In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the CEO of Colossal Biosciences joins us to talk about his company Colossal Biopsies, a company that wants to bring back extinct species, like mammoths and elephants, back to the wild.
00:01:57.000And I was like, if you had one project, is it this mammoth project?
00:02:00.000And 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.
00:02:12.000I literally thought that, like, the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke.
00:02:17.000Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line.
00:02:21.000Whether he was in 60 Minutes or, you know, Stephen Colbert, whatever he was 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.
00:02:32.000Seven 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.
00:02:39.000So how do you decide what to start with?
00:02:41.000So we started with the mammoth first, right?
00:02:44.000Because George had been working on it for eight years.
00:02:49.000We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.
00:02:52.000There 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.
00:03:01.000And so that was an easy place to start.
00:03:04.000After 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.
00:04:17.000So you have to get a lot of samples first.
00:04:19.000And then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative and And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right?
00:04:27.000So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths.
00:04:30.000They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.
00:04:35.000Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind.
00:04:37.000That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building pyramids.
00:04:41.000Like literally like humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed.
00:04:46.000And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur.
00:05:04.000I 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.
00:05:11.000But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed.
00:05:17.000They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.
00:05:33.000Well, there's a couple different theories, right?
00:05:35.000One of the theories with Wrangel 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.
00:05:51.000Okay. And so essentially though, Wrangell Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and Russia, also is where they were.
00:06:03.000Those were kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today.
00:06:48.000They have a little bit of a hump structure.
00:06:50.000You know, mammoths, because they have these massive, massive tusks, right?
00:06:54.000And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world.
00:06:58.000They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly.
00:07:01.000They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that.
00:07:07.000But 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.
00:07:18.000Wow. So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand?
00:07:22.000Yes. And Thailand and then parts of, different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent.
00:07:28.000I actually rode one of those once with my family.
00:09:51.000Okay, so we have the ancient genome, so you have to collect and assemble.
00:09:55.000Right. 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.
00:10:02.000Like 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.
00:11:04.000And 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.
00:11:14.000And I was like, and then there's, and he's like, just move the gun over.
00:11:16.000So I move the gun over, and he goes, listen, and this is the first words out of his mouth to me, if I stop short, you hand me that gun.
00:11:24.000And 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?
00:11:29.000If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun.
00:13:14.000I 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?
00:13:22.000And so we go to, like, the catacombs of the museums, and it's exactly what you think of as, like, the Vatican archives, right?
00:13:27.000You 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.
00:13:35.000It's got, like, little drawers and boxes, and they're like, oh, this is giant sloth poop.
00:13:41.000And I was like, I didn't know there was giant sloth poop.
00:13:42.000They're like, yes, and we think there's...
00:13:44.000Well, this is like, you know, the card catalog of all dead species, but it's not on display for the public.
00:14:14.000They'll pull out drawers that have Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.
00:14:19.000I mean, that's how we did the thylacine.
00:14:21.000We 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 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup.
00:14:38.000Wow. But they didn't even know they had it.
00:14:40.000They also on the thylacine, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later, they also found a head in a bucket.
00:15:54.000He's put real capital into it until now.
00:15:56.000And he's been working on it for 15 years and he's had people send him, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years.
00:16:05.000So he'd just send it to him and then he loves the thylacine so much he just sequences it and he's like, no, it's a dog.
00:18:40.000So 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.
00:18:52.000But I'm from software, so I just assume there's like the...
00:18:57.000We've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt, right?
00:19:00.000So we should assume that the government or someone backed up and had the 23andMe of all species.
00:20:03.000We can now actually make individual edits to, when you think of the DNA double helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides.
00:20:22.000And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA.
00:20:26.000So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference.
00:20:31.000And if it's in these certain like protein coding regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical attributes, like, you know, Because you're only really looking at that 0.4% difference, right?
00:20:53.000It's still a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that.
00:20:55.000And 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?
00:21:02.000Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
00:21:05.000Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size?
00:21:11.000They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants.
00:21:14.000So there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made.
00:21:23.000And so there were 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different ways, and some of them were larger.
00:21:29.000But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing, that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of an Asian elephant.
00:21:39.000But to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes.
00:21:42.000We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well.
00:21:48.000And 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?
00:22:53.000And 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.
00:23:00.000We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.
00:23:04.000So we look for the mouse equivalent, right?
00:23:06.000So we look for, like, all of us have similar genes.
00:23:09.000And 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...
00:23:22.000Wow. 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.
00:23:51.000And that's really important and really hard.
00:24:18.000you see very fresh mammoths, like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakuts and other places in northern Siberia that they actually have pretty well-preserved mammoths.
00:24:26.000They actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur.
00:24:41.000And then there's a meme account for the guy that did the, like the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China.
00:24:52.000Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on X that these are a bioweapon.
00:25:00.000So the weirdness of the woolly mouse went crazy viral.
00:25:04.000What 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.
00:25:11.000Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live.
00:25:15.000From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations.
00:25:21.000We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time.
00:25:25.000All 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.
00:25:46.000So we try to spend a lot of time on that because we're certified by American Humane Society.
00:25:51.000It's the oldest humane organization in the world.
00:25:54.000And if you've seen the film, it's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film.
00:26:22.000Museums actually are now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice?
00:26:27.000They're like, it'll drive so much value.
00:26:29.000It'll teach people about genetics and whatnot.
00:26:31.000So, you know, it's not our business model to sell our animals or to sell, you know, wooly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy.
00:26:39.000Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone, even at a zoo, who decides, I want more of these?
00:26:47.000Yeah, 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.
00:26:58.000I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.
00:27:16.000But if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live a couple years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice that live in a small little cage and all on top of each other.
00:27:28.000They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them.
00:30:50.000And when Chairman Fox was walking me through their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf.
00:30:59.000And he said, you know, that's the great wolf.
00:31:02.000And 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.
00:31:16.000And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing.
00:31:24.000And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up.
00:31:27.000I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster.
00:31:30.000You know, it's the That's only endemic to America.
00:31:48.000When you think of like the American West, right?
00:31:50.000You 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.
00:31:57.000The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons like...
00:32:01.000We were like, we have to do something about this.
00:32:04.000And so we put that kind of on the list.
00:32:06.000And then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years and teachers and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths.
00:32:42.000Maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species, because direwolves were only found in the U.S., in North America, but predominantly in the United States, coastal United States.
00:32:52.000And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the direwolf, also help wolf conservation and bring people from sci-fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation, we thought it was a cool idea.
00:33:09.000But we had no idea if we could pull it off.
00:33:12.000Is there dead direwolves that were trapped in permafrost?
00:33:17.000No. Most of the direwolf skulls out there, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tarpret.
00:33:22.000So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall.
00:33:25.000But because of heat and acidification, there isn't anything that's protected.
00:33:30.000Like there's nothing you can get from that.
00:33:31.000But 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.
00:33:41.000Right. And in that tooth, they actually found a they actually got point one five X or coverage of the genome.
00:33:49.000So they got about 15 percent of the genome.
00:34:08.000So we built, part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems that are 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.
00:34:28.000So you have this tooth, you have 1.5 Yeah, 0.5, so 15% of the genome.
00:34:34.000And so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, could you resample the tooth?
00:34:39.000And she's like, it's like, you know, half an inch long.
00:34:42.000She's like, it's destructive sampling, like it's going to ruin it.
00:34:44.000I was like, well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible?
00:34:49.000So we lucked out, and that tooth's 13,000 years old.
00:34:52.000The skull itself is 72, 73,000 years old.
00:36:10.000They'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.
00:36:46.000So my question, if I was going to grill you, if I was a reporter, it would be like, what right do you have to invade the natural process of nature and to inject your curiosity and your ability to create?
00:37:00.000I 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.
00:37:12.000In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right?
00:37:18.000Every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we...
00:37:22.000We are, you know, playing God on some level, right?
00:37:25.000Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.
00:37:30.000Now, the good news is, is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be.
00:37:38.000And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand, you know, one of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back into Yellowstone.
00:37:51.000Right. And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed.
00:38:34.000I 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.
00:39:34.000And he didn't know it was going to happen before it happened.
00:39:37.000And all the people around there are ranchers.
00:39:39.000Yeah. So already, these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said, killed over a dozen cows and calves.
00:39:47.000So the problem is, they've killed elk as well.
00:39:49.000In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground that the wolves had killed.
00:39:55.000I'm not a big fan of people getting to vote on whether or not you should do something with wildlife.
00:40:00.000I'm a big fan on having real wildlife biologists assess situations.
00:40:06.000And in the case of Colorado, Colorado obviously borders Wyoming, and Wyoming has wolves.
00:40:11.000Wolves were making their way into Colorado already, and they are protected.
00:40:16.000The problem with reintroducing them is you're essentially asking a wolf that doesn't know the territory to start killing things in that territory.
00:40:24.000At an imaginary border, it doesn't exist.
00:40:27.000They go hundreds and hundreds of miles.
00:40:28.000The idea that you're doing this and you're doing this where there's ranches is crazy.
00:40:34.000And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife.
00:40:42.000So they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they...
00:41:43.000I 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.
00:41:52.000We have to understand that some of these areas not are lost, but have already been changed for a different reason.
00:41:59.000Yes, and they've achieved homeostasis.
00:42:02.000Homeostasis. They've achieved a balance.
00:42:04.000Yeah. Which is the big issue with Colorado right now.
00:42:08.000It's going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce an animal that used to be there and is no longer there.
00:42:28.000So 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.
00:43:09.000And 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.
00:43:23.000Because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.
00:43:25.000But 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.
00:43:36.000And when the stats go crazy, then you're going to start looking to the animals that are the Exactly. The problem is people just have these ideas like wolves are beautiful.
00:44:00.000Yeah, and if it doesn't affect your livelihood, if it doesn't affect the risk to your animals or your family, yeah, you have to be mindful of that.
00:44:06.000There'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.
00:44:12.000His husband, apparently, is the one who really wanted it to happen.
00:44:15.000And, you know, you have a mandate, so you have to get wolves out by a certain time.
00:44:20.000And when you're doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill livestock, so you're like, fuck it.
00:45:46.000He physically, emotionally got chills and started crying.
00:45:49.000and 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 um 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 uh animal care when you say checkup you don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?
00:47:56.000We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf.
00:47:58.000We 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 dryness kind of cooling period.
00:48:25.000They probably weren't as fast based on kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be.
00:48:29.000But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium and whatnot.
00:48:34.000And we assumed that they're – and we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool, that they were white because there was like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they were red so they get their paper.
00:48:46.000Doesn't it make sense for natural selection?
00:48:48.000Yeah. They're an Arctic hunting animal.
00:48:50.000Yeah. And they have this beautiful – we didn't know this.
00:48:52.000They have this beautiful like mane-like quality to them.
00:48:54.000And when they're babies, you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears.
00:51:26.000We 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.
00:51:52.000We looked at what genes made really a dire wolf a dire wolf, like what was separated.
00:51:57.000And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 73,000-year-old skull, so we could actually understand the genetic distance.
00:52:05.000With that much genetic distance between them, we could actually understand what truly was fixed and conserved in the dire wolf genome and what wasn't just population genomics.
00:52:15.000If you and I are 50,000 years apart, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period.
00:52:21.000But if we can then really say, okay, what made Ben and what made Joe Joe?
00:52:48.000It's in the northern United States where we don't say where it is.
00:52:50.000But 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.
00:54:16.000Of the 2,000 acres, we have a subsection of it that's about 6.5 acres where we have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter.
00:54:23.000We 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 videos of them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly more contained area.
00:54:57.000And I mean, don't get me wrong, 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?
00:55:14.000But 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.
00:55:57.000Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right?
00:56:00.000Because you see different, which also tracks to the theory.
00:56:04.000So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but there was also a massive glacial lake and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied that then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns.
00:56:21.000So you went from a period in that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of...
00:56:30.000Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was brought to...
00:56:35.000His 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.
00:57:01.000He was looking at this enormous gorge and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed.
00:57:08.000And then he started noticing that there's...
00:57:11.000These huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere, that were just moved by this immense amount of water.
00:57:17.000And 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.
00:57:50.000He'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.
00:57:58.000So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of what is the 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?
00:58:12.000I'm not a scientist, and I don't come from academia.
00:58:15.000I'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?
00:58:21.000And what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non-academic, I'm sure I'll get...
00:58:28.000I'm crucified for this, but I don't read the comments.
01:00:06.000You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me.
01:00:10.000If I submit a paper, and we totally agree with you and we'll help you, but if 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.
01:00:19.000So it's a complete scam of a system, right?
01:00:22.000And 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.
01:00:29.000So we went through this whole philosophical perspective of all these things that people threw at us.
01:01:32.000But also academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right?
01:01:36.000So 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.
01:01:42.000Whereas in academia, you're only incentivized to get 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.
01:02:01.000Like, it's not just as simple as let's follow data.
01:02:05.000It's all got to be attached to this very left-leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects, ideology.
01:02:13.000And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true.
01:02:19.000You should just follow the scientific method.
01:02:20.000I'm not a scientist, but we should just...
01:02:28.000Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data.
01:02:30.000You know, I don't want to get into this, but if you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man can be a woman.
01:02:43.000Which is fine in terms of 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.
01:02:56.000You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.
01:03:06.000We separate philosophical perspectives from science.
01:03:09.000One 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 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 ones, right?
01:04:36.000Gray wolves or the precursor to gray wolves, right?
01:04:39.000So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group.
01:04:45.000And 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.
01:04:52.000And 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?
01:04:59.000So 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?
01:05:05.000And 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.
01:05:13.000And 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.
01:05:31.000And is this a 100% dire wolf, or is this a new thing?
01:05:36.000So this goes into the philosophical thing.
01:05:38.000So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically, the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species.
01:05:44.000So you've got certain people that'll say, well, if a species is dictated by something that can't breed, that's literally a definition.
01:05:51.000Like, if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species.
01:05:54.000Then 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.
01:06:02.000But then you have other paleontologists who just hate us.
01:06:04.000And they do it based solely on tooth morphology, because they argue that it's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time.
01:06:10.000paleontologist recently that hates us.
01:06:12.000I said, if I made a mammoth that was giant with 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.
01:06:32.000Because, why does anyone, you know, anytime you do anything in this world now that's like moderately bold or polarizing, people give you pushback.
01:07:09.000realms. Well, it's, it's, it's, there's philosophical and religious.
01:07:13.000And so like back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species, but they may produce five offspring all the time.
01:07:20.000And a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a cold, aquatic adapted, cold adapted bear.
01:07:26.000Right. And so I always ask people that they, their, their offspring are, they.
01:07:51.000But 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.
01:08:58.000If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functionality extinction.
01:09:02.000If 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.
01:09:11.000So this starts the whole religious Where it's funny because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don't like what you're doing, that's what they go to.
01:10:31.000Right. 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?
01:10:46.000How 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?
01:11:52.000You're going to die when you hear what I went through on this.
01:11:55.000So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free, right?
01:12:03.000Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals.
01:12:41.000So they're only recognized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife there.
01:12:46.000But 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.
01:12:59.000So she started darting them, taking samples.
01:13:01.000And what she found is they actually have more, quote unquote, red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina.
01:13:10.000And is it part of the problem they're inbreeding with coyotes?
01:13:12.000Yeah, but they've all been like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes.
01:13:16.000All the red wolves have some coyote in them.
01:14:13.000And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right?
01:14:19.000Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal.
01:14:25.000You have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.
01:14:28.000It's actually a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning.
01:14:32.000Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot.
01:14:37.000And so it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right?
01:14:41.000And so we found a way, 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, anesthetize the animal.
01:14:56.000We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using this thing.
01:15:02.000So I went out to Washington with my team.
01:15:05.000I showed them Hope as a baby in little videos of – and you may have videos of Hope, Jamie.
01:15:12.000I showed them videos of Hope, and I said, hey, you know, there's only a handful of – we made these – We made these from three different genetic lines.
01:15:25.000So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves than what's alive in the population.
01:15:31.000And we said we'd like for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana.
01:15:37.000And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead?
01:16:26.000I 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.
01:16:38.000And 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.
01:16:56.000Only about 3% ever come off, and we're really good at putting them on, and we celebrate putting them on.
01:17:00.000So we have to do something about this, and if you're saying that we could productionize He's like, why wouldn't we do this?
01:17:18.000Wiped out the previous folks and they said that we need, you know, five years and $20 million.
01:17:23.000They were going to spend it internally.
01:17:24.000They weren't going to ask us to do the feasibility.
01:17:25.000They were going to spend it internally on this.
01:17:28.000And we're like, we'll just do it for free.
01:17:30.000And 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.
01:17:39.000So when will you start reintroducing these soulless red wolves from hell?
01:25:06.000You have them just like playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying.
01:25:09.000Yeah, you were saying the Younger Gyrus is really interesting.
01:25:11.000It'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.
01:25:21.000I would love to have seen what it looked like.
01:25:27.000We kind of have a sense of what, because of safaris and videos, we know what it looks like when lions are interacting with wildebeests in Africa.
01:25:36.000What did it look like in Kansas 15,000 years ago?
01:26:20.000Yes. The American cheetah is, you know, we actually have a full genome of it.
01:26:23.000And 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.
01:27:58.000We've already killed everything in the ocean, unfortunately.
01:27:59.000So one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal.
01:28:04.000Because 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.
01:28:25.000You could then reintroduce them with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts, right?
01:28:30.000And 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.
01:28:38.000We are really just kind of focused on kind of the core science that supports their initiatives.
01:28:42.000But if we are successful with our artificial wombs and we are quite – I would not be surprised if eventually you see a...
01:29:05.000No, 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...
01:29:15.000People having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people freezing their embryos, all of that's massively on the increase.
01:29:27.000It's all going up to the right, right?
01:29:28.000And we also know that globally, sperm and fertility and others is going down to the right, right?
01:29:35.000So it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general.
01:29:39.000And so I think though, especially, and then we also have And, uh...
01:32:12.000If Colossal gets ultimate success, I'd say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.
01:32:18.000that we've revitalized these mosaic ecosystems that including your picture of what did the Arctic look like back in the day, like how do we have that?
01:32:28.000'Cause 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 It can add more biodiversity.
01:32:44.000It can actually keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter so it sequesters more carbon.
01:32:50.000So I think this idea of nature-based and living with nature in a ecological...
01:32:56.000In an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at.
01:33:00.000And I hope that, you know, Colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the endangered species list.
01:33:07.000So what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoths specifically in this study that showed that it would help.
01:33:12.000But they've already done it with like musk ox, horses, and a few other species up there.
01:33:19.000They've been doing it for over 20 years.
01:33:21.000And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia.
01:33:29.000Yeah, that was something that Sergey and Nikita Zimov wanted to do.
01:33:36.000How long before some Russian oligarch hunts a mammoth?
01:33:39.000Yeah, I mean, look, given the geopolit, you know, we see, going back to your wolf example, we see boundaries and geopolitical lines, right?
01:33:50.000And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoths in Siberia for many Um... But you think you will rewild a mammoth.
01:33:58.000Yeah, I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at colossal.com forward slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around, like, everyone from academia to private landowners to indigenous people groups, governments, to understand, like, we don't have a thylacine.
01:34:19.000I think we'll have a thylacine in the next eight years.
01:34:22.000I think based on where we are, current course and speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a fat-tailed dunart, which is like a mouse-sized marsupial, and a wolf in this, right?
01:34:33.000But we actually, if you just kind of scroll through into the people...
01:34:56.000But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, and just, like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines.
01:35:07.000We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania.
01:36:55.000So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land.
01:37:03.000So you have to work with these kind of big working groups.
01:37:04.000We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.
01:37:09.000And this, you know, the old school like Looney Tunes, like Wile E. Coyote where he's like, he like goes through a wall and there's like a hole or the Kool-Aid man, right?
01:37:16.000Well, 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.
01:37:25.000And we put them out near camera traps in central Tasmania.
01:37:28.000And 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.
01:37:39.000They'll see a cat and they'll kind of look at it when they see it.
01:37:41.000And remember, to your point, there's hundreds For them, it's multiple generations, right?
01:37:45.000Because these animals don't live hundreds of years.
01:37:47.000And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze and they absolutely freak out.
01:39:50.000If 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, there's not that much.
01:40:02.000When you see something like the one that happened in Canada where the plane flipped upside down too, you can't get that one out of your head.
01:42:12.000Unfortunately. 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.
01:43:03.000I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in Vegas.
01:43:06.000Saw everyone in the world, right, that's there, because it's stupid big.
01:43:09.000A 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 at my last company.
01:43:17.000And I was with my number two at the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer.
01:43:58.000You know, I've kind of tried to cut out some exercise regularly.
01:44:02.000And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light.
01:44:55.000We're so concerned about our day-to-day existence that we lose track of this big picture.
01:45:01.000Yeah, 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 can fix it.
01:45:31.000That'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.
01:45:39.000Yeah, and I'm not, like, I'm on the journey.
01:45:54.000It's just all if you go to your doctor, like I do quarterly blood work, but then I also then do this, the function test, which is just a massively all encompassing type of blood.
01:46:18.000And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients.
01:46:24.000You know, I buy, and you can actually taste a difference, right?
01:46:27.000If you go to a store and get a steak or chicken, even if it's like free range and all that shit, it tastes great.
01:46:35.000It tastes better than something that you buy that's terrible at a store.
01:46:38.000But when you order from some of these true 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.
01:46:52.000You can taste the difference in the nutrient density.
01:49:40.000But when I was visiting there a few years back, they have like a raptor, and one side of the raptor is feathered, and the other side is like Jurassic Park, like scaly.
01:49:51.000And, you know, you look at it and you go, oh.
01:49:54.000It's just like, oh, that's a fucking...
01:53:56.000There 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.
01:54:05.000Yeah. A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid.
01:55:26.000And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don't exist anymore.
01:55:29.000Yeah. So the cheetahs died off in the Younger Dryas Impact Theater or whatever happened, but these pronghorn antelopes remain, and they are...
01:55:38.000There's nothing like them in terms of speed.
01:55:42.000Like, it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone.
01:56:50.000To your point, when you travel and you go to these different places where you have that are truly more remote, and I'm not just talking about Yellowstone, but when you said going to Kruger National Park or looking at some of these places in Africa, when you go to central Tasmania, it's almost like a weird Disney movie.
01:57:07.000Like, at dusk, you've got, like, echidnas running around, and you've got wallabies jumping through.
01:57:13.000And they all just come through, and you're like...
01:57:15.000It's like that scene in, like, Ace Ventura, right?
01:57:18.000Where he sings, and, like, everything fucking comes to him.
01:59:01.000And 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...
02:00:43.000Wow. But they literally scratch and bite each other, and then they...
02:00:49.000It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of.
02:00:51.000So then it latches onto the next phase.
02:00:54.000Through 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 off by predators first.
02:01:06.000Right. And so there's a big movement within Tasmania and southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator, being the thylacine, it would eat.
02:03:03.000If you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats, outside of the cats that they actually own.
02:03:07.000They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials.
02:03:10.000They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats.
02:03:37.000One of the projects that we're working on with the thiocene, because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation, is have you ever seen a northern coal?
02:04:33.000Actually, I think this is part of our work.
02:04:36.000What 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.
02:05:29.000So one letter, a one-letter change, conferred, had no other, you know, deterioration, had no other effects that were negative.
02:05:35.000And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane-toed.
02:05:41.000Wow. So because, you know, quolls are endangered and we don't want to work an endangered species first, we want to start with a more model species.
02:05:48.000We worked in the fat-tailed dunnart, which is our model species for the thylacine, and we engineered dunnarts and dunnart cells and dunnarts that can eat cane-toed tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them.
02:06:04.000And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to, we'd like to engineer in this one Because if quolls would have most likely, through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put the quoll next to the kanto, they would have co-evolved together.
02:06:21.000They probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature.
02:06:26.000Wow. And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation.
02:06:33.000And so then you could like make these super quolls that eat the cane toads.
02:06:37.000And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this, and help the population of the quolls, 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.
02:06:49.000I hope you don't have to bring in big toads to eat the quolls.
02:07:46.000Imagine 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.
02:08:49.000I have a friend, his name is Jim Shockey, he's a professional hunter, and he was actually hired to go into Africa and hunt So what they had done was...
02:09:13.000They'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.
02:09:22.000Because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up.
02:09:27.000These fucking crocodiles went around the fence.
02:09:30.000They walked around the fence and slid into the water.
02:09:33.000So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to.
02:09:39.000And it's weird how some of 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.
02:09:49.000So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know.
02:09:52.000There'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.
02:10:00.000So there's this thing called Petto's Paradox where based on age and body weight both blue whales and Elephants get cancer a fraction of what they probably should based on how old they get and what their body size is.
02:10:13.000And they actually, that actually makes our lives very difficult.
02:10:16.000And that's why we had to create stem cells for elephants.
02:10:19.000Because anytime we try to, we had to figure out how to regulate P53.
02:10:22.000Because anytime you go to edit that one cell, it just says, looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell.
02:11:47.000You can't explain to people what they did.
02:11:49.000They said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is...
02:11:52.000Yeah. They actually were engineering babies and editing their embryos to confer a resistance to HIV.
02:12:02.000Now, still to this day, so they were cloning them and then they were genetically modifying them.
02:12:08.000And 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.
02:12:15.000So anything that could be passed on to the next generation, right?
02:12:19.000So things, so if you If you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, you know, from a germline, so all your cells in your body are somatic cells, except for your, like, agrosperm, those are germ cells.
02:12:31.000So anything that could be affected into the germline so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be, like, you know, umbrella corporation type moment, right?
02:13:48.000They 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.
02:15:19.000Well, there's been a recent publication out of Japan where they're allowing Japanese scientists to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes.
02:15:54.000So 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.
02:16:03.000I think one of the projects that's the furthest along is around sickle cell anemia.
02:16:28.000It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage.
02:16:30.000Could 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?
02:16:57.000If I was from another planet, I'd think you're different species.
02:16:59.000Yeah, they invited me to go 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.
02:17:06.000That's exactly what's never going to happen.
02:17:08.000And I just made up an excuse of why I couldn't go because they We want to go surfing.
02:18:05.000That's playing God to another level, right?
02:18:06.000And that's this eugenics world where we know, right?
02:18:09.000I 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 along the pregnancy, right?
02:18:21.000And when they put the embryo in, they look at the morphological grade.
02:18:25.000There'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.
02:18:31.000And they actually take cells from the developing neuro on the very outer derm, right, on this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development.
02:18:39.000They culture those cells, and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right?
02:18:45.000And so not selecting, they don't let you just select for like eye color or height or anything.
02:18:49.000But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue or is it compatible with life, which is what most people test for?
02:18:56.000You can now, you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things?
02:19:03.000Right. So, like, you know, if diabetes or cancer and type of disease.
02:19:06.000Wow. And I mean, we did that. We did that because I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation which affects the Titan gene and I create a truncated protein.
02:19:32.000So I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID that was a lab leak that attacked my heart.
02:19:41.000Wow. And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on.
02:19:48.000Like, you know, Two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.
02:19:54.000So you understand the technology better than most.
02:19:57.000Conceivably, what could be done that would, in the future, allow people to change their very shape and literally change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything?
02:20:12.000You know, neuro-enhancers, and I think, and this is the biological perspective, this is not even the 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.
02:20:26.000But I think it starts with things like healthspan, where it's like the very vain stuff.
02:20:32.000So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that, eye color, I think all of that is changeable.
02:21:33.000So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles, but right now the technology exists.
02:21:40.000Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of...
02:21:43.000For 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.
02:22:00.000You've seen anything that Bob Nelson's done.
02:22:03.000Bob started Arch Ventures, and he's arguably the number one biotech in the world, and he's working on epigenetic resets, so resetting your clocks at a cellular level.
02:23:36.000He 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.
02:26:07.000I'm new to this whole father thing, but I think it's important that they understand there's real things and there's consequences to decisions and we're going to age and we've got a limited time.
02:26:19.000I think that in his lifetime it will be massively accelerated.
02:26:24.000That is one of the things, though, I think having a kid...
02:26:27.000You 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.
02:26:37.000Because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right?
02:26:39.000So like on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or whatever, or an experiment doesn't work or whatever bad happens, and you look at this pile of kids.
02:26:51.000And teachers, like, we have this, there's a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter and literally like 40 pictures of mammoths.
02:27:00.000And in that letter she goes, I think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good.
02:27:19.000We can use technologies for conservation for good.
02:27:22.000We can help ecosystem with bringing back extinct species, but I think that we can also inspire the next generation.
02:27:41.000But he had a quote about I might have saved it.
02:27:44.000He had a quote about the just Getting all the dire information of the world sent to you all the time, which at his time back then, that was very new.
02:28:08.000And 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.
02:28:19.000I was like, so what happens if it's like, so if there's someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to get the dog's perspective.
02:29:07.000And at least you're transparent about it.
02:29:09.000At least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans.
02:29:14.000Yeah, and they train them with DNA to only eat Americans.
02:29:17.000But that's probably going to happen too.
02:29:20.000We'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.
02:29:30.000Yeah, synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute, AI, Yes.
02:30:48.000We can't even think about what's tomorrow.
02:30:50.000We spun out a company from Colossal called Breaking last year, and this incredible group at the Wiesb Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to.
02:31:04.000And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical – that's why I named it breaking.
02:31:11.000It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing.
02:31:41.000So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that, like, 10 years ago, if someone said, we can give you a magic microbe that 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 in there and it won't even touch it, you know, that would have sounded like science fiction.
02:32:06.000So. And we're talking about not just your water bottle, but you're also talking about things that are industrial defense plastics that are radiation hardened and whatnot for space.
02:32:17.000We're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.
02:32:19.000What about those stupid fucking windmills?
02:32:22.000That they have to change every few years.
02:32:54.000Wow. So these microbes would be able to break that down.
02:32:56.000Yeah. I mean, we haven't tested on that specific, but like one of the biggest ones that we tested on was nylon, just because there's so much, if you look at like what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets.
02:33:10.000So we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases.
02:33:12.000And then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others.
02:33:14.000So if we get to the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right?
02:33:20.000Because all that's passing through right now, like in our drinking water and everything.
02:33:23.000That's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like the three-layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water.
02:33:29.000You've got to do, Gary, you got me in new water.
02:33:34.000But 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...
02:33:42.000So when you're doing this, is this something that you could release, like, in the ocean itself?
02:33:46.000Or would you have to worry then about the effect, like, bringing the house cats to Australia?
02:34:19.000But 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 quolls, right?
02:34:31.000But the process of using it outside of contained systems like a bioreactor has to be done Very thoughtfully and measured, just like rewilding, right?
02:34:42.000Like, this is where sometimes people get confused about, like, the yells and stuff.
02:34:45.000They didn't just open the gate and throw some wolves in there.
02:34:47.000I mean, it sounds like they did more of that in Colorado.
02:34:49.000But there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through, right?
02:34:54.000Because there's intended consequences, which you get excited about, but then there's a shit ton of unintended consequences if you're not careful.
02:35:01.000Yeah. Synthetic biology is that it's an AI-level thing that we need to be worried about.
02:35:07.000And how many different nations are working on this stuff?
02:35:11.000So I think that the U.S. is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective.
02:35:17.000It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and biobanking, because they're biobanking.
02:35:22.000We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here.
02:35:32.000China 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.
02:36:16.000100%. 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 they're dying.
02:37:20.000You 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.
02:38:04.000And you said it best when you brought up quantum.
02:38:06.000You know, quantum's only two years away every two years, I hear.
02:38:09.000But eventually when it works and works at scale and you have that coupled with where some of these companies like X.ai and others are taking it, I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff.
02:38:24.000And look, it will be in nefarious hands.
02:38:49.000People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of a certain subset of race, right?
02:38:59.000And they were doing bad things with facial recognition.
02:39:02.000Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said, Not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says, we will not at all support any technology.
02:39:17.000We're going to ban investing in facial recognition technology.
02:39:21.000Because we now know there's things like deepfakes and all this stuff, but it's like, that's setting American innovation back because someone's doing something bad with it, right?
02:39:29.000That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns.
02:40:09.000What is going on in other countries, or is this a tightly guarded secret?
02:40:15.000Obviously, you have people in your company as well, and I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing.
02:40:25.000You must be being studied by other countries.
02:40:29.000Yeah, we definitely have investment by In-Q-Tel, so I'm sure that makes us more of a target.
02:40:36.000Yeah. So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and ICE.
02:40:41.000When you think about it a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, when you scale this out, there's no limit to what could be done with life.
02:41:20.000Yeah, 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 Con and folks in, if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, There's a lot of weird, similar...
02:41:50.000You can't look at like, you know, the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seem to now, there's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced.
02:42:00.000It's like, you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more.
02:42:04.000Especially the stuff around, if you look at Mayans and then you look at, you know, stuff in the Middle East and how it looks exactly the same.
02:42:39.000Between. You know, you can't see, and you see it, and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw.
02:42:44.000Oh, 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.
02:42:49.000You can't sit there and say, well, that's weird.
02:42:52.000If 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.
02:43:27.000But I don't know where, but you know, you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chichen Itza.
02:43:32.000Well, there's, in the jungles there on the Yucatan Peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids.
02:43:39.000But the carvings that they have on Chichen Itza and the carvings they have there, they're actually, the older ones have more precise carvings.
02:43:56.000Yeah. I mean, I'm talking to you about hardcore genetic science, but then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, we don't know a lot.
02:44:07.000And there's no way you can know a lot.
02:44:09.000And any time you suggest something new, you get shit for it.
02:44:12.000Yeah, you get a rash of shit, and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Graham Hancock.
02:44:17.000Yeah. I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if they're, you know, kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real.
02:44:32.000Yeah. 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.
02:45:28.000They know that it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.
02:45:33.000And there hasn't been large-scale exploration.
02:45:39.000I do think that the Younger Dry stuff is also a combination of, I think generally speaking, if you break down the Younger Dry period into that rapid cooling, I think...
02:45:53.000The vast majority of people say some of it, some of the destruction or some of the destruction around Megafon was anthropologic, which I'll give it some percentage.
02:46:01.000Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.
02:46:05.000Anthropologic meaning human beings killed them.
02:46:07.000Yes, humans had some impact on it, right?
02:46:10.000I think that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that was a – could have been a global-level flood with sea rising – with rushing waters and sea rising –
02:46:25.000No, that's, iridium is actually different.
02:46:45.000Iridium 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 that's what yes Yeah, that's the stuff from the Trinity explosion.
02:47:14.00010, 20 years ago, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian who can't talk to you ever again.
02:50:50.000That 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.
02:51:00.000What Hal Puthoff believes is that there's some sort of distortion around these things that's allowing them to be transmedium, to go through the ocean.
02:51:21.000It gets boring because there's no real resolution.
02:51:23.000You could lose your mind, but I had dinner with Jacques Vallée and Hal Puthoff once and a couple other gentlemen, and they were explaining the state of the technology.
02:52:26.000But imagine doing that to primitive hominids.
02:52:30.000Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is, and you're a million years more advanced than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australopithecus, I told you one edit makes 5,000.
02:52:53.000you know, confers 5,000 resistance to neurotoxins.
02:52:57.000So it's like a couple little edits here does a lot.
02:52:59.000And then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from the 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 with less less reliant on muscle.
02:53:11.000Yeah, and our heads are getting bigger.
02:54:53.000I 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 the ancient flood than anyone in the world.
02:56:42.000Oh, if people want to find more information, find more about you, Colossal.com We're Colossal.com and it is Colossal on YouTube and we're at Colossal on X. So fucking cool.
02:56:55.000Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow, I can't wait to see that one day.