Kayla: What things? Under what circumstances? Chris: You can use things when you can. It's protection for people to use other people's ip when they're using it satirical purposes. Kayla: That's not satirical. Chris: It totally was satirical. No, it's. Regardless, we will get to exactly what Pleistocene park is after I do the traditional culture. Just weird ritual of naming the sources. For today's episode, I consulted Wikipedia, which, you know, I kind of think we need to maybe stop listing this because it's like listing. It goes without saying, like, it's like listing bowl for a baking recipe. It's like, yeah, I know. We need the bowl.

19:00 Kayla: Where else are you gonna start? Like, literally, where else will you start? Chris: It's like saying I googled things. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Pleistocene Park Ru, their official website, a nice long article from the Atlantic. Very thorough, very good. PBS, new atlas.com, national Geographic, the New Yorker, CB's newsweek, the Economist, something called researchgate.net. Kayla: What? Chris: Something called carbonbrief.org, dot, some publications from Yale, some shit from Propublica, a short documentary film simply called Mammoth. A dash of my own mathematical knowledge and background. Kayla: Okay, you can't get on here and be like, I'm citing myself as a source.

19:43 Chris: Well, I'm just saying that some of the mathematical. Like, some of the chaos theory stuff here is based on my own knowledge, not on any research that I've done on the topic. Kayla: Mm. Chris: That's all I'm trying to say. Anyway, also, a particularly popular TED talk, something called the Savory Institute. Kayla: What? The savory institute, which is. Chris: I want to go there, sadly, has nothing to do with food. What I know it's super disappointing. And finally, but most importantly, I got some help from the guy who enlightened me to the existence of today's topic. I have to say, Kayla, one of the cool things about having a podcast is that it has the power to sort of, like, legitimize you as a stalker.

20:25 Kayla: Oh, yeah. It forces people to talk to you. Chris: Yeah. And I definitely took advantage of that in this case. Kayla: Oh, yeah. I want to talk to you for my podcast. Not because I'm obsessed with you. Chris: Right, exactly. And that's totally what happened here, as you know. But our listeners may not. I'm a huge fan of a YouTube channel that goes by the name Atlas Pro. Yes, you are literally one of my favorite science communicators out there right now, on par with other youtubers like Matt O'Dowd and PBS Spacetime or Ann Reardon's how to cook that science and futurism with Isaac Arthur. You get the idea. Atlas Pro has great production value. Interesting topics. A few of my favorites have been videos about the geography of Mars and one that asks the question of, is there an optimal temperature range for human civilization? It's like really cool hypotheticals like that. He also does a great job of not just researching and understanding the data and evidence for his topics, but presenting them as well.

21:18 Chris: And as you know, science communication is more important now than it has been probably ever in human history. Anyway, we got him on the show. Kayla: Amazing. Oh, my God. Chris: His Pleistocene park video was the thing that, like I said, turned me onto this topic. And I knew right away, like, immediately after watching the video months ago, that I wanted to do a cult or just weird episode on it. Kayla: Those are the best topics when you're. Chris: Like, yep, that's doing that one. So before we get into the meat of what Pleistocene park is, I asked him about the same thing that we began the episode with. Chris: First obligatory question that I always have to ask is, who am I talking today? And if you could tell us a little bit about your credentials.

22:03 AtlasPro: Sure. So, my name is Kaylin. I run the YouTube channel Atlas Pro, which I guess that might have some weight or it might not, depending on who Youtland. But what I do is I mostly talk about geography, the environment, geology, biology, and ecology, all sort of wrapping together because they all touch ins at a certain point. And my education is in environmental science, and it basically taught me the foundational level of what I talk about. And everything after that is research and discovery on your own. Chris: Okay, so you said, you don't know how much weight that'll carry. By this point in the podcast, I will have already gushed.

22:44 Chris: So. AtlasPro: Okay. Chris: By this point in the episode, it'll. Chris: Be like, oh, my God, that guy. So just. Chris: Yeah. Chris: Yeah, not. AtlasPro: Not to brag, but I did. Maybe two or three days ago, I hit 900,000 subscribers. So that's. Chris: I saw that. AtlasPro: I'm impressed by that. Chris: Hear that, listeners? If we can get a few you guys over to his channel, then we. We'll get him to break a million, which is well worth it. I mean, so you. I mean, you are one of my favorite science communicators on YouTube. So, you know, there's a few people that I really dig, and. And you're one of them. How long have you been doing the. The YouTube thing? Like, what got you into that? AtlasPro: If you watch YouTube, like, I watched YouTube. That's what got me into it. You know, I watched people like, wendover real life or CGP Grey, real engineering. I watched all those guys as a kid.

23:31 Chris: Funny. Chris: Other ones I was talking about were, like, that. You just listed, like, half of them, so. AtlasPro: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, there's whole. There's one community, and I watched them for as long as I've known about YouTube, really? And that's what really gave me the idea, is I'd watch their videos and just be like, man, like, I could make that video. As long as I just teach myself a lot and work really hard every day. One day I'll be able to do what they do. So I think it's been, like, three or four years, but, like, probably the first two years, I had, like, maybe 500 subscribers, you know, like, that's. It was very, like, low for the vast majority of the early time of the channel. Chris: What do you think turned the corner on that?

24:12 AtlasPro: For you, it's just YouTube. YouTube's own algorithm. Really? I hit 10,000. Like, the struggle to 10,000 was real. Like, that took me years, but the second I hit 10,000, like, the week after I hit 10,000, I hit 100,000. So, like, you can see it took two years to get to 10,000. Took one week to get to 100,000. For whatever reason, YouTube just hits you once you get 10,000. It's a good pat on the back. I guess it must be like that. They trust your channel. It's not like some weird thing or something. I don't know. Chris: I was watching a veritasium video the other day where he was talking a little bit about some of the feedback mechanisms. Sometimes that once a video gets better, whatever algorithm rating, then it gets shown to more people, which increases its algorithm rating. So there's a bit of a feedback that goes. Maybe some of that's at play.

24:59 AtlasPro: It's hard to, like, understand because it's just, it's all behind closed doors at YouTube. You can feel it, like as a person who makes videos, you feel the algorithm, but you don't actually get to see it. You know, you don't get to actually see what it's doing or why. But half the battle, like, you know, they give you all these analytics and it's just like scrolling through every single view just to figure out like, where these are even coming from. Like, what website is directing people here, like, how is it working? Chris: That's interesting. We'll check out this segue, though. Chris: This just came to me. Chris: So we just talked about feedback mechanisms. AtlasPro: Oh, wow. Damn. Wow. Chris: So what about feedback mechanisms in our ecology? That was one of the more interesting things that I will get to the exact video that interested me in talking to you. But first, yeah, if you could talk about like, what is a feedback mechanism in the planet's climate, like, and why do we hear about climate tipping points.

25:56 AtlasPro: And things like that? It's like there's so many. In maybe like half of my videos, I'll show the same graph where it's just a feedback loop. You know, one thing leads to another, which leads to another, and it increases the cycle infinitely within limits of, you know, whatever biology has. But there's so many different systems within the earth system. If you view the earth as a single system, there's things that interact and interplay with one another to such a complex degree that there's just, there's relationships abound. That's what ecology is pretty much. That's like the idea behind that one field. And just because everything is so tied to everything else, affecting one part of the world or one aspect of an environment can have drastic effects everywhere. And that's one of the things that you love learning about when you love the environment, right?

26:48 AtlasPro: It's just like understanding that it all rolls into each other. And once you know that, the situation becomes more dire, it lends more gravity. It's not like one isolated thing is happening, and then that's all that happens. It's like one thing happens and that'll start another thing happening and that'll start a whole chain reaction that just feeds into itself over and over again until we end up with a radically different environment. Chris: Can you give some examples. AtlasPro: It all starts with carbon in the atmosphere. And as soon as we increase the carbon, that's one small act, is increasing the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. It traps a little bit more heat. That's factor number two. More heat is trapped. More heat leads to more things melting the permafrost or the ice caps. Whatever it is, something happens because there's more heat being trapped. Permafrost melting, that releases carbon, methane, whatever. And methane, as you might be aware, is a radically stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So when methane is released, it's like an accelerator of the problem. Like, if the original problem was carbon dioxide and that causes methane to be released, that only speeds up the problem. So once methane is released, now we have even more warming, and we're back to square one.

28:07 AtlasPro: We have more warming, more melting, more gases in the atmosphere again. So it runs away with it after a while. And if you don't stop it before it starts, how do you stop something that just feeds into itself like that, right? Chris: Just about. Chris: I think a lot of our listeners will know what permafrost is, but not all of them. Can you explain what exactly permafrost is? AtlasPro: Yeah, sure. So in, like, the. The polar regions of the earth, more so in the north and in the south, because there's more land in the north, but all soil has water in it. There are some parts of the earth that are just so cold that even in the summer, the water stays frozen underneath the ground. It's permafrost. It's permanent frost.

28:48 Chris: Good name. AtlasPro: And over hundreds of thousands of years, with soil built on top of each other, this builds up layers and layers of ice. And within those layers, there's gas bubbles. There's decaying organic matter that, as time progresses, becomes methane or whatever gases are released by the decomposers that are in those natural materials. And eventually, what that ends up doing is storing all this carbon dioxide, methane, whatever. It stores it all underground. And the permafrost keeps it locked up. It's frozen inside of the permafrost. But the second that starts to melt, ice underneath the ground starts to melt. All that gas that's frozen with the permafrost gets released.

29:36 Chris: Since this is an audio program, I want to take a minute to paint a mental picture for you. Close your eyes if you like. Especially if you're listening to this while you're driving, by the way. Definitely close your eyes, then. Kayla: It's perfectly safe. Chris: Yeah. You are taking a nice hike in the siberian wilderness. Beneath your feet and as far as the eye can see in all directions, a thin layer of green moss, pale green against an even paler blue sky. It is summer, so you don't even really need your jacket that you brought. It's a brisk 20 degrees celsius, 68 fahrenheit. You squat and reach down and feel that the ground beneath your feet, the soil under the moss, is damp. The ground is thawing. It thaws every summer, though part of the seasonal cycle. You begin to question, however, whether the summer thawing you can feel in the wet soil is outpacing the winter freezing of that same patch of ground. As you walk and ponder this question, you're jolted back to the present moment when you stumble upon an embankment to a gray, silty looking river.

30:40 Chris: It's not wide. You can see easily to the other side. And the answer to your musings sits there right in front of you, impossible to ignore or mistake. You observe a gigantic gash in the flesh of the terrain, bleeding brownish gray soil into the river before you, as if Paul Bunyan took a pickaxe directly to the land in a particular spot where it meets the river. Around it is more flat, green moss, but not for long. The scene I just described is called permafrost slump, and it's a sign of permafrost melt that anyone with eyes simply cannot miss. When areas of permafrost on or near hills, lakes, and rivers consistently have summer thaws that exceeddeze winter freezes, the structural integrity that the ground ice provides is no longer there. There are slumps like these occurring all throughout the Arctic.

31:29 Chris: Now, I say this not to frighten, but rather to paint a scene and a setting in your mind for the rest of the show. So I asked Kalin if there are any strategies in play to prevent more of this or turn it around. Chris: So that doesn't sound great. AtlasPro: Yeah, no, it's not the best. Chris: And you mentioned, you know, what do you do when there is a feedback mechanism like that can run away with itself? So is there answer to that? Are there strategies for saving the permafrost? Can we use that in reverse? AtlasPro: People have tried lots of different things. What we're talking about today is one main strategy. But I've seen countries roll out these white plastic tarps and just put them over the ground.

32:11 Chris: Wow. AtlasPro: Yeah. Because it's not just about air temperature, it's also about sun hitting the ground. Right. If it's darker, the ground wobs were more heat. But if you can block that just with a white reflective layer. But there really any good way to stop permafrost from melting? If it's going to. There's ways to, like, slow it down or prevent it, but that's the thing, is, it's just a natural system. And the area that permafrost is in is just huge. It's half of Russia, it's half of Canada, and, like, Alaska. And it's just these vast areas that, on a human scale, there's no. There's no actual act that we can do. It has to be a greater act. And that's why we get ideas like Pleistocene park.

32:58 Chris: Real quick. Before we keep listening to Cailin, there's a theme that I want to communicate more than anything in this episode, and that is that feedback systems work both ways. Breaking a cycle is as powerful as creating one. Small changes lead to big effects in feedback systems. So if you're feeling shitty, which prompts you to stay in bed, which prompts you to keep feeling shitty, something like taking a simple 15 minutes walk outdoors can actually have an outsized impact. A nuclear chain reaction can be halted by just a block of cadmium microphone. Feedback can be silenced by a slight positional adjustment. Don't forget this.

33:39 Chris: What is pleistocene park? AtlasPro: So we know the importance that permafrost plays in keeping our planet from heating up too quickly or too disastrously. We know that protecting permafrost is important, but we don't really know great ways to do it. And one way that we have figured out, or that one specific man in Siberia has figured out, is that there's natural systems that protect permafrost that we don't have to just do this alone, by the might of man, right. We can recruit these natural forces to protect permafrost. And one system that this man, I think, is Sergey, he recognizes that when animals trample snow, the snow insulates the ground less so when the air temperature is, like, negative 40 degrees. But there's a big layer of snow on top of the ground.

34:34 AtlasPro: The ground might only reach, like, negative five degrees because there's all this air and whatever that just insulates the ground in snow. But when animals trample on the snow, that brings the insulation factor down by an astounding degree. So negative 40 degrees without snow can be -30 degrees in the ground. And what this does is more than preventing it from melting. This lets it regrow and strengthen. We can't really prevent it from melting in the summer. It's always going to get hot in the summer. There's no animals or anything that we can do other than white tarps, I guess, to protect it. But the real time that we have to make use out of is the winter, when it's growing and when it's solidifying. AtlasPro: And that's what he figured out is if he can just bring these animals back to where they used to be, they can once again trample the snow and alter the environment to this point where it better protects the permafrost. That's Pleistocene park in a nutshell, is bringing back animals that used to be here that were pushed out thanks to climate change and or human hunters back in, like the, you know, I guess the Pleistocene era. Right. Returning them to this environment so that their impact on the environment returns as well.

35:49 Chris: So that was my. That was my next question is why? Why is it called Pleistocene park? So it's because they're trying to revive a. Like an ecology, a biome from that. That era. AtlasPro: Yeah. Pleistocene is just a few thousand years ago. We're in the holocene now. And the Pleistocene was what we would really consider to be the ice age. We're still in the ice age, but the ice ages go through cycles. The glacier interglacier. So we're in the interglacial period where there's not a lot of ice, but there is still a ton of ice. There's a whole of Antarctica, all of Greenland are covered in ice. That's how, you know, we're in an ice age. But in the glacial period, the period of the Pleistocene, glaciers literally came down from the tops and the bottoms of the earth and covered most of Europe, most of Russia, most of North America, and, you know, some of South America. So that's where the idea of Pleistocene park comes from.

36:41 AtlasPro: It comes from bringing back the environment of the ice age, bringing back the animals, animal communities of the ice age of the Pleistocene epoch. Chris: So you see, you mentioned, Sergey Zimov, is the guy behind this, the mad scientist here. Chris: Right. Chris: So did he. And you mentioned, is that. Chris: Has he done that? Chris: Has he brought some of these animals back and. And how, if. AtlasPro: So, his mission started in, like, the 1990s, I think it was like 96. And he started with just these horses, Yukushan horses, which they're still around. These horses are still in parts of Russia. Yakutia is like this really big. It's basically half of Siberia. And it's this place where the native people there have bred these horses from the wild stock that used to be there. And these horses are incredibly resilient to the cold they have, if you see them they have these, like, huge coats of fur on them. They look like completely different than regular horses. They're like stubby or too. They're like, chunky, you know? And that was the first thing he brought back. And it took a few years. He had to feed them at the beginning because there wasn't any grass, really. Like, he had to get the ball rolling.

37:52 AtlasPro: But eventually he got a population and then he started introducing more animals. Now there's bisons, cows, all of them sourced from these different environments that have similar conditions. He's got like, musk ox from like the very tip of Canada and Greenland. Chris: Wow. AtlasPro: Half of them were just these siberian species that had abandoned these northern realms, these places where the steppe tundra had changed to just tundra. And he brought them all back. And what he has seen, like, I was very specific. I wasn't going to make the video if it wasn't actually successful. Like it was just an experiment gone awry. But, yeah, he's seen that trees have started to back off of the land, and the mosses of the tundra, even more than the trees, have started to recede, because just by animals being there, they trample on the moss. The moss can't take a horse stepping on it so many times every day. Right. And in their place, grasses are growing and that is. That's huge because the trees that are found that far north, and the mosses too, they aren't very good to eat for anything.

39:00 AtlasPro: In environmental science, you'd say they don't provide the environment with resources. So grass. Grass is obviously edible to so many different grazing animals. But trees, no cow is going to eat a tree. So you get all these greater resources once you release animals. And that's what he's started to see. Chris: That's interesting because I usually think that, like, the resource has to be there already for the animal to consume it. But what you're saying is actually there's. And I think that this maybe goes back to what you're saying earlier about feedback loops, is that the animals actually affect their environment, which then, yeah, it's allow them. AtlasPro: It's all interconnected. That's. That's ecology right there. Like, the animals eat the food and they make sure that the food can grow and then the food feeds the animals, so the animals eat, and the grass has its environment open for it. It's a symbiotic relationship, and you have to have these two factors together. If the bison don't destroy the moss, then they won't have grass to eat. And then they'll die. This is a natural cycle where you need both in tandem. And once they're gone, though, hard to get back. And that's what we're dealing with now is that early into human history, we just swept through the siberian tundra and just, like, murdered all those animals, and they all disappeared from those areas.

40:22 AtlasPro: So what we're doing now is just reintroducing them and hoping that those same relationships and the environment come back as well. Chris: You were saying about the animals and Pleistocene park that before you wanted to do your video, you wanted to see if it was like, if they were actually getting some good data back, which it sounds like they are, because you did do the video. Yeah, but what was Sergei Zimov's work? How was it received early on when he started his project by this larger scientific community? AtlasPro: I think it's like people don't really know what to think for a lot. He just looks like a crazy russian guy living in the middle of Siberia, just playing with animals. But the more I got into it, I found that the more it made sense. He wasn't some nut. He was a guy who was very passionate. And, like, that's. It's hard to. It's hard to distinguish those two. Sometimes people are just crazy. But the reason I was so convinced is because I listened to him talk. There's a great short movie about him. I think it's called math, and, yeah.

41:29 Chris: You get to hear him. AtlasPro: Yeah, you get to hear him talk. And he does sound thoughtful, and he does have ideas, but I don't know if it's really caught on yet. That's what, again, another reason I made the video is because I wanted to bring the idea to more people. And more than anything else, I wanted. Chris: Success, at least for me. I mean, I didn't want Russia to. AtlasPro: Be the only ones. You know, I was like, oh, man, if I could just get one of us, get one of these in Alaska, too. You know? I do want to see it experimented with because there's so many factors, there's so much that we can still learn about this whole process. And I fully endorse it as just, like, a concept that might come back to bite me, but I think it shows promise at the very least.

42:11 Chris: So Pleistocene park on board. Kayla: I'm on board, but little disappointed that it only goes back a few thousand years. Chris: Before we talk about any of those specifics, do you have any questions? Kayla: Why didn't someone come up with this earlier? That's my question. Chris: Well, early. It was pretty early, which. Which we'll get into 1996 is when the park, officially, boy, began that early. I mean, okay. For some of our listeners, Kayla, that's, like, before they were born. Now we are old. Kayla: I know it hurts, but do you. Chris: Have any questions about the science of it? Do you have any questions about. Because, you know, that was. There's some pretty, like, nitty gritty mechanical details that Kaylin talked about. So do you have any questions about.

42:56 Chris: What exactly is happening with these animals. Chris: In this tundra, about the trampling of the ice and that sort of thing? Kayla: No, I think that makes sense. When he first said, oh, trampling the ice back to insulation, I went, huh? And then the two of you talked about it, and it made sense. Chris: Yeah. So, I mean, snow is an insulator is the thing. The reason snow is an insulator is because it has a lot of air in it. Kayla: Right? Chris: And air is a big insulator. Anything with. With a lot of air in it, air pockets, air bubbles, insulate. So that's. So. So snow does that. And essentially what's happening here with the pleistocene park idea is that all of these yakutian horses and bison and whatever, trampling all of the air out of the snow to make it like this, like, tightly packed, you know, compact. I've seen pictures of it. We'll. We'll put them on our instagram. But the sort of, like, tightly compact white ice that's mixed in with this, you know, the soil and allows for the cold during the winter to essentially just to penetrate further into the soil layer. Yes, I know. Thank you, Kayla. So that's what's happening here. That's why the action of. And that's why the presence of animals will, in theory.

44:01 Chris: And like Caitlin said, this showed some promise from the data so far, prevent. Or it won't necessarily prevent it from melting in the summer. AtlasPro: Right. Chris: Because said, it'll still get hot in the summer, but more of it will refreeze in the winter. And we're just. We're looking for the average over the year. Kayla: Right. Chris: Right. So over, on average, more of it will freeze than melt, which is what we want, because when it melts, we already talked about the problem with that feedback loop. All right, so this is the time in the show where I want to talk to you a little bit about our very charismatic leader of Pleistocene Park, Sergei Zimov. Kayla: Question. Chris: Yes. Kayla: So can we, like, go visit.

44:42 Chris: I'm about to show you where Pleistocene park is on a map. I think you can, but it's not. It's. Don't think of it as a. It's a science experiment. It's not like amusement Park. I understand it just has a cutesy name. Kayla: But what I'm hearing is we can go visit. Chris: It's not impossible to go visit. Kayla: Can we, Peter? The horsies, little noseys. Cause I looked at pictures of them and they are very cute and chubby. I want touch their soft noseys. Chris: They're wild horsies. So they are still be my friend. Kayla: I've played breath of the wild. I know how to feed a horse a carrot and make it be your friend. You just jump on its back and ride it long enough, and it'll be your friend. Chris: Anyway, let's talk about Sergei Zimov. And actually, I think I would also, I would be remiss at this point if I didn't call him maybe the co charismatic leader with his son Nikita. I highly recommend the short documentary that we mentioned about the Zimoffs and Pleistocene park, and it's called mammoth. I will absolutely link it in our show notes. The production value on it is top notch. I think it actually won some filmmaking awards, and it really gets into the story in a much more grounded human way than we're really talking about right now in our dumb cult podcast. Sergey does have a Wikipedia bio, so let's hear from that real quick. Just a level set. Sergei. I can't pronounce his middle name. Zimov? No. Not even gonna try it is a russian scientist.

46:11 Chris: He is a geophysicist, which specializes in arctic and subarctic ecology. He is the director of Northeast Scientific Station, a research institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a senior research fellow of the Pacific Institute for Geography, and one of the founders of Pleistocene Park, a 160 square kilometer wildlife preserve and research substation of the northeast scientific station. He is best known for his work in advocating theory that human overhunting of large herbivores during the Pleistocene caused Siberias grassland steppe ecosystem to disappear, and for raising awareness as to the important roles permafrost and thermokarst lakes play in the global carbon cycle. According to a colleague, Sergey Zimov is the most cited russian earth scientist, end quote.

47:00 Kayla: Question? Chris: Yes? Kayla: Is he a vegetarian? We get some good veg wrap? Chris: I'm not sure, actually. I kind of. Kayla: Not that he has to be. Chris: I doubt it. Kayla: Oh, interesting. Chris: But I don't know. I really don't know. Kayla: I just. It's interesting to have it. And I obviously don't know what he would say himself to have it phrased as, like, human overhunting is responsible for. Chris: This is just, well, we'll get to that. Kayla: You don't often hear our, you know, older, more. Yeah, you don't often hear our ancestors. Our old, old ancestors is like, they're responsible for. We have them be responsible for, like, social ills a lot, but not necessarily like, natural, ecological ills.

47:45 Chris: Yeah, well, and especially when we're talking about this. And again, we'll get to this, but we're not talking like the Romans or even the Egyptians hunting. We're talking about, like, stone age, like, pre historical overhunting. Kayla: Oh, oh, we're talking about that far, long ago. Chris: Yeah. So it's actually, you're right. It's interesting. We don't, we usually sort of have this, like, idyllic picture of, you know, oh, well, prehistory humans, we're just at one with nature and that it was, it's only our sinful, you know, current technology that has destroyed the pristine, you know. But actually, as we'll find out in a minute, maybe not the case. And that's, he's one of the sort of, this guy, Sergey Zimoff is one of the leading proponents of that theory.

48:32 Kayla: You know, it's nice to not be blamed for something for once. Chris: Well, it's still human's fault. Kayla: It is, but it's not my fault. It's not because I used a plastic straw. Chris: That's true. Yeah. That's a good point. Now, you and I and most of our audience probably already find this person compelling just from that bio that I snipped because were all excited by science and jurassic parks. But, oh, no, it does not end there. For the Zimoff story, my friend. Hardly. Just for a sec, I want you to picture in your head the stereotype for an older man living not just in Siberia, but, like, the Siberia of Siberia here. Do you want to see it on a map where pleistocene park is located?

49:12 Kayla: I'm assuming it's, like, way off of one of them peninsulas. Chris: Take a look. Kayla: Is anybody else there? Chris: Like four or five people? Kayla: Like, literally four or five people. Chris: I think they have a manned presence at the research station. That's like six people. Totally. Kayla: Why is it there? Chris: Why did they locate Pleistocene park there? Yeah, because the rewilding that they are trying to do that, we talked about introducing the animals. This is where the permafrost is that can melt. And there's a combination of other factors, too. Like, you know, it's far from any, like, human productive land that he would have to consider. And there's some other biome considerations that. That we will talk more about in just a minute.

49:59 Kayla: I mean, we'll get to that. To be clear for our audience, this is nowhere near the Europe side of Russia. It is on the complete opposite end from where Europe is. This is closer to Alaska, probably, than it is to Europe, to Moscow. Chris: Yeah, probably. Kayla: Actually. Chris: Definitely. Kayla: It's very northern. It is very isolated. And like you said, there's about five people there. So it's as isolated can get while still being on land. Chris: Yeah. It's like this remote. There's beyond remote, and then there's where Sergei and Nikita Zimov live and work. Kayla: What does he eat? How does he go to the store? Chris: I don't think there's a. There's a lot of logistical questions that I did not have the time to get into, but is there an airplane? I will ask them, etcetera.

50:48 Kayla: I'm just saying it looks some of the logistics that. I'm just. Just looking at it right now. It look, it probably has similar logistics as, like, antarctic researchers in terms of, like, getting supplies. It just seems like there's probably some of those same logistics. Chris: Yeah. I don't know what. How reachable it is by various methods of transportation. I did not look at that. Like, there's definitely no trains or anything going there. Kayla: Right. Chris: If there's a road, it's probably, like, the most overgrown mud road. Maybe reachable by airplane only. I don't know. So picture the kind of gruff, old russian guy who would choose to live there and choose to dedicate his life to hard, physically demanding science. And you've pictured Sergei Zimov, giant, barrel.

51:36 Kayla: Chested, tattooed forearms with the sleeves rolled up three quarters of the way. Probably has a beard. Chris: He's got a huge Santa Claus beard. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: He has long hair. It's all gray. Kayla: Probably has a prominent scar somewhere on his face. Chris: He loves vodka. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: He smokes. He's got a. Kayla: Wait, are we saying. Chris: Are you a bitchin hat that he wears mostly. Kayla: Are you still saying the stereotypes? Are you saying what he actually. Chris: No, this is him. I'm describing him. Kayla: Really? Chris: Yes. Kayla: Wait, so he's really big and Santa Claus beard with, like, do you want. Chris: To see a picture? Kayla: Yes. I thought you're gonna say, like, oh, picture the stereotype. He's the exact opposite. Chris: No, he is the exact stereotype. Kayla: This is the guy looks like. Chris: He looks like how you would picture. Kayla: A russian wilderness scientist version of the. Of the supposed villain in home alone. The, like, oh, the guy with the shovel. Yeah, the scary shovel man. That, you know, he murdered his family, and then you find out, no, he's just a lonely old man that saves Kevin. That's what that guy looks like, except for the gianter beard and a more intimidating presence.

52:35 Chris: Yeah, well, instead of saving Kevin, he's saving the permafrost. Kayla: Cool. Chris: And he definitely has no time for your nonsense. He's like that kind of guy. Like, whatever the nonsense is, I don't. Whatever. He has no time for it. So now that you can kind of, hopefully our audience can picture him. If not, check out our instagram. But also, now that you're picturing him, good. Picture yourself shaking his hand, because he, his son and his team are standing against the forces of darkness like goddamn comic book heroes. Kayla: I like them. Chris: Honestly, as fascinating as the science is with Pleistocene park, the human interest tale of the Zmoffs is equally fascinating. Here's another couple quick hits. Other than just the how does he look and where do they live? First, there's the fact that it's been around for a while. It was officially founded in 1996, but Sergey actually started the project, the scientific part of the project, in 1988.

53:26 Kayla: Oh, same. Me too. Chris: Yeah, same. I forgot that. Yes, Pleistocene park is as old as you. Yes, they have been running the experiment for 33 years. And when did you hear about it? Kayla: Right now. Chris: Yeah, today. So the thing is, Sergey wasn't really taken seriously for some time. Boo. Up to and including today. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the greater scientific community didn't take hammer pleistocene park seriously early on, but now people are listening. Kayla: Good. Chris: The up to and including today part is just referencing the fact that Pleistocene rewilding as a concept isn't, like, 100% dogma acceptance the way something like quantum mechanics and physics is, or evolution and biology.

54:13 Kayla: It's, like, still something that's kind of evolving scientifically. Chris: Exactly. There are still some legitimate good faith arguments against it or risks with it. Like, it's not like, you know, 100% set in stone, but it's gaining a lot of acceptance. The bottom line, though, is that there. Yeah, there's a story arc here where Sergey Zimov goes from more of, like, an outsider in the scientific community to having more acceptance. But, you know, that's kind of expected with the ideas that we're talking about. They're very big, and in many cases that we. We'll actually still get to. They have some unintuitive conclusions about environmental science. Oh. Kayla: So what are some of those conclusions? Cars are good. Chris: Yeah, cars are good. Kayla: Should be rewilding. But with drink.

54:53 Chris: More vodka? No, with tanks, Kayla. Kayla: With tanks. Rewild, but with gas guzzling hummers. Chris: The other interesting human story here is the relationship his son Nikita has with him and the Pleistocene park project. Nikita heads up the project now, actually, but it wasn't always that way. As we said, Pleistocene park has been a decades long project. The key to Zimov is 38 at the time of this podcast here in 2021, Pleistocene park, if you measure all the way back to scientific origins, is 33. So let that soak in for a minute. Imagine being raised by a parent who is in charge of a generational science project, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

55:35 Kayla: You know what this sounds like? Chris: I don't. What does it sound like? Kayla: Any anime? Chris: Yeah. Oh, they should totally do anime. On place to scene poiling. Kayla: I want this. Chris: That'd be tight. Kayla: My God. Scientist father, complicated relationship with coworker son. Chris: Super high stakes. Kayla: Super high stakes. Gotta save the world. Anime. This is anime. Chris: And imagine that project is so remote, dad can't just put an ad on craigslist for someone to come help him run the thing, right? So imagine the pressure. Kayla: Where's the mom? Where's the mom? Chris: Imagine the anime responsibility. I don't actually know where the mom is. I think they answer that in the Atlantic article. Kayla: I'm just saying we got some tropes here.

56:17 Chris: Oh, it's tropes galore, baby. So if you're Sergei, there's a conflict between the needs of your critically important life's work and the agency and autonomy of your son. If you're Nikita, it's the same but in reverse. And for yourself. So here's a longish quote from that Atlantic article that I've mentioned a couple times now. It's extremely thorough. It's by a man by the name of Ross Anderson, who actually did visit Pleistocene park to get this story. And the article is entitled, appropriately enough, welcome to Pleistocene Park. I quote, the Zimovs have a complicated relationship. The father says he had to woo the son back to the Arctic. When Nikita was young, Sergey was, by his own admission, obsessed with work. Nikita told me. I don't even think he paid attention to me at all until I was 20.

57:07 Chris: Nikita went away for high school to a prestigious science academy in Novacebersk, Siberia's largest city. He found life there to his liking and decided to stay for university. Sergei made the journey to Novosibirskhe during Nikita's freshman year and asked him to come home. It would have been easy for Nikita to say no. He soon started dating the woman he would go on to marry. Saying yes to Sergei meant asking her to live and raise children in the ice fields at the top of the world. And then there was his pride. Quote, it is difficult to dedicate your life to someone else's idea, he told me. Kayla: Isn't that what we all do, though? That's so just like, oh, man, that is something that we all grapple with every damn day. Because it's like, if you're not doing.

57:51 Chris: Like that on steroids, if you're not. Kayla: In charge of your own thing, then you're helping somebody else's idea come into the world. Chris: Now imagine if that's you're living in someone else's dream. Kayla: But now imagine it's your dad's. But it's like, not even just, like, oh, the family business. Chris: It's like the family business of saving the world. Yeah, yeah, I know. The drama there is, like, through the freaking roof. Kayla: And it's like, oh, your dad didn't care about you until you could be of service to this thing, and now he needs you. And so it's like, oh, any of that. Chris: It's like somebody wrote this for, like, a tv show. Kayla: I'm telling you, it's literally anime. Somebody give me the anime of this. Somebody get a mech suit for this guy to go into and trample the grass himself. Chris: I can't help but grab an additional quote from further down in the same article just to plunk down next to the one I just read. Quote. When Sergey was out of earshot, I asked Nikita whether one of his daughters would one day take over a place scene park to see his plan through. We were watching two of them play in an old soviet military radar station.

58:47 Kayla: Oh, my God. What a childhood. Chris: I took the girls to the park last week, and I don't think they were too impressed. Nikita told me, laughing. They thought the horses were unfriendly. The author then Ross says, I told him that this wasn't answer. I'm not as selfish as my father. He said, I won't force them to do this, end quote. Kayla: I have thoughts and feelings. Chris: Yeah, I know. It's, the whole thing is very fascinating. Kayla: It's like the father's clearly, I can clearly see why his son would use the word selfish and forced. And also, we are all masters of our own. Yeah. Destiny. There is a choice to be there.

59:33 Chris: And he is choosing that. Kayla: Yeah. Chris: It's wonderful. It's just dripping with, like, human drama. Kayla: So this isn't about a cult. This is just. You wanted to talk about, like, this thing that should be anime. Chris: We'll get to that. Well, anyway, Kayla, the hero's journey is never a straight path. Kayla: Isn't that the truth? Chris: So again, I want to emphasize that these epic, decades long, emotionally packed storylines are. Are happening against the backdrop of an unforgiving siberian environment where the science is hard labor and the dirt never leaves from underneath your fingernails. Now, Kaylan listeners, if you're anything like me, you probably have some questions at this point. For instance, you might be wondering, okay, great. Pleistocene park is trying to restore a specific kind of ecology by bringing animals back to Siberia. But if there's a lack of fauna, if there's a lack of animals where it, quote, should be, then where did the original animals go?

1:00:30 Kayla: Yeah, where did they go? Chris: Is that something you're wondering? Kayla: Well, I mean, you said that they got hunted. Chris: Yeah, actually, that's true. We have hinted at that. So I asked our atlas pro friend that same question. Where did they go? Chris: Like, why? If it was a good symbiotic relationship between all the animals that were there in the Pleistocene than what happened to them. AtlasPro: There's two theories on this, and people will get mad at me depending on whether or not I say one or the other. Chris: I'll get mad at you for both. AtlasPro: Yeah, I'll just get people mad no matter what. One theory is that it was climate change. One theory is that because we're not in the glacial period of the ice age anymore, that as the environment transitioned from being heavily glaciated to not very glaciated change in environment changing conditions, that can cause other things in the environment to change, too. Right. The main argument is that more moisture was brought into the interior of Russia and that increased moisture was able to better supply trees with water and more trees were able to grow. Grass doesn't take that much water. So that's theory behind climate change. But theory that I prefer is the overhunting hypothesis that states that it was humans that mostly came through as we expanded out of Africa, as we moved through the world. This was the ice age. We weren't farming.

1:01:53 AtlasPro: We were still hunting and gathering. And like I said, there's not a lot of food resources up that far north. And we don't eat grass, we don't eat moss, and we don't eat trees. So the only thing to really eat up there were the animals. And people argue. People will say that we couldn't have killed them all, we couldn't have hunted all millions of these horses to extinction. But again, it comes back to cycles, and once you kill a few of the horses, a few of the mammoths, a few of the bisons, then they're less capable of maintaining their environment. Like we said, the animals maintain their environment. If we kill a few of them, they're less able to maintain the environment. Fewer bison means less grass means fewer bison.

1:02:37 AtlasPro: And that, again, starts a cycle where we didn't have to kill every single one. We just had to initiate this feedback loop that just ran itself out eventually after we had maybe even left. Chris: That's interesting. AtlasPro: Yeah. And that's why I find that to be the more convincing argument. Chris: Yeah, well, I mean, the nice thing about the silver lining there is that it seems as though if there is a feedback system in place, which there is with animals sustaining the conditions in their environment, and we can disrupt that, then it suggests that we can also disrupt other feedback mechanisms that we don't like, such as the melting of the permafrost. So, yeah, so that part's good, I guess.

1:03:19 Chris: Yeah. AtlasPro: Well, it is. It does give you hope, because if it's the animals that created the environment, then that shows that all we have to do to bring that environment back is to reintroduce the animals. If the animals come first and they can create that environment, it gives us hope, it gives us the possibility of recreating this environment. Chris: Right. Chris: Yeah. Which is. Chris: It's really fascinating because I just think that even for, like, more scientifically literate people, certainly for me anyway, just speaking for myself, I was. Not that I'm literate, but it was interesting to learn, as part of what I liked about your video, is interesting to learn just how symbiotic animals are with their environment. You usually, I feel like the default sort of assumption is that there's an environment that's like a setting, it's like a backdrop, and then you drop the little animals in it, and then as long as there's the stuff that they need, then they can, you know, as long as there's grass, then they can eat it. As long as there's trees, they can climb it, whatever it is. But this idea that. That it's symbiotic, that they're just part of all the same system, and it's not really.

1:04:23 Chris: It's not a background that the animals exist in. It's like all part of the same painting, I guess. AtlasPro: Yeah. Well, I. I forgot what class it was in college, but I remember one of my professors telling me that, you know, the reason we have so many ideas that don't really end up panning out in the long term environment, like why species exist or niches or anything. It comes back to Christianity, actually, you know, it comes back to this idea that God created the world and then he populated it with these animals and. Chris: Oh, wow, that is a christian idea, isn't it? AtlasPro: It's very intertwined in our brains where I still find myself at fault, you know, making these assumptions, because it all comes back to this worldview that we've all been raised into, where the world existed, and then animals came into it, and they're just. They're two different folks.

1:05:10 Chris: Oh, man, that's wild. AtlasPro: Yeah. Chris: Just blew my mind a little bit. AtlasPro: Yeah, that's why I remembered it when my professor said it. I was like, oh, my God. You know, that's why we think that species are different from one another, even though it's all a continuum of genetics. You know, it's all more complicated than the Bible makes it seem. Chris: Wow. The cultural thing there is really fascinating. Kayla: So, yeah, so me asking that, me making that statement earlier of, like, oh, it's so interesting to, like, be able to blame our ancestors for doing climate change shit. Chris: Yeah. Kayla: Totally validated. Clearly, I was on the right path. Chris: Oh, you were so right. Kayla: I'm so smart. Basically psychic with how intelligent I am.

1:05:52 Chris: Actually, can I respond to your response there real quick? Kayla: Fine, because I. Chris: No, because I think it's interesting. You're like, we already said this, so I don't want to rehash, but, yeah, we usually think of, like, industrial nations, civilization. Us. Right? Like, humans of the 21st, 20th, and 21st century being this negative influence on the environment. And I think we're used to the idea that, like, because we absolutely could kill a million horses, right? Like, that's a possible thing we could do. And so we look back at tribal hunters and gatherers during the prehistoric age, like, they couldn't kill that many horses. But as Kaylin said, it's not just about, like, killing a million horses. It's about getting the ball rolling, which is kind of what this whole episode is about. Kayla: Right? And I think it was interesting when he was talking about kind of reinforcing the idea of, we tend to think of humans and animals as separate things as opposed to, no, humans are animals and our actions are part of the ecological system. And I could see somebody taking that idea and maybe extrapolating the wrong conclusions about, like, our current climate crisis from that. But I think that my argument would be, it's not that. Just the effects we're having on the climate right now is just us being animals. I think that actually the effects we are having on the climate right now is because of that idea of humans and animals as separate as humans. We are separate from the ecological process. That, to me, is probably something that's very much underlying the current climate crisis that we are in.

1:07:28 Kayla: Like, the being so disconnected from our place in the natural, ecological system is part of why we're maybe not treating it the way we should. And we're not living with our ecology fighting against it in some pretty damaging ways. Chris: Yeah. I think there's always been, like, a bit of a binary that we're sort of having to grapple with now. Like, either. Either our ecology has been adversarial because it's been so dangerous to us. Kayla: Right. Chris: Or it's been sort of like this otherized, you know, ball of resources for us to tap into. But it's only recently, I think, that we've really understood the sort of interconnected.

1:08:08 Kayla: Nature of things we should be. When we say were referring to, like, western industrialized. Chris: Right. That's another good point. Kayla: Society. Chris: Right. I mean, you heard him mention, like, the Zimovs had to go get horses from, like, native tribes in area. And I feel like we can very much relate to that here in the states where there's like this sort of like, eurocentric civilizational view of how we husband nature. And then there's like, all this technology that native folks to the north american continent have that we are actually kind of behind on. And it's interesting to hear that the Zimu had to get those horses from them. Kayla: Right. Chris: Because they're the only ones like, that had Yakushan horses anymore because they went extinct everywhere else.

1:08:51 Kayla: And that's the thing that's. That's something that is probably going to help very much in the overall climate crisis, is tapping into the existing indigenous and native technologies and way of living within the ecological system. And I appreciate that we're doing an episode on, like, a very clear example of that. Chris: I think we absolutely have to. Yeah. And I think that. Yep, good example from Pleistocene park. And it's. It was also good to know that I'm, like, not alone in the. In the bias that there's, like, an environment and that animals just live in it. Kayla: Right. Chris: When in reality, animals are as much of a component of any environment as plants, soil, sunshine and rain. Kayla: Right. Chris: And again, Kaylin brings up this point that feedback systems are frighteningly powerful, but that also provides hope more animals contribute to more grasslands contribute to more animals shepherding. That process allows us humans to leverage what it takes to tackle problems at the scale of the global climate. So we talked about, how did all of the megafauna of the tundra go away?

1:09:58 Kayla: Now can we talk about the megaflora? I want to talk about giant, huge Venus flytraps that will exist eating big old horses. Chris: Oh, there's still giant trees, Kayla. Kayla: Yeah, I know. Chris: Well, if you're anything like me, you may wonder, then, okay, but if humans hunted or disrupted all of the megafauna out of Asia and the Americas, why are there still megafauna in Africa? Kayla: Question. Before we hop into answering that question, another question. When you say megafauna, what exactly do you mean? Because. Yeah. When I think. When I think of megafauna, I think of, like. I don't know, that makes me think of, like, megalodon and, like, really gigantic ancient animals, as opposed to, like, rhinos and elephants.

1:10:39 Chris: Okay, so rhinos and elephants are megafauna. So what we mean is, like, larger. And don't. Yeah, don't think of, like, brachiosaurus or whatever. We're just talking about. Kayla: Not dinosaurs in our current. Chris: Sort of, like, holocene. Pleistocene lasts tens of thousands of years. There are particular ecological niches that fill in, because, like, back when we're talking pleistocene, like, the world geographically looked the same. It wasn't like pangaea. It was still North America. It was still Asia, Africa, etcetera. Right? All the continents looked the same. So they had similar niches that were filled by similar animals. So, like, elephants exists in Africa. There used to be mastodons and mammoths that existed in the Americas. And Asia filled the exact same role. Very similar to elephants. There were woolly rhinos that were running around. Right. Rhinos exist now in Africa. There were a type of rhino that existed in Asia and North America.

1:11:33 Kayla: Right. Chris: They even had very similar predator niches. Right, so you have, like, lions in Africa. There were cave lions in. In Asia. North America had saber toothed tigers. Kayla: Wait, North America had saber toothed tigers? I thought we only had buffaloes. Chris: No, well, we have buffaloes now. What I'm talking about is, like, what used to exist in the Pleistocene before they were allegedly over hunted. Kayla: I don't think I knew that we ever had biggies here. Chris: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Kayla: We had. Chris: The whole ecosystem was different. No, no. We had mammoth, or it was either mammoths or mastodons in North America. I forget we had all that stuff. We had big cats. Kayla: Where did they go? Tell. Explain. Chris: Well, so we said, where did they go? The answer to that, if you recall, was we either overhunted. There's some combination of over hunting and. Or getting the ball rolling, killing enough that they were no longer able to maintain that ecosystem, and then they died off.

1:12:25 Kayla: But then why do some of them still be around? Chris: Why do the ones in Africa still be around? Kayla: Yeah. Chris: Well, that's what we're about to answer. Chris: One of the things I liked from your video was that you showed some pretty compelling charts for, like, when humans arrived in an area, and then when the megafauna of that area went away. But why did that not happen in Africa? Chris: We still have african megafauna. Chris: We still have giraffes and elephants and hippos and rhinos. AtlasPro: Yeah, I came to this problem a lot earlier than I actually came to the whole pleistocene problem, because I wanted to make a video asking why Africa's animals were so much bigger than everyone else's. You know, why. Why did they have elephants? Like, what? Where are. Where are elephants? You know, where are rhinos? Where are lions? And it turns out that everywhere else on earth did have giant animals until just a few thousand years ago. There were megafauna everywhere, and they were just as successful and just as prevalent and widespread as anywhere else. The only difference between Africa and everywhere else is the fact that humans evolved in Africa. And that's thought to be the big determining factor, is that as humans evolved, were evolving at the same speed as the elephants were, and everything was.

1:13:47 AtlasPro: And everything had time to learn what humans were. There's a lot that we take for granted in our own minds, but one thing is having fears. If you see something, it inherently scares you. People are scared of spiders and snakes and all sorts of things without ever. I've never been by a snake, but I still don't want to get near them, you know? Chris: Right. AtlasPro: I don't need to, because it's been put into my brain by evolution, by poor ancestors who had bigger snakes to worry about, that they're dangerous, and they can be dangerous. And we think that the same thing happened in Africa where elephants, rhinos, they all learned very fast that these little monkeys chasing me with pointy sticks are bad news. So I should either run away from them when I see them, or I should attack them the moment I have the chance. And so their environment basically gave them behaviors, right. The environment influenced their own brains and what they did when they encountered us, but that didn't happen anywhere else because we didn't evolve anywhere else. So as we got out of Africa, we found that the rest of the animals had no idea how dangerous were. The mammoths, they looked exactly like elephants.

1:14:57 AtlasPro: Had we hunting elephants, we would have known how to hunt a mammoth. If were hunting rhinos, we would have known how to hunt the woolly rhino, you know, and all these sorts of animals. So we got there, and it was likely the easiest thing to ever do. Like these. You can imagine these people just coming from Africa where all these animals are really mean, are really fast and get away from you before you can get them. And we just walk up right next to these mammoths and just. They wouldn't be scared of us at all, probably right. You know, we don't have records of that, but we assume, based on the behaviors that we've seen, elephants display similar animals that we think just a matter of their mentality. And I wasn't even too convinced by that until I saw the extent of it.

1:15:42 AtlasPro: And it was amazing, because the further away the landmass, or the animal was from the origin point of humans, the greater degree of extinction occurred within the megafauna population. So, yeah, North America, where I am, has nothing like that. I mean, we have moose and stuff, but, you know, all the mammoths are gone. All the giant animals of that time are pretty much gone. And, you know, same with South America. South America got even worse because it was so secluded. Africa, they're still there. And, you know, close to Africa, they're still there. There's still some elephants in Asia, too. And because that was the first place humans got to after Africa, it's all about how much these animals knew about humans before they started to get hunted.

1:16:29 Chris: Right. AtlasPro: Yeah, that's. That's really why we see this weird pattern of Africa having all the crazy animals, because they're. They're the only ones literally, evolutionarily smart enough to run away from us, right? Chris: And if you zoom away, too, from the. Just the mechanics of it, if you zoom away and just talk about it in terms of, like, there's just an arms race, right, between animals that don't want to get killed by humans and humans that want to kill them, the humans are going to get better at killing them, and they're going to better at surviving and so on and so forth. And then at a certain point, humans migrate, and then none of the animals that they encounter have gone through that arms race. So not only are they less afraid of humans have, like, all these strategies for killing giant tusk meat bags. So, yeah. So it's that from that 10,000 foot view, it's also really compelling.

1:17:20 Chris: And when you put in your video, when you put that next to the charts that you were just sort of just talking about when humans arrived and then the degree to which the populations crashed, it was really compelling. Chris: I'd never encountered it before. Chris: And, like, right off the bat, I was like, that makes sense. AtlasPro: Yeah. I was so glad when I found those graphs, because it's hard to explain it just by voice, but when you see the sudden crash, the whole time before humans had arrived, 100% survival rates for all megafauna. And then humans arrive not even a thousand years later, a crash, like, maybe 20% survival rate of the megafauna. And that's seeing it in plain daylight. It's just seeing, like, oh, well, if I see exactly when humans arrive and I see an immediate reaction in the environment, how could I note, think that it's humans that are doing that are causing that?

1:18:12 Chris: Interesting, right? Once again, this challenge and assumption I had, and so many assumptions that I had were challenged by learning about Pleistocene park from Atlas Pro and later from my own research. We already talked about my built in assumption of animals as actors on a stage, not part of the stage itself. And now my assumption that ice age megafauna just disappeared, along with the disappearing glaciers and warming earth. The data that Kalin presents in his video really opened my eyes on that. The existence of african megafauna helped convince me, and the timing really helped convince me. We talked about the, like, wow, what a coincidence. The evidence for megafauna population crashes is timed basically in every single case. Exactly. With the human fossils, when they started appearing in that area, we talked about that.

1:18:59 Chris: But actually, there's another thing that he mentions in his video that we forgot to talk about, and that's that we are in the middle of an interglacial period right now. So interglacial, as he mentioned, means the ice has receded to only polar regions. But this Holocene interglacial period wasn't the first. There were many interglacial periods before this one. But megafauna populations had no problem surviving previous warming periods. So the warming planet caused population crash theory doesn't seem to have a great answer as to why this current interglacial period was somehow deadlier than others, aside from were here. Kayla: It's all our fault, as it always is. Here's the thing, okay, this is really important for me to say right now. Man, the world would be so much cooler if you were, like, driving to work and there was just like a saber toothed tiger. Or if you were just, like, heading to your 405. Yeah, just like, running. Or if you're, like, heading to your friend's house, you're like, oh, I gotta take a different road because the mammoth. Imagine how much cooler the world would be if we didn't kill off all the biggies.

1:20:02 Chris: It would be much cooler. We are missing mega fun. I mean, that's why people love to safari in Africa is because they have, like, all the dope animals. Kayla: That's why people, like, get killed by bison and moose all the time here, because they get too damn close. They're like, oh, look at this gigantic animal. I've never seen anything like this. And then the bison runs them over. Chris: Right. It's probably why we still have bison is because the bison is smart enough to run over humans. Kayla: Yeah, keep doing it. Chris: Keep it up, buffalo, as we just talked about. Kayla: Good job, moose. Chris: How's your brain doing? Are you ready to have yet another assumption challenged? Kayla: Yeah, pull on my brain meat. Chris: There's a few things in your video where it kind of made me really? Chris: I didn't know that. Chris: This is an example. In pleistocene park, the zmops are actually knocking trees down.

1:20:43 Chris: Right. Chris: But we hear all the. Like, especially recently, we've heard a lot of talk about, like, oh, yeah, we plant a bunch of trees, we will fix climate change. So this seems opposite of that. Chris: So what's going on there? AtlasPro: Yeah, so this deals with a misconception that I had and probably most, you know, most people have, that trees are the pinnacle of the environment. You know, that you can't do better in an environment than trees. But that's really not the case. You know, trees are just like any other plants. Trees are trying to advantage themselves just like any other plant. And in an environment as harsh as super North Siberia, trees don't really want to produce a lot of fruits. Trees don't really want to produce a lot of nutritious seeds for animals to eat because it's harder for them to survive. And so they don't. So they're very lacking in nutrition. And on another level, trees also don't store all that much carbon dioxide. I mean, they obviously put a lot into their bodies and into their trunks.

1:21:43 AtlasPro: But once they die, trees don't grow at a rate where they're going to be buried by other trees. Right. Trees take years and years to grow and years to decompose. But trees almost always get to decompose before they get covered by stuff. That's where grass comes in is grass grows on top of itself. Grass will bury other grass in itself. And that just buries all of this carbon underneath a layer, layer of grass to the point where it can't decompose. It doesn't have the time to because it grows so rapidly. And grass also provides resources for the animals. So you knock down trees, thinking that's. That's a horrible thing for the environment.

1:22:24 AtlasPro: But when you realize that trees don't provide anything for animals and trees don't store all that much carbon when compared to grasslands, then you realize that knocking them down and allowing grasses to grow not only helps support animals and a larger animal community, it also sequesters carbon more efficiently. And the reason we don't have these tame grasslands going on is because all the grasslands that we have basically just been turned into farms. And that's why we don't want to return anything to grasslands. The only reason it works up in Siberia is because there's no farms up there. It's just trees or moss. And that's why in that setting, removing trees is more environmentally effective at removing carbon and fostering animal communities.

1:23:13 Chris: Interesting. Yeah, I had that. So that misconception you talked. Again, one of the things about your video that made me question my intuition was about the fact that, yeah, if you think of trees as being this sort of the final boss of ecology, right, when everything is fully developed, you have this fern Gully and there's just the most biodiversity, the most productiveness. And that's not always the case. Maybe it's the case for the Amazon, but not necessarily for these boreal forests. AtlasPro: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It's like when we think of forests, we either think of the forest that we live in, which is, I live in New York, it's a pretty productive forest. There's a lot of things going on, or we think of the tropical rainforest, but that's not what you're getting in the Arctic. It honestly comes back to the whole Christianity aspect, is we still think of the world as this orderly thing, where there's the top is the trees, and then below that's shrubs and below that's grass. And we think of it as a progression. We think of it as something that's been ordered and calculated and quantified. It isn't. Different things work better in different circumstances and for different reasons. And that just goes back to how complex of a system the earth is.

1:24:30 Chris: Again, fascinating. Right. Did that challenge any of your assumptions about forest biomes versus grassland biomes? Kayla: It did. And it's really stressing me out because it feels like we're sitting here in this episode talking about this incredible thing that's being undertaken to preserve the life of our planet and, like, prevent the climate crisis or roll back the climate crisis. And then we're talking about these things that are challenging assumptions that, man, I'm just looking at it going, boy, people could extrapolate the wrong lessons from these things. And it's so terrifying. And it goes back to, like, the truth is ultimately the most important thing. Even when it's, like, someone dangerous. Even when it's dangerous. But it's like, just, even if you say, like, oh, the trees are not important, it doesn't mean we should go and, like, cut down every single tree and, like, destroy all the trees and fuck the trees.

1:25:27 Chris: Don't fuck the trees. Kayla: Don't fuck the trees. But having a scientific understanding that puts trees in their place will help us put our energy where it needs to go in terms of, like, how do we preserve the environment, preserve our ecology, roll back the climate crisis, yada yada. Chris: Don't yada the climate crisis. Kayla: I'm just, it's not the. Chris: Have you learned nothing about yada ing from Seinfeld? Kayla: It is not the stance of this podcast that the crisis is not important. Chris: He's gonna be like, what's yada? Cause he's too young. He's not gonna know this. Kayla: Leave him alone. Anybody can watch Seinfeld. Oh, I'm so old. Climate change is real. Whatever you. Whatever you might extrapolate from this, climate change is real. Don't get down on the trees.

1:26:13 Chris: As Kayla just said, this is complex. So let's be super clear here. And hopefully, in some way, this should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway. It is so much more complicated than trees good, grass bad, right? Or trees bad, grass good. Okay. It is much more useful to think of various plants and animals filling different roles in different ecosystems. And those roles can change and shift depending on different geographies. So what might be good to knock down a tree in pleistocene park is probably not a good thing for you to do in the forested areas of New York. Kayla: Don't do that.

1:26:53 Chris: And as he also mentioned, boreal forest trees face a different survival puzzle than equatorial rainforest trees. Right? They're trying to survive in this cold northern climate, whereas equatorial rainforest trees have year round sunshine, heat, humidity. It's just a totally different puzzle. The same with any shrubs, grasses, animals, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and so on. The boreal tree's survival puzzle pushes them to be more guarded with their resources and generally less biologically productive in that region than something like mammoth steps might be. With all the grasslands in warmer, wetter climates, that's not necessarily the case, but since it is in the Arctic, that means boreal forests can't support animals the way a mammoth steppe could. And if the case is not clear, we've talked about it a couple times.

1:27:42 Chris: Mammoth steppe is the name for that biome that no longer exists, which is like this sort of, like, arctic prairie grassland, where mammoths and woolly rhinos and all of these megafauna that used to exist, that's where they would have lived. Kayla: S t e p p e. Yeah, step. Chris: Stepi. And we've already talked about how the presence of such animals in such an environment might beneficial to us humans and how it can fight the climate crisis. It's a powerful check on the assumption, though, that more trees equals more better. But that doesn't mean that planting trees is bad. Far from it. Reforestation programs in different parts of the world can also be good at the exact same time. Managed logging is actually good for greenhouse gas sequestration because tree growth is what really captures carbon. Tree respiration is actually fairly carbon neutral. It's the growth that really does most of the carbon removal from the environment. And when those trees are logged and use as building material, for example, that carbon that went into growing the trees is removed from the cycle, and the trees planted to.

1:28:44 Chris: To replace them keep removing carbon from the atmosphere. That's good, but maybe not so good for arctic permafrost. Hence Pleistocene rewilding. As yet another interesting side note about the zimovs. They have recommissioned a soviet era russian tank to knock down trees around the park to help kickstart the whole animal grassland symbiotic system. Kayla: Say that again. Chris: Do you remember earlier in the episode when you asked about them driving a car and I said, no tank? Kayla: Yes. Chris: Yeah, so they have one. Kayla: So they have a for real soviet era tank that they use to knock small. Chris: It's not like a gigantic tank. It's a small tank, but they use it to knock down trees in Pleistocene park.

1:29:26 Kayla: Okay, I am doing the wrong thing with my life. Chris: I know. So there's literally a russian dude with, like, a gray beard who doesn't have time for your shit, smokes, drinks vodka, driving a yemenite tank around with a. Kayla: Complicated relationship with his son. Chris: Yes. Yes. All of this is real. I've seen. I've seen video of it. So it may seem counterintuitive to knock these trees down somewhere when someone is planting them elsewhere, both with the same goals of preventing climate disaster. So again, this is another point where I can emphasize just how complex a system the ecology and climate for the entire earth is. So that means the problem of climate change is equally complex, and in turn, the solution is going to involve many systems. It's going to be interdisciplinary, etcetera. And as I mentioned before, there's even a debate as to how effective rewilding is as a policy. It's a bit out of scope for right now, but pleistocene rewilding is only one type of rewilding. There are other rewilding projects and proposed projects.

1:30:30 Chris: Some folks want to bring megafauna back to the north american prairie by introducing things like african rhinos and elephants and lions here in the good ol us of a. Kayla: Was I not just saying how much better it would be if there were mammoths running around all the damn time? Chris: It's a controversial proposal, to say the least. There's not to me, also something called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation initiative that has rewilding as a core tenethead. The Pacific Northwest in the US has undergone a pretty successful rewilding project by removing most of their hydroelectric projects in the region. The UK has a bunch of rewilding projects. Europe does, Africa does, other non Siberia, parts of Asia do. I mean, literally, I could just list every continent, right? Except for Antarctica, I guess. But my point is that this is a whole metadiscipline within environmental and conservation science. And my secondary point is that depending on specifically which type of rewilding we're talking about, there's some legitimate debate as to effectiveness. These challenges range from economic arguments to arguments along the like, you know, you're playing God lines.

1:31:40 Chris: The ZmoVs have a specific answer to this one because it's been levied at them so many times, which basically comes down to like, hey, we've been playing God this whole time. So, like, why is this where we should stop? Kayla: Right? Chris: Which I kind of subscribe to that, to be honest, to the like, hey, there may be unintended consequences here. Arguments. And actually, this is another great time to do a Jurassic park reference, because as we mentioned in the opening of the show, JP and the book, even more so than the movie, was kind of about the law of unintended consequences. And remember you were asking me earlier, like, what the hell? Why did they have so much character chaos theory in the book? Kayla: No, I asked. I didn't ask about the book. I asked about the movie. Chris: Okay, well, the movie was from the book. And the reason that chaos Theory featured as like a recurring theme in the book is that small changes can lead to unpredictably wild outcomes. The book was sort of about dinosaurs running loose, but the underlying theme was chaos theory. The underlying theme was unintended consequences of small changes.

1:32:42 Kayla: And that's why I was asking about the movie, not the book, because that makes sense for the book. The movie was about Steven Spielberg's relationship. Chris: With his father, which is what every Steven Spielberg movie is about. That's a good point. They probably didn't need Doctor Ian Malcolm for that. Actually, they definitely didn't. But then we would miss that. Kayla: Excuse you, sir. Chris: But then we wouldn't have the Jeff Goldblum. Kayla: Yeah, exactly. Chris: Meme with him, like reclining. Kayla: Also that like unrepentantly horny scene in which he has taken Doctor Ellie Sattler's hand and is dripping drops of water upon it in order to demonstrate chaos theory.

1:33:22 Chris: I forgot about that. Kayla: That's actually a good demonstration, though. Alan Grant looks on cuckolded and unable to intervene. Chris: My God. Did you just call Doctor Alan Grant. Kayla: A cuck in that scene? Absolutely has been cucked. Chris: Sorry. Oh my God. Kayla: We should all be so lucky as to be cucked by Jeff Goldblum. Chris: Fair enough. But yeah, like I said, I tend to agree with the zemovs here. Playing godship has long since sailed. We have always interfered with our natural environment. And also, just like the mammoth step megafauna, we are animals in that environment and we affect that environment. So let's endeavor to interfere with the natural environment in a conscious, scientific way rather than just doing it, you know.

1:34:08 Kayla: Willy nilly or even in a positive way. Like there's, that's what I mean, there's nothing to say that like, oh, we're animals. We interact with the environment. Yeah, but we're also animals that are very different than other animals. Like, we can interact with our environment in a conscious way, like you said. Said. So there's nothing unnatural about trying to do so in a positive or restorative way. Chris: Right, exactly. Kayla: That's just as natural as anything else. Chris: It's unnatural to consider that we don't have that effect. I think that's kind of what you were saying before about the sort of like binary, like divorcing ourselves from nature. We need to understand that we are part of the environment that affects the environment, which affects us the same way that a yakutian horse or a mammoth does. Here are a few bits of information that support me and Kaylin in our respect for pleistocene scene park first is from the Atlantic article that I mentioned before. Like many Russians, he and they're talking about Sergey here. He has a poetic way of speaking. In the arctic research community, he is famous for his ability to think across several scientific disciplines. He will spend years nurturing a big idea before previewing it for the field's luminaries. It will sound crazy at first, several of them told me.

1:35:20 Chris: But then you go away and you think, said Max Holmes, the deputy director of the Woods Hole Research center in Massachusetts, and the idea starts to make sense, and then you can't come up with a good reason as to why it's wrong, end quote. And if that isn't enough, here's a blurb from Wikipedia's entry on Mister Zimov and his park. Zimov's concept of Pleistocene park and repopulating the mammoth steppe is listed as one of the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming. By Project Drawdown, the list encompassing only technologically viable existing solutions, was compiled by a team of over 200 scholars, scientists, policymakers, business leaders, and activists. For each solution, the carbon impact through the year 2050 and the total net cost to society and total lifetime savings were measured and modeled, end quote.

1:36:13 Chris: So, Kayla, what do you think so far of Pleistocene park? Or actually, wait, hold on. Here's a better question. How does it compare to your true love, Jurassic Park? Kayla: I mean, they're completely different because whilst both park. I don't think you understand what you've done here. Whilst both parks have at their head a foreboding and or charismatic figure with a large white beard, only one of these charismatic figures seems to have any concept of perhaps their own hubris whilst playing God, as opposed to the other, which thought he could overcome his hubris and then had his grandchildren almost eaten by velociraptors.

1:36:59 Chris: Mmm, I see. Kayla: That's the only difference I'm really seeing here. Chris: That's the only difference? Yeah, it's just that, I mean, Pleistocene park is real. That's pretty nice, sir, and it's helpful. Kayla: Jurassic park is real. All of our hearts. Chris: I don't know. I think there's a lot speaking to Pleistocene park over Jurassic park. Kayla: What do you mean over? What do you mean? Chris: If we're stack ranking the two parks, I think it should. Kayla: You can't stack rank the two parks. Chris: I just did. Kayla: Okay, okay. You really want to stack rank them? Chris: Yeah. Kayla: Okay. Say Jurassic Park. I went like this. Okay, Jurassic park is real. You have the opportunity, okay? Just be in that universe for a minute. Chris: Okay, all right, fine. Kayla: Hold on, hold on. I'm not done yet. Jurassic park is real. Pleistocene park is real. God comes down and says, kris, I can transport you instantly to one of these parks.

1:37:45 Chris: I already am gonna. I'm obviously gonna say Jurassic park. Not the reason for that. Kayla: I'm not shitting on Pleistocene park. Chris: The reason for that is that Jurassic park actually has extinct animals watching, walking around. Okay, fine, fair. But what if? Chris: Do we want the zimovs to be knocking down trees by themselves this whole time? Or do they have another answer for that? Well, sort of leading question. AtlasPro: Yeah, maybe in, like, the next ten years, they would. Back when all of this step tundra was maintained naturally, the real champions of it were the mammoths. You know, we call it the mammoth step because not only were they the biggest animals, but they were really the causes of it. Some animals will trample the moss or whatever and make sure that moss doesn't grow, but the only animal that really knocks down trees are mammoths and mastodons, I should say. And we witnessed this in Africa. Still, you probably remember that clip of an elephant knocking down trees. Elephants do this all the time. You know, they either can't reach the leaves at the top or there's things that in the roots that they want to eat, so they just knock the tree over and eat whatever they want out of it.

1:39:01 AtlasPro: And we imagine, you know, considering just how related mammoths, mastodons and elephants are, that they would have the same exact impact on the environment, that we'd have mammoths running around and knocking trees over in order to get more food out of them. And that's why the z moths are doing it themselves, because we obviously don't have mammoths, but I. They're trying to actually de extinct the mammoth, and I think they set it up where pleistocene park would be a potential place to bring cloned mammoths or whatever test tube mammoths we come up with, whether it's splicing it with elephants or doing some DNA extraction on remains that are revealed from melting permafrost. How do we go about it? That's their end goal. I know they would accept it.

1:39:50 AtlasPro: I know they'd welcome a mammoth, and that would really be the point where the experiment is sustainable from, like, a natural perspective. Unless without them now, it would have just returned to whatever environment was there before, because, yeah, the tree, you know, there's still. There's still that level of moisture there's there aren't huge populations of animals. These are like, maybe there's a hundred of one type of animal, but there's not herds. You know, that's the thing is, back in the day, there used to be herds of millions of these things. Like, that's what really did it. Not just a few hundred, but without that, without. First without the mammoth, and then without those sorts of numbers, there does need to be sort of human inputs to keep the system working the way it does.

1:40:37 Chris: Right? So we're talking like Pleistocene park, but like Jurassic park now for bringing back mammoths, right? Hey, that sounds awesome. Yeah. AtlasPro: You know, I wrote, I made a video hoping that if one day they ever did make a mammoth, that I could, like, contact them and be like, can I go? Like, can I? Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what I want to do with this podcast, right? I want to be like, hey, guys, so if you have a mammoth, can I write it? Or is that. Yeah, but I mean, honestly, like, there do you think that will be. Chris: It feels like if that happens, that's. Chris: Going to be like a big news story. Like, all of a sudden, like, everybody is going to be talking about this. AtlasPro: That would, I think in like the late nineties, early two thousands, they were able to clone a sheep, dolly the sheep. And that was. Yeah, that was like a huge moment, you know, in terms of just genetics and biology. And I think that would be like the Russians, like sending Sputnik up, but like bringing a mammoth back, that would be like Americans landing on the moon and, like, walking around that. Right? That would be like, such a big. That would honestly, not even to compare it to Sputnik, that would be like equivalent of humans landing on the moon. Like, that would be as significant of an advancement in all forms of technology.

1:41:50 Chris: Yeah. AtlasPro: Personally, I am totally for it. I think it's cool if you're just doing it in labs or whatever stuff happens in labs all the time, but I really just don't know if it's possible. But if it is, Pleistocene park is probably where you're going to be able to see it. Chris: Yeah, I mean, I would see. I would be super jazzed about that, too. And it makes. Chris: Yeah. Chris: What you're saying about, like, comparing it to landing a man on the moon seems. Yeah, it seems equivalent. Like, if we brought back such a significant species, like, holy shit, that would be incredible. AtlasPro: Yeah. And that would, you know, even more space travel. That would open the door for just other species. You know, I just made a video about dodos and those only went extinct, like, 200 years ago, which means we still have some soft tissue from the dota. Like, we still have, like, their heads and some of their skin. And, you know, theoretically, like, we could actually extract full DNA. You know, there's just. There's so many other species that we could bring back. Honestly, thinking about it now, I don't think a mammoth would be the first animal that we brought back. I think it would. We'd probably have to work up to a mammoth. So, yeah, I'd probably expect a dodo before a mammoth, but either way, like, just to bring back any sort of animal that had been extinct would be remarkable.

1:43:08 Chris: So do you see any risks to that, though? Like, you know, Jurassic park, we know, didn't go very well. Chris: Not a risky prospect. AtlasPro: You'd like to think that the animals we'd bring back would all be carefully selected and, like, purposefully selected, but more than that, like, a mammoth, the mammoth's not a hunter. You know, we're not going to get a Jurassic park scenario where the, you know, the raptors have escaped their enclosure or anything. It's more going to be like, oh, my God, there's, like, one mammoth that's escaped, you know, like, this thing that, like, is, to be honest, the animals that we do end up bringing back, if we do at all, they will very likely be very sickly animals. They will not be like, you know, we're not going to get, like, a bralette mammoth first try. Like, they're going to be very vulnerable. They could die in, like, a matter of days, honestly.

1:43:57 Chris: Right. AtlasPro: I think that's how, like, the cloning of the sheep went. So I just. I can't picture us getting to the point where we're like, oh, my God. Like, the mammoths all escaped. Like, they're going to eat us all. It's like, they, like, they'll knock down a few trees, but, like, that's at worst, you know, the only thing I can mention is that a lot of people commented this on my video, but I didn't mention them bringing predators back, which would have to be done eventually, you know? Yeah, yeah. So, like, you know, you're introducing all these grazing animals, eventually you need to bring back predators, too. And there were some predators that went extinct. You know, there were, like, cave lions and all sorts of stuff. AtlasPro: You know, there were lions that were all the way up there, but I don't think we'd bother bringing those back. I think. I think we could still breed lions to be cold hardy if we really wanted to, or we could bring back wolves to the area. We have solutions to that problem where it wouldn't be, like, some animal that we've never seen, just, like, hunting humans, you know, it would just. It would more likely be us moving animals around that already exist here.

1:45:02 Chris: Right. AtlasPro: Other than things like mammoths, that really, we cannot find a replacement for. Chris: Right, right. I mean, realistically speaking, no offense to the Jurassic park fans, which I am one of them, but, like, we're. We're fine, you know? Like, even in the Jurassic park, like. Chris: Okay, we have nukes and they don't. Chris: So at the very least, we could just nuke the island. You know what I mean? Like, our technology is so far advanced, like, we, you know, our ancestors with spears were completely dominating these mammoths. So I don't think we would. AtlasPro: Our current technology, it's really, like, laughable to think that we would have the technology to bring them back, but not the technology to, like, deal with them.

1:45:43 Chris: Right, right. In general, are there any other risks or downsides to rewilding? AtlasPro: There are always ecological risks. If you consider it as an introduced species or as an invasive species, you could see it like that, which it could be. The mammoths could be so successful that they end up running amok in Siberia and knock down too many trees. And all of that causes a sudden spike in decomposition. Something that I read about recently was that diseases could come back, too. Like, certain animals were susceptible to more diseases or different diseases. If we brought back a mammoth, an elephant disease reached its way into the mammoth, it could just train even more diseases, which I don't think is necessarily that plausible.

1:46:33 AtlasPro: But it does bring back this worry that just something could be hiding in the behavior or, like, the physiology or anything of these animals that we don't really know about because we haven't seen them scientifically yet that could come back to bite us. And I think a mammoth's never going to hunt people, but a disease that comes from a mammoth might, right? Chris: Yeah, I guess if you take Jurassic park to be more metaphor than literal, then actually it does give some warning as to, like, there are things that we can't necessarily predict about these animals that have never existed during our lifetimes or during many lifetimes that, like you said, maybe it's disease, maybe it's behavior, maybe it's some interaction with some other thing.

1:47:20 Chris: With some interaction with some other thing. Chris: And that is definitely something worth being cautious about. AtlasPro: Yeah. Just being aware of how complex all of these relationships are before it's revealed to us. It could be something that's super obvious to us now, but we would have no way of knowing before bringing it back. Chris: Kayla, what do you think of the fact that in the next decade, we get to see a real life mammoth walking around in Siberia? Kayla: I have a lot of thoughts, shockingly, I have a lot of thoughts about this. Chris: Okay. Kayla: Shocking to no one. First, God, I hope it happens, because as of this moment, I'm just assuming we will all be dead from climate change within the next ten years.

1:48:03 Chris: Not a pleistocene park has anything to say about it. Kayla: Yeah. So I hope we're alive to see it. I hope we're alive to have it happen. That'd be cool and great. Chris: Yeah. Kayla: Second, I'm pretty sure, pretty, pretty sure that. I don't know. I can't imagine if we actually are able to bring back a mammoth at this point. I have very little faith that it'll, like, be under the, like, protection of science. It'll immediately be so that Jeff Bezos can eat it. Like, that is what is going to motivate us to bring a mammoth back before any sort of climate. Chris: If it makes me feel any better. If it makes you feel any better, there's a few, I think, a few different labs working on it. The one, there's a Harvard lab working on the problem. They specifically do have a deal with Sergey Zimov.

1:48:47 Kayla: Okay. Chris: To give him a mammoth. Kayla: Oh, my God. Chris: That's already. Kayla: The only thing I care about in life is that he gets his because, you know it'll be a baby. You know it'll be a baby mammoth. He'll get to take care of a little baby mammoth will have these pictures. Shut up. Don't talk about that part of him, this old grizzled man with a baby mammoth wrapped up in a blankie, feeding in a dang bottle. We need this to happen. We need to stave off the climate crisis just so we get those pictures of Sergey Zimov bottle feeding a baby mammoth. Chris: Fingers crossed. Kayla: Yes. Those are my immediate thoughts. Chris: So there's another video, by the way, that Atlas pro references in his Pleistocene park video on de extinction on the YouTube channel called Real Science, which is another great science communication. YouTube channel. Way too much for me to cover here. Again, I will link in the show notes, but this episode covers the detailed mechanics of the various methods of de extinction, including they cover back breeding, cloning, and CRISPR gene editing techniques. It's super fascinating. You should definitely watch it. If you want to know more about how the hell are they actually planning to bring a mammoth back, the other great thing from this video is that they talk about some of the de extinction projects that scientists have already done, such as the back breeding they did for the quagga, which is the extinct half zebra, half horse looking thing.

1:50:09 Chris: You know, there's like, a zebra in the front, horse in the back kind of deal. Have you ever seen a quagga? Kayla: Yeah. Quine version of a mullethood. Chris: And the semi successful cloning of animal called a Pyrenean. Pyrenean ibex. So, as Kaylin mentioned, so far, our de extinction efforts with cloning have produced mostly sickly animals. The ibex that the scientists birthed did not live very long, but that was all the way back in 1999. So I'm assuming some progress has been made. But, you know, speaking to his, like, well, we'll probably try something else first. It has already been tried. Like, they already tried to de extinct the Pyrenean ibex. Kayla: Okay. And as he mentioned, you know, just. Just reminding us all that ancient scientific event in which dolly the sheep was cloned.

1:51:00 Chris: We're getting to that age, Kayla, where, like, things that happened when were kids are, like, history book stuff. I know people that. Kayla: It makes me very excited. I just. I want people to think that I have a knowledge. I want people to think that I'm cool because I live through something. Chris: Yeah, I remember when Dolly happened. That was dope. And the fact that there's, like, somebody that refers to that as a historical event. It's kind of cool. Kayla: It was a historical event. Chris: Yeah. All right, so I have a confession to make. Kayla: Confess away. Chris: Okay. It's not really confessing. Kayla: Why are you gonna tell me that pleistocene park doesn't actually exist? I'll kill myself. I will jump in front of traffic. Chris: I would not do that to you. But, no, it's not really a confession, since you and our listeners have probably already noticed. I think you actually even commented on this, but this topic is a bit of a stretch for the cult thing.

1:51:51 Kayla: Yeah. What's the. Where's the cult? I mean, you've got a charismatic leader. You've got potentially chain of victims. Chris: Well, we'll get. Yeah, we'll get to our criteria. It's like. And it's definitely weird. Kayla: Yeah, it's for certain weird. Chris: Cloning mammoths and vodka pounding siberian super scientists is, like, kind of weird, but maybe not culty. So I kind of got into this as more of, like, you know, how you did cicada, or the line where just. I just really love the topic. I really wanted to do it on the show, come hell or high water. Even though the cult connection here is tenuous at best, I'm afraid for what. Kayla: You'Re about to say next, because I can see. See your face. Our listeners can't see your face, but I know the visage you have upon your face.

1:52:32 Chris: Or is it. Kayla: Oh, no. AtlasPro: I knew you were struggling to find out a way to tie this to cults or anything. And Sergey Zimov's ideas fit well into somebody else's ideas. And this guy, more than anything, is what I would think is where the cult starts to come into things. This man's name is Alan Savery, and he's from Africa. He's this white guy, though. He gave a TED talk a while ago. I actually had to watch it when I was in college, too. And he came up with this system called holistic management, or holistic land management. And it's the same thing. It's the same concept as Pleistocene park, except instead of protecting permafrost, you unleashed animals, grazing animals, onto lands that are becoming desertified. And they have the same effect. Right? They move moisture in the environment around.

1:53:29 AtlasPro: They take it from one place to the other, and they supposedly can bring back. The pictures that he's shared are amazing. But he has had far more reach and far more success at pushing this idea that holistic land management is a solution to not only desertification, but to climate change. And he, you know, it's the same idea, and he's come up with it. The reason that I didn't want to mention him in the video, and I didn't really want to send anyone his way, is that he. I don't know if he trademarked it, but he. He somehow made it his intellectual property to do this thing, to do holistic land management. Chris: He owns rewilding. I don't know about that.

1:54:09 AtlasPro: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like, you know, it's his operation at a certain point, and that's where it's like, it's one thing to educate people. You know, like, I. My videos are free online. Like, I don't have. I don't care. Watch it. Don't watch it. But don't charge people for letting cows loose in a pasture. Like, that's not. That's not really, you know, science in the same way. Chris: Yeah, agreed. AtlasPro: Yeah. I made that video, and obviously it connected with some other people. Lots of other people were like, have you read or watched Alan Savery? And I had, but then, you know, people started just, like, commenting on everything I would do. Like, they would everything on Twitter, emails, just like, hey, please contact me. Please contact me. I have to tell you about this amazing thing that's going to save the world, that's going to fight climate change. This is the solution.

1:54:58 Chris: Interesting. AtlasPro: That's when I started to get weirded out by it, when people thought that this was the solution, not a solution. Pleistocene park, that's a solution, not the solution. And there is no the solution. If you study in the environment, you know that there's not a single thing, not one act that you can do to save, you know, something as complicated as this. And that's really showed me that there is an aspect of this where some people are going to find the problem, right? In any cult, right? There's always a problem in a cult. Like, we're persecuted or we. The volcanoes erupting or something, or the crops aren't growing, and now we have this problem of climate change.

1:55:40 AtlasPro: And so as much as we have problems of the past, we still have them of today, and then we still have these people who will come out and say that they're the solution. Like, I can save you. I can be your savior, and only I have it, right? Only I have the ability to save you from climate change, to save you from desertification. So I think more than even the Pleistocene park. And Sergey Zimov, I'd say savory, has kind of cultivated a cult around his very similar, very, you know, it's just rewilding. It's just introducing animals. But he's gotten to the point where he has a following and people are very vocal and very convinced about his. His soul ability to end climate change.

1:56:30 Chris: That is a fantastic lead because I didn't know about that guy, and I am definitely, as soon as we hang up here, gonna check it out. Chris: Do it. AtlasPro: He has a TED talk. You watch. That's all. Need to watch. Really? Chris: Okay. Chris: Okay. Yeah. Chris: Like, the stuff you're talking about, like, really rings a bell for some of the things that we've talked about on the show before. Specifically, there's this. This idea, especially in, like, wellness and pseudoscience around wellness is the idea that there's, like, there's a one true cure, right? So, like, an example is like, back when most chiropractors still thought that subluxations was a thing. Chris: Every. Anything that you could possibly be wrong. Chris: With, you could fix by going to a chiropractor, right? Like, is all they had to do is adjust the subluxations in your spine, and they could fix disease, they could fix pain, they could fix cancer, they could anything, right? Yeah, that sounds like it's ringing a bell here, where there's, like, the one true cure for climate change, which is this, like, gigantic, massive, complex thing. And it brings me a question I was going to ask. I guess you sort of answered this already, but if you want to elaborate on it, I was going to ask you if this was like a silver bullet. Right? If we do this, Pleistocene rewilding all over Eurasia and North America, will that just completely solve the problem by itself?

1:57:43 AtlasPro: You know, definitely not. Chris: You know, I feel like I already. AtlasPro: Answered that aspect, you know. You know, on a basic level. No, because the main function of pleistocene park and rewilding is to protect the permafrost. So while it definitely will prevent, you know, more carbon from being released, there's still all this carbon that's already been released. You know, there's already a 200, 300 years of industrialized pollution that is already unaccounted for. And even though the other aspect of Pleistocene rewilding is building soil, which is a hugely carbon intensive process, and it stores a lot of carbon, that's something that takes thousands of years. These are natural cycles. These aren't. Turn them on and they start running at the speed that we think. It's gradual. How fast? Soil buildup. I took a few classes in soil and I think we build, like, one inch of topsoil for a thousand years.

1:58:41 Chris: Oh, man. That's not the speed of humans. AtlasPro: Yeah, exactly. And so even if the whole world is like that, you know, we. That's. It would not get to the point where we could combat our releases by just sequestering it through grasslands. Chris: Right. So it sounds like we're sort of like this might like it would diffuse a potential bomb, but it's more than we have. Yeah, yeah. AtlasPro: I've been thinking about it a little ever since you wrote to me. And I think. Yeah, I think we're just in a time where new cults around climate change can occur. I said it before, but cults always sort of arise from issues, whether it's the Romans killing us all or us being persecuted or even perceived threats. Right. They don't even need to be real threats. But I. The problem is that people think there's an issue, and that's ingredient one and two is somebody offers a solution. And as more and more people become aware and become worried about the climate and about the direction our earth is heading in, that opens up a possibility of just in this culture. And it starts as something that's harmless. It starts as people using paper straws instead of plastic straws or stuff like that.

1:59:53 AtlasPro: But the opportunity is always there for people to take advantage of people. And climate change is something that the more you know about science, the more likely you are to believe in climate change and to understand climate change. So the cults or the whatever that arise from that are all going to also be more science based. Right? Like, you can never tell somebody who believes in climate change that God is going to fix it or that me, the Messiah, is going to fix it, right? People who believe in climate change aren't going to really believe that, or most of them won't. But you can tell them that I have these special cows. I have this special way of doing something that's innate to me, and that's what you have to spread to other people.

2:00:39 AtlasPro: So I think the more dire the climate crisis becomes, the more people get involved and try to help, the more we'll start to see people sneaking in, people who don't really care, who just want to benefit themselves. Or maybe they'll probably start with trying to help the environment. It's an entry point. I can't really even imagine what people will say one day, but I don't think that it's hard to assume that we will see more stuff like that. Chris: Yeah, actually, that's really insightful. I think you're absolutely right about the threat thing. There's a lot that people will do when they feel justified means ends justified. In fact, we talked about this a little bit back when we did QAnon last year. Becoming self reflective a little bit. A lot of what you see with QAnon followers is they're willing to do almost anything because the threat is so great in their minds. The threat is so great that it's kind of like, whatever is just. Yeah, totally. Let's line up a bunch of politicians and hang them, right? Because what they're doing is they are abusing children and sucking their blood.

2:01:51 AtlasPro: Right. Chris: Which is, like, just so horrible that we're justified in almost anything to try to fix this. Now, obviously, that's absurd, but the self reflective part is like, do I feel that way about climate change? Like, am I susceptible to. Chris: Doing bad. Chris: Things as a means to an end? That is so compelling. And I think that's sort of what you're bringing up here. Is that like, then. Yeah, that opens the door. AtlasPro: Yeah. When I, you know, when I first started learning about the environment, we learned about these different paradigms that were like, the environment is something that humans are a part of. The one that struck me as most extreme is something called deep ecology, which is that humans by nature destroy the environment. Humans by nature harm the world, which I don't really believe. I mean, obviously we do, but we are also, you know, there is value in the human world. But if you don't find value in the human world, if you think it's your duty to protect life, not even like a living thing, like all living things, if you think that's your purpose or that's your goal, then yeah, what will stand in your way?

2:02:59 AtlasPro: What will tell you not, oh, if I have to murder all these people, if I have to convince people to drink all this poison, all this Kool Aid, it's for the environment, you know, it's to save us all, you know, and it's the same threat that anyone, right. About any sort of issue. This might be a bit before my time, but there were, there was a time where there were like climate terrorists even. You know, there were people who would like, attack oil rigs and there were people who would attack things and, you know, whether or not they were justified, I don't know, like, I'm not gonna say. But you can see that there is this very clear potential for people to be radicalized into thinking that they're protecting all of life on earth.

2:03:40 AtlasPro: And that's equally as tantalizing for human brains as stopping people from eating babies and stuff. Yeah, it fulfills the same goal or the same desire humans have to make things right. Chris: Yeah, I think people who are science minded to tend to like, you know, think in utilitarian terms more than like, you know, dogmatic moralist terms. And I, you know that I can see the person attacking the oil rig thinking like, okay, well, yeah, maybe I'm going to kill ten people in this oil rig, but I'm actually going to save 1000 people because the oil won't pollute, blah, blah, you know, lung cancer. AtlasPro: Yeah, I'll save 1000 people in the year 2022 or something, you know, 20, like 2100. Yeah. It's all a justification. But you have to realize that the best way we do this is not by becoming crazy, it's figuring out actual solid things that show clear results and that don't harm other people.

2:04:34 Chris: Right, right. And I think that a lot, and this is my preferred sort of framework for it is just that climate change isn't about saving the planet. Like, the planet's going to be fine. Like, it's been here for a long time. Chris: It will be here a long time after we're gone. Chris: And by the planet, I mean, like the whole biosphere, the whole ecosphere. Right. So it's really about saving a us, right. It's really about preserving our privileged place in it right now. You know, we've been worse off before, and we could potentially be worse off after right now. And so the question is, can we preserve our place and our comfort level in our way of life? Because the. Yeah, the earth is going to be fine. Like, it will continue.

2:05:16 AtlasPro: Life will still be around. But yeah. It's more of a question is, are the fields that used to farm today going to be the same fields that we've used to farm tomorrow? That if you have all these shifting weather patterns, are the places that reliably grow food going to be the same places that reliably grow food in a decade? And those are the real issues. That's the real implications of climate change. It's not, oh, my God, this ice is disappearing. No. The systems that we rely on, everything that we take for granted, that we don't even understand, that we take for granted, those can also go away. Those can also disappear in no time at all. Like, we can have floods ten times than we've ever experienced if we just keep doing this.

2:05:59 AtlasPro: And people don't realize that it is self preservation, it is still, again, about ourselves, as it always will be. But. Chris: There'S a lot of themes there that we've talked about on the show before. Utilitarianism leading to dangerous thoughts of means, justifying the ends. The whole, like, I can save a thousand people by murdering ten thing. Right? We've talked about that. Kayla: We have. Chris: We've talked about the one true cure. Right? We've seen that before. Actually, one of the articles I read, this one from the New Yorker, mentioned a fun word that I had never read before, probably because some obscure philosopher made it up as sort of like a joke. But here, let me try to pronounce it. Mono causotaxophilia. Monochazotaxophilia.

2:06:49 Kayla: Mono causotaxophilia. Chris: Which you can kinda get from the. Like he just jammed a bunch of words together. But it means the love of single causes that explain everything. I've been plagued by this many times in the past, and I think we all get plagued by this problem, right? It's a very easy hole to fall into, right? In the New Yorker article, the author was explaining that simple solutions to the climate crisis don't exist. And if you think one thing is going to silver bullet it, then you're suffering from mono causa taxophilia. I think Alan Savery, and therefore some of his followers definitely suffer from this. And while I didn't talk to any of his followers for this episode, I can say that I absolutely watched his TED talk. And, well, here's a quote. What are we going to do? And then he takes a long pause.

2:07:39 Chris: This is during his TED talk. There is only one option, I repeat to you. Only one. He raises his voice. Only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable. To use livestock bunched and moving as a proxy for herds mimicking nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind. End quote. Kayla: Man, what must it feel like to have that level of confidence? Chris: He got a standing ovation. Kayla: Of course he did. As we have learned from history, if you get up with enough confidence and speaking ability and passion, you can say a lot of stuff that will get people on their feet cheering for you. Not that I'm not saying that he's like a fascist, but I'm just saying a standing ovation is not necessarily an indicator of the value of your ideas.

2:08:34 Chris: Right? By the way, as an aside, I also checked the Savory Institute website, and yes, holistic land management is in fact trademarked. Anyway, now, I'm not an environmental scientist like Alan Savery was, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is wrong. Not only are there many alternatives that we can pursue, but there are many alternatives that we absolutely must pursue if this is something we're going to defeat and save our civilization. And I have some backup here, too. On this very video's page on Ted.com, there's a statement listed immediately below the video, which reads, note, statements in this talk have been challenged by scientists working in this field. Please read criticism and updates below for more details.

2:09:23 Chris: And those more details, read as in his talk at TED 2013, how to fight desertification and reverse climate change, biologist Alan Savery offered a surprising solution to the spread of deserts around the globe, grazing. By reversing the transformation of grassland into desert, he said such holistic, planned grazing could help solve climate change. Savery notes that such grazing is just one component of appropriate land stewardship, not a prescribed system, and its potential for success is influenced by each unique environment and context. But some critics have challenged the hypothesis. For example, one recent report argues that any gains from greening after grazing are more than offset by methane emitted from the grazing animals. In other words, the science around Savory's idea is complicated as with every area of inquiry, research is ongoing, end quote.

2:10:16 Chris: Now, specifically, as it regards Pleistocene park, this whole, like, methane produced versus carbon sequestered problem. Yeah, it exists, but remember that the primary goal of the animal rewilding there is to use the animal's activity to lower the average temperature of permafrost, to prevent it from melting, not necessarily to balance like, you know, greenhouse gas in greenhouse gas out. Kayla: Right. Chris: As Kaylin mentioned, grass decay, sequestering carbon takes a long time, but, you know, cows fart methane in real time, they do. But the larger point here again is about the silver bullet, or lack thereof. Pleistocene park is one bullet in that chamber, just a regular bullet, not silver. It is critical work that the Zmoffs are doing. It's critical science that they're exploring. But we have to also be open to other strategies, of which there are many new building techniques. Using wood for things that we would normally use, concrete or steel, for example. We should be open to carbon capture technology. We should be open to using more nuclear power to reduce consumption, especially in the west, to improving renewable power such as wind and solar, but also things like tidal energy.

2:11:29 Chris: We should also be open to considering out of the box scary things like geoengineering projects at this point. Hell, we should even be open to weird stuff like Kalin mentioned about putting white tarps over large tracts of land in the north. Who knows? Kayla: It doesn't even seem that weird. Chris: See if it does anything. Kayla: Yeah, like that seems like easy, cheap, right? Common sense, you know what I mean? Chris: It doesn't seem that weird, actually. You're right. That's a good point. But all these things, now's the time to try. The fact is, the climate has already changed. Like yakutian horses and mammoths, like all animals, we humans affect our environment, and it will have an effect on us. Climate change is scary, but also it was never avoidable in the first place, in the platonic ideal sense. We never had the ability to freeze our planetary ecosystem in time and have it never change. The question is, are we going to be thoughtful about it or not? Are we going to take some control of the undeniable and incredibly powerful effect our species has on the environment? Or are we just going to let those effects kill us off? Do we want to live in a world where we can sustainably allow our population to survive?

2:12:37 Chris: Or do we want to live in one where New York and Philadelphia are underwater, California is on fire, and the southeastern US gets ripped apart by hurricanes, or one where desertification of farmland causes widespread famine and refugee crises and wars over dwindling resources. Climate action isn't about saving the planet, it's about saving ourselves. And there are as many strategies to solve this puzzle out there as the human imagination can pump out, which is to say, endless. We talked about a few just now. If you want some specific actions you can take immediately, I recommend going over to place scene parks Patreon and giving them a bit of cash. I know we're also all politically exhausted in the United States right now, but if you get the chance, learn which politicians support climate oriented policies.

2:13:20 Chris: It's hard here, I know, because on both sides of the aisle there's a lot of either explicit denial on the right and a lot of, like, worthless lip service on the left. So you need to figure out how to support things like the Green New Deal. A good source for this, again in the interest of actions you can take, is the sunrise movement. They've done an excellent job recently of supporting climate friendly candidates. And as an example, they are in large part responsible for Ed Markey getting elected to the Senate over a Kennedy in Massachusetts. That's pretty huge. So once again, we'll put a lot of this stuff in our show notes, but there's action all across the board. There are a lot of things that people are working on to solve this problem across the world and there is no one silver bullet.

2:14:04 Chris: All right, Kayla, it is time for our gimmick. Kayla: I don't have a piece of paper. Chris: Cult criteria. Kayla: Hold on. Oh, God. Paper, paper. Chris: There we go. There's the criteria. Kayla: This is absolutely a piece of paper that has the criteria written on them. Chris: Don't tell people. Now I think we can maybe talk about both Alan Savory and Pleistocene even though the topic is Pleistocene Park. Kayla: I don't know. Chris: Fine. Pleistocene park. Kayla: Fine. Yeah, I don't think charismatic leader, in terms of what we're. Just to finish my thought in terms of what we're evaluating. We're evaluating pleistocene park. Chris: Fine. Kayla: Charismatic leader, obviously present. I could not be more charisma'd. I want six seasons in a movie of the anime about pleistocene park and the father son journey.

2:14:52 Chris: Absolutely expected harm. Kayla: That. See, that's hard. Chris: Look, it's uncertain. Kayla: It's uncertain for the folks involved in it seems like there's high. Chris: No. Kayla: For the sun. He's had a lot of harm. He has been. Chris: You don't know that. It's complicated, Kayla. He. Kayla: He said as much in his interview. Chris: No, he said that. He said that his father was selfish. It doesn't necessarily mean that. Kayla: And he was forced to be there. Chris: But he wasn't, though. Kayla: Like, he wasn't it. I'm just saying I know for. Okay, well, you and I need to have a conversation outside of this. But in terms of, like, the greater involvement. Yeah, it's probably not. Probably not that high.

2:15:36 Chris: Yeah. I think, like, the harm to the rest of society is, like, there's maybe some chance of something backfiring that we talked about. Right. Some unintended consequence. Kayla: I don't think the cute little chubby horses are going to do anything bad to us. Chris: No, but, like, what about the mammoths running amok and knocking trees? Kayla: He's so cute. Chris: I think there's a small chance that we could have, like, a mammoth related crisis. But for the most part, I think they're doing good. Kayla: Nah, I think they'll be fine. Chris: Yeah. Kayla: I want to see a mammoth knock some trees down. Chris: Presence of ritual. Kayla: Hi. Chris: Really? Kayla: I don't know. Chris: Probably mammoth. I guess if they, like, resurrect a mammoth in, like, a pentagram with candlest, I just. Kayla: I just. Yeah, it's probably not. I don't know.

2:16:21 Chris: You just said that for no reason. Kayla: I just pick. I just figure if it's science, then the ritual is high. Chris: Oh, that is not what we say here on the show. Kayla: Why not? Chris: I mean, there are rituals associated with science, but that's not what science is, bro. Besides, like, they're not wearing a lab. You saw the pictures I showed you of Sergey. He's not out there. Kayla: Certainly not lab coding. Chris: Erlenmeyer flask. He's out there, like, knocking down trees with a tank. Kayla: That feels like ritual to me. Chris: That is not ritual. That is just doing whatever the fuck you have available to you. Kayla: Say hello. Chris: Say hello. I think it's low. Kayla: They're definitely. There's no lab coding going on in this episode. Chris: No niche within society. Yes, I think it's pretty niche, because. Kayla: I hadn't heard of dang niche.

2:17:01 Chris: And I love science, and I was. I've. I watch science stuff on YouTube, as I mentioned. Kayla: I'm okay, actually. Chris: Didn't know about it till this year. Kayla: Question for you. Does Sergey Zimov call this place Pleistocene park? Chris: Yeah. Kayla: Has he seen the movie Jurassic park? Chris: I don't know. Kayla: Like, I'm just kind of surprised that he would tolerate the whimsy. Chris: I'm not sure, because it says that he started the project in 88, but, like, the park wasn't officially created until 96, so I don't know what started the project means. If that just means he was, like, dithering around with, like, some, you know, Excel spreadsheets or if it means he, like, had this whole vision. I don't know. Kayla: I mean, 96 is not that long after Jurassic park came out. Maybe he could not coalesce around the project until he had the cheeky name. Jurassic park came out, and then it was like, oh, this is the last puzzle piece I needed to fall into place. Pleistocene park. I'm just saying I'm a little shocked at, and this is my own bias, that the man that we saw would be into the cheeky name.

2:18:00 Chris: Maybe he was different when he was younger, maybe before he had his. Kayla: Maybe his son loved. Oh, my God. Maybe his son loved the movie Jurassic park, and so he named it Pleistocene park as a way to connect with the sun that he felt isolated from. Chris: Yeah, and I just looked up the book published date for Jurassic park, and that's 1990, so that doesn't. That doesn't encompass that 88 date. I don't know. But we're saying niche antifactuality, absolutely not low. I I mean, unless. I guess there's probably some people that still disagree with rewilding and specifically priced Pleistocene rewilding. They might say that the facts are not on their side. Kayla: I would say that they're wrong there. Chris: There's also maybe a little bit of motivated reasoning on the part of Sergey Zenith.

2:18:42 Kayla: Absolutely. Chris: I mean, I've seen him say things that are, like, very, like, oh, this is how it is when, you know, granted, he's seen data now from his studies, but he definitely had a theory that he wanted to prove true. Right. Which is a little. Kayla: That's not really how science works, as we discussed in the last episode. Chris: Right. Percentage of life consumed. See, I think this is where you're going for. With life, with expected harm. Kayla: Hundo. Hundo percent. Chris: It has consumed the life of two generations of russian scientists. Kayla: Three, because the son's children live there. Chris: The daughters play there. Kayla: They currently are fully isolated from the rest of society. Chris: Awesome. They get cute.

2:19:23 Kayla: I'm not saying it's not awesome, but that doesn't mean that 100% of your life is not considered fair. Chris: Fair. All right. Are their beliefs dogmatic? Kayla: I don't know. You tell me. Chris: Limited amount of information I've heard from the Zimovs themselves. I don't think it's dogmatic. Like, it seems to fit well within the greater paradigm of environmental science, at least at this point. Kayla: They're on that top hundred list that save, like, Doctor Savory flavor, where this is the only thing. Chris: Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Kayla: Which is the Doctor. Chris: It definitely doesn't have that, which I super got that from him. Finally. Chain of victims. Is there a chain of victims here? Don't bring up the sun thing again.

2:20:07 Kayla: How can I not? That's what it's all about. Do you think I care? The rest is bullshit. No, I care about the Shakespeare experience story at the heart of it all. Chris: Effort here. Kayla: What are you talking about? Chris: Single recruiting effort from the father to the son. But there's not, like, a pyramid of people underneath. Kayla: No, but you said chain, and I. They got. There's only. There's two links. Two links make a chain. I'm pretty sure that's the saying. Two links make a chain. Maybe the daughters are gonna get ripped into this too. You don't know. Chris: Yes. Kayla: The wife. The wife, she, like, fell in love with this man and then, you know, chained into it, forced to, like, decide, do I want to be with the man I love? Oh, I'm just reacting to the information that you have given me. And literally, the son was like, I had to. Had this wife, and she had to decide, you know, whether she was gonna go with me or not. Like, it was not presented as, like, oh, it was presented. It's like, this is a hard, tough thing.

2:21:03 Chris: So I think the authorization of the article was simply trying to point out that it's a tough decision in general. Not that there was, like, coercion happening. Kayla: Necessarily, but the son was saying that because he used the word forced. Chris: Okay, yeah, fine. Fair. So maybe there's some chain of victims, then. Kayla: I'm just. There is a. There is pain between the father and son. Maybe pain between the son, his wife, his daughters. Either way, I'm just saying there's, along with all of the good that I'm sure there is, there's also pain here. I don't know if that means there's a chain of victims. I just wanted to point it out. Chris: Medium. All right, so is it a cult or is it not a cult? Kayla: Bro.

2:21:43 Chris: What? Kayla: It's not a cult. Chris: Yeah, of course it's not a cult. I thought you were gonna bro me into saying it was a cult. No, no, it's obviously not a cult. What about the savory institute? Kayla: I don't know enough about them to say if it's a cult, but it definitely seems dogmatic. Seems a little more problematic than the pleistocene park. Chris: Yeah, I think there's definitely some. I would say their antifactuality is definitely higher because they have that, like, one true cause thing right. Kayla: What is it? Mesothelioma. What is it? Chris: Yeah, it's mesothelioma. You got it. Kayla: Maxofaxotaxilomelia. Chris: Maxofaxo tivola. It's mono causotaxophilia. Kayla: Monocazo taxophilia. Chris: Monosingle cause causo taxo. I don't know what the fuck that means. Philia, love of. Oh, taxo means like, everything, I guess. Okay, okay, so not a cult. Alan Savery's thing. A bit culty.

2:22:35 Kayla: Right? Chris: And I think that Kaylin brought up a good point about the increasing pressures and fears of the climate crisis driving people towards solutions that are hopeful but maybe not. Kayla: We are gonna see some wild shit over the next few years. We are going to see some wild shit. And I love that he brought up kind of the more seventies and eighties style Greenpeace actions that used to be. I'm assuming Greenpeace is still around, and I'm assuming those actions are still a thing, but they're less of a thing than they were in the eighties. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some return to some of those activities as well. If we see a spike in eco terrorism, we're going to see spikes in eco fascism, we're going to see some weird groups, we're going to see some weird cults. It's going to be wild. Yeah, but we can always just move to Pleistocene park and do the good work. I'm sure it will be cold enough there.

2:23:35 Chris: Yeah, I mean, well, actually, it'll probably be pretty temperate there in a few years. Kayla: Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Chris: Alright, as we sign off here, this is usually where we do the action items. Now, I've already talked about some action items with supporting Pleistocene Park's Patreon or checking out the sunrise movement. The usual action item also still applies. Don't like, don't subscribe, just enjoy the show. But I also want to circle all the way back to theme that we open the show on, that we've talked several times about, theme that feedback loops are powerful. And I want to remind you of that because the climate crisis seems so overwhelming sometimes that small actions don't feel like they can help at all. Why bother? What hope is there? And what I hope I've communicated here, is that small actions can have extremely powerful effects. And thanks to chaos theory, this is actually mathematically true.

2:24:28 Chris: I want to leave you with a cool little adage or thought experiment that has sort of made the rounds online over the years. I don't remember where this was first posted or who posted it, but the story goes something like in time travel stories we always talk about how dangerous it is to travel to the past because tiny changes in the past can have such a huge effect on the present. You know the old time travel trope of like oops, if I step on the wrong blade of grass in ancient Greece then when I come back home to 2021 we're all speaking German in America because we lost world War two or something. That's the butterfly effect and it's a popular time travel trope, but we never seem to consider that when we think about our own actions being useless in the present.

2:25:10 Chris: We never consider that from the perspective of a time traveler from the future. We actually have an extraordinary amount of power to create change. This is Chris, this is Kayla, and this has been cult or just weird shit. No, that's fine. It harmonized. Kayla: Terrible.