Beth Shapiro

And I had several different roles.

And then I randomly assigned whether they were pro or con.

And they had a couple of weeks to figure out what their debate was going to be.

And I took a vote before the debate.

And as you might expect for 18-year-olds in California, you say at the beginning, should wolves be introduced?

100% yes.

Right.

They do this debate, and I did it four years in a row, and every year after they had to do this, after they had to put themselves in somebody else's shoes and think about it from their perspective, it would shift, and the majority of people would be like, yeah, no, it's a bad idea.

I think if you give people the tools to be able to think, they can imagine themselves in a different scenario, and we need to do that.

We need to be arming people with thoughtfulness rather than jumping to a conclusion.

But everybody's going to vote.

Well, they're biology, right?

They're making decisions on where they can find their next meal.

We're not planning on rewilding dire wolves, just to put that out there.

I like that.

Plus, you've met Khaleesi.

I don't think she would be...

She kind of freaks me out already when you look at her.

We've been putting together, not because we're not going to release them, the next step for their lives is to study them and see how they're changed by their DNA being modified, measure things like their gene expression, their growth, their health span, their lifespan, learn the consequences of the work that we're doing, learn how they interact with the habitat, introduce Khaleesi to her brothers and the next animals that we make into that pack to make a small pack, but they will stay on that secure, expansive, ecological preserve that you were talking about.

Yes.