#2301 - Ben Lamm

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience.

Speaker 2 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 2 What's up, Ben? Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1 My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man.

Speaker 1 So, why don't you, instead of me, why don't you explain to people what you do?

Speaker 2 So, I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that is a wild thing. I mean, this is essentially, literally wild.
This is essentially real-life Jurassic Park.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally. Like, believe it or not, we get that.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 2 I got to drop my hydrogen tablet in here.

Speaker 1 Oh, you do those? The Gary Brecker ones, right? Those are great. Yeah, so.
Yeah, I love those.

Speaker 2 I just didn't want you to think it was, we were going a different direction.

Speaker 1 How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?

Speaker 2 So I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan.
I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park. I'm super stoked.
I love animals. I want to go work on this.
I'm just a weirdly curious person.

Speaker 2 So there's this guy named George Church. If you don't know George, you should look him up.
He's the father of synthetic biologies at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy.

Speaker 2 He's just the best, right? So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just, he's the absolute best. He's a genius.

Speaker 2 And I thought my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right?

Speaker 2 And so I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better.

Speaker 2 Like, how do we do directed evolution and how that could apply to like crops and animals and all kinds of stuff? So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions.

Speaker 2 He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab.

Speaker 2 In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things. I was like, wait, wait, what? And I was like, if you had one project, what is it, this mammoth project?

Speaker 2 And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them to the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human healthcare.

Speaker 2 And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that like the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke.

Speaker 2 Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line, whether he was in 60 Minutes or, you know, Stephen Colbert, whatever he's in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths and everyone kind of wanted him to do this.

Speaker 2 So I called him back the next day. Seven days later, I'm in his lab and we were off to the races on, okay, we're going to try to go build a company to bring back sing species.

Speaker 1 So how do you decide what to start with?

Speaker 2 So we started with the mammoth first, right? Because George, you know, had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies.

Speaker 2 We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.

Speaker 2 There was some ecological modeling that had been done to show that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem.

Speaker 2 And so that was an easy place to start. After we launched the company, it went crazy viral.

Speaker 2 And all these other folks from de-extinction research started calling us, like folks from the Thylocene or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature. It's awesome.

Speaker 2 The best shapir with the dodo, everyone just started calling us. And then we just started expanding

Speaker 2 our entire set.

Speaker 1 So how does one do this? So like, let's, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing, before that, that, how does one do this? Like,

Speaker 1 from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth. Yeah, let me walk through the whole process.

Speaker 2 So, first, you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So, the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate.

Speaker 2 So, we definitely need to find a lot of samples. So, we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.

Speaker 2 But it's also fragmented. It's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is, and someone's stolen part of the puzzle.

Speaker 2 And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So there's all kinds of problems with that.
So this is really an AI and compute problem.

Speaker 2 It's not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first, and then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative.

Speaker 2 And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as as mammoths.

Speaker 2 They're actually closer related to mammoth than they are to African elephants. Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind.

Speaker 2 That and the fact that mammoth were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids, like literally like humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed.

Speaker 2 And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur.

Speaker 1 When did they go extinct?

Speaker 2 So the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago. Really? On Wrangell Island.
Yeah. Wow.
So they've been a while. They were around for a long time.

Speaker 1 4,000 years? I know.

Speaker 2 They weren't, I mean, now they appeared about two and a half million years ago as far as we understand.

Speaker 2 They were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed.

Speaker 2 They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.

Speaker 1 Wow. And where's Wrangell Island?

Speaker 2 It's northeast of Siberia.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 And they just, was it a small island? They just ran out of resources there? Like, what happened?

Speaker 2 Well, there's a couple different theories, right? One of the theories with Wrangell Island is that they actually,

Speaker 2 there's lots of inbreeding. So there's lots of like genetic bottleneck, which happened because there's not a different species there.

Speaker 1 How large is Wrangell Island? I'm not quite sure. Can you give me a photo again, Jamie? I'll pull up a map one.

Speaker 2 Okay. And so essentially, though,

Speaker 2 Wrangell Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and the United and Russia, also is where they were.

Speaker 2 Those were kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today.

Speaker 1 And they died out 4,000 years ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and now some actually.

Speaker 2 There is actually

Speaker 2 another working hypothesis that they actually ran out of water. They ran out of access to fresh water on the island.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.

Speaker 1 Wow. 4,000 years is so recent.

Speaker 2 I know, it's crazy recent, right?

Speaker 1 Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus a African elephant?

Speaker 2 And they're actually mammoths, because there's a, you know,

Speaker 2 mammoth themselves, yeah.

Speaker 2 Mammoths themselves are close related to the Asian elephant.

Speaker 1 Which is on the left?

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium.
They have the small ears. They have a little bit of a hump structure.

Speaker 2 You know, mammoths because they have these massive, massive tusks, right? And,

Speaker 2 you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world. They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly.

Speaker 2 They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that. But one of the things that's awesome also about the Asian elephants is some Asian elephants,

Speaker 2 some of the ones that are born actually have, they look, they're not mammoth-like, but they have a lot of fur on them and they kind of lose it over time. Wow.

Speaker 1 So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand?

Speaker 2 Yes. And Thailand and then parts of different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent.

Speaker 1 I actually rode one of those once once with my family. Oh, did you go to them? I recommend it.

Speaker 2 Did you go to one of those places that you like to take care of them?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You have to get a relationship with them. So you feed them sugar cane and you wash them.
And

Speaker 1 you play nice with them for a while. Yeah.
A couple of hours. It was like at least an hour.
You're just hanging out with them, petting them.

Speaker 1 And then once they decide you're cool,

Speaker 1 they'll let you ride them.

Speaker 1 But my whole family rode them and I was like totally opposed to it. I was like, I'm doing it just because you guys want to do it.
I just want to feed them. Yeah.
I just want to hang out.

Speaker 1 Hang out with them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It just felt weird.

Speaker 1 My daughter fell off, I think, twice. One of them, my youngest daughter, fell off once, at least.
And I was like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding? You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's kind of a weird thing.

Speaker 2 It's a weird thing, right?

Speaker 1 And then afterwards, you get in the water and you wash them

Speaker 1 and everything. And I just kind of hung out with them.

Speaker 1 I'd be cool. They're very sweet.

Speaker 2 I don't think I'd want to ride one.

Speaker 2 I would just, I like being around them.

Speaker 1 There's a video on my Instagram of it. Yeah, there is.
There definitely is because she was eating a log. I was like, why are you eating a log?

Speaker 1 It's just weird. They're so enormous, but they're really peaceful and

Speaker 2 incredibly smart. And they have incredible pack dynamics, right?

Speaker 1 So they live in a herd.

Speaker 2 They've even had all these different examples where they also adopt other animals. I don't know if you've seen any of these videos.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. So here it is.
This is a few years ago in Thailand.

Speaker 1 And this is

Speaker 1 an Asian elephant just chilling with this elephant.

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Speaker 1 Yeah, 2018. Okay.
There it is.

Speaker 1 It was really cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's awesome.

Speaker 1 It's just cool to be around them. They're just a fascinating animal.
Just the biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists. This enormous.

Speaker 2 This enormous thing with this like robotic potential arm. Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you. Yeah, they sense it, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, we see that nature with a lot of animals, right? If you sense it and they don't feel like they're being backed into a corner or fearful, then they're not going to be around that.

Speaker 2 So some of our animals I've been around and they're starting to get quite large, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. Yes.

Speaker 2 That, yeah, at some point, though, you're still kind of like, they are wild animals, so you have to maintain some level of healthy distance.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so let's just get right to it. Wait, wait, wait, no, no, you want to finish the process?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, please. So, okay, so we have the

Speaker 2 ancient genomes that you have to collect and assemble. Right.
And that's, a lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab. But that's like some Indiana Jones shit.

Speaker 2 Like, we're literally going into the permafrost and like collecting dead samples from the permafrost, which, you know, you've had, you know, John Reeves on here. It's disgusting.

Speaker 2 It smells like death. It literally, I mean, I guess it is death.
It's just overtime piled up death.

Speaker 1 Have you visited John? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I visited John. You went to the boneyard? Yeah, I went to the boneyard.

Speaker 1 What's it like there?

Speaker 2 It's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect.
I didn't know John.

Speaker 2 So I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club. So we take these expeditions.
We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval.

Speaker 2 And then we're also doing some cultural studies with some of the Indigenous people groups around mammoths. Like, do you want mammoths back? Is this a good idea, right?

Speaker 2 Because we tried to be pretty inclusive.

Speaker 2 And they were like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in alaska john i was like okay great i'm excited so go meet him we pull up he's in a different car and he's like and i think he wanted us to follow him he's like get in i was like

Speaker 2 okay and he's a big dude he's enormous i'm not that big of a dude right no especially

Speaker 2 especially after gary breck has been working on me i'm a smaller dude right and so like i literally uh uh get in i get in the car there's a there's a bunch of stickers and there's one that has a butterflies on it uh that says give zero fucks and i was like and then there's and he's like, just move the gun over.

Speaker 2 So I move the gun over and he goes, listen, and this is the first words out of his mouth to me. If I stop short, you hand me that gun.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I didn't even ask a follow-up question because, like, what do you do when you get in the car with John? And he says, you hand me that gun.

Speaker 2 If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun. I was like, that's awesome.
And he showed me around the what kind of gun was it? It was just some type of rifle.

Speaker 1 So it was grizzlies.

Speaker 2 I assume it was for grizzlies, yeah. Or bears or, you know, something large.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then he showed me around the boneyard and showed me his collection. And he was completely, I mean, he didn't know us from anybody.
He just opened up everything to us, right?

Speaker 2 And he's like, let me show you all this, showed us his skull. He actually has a warehouse.

Speaker 2 I don't know if he ever discloses where it is, but he has a warehouse where he has some of the greatest specimens ever. So it's cool.
You should go. It's cool.
I do want to go.

Speaker 1 He's an amazing guy. Yeah, and he's a cool, and he's a cool guy.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, oh, we'd love to, we'd love to, you know, take you some of your samples. Can we take him? And he's like, no.

Speaker 2 And he was very honest. And he told us, and that's like before your podcast with him, we kind of learned that story, right? And so that's what sucks is how like some people can ruin it for everybody.

Speaker 2 You know, because he's, you know, outside of Fairbanks, it's not the easiest place to build a, you know, biocontainment level three lab.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 But he's like, but he was open. He's like, you build a lab here, you can use whatever you want.
But he's like, the bones stay here. So he is very consistent with his messaging.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, the whole deal with the Museum of Natural History, right?

Speaker 2 And I totally believe it. I totally believe it.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a fact now. They found these bones in the East River exactly where they told them to drop it off.
They have step bison fragments.

Speaker 2 Yes, I've seen it.

Speaker 1 Woolly mammoth fragments. So they know that they're there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and we'll, I mean, you've built a relationship with John. He's just a normal, no-bullshit kind of guy.
Yeah. He's like, you stole this stuff, give it back.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Or he's also like, hey, if you want to come work on it, come on. Like, he's very collaborative.

Speaker 1 It's also, it's like, what do you guys have? Like, why are you keeping that shit in a basement? Like, what is that?

Speaker 2 I mean, when we do work, you know, outside of the expeditions of collecting ancient DNA, DNA, when we do work, we also work with museums, right?

Speaker 2 And so we go to like the catacombs of the museums, and it's exactly what you think of as like the Vatican archives, right?

Speaker 2 You go down to like sub-basement four of the Smithsonian, and it's just rows and rows and rows of taxidermy animals that you've never seen.

Speaker 2 It's got like little drawers and boxes, and they're like, oh, this is giant sloth poop. And I was like, I didn't know there was giant sloth poop.
They're like, yes, and we think there's DNA.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, this is like, you know, the card catalog of like all speech, of all like dead species, but it's not on display for the public. It's just in a basement.

Speaker 1 And is it extensively archived? They know where everything is, or is there some stuff down there?

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say that they are the

Speaker 2 at least any museum.

Speaker 2 I think they have a lot more than they know. I don't see it in massive computer systems because we asked for inventory lists.

Speaker 2 What's the shopping list?

Speaker 1 It's been over 100 years they've been doing this. So people have come and gone.
Oh, they'll pull out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, and they'll pull out drawers that have like Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's how we did the thylacine. We actually found in a cup about this size, we actually found what's called, we call it the miracle pup, where they shot the mother.

Speaker 2 They took the three Joeys, the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde. And we got a 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup.
Wow.

Speaker 2 But they didn't even know they had it. They also,

Speaker 2 on the thylacine, which I'm sure I'll talk more about more later, they also found a head in a bucket. They didn't even know it was the mom's head.

Speaker 2 So, we actually knew we could actually look at the genetic relation between the two. And they actually found, they didn't know they had the head in the bucket.
They just had a head in a bucket.

Speaker 2 They opened it up, it was marked thylacine, they opened it up, and there was a full thylacine skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything.

Speaker 2 And we use that to get to a 99.9% complete genome because we also had the ancestry of the two, of the pup and mother.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being fully utilized.

Speaker 1 So if you have 98% or you have 99%,

Speaker 1 what's the process of going from that?

Speaker 1 So here it is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's the head in the bucket.

Speaker 2 So Andrew Pask, who leads our,

Speaker 2 in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And yeah, that's the head and bucket.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's Petrus bones, which we'll talk about a little bit.

Speaker 1 Do you buy into any of these sightings?

Speaker 2 No. I did.
So Andrew Pasque Pask for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing.
He's awesome.

Speaker 2 He's been working on like a shoestring budget. And that's part of the problem with the extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now.
And he's been working on it for 15 years.

Speaker 2 And he's had people send him, you know,

Speaker 2 poop,

Speaker 2 clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years. So you just send it to him.
And then he loves the thylacine so much, he just sequences it. And he's like, nope, it's a dog.

Speaker 2 You sent me more dog shit. Thanks.
I mean,

Speaker 2 it's demoralizing. But like when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with him.

Speaker 2 We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than the Australian government. We made the largest investment in research for marsupial development of anyone.

Speaker 2 So we do this, and then you get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? You start reading, I start reading all the books on the thylacine.

Speaker 2 I want to be at, I get obsessive about projects. And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now.
And so got super deep in it. And then I started calling Pasco.

Speaker 2 I was like, hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos and I kind of think they're still there. And Pascal's like, no, no, stop it.
Don't go down that rabbit hole. So I don't believe that.

Speaker 1 Well, why did he say that?

Speaker 2 Well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right? So not just southern Australia, but all over Tasmania.

Speaker 1 So samples, poops.

Speaker 2 Samples, just everything, using camera traps. And nobody's,

Speaker 2 I think they officially say that the thiolacine went extinct in 1936.

Speaker 2 But probably into the late 40s and early 50s, they still existed. But I mean,

Speaker 2 I think it's very unlikely that one still exists. It'd make our lives a lot easier for it.

Speaker 1 Forrest really believes in it.

Speaker 2 He does. He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.

Speaker 1 And because of sightings.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 he thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea in the mountains.

Speaker 1 And they're also incredibly remote. Yeah, very difficult.

Speaker 2 And the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea

Speaker 2 singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator prey, from where the thylassine sightings were.

Speaker 1 It's a singing dog.

Speaker 2 It's just another large canid that has a unique howl.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. So, but it still exists.

Speaker 2 I'm sure Jamie can find a video.

Speaker 1 I want to hear that. I've never heard of this.
A singing dog. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wow. Hopping New Guinea singing dogs.

Speaker 1 By the way, folks, we're teasing you because

Speaker 1 this is not just theoretical. Yeah.
So this is what's going to get crazy.

Speaker 1 This is going to get weird. This podcast is going to blow your fucking mind.
Go ahead, Jamie.

Speaker 1 Opera singers.

Speaker 1 these queer animals have a knack for holding a tune, even to an exact key.

Speaker 1 Opera singers love these. Oh, they're so cute.
Yeah. They're so cute.
Do people keep them as pets? That looks like a dog dog. Yeah, it looks like a dog dog.

Speaker 1 That looks like a dog that would be a little bit more.

Speaker 2 They're wild dogs in Papua New Guinea, but I'm sure people have domesticated them.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Pretty fucking cool dogs. And hanging out with a fox.

Speaker 2 So once you have enough of that DNA, right, from all these different samples and you can assemble it, you then have to build comparative genomic models to its closest living relatives, in the case of the mammoth, the Asian elephant.

Speaker 2 But I'm from software. So I just assume there's like the, you know, Google cloud of DNA.
Like we backed up, like we've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt, right?

Speaker 2 So we should assume that, I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of like the 23andMe of all species. Right.
That doesn't exist. Wow.
Which is insane.

Speaker 2 So there's like, there's no backup. There's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life, like kind of like the seed vaults.
That doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 And so we're actually petitioning the US government to help put a massive project together to help biobank. It's starting with just American megafauna and keystone species.

Speaker 2 So that doesn't exist at all.

Speaker 2 And so then you so then Colossal had to go out and go build the reference genomes for all the species, like the closest living relatives for all the species that we're working on.

Speaker 1 So this is the question. If you have, say, let's go to Woolly Mammoth.
So if you have Woolly Mammoth and you have 99%, how do you bridge that gap?

Speaker 1 How do do you create?

Speaker 2 That's synthetic biology. So you never have to get to 100%, right? You need to get to probably

Speaker 2 synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools.
Probably heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is it knock out, it breaks the DNA.

Speaker 2 It's not always the best tool.

Speaker 2 We can now actually make individual edits to, when you think of the DNA double you know, helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides.

Speaker 2 We can change the letters. Like that's how precise we can be.
We can say at spot, you know, 4,008, I need to change that letter. And so you change that letter.

Speaker 2 And then other times, you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in

Speaker 2 the Asian elephant, there's a difference.

Speaker 2 And if it's in these certain like protein coding regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical like attributes, like, you know, curved tusk, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 you're only really looking at that 0.4% difference, right? It's still a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that.

Speaker 2 And so the better you can be at software and the better you can be using AI and computer models, the less edits you have to make, right?

Speaker 2 Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes. Right.

Speaker 1 Are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they're larger than the elephant.

Speaker 2 So mammoths were about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made.

Speaker 2 And so there were 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different

Speaker 2 ways, and some of them were larger. But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing, that has that woolly

Speaker 2 phenotype, it was about the size of an Asian elephant.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 but to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes. We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well.

Speaker 1 And so there's specific characteristics that these animals have, one of them being the big furry coats that you guys, what did you do with mice?

Speaker 2 We made woolly mice.

Speaker 1 See if you can find that.

Speaker 2 The only unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck. Like people lost their minds, right?

Speaker 2 Like we are, there's, there's, I was, I was on the phone recently with a, you know, moderately aggressive

Speaker 2 journalist,

Speaker 2 and it was going quite poorly, as some calls go.

Speaker 1 Moderately aggressive? You're being aggressive in what way? Why are you doing this?

Speaker 2 Some people, yeah, everyone likes to be like, Look how cute.

Speaker 1 Look how cute. My daughter actually found this online and wants one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so we get that a lot from.

Speaker 1 She wants a woolly mouse.

Speaker 2 So every week, every week, I don't have my laptop. I actually.

Speaker 1 Look how cute. But every week.
Oh, my God. They're adorable.

Speaker 2 So these woolly mice aren't just adorable. We basically said, look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a of a mammoth from an Asian elephant to a mammoth?

Speaker 2 And then because we want to do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants.

Speaker 2 We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens. So we looked for the mouse equivalent, right? So we look for like all of us have similar genes.

Speaker 2 And so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them, right?

Speaker 2 Or that may not even be compatible with life, right? So we try to be really, really thoughtful about it. And the woolly mice went like it went insane.
There's people that are like making t-shirts.

Speaker 2 There's a meme coin.

Speaker 2 And so we made 36 mice.

Speaker 1 They're all healthy.

Speaker 2 There's 36 mice that we made.

Speaker 2 And what was crazy about it is we're excited about it because it shows that the end-to-end process of taking data from an ancient

Speaker 2 DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with a hundred percent efficiency. And that's really important and really hard.
So we did it with a hundred percent efficiency.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the

Speaker 2 difference.

Speaker 1 Well, so the one of them, if it was in a trap, you'd be so sad. Yeah.
Like the little guy on the left, if he was in a trap, I'd be like, oh, what could we killed? Isn't that funny?

Speaker 1 Just a little bit of fur makes you love them.

Speaker 2 And that's the color that we think most mammoths were.

Speaker 1 Really? They were like a blonde.

Speaker 2 They were like a golden brown color, right?

Speaker 2 Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time oh but if you see very fresh mammoths like from siberia and whatnot like in yakuts and other places in northern siberia that they actually have uh pretty pretty well-preserved mammoth they actually have kind of a uh dirty blonde meat uh gold meats brown fur wow and so we did that and now there's people that are making t-shirts that aren't us and pillows that are like legalized woolly mice i'm like they're not illegal and then there a meme account for the guy that did the like the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A meme account.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. So that's mammoth fur.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on X that

Speaker 2 these are a bioweapon and that Colossal is made a bio.

Speaker 2 So the weirdness of the woolly mouse went crazy viral. What we were trying to show is that we used our multiplex editing tools, meaning that we edited all of those genes at the same time.

Speaker 2 Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live. From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations.

Speaker 2 We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time, all over the genome, get exactly what we want.

Speaker 2 And then we have this, what's called monoclonal screening, where we're screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds like overkill.

Speaker 2 But then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off-target effects in the genome so that we know the mice that we then do cloning with, we know that they'll they'll be healthy.

Speaker 2 And so we try to spend a lot of time on that because we're certified by American Humane Society. It's the oldest humane organization in the world.

Speaker 2 And if you've seen the film that's like, no animals were harmed in the making of this film, that's those guys.

Speaker 2 So we've ended up,

Speaker 2 so we really care about kind of not just the de-extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out.

Speaker 2 And so the woolly mouse was a really interesting proof of concept. It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right and we're getting exactly what we predicted.

Speaker 1 Is there any plans to sell those?

Speaker 2 No, everyone keeps asking us that. But you know what? Museums actually are now calling us saying,

Speaker 2 and zoos are calling us saying, Can we display the woolly mice? They're like, it'll drive so much value. It'll teach people about genetics and whatnot.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy.

Speaker 1 Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone, even at a zoo, who decides I want more of these.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 if we ever put them, I think more likely we'd put them in a museum that needs to be free, like the Smithsonian or something like that from an education perspective versus something that's more attraction-based.

Speaker 2 I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.

Speaker 1 Do you plan on keeping this batch alive? Yeah, they're going to live out their normal lives.

Speaker 1 But you're not going to make new ones.

Speaker 2 We may make new ones. What if they make?

Speaker 2 They're all separated. They're all separated by sex.
So we're not going to have like a Jurassic Park moment where they change.

Speaker 2 They're all separated by sex.

Speaker 2 But if you if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live, they live a couple years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice that live in like a small little cage and all on top of each other.

Speaker 2 They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like

Speaker 2 he spared no expensive cool little house. Yeah, and they're big and we, you know, we put fun stuff in them to play with like this.

Speaker 2 And what's been crazy is we only named two of them and we named them Chip and Dale because

Speaker 2 people were asking what the names were, and I was like, Chip and is the only thing that I could think of at the moment. And now, even on X, people are like, We need pictures of Chip.
Where is Chip?

Speaker 2 We've only seen pictures of Dale. And there's like these incredible internet sleuths that are like, that's not Chip, that's Dale.
We need a picture of Chip.

Speaker 1 You can't get involved.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so we've just, yeah, we don't, don't get involved with those people.

Speaker 2 We've not leaned in. Yeah.
You cannot. We're excited.
They're excited, but we just can't. Yeah, we're busy.

Speaker 1 So, so this is a new thing. The woolly mouse is a new thing.

Speaker 1 Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things?

Speaker 2 So it's more of a proof of technology. I think that the mouse model, because it's a 20-day gestation versus 22 months in elephants, it's a great way to test phenotypes.
Because with

Speaker 2 a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right. One, you can do molecular tests.
You can do DNA sequencing to see if it worked.

Speaker 2 Two, I guess there's four. Two, you could grow a mammoth and see if it looks like it, but that's a lot of work in 22 months, like a lot of gestational time, a lot of money.

Speaker 2 I think there's a lot of risk in that. The third, and this is a little weird, we created what's called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Speaker 2 So we created cells that you can then turn into any type of tissue. So we actually do have mammoth hair follicles growing in a lab.

Speaker 2 So we have hair growing in petri dishes in the lab, which is pretty cool. And if you come see the lab, you'll get the whole Willy Wonka Torah, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 And then the fourth way is mice, right?

Speaker 2 Because it's like, if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately within 20 days if the edits were working, if there were any unintended consequences that would be detrimental to the animal.

Speaker 2 Wow. So we'll probably make more iterations of the woolly mice.
The thylacine's closest living relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, which is a mouse-sized marsupial.

Speaker 2 And it actually gestates in 13 and a half days versus 20 days. So there's no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model species.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So, how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?

Speaker 2 So we're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo for different reasons. We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and Indigenous people groups.

Speaker 2 And a project that we announced through our Colossal Foundation about two and a half years ago is doing a population genomics map. We talked about biobanking a little bit.

Speaker 2 So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity, what's been lost, you know, what's the number of inbreeding.

Speaker 2 So we go through this whole process to try to understand. And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox.

Speaker 2 It's one of the largest Indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we're giving them a report out on this.

Speaker 2 We went to their nation, wanted to share this. And then we're curious.
So we said, what other projects would you work on

Speaker 2 that we could do that's helpful outside of helping the bison? And they said that we needed to help with wolf conservation. They brought up that.

Speaker 2 They said that we needed to help with more bison conservation.

Speaker 2 They said if we could do stuff around eagles and fish. And so we kind of got that feedback.
And when Chairman Fox is walking me through

Speaker 2 their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf. And he said, you know, that's the great wolf.

Speaker 2 And he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost and how many people believed

Speaker 2 that it could have even been a dire wolf.

Speaker 1 And I was like, from Game of Thrones?

Speaker 2 That's cool. I love the show.
That's interesting. So I did that.
We talked about that.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and

Speaker 2 understanding that

Speaker 2 for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up.
I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster.

Speaker 2 You know, it's the only endemic wolf to America. It's only endemic to America.
It's a red wolf. It's beautiful.
And there's like 15 left in the wild.

Speaker 2 with massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation.
We can't save our own.

Speaker 2 When you think of like the American West, right? You think of wolves, you think of like, you know, eagle soaring, you think of like trout, bears catching trout,

Speaker 2 you think of bison. The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like, we were like, we have to do something about this.
We have to figure something out.

Speaker 2 And so we put that kind of on the list.

Speaker 2 And then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years and teachers sent parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths or dodos or tiles scenes like we get like boxes of this every single week which is pretty cool so we're gonna make a colossal kids corner at our new labs and and in that we've had all this some Hollywood talent like you know Tom Brady others that have invested in the business they're just excited about it most of them learned about it through their kids kind of like with the Woolly Mouse with you.

Speaker 2 And so everyone's excited about it. And then we talked again to MHA Nation.
They brought up the direwolf again.

Speaker 2 And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species because dire wolves were only found in the U.S., a little, in North America, but predominantly in the United States,

Speaker 2 coastal United States. And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also

Speaker 2 help wolf conservation and bring people from like sci-fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation, we thought it was a cool idea.

Speaker 2 But we had no idea if we could pull it off.

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Speaker 1 is there

Speaker 2 dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost or is no most are most of the dire wolf skulls out there uh there's thousands of them in the brea tarprett so if you go there they have this beautiful wall but because of heat and

Speaker 2 acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like, there's nothing you can get from that.

Speaker 2 But about six years ago, a group, including Besh Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right? And in that tooth, they actually found a

Speaker 2 they actually got 0.15x or coverage of the genome, so they got about 15% of the genome. But that's not really enough.

Speaker 2 You need to get up to about 10x, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times so that even if there are gaps, you understuff it, understand enough of the core kind of coding regions that you could bring back that animal.

Speaker 1 So is this done by AI? Is this done by AI?

Speaker 2 It's done by AI and software, yeah. So we built part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems.

Speaker 2 They're much harder to solve than just solving them for existing species, open sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out.

Speaker 2 So our first computational analysis analysis company was called Form Bio, and we actually spun it out of the business.

Speaker 1 So, you have this tooth, you have 1.5.5%, so 15% of the genome.

Speaker 2 And so, I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, Could you resample the tooth? And she's like, It's like, you know, half an inch long.

Speaker 2 She's like, It's destructive sampling, like it's going to ruin. I was like, Well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible? So, we lucked out, and that tooth is 13,000 years old.

Speaker 2 The skull itself is 72,000, 73,000 years old, not exactly sure. But it was found in a riverbed and it wasn't found in a riverbed at the mouth of a cave.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't found like in the permafrost, but it also wasn't found in like heat and

Speaker 2 acidification. So there's a bone in all of us called the Petrus bone, which is insanely dense and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born.

Speaker 2 It's a great DNA storage, better than teeth, better than anything.

Speaker 2 It's like in the inner ear kind of head area.

Speaker 2 And so we got permission from the museum to very carefully drill into the back, the underside of the skull and remove the Petrus bone to see if we could get DNA.

Speaker 2 And we got really lucky between resampling the first and

Speaker 2 the skull, we ended up getting about 13 to 14x coverage. So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the direwolves.

Speaker 1 And then what'd you do?

Speaker 2 Well, and then

Speaker 2 we got a knock on the door. I know CIA.

Speaker 2 No, so we took that DNA.

Speaker 1 Can I ask you before we even start with this? Yeah. The aggressive reporters,

Speaker 1 is it you're playing God?

Speaker 1 How do you have the right to do this?

Speaker 2 So it's been a journey. Okay.
So the journey that we've had is when we started the business, we didn't have any scientists. We just didn't, right?

Speaker 2 They're like, this is tech bros wanting to see cool animals. And oh, they've only got $16 million in funding and they don't have any scientists.
Ha ha. So that was phase one.

Speaker 2 And then we're like, oh, well, you know, as an entrepreneur, my job is to hire much smarter people than me. You smoke cigars?

Speaker 1 i do not um gary's got me on quite a kick so health kick yeah so yeah i mean cigars aren't bad for you well i'm not saying they're bad for you i'm just saying that i allegedly yeah i i don't care i'll take this is the last of them the things that i partake in that are probably bad for you yeah but you gotta uh you gotta do what you gotta do everyone's got their vices i like a little cigar um so

Speaker 1 my question if i was gonna grill you if i was a reporter it'd be like what what right do you have to invade the natural process of nature and to inject your curiosity and your ability to create new life?

Speaker 2 I think that we've become the apex part on this planet. And we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean, we overhunt something.

Speaker 2 In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right?

Speaker 2 And every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we drink hydrogenated water, we are playing God on some level, right?

Speaker 2 Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things. Now, the good news is, is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be.

Speaker 2 And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand.

Speaker 2 One of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing 14 or 15 wolves back into Yellowstone.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed.

Speaker 2 Like it changed the shape of rivers, you know, because the elk population were just, you know, they were getting fat, they were getting lazy, they weren't migrating.

Speaker 2 The sick and the old and the weak weren't getting killed off. They were spreading disease.
They were eating all of the willows and everything along the banks. So therefore, the beavers went away.

Speaker 2 Beavers are like the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist because they make wetlands,

Speaker 2 they cause the rivers and ponds to get deeper. So it allows different types of fish and different types of animals.

Speaker 2 So you have this thing called tropic downgrading, and you have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce these species.

Speaker 1 That documentary is fascinating.

Speaker 2 It's so fascinating.

Speaker 1 Wolves change rivers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know people that lived in Montana before the wolf reintroduction, and a lot of people don't like that the wolves are there, but most of them are elk hunters that were used to something that's just outrageously overpopulated.

Speaker 1 That's the reality of it.

Speaker 1 But they were telling me that there was

Speaker 1 so many elk that were living, they had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available that they had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter.

Speaker 1 Like you can hunt cows in the snow. So in the middle of the winter where they can't move good, you just pick them off in the snow.
Because they were just trying to cull the population.

Speaker 1 They were trying to diminish them.

Speaker 2 And that's not good for the elk

Speaker 2 population. No, it's not.
It's not only good for the ecosystem, but it's not good for the elk population itself. Right.

Speaker 1 I have a good friend who lives in Colorado. He has a ranch in Colorado.
And we were at his place

Speaker 1 approximately two weeks after they reintroduced wolves. So they actually reintroduced wolves on his property.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And he didn't know it was going to happen before it happened. And all the people around there are ranchers.

Speaker 1 So already, these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said, have killed over a dozen cows and calves. So the problem is they've killed elk as well.

Speaker 1 In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground that the wolves had killed. I'm not a big fan of people getting to vote on whether or not you should do something with wildlife.

Speaker 1 I'm a big fan on having real wildlife biologists assess situations. And in the case of Colorado, Colorado obviously borders Wyoming, and Wyoming has wolves.

Speaker 1 Wolves were making their way into Colorado already, and they are protected.

Speaker 1 The problem with reintroducing them is you're essentially asking a wolf that doesn't know the territory to start killing things in that territory.

Speaker 2 If that were to stop at an imaginary border, it doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 There's no border. They go hundreds and hundreds of miles.
But the idea that you're doing this and you're doing this where there's ranches is crazy.

Speaker 1 And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife.

Speaker 1 So they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they

Speaker 1 started killing wildlife. Yeah, but they're killing, excuse me, I'm saying wildlife.

Speaker 1 What I really meant to say was

Speaker 1 animals, agriculture.

Speaker 1 They're killing domesticated cows.

Speaker 1 They're killing these calves. And

Speaker 1 they're having a real fucking problem with that.

Speaker 2 And it is something that needs to be continually monitored, that shouldn't just be on some random vote of how you feel about it, right?

Speaker 1 You just can't let people vote on that.

Speaker 1 Too many people live in these high population areas.

Speaker 2 I couldn't agree more, right? And so, like, we as humanity, like, if you look at the third leading cause of death of

Speaker 2 elephants, it's human-elephant conflict, right? Like, we have to figure these things out.

Speaker 2 We don't want degraded ecosystems, we don't want to lose species, but

Speaker 2 you have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way, right? Like with Yellowstone, they're like, this is big enough ecological preserve.

Speaker 2 We're tagging the animals, we're going to walk and measure it.

Speaker 2 I don't think that it's safe or smart to put any, you know, not just predators, but also like large herbivores in these heavy population-dense areas.

Speaker 2 We can just, we just, we have to understand that some of these areas not are lost, but have already been changed for a different reason.

Speaker 1 Yes, and they've achieved homostasis, homeostasis. They've achieved the balance,

Speaker 1 which is the big issue with Colorado right now. And it's going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce an animal that used to be there and is no longer there.

Speaker 1 And I think in the case of Montana, I think you're right. And I think that there is an argument that maybe the wolves being there is better.
Obviously, not if you're a rancher.

Speaker 2 Well, the Colorado, so the Colorado stuff is completely going to to destroy all of the stats. So pre-Colorado, right?

Speaker 2 So I'm talking about reintroduction into Montana, reintroduction into parts of Canada, reintroduction into Yellowstone, the Red Wolf, which is a very small population in North Carolina.

Speaker 2 There's been less than five confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last hundred years. You mean humans?

Speaker 1 Humans, humans. And are most of them in Alaska?

Speaker 2 Most of them are in Alaska or in Canada.

Speaker 2 And then it's before Colorado. So not saying, I don't know if the data has, I don't think it has the latest from Colorado, but it represents 0.02%

Speaker 2 of deaths associated with wolves and cattle and livestock, right? And all livestock, not just cattle.

Speaker 2 And so the problem is when you go out there and you have a maintained balance that people can understand, and governments actually give subsidies to the ranchers when

Speaker 2 they get killed by the by wolves. So I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.

Speaker 2 But the problem is when you're not as thoughtful with a rewilding program and you don't, and you're not as measured as like what they did in Yellowstone and they start encroaching in these areas, then the stats are going to go crazy.

Speaker 2 And once the stats go crazy, then you're going to start looking to the animals that are the problem, but it's not the animals that are the problem.

Speaker 2 It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision.

Speaker 1 Exactly. The problem is people just have these ideas like wolves are beautiful.
They're amazing. We all love wolves.
It's an incredible animal. I'm so happy it exists.

Speaker 1 Don't put it near where there's a ranch. Exactly.
You can't vote on that if you live in Denver. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if it doesn't affect your livelihood, if it doesn't affect the risk to your animals or your family, yeah, you have to be mindful of that.

Speaker 1 There's also, they're getting a very skewed perspective because the governor's really interested in it, and his husband is really interested in it.

Speaker 1 His husband apparently is the one who really wanted it to happen. And, you know, you have a mandate, so you have to get wolves out by a certain time.

Speaker 1 And when you're doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill livestock. So you're like, fuck it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just not. It's just, it's, you have, and the, a lot of the, so the project that we'll probably eventually talk about is

Speaker 2 we brought in a lot of the teams,

Speaker 2 so many people that have been on your show, that

Speaker 2 know how to do the rewilding the right way over time.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is what we'll just get to it. You made a fucking dire wolf.

Speaker 2 I didn't. You got our team, our incredible team,

Speaker 2 made three dire wolves so far.

Speaker 1 Let's see the photos. Jamie, bust out some photos.
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself because this is truly fucking crazy. Yeah.
That's the pop. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So this is, so that's actually Romulus as so we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. And then

Speaker 2 we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl. So this is Romulus and Remus.
So funny, funny story about this. So Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 1 Jamie.

Speaker 2 Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings was actually

Speaker 2 one of our investors, and he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props. And he's like, I was sitting in Peter's house with he and his

Speaker 2 partner Fran, and I was like, you know,

Speaker 2 I showed him the video of them howling. He started tearing up.
He goes, this is the first time I've heard a dire wolf or anyone's heard of direwolf in 10,000 years. Well, he like.

Speaker 2 He like physically, emotionally got chills and started crying. And then he's like, well, you know, I do have the throne.
I was like, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 He goes, I bought the throne last week at auction,

Speaker 2 at a private auction for like Zothebies or someone, right? And so he did, and it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup. Like, talk about cosmic coincidence.

Speaker 2 Incredible, right? And so,

Speaker 2 you know, what you don't see in this photo is you don't see the fact that we have American Humane Society there. We have three veterinary people.
We had six people from our animal care.

Speaker 1 When you say checkup, you don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?

Speaker 2 They do get, because of viruses that they can get from the soil,

Speaker 2 At eight weeks, they do get basic virus.

Speaker 2 They do get basic vaccines.

Speaker 1 Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you're just.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so these are staying on, you know, like these are not going back into the wild, right?

Speaker 1 Not yet.

Speaker 2 Right now, they're on a 2,000-acre secure, expansive ecological preserve with 24-7 care. We have an animal hospital that we built.

Speaker 2 People are always like, you guys raised so much money. And I was like, well,

Speaker 2 because we didn't just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities, and whatnot.

Speaker 1 Let's see the photo of the actual grown ones because they're fucking nuts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this is Rogmus and Remus playing in the snow on the preserve when they are

Speaker 2 three months old.

Speaker 1 So three months, how big are they?

Speaker 2 Three months, they were north of 45 pounds.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 look at that face. God, they're so beautiful.

Speaker 2 They just get, as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.

Speaker 1 So let's go to the adults because the adults have crazy characteristics. And you were saying that you didn't even know they were.

Speaker 2 We didn't know, right? And so

Speaker 2 we ended up getting a...

Speaker 1 Is this a full-grown one?

Speaker 2 They're still five months old, so they're 80 pounds at five months. So wolves typically grow 12 to 14 months.
So they're not full-grown yet. Wow.

Speaker 1 And how big is it already?

Speaker 2 80 pounds,

Speaker 2 about five and a half feet.

Speaker 1 And the mane.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and so a couple things about the wolves. Jamie, if you go back, yeah.
So we didn't know this, right? We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf.

Speaker 2 We knew that they existed and went extinct about 12,000 years ago when a lot of megafauna went extinct, like the during kind of that younger dry period, that younger dryest kind of cooling period.

Speaker 2 They went extinct as well, right?

Speaker 2 And we knew, all we know, because all we have is we don't have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples. We literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25%

Speaker 2 larger. They were stockier.
They probably weren't as fast based on kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be.

Speaker 2 But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium, and whatnot. And we assumed that their fur.
And we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool, that they were white.

Speaker 2 Because there was like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they were red so they get their paper.

Speaker 1 It doesn't make sense for natural selection.

Speaker 1 They're an Arctic hunting animal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they have this beautiful, we didn't know they have this beautiful like mane-like quality to them.

Speaker 2 And when they're babies, you saw a a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It's crazy.
Wow. It's so.

Speaker 1 Is it like polar bears and it's hollow? Or is it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not. It's like typical wolves, but it's incredibly thick.
It grows in kind of these, these clumps. But then

Speaker 2 as they've grown in, they've started to get this kind of like mane to them, which is the females as well? Well, the female, she's only six weeks old, so it's two sooners all.

Speaker 2 So if you keep going through a couple other photos, yeah, I mean, they are just, they're just beautiful. And I mean, it's funny.

Speaker 2 Someone actually said they on our team was like they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point, right?

Speaker 1 Right. There's something they're so stocky.

Speaker 2 They're stocky. They're thicker

Speaker 2 They are I mean they're they're absolutely beautiful

Speaker 2 That so this is Khaleesi so who looks like a baby

Speaker 2 and we we nailed it. We we we named her can we hear it?

Speaker 1 Let me hear her

Speaker 2 We named Khaleesi for George R. Martin, obviously.
Obviously.

Speaker 2 Who's an investor in Colossal?

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Aww.

Speaker 1 Nature's cute little murderers.

Speaker 2 Well, everything in nature murders something, right? Yeah. Like, we were.

Speaker 1 Well, cows murder grass. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants like scream now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, they scream.

Speaker 2 So I guess we all are bad.

Speaker 1 Life eats life.

Speaker 1 This is, I mean, that's the reason why plants have chemicals to dissuade us from eating them. What are they eating there?

Speaker 2 So they love to chew on horns.

Speaker 2 So we have different phases of, we built a 145-page animal guide. These are actually different horns from different elk and other species that we're putting out there.
And they chew on horns.

Speaker 1 They just love them. Like a dog does.
Like a dog does, right? So are you letting these animals kill things or are you feeding them?

Speaker 2 So we're feeding them still. So they eat a combination of bison meat, horse meat, and do you plan on letting letting them kill things? So we're just about to introduce carcasses to them.

Speaker 2 So giving them part of a carcass, letting them feed, building in that dynamic between the two brothers for now. And then

Speaker 2 they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.

Speaker 1 Are you going to let them hunt?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 they are on a seemingly wild 2,000-acre preserve with just them. So they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve, but they're not doing it yet.

Speaker 2 They're starting to exhibit the original, kind of the first inklings that it will trend toward that. But we want them to live, we want them, and we're going to probably make two or three more.

Speaker 2 We want a solid little social pack that we can monitor, that can live a seemingly wild life that we can understand more about them.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 It's cool. But the other thing that's equally cool to it, going back to the Red Wolf story,

Speaker 2 can you.

Speaker 1 What's just crazy to me that you have reignited these 10,000-year-old hunting genes that they're starting to get? Including size.

Speaker 2 Including size. So we understand more about like.

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Speaker 2 We looked at what genes made really a dire wolf, a dire wolf, like what was separated. And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 73,000-year-old skull.

Speaker 2 So we could actually understand

Speaker 2 the genetic distance with that much genetic distance between them. We could actually understand

Speaker 2 what truly was fixed and conserved in the dire wolf genome and what wasn't just population genomics, right? If there's, if you and I are 50,000 years apart,

Speaker 2 there's a lot of different mutations in that time period.

Speaker 2 But if we we can then really say, okay, you know, what made Ben Ben and what made Jojo, oh, here's the overlaps, it allowed us to really understand that.

Speaker 1 And it's just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are kind of baked into the

Speaker 1 genes and they just were dormant for 10,000 years. And now these things are waking up.

Speaker 2 And so I was, I was like, so I was in, you know, because I bottle-fed Romulus

Speaker 2 and Romulus was partly raised with me. Like, I'd go out to the preserve.
I'd check on him quite frequently. It's in the northern United States where we don't say where it is.

Speaker 2 But mainly because we're for not just the animal's health, but for human health, ever since we launched the woolly mouse, we've had

Speaker 2 very excited people just show up at our, our labs are not open to the public, and we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice. And so

Speaker 2 showing people too much of the preserve, we're always very, very nervous about it.

Speaker 2 We scrub all the videos and whatnot to ensure that no one can pick it out because we assume people will be moderately excited.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Oh, the internet sleuths will try to find you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so we've, we've done, I'm I'm not trying to challenge them, but we've done everything we can to protect it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I understand. I mean, you have to.

Speaker 1 Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf. Yeah, exactly.
Somebody wants a dire wolf.

Speaker 1 We already get a lot to come over here. We already get a lot of weird calls.

Speaker 2 Oh, I bet you do.

Speaker 1 The other thing, though. Someone with deep pockets.
Oh, we get. Make me a dire wolf, my friend.

Speaker 1 I have everything.

Speaker 1 I have a die collection.

Speaker 2 We get a lot of weird calls. Yeah.
Yeah, from people that are like.

Speaker 1 Well, those people that have private zoos. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Like enormous.

Speaker 2 Like in India. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 They have that family has like the largest private zoo and preserve.

Speaker 1 It's just so wild. It's so crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, Texas is history with animals, right? Yeah. There's more tigers in captivity in private collections in Texas than in the wild.
Than in the wild of the world. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's crazy. But I was in the

Speaker 2 I was in, so we of the 2,000 acres, we have a

Speaker 2 subsection of it that's about six and a half acres where we have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter.

Speaker 2 We have a couple of natural dens that we've built for them, as well as an animal husbandry area.

Speaker 2 So that way, when we want to take photos of them or video them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly more contained area. And

Speaker 2 it's funny, two weeks ago, I was up there and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of those pictures and Remus came up. Romulus, who I spent the most amount of time with.

Speaker 2 Remus came up, came pretty close, and I was able to touch him again. But I thought at that moment, and he kind of skittished away.
I was like, that's the last time I'm touching Remus.

Speaker 2 Like, what am I doing? And I mean, don't be wrong, I had animals. I don't eat you.
Yeah, I have animal care teams there and everything.

Speaker 2 And they have been some, there's some level of habituation between the care team. They really know and love the care team, but they're still wild animals, right? And so they probably hunted humans.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 we don't know, right? But the rise of kind of going back to their extinction, the rise of the change in kind of this younger, dryest period and the change, the massive, I don't know,

Speaker 2 some of the stuff that there's like several different prevailing theories, one of which is human predation, right? That like the rise of humans led to the extinction of the megafauna.

Speaker 2 That's kind of, you know, I think it's the answer is probably a combination.

Speaker 2 Could have there been an astrological event? There's starting to be more and more data around that.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you've seen Randall Carlson talk about it.

Speaker 2 I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it. Graham Hancock talk about it.

Speaker 2 And they just got the shit beat out of them. Yeah, but not not anymore.

Speaker 1 The Arcturus impact theory is well respected now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it happened. Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right? Because you see different,

Speaker 2 which also tracks to the theory, right?

Speaker 2 So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but there was also a massive glacial lake and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied, they then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns.

Speaker 2 So you went from a period, you know, in that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of insanely accelerated cooling.

Speaker 1 Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was brought to like his idea?

Speaker 1 Is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps or some sort of immense cosmic event, and millions and millions of trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ran through the land land and just carved deep gouges into the earth.

Speaker 1 He was on acid. He was on acid and this idea came to him.

Speaker 1 He was looking out over a ridge. He was looking at this enormous gorge and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed.

Speaker 1 And then he started noticing that there's these huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere that were just moved by this immense amount of water.

Speaker 1 And then the way the ground, the features of the ground looks like the features that you see on sandy beaches when the tide rolls in and out. And it's like, this is crazy.
And it all tracks.

Speaker 1 It tracks all over the world.

Speaker 2 It's like those, it reminds me of those stories where they show people like the side of the Sphinx and they're like, oh man, that's a lot of water erosion.

Speaker 2 And then they like flip the photo and then you see the head of the things like, that's not water erosion.

Speaker 1 It's Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University.

Speaker 1 I've interviewed him. He was the first guy to propose this.
He's like, this is thousands of years of rainfall.

Speaker 1 And we know that the last time there was rainfall like that in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of like, what is the timeline that this stuff was actually built? And are we just assuming because we've decided that it's 2,500 BC that that's it forever?

Speaker 1 And no one wants to let that go.

Speaker 2 Well, that, I'm not a scientist, but that's, and I don't come from academia.

Speaker 2 I'm just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me, and I find cool shit interesting, and I try to work on it, right?

Speaker 2 And what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non-academic, I'm sure I'll get crucified for this, but I don't read the comments.

Speaker 1 I don't read the comments. I don't read the comments.

Speaker 2 Trust me, I don't read the comments.

Speaker 2 Good for you. I sleep quite well.

Speaker 2 But, you know, the academic, so we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot. We've got, we fund 17 academic universities, right? All over the world.

Speaker 2 We fund 40 postdocs

Speaker 2 all over the world, right? And that are doing this. So we're very integrated with different ideas from academia and these scholars.
And our top people that were at Colossal came from academia.

Speaker 2 So I think we try to be very academically friendly, but they live in this world, this super kind of like fortune and glory world where it's like. It's a popularity contest.

Speaker 2 If someone has a paper, because their entire motivation is publish or pair.

Speaker 2 So one of the other things that people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for every single thing you do. It's like, we're not an academic university.

Speaker 2 We're not allowed. I don't have to write a a paper on anything ever.
We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with the community, right?

Speaker 2 But we get this feedback of like, if we wrote a scientific paper for every single thing that we did that went through peer review, like we would have 3,000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever, right?

Speaker 2 Because we'd just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because they want to impose their idea of what you're supposed to and not supposed to do.

Speaker 2 Well, they want to impose their idea that they've already established and any change to that establishment.

Speaker 2 So in addition, the public, 95 scientific advisors, and these are some of the top women and men in the world, right?

Speaker 2 That fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there.

Speaker 2 We have another probably 40 advisors. They're like, we love you.

Speaker 2 You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me. If I submit a paper,

Speaker 2 and we totally agree with you and we'll help you. But we submit a paper, they judge my paper, it gets rejected, then I don't get my grant, so then I can't continue my research.

Speaker 2 I have to fire my postdocs. So it's a complete scam of a system, right?

Speaker 2 And so we went through this phase where it's like we didn't have enough scientists, we didn't have labs, we didn't have money, we weren't doing anything for conservation.

Speaker 2 So we went through this whole like philosophical perspective of these, like, these, all these things that people threw at us from the scientific community.

Speaker 2 And some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding.

Speaker 1 Of course. Well, the problem is not the scientific community.
The problem is weak men. It's this, this,

Speaker 1 what you see in these, these squabbles, squabbles, these like ultra-personal squabbles, where like horrible vitriolic statements made about people.

Speaker 2 They're just not happy people.

Speaker 1 Exactly. It's the same problem with all of life.
It's these bitchy little people, these bitchy little monsters. And they have taken over something that's incredibly important.

Speaker 1 And their work, their work, these bitchy little people, their work is incredibly important. Yes.
But at the core of their being, they're a bitchy little person.

Speaker 2 And they can't, and and that is why we don't have flying cars, we don't have mammoth, and until Elon, we were not going to live on Mars, right? And so like we didn't have, like, I think.

Speaker 1 It takes time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it doesn't come. But also, academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right?

Speaker 2 So if you want to go to Mars or you want to bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system and you have to innovate across everything.

Speaker 2 Whereas in academia,

Speaker 2 you are only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved.

Speaker 1 Well, it's also

Speaker 1 you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of of money that gets donated and given to these institutions

Speaker 1 along with a whole ideology. Like, it's not just as simple as let's follow data.
It's all got to be attached to this very left-leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects ideology.

Speaker 1 And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true.

Speaker 2 You should just follow the scientific method. I'm not scientist, but you should just, and guess what? When new data shows up that

Speaker 2 changes your old data, you shouldn't get mad about that. You should celebrate it.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, also, you have to look at all data.

Speaker 1 I don't want to get into this, but

Speaker 1 you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man can be a woman, which is fine in terms of who you are.

Speaker 1 But now when you're having them compete with women in sports, you've entered into nonsense land, and you're the person we're counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject.

Speaker 1 You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.

Speaker 2 I just wish we could get philosophy, we separate philosophical perspectives from science.

Speaker 2 One of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because it's like once we got the scientists and once we got the money and once we proved that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once Incutel, which is

Speaker 2 the funding arm of the CIA and other governments, started investing in Colossal because of our technologies, and once we started proof points, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical ones, right?

Speaker 2 They're like, it's not a mammoth. It's not a dire wolf.
And it's like this concept of speciation is a human construct that we are trying to impose on nature that flows more like a river than a rock.

Speaker 1 So are they saying that it's not because it didn't come straight from nature? It's something that you've recreated by piecing this together with that.

Speaker 1 Like, what are the genes that you had to use to create a dire wolf? We didn't totally explain this. So you have CRISPR, you have these gene editing tools, you have a good sample of DNA.

Speaker 1 How do you turn that into a wolf?

Speaker 2 So you map them next to it. And there was a study that came out about, and once again, this goes back to the status quo of scientists, of academic scientists.

Speaker 2 There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data. They said that dire wolves were closer related, weren't closer related to wolves.

Speaker 2 They were close-related to jackals. And that's because at the time, they only had 0.15% of the genome, right? They just didn't have all the data.
It's not negative. They just didn't have all the data.

Speaker 2 Now we know that they actually were close related to wolves because we have more data.

Speaker 1 Which wolves?

Speaker 2 Gray wolves, or the precursor to gray wolves, right?

Speaker 2 So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group.

Speaker 2 And so what we found is, so once you do that, we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what the difference is.

Speaker 2 And we start to see that in certain parts of the genome that are responsible for size, for muscle, for craniofacial, that there's differences, right?

Speaker 2 So we can start to map and say, okay, where are the differences between gray wolves and where are the differences between gray wolves and dire wolves?

Speaker 2 And then with those, we have a lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the dire wolves in a gray wolf cell line.

Speaker 2 And so, and then once you go through that process, we didn't talk about this earlier, you do the same process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively cloning, where you take the nucleus of one cell, you put that into another egg cell, and then you take that embryo and you insert it into a surrogate.

Speaker 1 And is this a 100% dire wolf or is this a new thing?

Speaker 2 So this goes into the philosophical thing. So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species.

Speaker 2 So you've got certain people that'll say, well,

Speaker 2 if a species is dictated by something that can't breed, that's literally a definition. Like if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species.

Speaker 2 Then you have other people, you have the paleontologists, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lacavaro, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world that loves us.

Speaker 2 But then you have other paleontologists that just hate us, and they do it based solely on tooth morphology because they argue that's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time.

Speaker 2 And I asked a paleontologist recently that hates us.

Speaker 2 I said, if I made a mammoth with like, that was giant with like pink, curly fur, and it had the right tooth morphology, you're saying that based on your scientific papers that you would say that's a mammoth.

Speaker 2 And she's like,

Speaker 2 yes, but that doesn't matter. And I'm like, well,

Speaker 1 but then why does she hate you guys?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 why does anyone, you know, anytime you do anything in this world now that's like moderately bold or polarizing, people give you pushback.

Speaker 1 But this is heavily bold. I wouldn't say this is moderately bold.
You made three fucking dire wolves. That's not moderately bold.

Speaker 1 It's really kind of one of the craziest things that a human being's ever done.

Speaker 2 It's definitely in the the realm.

Speaker 1 This is right up there with inventing the internet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so when you see, well, and we have more stuff to come that I think would be equally interesting.

Speaker 1 There's people out there. Did you worry that someone is going to get, you know, because this falls into

Speaker 1 religious

Speaker 2 realms. Well,

Speaker 2 there's philosophical and religious. And so like back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species.
Right. But they mate and produce five offspring all the time.

Speaker 2 And a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a cold, aquatic, adapted, cold-adapted bear, right? And so I always ask people that.

Speaker 1 Their offspring are, they can have children. Yes.
Yes. But it's not like a donkey.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So there's different ways to characterize it.

Speaker 1 It's making a mule.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But there's different ways to say is something, a something, right? And so, you know, we are not the same, right?

Speaker 2 I don't know what percentage you probably from 23andMe or something have some percentage Neanderthal. You don't say that you're an admixture or a hybrid.
You just say you're a human.

Speaker 2 You don't, you don't really.

Speaker 1 Right, but that's a good point, though, because Neanderthal, if you want to talk about a different species, just because they could breed with us, God, they're so different.

Speaker 2 But that's it. But like I said, there's six different ways.
There's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographics. And there's a funny

Speaker 2 paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through. And the same toads live on two sides of the street, and they're different species.
And they're the same fucking toad.

Speaker 1 Just because there's a road.

Speaker 2 Just because we as humans change, it's called geographic isolation of speciation. So it's just crazy.
And so the only arguments that we now have is, but is it a mammoth?

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, then don't call it a mammoth. I was like, I asked people, I was like, did you see Jurassic Park? And they're like, yeah.
I was like, what was Jurassic Park?

Speaker 2 What was Jurassic Park? To your question, what do you think? What was Jurassic Park about to you?

Speaker 1 To me? Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you're like, if you're going to take your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about?

Speaker 1 Dinosaurs.

Speaker 2 Is it? Because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff. Are they dinosaurs or

Speaker 2 are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or are they dinosaurs?

Speaker 2 If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de-extinction.

Speaker 2 If they serve the ecological function and they have the lost biodiversity and phenotypes that made that animal unique, like the polar and a bear and a bear, they're just that animal.

Speaker 2 So these goes into, this starts the whole religious and philosophical debates where it's funny because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don't like what you're doing, that's what they go to.

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Speaker 2 Oh, it's just like it's

Speaker 2 by their own definition, they're like, well, it doesn't have enough DNA. So I was like, so if I said, but the second dire wolf that we have, or the second genome that we have from the tooth,

Speaker 2 has less of the same DNA than the skull. Does that mean that it wasn't a dire wolf? And it just turns into an

Speaker 2 you're missing the point conversation.

Speaker 1 I would like to know the point, though. What is her point?

Speaker 1 What is her overall argument?

Speaker 2 The general point of the people is that they want to pick one speciation definition and adhere us to that. And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species, right?

Speaker 2 It's just people that are using the framework that they set that isn't consistent kind of against the,

Speaker 2 based on the argument that they want to make.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So species is just something.

Speaker 1 And it's just a thing if it can breed with another thing.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, that is one definition. There is another definition saying that it's only a species if it can't breed with another thing.

Speaker 2 So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves, does that mean they're now their own species?

Speaker 2 It just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct.

Speaker 1 Right, but as a person who studies biology, which this person is, right?

Speaker 1 I could kind of understand her perspective where she's like,

Speaker 1 what are you doing? Like, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 How is this group of people with a bunch of money and a bunch of eggheads, how are these geniuses allowed to get together, splice some genes up, and serve up a dire wolf?

Speaker 1 I could see it from her perspective.

Speaker 2 100%, right? But I think that if we don't do big, bold things, it's important. You know, one of of the things we should definitely show is this.

Speaker 1 This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park. But we should

Speaker 1 basically,

Speaker 2 yeah, but John Hammond.

Speaker 2 But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that didn't make it the final cut.

Speaker 1 No, he actually want to make an attraction.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so if we could show the red wolf, I think that'd be amazing because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back the dire wolf, we, one, make available to conservation.

Speaker 1 Will this explain the red wolf to people? Because you were saying before, I didn't even know how few of them there are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so if you go to

Speaker 2 the one more, yeah. So this is a red wolf.
That's Hope. That's the world's first cloned red wolf.
So I've actually made more red wolves than I've made dire wolves.

Speaker 2 So I've made four red wolves, one female.

Speaker 1 Are you just releasing these fuckers? No, no,

Speaker 2 they're in an ecological preserve as well. And so, but you're going to...
You're going to die when you hear what I went through on this.

Speaker 2 So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project. Outside of making all of our technology for free, right?

Speaker 2 Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals. They don't pay us a dime.
It's all open source. It's all free.

Speaker 2 We have 48 conservation partners. The team that's running the Northern White Rhino Project, we're their exclusive genetic rescue partner.

Speaker 2 It doesn't, we're working with elephants in Botswana, we're working at elephants in Kenya. So anybody can use our technologies for free, right? We're working on Ketrid terrible fungus in Australia.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 if that's not enough, I found out that, you know, that there's only 15 of those

Speaker 2 red wolves back in the wild in North Carolina. So I met with the upcoming governor.

Speaker 1 Are they in other states as well? No, no. Well, we'll get to that.

Speaker 2 We'll get to that. So they're only recognized by U.S.
Fish and Wildlife there.

Speaker 2 But this incredible woman from Princeton, top of her field, she's one of the top wolf geneticists in the world, Bridget Von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have red wolf-like characteristics.

Speaker 2 So she started darting them, taking samples, and what she found is they actually have more quote-unquote red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina.

Speaker 1 And is it part of the problem they're inbreeding with coyotes?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but they've all been like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes. All the red wolves have some coyote in them.

Speaker 1 They look like coyotes.

Speaker 2 Well, because every,

Speaker 2 well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes. And yeah, because the reality is every single species is what's called an admixture.

Speaker 2 Everything is inbreeding with everything on some level, right? And so everything in life is an admixture. Nothing's, this goes back to the Neanderthal.

Speaker 1 So this binary idea that we have is silly.

Speaker 2 It's no, it's a human-caused construct, right? And

Speaker 2 it's insane. So

Speaker 2 I went to some folks from the last administration, right? And

Speaker 2 I took some data with me and I said, hey, we really want to help this Red Wolf program. We don't need any money.
We open source all of our technologies.

Speaker 2 And we've used a technology that's non-invasive for cloning, where we actually take a vial of blood, we isolate what's called endothelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right?

Speaker 2 Because there's no nucleus in blood cells.

Speaker 2 So we catch those, and when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right?

Speaker 2 Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal, you have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.

Speaker 2 It's actually

Speaker 2 a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning. We can simply do it.
Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot. We give blood all the time.

Speaker 2 And so it's a very non-invasive, it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right? And so we found a way, which we've opened, which we're open sourcing on Tuesday, is

Speaker 2 open sourcing this model of how you go clone from blood, which is a game changer for biobanking because now you don't have to go herd an animal, take pieces of the animal, anesthesize the animal.

Speaker 2 We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using this thing. So I went out to Washington with my team.
I

Speaker 2 showed them hope as a baby in little videos of, and you may have videos of hope, Jamie. I don't know if it's in the folder.
I showed them videos of hope.

Speaker 2 And I said, hey, you know, there's only a handful of, we made these four wolves from three different genetic lines.

Speaker 2 We made these from,

Speaker 2 we made these from three different genetic lines, right? So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves than what's alive in the population.

Speaker 2 And we said, we'd like for for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana.

Speaker 2 And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead? And we'll just give them to you. There's no cost.
Here was the feedback.

Speaker 2 We need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend $22 million to see if it's possible to clone wolves. And I was blown away.
I was like, oh, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1 I wasn't very clear.

Speaker 2 This is a cloned wolf. Like here, you can fly with me to the preserve.
You have signed NDA, but you fly with me to preserve.

Speaker 2 And they're like we need to spend five to six years and 20 plus million dollars to go to go understand this to understand this pod it's like we'll give you all of the technology and if you tell me you want a hundred wolves i'll just make you a hundred wolves and we'll even engine we'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you and the response was we'll get back to you we went to we tried to have three other meetings no showdown canceled every time when we fly there i just got back from a meeting with department of interior which fish and wildlife rolls rolls up to and they're very, very focused on innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing.

Speaker 2 That's great. And immediately they said, we celebrate.

Speaker 2 Doug Bergum, the Secretary of Interior there, who we met with, said, we celebrate, he's a huge conservationist, huge Teddy Roosevelt guy, member of the Explorers Club.

Speaker 2 And he's like, we do not have a... celebration when animals come off the endangered species list.
Only about 3% ever come off and we're really good at putting them on and we celebrate putting them on.

Speaker 2 So we have to do something about this.

Speaker 2 And if you're saying that we could productionize species and as long as we have the right support to rewild them, people can use your technologies for free to make more of these different species that are critically endangered while also biobanking the samples along the way.

Speaker 2 He's like, why wouldn't we do this? And I was like.

Speaker 2 Well, I met with the previous folks and they said that we need, you know, five years and 20 million that they were going to spend it internally. They weren't giving it to us to do the feasibility.

Speaker 2 So they were going to spend it internally on this. And we're like, we'll just do it for free.

Speaker 2 And he's like, we will completely support the initiative initiative and we're going to help get you plugged in so you can help biobank our species and also help us support, you know, red wolf conservation.

Speaker 1 So when will you start reintroducing these?

Speaker 2 So we just had that meeting last week.

Speaker 1 Soulless red wolves from hell.

Speaker 1 You've created a lab. They're going to start eating people.

Speaker 2 And so we're going to, we just met with him last week.

Speaker 1 So well, it's,

Speaker 1 they're beautiful. God, they're so beautiful.

Speaker 2 Which is, it's like, why? We shouldn't be afraid of innovation, right?

Speaker 1 No, but you know, the real question is, where do you stop? Yeah. Because 90 what percent of all animals that have ever existed, all species are extinct? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are we going to...

Speaker 2 I think you focus on the species that are critically endangered and are keystone species, meaning the environment needs them. Right, but

Speaker 1 the ones that we drove back.

Speaker 2 But the ones that we drove to extinction, right?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So it's debatable whether or not we drove dire wolves to extinction. We don't really know what happened 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 I'm inclined to think that when you see the death of 65% of North American megafauna, that happened really quickly.

Speaker 2 Really quickly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a common impact are correct.

Speaker 2 I think it's most likely it's a combination. We do know that when early

Speaker 2 that anthropologic effects from humans, that when early man went

Speaker 2 onto a landmass at scale, that

Speaker 2 we start to see that. We see that in Australia and other places.

Speaker 2 But to your point, it's much slower. It's much, much slower.

Speaker 1 This is a different thing.

Speaker 1 Are you going to bring back saber-toothed tigers?

Speaker 2 So we get, everyone seems to have their favorite animal up for us to save, right? Like the

Speaker 1 favorite. Yeah.
Direwolves would be my favorite.

Speaker 2 Dire wolves, you got to come, maybe at some point you see them, but I want to. They're amazing.
I mean,

Speaker 2 they're just beautiful animals. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we, they're, they're, so sabertooth tiger is a class. We put it that is a class.
Most commonly, people think of the Smilodon as the saber-toothed tiger.

Speaker 2 There's not, to date, been really great spilodon DNA. There is great homotherium DNA, which is another

Speaker 2 type of saber-toothed cat.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't know there was more than one type of sabert-tooth.

Speaker 2 They classify them differently, you know, based on it.

Speaker 1 Obviously, you've been studying this, so you're thinking about doing it.

Speaker 2 I'm not, I mean, we like to study ancient DNA, right?

Speaker 2 Like, like, you know, one of the things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is 100% right is people say there were no saber-toothed tigers in Alaska. That's just an incorrect statement.

Speaker 2 There were probably no Smilodons there, but there are homotheriums which are a saber-toothed cat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's found things that were not supposed to be.

Speaker 2 I've held things in his,

Speaker 2 I've held a dire wolf skull in his,

Speaker 2 I hope he's fine with me saying that, in his

Speaker 2 facility.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think he's talked about that.

Speaker 1 But they found cave bears, short-faced bears. Wow.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Homotherium is still a saber-toothed cat. But what happens is this goes back to that philosophical,

Speaker 2 perspective. They think that only so if you look up Smilodon in comparison, oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still.

Speaker 1 Can you give me that CGI image of it again, Jamie, on the left? That's so fucking cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I don't think they're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 I don't think you should bring something like that back, but if you do, I'm going to visit it.

Speaker 1 I mean, I want to see someone take down a bite. Look at his paws.
There was a...

Speaker 2 I mean, wait till you see the direl pause.

Speaker 1 Bro, but that would be so crazy.

Speaker 1 Now all of a sudden I want you to do it.

Speaker 1 Give me another large picture of it, Jamie. There's some other pictures of those.

Speaker 1 So Smilodon's the one that has the largest teeth?

Speaker 2 It has the largest known teeth.

Speaker 2 But when people think of Saber 2 Tiger, this is what. Or Saberto Cat.
That's a crazy. This is what they think of.

Speaker 1 Those are crazy. I wonder why nature wanted you to have that.

Speaker 2 I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides and all those stuff are quite thick.

Speaker 1 It has to be, right? Something where there's a genetic advantage.

Speaker 1 Look at that one on the right, lower right, Jamie. Below that, below that, to the right, to the right, yeah, right there.
Click on that. Look at that, man.

Speaker 1 And I see I love it.

Speaker 2 I love because we don't, you know what's amazing? We don't have the DNA from it. So we have no idea what the color pattern is, which you can see here, right?

Speaker 2 It's like it's got a short tail, it's got a long tail, it's got a leopard, it's got stripes, right? Right.

Speaker 1 We don't even know if they had long tails. We don't even know if they're, they could have been white.
Wow, that would be wild.

Speaker 2 So we do have, there have been some really well-preserved pups and others of, in the permafrost, of

Speaker 2 Homotherium.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 And Homotherium we know has that kind of coloration to it?

Speaker 2 We don't.

Speaker 2 I don't want to say we do or don't. We have not done the analysis on that, on the homotherium yet.

Speaker 1 Look at that little guy.

Speaker 2 We do have the genome of it, though.

Speaker 1 Wow. Not that we're going to work on it.
Okay, so that has brown hair.

Speaker 2 Have you seen the American short-faced bear? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's the thing I'm probably the most scared of. Yeah, you can't bring that back.
17 or 18-foot giant bears. You can't bring that back.

Speaker 1 We're not working on it i'm just saying but somebody might that's the problem there might be some fucking crackhead out there that's got 40 billion dollars that's out of his mind well i also think that like some crazy dude who's just got the resources that's insane that's you know that is that to me is megalodon scary made a lot of money

Speaker 1 yeah that's a land megalodon well that's that yeah that is an enormous animal and they think that's one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the bering strait um more i read that yeah yeah it was it's a theory but it's a prop pretty good one yeah if you knew that if you knew there was a lineage of like super you know polar bears were out there I wouldn't go near it and it is essentially a super polar bear which is really scary because polar bears are terrifying and completely carnivorous and they don't care they'll just walk right up to you and kill you oh yeah there's a great video of these guys that are behind a fence yeah that was somebody sent it to me yesterday oh fuck I'll find it.

Speaker 1 I know where it is. Someone sent it to me yesterday of these guys that are right behind a fence while this polar bear is trying to get through the fence.
There's three of them.

Speaker 1 And they're, you know, they're talking to like, hey, big guy, you can't come in here. Hey, fella.

Speaker 2 And it's just calmly walking towards, like, I'm going to get in there.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.
It's polar bears scary. Very spooky.
Well, they're spooky because they don't eat anything but meat. So we're on the menu.
Yeah. All humans are on the menu.

Speaker 1 Anything that walks and breathes is on the menu.

Speaker 1 I got it here. Where is it? Shit.
It'll take me a few minutes. Sorry.
Jamie, pause for a second. Let me find this because it's good.
Okay. I just sent it to you.

Speaker 1 So, um, I'm, it looks like they're in.

Speaker 1 I don't know where they are. I think it'll say on the video.
So, these guys, here, give me some volume. Polar bears.
That's an oil rig.

Speaker 1 So, it's probably Canada. Look at these guys.

Speaker 1 That's sound.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're just trying to eat you.

Speaker 2 Look at this. I have two more behind it.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Hey.

Speaker 1 Go on.

Speaker 1 Go on.

Speaker 1 Go on.

Speaker 2 Probably not going to work.

Speaker 1 They're just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you.

Speaker 2 Hey, sweetheart. Hey.

Speaker 1 Sweetheart.

Speaker 1 Sweetheart wants to rip your liver out.

Speaker 1 Hey.

Speaker 1 Go on.

Speaker 1 They're so beautiful. They are beautiful.
It's interesting that they're the most dangerous ones because they're the ones we use for Coca-Cola and Klondike bars. Yeah.
Isn't that wild, though?

Speaker 2 You have them just like playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you were saying the younger gyros is really interesting. It's very, very interesting because it's a fairly new theory and explains a lot.

Speaker 1 And especially when you look at the mass extinction that did take place during that time, I would love to have seen what it looked like. when all those animals were around.

Speaker 1 Like, what was a, you know, we kind of have a sense of what, because of safaris and videos, we know what it looks like when lions are interacting with wildebeest in Africa.

Speaker 1 Like, what did it look like in Kansas

Speaker 1 15,000 years ago? Yeah, like, what was it like?

Speaker 2 I know there's an extinct bison species that is the bison latifrons.

Speaker 1 Have you seen those guys?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're like, they have like eight-foot-long Texas longhorns

Speaker 2 on like, you know,

Speaker 2 super HGH

Speaker 1 like bison. Yeah, our bison are small compared to the extinct bisons, right? Were they the largest of the North American bisons? Yeah.

Speaker 2 The bison lot of fronts was.

Speaker 1 See if we can get a photo of that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't know about that until a few years ago. Yeah.
I didn't even know that was a thing. It's, I mean, there were so many different things.

Speaker 1 Giant sloths, there's the saber-toothed tiger, the American lion, which is an American cheetah.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 The American cheetah is, you know, we have, we actually have a full genome of it.

Speaker 2 And then there was a, there was also, one of my favorite animals, which is kind of a weird one probably on the list since we're talking about dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers.

Speaker 2 Have you seen the stellar sea cow?

Speaker 1 No. What is that?

Speaker 2 Think of like a manatee or dugong, right? That's the size of like a large whale.

Speaker 1 What? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the sad thing is it died. It actually died off before.
It died off.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It died off, though, within 100 years of its discovery.

Speaker 1 When was that?

Speaker 1 We killed them all, huh? Yeah, we killed them. We probably turned them into candles or something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, lipstick. Burn their fat.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, but it was actually really larger.

Speaker 1 Syrinian

Speaker 1 to ever exist. It was hunted to extinction only 30 years after being discovered.
30 years. It was described in the 18th century.

Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah.
And it was, and we actually

Speaker 2 fucking have a full genome of this too, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 1 You can bring it back.

Speaker 2 We can't just. I would bring this back in a heartbeat.

Speaker 2 It was hugely important to the kelp forest of the Pacific Northwest. It was great.
It's a great, it's not scary. It's huge.

Speaker 1 It's like, but then Nether Reed, if you bring all that back, why wouldn't you bring back a megalodon?

Speaker 2 There is no megalodon DNA.

Speaker 1 There's none? No.

Speaker 2 I will say that the ceo of the largest uh

Speaker 2 the the president and ceo of the largest free museum in america um

Speaker 2 really wants me to do megalodon but he's like i can never say that publicly

Speaker 2 because i just outed him yeah but there's a lot of museums i i could be wrong on the size yeah whatever he's great though uh but there is there is no dna you might have to eat a lot and

Speaker 2 killed everything in the ocean so one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is is artificial wombs at Colossal.

Speaker 2 Because if you want to get to this world where you could productionize endangered species like northern white rhinos instead of having to use surrogates for an animal welfare perspective,

Speaker 2 if you can get to the point that you can engineer genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos.

Speaker 2 grow them in labs and bags and then work with and then you can control that population very very well you could then reintroduce them you know with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts right and so we we were really not focusing on on the, we kind of rely on third parties on the rewilding modeling and all of our, you know, our 48 conservation partners.

Speaker 2 We are really just kind of focused on the kind of the core science that supports their initiatives. But if we are successful with our artificial wombs, and we are quite

Speaker 2 far on that project, that

Speaker 2 I would not be surprised if eventually you see a, we have to get a mouse first, but if a mouse.

Speaker 1 Have you guys had these conversations where you sit down and you go, how does this scale outward?

Speaker 2 What does this look like, this technology in a hundred years did we just fuck up no i think i i think that if you look at the birthing crisis that that we're in and kind of population decline price crisis i think that you you look at global like um people having uh women having kids later um uh ivf clinics uh people uh freezing their embryos all of that's massively on on the incline you know on the increase it's all going up to the right right um and we also know that like uh globally like sperm and and fertility and others is going down into the right right so it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general and so i think though you know especially and then we also have philosophical and uh you have religious you have philosophical and then you have social socio socio issues right that people have different perspectives on like having kids having kids same-sex couples get all these things so we at colossal have kind of made this mandate that we're not going to work on humans right because it's it's just it gets too weird we get asked the neandrotal and the dinosaur question every fucking day.

Speaker 2 So we're just not going to bridge that gap. What we'll do is spin out those technologies.
But

Speaker 2 I do think it is harder to grow a rhino. in a artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human.

Speaker 2 Not ethically or through an FDA process, but it is scientifically harder to gestate some of the animals we're trying to gestate, ex utero.

Speaker 2 So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population.

Speaker 1 That's where it gets really weird, right?

Speaker 1 You could create a child with no mother or father.

Speaker 2 I do think that, I think it's about optionality, right? I think that there are certain situations where that would be a blessing. You know, I just had my first kid,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 1 we did not grow up in an artificial womb. Yeah, but I mean, the people that are skeptical about this stuff, this is what they point to.
It's like, what... What is involved in the creation of life?

Speaker 1 Well, it's been people having sex, and then a sperm fertilizes the egg, a child is born, they raise the child, it gets some of their behavior characteristics, it gets the genetics, and then we integrate it into a community and there's like, but if you could just make life without any of that, like what is that?

Speaker 1 That's that, where is that,

Speaker 1 you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 Like, no, it's a good, it's a great philosophy.

Speaker 1 How much of the child's development is taking place while it's in the mother and

Speaker 2 sharing that shared experience, the hormonal cues and whatnot.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't have a child that way.

Speaker 1 Right, what if you're making a sociopath? Like, what if you're making a completely

Speaker 1 no empathy?

Speaker 2 There's no connection. No connection to people.

Speaker 1 They come out out of the gate, Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up. Like, really, that's.
No,

Speaker 2 it's a fair point.

Speaker 1 We don't know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman's body.

Speaker 2 And there's people that are working on this technology specifically for humans. Like, right now, we're focusing on it for extinct species and endangered animals.

Speaker 1 The question was: when this scales out, when you scale out 100 years from now, like what did you just do?

Speaker 2 Well, I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if we had a world where we, like the, if Colossal gets ultimate success, I would say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.

Speaker 2 We've revitalized these mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including

Speaker 2 your picture of what did the Arctic look like back in the day? Like, how do we have that?

Speaker 2 Because that was actually a crazy, if you look at the work that's been done in Pleistocene Park by Sergei and Akita Zimov they've actually shown that rewilding northern Siberia with cold tolerant megafauna actually can revitalize the ecosystem it can add more biodiversity it can actually uh

Speaker 2 keep the ground temperatures cold during the winter so it sequesters more carbon so i think this eco this idea of nature-based and living with nature in a ecological in an ecological model is something that you know i hope that we are successful at and i hope that you know colossal is also successful at removing animals from the endangered species list.

Speaker 1 So, what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoth specifically, the study that showed that it would help.

Speaker 2 But they've already done it with like

Speaker 2 musk ox, horses, and a few other species up there. So, they're doing it right now.

Speaker 2 They've been doing it for over 20 years.

Speaker 1 And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia. Yeah,

Speaker 2 that was something that Larry, or that

Speaker 2 Sergei Nikita Zimov wanted to do.

Speaker 1 How long before some Russian oligarch hunts a mammoth?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, look, given the geopolitical, you know, we see,

Speaker 2 going back to your wolf example,

Speaker 2 we see boundaries and geopolitical lines, right? The animals don't, right? And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoths in Siberia for many reasons.

Speaker 1 But you think you will rewild a mammoth.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, you know, our goal, like not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at colossal.com forward slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around like everyone from academia to private landowners to indigenous people groups, governments, to understand, like, like, we don't have a thiolacine.

Speaker 2 I think we'll have a thiocene in the next eight years. I really do.

Speaker 2 I think based on where we are, current course and speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a fat-tailed dunnart, which is like a mouse-sized marsupial, and a wolf

Speaker 2 in this, right?

Speaker 2 But we actually, and if you just kind of scroll through into the people.

Speaker 1 So it's a wolf-like marsupial.

Speaker 1 Does it actually have a pouch that is? It does.

Speaker 2 It actually also has a backward pouch. So most pouches

Speaker 2 other than like the wombat are forward-facing. It is a backwards because it was, they think because it was a burrowing animal.

Speaker 1 So that way you protect the babies. Yeah, like absolutely suffocate them.
But nature's fascinating.

Speaker 2 But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, and just like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines.

Speaker 2 We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacene with, and one of the groups that we have involved in it is the logging commission.

Speaker 2 Going back to your, you know, how does, how does, how do we live with nature, kind of like with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers. Well, the biggest economic driver right now in

Speaker 2 Tasmania is actually

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 logging commission.

Speaker 2 So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a into the forest, without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world.

Speaker 2 And so we going back to like the thiocene and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups ahead of time so that people can get excited about, you know,

Speaker 2 what are the challenges? What are the unintended consequences? And that's not our job to persuade them. It's just our job to kind of listen to them and then figure it out.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that approach of like listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities has helped us, I think, dramatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.

Speaker 1 So, when you have a rewilding strategy,

Speaker 1 what experts do you bring in to have this discussion of what kind of an impact this could? I mean, you haven't done any rewilding, let's be clear to everybody. They're not releasing dire wolves.

Speaker 2 And the woolly mice are not getting released. Right, right.

Speaker 1 So, this is all theoretically.

Speaker 1 But if you do have one, what would be the

Speaker 1 specifically? How do you take into account all the different species?

Speaker 1 Do you take into account, like with the thylacine, particularly because it's a large predator, the amount of animals it's going to eat? Right. These animals are not conditioned.

Speaker 1 They haven't evolved to be around this thing. It's been almost 100 years since the last one was there.

Speaker 2 So on the evolve part, this is actually kind of weird.

Speaker 2 So you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists,

Speaker 2 predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land. So you have to work with these kind of big working groups.

Speaker 2 We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.

Speaker 2 And this, you know, the old school like Looney Tunes, like Wily Coyote, where he's like, and he goes through a wall and there's like a hole or the Kool-Aid man, right?

Speaker 2 Well, if you had that cutout,

Speaker 2 we made cutouts and painted them of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and other things, and wolves and other things. And we put them out in your camera traps in central Tasmania.

Speaker 2 And when we've reviewed the data, you'll have like a qual or a wombat or one of these animals kind of walking through or even a wallaby kind of walking through.

Speaker 2 And they'll see a cat, they'll see a cut, and they'll kind of look at it. When they see it, and remember, to your point, this is hundreds, this is for them, is multiple generations, right?

Speaker 2 Because these animals don't live hundreds of years. And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze and they absolutely freak out.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we've been collecting this data for 18 months and we're publishing a paper on it.

Speaker 1 See, that is so cool.

Speaker 2 There's like generational trauma that is baked in to their DNA

Speaker 2 to avoid a thiolacine.

Speaker 1 What's the only way they survive? I mean without a language to pass down information.

Speaker 1 It makes you wonder like how much of that is in us.

Speaker 1 When people have aphidiophobia or arachnophobia, fear of snakes and spiders, what is that from? Because it's crippling.

Speaker 1 I've seen people that have crippling fear of spiders where it doesn't even make any sense. Well, they probably, somebody got almost killed by a spider and that's inside of them.

Speaker 1 You know, that those genes passed on and you see a spider just they freak out, man.

Speaker 1 When I was doing Fear Factor, we had, if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what?

Speaker 2 That was on the show. That's on the show.
Yeah, that's like me and Heights. It's like every episode you had back in the day in Heights.

Speaker 1 That's because you're smart.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like fucking terrifying. I'm Heights.

Speaker 1 Whenever I'm in a fucking hotel and I'm on like the 50th floor, why? Why? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Why? So I don't have like road noise. I'm like, it's gonna be really hard to get out of here.

Speaker 1 It's so sketchy. It's so scary.
It's just like the building moves a little bit when it's windy. Yeah.
Fuck all this.

Speaker 2 I saw my toilet water shaking the other day.

Speaker 1 Fuck that. No.
Here? Yeah, Jamie.

Speaker 1 He lives way up high. Jamie sends me pictures from his house.
I freak out.

Speaker 2 Like, no. No, I can't.
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't. I just, I like to be on the ground.

Speaker 2 I like to be on the ground. Well, I hate flying too, which sucks because I fly.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 I fly all the time.

Speaker 1 Just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because the worst is when you're sitting there, and there's now been these renders of planes that have glass or plexiglass. I'm like, I don't want to see that.

Speaker 2 I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don't shut the window. I was like, I don't even, I'm in the ball.
I'm in the tube.

Speaker 1 It's lit on fire.

Speaker 2 I just, I just want to go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I get just a little bit of a mistake.

Speaker 2 Because if you think about the point where you're sitting in a chair and then you look down and you have a floor, you're like, that's not, there's not that much. There's like 10,000 feet, you know,

Speaker 2 3,000 feet below me.

Speaker 1 When you see see something like the one that happened in Canada where the plane flipped upside down, too, you just like that, you can't get that one out of your head.

Speaker 2 A Delta Airlines life.

Speaker 2 It wasn't like

Speaker 2 a crazy airline that you've never heard of.

Speaker 1 It was a person who was not that good at flying and kind of recent. Yeah.
Like, hey, yeah.

Speaker 1 Hire someone better. Yeah.
And I try.

Speaker 2 And I go to DC a decent amount instead of like the whole DC thing absolutely freaked me out. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because sometimes I stay at some of those hotels that are right on the river and you see the choppers fly. You see the choppers fly.
You see the choppers fly.

Speaker 1 That's the decent one but look how much the water is shaking at this pool oh yeah did you see the one in thailand this is this is where it was oh did you see the water that's flying off the roofs yeah in the in the uh in the flying off the roofs where you see like from the ground it looks like it's raining

Speaker 1 it's crazy anyways

Speaker 1 yeah whoa those that is that would be the last day i would spend in that fucking room yeah you're out like that's it it's like if i saw bye-bye if i saw a ghost i'm like all right i'm moving yeah bye-bye maybe maybe the ghost is cool i'm not totally scared of ghosts because i don't think ghosts have ever killed anybody.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm scared of thylacines.

Speaker 1 I'm not scared of thylacines.

Speaker 2 They started off the size of a grain of rice.

Speaker 1 I've noticed that.

Speaker 2 It's got to be really nice to them. So does everything.
It's kind of like AI. You've got to be really nice to it.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I saw a great gift. I saw this great image on X the other day that is like, it's got all the robots lining up to kill humans.
And it's like, no, not this one. It said thank you in its request.

Speaker 2 Oh, boy. So I was like, I'm going to be very nice on all of my requests on croc.

Speaker 1 Well, I have a weird situation going on at my house because I have chickens, but I eat chicken.

Speaker 1 And I don't eat the chickens that I have. I eat their eggs.
Yeah. But they're cute.
I'm like, hey, girls, what's up, ladies? Yeah. I have no desire to harm them.
I try to protect them.

Speaker 1 If I'm driving on the driveway and one of them is in the middle of the driveway, I have to be very slow and let her cross.

Speaker 1 But I eat chicken.

Speaker 2 Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs,

Speaker 2 I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but you have two eggs, if you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It turns out Alzheimer's connected to a lot of stuff that's in the middle.

Speaker 2 Around inflammation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Unfortunately.

Speaker 2 You're saying that Gary said it was,

Speaker 2 I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was like, it's now becoming a more popular belief that it's diabetes type 3.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. I've heard that.
Which is really weird. to think of it that way.
But it's just, there's so much.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously you know this now because you're a health path yeah you know and you you feel much better i feel incredible i mean i do isn't it nuts how many people are just running around out there feeling like well i was i was i mean part of the reason i started colossal i mean i told you the story about how i got with george but before that uh I built a handful of different technology companies.

Speaker 2 My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it. And

Speaker 2 this was in early, late 2019, early 2020. I had to be in Tokyo and I had to be in Shanghai.
So I came back.

Speaker 2 I went to CES, the big consumer electronic show in Vegas, saw everyone in the world, right, that's there because it's stupid big. A week and a half later, I'm in NASA Marshall

Speaker 2 with the director there because we're doing some work for NASA at the time at my last company.

Speaker 2 And I was with one of my number two, my number two at the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer. He was coughing.
He wasn't feeling well.

Speaker 2 We both were kind of feeling like shit. I was like, oh, we've been on the road a lot.
We've been drinking. We came back on a Friday.

Speaker 2 On Friday night, we were going back on Slack around talking about aliens and shit. And then the next day, I got a call from his wife that he had a sudden cardiac event.
Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 2 And so that for me was a big wake-up call because I got really sick during COVID. Like I was on that early strain of COVID.
And there's definitely multiple strains. I don't care what anyone tells you.

Speaker 2 There was definitely multiple things that came out of the thing.

Speaker 2 And so I got super, super sick. And, you know, I now rarely drink.
I rarely have caffeine. You know, I've kind of tried to cut out stuff.
I exercise regularly.

Speaker 2 And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative like you know a dry sauna a uh cold plunge red light i do that every day now every day every day yeah that's beautiful that's awesome man you're lifting weights too yeah lifting weights on a regimen everything that's so important yeah so important and i tell people it's not even a vanity thing don't do it because you want big muscles preserve your tissue preserve your bone mass well i i don't want to be like i now have a nine-month-old son right and he like wants to hang out and uh you know he's gonna get bigger and if I can't pick him up, that's a sad day, right?

Speaker 2 You know, and I've kind of gotten this mindset of like, you know, I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can't walk. It's like it's kind of a blessing to walk.
It is.

Speaker 2 So, so, like, why, why would I squander that blessing? Why would I not like lean into it and make sure that when I'm 90, I can walk?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a blessing to be healthy, it's a blessing. I mean, it's just we're so concerned about our day-to-day existence that we lose track of this big picture.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn't possible, you would wish it was possible. And that is get healthier.

Speaker 1 Like if it wasn't possible, if we just existed in a state and whatever that state was, there's no medicine that could fix it. There's no exercise that could fix it.
Diet doesn't change it.

Speaker 1 This is just who you are as a being and it goes away. But that's not even remotely true.
It's actually the opposite.

Speaker 1 There's friends that I have that are my age and they look like they're my dad. Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 that's because they've been drinking and smoking and sleeping late and fucking off their whole life and no exercise at all. And your body deteriorates.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I'm not, like, I'm on the journey.
I'm not at the end, right? It is a constant journey.

Speaker 1 I'm on the journey. We're all on the journey.

Speaker 2 Since I started working with Gary, like, I did,

Speaker 2 have you seen this function test? Have you done the function test?

Speaker 1 What is the function test?

Speaker 2 It's like function health. It's like a, it's just a soup.

Speaker 2 It's just all, if you go to your doctor, like, I do quarterly blood work, but then I also then do this, uh, the function test, which is just a massively all-encompassing blood.

Speaker 2 It's like two tests twice a year. And so I do that test.
And

Speaker 2 after working with Gary for a while,

Speaker 2 now my biological age, or my actual age is 43.

Speaker 2 My biological age is 35. That's amazing.
And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients.

Speaker 2 You know, I buy, and you can actually taste a difference, right? Like if you go to a store and get steak or chicken,

Speaker 2 even if it's like free range and all that shit, it tastes great. It tastes better than like something that you buy just that's that's terrible at a store.

Speaker 2 But when you order from some of these like true, like Amish places and places that have actually like grown the food like completely natural that doesn't have just a fake pre-purchased certified organic, you can taste the difference in the nutrient density.

Speaker 2 It's insane. And

Speaker 1 you have a lot of wild game?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's what I order now. So I order a bunch of, so I do elk steaks.

Speaker 2 I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary

Speaker 2 recommended to me. It's just great.

Speaker 1 Is it bison? Do they have bison steaks?

Speaker 2 They do have bison too, yeah. It's Parker Pastures.
They're just

Speaker 2 like when I have a steak from these guys, like it's been, like, you can taste it. And I've had like my brother-in-law and my father-in-law had friends.

Speaker 2 I was like, I was like, no, no, no, we're going to try these steaks out of the freezer. And I was like, we're not just going to buy something.

Speaker 1 It looks different.

Speaker 2 It looks different. Yeah, it looks like the color of it.

Speaker 1 You can get a pink steak from the grocery store, which is fine. You cook it, it tastes great.
But if you get a grass-fed, grass-finished steak, like grass-fed-finished

Speaker 1 a lot of ranches out here, you know, Texas is a great place, and there's a lot of ranches out here that use regenerative agriculture, and they sell the animals that they kill, and it's like a dark red meat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it looks completely different, but the tastes different.

Speaker 2 You want to eat more of it. Like, I feel full, but I want to finish it.
And I also feel like I'm like... My body likes this because it's getting shit that it hasn't even been given.

Speaker 1 You feel better when you eat it. Like, you literally feel energized.
You know, I've given people elk before and one of the things I say is like, you have so much energy. I'm like, yes.

Speaker 1 Welcome to my world.

Speaker 2 It's awesome. It is.
It is so great. But that was in the early days of Colossal, that was one of the things that we got asked by

Speaker 2 heads of state, like not, not by like, you know, just random people. I have random people on the internet too, but mostly like some people at large at different locations.

Speaker 2 They're like, can we eat them? Can we eat a mammoth? What's it taste like? That was like, that question came up faster than we thought.

Speaker 2 And this is in the first, I know, that was in the first. It was so weird.

Speaker 2 Like, they just don't.

Speaker 1 I imagine you want to eat something that's been extinct for 10,000 years. You just bring it back.

Speaker 1 And not even yet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that was the first question.

Speaker 1 Can I eat this? Yeah. I want woolly mammoth steak, my friend.

Speaker 2 It was also domestic. The question happened domestic.

Speaker 1 Oh, domestic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like people, people

Speaker 1 have too much money. Yeah.
Fucking psychos.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's been.

Speaker 1 Go buy a car, you retards.

Speaker 1 It's been want to eat a mammoth. That's so crazy.

Speaker 2 we get the di we get that we get we get so many weird questions well we get the dinosaur question probably the probably the number one question we get is uh is the dinosaur question do you think if they brought if jurassic park if spielberg did it today they'd have feathers

Speaker 2 uh we know that some dinosaurs had feathers we know some had hair like hair like kind of precursor to feathers and we know some that were just scaly we have preserves of them we we can see yeah in the fossil record whether they had it right have you seen the one that's in the montana university There's a university in Bozeman that has a museum.

Speaker 1 Isn't the university? It might just be a museum. But when I was visiting there a few years back, they have

Speaker 1 a raptor, and one side of the raptor is feathered, and the other side is like Jurassic Park, like scaly. And, you know, you look at it and you go, oh,

Speaker 1 it's just like, oh, that's a fucking, it's a bird. Yeah.
Like, now it makes sense. Like, it makes more sense.
It's little stupid arms. Like, makes more sense.
I mean,

Speaker 2 have you seen the Hoatson?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Can we pull up a Hatson? So, this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon. And it is

Speaker 1 called a Hoatsen.

Speaker 2 I think it's called a Hotshots. I don't know how you spell it, but it's like H-O-A-T-Z-E-N or something like that.
We can find it. Yeah.
Apparently, it also smells terrible.

Speaker 2 But if you click, if you type in

Speaker 2 the Hoatsen, and then if you click in and find a baby picture, it's got these little creepy hands.

Speaker 2 It looks like kind of like a bird-like dinosaur. We did the genome on this for fun.
So, oh yeah, you can see it. It's like it climbs.
So before it ever flies, it actually climbs up everything.

Speaker 1 Well, when you look at an eagle's talon, you're like, well, what the hell is that?

Speaker 2 And then it evolves. Like, if you,

Speaker 2 the,

Speaker 2 the first kind of like, quote-unquote, dinosaur bird out there,

Speaker 2 it actually,

Speaker 1 yeah, it crawls.

Speaker 2 It crawls like, it doesn't fly. You know, most birds just sit there with their little like wing nubs and just don't do anything.
These guys actually actually climb.

Speaker 1 What about terror birds?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Those are scary.

Speaker 1 That's a crazy animal. Like, what the hell was that thing?

Speaker 1 What was that? How many years ago did those things go extinct? Oh, those are millions.

Speaker 2 Millions, right? Yeah. So the oldest DNA that we have is about 1.5 million years old.
That's it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Dead dinosaurs are out of the picture.

Speaker 2 So you can.

Speaker 2 A guy you should talk to about, not that, but that's interesting, is Kenneth Lacavara.

Speaker 2 He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including Dreadnautus, which is is just it's the craziest thing ever. And going back to Dreadnaught.
Dreadnoughtis.

Speaker 2 And going back to the issues that...

Speaker 1 What is Dreadnaughtis?

Speaker 2 Oh, Dreadnoughtus is amazing.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if it looks like.

Speaker 1 Imagine a dick.

Speaker 1 What cool color. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's a planet.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's a planet.
It's the size of my fucking 737.

Speaker 1 It's almost as big as a 737. That's so crazy.

Speaker 2 Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he founded Argentina,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 Kenneth Lacavara, he's amazing. He found it in Argentina,

Speaker 2 discovered the species, named the species, and

Speaker 2 he brought it to New Jersey to do all the modeling and all that. The government changed.
And they yanked it back. You know, the old school, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Art? That's where it is.

Speaker 2 It's basically in a warehouse. So it's not on display for people in a museum.
It's literally, this goes back to some of these, these governments and these museums.

Speaker 2 It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in western Argentina.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like the coolest thing ever. This is, yeah, so yeah, that's Lacavara's lab.
And so,

Speaker 2 but it, but it's, it's truly, truly amazing.

Speaker 1 So with these, like, that's one of the things about dinosaurs and museums, right? Like a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks.

Speaker 2 Fill in a lot of the blanks. Sometimes they'll get like a jawbone and they're like, and here's the reconstruction.

Speaker 1 Right. It's weird because you go to see it and you think you're going to see a dinosaur bone.

Speaker 2 But it's only a percentage complete. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And sometimes they're real clever and sometimes they're not. Like sometimes it'll be different colors for the real bone.
Yeah. Versus, and you're like, how much of this do you have?

Speaker 2 And they're like, 4%. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How did you guess what it looked like?

Speaker 1 And a lot of the images, like of the soft tissue overlay, like when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it.

Speaker 1 Like, have you ever seen what rabbits look like if you take away their skin?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they did this with like whales and stuff. They look absolutely if you look at

Speaker 2 the scariest things ever. And then you put a whale on there and you're like, oh, that's not the worst thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for whales, you see them and you look at them, you're like, oh, they're sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just chilling in the water. But if you see them with the teeth and everything and just the skeleton.

Speaker 2 It looks like an alien monster.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like an alien monster. So I wonder what we were looking at.

Speaker 2 There was one species that we don't have DNA for that would be amazing to bring back because the ecological benefit is there there was a giant beaver.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid.

Speaker 1 When did that thing die off?

Speaker 2 I don't know. It'd probably have to be.

Speaker 2 It would probably be in the late Pleistocene.

Speaker 1 One of the things that I learned through Renella is that

Speaker 1 at the founding of this country in the early days, the richest man in the world was selling beaver pelts. Oh, really? It was the richest guy in the world.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Here at the Pleistocene.

Speaker 2 Well, on the dinosaur bone.

Speaker 1 So this beaver, giant beaver, enormous bear-sized beaver that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Wow.
So when did these die off? What year? What was the Pleistocene officially?

Speaker 2 So about 13,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 Could have been the same thing with the 10 years ago. 12,000 years ago.
Wow, so it probably died off

Speaker 1 the American lion and all that other stuff. And you know the pronghorn.
You know the whole story about that. Yeah, that's why they're so fast.

Speaker 2 Oh, for because the American lion? No, American cheetah.

Speaker 1 American cheetah. Like they're the last of these animals.
They're a bizarre animal. Have you ever seen one in real life? I've never seen one in real life.
I've only seen it through binoculars.

Speaker 1 I've never seen one

Speaker 1 on the ground real close. I've only seen it from a few hundred yards away.
But when you look at images of them, they have insane eyesight. They have almost 360-degree vision.

Speaker 1 Their eyes are on the side of their heads. It's like literally way by the way.
And they can run 55 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don't exist anymore.

Speaker 1 So the cheetahs died off in the younger dryest impact or whatever happened, but these pronghorned antelopes remain and they are,

Speaker 1 there's nothing like them in terms of speed. That's all.

Speaker 1 Like it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone. They remain.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so can anything catch them now?

Speaker 1 Nothing. Once they're done, like once they're grown,

Speaker 1 good fucking luck. They have insane eyesight.
But you know one of the ways that people hunt them? They're really dumb. One of the ways people hunt them is on horsebacks.
Like that dog has zero chance.

Speaker 1 But the cheetah,

Speaker 1 the cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down.

Speaker 1 So it's like another, you know, a different kind of antelope.

Speaker 1 But a super fast. They're quite a bit faster, I bet, than these antelope.
They're crazy fast. There's like nothing like them in North America.

Speaker 2 It's awesome.

Speaker 1 But the vision that these things have.

Speaker 1 Give me a photo of one of their heads.

Speaker 1 Pronghorn's eyes. They're so weird looking.
They look archaic. Like if you see their face, they they don't look like they it looks like they're from another time

Speaker 2 from a star wars movie yeah they look like they're from another time yeah and they are they're literally on the side of that yeah they this is what would have been so amazing to like look at what the earth looked like you know 12 000 years ago which it is it is cool like america like to to your point when you travel and you go to these different places where you have that are truly more remote right and i'm not just talking about like yellowstone but you know like when you've said you like going to kruger national park or looking at some of these places in africa when you go to Central Tasmania, it's almost like a weird Disney movie.

Speaker 2 Like, like at dusk, you've got like echidnas running around and you've got wallabies jumping, jumping through.

Speaker 2 And they all just come through and you're like, like, it's like that scene in like Ace Ventura, right? Where he sings and like everything fucking comes to him.

Speaker 2 And I, and like, I remember the first, I was like, this isn't real. Like, are these animatronic? Like, there's no way there's this much life in biodiversity.

Speaker 2 And it's all, and it was all just like, you know, the echidnas are running, the wallabies are jumping. You've got like womb bats like kind of like kind of scurrying along.

Speaker 2 And you're just like, there's all these weird, dumb animals that are just excited. You know, they're so strange to us, right? In terms of like how we think about them because you never see them.

Speaker 2 But then there's just like this insane plethora of them. They're just so many.
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 Well, I wonder what would be different had the thylacine survived. So they say it was kind of the only thing that was.

Speaker 2 It was the only apex predator for Tasmania in Lower Australia. And

Speaker 2 have you seen a Tasmanian double in person?

Speaker 1 Not in person. They're awesome.

Speaker 1 They look cool as shit.

Speaker 2 They're cool as shit. They're awesome.
They eat in these little packs. And the reason why they call them Tasmanian Devils is because they make the weirdest.
I mean, they make sound.

Speaker 2 If I heard the sounds that they make, if you're out in the woods and you hear that sound, you're like, this is a, this is Sasquatch. This is crazy.
They're crazy.

Speaker 1 See, we can hear some.

Speaker 2 Oh, cute face. You find them eating.
They just sound terrible.

Speaker 1 Find Tasmanian tiger noises.

Speaker 2 I don't think we know what they make.

Speaker 1 Excuse me. Tasmanian devil noises.
Sorry. Sorry.

Speaker 2 Have you seen this video though?

Speaker 1 I have. Yeah.
We can go to that in a second, too. I just want to hear this.

Speaker 1 Look at that fucker.

Speaker 1 Look at this. No face.

Speaker 2 And cool. And so they, so they're, they're part of the reason why they're, but that, that, isn't that terrifying?

Speaker 1 You know, they give each other cancer?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 And many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think that if the thiolacine was there, because this is where people give wolves and thiocenes and predators bad, but they go after the same, there's an energy expenditure ratio, right?

Speaker 2 They're not just sitting there grazing. They're not getting sedentary.
They have to go make the kill. They have to decide, I'm going to go kill stuff.

Speaker 2 So they kill the young, so they're thinning out the weakest. They kill the old, and they kill the sick.

Speaker 2 An environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.

Speaker 2 And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate

Speaker 2 kind of that mezzanine level of marsupials. And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not, if you've seen, I don't know if you saw it, it's disgusting.
It's really gross.

Speaker 2 But that face.

Speaker 1 What are we looking at here?

Speaker 1 Oh, feeding frenzy.

Speaker 1 Give me some volume. It's doing it right in front of people, too, which is crazy.
They might be talking all the time.

Speaker 2 I fed them like this. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 They're just not scared. Watch how fast they are capable of

Speaker 1 consuming.

Speaker 2 They're like piranhas. These are Tasmanian devils, the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera.
And next to Tasmanian.

Speaker 1 It's so cool that they're not

Speaker 1 remotely scared of people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they don't even notice you're there. It's crazy.
So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of

Speaker 1 Brave Wilderness channel. Look at these little fuckers coming up.

Speaker 2 And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights. And that fighting

Speaker 2 is when they that's when they do the transmission.

Speaker 1 Oh, right in the middle of the devil fight. No, I mean, like,

Speaker 1 wow.

Speaker 2 But they literally scratch and bite each other, and then they

Speaker 2 transmit this. It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of.
So then it latches onto the next face through biting.

Speaker 2 And if you see an animal with a Tasmanian devil with a facial tumor disease, and you see them, like, they can't walk well they can't really see well those are the animals that would be picked up by predators first

Speaker 2 and so they so there's a big movement within Tasmania in lower australia southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator being the thylacine it would eat

Speaker 1 I can't even look it oh god we're looking for people listening we're looking at tumors on Tasmanian devils faces yeah which are just terrible what I mean that was a perfect inspiration for a comic book character or for a cartoon character rather the Tasmanian yeah Tasmanian devil yeah

Speaker 2 I mean they're they're like they'll be sitting there not making those sounds they start eating or they get threatened and they make those death sounds you are you are it is a terrible because it if you've never heard it before in person it just catches you by surprise and it like blows you away so I was it was a pretty weird experience person I did yeah I'd imagine

Speaker 1 that's such a cool little animal so the idea of ultimately eventually releasing thylacines

Speaker 1 how would that be done and what kind of study would have to be done Because you're talking about all these animals that come out. Look at all the animals.

Speaker 1 That probably won't be the case if you reintroduce

Speaker 1 it. They'll start

Speaker 1 spinning it out and

Speaker 1 achieve a balance. Yeah, it'll achieve a balance.
So they've done a lot. Let's just keep people up to date on Australia.
Most people don't know that they've introduced cats. So house cats.

Speaker 1 You want some water? Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 1 They introduced house cats, like just feral house cats in Australia to combat certain species.

Speaker 1 And they started decimating all the other species.

Speaker 2 It's literally the worst. It's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate in Australia.

Speaker 1 And it's because it's an invasive species. Would that be a problem that would be, would there be a similar problem if you reintroduce the Tasmanian tiger? Would there be

Speaker 1 potentially, would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct? So these cascade.

Speaker 2 The good news about the

Speaker 2 Tasmanian in the southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right?

Speaker 2 Hopefully they'd eat the cats.

Speaker 2 If you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats outside of the cats that they actually own. Yeah.
They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials.

Speaker 2 They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats.

Speaker 1 Yeah, people hunt them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people hunt them.

Speaker 1 Like, you have, I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, and they have this magazine. It's like a bow hunter magazine in Australia, and he gave me a copy of it.

Speaker 1 I was reading on a plane, and this guy's holding up a dead cat. He shot with a bow and arrow.
I'm like, hey, man. Like, what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 1 They hold them up like trophies.

Speaker 2 Well, because it's a huge problem, right? It goes back to the invasive species.

Speaker 2 One of the projects that we're working on with the thiocene, because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation, is, have you ever seen a northern quoll?

Speaker 1 No, what is that?

Speaker 2 Northern quoal, it kind of looks like a mink or like a ferret, but way prettier. It's amazing.
How do you spell it? Q-U-O-L-L.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, they're absolutely beautiful. They're absolutely, I mean, their coats are beautiful, but they're another type of carnivorous marsupial.

Speaker 2 But, you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity introduced cane toads.

Speaker 2 Have you ever seen a cane toad? It's like the job of the hut.

Speaker 1 I mean, it looks fucking evil, right? They're monsters.

Speaker 2 And so we introduced, we as humanity introduced cane toads into Australia. And

Speaker 2 they have a neurotoxin. Well, guess what? Most coals and small marsupials love to eat? Frogs and toads.
And so this is actually, I think, about our work. This actually is about our work.
And so,

Speaker 2 no, this is maybe, no, actually, I think this is part of our work. And what we've done is, if you go back to your point about co-evolving and evolution, if you go back to

Speaker 2 South America where cane toads evolved along snakes and mice and other small mammals, they eat cane toads all day long. And they don't die of the neurotoxin.

Speaker 2 They don't completely stroke out and die, which is what happens in northern Australia. And so the cane toads are, they reproduce in in an insane rate.
They're having like thousands of babies.

Speaker 2 They're just making more and more of them. So guess what? More and more cane or more and more coals and others are eating these cane toads and dying.

Speaker 2 So what we did is we actually did a study where we understood what are the genes in the mammals and snakes even in South America that make them cane toad toxin resistant. And here's what we found.

Speaker 2 This is amazing. One letter.
in three and a half billion base pairs. So one letter, a one letter change, conferred, had no no other, you know, deteriorating, no other effects that were negative.

Speaker 2 And it

Speaker 2 created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 So because coals are endangered and we don't want to work in endangered species first, you want to start with a more model species. We worked in the fat-tailed dunnart,

Speaker 2 which is our model species for the thylacine.

Speaker 2 And we engineered Dunnarts that, and Dunnart cells and Dunnarts, that can eat canetoed tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them.

Speaker 2 And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that

Speaker 2 we like to engineer in

Speaker 2 this one edit into quolls, because if coals would have, would have most likely, through this concept of convergent evolution,

Speaker 2 if you would have put the coal next to the cane toad, they would have co-evolved together, they probably would have had that

Speaker 2 resistance already built into them through nature.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation. And so then you could like make these super quoals that eat the cane toads.

Speaker 2 And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this and help the population of the quoals, but it also has a halo effect to all these other marsupials that we don't know how many are dying from eating cane toads.

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Speaker 1 Big toads to eat the coals.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 you know what I'm saying? Have you seen

Speaker 2 those toads and frogs that like latch out and they'll eat anything in front of them? Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're terrible. I've seen it.

Speaker 2 There was a giant one of those toads back in like, I don't know, thousands of years ago.

Speaker 1 How big was it? I don't know.

Speaker 2 I've seen a picture, a 3D render of it, and it grabs deers and stuff. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 Whoa. We've played videos of toads eating mice.
I had no idea. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice. Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 So they put them in this bin with a bunch of mice and this toad is just going ham, just snatching mice up and swallowing them.

Speaker 2 And you'd think that they're just sitting there docile and then they just absolutely throw their whole body. Well, they sit there.

Speaker 1 They have the creepiest dead eyes. They're just machines to eat.
You ever seen them fight with each other? That's pretty wild too.

Speaker 1 They bite each other's heads and they throw each other through the air.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've seen them toss each other.

Speaker 1 Imagine you're fighting with a dude and he literally bites half your torso and throws you through the air and they and they don't even look like it bothered them. Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's just part of the fight.

Speaker 2 That's totally within the rules.

Speaker 1 That's what creeps me out about reptiles. There's this lack of emotions.
Like at least a wolf has emotions.

Speaker 1 There's something going on there. There's an intelligence.
There's something really creepy about getting eaten by something stupid. Like a crocodile.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like a crocodile or like a toad. There was a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting, but it turns out to not be true.

Speaker 1 That they would lie on their back and put their their arms in the air. Oh, yeah, pretend to simulate drowning.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw that video.

Speaker 1 Apparently, that's not what they're doing. Apparently, that's a normal characteristic that they do.

Speaker 2 But stupid, but stupid. But from a natural selection perspective, stupid people are like, I have to save that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got to go save that dude.

Speaker 2 And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart, but in reality, just got a free meal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you would think, though, if they have gotten those meals before, that that would be a learned behavior. I mean, it just makes sense.
They do have some learned behavior.

Speaker 1 I have a friend, his name is Jim Shocky. He's a professional hunter, and he was actually hired to go into Africa and hunt crocodiles that were killing all these people in this village.

Speaker 1 Like they're actively targeting people in this village.

Speaker 1 When he went to the village, everybody was like missing a foot, a chunk taken out of their leg. And while he was there, a crocodile took a woman who was washing clothes.

Speaker 1 So what they had done was They'd set up this area by the water where they had driven these stakes in the ground that would prevent the crocodiles from getting in the water and getting really close to the edge.

Speaker 1 You you know, because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up. These fucking crocodiles went around the fence.

Speaker 1 They walked around the fence and slid into the water. So they just figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to.
So they hunt people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they absolutely do. And it's weird how some of those

Speaker 2 it's very strange as we start to study, because like one of the things that Colossal is doing is we're studying a lot of what's called non-model species.

Speaker 2 So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know.

Speaker 2 There's some things that are known, like in like elephants get cancer a fraction of what they should due to an overexpression of a gene called p53.

Speaker 2 So there's this thing called pedo's paradox where based on age and body weight, both blue whales and elephants get cancer a fraction of what they probably should based on how old they get and what their body size is.

Speaker 2 And they actually, that actually makes our lives very difficult.

Speaker 2 And that's why we had to create stem cells for elephants because anytime we try to, we had to figure out how to regulate p53, because anytime you go to edit that one

Speaker 2 cell, it just says, looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell, right? It's like programmed in.

Speaker 2 So we have to be able to, we have to be able to turn that down because we're in the editing phase on the mammoth project, right? So there's about 85 genes.

Speaker 1 But if you turn that down, does that make them more susceptible to cancer?

Speaker 2 And so you got to turn it back up after you make the edits.

Speaker 2 So these are the things that you just, that we are learning.

Speaker 1 I'm with that lady doctor. that lady scientist.
You guys are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

Speaker 2 No, we're learning about things, right?

Speaker 1 We're learning about things. I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding.
If I was her, I would probably have the same opinion. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'd probably say, especially if I found out you guys weren't really scientists. I'd be like, what are you doing? Yeah.
Why are you doing this?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, the good news is about Colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and our 95 scientific advisors, 90% of the company is scientists. There's very few.

Speaker 2 I fall in the very few.

Speaker 1 I'm kind of kidding about you're not scientists. But I've definitely been aware of that.

Speaker 1 I'm not kidding about the technology getting into someone else's hands. And this is where it gets weird.
Like China, Russia, somebody.

Speaker 2 And it is getting weird.

Speaker 2 like crisper and these genome engineering tools are outside of the bottle are they're out it's it's like the genie out of the bottle right it's like it's out there you can't put it back in um i think that more and more people in other countries are going to be doing things with these two these technologies for humans that's why Colossal just said we will never do anything for humans if someone else wants to use our technologies for humans we'll evaluate it get so weird right like the China story like can you explain to people what what they did they said they were inoculating them from HIV which is yeah They actually were engineering.

Speaker 2 They were engineering

Speaker 2 babies

Speaker 2 in editing their embryos to confer a resistance to HIV. Now, still to this day, so they were cloning them and then they were genetically modifying them.

Speaker 2 And so they're doing lots of things that are, there's a general moratorium in the world on some of these things around humans. Anything that's considered a germline edit.
So anything that could be

Speaker 2 passed on to the next generation, right? So things, so

Speaker 2 if you engineer something into the genome, the fear is,

Speaker 2 you know, from a germline, so any, all your cells in your body are somatic cells, except for your, like, egg or sperm, those are germ cells.

Speaker 2 So anything that could be affected into the germline so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be like, you know,

Speaker 2 umbrella corporation type moment, right?

Speaker 2 We don't want that.

Speaker 1 But the scary thing was they didn't just do that. They also edited something that would allow the child to have much higher intelligence.

Speaker 2 Well, so that part's like,

Speaker 2 that part's quoted under debate. There's people that say that happened.
There's people that say it doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 If you look at BGI or Beijing Genomics Institute, right, they did this thing that from a nefarious perspective was brilliant. From a nefarious perspective, it's also terrifying.

Speaker 2 During COVID, they're like, we'll do all the COVID testing for you, free. We'll do all this COVID testing for you for free.
No worries. Just send us your data.
We'll do it all for free.

Speaker 2 You just want to help the world, right? We'll work with the World Health Organization. Just send us all your samples from all your countries, everything.

Speaker 2 And publicly, the CEO of BGI has said, which is funded by the CCP, has said

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 they are looking at genes with humans. They are looking at what makes humans more intelligent.
They don't shy away from this. This is not like some

Speaker 2 conspiracy theory, like, is it a Sasquatch or is it just a man in an ape suit? This is something that is very real.

Speaker 2 They are openly saying we are sequencing as much as we can of the world population looking for genes for intelligence, and we will act on that.

Speaker 2 That's not a hidden thing.

Speaker 1 So, that is the thing that you supposedly did with these children.

Speaker 1 How many older these kids now?

Speaker 2 I mean, that would have, when did that happen, Jay? It was

Speaker 2 in like

Speaker 2 six or seven or six.

Speaker 1 Are they already winning chess championships? Yeah, so I mean, we should find out. Yeah, we should find out what Max Kids are probably in a lab somewhere with a headset on.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 teaching them how to be psychic.

Speaker 2 I don't know how public it's like, it was also one of those weird things that it was like, he's in trouble. He's going to jail.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then he's like

Speaker 2 and he's out.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 All is for God. Yeah.
But meanwhile, if you go to jail in China, you fucking vanish. Forever.
Yeah. Yeah, except for this guy.
You're making iPhones until you drop dead of starvation.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's 100% true.

Speaker 2 And so it is weird that he got in trouble for a few months.

Speaker 1 Right. And he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place.
They funded his lab.

Speaker 2 His lab was funded by the and this is what we found out about.

Speaker 1 I guarantee you there's some shit that they're doing somewhere that we haven't found out about yet.

Speaker 1 And if you were going to do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that

Speaker 1 what Russia was attempting to do during, was it World War I or World War II? They were trying to make a chimpanzee human hybrid for war.

Speaker 2 Oh, I saw that.

Speaker 1 Through a war. Yeah.
Yeah. A chimp-human hybrid for war.

Speaker 2 Well, there's been a recent publication out of Japan where they're allowing uh japanese soldier or japanese scientists to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes

Speaker 1 with other mammalian genes like what kind of genes like woolly mammoth genes in a person

Speaker 1 no we are not doing that people ask us if we could solve ball uh uh uh hair loss with woolly mammoths that would be the first thing people want yeah hair loss next thing bigger dicks yeah is it's a consistent you can't engineer once a person's already born right well you with the current technology.

Speaker 2 With the current technology.

Speaker 2 So being able to send stuff to specif gene therapies and targeting it, being able to deliver specifically to cells is an area that we're getting better at.

Speaker 2 Like, I think one of the, probably the most...

Speaker 2 I think one of the

Speaker 2 projects that's the furthest along is around like sickle cell anemia. It's a single CRISPR knockout, right? So it's a single knockout.
It's not multiplex editing.

Speaker 2 And now it's about can you target that in all of the tissue types that are the most affected? And then over time, how do you deliver that gene therapy to everything?

Speaker 1 And you could do that to a person who's already born.

Speaker 2 To someone that's already born. It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage.

Speaker 1 Could you envision a world where the gene editing technology becomes so powerful that you could do it to a person who is already fully formed? Yes. Whoa.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is what I predicted. Everyone's going to look like Thor.
It's a bunch of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Momoas and no more people look like you and me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wait.

Speaker 2 So Chris is one of our investors and I always think we look just like each other.

Speaker 1 So, he invited,

Speaker 2 Luke invited me to go to Vylon.

Speaker 1 I think you different species is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they invited me to go up to Byron Bay and go surfing with them. And I was like, Yeah, I'm going to go take my shirt off next to you, nerds.
That's exactly what's never going to happen.

Speaker 2 And I just made up an excuse of why I couldn't go because they were like, We want to go surfing. And I was like,

Speaker 1 Sure, you do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not going surfing with you too.

Speaker 1 Measure Cox, too? Yeah, I was like,

Speaker 2 I'm going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible.

Speaker 1 But you got to imagine if that becomes a reality. Like what we're doing today just with

Speaker 1 plastic surgery. Yeah.
Right. Like let's take

Speaker 1 an example. Yeah, GLP ones.
But

Speaker 1 that's achievable, right? What GLP ones are doing is achievable through hard work. Yeah.
But

Speaker 1 like what they're doing in South Korea with eye surgery. Like it's ubiquitous.
Like so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these K-pop eyes. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 2 it's a strange thing.

Speaker 1 It's a strange thing. And if that's just primitive cutting cutting and sewing tissue artistically, right?

Speaker 1 But if people can decide what they're going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a eugenics.

Speaker 1 Now we're really playing God. No, no, no.

Speaker 2 No, that's playing God to another level, right? And that's like that's this eugenics world where we know, right?

Speaker 2 Like I just had a child, and, you know, typically, I'd say if you go through the IVF process, which we went through,

Speaker 2 you typically can test for certain types of issues like along the pregnancy, right? And when they put the embryo in, in, they look at kind of the morphological grade.

Speaker 2 Well, now there's new tests, new companies out there, one of which I use, which after I used it, I was so impressed I invested in it called Orchid Health.

Speaker 2 And they actually take cells from the developing area on the very outer derm, right? On this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development.

Speaker 2 They culture those cells and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right? And so we had a handful of embryos.

Speaker 2 And so not selecting, they don't let you just select for like eye color or height or anything.

Speaker 2 But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue or is it compatible with life, which is what most people test for, you can now,

Speaker 2 you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things, right?

Speaker 2 So like, you know, if diabetes or certain types of cancers or Alzheimer's rollins in your family, you can now get a lot of that's environmental, but you can still get a distribution scored so you can understand what are the genetic factors in that.

Speaker 2 So that's today. So that's not like 20 years in the future.
That's not Gattaca. That's today.
Wow. And I mean, we did that.
We did that because

Speaker 2 I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation which affects the Titan gene and I create a truncated protein.

Speaker 2 So I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID that was a lava leak that attacked my heart. Wow.
And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on.

Speaker 2 So we screened for that, right? But that's not a standard thing.

Speaker 2 But that's a today thing. Like,

Speaker 2 you know, two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.

Speaker 1 So you understand the technology better than most.

Speaker 1 Conceivably, what could be done that would, in the future, allow people to change their very shape and literally like change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything?

Speaker 2 I think it starts with,

Speaker 2 you know, neuroenhancers. And I think

Speaker 2 this is the biological perspective.

Speaker 2 This is not even the computer brain interfaces merging with AI, that whole world, which I think that world has a lot lot of traction and is scarily getting a lot of traction pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 But I think it starts with things like health span, where it's like the very vain stuff. So, like,

Speaker 2 you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that, eye color. I think all of that is changeable.

Speaker 2 There's a company right now, I've read the name of it, that spun out of Harvard that is making patches using microneedling patches that you can even feel the needles, right?

Speaker 2 And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin.

Speaker 2 So you can have 30-year-old looking skin when you're 85 years old.

Speaker 1 What? Yes.

Speaker 2 So, and the same thing for hair, right? The reason why our hair is.

Speaker 1 That's going to be real soon?

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean,

Speaker 2 the speed of which,

Speaker 2 I think the biggest, I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process and

Speaker 2 not the technology. I think it'll be a process problem.
We saw that with Operation Warp Drive, right? We saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to. So I think that's number one.

Speaker 2 And I think that you're going to have the ethical pushbacks on this.

Speaker 1 So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles. But right now, the technology exists.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of on for the folks that are deep in longevity,

Speaker 2 they'll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it's not currently classified as a disease state. Right.

Speaker 2 And so they're not getting NIH funding. They're getting all that funding is going to other random stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, but people aren't focusing on longevity.

Speaker 2 That's why you've got, like, if you've seen anything that like Bob Nelson's done, Bob started Arch Ventures, and he's like arguably the number one biotech in the world, and he's working on epigenetic resets, so resetting your clocks at a cellular level.

Speaker 2 That's what Jeff Bezos and them have. They're doing it Altos Labs.
George Church has another company called Rejuvenate Bio. They're doing the same things.
And they're smart.

Speaker 2 They did it in dogs first because people love dogs. And they can also collect a lot of data that they can then apply to clinical trials.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people cloning their dogs now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's people that are cloning their dogs. They can do it even easier now with this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I didn't bring Marshall to the studio.

Speaker 2 We did clone one person's dog.

Speaker 1 I couldn't do it. I love him too much.
I couldn't do it. I would feel so weird around this fake Marshall.
Yeah. I wouldn't want to do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's how people feel about it. Some people.

Speaker 1 Dogs are unique little creatures. They have their own little personalities.
I know.

Speaker 2 I've got two, and they're amazing. And, you know, I did, my wife is closer to one.

Speaker 2 And so I did, I did, just full disclosure, I did, we did do a blood sample on that one.

Speaker 2 I just don't know what the meltdown could look like.

Speaker 2 But the other one we haven't. And so, because you're right, you have, you have environmental factors, you have personalities.
We don't understand all of that.

Speaker 2 But I won't say who it is, but someone that's very well known in the world, when I was showing him some of our Dire Wolf and Red Wolf Tech, his kids were devastated because his dog was dying. And

Speaker 2 they didn't want to put her in any harm. They didn't want to go to one of these dog cloning companies and do like ear.
They didn't want to put it to sleep. They didn't think she'd wake back up.

Speaker 2 So we did a dread, a blood draw. He called me over Christmas

Speaker 2 or before Christmas last year and told me that, you know, that they think the dog's got weeks, days to weeks to live. Could we could we do it for her?

Speaker 2 And we did it for him. We're not in that business.
That's not our business. But he was just happy because his choice wasn't he didn't want this other dog or his family didn't want another dog.

Speaker 2 His biggest issue was

Speaker 2 they couldn't let go of that dog, number one. And number two, but they didn't want that dog to suffer.
They didn't want to say, for our selfish means,

Speaker 2 you're already suffering. We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken out, like Frankenstein pieces of you.

Speaker 2 And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw. It was like totally awake, just sitting right there while we did it.

Speaker 2 And, you know, he was happy with that.

Speaker 2 so i think these that dog is going to be reincarnated into a higher level of existence you stop it and put it on this like yeah so that's not exactly our business you know what i'm saying i do i do it's all we don't really exactly know what life is no we don't we definitely don't know life and here's one thing that his his assistant told uh my chief of staff he said to her he's like you know what's weird i didn't think it was the same dog at all and i it's definitely not the same dog but he's like it goes and sits in the same place which isn't like it's not like in front of a window on its bed, right?

Speaker 2 I don't know the exact place, but it would always go sit in the exact same place the other dog said. So there's weird stuff.
We don't understand this.

Speaker 1 That would creep me out. It would creep me out because Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps.

Speaker 2 And if that happens, yeah.

Speaker 1 It would creep me out. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 I've had other dogs stay at my house. I had my older daughter's dog stay at my house, and that dog didn't go to that same spot.
It's not like this is one spot that's warmer or cooler.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 I was like, my dog Ken, he, if he like gets on, like, he only wants to sleep on my feet. If I fall asleep on the couch, he's cool.

Speaker 1 He won't sleep on my feet.

Speaker 2 He just wants to sleep on me. And that's not comfortable for him because I'm like kicking him and everything, but that's just where he wants to sleep.

Speaker 1 They want to be in contact with you. My dog watches TV with me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I taught

Speaker 1 the best. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we didn't even teach it this, but when we say security at our house, our dogs just lose it. Like Ken just loses his mind.
He just

Speaker 2 runs to the door. He runs the front door, runs the back door, runs the side doors.

Speaker 2 What kind of dog? They're just mutts. So I have Barbie and Ken.
They're just two little weird mutts.

Speaker 1 Dogs.

Speaker 2 But we named them before the movie.

Speaker 1 It's just a weird thing to take that dog. And I think also for kids, like the thing is, like, kids, the loss is so devastating.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's also good to teach them those things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think loss is important. I think loss is important.

Speaker 2 I don't want to, you know, I only am new to this whole father thing. But, you know, I think it's important that they understand that

Speaker 2 there's real things and there's consequences to decisions. And we're going to age and we've got a limited time.
I think that in his lifetime, it will be massively accelerated.

Speaker 2 But I think that's important.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that is one of the things, though, I think having a kid, you know, and also all of these kids and parents that have been sending us pictures of mammoths and thylacines and dodos and hopefully now dire wolves

Speaker 2 is something that's exciting because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right? So like on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or whatever,

Speaker 2 and we get, or an experiment doesn't work, or whatever bad happens, and you look at this pile of kids' photos and teachers, like, we have this this there was a teacher named katie from florida who sent us a letter and and literally like like 40 pictures of mammoths and in that letter she goes my kids won't be quiet we're in this like attention war with everything my kids won't be quiet i start talking about colossal i show the woolly mouse stuff they all want to just talk about it they just zone in right because it's interesting it's interesting and and kids and so i i think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good we can use technologies for conservation for good and we can help ecosystem with bringing back extinct species.

Speaker 2 But I think that we can also inspire the next generation. Like, don't we want to preach hope? We're on this 24-7 psycho news cycle, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that wasn't around when I was a kid, or you know, C.S. Lewis first started talking about this.
Like, what year was C.S. Lewis alive?

Speaker 1 But he had a quote about, I might have saved it. He had a quote about

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 just getting all the dire information of the world

Speaker 1 sent to you all the time, which at his time back then, that was very new. That was a completely new thing.

Speaker 2 And this idea of these 24-hour news cycles, right? You know, like there's actually a law in the UK.

Speaker 2 This blew my mind. There's a law in the UK that they cannot tell, they cannot report on a piece if it has any degree of social impact that they don't tell the negative side.

Speaker 2 I was like, so what happens if it's like, so if, if there's, someone saves a kitten from a a tree, you have to get the dog's perspective? Like, it's like, and they're like, yes.

Speaker 1 And they're dead serious. Oh, that's so ridiculous.

Speaker 2 So it's like, it's like, there can be stories that are just negative, and there can be stories that are just positive. That's okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you're going to have very lively debate. That's always going to happen with something that's so groundbreaking, like what you're doing.
But I also think it's inevitable.

Speaker 1 I think human beings have this inescapable desire for innovation. Right.
And it's going to apply to biology just like it applies to electronics. And you can't do anything about it.

Speaker 1 You can have debates about it, and we should. We should have, you should, you know, what you guys are doing is great.

Speaker 1 You've got the dire wolves fenced off, and you're very careful, and you're monitoring them. It's great.
It's going to happen. It's going to happen.
And at least you're transparent about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, at least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and

Speaker 2 they train them with DNA to only eat people.

Speaker 1 But that's probably going to happen too.

Speaker 1 This is just, we're going to face unique problems no matter what we do because technology is allowing people to do things that are unprecedented, including change what it means to be an actual person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute AI and synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer life.

Speaker 2 I think that we're at the doorstep of, you know, everyone's very, very worried about AI.

Speaker 2 But I do think that synthetic biology is in that camp. I think

Speaker 2 it's like discovering fire. It's the God camp.

Speaker 1 It's all falling into the same thing. And then when you add to that incredible computing power that's going to be available with quantum computing.

Speaker 1 And then you have new technologies that are going to emerge from AI using quantum computing.

Speaker 2 And then the interface of it all, like the Aerolink stuff and everything. It's just going to get...

Speaker 2 The interfaces are crazy.

Speaker 1 Because we had that gentleman, Noah, the first guy who got it, and he said he has an AIM bot in his head. So when he plays games, he's got a crazy advantage.

Speaker 1 Because where he looks is where the cursor goes. Like instantaneously.
So he could shoot things. Like he's not going to miss.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, we are living in a weird time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's the weirdest time. It's the weirdest time that people have ever been through.
And we're at the door. We haven't even gone into the

Speaker 1 wild.

Speaker 2 That's what I say about synthetic biology, right? So like the ability to like engineer drought-resistant crops or a vaccine or regrow our hair or make mammoths. That's today.

Speaker 2 We can't even think about what's tomorrow. We spun out a company from Colossal called Breaking

Speaker 2 last year, and this incredible group at the Vies Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to.

Speaker 2 And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical box. That's why I need it breaking.

Speaker 2 It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing. Well, guess what? You know, so it takes things that have broken down never and has got it down into years.

Speaker 2 We have used now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it so now that it's in, you know, 22 months. And I think that we can get it down to two weeks.

Speaker 2 And so that will be huge for the plastic problem because we can all say that we're going to change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics, but we still have the existing plastics here and we have to do something about it.

Speaker 2 So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, if someone said, we can give you a magic mic,

Speaker 2 a magic microbe that can, you can put in a vat and you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw you know salads and other stuff there and it won't even touch it.

Speaker 2 That would have sounded like science fiction 10 years ago.

Speaker 1 That's so crazy. And so now it's you said it's down to a couple months?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's 22 months right now.

Speaker 2 And we're talking about like not just like your water bottle.

Speaker 2 Your water bottle, but you're also talking about things that are like industrial defense plastics that are like, you know, radiation hardened and whatnot for space.

Speaker 2 Like we're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.

Speaker 1 What about those stupid fucking windmills that they have to to change every day? Oh,

Speaker 1 they actually have a landing for windmills.

Speaker 2 And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make, yeah.

Speaker 1 And they barely make any electricity. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 They kill livestock, or they kill animals, kill birds. They disrupt

Speaker 2 whales.

Speaker 2 They also disrupt migratory patterns of birds.

Speaker 1 Of course they do. Yeah.
Yeah. You can't fly into that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And they're all made with plastic and plastic polymers.

Speaker 1 And then they have to get rid of them. And then the only place to put them is in a landfill.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So that's why we started breaking.

Speaker 1 Wow, so these microbes would be able to break that down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, we haven't tested on that specific, but like one of the biggest ones that we tested on was nylon, just because there's so much.

Speaker 2 If you look at like what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets.

Speaker 1 Oh, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 So we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases, and then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others.

Speaker 2 So if we get to the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right? Because all that's passing through right now, like in our drinking water and everything.

Speaker 2 That's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like the three-layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water. You've got to do, Gary, you got me a new water machine.

Speaker 2 So, but you have to do those types of things because the microplastics and then

Speaker 2 the chlorine and other stuff still passes through a lot of the existing materials.

Speaker 1 So when you're doing this, is this something that you could release like in the ocean itself? Or would you have to worry then about the effect like bringing the house cats to Australia?

Speaker 2 No, it dies.

Speaker 2 It only eats this like

Speaker 1 this is what they always say right before it fucks up. I'm not going to worry about that.

Speaker 2 But with a distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA. There's a lot of testing that you have to do, right?

Speaker 1 But you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the Great Pacific garbage patch.

Speaker 2 So I don't know, based on heat and salinity and whatnot, right now it's working in bioreactors, so I don't want to overpromise and say we can just go sprinkle it and call it a day.

Speaker 2 But that's the long-term goal, right?

Speaker 2 But that's the power of, you know, we used AI and computational analysis of this microbe that's found in nature. And then we said, let's supercharge it, just like supercharging the coals, right?

Speaker 2 And so, but that's, but the process of using it outside of contained systems like a bioreactor has to be done very thoughtfully and measured, just like rewilding, right?

Speaker 2 Like, this is where sometimes people get confused about like the yelts and stuff. They didn't just open the gate and throw some wolves in there.

Speaker 2 I mean, it sounds like they did more of that in Colorado, but there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through, right?

Speaker 2 Because there's intended consequences, which you get excited about, but then there's a shit ton of unintended consequences if you're not careful.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But synthetic biology is that

Speaker 2 it's an AI-level thing that we need to be worried about.

Speaker 1 And how many different nations are working on this stuff?

Speaker 1 So I think that the U.S.

Speaker 2 is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective. It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and biobanking, because they're biobanking.

Speaker 2 We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here. That's one of the things

Speaker 2 I was meeting in Washington about. But China does.

Speaker 2 China is going, like we see them in Africa where they'll make donations to a university or a school and say, oh, but we're going to take blood samples from all of your animals around here.

Speaker 2 You guys are cool, right? So they are doing this, right? So they're looking for insights in animals. They're looking for that data.
They're also trying to build like today's NOAA's Ark.

Speaker 2 And so China is for sure. There's some countries it's harder, like the European Union's harder to do anything because they've kind of put a moratorium on GMOs or genetically modified organisms.

Speaker 2 But we've been making GMOs for a long time. Like, have you ever seen a pug? Like, we've just done it pretty inefficiently, right?

Speaker 2 We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences now through AI and software.

Speaker 1 Bro, people are going to have dire wolves guarding their house. No.
In 100 years?

Speaker 2 They're not open to it.

Speaker 1 100%. They're going to get your technology and they're going to sell it.
And people are going to be eating woolly mammoth steaks while the dire wolves guard their house.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's not the future that I hope for. I'm more of an optimist, so I kind of believe in the general good of humanity.

Speaker 1 Of course, it's your company. Your company is fucking the whole world up.
You have to think that way. I'm just kidding.
I know. But it is a weird, it's a weird venture.

Speaker 1 I mean, you're going down a very bizarre path, but it's so fascinating. I'm so glad you're doing it because it's so interesting.
And we're learning a lot, right?

Speaker 2 And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right? Yeah. And I think that...

Speaker 1 Do you think there could ever be a time, well, there's no DNA from the dinosaurs, right? So would it be possible that with future technology, there would be some way to get around that?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the closest you could get from a dino DNA perspective

Speaker 2 is that

Speaker 2 there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids. So like the smallest building blocks possible, you don't know where they go, right?

Speaker 2 I think that it's not possible to de-extinct a dinosaur.

Speaker 2 I do think at some point you could use AI and software to do an ancestral state reconstruction, looking at kind of what we know about birds, what we know about reptiles, and kind of where they brand.

Speaker 1 So you could make one. I think you could.

Speaker 1 Wasn't that one of the things they did in Jurassic? That's where they made a dinosaur that didn't exist before, the big giant one?

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 2 Adominus Rex, yeah.

Speaker 1 Right. That was something they created.

Speaker 2 That's something they created, right? And so I think from a genome engineer, from a technology and genome engineering perspective, that is eventually possible.

Speaker 1 So they could easily make a T-Rex without a single-speed.

Speaker 2 I would say easily,

Speaker 2 like, you know, the CAD software of biology where you can engineer almost anything.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right? The better. And you said it best when you brought up quantum.

Speaker 2 Quantum's only two years away every two years, I hear.

Speaker 2 But eventually when it works and works at scale, and you have that coupled with where some of these companies like X.ai and others are taking it, I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 And it will be in, and look, it will be in nefarious hands. Like, let's just be

Speaker 2 real. Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right? Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right? And so this is nuclear weapons.

Speaker 2 And I think that you have to be, just because it exists, we can't put our head in the sand and say, oh, we just can't let it be because it does exist.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like... It's like five years ago, no, no longer that.
It was like seven years ago.

Speaker 2 People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of a certain subset of race, right?

Speaker 2 And they were doing bad things with facial rec. Well, the San Francisco government,

Speaker 2 where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said,

Speaker 2 not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says, we will not at all

Speaker 2 support any technology. We're going to ban investing in facial rec technology.
Well, that's just dumb, right?

Speaker 2 Because we now know there's things like deep deep fakes and all this stuff, but it's like, that's setting American innovation back because someone's doing something bad with it, right?

Speaker 2 That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns. We should never develop guns, right? Like, it's just, it's a, it's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology.

Speaker 2 And so, um, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology. The world is currently the United States is the leader in synthetic biology.

Speaker 2 And we've got national treasurers like George Church, my co-founder and others. And I hope that we continue to be the world's leader.

Speaker 2 But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do, and they will experiment on kids.

Speaker 1 But it's interesting also that you're a company.

Speaker 1 This isn't the government. This is just a group of people and investors that have decided to do this.
And you've been able to do it here in America.

Speaker 1 But do you know what is going on in other countries? Or is this a tightly guarded secret?

Speaker 2 So, I mean, we know. Obviously,

Speaker 1 you have people. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
You have people in your company as well. And I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing.
So

Speaker 1 you must be being studied by other countries.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we definitely, and we have investment by Incutel, right? So I'm sure that makes us more of a target.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and IC frequently.

Speaker 1 It's just when you think about it 100 years from now, 1,000 years from now, when you scale this out,

Speaker 1 there's no limit to what could be done with life. That's so strange.

Speaker 1 It's so strange to think that for four plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern.

Speaker 2 On rails. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then one day.

Speaker 2 And now we say we can take the rail whatever we want.

Speaker 1 Whoo, boy. And you know, that's the grandest of all conspiracy theories is the thought that's how humans were created.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or the panspermia.

Speaker 1 Well, either panspermia.

Speaker 2 Or that we were engineered in places.

Speaker 1 The great one is the Anunnaki, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I will say that if you look at, you know, not to get too weird, but if you do look at the, it's like Cuckoo Khan and folks in,

Speaker 2 if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, there's a lot of weird similarities.

Speaker 2 I mean, you can't, you, you can't objectively, it's like the guy with the pyramid with the

Speaker 2 Sphinx, right? Was that like, yep, that's water. I'm an expert on erosion.
That is water. And then they're like, head of the Sphinx.
Like, that's not water, right? Yeah. It's the same thing as this.

Speaker 2 You cannot look at some of the stuff and say, that's not weird, right?

Speaker 2 You can't look at like, you know, the uh the the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seem to now there's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced out of it's like you you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more especially the stuff around if you look at mayans and then you look at um you know stuff in the middle east and how it looks exactly the same it's very weird it looks exactly the same

Speaker 2 have you been to peru no so that i would put you know because i don't teach you i do not want to take you away from going and visiting the boneyards you should totally do that but you should also go to peru peru if you like you can see peru and you can see it's like standing in the grand canyon versus seeing on google maps right if you go to like allendam alien tombo or whatever it's called and you see these blocks that you can't uh like put a piece of paper between you know you can't see yeah and you and you see it and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw oh and by the way they came from a type of rock in a quarry that's 2000 miles from here or whatever however many thousands of miles from here you can't sit there and say well that's weird if you don't say that's weird, then it's like, like, you're like one of those

Speaker 2 people that are just like, huh. You're a denier.

Speaker 2 You can't say it's not weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 to say it's not weird is actually denying science.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's the weird. So you should put Peru on your, because when you see it, there's nothing like it.

Speaker 2 I've been fortunate and been able to travel over the world. You see it and you're just like, that just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 The coolest thing I've ever seen is Chichen Itza. Yeah.
I've been in Chichen Itza. And you go there and you're like, what did you do?

Speaker 1 What did did you do? How'd you do this? Yeah.

Speaker 2 How did you guys do this? You know what's crazy about Chitsunita? They don't let you go there anymore.

Speaker 2 But I don't know where, but you know, you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chitsunita.

Speaker 2 Well, there's in the jungles there on the Yucatan Peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids.

Speaker 2 But the carvings that they have on Chitsunitsa and the carvings they have there, they're actually, the older ones have more precise carvings.

Speaker 2 But now, guess what? It's not open to the public.

Speaker 2 I've seen that. I've been there.

Speaker 1 That's so frustrating.

Speaker 2 But also,

Speaker 2 it is such a weird world, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm talking to you about like hardcore genetic science, but then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, it is, we don't know a lot.

Speaker 1 Or a lot. Yeah.
And there's no way you can know a lot.

Speaker 2 And anytime you suggest something new, you get, you know, shit for it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get a rash of shit and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Graham Hancock. Yeah.
But

Speaker 2 I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if they're,

Speaker 2 you know, kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't think they were just like playing around and like, oh, we're going to write something that's going to be in history as a joke forever.

Speaker 1 You've seen the Reichardt structure? Uh-uh. You ever seen that? Uh-oh.
This is what there's a lot of people like Jimmy Corsetti, who's this famous YouTube, I guess you would call him,

Speaker 1 I guess he'd be like an

Speaker 1 ancient structure. Sure.
He'd be like an ancient history enthusiast. He's a guy who's like studies these things and does YouTube videos on them.
But the Reichshardt structure is essentially Atlantis.

Speaker 2 Oh, this is in the desert. Yes.

Speaker 1 It looks like Atlantis. There's salt all around it.

Speaker 2 It has the rings that Plato described.

Speaker 1 And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean. I mean, it literally looks like Atlantis.
And people disputed a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Have people gone and studied it there?

Speaker 1 Well, it's a very difficult place to get to, and it's also very dangerous.

Speaker 1 So people have studied it, but

Speaker 1 there hasn't been like large-scale archaeological digs there.

Speaker 1 The whole sub-Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating. They find whales there.

Speaker 1 They know that it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.

Speaker 1 And there hasn't been like large-scale exploration of what's in that ground.

Speaker 2 And it's immense. I do think that the Younger Dry stuff is also

Speaker 2 a combination of, I think generally speaking, if you

Speaker 2 break down the Younger Drys period into that rapid cooling, I think the vast majority of people will say some of it, some of the destruction or some of the destruction around Megafauna was anthropologic, which I'll give it some percentage.

Speaker 2 Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.

Speaker 1 Anthropologic meaning human beings killed.

Speaker 2 Yes, that humans had some impact on it, right?

Speaker 2 I think that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that was a, could have been a global level flood with sea rising light with rushing waters and sea rising

Speaker 2 whatnot. And then you've got, you know, what caused that flood, most likely meteorological, you know, astrological or meteorological.

Speaker 1 And then they combine that with core samples that show large levels of iridium.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain inputs.

Speaker 2 It's like that nuclear glass or whatever they find.

Speaker 1 Iridium is actually different. Iridium is actually very common in space, but very much.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And there's a layer. Yeah, there's a silt of this right here.

Speaker 1 The micro-diamonds is what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 But they have those too as well. Trinitide.
Yeah, Trinitide. That's what it is.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the stuff from the Trinity explosion. They discovered it there.

Speaker 1 They find these little micro. There's 100% there was impacts.
That's a fact.

Speaker 1 And they also know, like, when the meteor shower, and this is a thing that they study, like, when we go through this comet shower, and that that's.

Speaker 2 But you remember, like, probably 10, 20 years ago, people, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian.

Speaker 2 We can't talk to you ever again. Exactly.
Right. Oh, water canopy, you're weird.
Don't talk to me again.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 2 And now it's like, well, maybe there was a giant flood. Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right?

Speaker 2 Oh, maybe it was done by impact of comments, right?

Speaker 1 That's what brings me to the weird ones when you go back to like the Vedic texts and you're like, what was the Vimanas? What were these flying vehicles that they had?

Speaker 1 What was Ezekiel talking about when they showed the Bible?

Speaker 2 Have you seen that stuff when have you seen those videos

Speaker 2 that have come out in the last year when there was the most recent UAP

Speaker 2 craze, and they'd show it and it looked like crazy ball lightning. It almost looked like those things that used to put your hand, you'd put your hands on your head and stand up, right?

Speaker 2 And then they'd compare some of those to paintings

Speaker 2 from like, you know, from like 500, 700 years.

Speaker 1 Remember, I'll be there because a lot of those crazy balls of light were all fake. No, you can just zoom in on Venus.
Yeah. And that's what you get.
Cool.

Speaker 1 You zoom in on stars and you get this sort of bizarre, distorted image. Have you seen those?

Speaker 1 Find

Speaker 1 zoomed in stars. I think they did it with the North Star.
They've done it with several stars.

Speaker 1 But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth, you can get that sort of distorted, weird effect.

Speaker 1 Because you're looking through the

Speaker 2 I've always seen this stuff on the internet until I was in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was with Peter. Peter,

Speaker 2 his house in Wellington is like on a body of water, I want to say where.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we were talking, of course, like the conversation went to ghosts and UFOs.

Speaker 1 Cause like, oh, you've seen them. Why not?

Speaker 2 No, I haven't seen them in person. I've seen them on his iPhone.
Like, these are, this wasn't like a telescopic lens.

Speaker 2 This is an iPhone, and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom ends.

Speaker 1 But that's the thing about zooming in. See, the thing is,

Speaker 1 like, these are planets that people have zoomed in on. But there's weirder ones where, like, there's video of it, and so it looks like it's moving.

Speaker 1 Yeah, here we go. Like, look at that.

Speaker 1 I'll have to see. But you see what I'm saying? Yeah.
Like, this is a perfect example. So, this is a star in the night sky with a Nikon P900.
So, is that 900x, Jamie? No. What is that?

Speaker 1 That's the model number. Can you talk to the mic?

Speaker 2 Just the model number. I have no idea what that means.

Speaker 1 So, what would you think that the amount of

Speaker 2 10x 100x? I have no idea. Okay.

Speaker 1 So, but do you see how they're having a hard time zooming in on it because this is a hand? It's a handheld, I think. But look how weird it is.
It looks so weird.

Speaker 1 It's how it's moving around like you'd say, oh my God, you found a UFO. But it's not.
It's just a star.

Speaker 2 Well, I do hate that every UFO video is blurry.

Speaker 1 Or a star. You know, I mean, that could be, if you want to get into the whole Hal Putoff

Speaker 1 perspective, who's this brilliant physicist. Yeah, he's on a lot of papers.
Yeah, he explained it to me. He thinks there's some sort of gravity distortion that's around this.
So this isn't that the...

Speaker 1 This is that particular camera. So this is is this not a very um it's like a Hannah.
What is it that's so that's a 770 749 camera on Amazon. 83x option.

Speaker 2 So I'll see if Peter will give me that his I'm sure he would and I'll send it to you because it's just weird to see.

Speaker 1 Oh, they're weird. No, I'm not saying

Speaker 2 this was like not zoomed in, his wife's next to him, and it's

Speaker 1 not denying

Speaker 1 that people are seeing things, but I'm not denying that they're real.

Speaker 1 What I'm saying is that kind of evidence of that star, if you didn't know any better and someone sent it to you, oh my God, they found a UFO, you'd be like, holy fucking shit, it's real.

Speaker 1 Look at that, it's undeniable. Look at the energy around it.

Speaker 1 What Hal Putoff believes is that there's some sort of distortion around these things that's allowing them to be transmedium, to go through the ocean.

Speaker 2 That's all the,

Speaker 2 yeah, that's all their like zero-point energy and

Speaker 2 moving and in gravitational wave type stuff. Do you go deep on this?

Speaker 1 I get

Speaker 1 a little bored. It gets boring because there's no real resolution.

Speaker 1 You could lose your mind, but I had dinner with Jacques Valet and Hal Putoff once and a couple other gentlemen, and they were explaining the state of the technology, like what they think is currently available and what they think these things are using.

Speaker 2 These guys.

Speaker 2 I did a call with Hal. I got into that crowd for a while

Speaker 2 before I started Colossal. And, you know, I knew a bunch of

Speaker 2 those folks. So I talked to Lou, I talked to Hal, I did a Zoom with Hal.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine what we are now, where we are, what you're describing in terms of technology that's emerging right now?

Speaker 2 And we have dire wolves today in 2025.

Speaker 1 Yes. And now imagine this 5,000 years advanced.
And you're probably looking at that. If we are being visited, that's what you're probably looking at.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve,

Speaker 2 it's not that far.

Speaker 1 Now, imagine the monkeying that you guys have done with dire wolves.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say it's monkeying.

Speaker 1 This little monkey.

Speaker 2 The selective precision genome engineering.

Speaker 1 Amazing stuff you've done with dire wolves. I'm just being silly.
But imagine doing that to primitive hominids.

Speaker 1 Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is, and you're a million years more advanced than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australia Pithecus, you know, trying to figure out how to make a spear.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you say, listen, let's

Speaker 1 put a little bit of this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 A little bit of that. I told you,

Speaker 2 yeah, one edit makes 5,000, you know, confers 5,000 resistance to neurotoxins. So it's like a couple little edits here does a lot.

Speaker 1 And then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from the future.

Speaker 1 And if you think about what's happening to human beings, we're becoming less and less stout and muscular, and we're becoming more and more, less and less reliant on muscles.

Speaker 1 We're just killing this all the time. Yeah, and our heads are getting bigger.
That's them.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I read that theory too.

Speaker 1 It's a bizarre archetype, right? It's a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 It's very very weird that there's a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see.

Speaker 2 No, I got one. I go down those rabbit holes because I mean, I just think, once again, going back to like the stuff of like Cuckoo Khan and

Speaker 2 Anunnaki and all, like, just all this stuff. It's the Anunnaki stuff the most interesting.

Speaker 1 It's just so strange.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And how and how you have certain things that are aligned to celestial,

Speaker 2 you're like, yeah, but they could have picked a lot of constellations. Why do they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is, right? Like why did they do that?

Speaker 1 And also, how did the fucking ancient Sumerians have a detailed map of the solar system?

Speaker 2 Insanely detailed.

Speaker 1 From 6,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 How? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps.
Yeah. Like, what are you saying?

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's, there's weird.

Speaker 2 The cool thing about this, but think, take a step back.

Speaker 2 Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, and we get ridiculed even for the actual signs that we're doing and proving every day,

Speaker 1 at the end of the day, it is still cool and it's interesting.

Speaker 2 I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out. Every day is amazing, and we're figuring out amazing things.

Speaker 1 Well, unlike you, I don't have the burden of being taken seriously.

Speaker 1 And that's great for disgusting ridiculous. But you can go

Speaker 1 to the bottom. That's awesome.
It is great.

Speaker 1 It's super interesting.

Speaker 2 But I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcast: because one minute you'll talk to a comedian in a UFC fighter, and the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about the ancient flood than anyone in the world.

Speaker 1 And that's cool. It is cool.
Yeah. It's very fascinating.
Because we had all the conversations. Yes.
And the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's almost impossible.
I mean, and you can get lost, like we were talking about with the C.S. Lewis quote.
Did you ever find that? No, I don't. I couldn't.

Speaker 1 He talked about getting the the news. What year was C.S.
Lewis alive?

Speaker 1 1898. So like, yeah.

Speaker 2 I started tracking down, like, there's a bunch of misquoted C.S.

Speaker 1 Lewis quotes.

Speaker 1 It could be one of those.

Speaker 1 It could be one of those.

Speaker 1 But we're being inundated by the worst news of the day because that's the news that's going to ensure that you watch it. And there's so many cool things that are happening at the same time.

Speaker 1 And I think it gives people a distorted perception of the hope that we have for mankind. You hear about wars, like, oh my God.
But most people aren't going to war.

Speaker 1 Most people are cool with each other. Most interactions between human beings

Speaker 1 are positive and they're fascinating. And human beings are a fascinating creature.

Speaker 1 And we're so lucky to be alive at this time where the innovation is reaching this bizarre tipping point where we're, you know.

Speaker 2 I mean, I love it.

Speaker 2 I'm working more hours than I've ever worked in my life. And I've been fortunate before this business.
And I will just tell you, I just love it. Every day I wake up, it's awesome.

Speaker 1 It's just so cool. It's the coolest thing in the world.
Well, I'm glad you're doing it, man. I really appreciate you.

Speaker 1 And thank you so much for coming in here and showing people the tire wolves and the red wolves. And I hope more.

Speaker 2 We'll keep you up to date on fun stuff. And I want to go see him.

Speaker 1 I want to see him. All right, we'll talk offline.
Okay, we'll talk offline. Thank you very much.
Oh, if people want to find more information, find more about you,

Speaker 1 it's just we're colossal. Colossal.com.

Speaker 2 We're colossal.com, and we're it is colossal on YouTube and X and everything. And we're at Colossal on X.

Speaker 1 So fucking cool. Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow.
Yeah. I can't wait to see that one day.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's cool. It's cool.
And I mean, look, the cool thing about Colossal is we have so many people that, you know, we have 170 people over 135 scientists just that wake up and they work 24-7.

Speaker 2 Like we've got four labs. People are just, you know, in love with it.

Speaker 1 That's it's amazing. Thank you very much.
You gotta go through the lab. I will.
Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Bye, everybody.