#2301 - Ben Lamm

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up, Ben? Hey, thanks so much for having me.
My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man.
So why don't you, instead of me, why don't you explain to people what you do? 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.
Yeah. And that is a wild thing.
I mean, this is essentially, literally wild. This is essentially real life Jurassic Park.
Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally. Like, believe it or not, we get that.
Of course. I mean, I got to drop my hydrogen tablet in here.
Oh, you do those? The Gary Breckle ones, right? Those are great. Yeah, so.
Yeah, I love those. I just didn't want you to think it was, we're going a different direction.
How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this? 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.
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.
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.
And I thought, uh, my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me. Right.
And so I, 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. Like how do we do directed evolution and how, and how that can 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. 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. 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? 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 health care. 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. 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.
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 extinct species.
So how do you decide what to start with? 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.
We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. 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.
And so that was an easy place to start. after we launched the company, it went crazy viral.
And all these other folks from de-extinction research

started calling us like folks from like the thylacine or tasmanian tiger which looks like a mythical creature it's awesome um the best shapiro with the dodo everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding you know our our entire set so how does one do this it's like's, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing before that, how does one do this? Like 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. So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day.
So minute we take dna out of our bodies or out of anything it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate so we definitely need uh 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 but it's also fragment it's like it's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is and someone's stolen part of the puzzle. 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.
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.
And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths. They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.
Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind. That and the fact that mammoths 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. And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this weird prehistoric 65 million years old dinosaur.
When did they go extinct? So the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago. Really? On Wrangell Island.
Yeah. Wow.
So they were around for a long time. 4,000 years ago.
I know. They weren't.
I mean, now they appeared about two and a half million years ago, as far as we understand. And 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. They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.
Wow. And where's Wrangell Island? It's northeast of Siberia.
Whoa. And they just, was it a small island? They just ran out of resources there? Like, what happened? Well, there's a couple different theories, right? One of the theories with Wrangell Island is that they actually, there's lots of inbreeding.
So there's lots of, like, genetic bottleneck, which happened because there's not a different species there. How large is Wrangel Island? I'm not quite sure.
Can you give me a photo again, Jamie? I'll follow up on that one. Okay.
And so essentially though, Wrangel Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and Russia, also is where they were.
Those are kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today. And they died out 4,000 years ago.
Yeah. And now some actually, there is actually another working hypothesis that they actually ran out of water.
They ran out of access to fresh water on the island. Oh, wow.
So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred. Wow.
4,000 years is so recent. I know.
It's crazy recent, right? Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus a African elephant? And they're actually mammoths because there's, you know, mammoths themselves. Yeah.
Mammoths themselves are close related to the Asian elephant. Which is on the left? 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. You know, mammoths because they have these massive, massive tusks, right? And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world.
They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly. 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, 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.
So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand? Yes. And Thailand and then parts of different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent.
I actually rode one of those once with my family. I don't recommend it.
Did you go to one of those places that you like to take care of them? Yeah. You have to like get a relationship with them.
So you feed them sugar cane and you wash them. Yeah.
You know, you play nice with them for like a while yeah a couple hours it was like

at least an hour you're just hanging out with them petting them and and then once they decide you're cool they let you let you ride them yeah but uh my whole family wrote 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 would just want to feed them yeah i just want to hang out hang out. It just felt weird.
My daughter fell off, I think twice.

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? It's kind of a weird

thing. It's a weird thing, right? And then afterwards

you get in the water and you wash

them and everything. And I just

kind of hung out with them.

I'd be cool. They're very sweet.
I don't think I want to

ride one. I would just, I like being around them.
I think there's a video on my Instagram of it. Yeah, there definitely is because she was eating a log.
I was like, why are you eating a log? It's just weird. They're so enormous, but they're really peaceful and chill.
They're incredibly smart, and they have incredible pack dynamics, right? So they live in a herd. 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. Oh, yeah.
So here it is. This is a few years ago in Thailand.
And this is an Asian elephant just chilling with this elephant. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock.
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Yeah, 2018.

Okay.

There it is.

It was really cool.

Yeah, it's awesome.

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. It's enormous.
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sure we'll talk about at some point. Yeah.
That, yeah, at some point though, you're still kind of

like, they are a wild animal. So you have to maintain some level of healthy distance.
Yeah.

So let's just get right to it. Wait, wait, do you want to finish the process? Yeah, yeah,

please. So, okay.
So we have the ancient, ancient genome. So you have to collect and assemble..
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.
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.
Yeah. It's, it smells like death.
It literally, I mean, I guess it is death. It's just over time piled up death.
Have you visited John? Yeah. Yeah.
I visited John. You went to the boneyard? Yeah, I went to the boneyard.
What's it like there? It's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect.
I didn't know John. 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.
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.
Because we try to be pretty inclusive. And they're like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John.
And 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, okay. And he's a big dude.
He's enormous. I'm not that big of a dude, right? No, John's a giant.
Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me. I'm a smaller dude, right? And so, like, I literally get in.
I get in the car. There's a bunch of stickers, and there's one that has butterflies on it that says, give zero fucks.
And I was like, and then he's like and he's like, just move the gun over. So I moved 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.
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. 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.
So it was just grizzlies. I assume it was for grizzlies, yeah.
Or bears or something large. Yeah.
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? And he's like, let me show you all this. Showed us his skull.
He actually has a warehouse. 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.
He's an amazing guy. Yeah, and he's a cool guy.
And then, you know, being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, oh, we'd love to use some of your samples. Can we take them? And he's like, no.
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.

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

But he's like, but he's 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's very consistent with his messaging.

Well, you know, the whole deal with the Museum of Natural History, right? And I totally believe it. I totally believe it.
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. Yeah, I've seen it.
Wooly mammoth fragments. So they know that they're that they're there yeah and well i mean you 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 or he's also like hey if you want to come work on it come on like he's very collaborative it's also it's like what what do you guys have like why are you keeping that shit in a basement like Like, what is that? I mean, when we do work, you know, outside of the expeditions of collecting ancient DNA, when we do work, we also work with museums, right? 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? 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. 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.
And I was like, well, this is, like, you know, the card catalog of, like, all dead species. But it's not on display for the public.
It's just in a basement. And is it extensively archived? They know where everything is? Or is there some stuff down there that they don't know what it is? I wouldn't say that they are the, at least any museum, 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 and what's the shopping list? It's been over 100 years they've been doing this. So people have come and gone.
Yeah, they'll pull out, yeah, and they'll pull out drawers that have, like, Darwin's name on it and stuff like that. Whoa.
I mean, that's how we did the thylacine. We actually found, in a cup about this size, we actually found what we call the miracle pup, where they shot the mother.
They took the three joeys, the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde, and we got a a 98 complete genome from the first sample of that pup wow but they didn't even know they had it they also on the thylacine which i'm sure we'll talk about more later they also found uh a head in a bucket they didn't even it was the mom's head so we actually knew we could actually look at the genetic uh 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. They opened it up as marked thylacine.
They opened it up and there was a full thylacine skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything.
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. Wow.
Yeah. So there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being fully utilized.

So if you have 98% or you have 99%, what's the process of going from that?

Yeah, there's the head in the bucket.

So Andrew Pask, who leads our, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And yeah, that's the head and bucket.
I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrous bones, which we'll talk about at some point. Do you buy into any of these sightings? No, I did.
So Andrew Pask, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing.
He's awesome. He's been working on it like a shoestring budget.
And that's part of the problem with de-extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now. And he's been working on it for 15 years, and he's had people send him poop, clippings from hair, and all this stuff over the years.
So he just sent it to him, and then he loves the thylacine so much he just sequences it. And he's like, no, it's a dog.
You sent me more dog shit. Thanks.
I mean, it's demoralizing. But when when I got into the thylacine, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with him.
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.
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. I want to be i get obsessive about projects and so i'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now and so got super deep in it and uh then i started calling pasca's like hey i've been watching these youtube videos and i kind of think they're still there and pasca's like no no stop it don't go down that rabbit hole i so i don't believe but why did he say that well because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right? So not just Southern Australia, but all over Tasmania.
So samples, poop, stuff like that. Samples, just everything, using camera traps.
And nobody's, I think that they officially say that the thylacine went extinct in 1936. But probably into the late 40s and early 50s, they still existed.
But, I mean, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists.

It would make our lives a lot easier.

Forrest really believes in it.

He does.

He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.

And because of sightings.

Yeah.

He thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea in the mountains.

And also incredibly remote.

Yeah, yeah.

Very difficult.

And the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea singing dogs,

which can be a good one. incredibly remote.
Yeah, yeah. Very difficult.
And the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea

singing dogs, which could be

competitive for them for predator

prey, from where the thylacine

sightings were. What's a singing dog?

It's just another large canid

that has a unique howl. Oh, wow.

Yeah, so it still exists.

I'm sure Jamie can find a video

of it. I want to hear that.
I've never heard of this.

Singing dog. Yeah.
Wow. Papua New Guinea

singing dogs. By the way, folks, this is

Thank you. Yeah, so this is all exist.
I mean, I'm sure Jamie can find a video. I want to hear that I've never heard of this.
Yeah singing. Yeah, wow.
I'm getting a singing dog by the way folks. This is we're teasing yet because

There's a this is not just theoretical. Yeah, so this is what's gonna get crazy Yeah, it's gonna get weird this podcast is gonna blow your fucking mind.
Go ahead, Jimmy

That's what these rare animals have a knack for holding a tune, even to an exact key. Opera singers love these.
Aw, 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. That looks like a dog that would be at the park.
They're wild dogs in Papua New Guinea, but I'm sure people have domesticated them. Wow.
Pretty fucking cool dogs. And hanging out with a fox.
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. But I'm from software, so I just assume there's like the, you know, Google cloud of DNA.
Like we've backed off, like we've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt. Right.
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. 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.
And so we're actually petitioning the U.S. government to help put a massive project together to help biobank it, starting with just American megafauna and keystone species.
So that doesn't exist at all. And 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.
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? How do you create? That's synthetic biology. So you never have to get to 100%, right? You need to get to probably- Synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools tools probably heard of crisper all these other things genetics you know which is it knock out it breaks the dna it's not the always the best tool we can now actually make individual edits uh to when you think of the dna double you know helix right in those rungs of the ladder those individuals are called nucleotides we can change the letters like that's how precise we can be.
We can say at spot, you know, 4,000,008, I need to change that letter. And so you change that letter.
And then other times, you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference.
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, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right? Because you're only looking you're only really looking at that point 4% difference, right? It's a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that. 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? Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they're larger than- It's a, so mammoths were about the same size.
They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants. So there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made.
And so there are 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different ways, and some of them were larger. But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of an Asian elephant.
And 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.
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 we we made woolly mice see if you can find that then the only the only like unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck like people lost their minds right like we're there's there's i was i was on the phone recently with a you know aggressive journalist, and it was going quite poorly as some calls go. Moderately aggressive? They were being aggressive in what way? Like, why are you doing this? Some people, yeah, everyone likes to fight it.
Look how cute. My daughter actually found this online and wants one.
Yeah, so we get that a lot from kids. She wants a willy mouse.
So every week, every week, I don't have my laptop. I should have brought it in here.
Look how cute. But every week.
Oh my God, they're adorable. 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 mammoth from an Asian elephant to a mammoth? 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. We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.
So we look for the mouse equivalent, right? So we look for, like, all of us have similar genes. 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 or that may not even be compatible with life right so we try to be really really

thoughtful about and the the woolly mice um went like it went insane there's people that are like

making t-shirts a meme coin uh and so we we made 36 mice they're all they're all healthy there's

36 mice that we made.

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 DNA,

comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with 100% efficiency.

And that's really important and really hard.

So we did it with 100% efficiency.

Yeah, that's the difference. One of them, if it was in a trap, you'd be so sad.
Yeah, exactly. Like the little guy on the left, if he was in a trap, I'd be like, oh, look at me good.
Isn't that funny? Just a little bit of fur. Yeah.
It makes you love them. And that's the color that we think most mammoths were.
Really? They were like a blonde? They were like a golden brown color, right? Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time. But if you see very fresh mammoths, like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakutsk and other places in northern Siberia, that they actually have pretty well-preserved mammoths.
They actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur. Wow.
Interesting. 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 a meme account for the guy that did the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for making edited babies in China.
Yeah. A meme account.
Oh, wow. So that's mammoth fur.
Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on X that these are a bioweapon and that Colossal's made a bioweapon.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 be healthy. And so we try to spend a lot of time on that because we're certified by American Humane Society.
It's the oldest human organization in the world. And if you've seen the film, it's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

That's those guys. So we've ended up

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. 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.

Is there any plans to sell those? No. Everyone

Thank you. 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. Is there any plans to sell those? No, everyone keeps asking us that.
But you know what? Museums actually are now calling us saying, 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.
So it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell, you know, woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy. Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone, even at a zoo, who decides, I want more of these? Yeah, 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.
I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum. Do you plan on keeping this batch alive? Yeah, they're going to live out their normal lives.
But you're not going to make new ones? We may make new ones. What if they breed? They're all separated.
They're all separated by sex. So we're not going to have a Jurassic Park moment where they change.
They're all separated by sex. But if you if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live.
They live a couple of 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. They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them.
They're all. Yeah.
Like we expense cool little house yeah and they're big and we you know we put fun stuff in them to play with like like this and what's been crazy is we only named two of them and we named him chip and dale because we people were asking what the names were and i was like uh chip it is the only thing that i could think of at the moment and now even on x people are like we need, we need pictures of Chip. Where is Chip? 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. You can't get involved.
Yeah. So we've just, yeah.
Don't get involved with those people. We've not leaned in.
You cannot. We're excited.
They're excited, but we just can't. Yeah.
Yeah, we're busy. this is a new thing.
The woolly mouse is a new thing. Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things? 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 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 uh two i guess there's four uh 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 uh 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. 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. So we have hair growing in Petri dishes in the lab, which is pretty cool.
If you come see the lab, you'll get the whole Willy Wonka tour of it, which is pretty cool. And then the fourth way is mice, right? 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.
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. 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. Wow.
Yeah. Okay.
So how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show? 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.
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.
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? So we go through this whole process to try to understand. And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox.
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.
We went to their nation, wanted to share this. And then, you know, we're curious.
So we said, what other projects would you work on that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison?

And they said that we needed help with wolf conservation.

And they brought up that.

They said that we needed help with more bison conservation.

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 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.
And and he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost and how many people believed that it could have even been a dire wolf. from Game of Thrones.
That's cool. I love the show.
That's interesting. So I did that.
We talked about that.

And then, you know,

three months later, I was in North Carolina

and

I was like,

I don the show. That's interesting.
So I did that. We talked about that.
And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that 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. You know, it's the only endemic wolf to America.
It's only to America. It's a red wolf.
It's beautiful. And there's like 15 left in the wild 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.

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.

You know, you think of bison.

The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons like we're like we have to do something about this we have to figure something out and so we put that kind of on the list and then in a weird series of events we've had all of these kids over the last three years sent in teachers sent parents sending us pictures of wooly mammoths or dodos or thylacines like we get like boxes of this every single week which is pretty cool so we're gonna make a colossal kids corner um at our new uh 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 you. And so everyone's excited about it.
And then we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the dire wolf again.
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, coastal United States.
and we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also 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, but we had no idea if we could pull it off. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock.
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See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost? No.
Most of the direwolf skulls out there, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tarpet. So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall.
But because of heat and acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like there's nothing you can get from that.
But about six years ago, a group, including Bess 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, they actually got 0.15 X or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15% of the genome.
But that's not really enough. 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 understand enough of the core kind of coding regions that you could bring back that animal.
Is this done by AI? Is this done by AI and software? Yeah. So we built part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems.
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. So our first computational analysis company was called FormBio, and we actually spun it out of the business.
So you have this tooth. You have 1.5.
Yeah, 1.5. So 15% of the genome.

Okay.

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.

She's like, it's destructive sampling.

Like, it's going to ruin us.

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.

The skull itself is 72, 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. So it wasn't found in the permafrost, but it also wasn't found in heat and 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. It's a great DNA storage, better than teeth, better than anything.
It's like in the inner ear kind of head area. 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.
And we got really lucky. Between resampling the first and the skull, we ended up getting about 13 to 14x coverage.
So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the direwolves. And then what'd you do? Well, and then we got a knock on the door.
No, so we took that DNA. Can I ask you before we even start with this? Yeah.
The aggressive reporters are, is it you're playing God? How do you have the right to do this? 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? 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. And then we're like, oh, well,

as an entrepreneur, my job

is to hire much smarter people than me.

Do you smoke cigars? I do not.

Gary's got me on quite a kick.

A health kick? Yeah.

Cigars aren't bad for you?

I'm not saying they're bad for you. I'm just saying that...
yeah i i don't care so this is the last of the 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 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? I think that we've become the apex predator on this planet. And we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean.
We overhunt something. In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right?

Every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we drink hydrogenated water,

we are playing God on some level, right?

Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.

Now, the good news is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be. And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand, you know, you know, one of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back into Yellowstone.
Right. And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed.

It changed the shape of rivers.

Because the elk population were

just, they were getting fat, they were getting lazy,

they weren't migrating. 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. Beavers are like the most

super climate impact

animals that probably exist.

Because they make wetlands,

They make, they... the banks.
So therefore the beavers went away. Beavers are like the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist because they make wetlands.
They cause the rivers and ponds to get deeper. So it allows different types of fish and different types of animals.
So you have this thing called tropic downgrading. You have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce these species.
That documentary is fascinating. It's so fascinating.
How wolves change rivers. 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. That's the reality of it.
Yeah. But they were telling me that they had so many elk that were living.
They had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available. They had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter.
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. They were trying to diminish them.
And that's not good for the elk population. No, it's not.
It's not only good for the ecosystem, but it's not good for the elk population itself. Right.
I have a good friend who lives in Colorado. He has a ranch in Colorado.
And we were at his place approximately two weeks after they reintroduced wolves. So they actually reintroduced wolves on his property.
Oh, yeah. And he didn't know it was going to happen before it happened.
And all the people around there are ranchers. So already, these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said, killed over a dozen cows and calves.
So the problem is, they've killed elk as well. 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. 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. Wolves were making their way into Colorado already, and they are protected.
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. Yeah, or to stop at an imaginary border.
It doesn't exist. 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.
And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife. Yep.
So they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they started killing wildlife. Yeah.
Excuse me. I'm saying wildlife.
What I really meant to say was animals, agriculture. They're killing domesticated cows.
They're killing these calves and, you know, they're having a real fucking problem with that. 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? You just can't let people vote on that.
Too many people live in these high population areas. I couldn't agree more, right? And so we as humanity, if you look at the third leading cause of death of elephants, it's human-elephant conflict, right? We have to figure these things out.
We don't want degraded ecosystems. We don't want to lose species, but you have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way, right? With Yellowstone, they're like, this is big enough ecological preserve.
We're tagging the animals. We're going to walk and measure it.
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. We have to understand that some of these areas not are lost, but have already been changed for a different reason.
Yes. And they've achieved homeostasis, homeostasis.
They've achieved a balance, 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.
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. Well, the Colorado stuff is completely going to destroy all of the stats.
So pre-Colorado, right? 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. There's been less than five confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last hundred years.
You mean humans? Humans, humans. Right.
And are most of them in Alaska? Most of them are in Alaska or in Canada. And then it's before Colorado.
So I'm 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% of deaths associated with wolves and cattle and livestock, right? And all livestock, not just cattle.
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 they get killed by wolves. So I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.
But the problem is when you're not as thoughtful with a rewilding program and you're not as measured as what they did in Yellowstone, and they start encroaching in these areas, then the stats are going to go crazy. And when 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.
It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision. 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. don't put it near where there's a ranch exactly can't vote on that if you live in Denver that's crazy yeah if it doesn't affect your livelihood it doesn't affect your the risk to your animals or your family yeah you have to be mindful 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 his husband apparently is the one 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. And when you're doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill livestock.
And so you're like, fuck it. Yeah, it's just not.
It's just. You have.
A lot of it. So the project that we'll probably eventually talk about is we brought in a lot of the teams, many people that have been on your show, that know how to do the rewilding the right way over time.
Okay. So this is what we'll just get to it.
You made a fucking dire wolf. I didn't.
You guys. Our team, our incredible team, made three dire wolves so far.
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 pup.

Yeah.

So that's actually Romulus.

So we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome.

And then we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl.

So this is Romulus and Remus. So funny story about this.
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So funny, funny story about this. So Peter Jackson, uh, from Lord of the Rings, um, Jamie, uh, Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings, uh, was actually, uh, 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, we're, I was sitting in, in Peter's house with he and his, his partner, Fran. And I was like, you know, um, uh, I showed him the video of them howling.
He started tearing up. He goes, this is the first time I've heard a direwolf or anyone's heard a direwolf in 10,000 years started.
Well, he like, 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? He goes, I bought the throne last week at auction at a private auction for like Sotheby's or someone. Right.
And so so he did. And it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup.
Like talk about cosmic coincidence. Incredible.
Right. And so, 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 had three veterinary people. We had six people from our

animal care team. When you say checkup, you

don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?

They do get, because of viruses

from, that they can get from

the soil, at

eight weeks, they do get

basic virus, they do get

basic vaccines. Are we concerned

about that? I mean, you have this animal that

you're just... Yeah, so these are staying on, you

know, like these are not going back into the wild,

right? Not yet. Right now, they're

All right. get basic vaccines.
Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you just... Yeah, so these are staying on, you know, like these are not going back into the wild, right? Not yet.
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.
Wow. People are always like, you guys raise so much money.
And I was like, well, because we didn't just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities.
Yeah. Let's see the photo of the actual grown ones because they're fucking nuts.
Yeah. So this is Romus and Remus playing in the snow on the preserve when they are three months old.
So three months, how big are they? Three months, they were north of 45 pounds. Wow.
So. Look at that face.
God, they're so beautiful. They just get, as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.
So let's go to the adults because the adults have crazy characteristics. You were saying that you didn't even know they're going to have.
We didn't know, right? And so we ended up is this a full-grown one uh no 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 and how big is it already uh 80 pounds um about five and a half feet um and the main yeah and so so a couple things about the wolves jamie, yeah. So we didn't know this, right? We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf.
We knew that they existed and went extinct about 12,000 years ago when a lot of megafauna went extinct, like during kind of that younger dry period, that younger dryness kind of cooling period. They went extinct as well, right? 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% larger. They were stockier.
They probably weren't as fast based on kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be. But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium and whatnot.
And we assumed that they're there. And we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool that they're white because there's like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they're red.
So they get their paper. Doesn't it make sense for natural selection? Yeah, they're an Arctic hunting animal.
Yeah. And they have this beautiful we didn't know they have this beautiful like main like quality to them.
And when they're babies, you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It's crazy.
Wow. It's so cool.
Is it like polar bears and it's hollow? Or is it not? It's not. It's like typical wolves.
But it's incredibly thick. It grows in kind of these clumps.
But then as they've grown in, they've started to get this kind of like mane to them, which is incredible. The females as well?

Well, the females, she's only six weeks old, so it's two years old.

So if you keep going through a couple other photos.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, they're just beautiful.

And I mean, it's funny.

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

Right.

There's something, they're so stocky.

They're stocky.

They're thicker.

They are, I mean're they're absolutely beautiful um that so this is khaleesi so who

looks like a baby and uh we we nailed it we uh we we named her can we hear it let me hear

we named khaleesi for george r martin Martin, obviously. Obviously.
Who's an investor in Colossal? Oh, wow. Aww.
Nature's cute little murderers. Well, everything in nature murders something, right? Yeah.
Like we were... Well, cows murder grass.
Yeah. And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants like scream.
Yeah. Yeah, they scream.
So I guess we all are bad. Life eats life.
This is, I mean, that's the reason why plants have chemicals to dissuade us from eating them. What are they eating there? So they love to chew on horns in this state.
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 them like a dog does. Like a dog does, right.
So are you letting these animals kill things? Are you feeding them? So we're feeding them still. So they had a combination of bison meat, horse meat, and some-

Do you plan on letting them kill things eventually?

So we're just about to introduce carcasses to them.

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

And they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.

Are you going to let them hunt?

I mean, 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.
They're starting to exhibit 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. 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.
Wow. It's cool.
But the other thing that's equally cool to it, going back to the Red Bull story, can you— It's just crazy to me that you have reignited these 10,000-year-old hunting genes. Yeah.
That they're starting to exhibit— Including size. Including size.
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We looked at what genes made really a direwolf like what was separated. And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000-year-old tooth and a000 year old skull.
So we could actually understand the genetic distance with that much genetic distance between them. We could actually understand, you know, what truly was fixed and conserved in the direwolf genome and what wasn't just population genomics, right? If there's, if you and I are 50,000 years apart, we, you know, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period.
But if we can then really say, okay, you know, what made Ben, Ben and what made Joe, Joe, Oh, here's the overlaps. It allowed us to really understand that.
Wow. It's just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are kind of baked into those genes and they just were dormant for 10,000 years.
And now these things are waking up. And so I was, I was like, so I was in, um, you know, cause I bottle fed Romulus.
Um, and, and Romulus was partly raised with me. I could go out to the preserve.
I'd check on him quite frequently. It's in the northern United States.
We don't say where it is. But mainly because we're not just the animal's health, but for human health, ever since we launched the Woolly Mouse, we've had very excited people just show up.
Our labs are not open to to the public and we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice and so um showing people too much of the preserve we're always very very nervous about we scrub all the videos and whatnot to ensure that no one can pick it out because we assume people will be moderately excited oh yeah oh the internet sleuths will try to find you yeah so we've we've done, I'm not trying to challenge them, but we've done everything we can to protect it.

Yeah, I understand.

I mean, you have to.

Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf.

Yeah, exactly.

Somebody wants a dire wolf.

We already get a lot of weird calls.

Oh, I bet you do.

The other thing, though, is-

Someone with deep pockets?

Make me a dire wolf, my friend. I have everything in my collection.
We get a lot of weird calls. Yeah.
Yeah, from people that are like... Most people that have private zoos.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, like enormous...
Like in India. Yeah.
Yeah. They have...
That family has, like, the largest private zoo and preserve. Which is so wild.
It's so crazy. Yeah.
Well, you know, Texas is history with animals, right? Yeah. There's more tigers in captivity and private collections in Texas.
In Texas than in the wild. Than in the wild of the world.
Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.
But I was in the – so of the 2,000 acres, we have a subsection of it that's about six and a half acres. We have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter.

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

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

And it's funny.

Two weeks ago, I was up there, and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of of those pictures and Remus came, Romulus, who I spent the most amount of time with. 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.
Like, what am I doing? And I mean, don't get me wrong. I had our animal.
Yeah. I have animal care teams there and everything.
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.
Yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't, 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 driest period.
And the change, the massive, I don't know, 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. That's kind of, you know, I think the answer is probably a combination.
Could have there been an astrological event? There's starting to be more and more data around that. I'm sure you've seen Randall Carlson talk about this.
Yeah, I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it, Graham Hancock talk about it, and they just got the shit beat out of them. Yeah, but not anymore.
The Younger-Badrius impact theory is well-respected now. It happened.
Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right? Because you see different, which also tracks to the theory, right? So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but, you know, there was also a massive glacial lake and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied. Right.
They then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns. 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. Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was brought to, like his idea is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps, some sort of immense cosmic event

and millions and millions of trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ran through the land and just carved deep gouges into the earth. He was on acid.
He was on acid and this idea came to him. Some weird idea.
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. 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.
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 yeah this is great and it all tracks it tracks all over the world it's like 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 and then they like flip then you see the head of the thing. It's like, that's not water erosion.
It's Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University.
I've interviewed him. He was the first guy to propose this.
He's like, this is thousands of years of rainfall. And we know that the last time there was rainfall like that in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago.
So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of like, what is timeline that this stuff was actually built and are we just assuming because we've decided that it's 2500 BC that that's it forever and no one wants to let that go well that that I'm not a scientist but that's and I don't come from academia 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.
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.

Don't read the comments.

I don't read the comments.

Trust me.

I don't read the comments.

Good for you.

I sleep quite well.

The, uh, but, but, you know, the academics, 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.
We fund 40 postdocs, right, all over the world, right, 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. 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.
If someone has a paper because their entire motivation is publish or perish. 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're using.
We're not an academic university. We're not allowed.
I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with the community.
Right. 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 3000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever.
Right. Because we'd just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.
It's interesting because they want to impose their idea of what you're supposed to and not supposed to do. Well, they want to impose their idea that they've already established in any change to that establishment.
So in addition, the public, 95 scientific advisors, and these are some of the top women and men in the world, right? That fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there.

We have another probably 40 advisors.

They're like, we love you.

You can't say anything because if I submit it,

we know these other people don't like me.

If I submit a paper,

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.

I have to fire my postdocs.

So it's a complete scam of a system, right? 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 so we went through this whole like philosophical perspective of these like these all these things that people threw about threw at us uh from the scientific community and some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding of course well the problem is not the scientific community the problem is weak men it's this this what you see in these these squabbles these like ultra personal squabbles where like horrible vitriolic statements made about people like they're just not happy people. 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.
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. And that is and that's why and that is why we don't have flying cars we don't have mammoths and until elon we were not gonna live on mars right and so like we didn't have like i think it takes time it yeah but it doesn't come but also academia is really focused on point solutions not full systems right 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.
Whereas in academia, you're only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved. Well, it's also, you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and given to these institutions 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 and everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true you should just follow the scientific method i'm not a scientist but we should just and guess what when new data shows up that you know changes your old data You shouldn't get mad about that. You should celebrate it exactly Well, also you have to look at all data, you know, like I don't want to get into this but I like if you you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers Who are telling you that a man can be a woman and which is fine in terms of like who you are 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 you're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.
I just wish we could get philosophy. We separate like philosophical perspectives from science.
We did 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 In-Q-Tel, which is 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. It's 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.
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. Like, what are the genes that you had to use to create a dire wolf? We didn't totally explain this.
Yeah. So you have CRISPR.
You have these gene editing tools. You have a good sample of dna how do you turn that into a wolf so you map them uh next to it and there was a study that came out about and once again this goes back to the status quo of scientists um of academic scientists there was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data they said that uh dire wolves were closer related weren't closer to wolves.
They were closer 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.
This is not a negative. They just didn't have all the data.
Now we know that they actually were closer related to wolves because we have more data. Which wolves? Gray wolves, or the precursor to gray wolves, right? So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canine group and family group.
And so what we found is once you do that, we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what the difference is. 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? 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? 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.
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. And is this a 100% dire wolf or is this a new thing? 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. So you've got certain people that will say, well, 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. Then you have other people.
You have the paleontologists, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lacovara, who's arguably the number one paleontologist in the world that loves us but then you have other paleontologists who 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 and I asked a paleontologist recently that that hates us 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 and she's like yes but that doesn't matter and i'm like well we'll do it and so so but then why does she hate you guys because why does anyone you know anytime you do anything in this world now that's like moderately bold or polarizing people give you pushback but this is heavily bold i wouldn't say this is moderately bold. You made three fucking direwolves.
That's not moderately bold or polarizing people give you pushback. But this is heavily bold.
I wouldn't say this is moderately bold. You made three fucking direwolves.
That's not moderately bold. It's really kind of one of the craziest things that a human being has ever done.
It's definitely in the realm. This is right up there with inventing the internet.
Yeah. So when you see – well, and we have more stuff to come that I think will be equally interesting.
There's people out there do you worry that someone is going to get you know because this falls into religious realms well it's it's 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 may produce five offspring all the time and a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a aquatic adapted, cold adapted bear. Right.
Right. And so I always ask people that.
Their offspring are they can have children. Yes.
Yes. It's not like a donkey.
Yeah, exactly. So there's different ways to characterize it.
Making a mule. Yeah.
But there's different ways to say something is something. Right.
And so, you know, we are not the same, right? If, I don't know what percent, 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. You don't really.
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. But that's it.
But like I said, there's's six different ways there's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographics and there's a funny uh uh paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through and the same toads live on both on two sides of the street and they're different species and they're the same fucking toad just because there's a road just because because we as humans change it's called geographic isolation of speciation so it's just crazy and so so the only arguments that we now have is but is it a mammoth and it's like well then don't call it a mammoth you i was like i asked people i was like did you see jurassic park and they're like yeah i was like what was my draft part what was to your question what do you think what was jurassic park about to you when you me yeah if you're like if you're gonna your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about? Dinosaurs. Is it? Because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff.
Are they dinosaurs or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or are they dinosaurs? If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de de-extinction 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 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 they go to. So what was the argument? How did they present it? Oh, it's just like, it's 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 direwolf that we have, the second genome that we have from the tooth has, is, has less of the same DNA than the skull.
Does that mean that it wasn't a wolf and it just turns into an uh uh you're missing the point conversation it's like i'm just asking

questions i would like to know the point though what is their point what is what is she what is

her overall argument the general point of the 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 it's just people that are using the framework that they set that doesn't

Thank you. adhere us to that.
And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species, right? It's just people that are using the framework that they set that isn't consistent kind of based on the argument that they want to make. Interesting.
So species is just something that- It's a human construct. It's not- And it's just a thing if it can breed with another thing.
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 so if i genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves does that mean they're now they're like it it just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct right but as a person who studies biology which this person is right i could kind of understand her perspective where she's like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? 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? I could see it from her perspective.
100%. Right.
But I think that if we don't do big, bold things, it's important.

You know, one of the things we should definitely show is the red— This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park. But we should— This is basically the same conversation.
Yeah, but John Hammond— Don't worry. But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that, you know, didn't make it the final cut.
No, they just want to make an attraction. 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. Will this explain the red wolf to people? Because you were saying before, I didn't even know how few of them there are.
Yeah. So if you go to 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.
So I've made four red wolves, one female. Are you just releasing these fuckers? No, no, they're, they're in a, they're in an ecological preserve as well.
And so, but you're, you're gonna, you're gonna die when you hear what I went through on this. So I found out that, you know, uh, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free, right? 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. We have 48 conservation partners.
The team that's running the Northern White Rhino Project, we're their exclusive genetic rescue partner. We're working with elephants in Botswana, working elephants in Kenya.

So anybody can use our technologies for free, right? We're working on chytrid, a terrible fungus in Australia.

And so if that's not enough,

I found out that there's only 15 of those red wolves

back in the wild in North Carolina.

So I met with the upcoming governor.

Are they in other states as well?

No, no, we'll get to that. We'll get to that.
So they're only recognized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife there.
But this incredible woman from Princeton, you know, 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. 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, in North Carolina. And is it part of the problem they're inbreeding with coyotes? Yeah, but they've all been like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes.
They, all the red wolves have some coyote in them because they look like coyotes. Well, because every, uh, every, well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes.
Really? Yeah, because the reality is every single species is what's called an admixture. Everything is inbreeding with everything on some level, right? And so everything in life is an admixture.
Nothing goes back to the Neanderthal. So this binary idea that we have is silly.
No, it's a human cause construct, right? And it's insane. So I went to some folks from the last administration, right? And 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.
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? Because there's no nucleus in blood cells.
So we catch those. And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right? 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.
It's actually 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.
And so it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right. And so we found a way which we've open, which we're open sourcing on Tuesday, is 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 and necessities animal, we can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them.
If there a lack of genetic diversity using this thing so i went out to washington with my team i showed them showed them hope as a baby and little videos of and you may have videos of of hope jamie i don't know if it's in the folder it showed videos of hope and i said hey you know there's there's only a handful of uh we made these four wolves from three different genetic lines um we made these from, we've 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. And we said, we'd like for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana.
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 we need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend 22 million dollars to see if it's possible to clone wolves and I was I was blown away I was like oh I'm so sorry I wasn't very clear this is a cloned wolf like here is you can fly with me to the preserve you sign in da but you fly with me sir 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 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 we'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you and the response was we'll get back to back to you. We tried to have three other meetings.
No showed and canceled every time when we were there. I just got back from a meeting with the Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife rolls up to.
And they're very, very focused on innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing. That's great.
And immediately they said, we celebrate. Doug Burgum, 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 and he's like that we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list only about three percent ever come off and we're really good at putting them on and we celebrate putting them on so we have to do something about this 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 he's like why wouldn't we do this and i was like why about the previous folks and they said that we need you know 20 million that they, they were gonna spend it internally.
They weren't giving us us to do the feasibility. So they were going to spend it internally on this.
And we're like, we'll just do it for free. And he's like, we will completely support the 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.
So when will you start reintroducing these? So we just had that meeting last week. So we just had that meeting last week.
So we just had that meeting last week. So we just had that meeting last week.
So we just had that meeting last week. So red wolves from hell.
You've created a lab. They're going to start eating people.
And so we're going to, we just met with them last week. Well, they're beautiful.
God, they're so beautiful. It's just like, we shouldn't be afraid of innovation, right? 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. Are we going to – I think you focus on the species that are critically endangered and are keystone species meaning the environment needs them.
Right, but you're bringing them back. But the ones that we drove to extinction, right? Okay.
So that's where I think you start. So it's debatable whether or not we drove dire wolves to extinction.
We don't really know what happened 10,000 years ago. I'm inclined to think that when you see the death of 65% of North American megafauna that happened really quickly.
Really quickly. Yeah.
I'm inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a common impact are correct. I think most likely it's a combination.
We do know that anthropologic effects from humans, that when early man went onto a landmass at scale, that we start to see that. We see that in Australia and other places.
But to your point, it's much slower. It's much, much slower.
This is a different thing yeah um are you gonna bring back saber-toothed tigers we so we get everyone seems to have their favorite animal up for us to save right like direwolves would be my favorite yeah that would be my favorite yeah direwolves you got to come maybe at some point you see them but i want to they're amazing i mean they're they're they're just beautiful animals yeah um so uh we they're in there. So saber saber to tiger is a class.
We put that as a class. Most commonly people think of the Smilodon as the saber-toothed tiger.
There's not, to date, been really great Smilodon DNA. There is great homotherium DNA, which is another type of saber-toothed cat.
Oh, I didn't know there was more than one type of saber-toothed there? They classify them differently, you know, based on it. Obviously, you've been studying this, so you're thinking about doing it.
I'm not. I mean, we like to study ancient DNA, right? 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. There were probably no smilodons there, but there are homotheriums, which are a saber-toothed cat.
Yeah, he's found things that were not supposed to be— I've held things in his—I've held a direwolf skull in his—I hope he's fine with me saying that—in his facility. Yeah, I think he's talked about that.
But they found cave bears, short face bears. Wow.
Yeah, so Homo Theorem is still a saber tooth cat. But what happens is this goes back to that philosophical perspective.
They think that only if you look up Smilodon in comparison. Oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still.
Can you give me that CGI image of it again, Jamie, on the left? That's so fucking cool. Yeah, and I don't think there's anything.
I don't think you should bring something like that back, but if you do, I'm going to visit it. I mean, I want to see that thing take down a bite.
Look at his paws, man. There was a, I mean, wait till you see the Daryl paws.
Bro, but that would be so crazy. Now all of a sudden I want you to do it now give me another large picture of it jamie there's some other pictures of those so smile don's the one that has the largest teeth it has the largest known teeth um uh but when people think of saber-tooth tiger this is what right that's a crazy what they think of those are crazy i wonder how why nature wanted to have that i mean probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides and they're quite thick it has to be right something where you there's a genetic and their jaw hinges look at that one on the right lower right jamie below that to blow that to the right to the right there yeah right there click on that look at that man and i love because we don't you know it'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?

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.

We don't even know if they had long tail or short tail.

We don't even know if they were, they could have been white.

Wow.

That would be wild.

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

permafrost of homotherium.

Whoa.

Have you ever seen any other people? There have been some really well-preserved pups and others in the permafrost of homotherium.

Whoa.

And homotherium we know has that kind of coloration to it?

We don't.

I don't want to say we do or don't.

We have not done the analysis on that, on the homotherium yet.

Look at that little guy.

We do have the genome of it, though.

Wow.

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

Have you seen the American short-faced bear? Yes. That's the thing I'm probably the most scared of.
Yeah, you can't bring that back. 17 or 18-foot giant bear.
You can't bring that back. 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 that's out of his mind.
Well, I also think 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 man yeah that's a land megalodon well that yeah that is an enormous animal and they think that's one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the bearing strait um more i've read that yeah yeah it's a theory but but it's a pretty good one. If you knew there was a lineage of super polar bears that were out there, I would go near it.
And it is essentially a super polar bear, which is really scary because polar bears are 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 uh behind a fence yeah that was somebody sent to me yesterday oh fuck i'll find it i know where it is um someone sent to me yesterday of these guys that are right behind a fence where this polar bear is trying to get through the fence there's three of them and they're you know they're talking to like hey big guy you can't come in here hey fella and fella.
And it's just calmly walking towards like, I'm going to get in there. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, polar bears scare me.
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. Anything that walks and breathes is on the menu.
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.
So, it looks like they're in... I don't know where they are.
I think it'll say in the video. So these guys...
Here, give me some volume. Polar bears.
That's an oil rig. So it's probably Canada.
Look at these guys.

That sound.

Yeah.

They're just trying to eat you.

Look at this.

I have two more behind it.

Yep.

Hey.

Go on.

Go on.

Go on. Probably not going to work.
They're just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you. Hey, sweetheart.
Hey. Sweetheart.
Sweetheart wants to rip your liver out. Hey.
Go on. 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? You have them just, like, playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying.
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, 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. 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.
Like what did it look like in Kansas 15,000 years ago? Yeah,. What was it like? You know there's an extinct bison species that is the bison latifrons.
Have you seen those guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they have like eight-foot-long Texas longhorns on like, you know, super HGH, like, bison.
Yeah, our bison are small compared to the extinct bisons, right? Were they the largest of the North American bison? Yeah. The bison lot of fronts was.
See if you can get a photo of that. Yeah.
I didn't know about them 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.
Giant sloths, there's the saber-toothed tiger, the American lion, which is... There's an American cheetah.
Yes. The American cheetah is, you know, we actually have a full genome of it.
And then 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. Have you seen the stellar sea cow? No.
What is that? Think of like a manatee or dugong, right? That's the size of like a large whale. What? Yeah.
And the sad thing is it died, it actually died off before, it died off in, yeah. Whoa! It died off though within a hundred years of its discovery.
When was that? We killed them all, huh? Yeah, we totally killed them. They probably turned them into candles or something.
Yeah, or burned their fat. Yeah.
So, but it was actually really important. Largest serenian to ever exist.
It was haunted to extinction only 30 years after being described in the 18th century. Wow.
Yeah, and it was, and we actually have a full genome of this too, which is pretty cool. You going to bring it back? We can't just, I would bring this back in a heartbeat.
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.
It's like, right. But then if you bring that back, why wouldn't you bring back a megalodon? There is no megalodon DNA.
There's none? No. I will say that the CEO of the largest, the president and CEO of the largest free museum in America really wants me to do the Megalodon.
But he's like, I can never say that publicly. I think he just outed him.
Yeah, but there's a lot of museums. I could be wrong on the size.
Yeah, whatever. He's great, though.
But there is no DNA. He would have to eat a lot.
We already killed everything in the ocean, unfortunately. So one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal.
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. If you can get to the point that you can engineer genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos, grow them in labs and bags, and then work with, and then you can control that population very well.
You could then reintroduce them with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts, right? And so we were really not focusing on the, we kind of rely on third parties on the rewilding modeling and all of our 48 conservation partners. We are really just kind of focused on the core science that supports their initiatives.
But if we are successful with our artificial wombs, and we are quite far on that project, that I would not be surprised if eventually you see a – we have to get a mouse first. Have you guys had these conversations where you sit down and you go, how does this scale outward? What does this look like, this technology in 100 years? Did we just fuck up? No, I think that if you look at the birthing crisis that we're in and kind of population decline crisis, I think that you look at global, like people having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people freezing their embryos, all of that's massively on the increase.
It's all going up to the right, right? And we also know that, like, globally, like, sperm and fertility and others is going down to the right, right? So it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general. And so I think, though, you, especially, and then we also have philosophical and, uh, you have religious, you have philosophical, and then you have social, social, social 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. Cause it's, it's just, it gets too weird.
We get asked the Neanderthal and the dinosaur question every fucking day. So we're just not going to like bridge that gap.
What we'll do is spin out those technologies. But I do think it is harder to grow a rhino in an artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human.
Not ethically or through an FDA process, but it is scientifically harder to

gestate some of the animals who are trying to gestate ex-utero. So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population.
But that's where it gets really weird, right? You could create a child with no mother or father. 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.

So, you know, we, we did not grow up in an artificial womb. Yeah.
But I mean, the, 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? 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. But if you could just make life without any of that, like what is that? Where is that? You know what I'm saying? No, it's's a great philosophy how much of the child's development is taking place while it's in the mother and in getting sharing that shared experience that hormonal cues and whatnot i wouldn't have a child that way right what if you're making a sociopath like what if you're making a completely because there's no no empathy there's no connection no.
They come out, out of the gate, Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up. Like, really? No, it's a fair point.
We don't know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman's body. 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. The question was, when this scales out, when you scale out 100 years from now, what did you just do? Well, I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if we had a world where we, like, if Colossal gets ultimate success, I would say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.
We've revitalized these mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including your picture of what did the Arctic look like back in the day? Like, how do we have that? Because that was actually a crazy, if you look at the work that's been done in Pleistain Park by Sergei Nikita 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 keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter, so it sequesters more carbon. So I think this idea of nature-based and living with nature in an ecological model is something that I hope that we are successful at.
And I that, you know, Colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the endangered species list. So what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoths specifically, the study that showed that it would help.
But they've already done it with like muskox, horses, and a few other species up there. So they're doing it right now.
They've been doing it for over 20 years. And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia.
Yeah. That was something that Larry, or that Sergey and Nikita Zimov wanted to do.
How long before some Russian oligarch hunts a mammoth? Yeah, I mean, look, given the geopolit—we see—going back to your wolf example, we see boundaries in geopolitical lines, right? The animals don't, right? Right. And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoth in Siberia for many reasons.
But you think you will rewild a mammoth? Yeah, I think our goal, like not 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 thylacine. We're we're I think we'll have a thylacine in the next eight years.
I really do. I think based on where we are, current course in speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a bat-tailed Dunhart, which is like a mouse-sized marsupial, and a wolf, and this, right? But we actually, if you just kind of scroll through into the people.
So it's a wolf-like marsupial. Yeah.
Does it actually have a pouch that it teaches? It does. It actually also has a backward pouch so most most pouches uh other than like um the wombat are forward-facing it has a backwards because it was they think because it was a burrowing it burrowing animal so that way you weren't like the babies yeah like absolutely suffocate them but nature's fascinating but if you scroll down a little bit further you'll see uh and just like if you just do a quick scroll you you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines.
We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacine with, and one of the groups that we have involved in it is the logging commission. It's 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 Tasmania is actually the logging commission.
So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having an end of the forest, without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world. And so we going back to like the thylacine and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups in ahead of time so that people can get excited about, you know, you know, 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. 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.
So when you have a rewilding strategy, 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, which be clear to everybody. They're not releasing dire wolves.
And the woolly mice are not getting released. Right, right, right.
Yeah, yes. So this is all theoretically.
Yes. But if you do have one, what would you look at specifically? How do you take into account all the different species? 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.
These animals are not conditioned. They haven't evolved to be around this thing.
It's been almost 100 years since the last one was there. So on the evolved part, this is actually kind of weird.
So you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land.
So you have to work with these kind of big working groups. We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.
And this, you know, the old school, like Looney Tunes, like Wile E. Coyote, where he's like, and he like goes through a wall and there's like a hole, or the Kool-Aid man, right? Well, if you had that cutout, 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 near camera traps in central Tasmania. And, uh, when we've reviewed the data, you'll have like a call or a wombat or one of these animals kind of walking through, or even a wallaby kind of walking through and they'll see a cat, they'll see a cutout and they'll kind of look at it when they see point this is hundreds this is for them is multiple generations right 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 wow yeah so we have we we've been collecting this data for uh 18 months we're publishing a paper on it.
That is so cool. There's like generational trauma that is baked in to their DNA to avoid a thylacine.
That's the only way they survive. I mean, without a language to pass down information.
Yeah. It makes you wonder how much of that is in us.
When people have a you know, or arachnophobia, fear of snakes and spiders, like, what is that from? Like, because it's crippling. 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. Right.
You know, those genes passed on, and you see a spider. And you strike out, yeah.
They freak out, man. When I was doing Fear Factor, if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what? That was on the show.
That's on the show. Yeah, that's like me in heights.
It's like every episode you had back in the day in heights. That's because you're smart.
Yeah, it's like fucking terrifying. It's terrifying.
Whenever I'm in a fucking hotel and I'm on like the 50th floor, I'm like, why? Why? Yeah. Why? So I don't have like road noise.
I'm like, but it's going to be really hard to get out of here. This is so sketchy.
It's so scary. It's just like the building moves a little bit when it's windy.
Yeah. Fuck all this.
I saw my toilet water shaking the other day. Fuck that.
No. Here? Yeah.
He lives way up high. Jamie sends me pictures from his house.
I freak out. Like, no.
No, I can't. No, no, no, no.
I'm not. I wouldn't.
I just. I like to be on the ground.
I like to be on the ground. Well, I hate flying, too, which sucks because I fly.
Yeah. I don't like it.
I fly all the time. I'm just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah. I get mad if i get on a plane and the people don't shut the window so i was like i don't need like i'm in the ball i'm in the tube yeah it's literally fired i just i just want to go yeah i get just 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 that's not there's not that much there's like 10 000 feet you know 3 000 below me.
When you 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. A Delta Airlines life.
Yeah. It wasn't like crazy airline you'd never heard of.
It was a person who was not that good at flying and kind of recent. Yeah.
Like, hey. Yeah.
Hire someone better. Yeah.
This is crazy. And I go to D.C.
a decent amount.

And so, like, the whole D.C. thing, like, absolutely freaked me out.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

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.

The D.C. one.

But look how much the water is shaking at this pool.

Oh, yeah.

Do you see the one in Thailand?

This is where it was.

Oh, did you see the water that's flying off the roofs in Thailand?

Yeah, in the.

Flying off the roofs where you see like from the

ground, it looks like it's raining.

It's crazy.

Anyways. Yeah, well,

that would be the last day I would

spend in that fucking room. Yeah, you're out.

Like, that's it. Done.
Bye-bye.

If I saw a ghost, I'm like, alright, 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.

I'm scared of thylacines.

I'm not scared of thylacines.

They start off the size of a grain of rice.

I'm not scared of them.

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.

Yes.

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.

Oh, boy.

So I was like, I'm going to be very nice on all of my requests on GROC.

Well, I have a weird situation going on at my house because I have chickens, but I eat chicken.

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.
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. But I eat chicken.
Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs – 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. It turns out Alzheimer's connected to a lot of stuff that's around inflammation.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Unfortunately.
They're saying that Gary said it was, 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. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that, which is really weird to think of it that way.
But it's just so much. I mean, obviously, you know this now because you're on a health path.
Yeah. You know, and you feel much better.
I feel incredible. I mean, isn't it nuts? How many people are just running around out there feeling like shit? 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, I built a handful of different technology companies. My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it.
And 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. I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in Vegas.
Saw everyone in the world, right, that's there because it's stupid big. Week and a half later, I'm in NASA Marshall with the director there because we were doing some work for NASA at the time of my last company.
And I was with one of my number two of the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer. He was coughing.
He wasn't feeling well. 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. On Friday night, we had, 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.
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. There was definitely multiple things that came out of the thing.
And, um, and, and so I got super, super sick and, uh, you know, I, I, I now rarely drink. I rarely have caffeine.
You know, I've, I've kind of tried to cut out stuff. I exercise regularly and looking at all these things that people think are weird or are that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a 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 yeah serve your bone mass why we I don't want to be like I now have a nine-month old son right and you like wants to hang out and you know he's gonna get bigger and if I can't pick him up that's a sad day 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. 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? Yeah.
It's a blessing to be healthy. It's a blessing.
I mean, it's just, we're, we're so concerned about our day to day existence that we lose track of this big picture. You have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn't possible, you would wish it was possible.
And that is get healthier. 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.
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. There's friends that I have that are my age and they look like they're my dad.
Yeah. And 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.
Yeah. And I'm not, like, I'm on the journey.
I'm not is a constant journey i'm on the journey we're all on the journey like since i started working with gary like i did have you have you seen this function test have you done the function test what is the function test it's like function health it's like a it's just a suit 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 type of blood. It's like two tests twice a year.
And so I do that test. And after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my biological age or my actual age is 43.
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. You know, I buy, and you be a little bit.
I just, that's, that's terrible at a store. But when you order from some of these like true, like Amish places and in places that have actually like grown the food, like completely natural, that is, doesn't have just a fake pre-purchased certified organic, you can taste the difference in the nutrient density.
It's, it's insane. And you only want to eat it.
A lot of wild game? Yeah. So that's what I order now.
So I order a bunch. So I do elk steaks.
I do a lot of stakes from yeah so that's what i order now so i order a bunch so i do elk steaks i do i do a lot of steaks uh from uh this farm that that gary uh recommended to me it's just great is it bison do they have bison they do have bison too yeah it's parker pastures they're just like when i have a steak from these guys like it's been like you can taste it i've had like my brother-in-law and my my father-in-law had friends i was like i was like no no we're gonna try these try these steaks out of the freezer. I was like, we're not just going to buy something.
Well, it looks different. It looks different.
Yeah, it looks like the coloration. You 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.
Grass-finished, 100%. 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 yeah it looks completely different but the taste different the take 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 been you feel better when you when you eat it. Like you literally feel energized.
Yeah. You know, I've

given people elk before. Yeah.

One of the things I say is like, do I have so much energy?

I'm like, yeah. Yes.
Welcome to my world.

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 like

heads of state. Like not by like

you know, just random people. Random people on the

internet too. Mostly like some people at large at locations, 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.
Jesus Christ. I know, that was in the first.
People are so weird. They just don't, it reminds- I imagine we wanted to eat something that's been extinct for 10,000 years, you just bring it back.
And's not even yet Yeah, and that was the first question. Can I eat this? Yeah, I want woolly mammoth steak my friend It was also domestic the question happened domestic.
Oh domestic. Yeah, like people people in very gross Yeah, I know too much money.
Yeah fucking psychos. Yeah, it's it's been it's it go buy a car you retards It's not want to eat a mammoth.
That's so crazy. We get that.
We get so many weird questions. We get the dinosaur question.
Probably the number one question we get is the dinosaur question. Do you think if they brought Jurassic Park, if Spielberg did it today, they'd have feathers? We know that some dinosaurs had feathers.
We know some had hair, like kind of precursor to feathers. And we know some that were just scaling.
We have preserves of them. We can see 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.
Isn't the university? It might just be a museum. But when I was visiting there a few years back they have a like 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 you go oh it's just like oh that's a fucking it's a bird yeah like now it makes sense like makes more sense with its little stupid arms like makes more sense i mean it mean if you're have you seen the Watson no can we can we pull up a Watson so this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon and it is it's called a or Hotson I think so I don't know you spell it's like H O A T Z E N or something like that we can find it yeah apparently also smells terrible but if you click if you type in uh uh oh yeah it's the hotzen and then if you click in uh and find a baby picture it's got these little creepy hands it looks like a it looks like kind of like a bird like dinosaur we we did the gina one this for fun so oh yeah you can see it's like it it climbs so before it ever flies it actually climbs up everything well when you look at an eagle's talon you're like what the hell is that And then it evolves.
So before it ever climbs, it actually climbs up everything. Well, when you look at an eagle's talon, you're like, what the hell is that? And then it evolves.
Like if you, uh, the, uh, the first kind of like quote unquote dinosaur bird out there, um, it actually, uh, yeah, it crawls. It crawls like it doesn't fly.
You know, most birds just sit there with their little wing nubs and just don't do anything.

These guys actually climb.

What about terror birds?

Oh, yeah.

Those are scary.

That's a crazy animal.

Like, what the hell was that thing?

Yeah.

And that was, what was that?

How many years ago did those things go extinct?

Oh, those were millions.

Millions, right?

Yeah.

The oldest DNA that we have is about 1.5 million years old.

That's it?

Yeah.

So dinosaurs are out of the picture. So you can, a guy you should talk to about, not that, but that's interesting, is Kenneth Lacovaro.
He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including Dreadnoughtus, which is just, it's the craziest thing ever. And going back to- Dreadnought.
Dreadnoughtus. And going back to the issues that- What is Dreadnoughtus? Oh, Dreadnoughtus is amazing.
So, I don't know if it looks like that. What? Imagine if it did.
Yeah, go to that. What cool colors.
Yeah. So, it's a plan eater.
Yeah, it's a plan eater. It's the size of a fucking 737.
It's almost as big as a 737. That's so crazy.
Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he found it in Argentina. And he's amazing.
Kenneth Lacovara, he's amazing. He found it in Argentina, discovered the species, named the species.
And 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 Ark? That's where it is. It's basically in a warehouse.
So it's on display for people in a museum. It's literally, this goes back to some of these governments and these museums.
It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in Western Argentina. Really? Yeah.
And it's, like, the coolest thing ever. This is, yeah.
So, yeah, that's Lacovara's lab. And so, but it's truly, truly amazing.
So with these, like, that's one of the things about dinosaurs in museums, right? Like, a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks. Fill in a lot of the blanks.
Sometimes they'll get, like, a jawbone and they're like, and here's the reconstruction. Right.
It's weird because you go to see it and you think you're going to see a dinosaur bone. But it's only a percentage complete.
Yeah. And sometimes they're real clever and sometimes they're not.
Like sometimes it'll be different colors for the real bone versus, and you're like, how much of this do you have? And they're like 4%. Yeah, how did you guess what it looked like like and a lot of the Images like of like the soft tissue overlay like when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it Like if you're seeing like what like rabbits look like if you take away There's yeah, they did this with like whales and stuff They look absolutely if you look at it They looked like the scariest things ever and then you put put a whale on there and you're like, oh, that's not the worst thing.

Yeah.

For whales, you see them and you look at them, you're like, oh, they're sweet.

Yeah.

Just chilling in the water.

But if you see them with the teeth and everything and just the skeleton.

It looks like an alien monster.

Yeah.

Like an alien monster.

Yeah.

So I wonder what we were looking at.

There was one species that we don't have DNA for that would be amazing to bring back because the ecological benefit is there was a giant beaver. Yeah.
A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid. When did that thing die off? I don't know.
It'd probably have to be... It would probably be in the late Pleistocene.
One of the things that I learned through Rinella is that 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. Here at the Pleistocene.
Well, on the dinosaur bone. 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? So about 13,000 years ago.
It could have been the same thing. 12,000 years ago.
Wow. So it probably died off with American lion and all that other stuff.
And you know the pronghorn, you know the whole story about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's why they're so fast. Oh, because of the American lion? No, American cheetah.
American cheetah. Like they're the last of these animals.
They're a bizarre bizarre animal have you ever seen one in real life I've only seen it through binoculars I've never seen one you know 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 their eyes are on the side of their head yeah I've seen their head. And they can run 55 miles an hour.
And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don't exist anymore. So the cheetahs died off in the Younger Dryas Impact or whatever happened.
But these pronghorn antelopes remain and they are, there's nothing like them in terms of speed. Like it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past right where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators but the predators are gone they remain yes can anything catch them now nothing once they're done like once they're grown good fucking luck they have insane eyesight but you know one of the ways that people hunt them they're really dumb of the ways people hunt them is on horsebacks.
Like that dog has zero chance. But the cheetah.
The cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down. So it's like another, you know, different kind of antelope.
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.
It's awesome. But the vision that these things have, give me a photo of one of their heads, Pronghorn's eyes.
They're so weird looking. They look archaic.
Like if you see their face, they don't look like, it looks like they're from another time. It looks like 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.
This is what would have been so amazing to look at what the Earth looked like 12,000 years ago. It is cool.
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 Yellowstone, but when you said going to Cougar 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. Like at dusk, you've got like echidnas running around and you've got wallabies jumping through.
Wow. And they all just come through and you're like, it's like that scene in like Ace Ventura, right, where he sings and like everything fucking comes to him.
And I remember the first, I was like, this isn't real. Like, are these animatronics? Like, there's no way there's this much life in biodiversity.
And it was all just like, you know, the echidnas are running, the wallabies are jumping. You've got like wombats, like kind of scurrying along.
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 how we think about them because you never see them.
But then there's just like this insane plethora of them. There's just so many.
It's crazy. Well, I wonder what would be different had the thylacine survived.
So they say that— Because that was kind of the only thing that was— It was the only apex predator for Tasmania in lower Australia. And have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person? Not in person.
They're awesome. They look cool as shit.
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 sounds. 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 Sasquatch.
This is this is crazy. Yeah they're crazy see if we can hear some.

Referred to Tassies as bear devils

due to the superficial resentment.

Oh cute face. If you find them eating

they just sound terrible. Find a

Tasmanian tiger noises.

I don't think

we know what they make. Or excuse me

Tasmanian devil noises sorry.

Sorry not. Have you seen this video though?

I have yeah. We can go to that in a second Sorry.
Not. Have you seen this video though? I have.
Yeah.

We can go to that in a second too. I just want to hear this.
Look at that fucker. Look at his face.
So cool. And so they're part of the reason why they're, but isn't that terrifying? You know they give each other cancer? Yeah.
That's what I'm saying. And many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think that if the thylacine was there, because this is where people give wolves and thylacines and predators bad.
But they go after the sick. There's an energy expenditure ratio, right? 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. So they kill the young.
So they're thinning out the weakest. They kill the old, then they kill the sick.
An environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species. And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate kind of that mezzanine level ofials.
Many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not... I don't know if you saw it.
It's disgusting. It's really gross.
What are we looking at here? Feeding frenzy? Give me some volume. It's doing it right in front of people too, which is crazy.
They might be talking at the time. I fed them like this.
It's crazy. They they're just not scared watch how fast they are capable you just they're like piranhas these are tasmanian devils the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera and next to tasmania it's so cool that they're not remotely scared of people yeah they don't even notice you're there it crazy.
So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of a wallaby. Whose video is this, Jimmy? Coyote Peterson.
Yeah, Brave Wilderness. Oh, okay.
Look at these little fuckers go. And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights, and that fighting is when they do the transmission.
Oh, right. You see that?

I'm going to fight.

No, I mean like, wow.

But they literally scratch and bite each other and then they transmit this.

It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of.

So then it latches onto the next face through biting.

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.

Right.

And so there's a big movement within Tasmania and lower southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator being the thylacine, it would eat.

Ugh.

I can't even look.

Oh, God.

It's rough.

We're looking for people listening.

We're looking at tumors on Tasmanian devil's faces.

Yeah, which is terrible.

That was a perfect inspiration for a comic book character, or for a cartoon character, rather. Yeah, Tasmanian devil.
He was amazing. I mean, they'll be sitting there not making those sounds.
They start eating or they get threatened, and they make those death sounds. It is a terrible— because 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 for someone like that. Yeah, I'd imagine that's such a cool little animal.
So the idea of ultimately eventually releasing thylacines, 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.
That probably won't be the case if you reintroduce thylacines. They'll start thinning it out and it'll 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. You want some water? Yeah.
They introduced house cats, like just feral house cats in Australia to combat certain species. And they started decimating all the other species.
It's literally the worst. It's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate is in Australia to the cats.
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, potentially would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct? The good news about the Tasmanian in the Southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right? Hopefully they'd eat the cats.
If you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats outside of the cats that they actually own. They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials.
They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats. Yeah, people hunt them.
Yeah, people hunt them. 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. I was reading it on a plane, and this guy's holding up a dead cat.
He shot with a bow and I'm like, hey, man. Like what the fuck? They hold them up like trophies.
Well, because it's a huge problem, right? It goes back to the invasive species. One of the projects that we're working on with the thiosine because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation is have you ever seen a northern coal no what is that northern coal it it it kind of looks like a mink or like a ferret but way prettier it's amazing how do you spell it uh q u o l l yeah i mean they're they're absolutely beautiful they're absolutely i mean their coats are beautiful uh but they're another type of carnivorous marsupial.
But, you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity introduced cane toads. Have you ever seen a cane toad? It's like the job of the, I mean, it looks fucking evil, right? They're monsters.
And so we introduced, we as humanity introduced cane toads into Australia. And they have a neurotoxin.
Well, guess what most quolls and small marsupials love to eat? Frogs and toads. Oh, no.
This is actually, I think, about our work. This actually is about our work.
And so, no, this may be. 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 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.
They don't completely stroke out and die, which is what happens in northern Australia. And so the cane toads, they reproduce in an insane rate.
They're having like thousands of babies. They're making more and more of them.
So guess what? More and more coals and others are eating these cane toads and dying. 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. This is amazing.
One letter in three and a half billion base pairs. So one letter, a one letter change conferred, had no other, you know, deterioration, had no other effects that were negative.
And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad. Wow.
So because, you know, 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, which is our model species for the thylacine.
And we engineered dunnarts that, and dunnart cells and dunnarts that can eat cane toad tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them. And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to enter, we like to engineer in this one edit into quolls, because if quolls would have most likely, through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put the quoll next to the cane toad, they would have co-evolved together.
They probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature. 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 quolls that eat the cane toads. And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this help the population of the of the coals 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 I hope you don't have to bring in big toads to eat the coals you know have you seen those toads and frogs that like latch out and like they'll eat anything in front of them yes yeah they're terrifying there was a giant one of those toads and frogs that latch out and they'll eat anything in front of them? Yes.
Yeah, they're terrifying. There was a giant one of those toads back in, I don't know, thousands of years ago.
How big was it? I don't know. I've seen a 3D render of it, and it grabs deers and stuff.
It's crazy. Whoa.
We've played videos of toads eating mice. I had no idea.
Yeah. Before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice.
Yeah, it's crazy. 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.
And you'd think that they're just sitting there docile, and then they just absolutely throw their whole bodies out. Well, they sit there.
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. They bite each other's heads and they throw each other through the air.

Yeah, I've seen them toss each other.

Imagine you're fighting with a dude and he literally bites half your torso and throws

you through the air and they don't even look like it bothered them.

Yeah, that's just part of the fight.

That's totally within the rules.

That's what creeps me out about reptiles.

There's this lack of emotions.

At least a wolf has emotions.

It's like there's something going on there.

There's an intelligence.

And I think that like a toad. There's a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting, but it turns out to not be true, that they would lie on their back and put their arms in the oh yeah I saw that video apparently that's not what they're doing apparently that's a normal characteristic that they do but stupid but from a natural selection perspective stupid people like I have to say I gotta you save that dude and then we credit the crocodile for being super smart but in reality just got a free meal yeah well you.
Yeah. Well, you would think, though, if they have gotten those meals before, that that would be a learned behavior.
I mean, just they do have some learned behavior. I have a friend.
His name is Jim Shockey. 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.
Like they're actively targeting people in this village. 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. 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, you know, because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up.
Yeah. These fucking crocodiles went around the fence.
They walked around the fence and slid into the water. So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to.
So they, they hunt people. Yeah, they, they absolutely do.
And it's, it's weird how some of those, those, 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. So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know.
There's some things that are known, like elephants get cancer a fraction of what they should due to an overexpression of a gene called P53. So there's thing called pedos paradox where based on age and body weight both blue whales and uh elephants get cancer a fraction of what they probably should based on how old they get and what their body size is and they actually that actually makes our lives very difficult 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 cell, it just says looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell, right?

It's like programmed in.

So we had 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.

But if you turn that down, does that make them more susceptible to cancer?

So you got to turn it back up after you make the edits. Whoa.
Yeah. So these things that we are learning about.
I'm with that lady doctor, that lady scientist. You guys are doing something you shouldn't be doing.
No, we're learning about things, right? We're learning about things, right? I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding. If I was her, I would probably have the same opinion.
Yeah. I'd probably say, especially if I found out you guys weren't really scientists.
I'm like, what are you doing? Yeah. Why are you doing this? Well, I mean, the good news about Colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and our 95 scientific advisors, 90% of the company are scientists.
There's very few. Like, I fall in the very few.
I'm kind of kidding about you're not a scientist. I'm definitely not a scientist.
I'm not kidding about the technology getting into someone else's hands. And this is where it gets weird.
Like, China, Russia, some other. And it is getting weird.
Like CRISPR and these genome engineering tools are outside of the... It's like the genie out of the bottle, right? It's like if it's out there, you can't put it back in.
I think that more and more people in other countries are going to be doing things with 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. But that gets so weird, right? Like, the China story.
You can't explain to people what they did. They said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is...
Yeah. They actually were engineering babies 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. 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 passed on to the next generation, right? So things, so if you, if you, if you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, you know, from a germ line. So any, all your cells in your body are somatic cells, except for your like egg or sperm, those are germ cells.
So anything that could be affected into the germ line so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be like, you know, umbrella corporation type moment, right? So we don't want that. 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. Well, so that part's like, that part's quoted under debate.
There's people that say that happened. There's people that say it doesn't happen.
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.
During COVID, they're like, we'll do all the COVID testing for you for free. We'll do all this COVID testing for you for free.
Don't worry. Just send us your data.
We'll do it all for free. You just want to help the world, right? We'll work with the World Health health organization just send us all your samples from all your countries everything and publicly the ceo of uh bgi has said uh which is funded by uh the ccp has said um that uh they would that 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 you know conspiracy theory like, is it a Sasquatch or is it just a man in an ape suit? This is something that is very real.
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. That's not a hidden thing.
So that is the problem. But they supposedly did with these children.

Supposedly.

How old are these kids now?

I mean, when did that happen?

Yeah, so they've been like six or seven.

Are they already winning chess championships?

Yes, I'm not.

We should find out.

We should find out.

These kids are probably in a lab somewhere with a headset on.

Yeah.

Teaching them how to be psychic.

I don't know how public it's like.

It was also one of those weird things that was like, he's in trouble. He's going to jail.
Yeah. And then he's like.
And then he got out. And then he's out.
Yeah. Always forgiving.
He's a good guy. 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.
Yeah. It's 100% true.
And so it is weird that he got in trouble for a few months. Right.
And he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place. Well, they funded his lab.
His lab was funded by the party. And this is what we found out about.
I guarantee you there's some shit that they're doing somewhere that we haven't found out about yet.

And if you were going to do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that Russia— Well, that's what separates us. That separates us.
You know 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. Oh, I saw that.
I read about that. For war.
Yeah. A chimp-human hybrid for war.
Well, there's been a recent publication out of Japan where they're allowing Japanese scientists to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes.

With other mammalian genes.

Like what kind of genes?

Like woolly mammoth genes in a person?

No, we are not doing that. People ask us if we could solve hair loss with woolly mammoths.
That would be the first thing people want. Hair loss, next thing, bigger dicks.
Those are consistent questions. You can't engineer once a person's already born, right? With the current technology.
With the current technology. So being able to send stuff to gene therapies and targeting and being able to deliver specifically to cells is an area that we're getting better at.
Like I think one of the probably the most, I think one of the 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. 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? And you could do that to a person who's already born? To someone that's already born.
It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage. 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.
This is what I predicted. Everyone's going to look like Thor.
It's going to be a bunch of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Momoa's and no more people look like you and me. Wait.
So Chris is one of our investors and I always think we look just like each other. Oh yeah.
For sure. Luke invited me to go to Byron.
Follows from another planet. I think you're different species is.
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.
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, yeah.
Sure you do. Yeah, I'm not going surfing with you two.
Measure cocks too? Yeah, I was like, I'm going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible. But you've got to imagine if that becomes a reality.
What we're doing today just with plastic surgery. Yeah.
Let's take South Korea, for example. Yeah, GLP-1s.
But that's achievable. What GLP-1s are doing is achievable through hard work.
Yeah. But what they're doing in South Korea with eye, like it's ubiquitous.
Like so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these K-pop eyes. Yeah.
You know? It's a strange thing. It's a strange thing.
And that's just primitive cutting and sewing tissue artistically, right? But if people can decide what they're going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like. Yeah, it's a eugenics world.
Now we're really playing God. No, no, no.
That's playing God to another level, right? And that's like this eugenics world where we know, right? Like I just had a child. And typically, I'd say if you go through the IVF process, which we went through, you typically can test for certain types of issues like along the pregnancy, right? And when they put the embryo in, they look at kind of the morphological grade.
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. And they actually take cells from the developing neuro on the very outer derm, right? On this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development.
They culture those cells and then they're doing doing full genome sequencing. And so we had a handful of embryos.
And so they don't let you just select for eye color or height or anything. But outside of the core, is there a mental issue or is it compatible with life, which is what most people test for, you can now ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things, right? So, like, you know, if diabetes or certain types of cancers or Alzheimer's or it's in your family, you can now get a lot of that's environmental.
But you can still get a distribution score so you can understand what are the genetic factors in that. So that's today.
So that's not, like, 20 years in the future. That's not Gattaca.
That's today. And I mean, we did that.
We did that because I have a I have a I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation, which affects the Titan gene and I create a truncated protein. So I have I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID.
That was a lab leak that in that attacked my heart. Wow.
And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on. So we screened for that, right? But that's not a standard thing.
But that's a today thing. Like, you know, two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.
So you understand the technology better than most. Conceivably, what could be done that would, in the future people to change their very shape and it literally like change everything about them change their intelligence change everything i think it starts with um you know neuroenhancers and i think and and this is the biological perspective this is not even the you know computer brain interfaces merging with ai that whole world which i think that world has a lot of traction and is scarily getting a lot of traction pretty quickly.
But I think it starts with things like health span where it's like the very vain stuff. So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that eye color.
I think all of that is changeable and not like, there's a company right now, I forgot the name of it that spun out of Harvard that is making a patch using a micro needling, uh, patches that you can even feel the needles, right. And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help like, uh, replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin.
And so, so you can have 30-year-old-looking skin when you're 85 years old. What? Yes.
So, and the same thing for hair, right? The reason why our hair is great. That's going to be real soon? Yes.
I mean, the speed of which, I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process and 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.
And I think that you're going to have the ethical pushbacks on this. So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles.
But right now the technology exists. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of for the folks that are deep in longevity, they'll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it's not currently classified as a disease state.
Right. And so they're not getting NIH funding.
Right. They're getting all that funding is going to other random stuff.
But people aren't focusing on longevity. That's why you've got, like 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

or resetting your clocks at a cellular level.

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.

They did it in dogs first because people love dogs and they can also collect a a lot of data that can then apply to clinical trials. Yeah, I know.
There's a lot of people cloning their dogs now. Yeah, there's people that are cloning their dogs.
They can do it even easier now with this. Yeah, I didn't bring Marshall to the studio.
We did clone one person's dog. 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. Yeah.
And that's how

people feel about it. Some people.
Dogs are unique

little creatures. They have their own little personalities.

I know. I've got two and they're amazing

and you know I did

my wife is closer

to one and so I did

I did full disclosure I did

we did do a blood sample on that one.

Just in case. I just don't know what the meltdown

could look like. So but

Thank you. to one.
And so I did full disclosure. We did do a blood sample on that one.

Just in case? I just don't know what the meltdown could look like.

But the other one we haven't.

Because you're right. You have

environmental factors. You have personalities.

We don't understand all of that.

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 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. So we did a blood draw.
He called me over Christmas 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 do it for him? 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. Like his biggest issue was they couldn't let go of that dog, number one.

And number two, but they didn't want that other dog or his family didn't want another dog his biggest issue was they want they 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 to say for our selfish means right you're already suffering we want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken like frankenstein pieces of you and so the fact that we could just take a blood draw the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw i was like totally awake just sitting right there while we did it and you know he was happy with that so i think these what if 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 so you know what i'm saying i do i 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 it's weird i didn't think it was the same dog at all and 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 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 me out. It would creep me out too.
Because Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps. And if that happens, yeah.
It would creep me out. Yeah.
Because 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.
Yeah. Same thing.
It's like my dog, Ken, if he gets on, he only wants to sleep on my feet.

If I fall asleep on the couch, he's cool.

He won't sleep on my feet.

He just wants to sleep on me.

And that's not comfortable for him because I'm kicking him and everything, but that's just where he wants to sleep.

They want to be in contact with you.

My dog watches TV with me.

Yeah, that's awesome.

They're the best.

Yeah, and we didn't even teach it this, but when we say security at our house, Ken just loses his mind. He just runs to the door.
He runs to the front door, runs to the back door, runs to the side doors. What kind of dog? They're just mutts.
So I have Barbie and Ken. They're just two little weird mutts.
But we named them before the movie. 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.
But it's also good to teach them those things. Yeah.
I think loss is important. Yeah.
I think loss is important. I don't want to, you know, I only, I'm new to this whole father thing, but you know, I think it's important that they understand that there's real, 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. But I think that's important.
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 direwolves 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 or whatever um and we get or an experiment doesn't work or or whatever bad happens and you look at this pile of kids photos and teachers like we have this this there's 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 kids won't be quiet. We're in this like a tension 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 kids, and so 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. But I think that we can also, like, inspire the next generation.
Like, don't we want to preach hope? We're on this 24-7 psycho news cycle, right? Like, that wasn't around when I was a kid. Do you know how C.S.
Lewis first started talking about this? Like, what year was C.S. Lewis alive? he had a quote about I might have saved it he had a quote about the just getting all the dire information of the world all the time sent to you all the time which at his time back then that was very new that was a completely new thing in this 24-hour news cycles, right? You know, like there's actually a law in the UK.
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.
I was like, so what happens if someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to get the dog's perspective? And they're like, yes. And they're dead serious.
Oh, that's so ridiculous. So there can be stories that are just negative, and there can be stories that are just positive.
That's okay. 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 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 you can have debates about it and we should we should have you should you know what you guys are doing is great you've got the dire wolves fenced off you're very careful you're monitoring them it's great it's gonna happen it's gonna happen and at least you're transparent about it yeah like at least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans yeah and they and they train and they train them with DNA to only eat but that's probably gonna happen too 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.
Yeah. Synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute AI and synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer life.
I think that we're at the doorstep of – everyone is very, very worried about AI. but I do think that synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer life.
I think that we're at the doorstep of, you know, everyone's very, very worried about AI,

but I do think that synthetic biology

is in that camp. I think it's

like discovering fire. It's the God camp.

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, and then you have

new technologies that are going to emerge from

AI using quantum

computing. And then And then you have new technologies that are going to merge from AI using

quantum computing.

And then the interface at all, like the neural link stuff and everything.

It's just going to get, you know.

The interfaces are crazy because we had that gentleman, Noah,

the first guy who got it, and he said he has an aim bot in his head.

So, like, when he plays games, he's got a crazy advantage

because where he looks is where the cursor goes.

Yeah.

Like instantaneously.

So he could shoot things like he's not going to miss. Yeah.
I mean, we are living in a weird time. 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 great wild.
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, you know, make mammoths. That's today.
We can't even think about what's tomorrow.

We spun out a company from Colossal called Breaking last year, and this incredible group at the Visa Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to.

And not making smaller plastics not making microplastics which are fucking terrible but actually breaks the chemical that's why i need it breaking it actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as the as a thing well guess you know so it takes things that have broken down never and has got it down into years. We have used now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it so now that it's in 22 months.
And I think that we can get it down to two weeks. 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. We have to do something about it.
So, so I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, if someone said, we give you a magic, 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.

You know, that would have sounded like science fiction 10 years ago.

That's so crazy. And so now it's, you said it's down to a couple months? Yeah, it's 22 months right now.
So. And we're talking about like, not just like your- Water bottle.
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. Like we're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.
What about those stupid fucking windmills that they have to change every few years? Oh, they actually have a landfill for windmills. And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make, yeah.
And they don't barely make any electricity. Yeah, yeah.
They kill livestock or they kill animals, kill birds. They disrupt...
Whales. They also disrupt migratory patterns of birds.
Of course they do. Yeah.
Yeah, you can't fly into that. Yeah.
And they're all made with plastic and plastic polymers. And then they have to get rid of them.
And then the only place to put them is in a landfill. Yeah, exactly.
So that's why we started breaking. Wow.
So these microbes would be able to break that down. Yeah.
I mean, we haven't tested on that specific, but one of the biggest ones that we tested on was nylon, just because there's so much. If you look at like what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets.
Oh, that makes sense. So we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases, and then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others.
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, 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.
But you have to do those types of things because the microplastics and then the chlorine and other stuff still passes through a lot of the existing materials. 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? No, it dies.
It only eats this like... This is what they always say right before it fucks up.
Don't worry about it. 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? But you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the Great Pacific garbage patch? 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 just go sprinkle it and call it a day.
But that's a long-term goal, right? Wow. 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 quals, right? 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?

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.
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? 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. but synthetic biology is is that net is that it's it's an ai level thing that we need to be worried about and how many different nations are working on this stuff so i i think that the u.s is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective it is a major directive of china you know um not just sequencing and biobanking because they're're biobanking.
We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here. That's one of the things I was meeting in Washington about.
But China does. 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.
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 Noah's Ark. 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. But, you know, 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? We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences now through AI and software. Bro, people are going to have dire wolves guarding their house.
No. In 100 years? They're not open to the public.
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.
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.
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 venture. 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? And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right? Yeah.
And I think that— 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? So the closest you get from a dino DNA perspective is that 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? I think that it's not possible to de-extinct a dinosaur.
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 branch. So you could make one.
Wasn't that one of the things they did in Jurassic Park? That's what they all did. They made a dinosaur that didn't exist before, the big giant one? Adominus rex, yeah.
Right. That was something they created, correct? That's something they created, right? And so I think from a technology and genome engineering perspective, that is eventually possible.
Ooh. So they could easily make a T-Rex without having- I wouldn't say easily, yeah.
But they could potentially. At some future state.
At some future state, I think we'll have the CAD software biology where you can engineer almost anything. Oh, my God.
I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right? The better, and you said it best when you brought up quantum. You know, quantum is only two years away every two years, I hear.
But eventually when it works and works at scale and you have that coupled with, you know, 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. And look, it will be in nefarious hands.
Let's just be real. Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right? Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right? And so this is nuclear weapons.
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. And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like, it's like five years, you know, no longer that was like seven years ago.
People in China, companies in China and the government in China, were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of certain subset of race, right. And they were, they were doing bad things with facial rec.
Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said not not not at a nationwide level. But but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says we will not at all support any technology.
We're going to ban investing in facial wreck technology. Well, that's just dumb.
Right. Because we now know there's things like 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? 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. And so, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology, the world is currently the United States is the leader in synthetic biology.
And we've got national treasures like George Church, my co-founder and others. And I hope that we continue to be the world's leader.
But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do. And they will experiment on kids.
But it's interesting also that you're a company. 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 but do you know what is going on in other countries or is this a tightly guarded secret so I mean we know obviously you're you have people I'm sorry to interrupt you know people in your company as well and I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing. So you must be being studied by other countries.
Yeah, we definitely, and we have investment by In-Q-Tel, right? So I'm sure that makes us more of a target. Yeah.
So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and IC. It's just when you think about it 100 years from now, a thousand years from now, when you scale this out, there's no limit to what could be done with life.
That's so strange. Yeah.
It's so strange to think that for four plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern. On rails.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then one day. And now we say we can take the rail where we want.
Oh, boy. And, you know, that's the grandest of all conspiracy theories is that's how humans were created.
Yeah, the panspermia. Well, either panspermia or that we were engineered in places.
The great one is the Anunnaki, right? Oh, yeah. It's the Sumerian tax stuff.
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, and if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, there's a lot of weird, similar, I mean, you can't, you can't objectively, it's like the guy with the, with the Sphinx, right? It was like, yep, that's water. I'm an expert on erosion.
That water and then they're like head of the sphinx like that's not water right yeah it's the same thing as this you cannot look at some of the stuff and say that's not weird right you got you can't look at like you know the uh the the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seemed to now there's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced out of you 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 have you been to peru no so that i would put you know because i don't want to i do not want to take you away from going and 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 Aliantumbo or whatever it's called and you see these blocks that you can't like put a piece of paper between.
You know, you can't see 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 2,000 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 you're one of those people that are just like, huh.
You're a denier. You can't say it's not weird.
Yeah, to say it's not weird is actually denying science. Yeah, it's the weird...
So, you should put Peru on your... Because when you see it, there's nothing like it.
I've been fortunate to be able to travel over the world. You see it, and you're just like, that just doesn't make sense.
The coolest thing I've ever seen is Chichen Itza. I've been to Chichen Itza, yeah.
And you go there, and you're like, what did you do? What did you do? How'd you do this? How'd you guys do this? You know what's crazy about Chichen Itza. Yeah.
I've been to Chichen Itza. And you go there and you're like, what did you do?

What did you do?

How'd you do this?

Yeah.

How'd you guys do this?

You know what's crazy about Chichen Itza?

They don't let you go there anymore.

But I don't know where,

but you know,

you've got all those paths

with all the vendors

and you see Chichen Itza.

Well, there's,

in the jungles there

on the Yucatan Peninsula,

there's actually other older pyramids.

But the carvings that they have

on Chichen Itza

and the carvings they have there, they're actually, the older ones have more precise carvings. But now, guess what? It's not open to the public.
I've seen that. I've been there.
Oh, it's so frustrating. But it is such a weird world, right? Yeah.
Yeah. 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.
A lot. Yeah.
And there's no way you can know a lot. And anytime you suggest something new, you get shit for it.
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 I think Graham Hancock in the end. I don't know if they're kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real.
Yeah. 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.
You've seen the Reichardt structure? Uh-uh. You ever seen that? Uh-uh.
This is what there's a lot of people like jimmy corsetti who's this uh famous youtube i guess you would call him uh i guess he'd be like can we pull up the 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 reichardt structure is essentially atlantis oh this is in the desert yes it looks like atl. There's salt all around it.
It has the rings that Plato described. And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean.
I mean, it literally looks like Atlantis. And people dispute it.
A lot of people don't. Have people gone and studied it there? Well, it's a very difficult place to get to, and it's also very dangerous.
So people have studied it, but there hasn't been, like, large-scale archaeological digs there. The whole sub-Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating.
They find whales there. I mean, they know that it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.
Yeah. And there hasn't been like large scale exploration of what's in that ground.
And it's immense. I do think that the Younger Dryas stuff is also a combination of, I think generally speaking, if you break down the Younger Dryas 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, then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.
Anthropologic meaning human beings killed them. Yes, humans had some impact on it, right? I think that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that could have been a global level rising with rushing waters and sea rising whatnot.
And then you've got, you know, what caused that flood most likely meteorological, you know, astrological meteorological. And then they combine that with core samples that show large levels of iridium.
Yeah, which which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain impacts. It's like that.
It's like that glass or whatever that's iridium is actually different iridium is actually very common in space but oh yeah that's this and there's a layer yeah that's right the micro diamonds but they have those two as well yeah yeah that's what yeah yeah that's what yeah from the Trinity explosion they discovered it there they find these microglades. 100% there was impacts.
That's a fact. And they also know when the meteor shower, and this is a thing that they study, like when we go through this comet shower.
But you remember probably 10, 20 years ago, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian. I can't talk to you ever again.
Exactly, water canopy, you're weird. Don't talk to me again.
I know. And now it's like, well, maybe there was a giant flood.
Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right? Maybe it was done by impact of comets, right? 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 Vemanis? What were these flying vehicles that they had? What was Ezekiel talking about in the Bible? Have you seen that stuff when, have you seen those videos in the last that have come out in the last year when there was the most recent UAP craze and they'd show it and it looked like crazy ball lightning. It almost looked like those things that you'd put your hands on your hair and stand up, right? And then they compare some of those to paintings from like 500, 700 years ago.
Let me stop you there because a lot of those crazy balls of light- We're all fake? No, you can just zoom in on Venus. Yeah.
And that's what you get. Cool.
You zoom in on stars and you get this sort of bizarre distorted image. Have you seen those? Find zoomed in stars.
I think they did it with the North Star. They've done it with several stars.
But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth, you can get that sort of distorted weird effect. Because you're looking through the i have i've always seen this stuff on the internet until i was in wellington new zealand when i was with peter peter is because his house in wellington is like on a body of water ones i wear and uh and we were talking of course like the conversation went to ghosts and ufos because like oh you've seen why not I haven't seen them in person.
I've seen them on his iPhone.

Like these are, this wasn't like a telescopic lens.

This is an iPhone and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom ends.

But that's the thing about zooming in.

See, the thing is 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.
Yeah, here we go. Like, look at that.
Okay. 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? That's the model number.
Can you talk in the mic? It's just the model number. I have no idea what that means.
So what would you think that the amount of... I don't know, 10X, 100X? I have no idea.
Okay. But do you see how they're having a hard time zooming in on it? Because it's a handheld, I think.
But look how weird it is. It looks so weird.
It's how it's moving around like you say, oh my God, you found a UFO. But it's not.
It's just a star. I do hate that every UFO video is blurry.
Or a star. You know, I mean, that could be if you want to get into the whole Hal put off 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 it. So this is the camera.
This is that particular camera. Is this not a very...
No, it's like a Hanahad DSLR camera. So that's a $749 camera on Amazon.
I'll see if Peter will give me his... I'm sure he would, and I'll send it to you, because it's just weird to see.
Oh, they're weird. No, I'm not saying that they're not real.
But this was like not zoomed in.

His wife's next to him. And it's just weird stuff.
I am not denying that people are seeing things. But I've never seen it.
I'm not denying that they're real. 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. Look at that.
It's undeniable. Look at the energy around it.
Yeah. With how Puthoff believes is that there's some sort of distortion around these things.

Yeah.

That's all their zero-point energy and moving and gravitational wave type stuff. Do you go deep on this? I get bored.
I get a little bored. It gets boring because there's no real resolution.
Yeah. You could lose your mind.
But I had dinner with Jacques Vallée 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. These guys.
I did a call with Hal. I got into that crowd for a while before I started Colossal.
And I knew a bunch of those folks. So I talked to Lou.
I talked to Hal. I did a Zoom with Hal.
If you imagine what we are now, where we are, what you're describing in terms of technology that's emerging right now. And we have dire wolves today in 2025.
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.

Yeah, and if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve,

it's not that far.

Now, imagine the monkeying that you guys have done with dire wolves.

I wouldn't say it's monkeying.

It's a little monkeying around.

The selective precision genome engineering. Amazing stuff you've done with dire wolves.
I wouldn't say it's monkeying. It's a little monkeying around.
The selective precision genome engineering.

Amazing stuff you've done with dire wolves.

I'm just being silly.

But imagine doing that to primitive hominids.

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 youithecis you know trying to figure out how to make a spear yeah and you say listen let's uh

put a little bit of this yeah a little bit of that i told you one edit yeah one edit makes

5 000 you know confers 5 000 uh resistance to neurotoxins so it's like a couple little edits

here does a lot and then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from

the future and if you think about what's happening to human beings we're becoming less and less

I'm just... neurotoxin so it's like a couple little edits here does a lot and then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from the future 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 less reliant on muscle yeah and our heads are getting bigger yeah that's them yeah i mean i've read that i read that theory too it's a bizarre archetype right it's a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again.
It's very weird that there's a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see. I go down those rabbit holes because, I mean, I just think, once again, going back to the stuff of Kuku Khan and Anunnaki and all this stuff.
The Anunnaki stuff is the most interesting. It's just so strange.
Yeah. And how you have certain things that are aligned to celestial.
And you're like, yeah, but they could have picked a lot of constellations. Yes.
Why did they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is, right? Right. Why did they do that? And also, how did the fucking ancient Sumerians have a detailed map of the solar system? Insanely detailed.
From 6,000 years ago. How? Yeah.
And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space. Yeah.
And also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps. Yeah.
Like, what are you saying? Yeah. There's weird...
The cool thing about this... But take a step back.
Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, and we get ridiculed even for the actual science that we're doing and proving every day, at the end of the day, it is still cool, and it's interesting. 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. Well, unlike you, I don't have the burden of being taken seriously.
And that's great for discussing ridiculous. I have a ghost hunter on here.
It is great. It's super interesting.
I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcast is because one minute you'll talk to a comedian and a UFC fighter and the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about like the ancient flood than anyone in the world. And that's cool.
It is cool. Yeah.
It's very fascinating. Because we should have conversations.
Yes. And the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time.
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.
You talked about getting the news. What year was C.S.
Lewis quote did you find that? He talked about getting the news what year was C.S. Lewis alive? 1898 yeah, I started tracking down like there's a bunch of misquoted C.S.
Lewis quote and it could be one of those It could be one of those but We're being inundated by the worst news of the day because that's the news that's gonna ensure that you watch it. And there's so many cool things that are happening at the same time.
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. Most people are cool with each other.
Most interactions between human beings are positive and they're fascinating. And human beings are a fascinating creature.
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 i mean i love it i i i'm having i'm working more hours than i've ever worked in my life and uh 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 so cool. It's the coolest thing in the world.
Well, I'm glad you're doing it, man. I really appreciate you.
And thank you so much for coming in here and showing people the dire wolves and the red wolves. And I hope more.
Yeah, we'll keep you up to date on fun stuff. I want to go see them.
I want to see them. 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.
It's just, we're Colossal.com. We're Colossal.com and we're, it is Colossal on YouTube and X and everything.
And we're at Colossal on X. So fucking cool.
Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow. Yeah.
I can't wait to see that one day. Yeah.
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.

Like, we've got four labs.

People are just, you know, in love with it.

That's great.

It's amazing.

Thank you very much.

You got to come see the lab.

I will.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.