The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:00:02.000 Check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:05.000 Train by day.

00:00:06.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:00:08.000 All day.

00:00:12.000 What's up, Ben?

00:00:13.000 Hey, thanks so much for having me.

00:00:15.000 My pleasure.

00:00:15.000 Very nice to meet you, man.

00:00:17.000 So, why don't you, instead of me, why don't you explain to people what you do?

00:00:22.000 So, I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences.

00:00:27.000 We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.

00:00:31.000 Yeah, and that is a wild thing.

00:00:34.000 I mean, this is essentially, literally wild.

00:00:37.000 This is essentially real-life Jurassic Park.

00:00:41.000 Yeah, we get the Jurassic Park occasionally.

00:00:43.000 Believe it or not, we get that.

00:00:45.000 Of course.

00:00:46.000 I gotta drop my hydrogen tablet in here.

00:00:48.000 Oh, you do those?

00:00:48.000 The Gary Brekker ones, right?

00:00:49.000 Those are great.

00:00:50.000 Yeah, I love those.

00:00:52.000 I just didn't want you to think we were going a different direction.

00:00:55.000 How did you...

00:00:58.000 So I kind of fell into it.

00:01:00.000 I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park.

00:01:03.000 I'm super stoked.

00:01:04.000 I love animals.

00:01:05.000 I want to go work on this.

00:01:06.000 I'm just a weirdly curious person.

00:01:08.000 So there's this guy named George Church.

00:01:11.000 If you don't know George, you should look him up.

00:01:12.000 He's the father of synthetic biologies at Harvard University.

00:01:15.000 He's six foot seven with narcolepsy.

00:01:18.000 He's just the best, right?

00:01:19.000 So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just, he's the absolute best.

00:01:23.000 He's a genius.

00:01:24.000 And I thought, my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right?

00:01:29.000 And so I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could...

00:01:34.000 And that we could use AI and compute to make it even better.

00:01:37.000 Like, how do we do directed evolution and how that can apply to like crops and animals and all kinds of stuff?

00:01:42.000 So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions.

00:01:45.000 He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius.

00:01:48.000 And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab.

00:01:51.000 In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things.

00:01:56.000 I was like, wait, wait, what?

00:01:57.000 And I was like, if you had one project, is it this mammoth project?

00:02:00.000 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.

00:02:12.000 I literally thought that, like, the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke.

00:02:17.000 Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line.

00:02:21.000 Whether 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.

00:02:31.000 So I called him back the next day.

00:02:32.000 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.

00:02:39.000 So how do you decide what to start with?

00:02:41.000 So we started with the mammoth first, right?

00:02:44.000 Because George had been working on it for eight years.

00:02:47.000 We needed his core technologies.

00:02:49.000 We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.

00:02:52.000 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.

00:03:01.000 And so that was an easy place to start.

00:03:04.000 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.

00:03:13.000 It's awesome.

00:03:15.000 The best should appear with the dodo.

00:03:17.000 Everyone just started calling us, and then we just started expanding, you know, our entire set.

00:03:21.000 So how does one do this?

00:03:24.000 It's like, let's... 0.92

00:03:25.000 Before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing.

00:03:29.000 Before that, how does one do this? 0.90

00:03:31.000 Like, from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth.

00:03:38.000 Yeah, let me walk through the whole process.

00:03:40.000 So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. 0.74

00:03:45.000 So the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate.

00:03:50.000 So we definitely need to find a lot of samples.

00:03:53.000 So we actually have about...

00:03:54.000 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.

00:04:01.000 But it's also fragmented.

00:04:02.000 It's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is and someone's stolen part of the puzzle.

00:04:07.000 And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there.

00:04:11.000 So there's all kinds of problems with that.

00:04:13.000 So this is really an AI and compute problem.

00:04:15.000 It's not as much a human problem.

00:04:17.000 So you have to get a lot of samples first.

00:04:19.000 And 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?

00:04:27.000 So Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths.

00:04:30.000 They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.

00:04:35.000 Really? Yeah, which always blows people's mind.

00:04:37.000 That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building pyramids.

00:04:41.000 Like literally like humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed.

00:04:46.000 And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur.

00:04:55.000 How did they go extinct?

00:04:55.000 So the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago.

00:04:59.000 Really? On Wrangell Island.

00:05:00.000 Yeah. Wow.

00:05:02.000 So they've been around for a long time.

00:05:03.000 4,000 years ago?

00:05:04.000 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.

00:05:11.000 But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed.

00:05:17.000 They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.

00:05:22.000 Wow. And where's Wrangell Island?

00:05:24.000 It's northeast of Siberia.

00:05:26.000 Whoa. And they just...

00:05:30.000 Was it a small island?

00:05:31.000 They just ran out of resources there?

00:05:32.000 Like, what happened?

00:05:33.000 Well, there's a couple different theories, right?

00:05:35.000 One 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.

00:05:46.000 How large is Wrangel Island?

00:05:47.000 I'm not quite sure.

00:05:49.000 Can you give me a photo again, Jamie?

00:05:51.000 Okay. 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.

00:06:03.000 Those were kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today.

00:06:07.000 And they died out 4,000 years ago.

00:06:09.000 It's fairly small.

00:06:10.000 There is actually another working hypothesis that they actually ran out of water.

00:06:15.000 They ran out of access to fresh water on the island.

00:06:17.000 Oh, wow.

00:06:18.000 So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.

00:06:22.000 Wow. 4,000 years is so recent.

00:06:25.000 I know.

00:06:25.000 It's crazy recent, right?

00:06:26.000 Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus an African elephant?

00:06:33.000 And they're actually mammoths because there's, you know, Mammoths themselves, yeah.

00:06:41.000 Mammoths themselves are closely related to the Asian elephant.

00:06:43.000 Which is on the left?

00:06:44.000 Yeah, which is on the left.

00:06:45.000 So they have that dome cranium. 0.95

00:06:47.000 They have the small ears.

00:06:48.000 They have a little bit of a hump structure.

00:06:50.000 You know, mammoths, because they have these massive, massive tusks, right?

00:06:54.000 And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world.

00:06:58.000 They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly.

00:07:01.000 They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that.

00:07:07.000 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.

00:07:18.000 Wow. So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand?

00:07:22.000 Yes. And Thailand and then parts of, different parts of India and the Indian subcontinent.

00:07:28.000 I actually rode one of those once with my family.

00:07:31.000 I don't recommend it.

00:07:32.000 Did you go to one of those places that you take care of them?

00:07:35.000 You have to get a relationship with them.

00:07:37.000 So you feed them sugar cane and you wash them.

00:07:41.000 You play nice with them for a while.

00:07:43.000 A couple hours.

00:07:45.000 It was at least an hour.

00:07:46.000 You're just hanging out with them.

00:07:47.000 Petting them.

00:07:48.000 And then once they decide you're cool, they let you ride them.

00:07:52.000 But my whole family rode them.

00:07:55.000 And I was totally opposed to it.

00:07:57.000 I was like...

00:07:57.000 I'm doing it just because you guys want to do it.

00:07:59.000 I just want to feed them.

00:08:00.000 I just want to hang out with them.

00:08:02.000 It just felt weird.

00:08:03.000 My daughter fell off, I think twice.

00:08:06.000 My youngest daughter fell off once, at least.

00:08:09.000 And I was like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding it?

00:08:12.000 You know what I mean?

00:08:13.000 It's kind of a weird thing.

00:08:14.000 It's a weird thing, right?

00:08:15.000 And then afterwards you get in the water and you wash them and everything and I just kind of hung out with them.

00:08:21.000 I'd be cool.

00:08:22.000 They're very sweet.

00:08:23.000 I don't think I'd want to ride one.

00:08:24.000 I like being around them.

00:08:27.000 I think there's a video on my Instagram of it.

00:08:29.000 Yeah, there definitely is, because she was eating a log.

00:08:33.000 I was like, why are you eating a log?

00:08:36.000 It's just weird.

00:08:37.000 They're so...

00:08:39.000 Enormous, but they're really peaceful and chill.

00:08:42.000 And incredibly smart.

00:08:43.000 And they have incredible pack dynamics, right?

00:08:45.000 So they live in a herd.

00:08:47.000 They've even had all these different examples where they also adopt other animals.

00:08:50.000 I don't know if you've seen any of these videos.

00:08:52.000 Oh yeah, so here it is.

00:08:53.000 This is a few years ago in Thailand.

00:08:56.000 And this is an Asian elephant just chilling with this elephant.

00:09:03.000 Yeah, 2018.

00:09:04.000 Okay. There it is.

00:09:06.000 It was really cool.

00:09:07.000 No, it's awesome.

00:09:08.000 It's just cool to be around them.

00:09:11.000 They're just a fascinating animal.

00:09:12.000 Just the biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists.

00:09:17.000 It's enormous.

00:09:18.000 This enormous thing with this robotic pretensile arm.

00:09:22.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:09:22.000 As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you.

00:09:24.000 Yeah, they sense it, right?

00:09:26.000 I mean, we see that in nature with a lot of animals, right?

00:09:28.000 If you sense it and they don't feel like they're...

00:09:30.000 Right. Right.

00:09:35.000 Yes. Maintain some level of healthy distance.

00:09:46.000 Yeah, so let's just get right to it.

00:09:48.000 Wait, wait, do you want to finish the process?

00:09:50.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

00:09:51.000 Okay, so we have the ancient genome, so you have to collect and assemble.

00:09:55.000 Right. And that's, a lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab, but that's like some Indiana Jones shit. 0.98

00:10:02.000 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. 0.97

00:10:11.000 Yeah. It smells like death.

00:10:17.000 Have you visited John?

00:10:18.000 Yeah, I visited John.

00:10:20.000 You went to the Boneyard?

00:10:21.000 Yeah, I went to the Boneyard.

00:10:22.000 What's it like there?

00:10:22.000 It's crazy.

00:10:23.000 It's exactly what you'd expect.

00:10:25.000 I didn't know John.

00:10:26.000 So I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club.

00:10:29.000 So we take these expeditions.

00:10:30.000 We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval.

00:10:33.000 And then we're also doing some cultural studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoths.

00:10:38.000 Like, do you want mammoths back?

00:10:40.000 Is this a good idea?

00:10:40.000 Right? Because we try to be pretty inclusive.

00:10:42.000 And they're like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John.

00:10:46.000 And I was like, okay, great.

00:10:47.000 I'm excited.

00:10:48.000 So go meet him.

00:10:49.000 We pull up.

00:10:49.000 He's in a different car.

00:10:51.000 And he's like, and I think he wanted us to follow him.

00:10:53.000 He's like, get in.

00:10:54.000 I was like.

00:10:56.000 Okay. And he's a big dude.

00:10:58.000 He's enormous.

00:10:58.000 I'm not that big of a dude, right?

00:11:00.000 No, John's a giant.

00:11:01.000 Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me.

00:11:03.000 I'm a smaller dude, right? 0.92

00:11:04.000 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.

00:11:14.000 And I was like, and then there's, and he's like, just move the gun over.

00:11:16.000 So I move the gun over, and he goes, listen, and this is the first words out of his mouth to me, if I stop short, you hand me that gun.

00:11:24.000 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?

00:11:29.000 If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun.

00:11:32.000 I was like, that's awesome.

00:11:33.000 And he showed me around the...

00:11:34.000 What kind of gun was it?

00:11:35.000 It was just some type of rifle.

00:11:37.000 So it was just Grizzlies?

00:11:38.000 I assume it was for Grizzlies, yeah.

00:11:39.000 Or Bears or, you know, something large.

00:11:41.000 Yeah. But then he showed me around the Boneyard and showed me his collection and he was completely...

00:11:47.000 I mean, he didn't know us from anybody.

00:11:49.000 He just opened up...

00:11:50.000 Everything to us, right?

00:11:51.000 And he's like, let me show you all this.

00:11:53.000 He actually has a warehouse.

00:11:55.000 I don't know if he ever discloses where it is.

00:11:57.000 But he has a warehouse where he has some of the greatest specimens ever.

00:12:01.000 So, it's cool.

00:12:02.000 You should go.

00:12:02.000 It's cool.

00:12:02.000 I do want to go.

00:12:03.000 He's an amazing guy.

00:12:04.000 And he's a cool guy.

00:12:06.000 And then, you know, being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, oh, we'd love to use some of your samples.

00:12:13.000 Can we take them?

00:12:13.000 And he's like, no.

00:12:14.000 And he was very honest.

00:12:15.000 And he told us, and that's...

00:12:16.000 Before your podcast with him, we kind of learned that story, right?

00:12:20.000 That's what sucks is how some people can ruin it for everybody.

00:12:24.000 Outside of Fairbanks, it's not the easiest place to build a biocontainment level 3 lab.

00:12:31.000 But he's like, you build a lab here, you can use whatever you want.

00:12:34.000 But he's like, the bones stay here.

00:12:36.000 He's very consistent with his messaging.

00:12:39.000 Well, you know the whole deal with the Museum of Natural History, right?

00:12:43.000 I totally believe it.

00:12:45.000 Well, it's a fact now.

00:12:46.000 They found these bones in the East River exactly where they told them to drop it off.

00:12:50.000 They have step bison fragments and woolly mammoth fragments, so they know that they're there.

00:12:56.000 Yeah, and well, I mean, you've built a relationship with John. 0.96

00:12:59.000 He's just a normal, no bullshit kind of guy.

00:13:01.000 He's like, you stole this stuff, give it back. 0.86

00:13:04.000 Or he's also like, hey, if you want to come work on it, come on.

00:13:07.000 He's very collaborative.

00:13:09.000 It's also like, what do you guys have? 1.00

00:13:11.000 Like, why are you keeping that shit in a basement? 1.00

00:13:13.000 Like, what is that? 1.00

00:13:14.000 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?

00:13:22.000 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?

00:13:27.000 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.

00:13:35.000 It's got, like, little drawers and boxes, and they're like, oh, this is giant sloth poop.

00:13:41.000 And I was like, I didn't know there was giant sloth poop.

00:13:42.000 They're like, yes, and we think there's...

00:13:44.000 Well, this is like, you know, the card catalog of all dead species, but it's not on display for the public.

00:13:52.000 It's just in a basement.

00:13:53.000 And is it extensively archived?

00:13:56.000 They know where everything is?

00:13:57.000 Or is there some stuff down there that they don't know what it is?

00:13:59.000 I wouldn't say that they are the, at least any museum, I think they have a lot more than they know.

00:14:05.000 I don't see it in massive computer systems, because we ask for inventory lists.

00:14:09.000 What's the shopping list?

00:14:11.000 It's been over 100 years they've been doing this.

00:14:13.000 So people have come and gone.

00:14:14.000 They'll pull out drawers that have Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.

00:14:19.000 I mean, that's how we did the thylacine.

00:14:21.000 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 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup.

00:14:38.000 Wow. But they didn't even know they had it.

00:14:40.000 They also on the thylacine, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later, they also found a head in a bucket.

00:14:47.000 It was the mom's head.

00:14:48.000 So we actually knew, we could actually look at the genetic relation between the two.

00:14:52.000 And they actually found, they didn't know they had the head in the bucket.

00:14:55.000 They just had a head in a bucket.

00:14:56.000 They opened it up, it was marked thylacine, they opened it up, and there was a full thylacine skull in there.

00:15:01.000 There's pictures of it online and everything.

00:15:03.000 And we used that to get to a 99.9% complete genome because we also had the ancestry of the two, of the pup and mother.

00:15:11.000 Wow. Yeah.

00:15:12.000 So there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being fully utilized.

00:15:18.000 So if you have 98%, or you have 99%, what's the process of going from that?

00:15:25.000 Yeah, there's the head in the bucket.

00:15:29.000 So Andrew Pask, who leads our, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work.

00:15:35.000 And yeah, that's the head and bucket.

00:15:36.000 I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrous bones, which we'll talk about.

00:15:40.000 Do you buy into any of these sightings?

00:15:43.000 No, I did.

00:15:44.000 So Andrew Pask, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years.

00:15:47.000 He's amazing.

00:15:48.000 He's awesome.

00:15:49.000 He's been working on it like a shoestring budget, and that's part of the problem.

00:15:53.000 De-extinction.

00:15:54.000 He's put real capital into it until now.

00:15:56.000 And 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.

00:16:05.000 So 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. 0.99

00:16:10.000 You sent me more dog shit. 1.00

00:16:12.000 Thanks. You get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? 1.00

00:16:31.000 I start reading all the books on the theocene.

00:16:33.000 I get obsessive about projects.

00:16:35.000 And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now.

00:16:38.000 And so I got super deep in it.

00:16:40.000 And then I started calling Pascal.

00:16:43.000 I was like, hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos.

00:16:45.000 And I kind of think they're still there.

00:16:46.000 And Pascal's like, no.

00:16:47.000 No. Stop it.

00:16:48.000 Don't go down that rabbit hole.

00:16:50.000 So I don't believe...

00:16:51.000 But why did he say that?

00:16:53.000 Well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right?

00:16:57.000 So not just southern Australia, but all over Tasmania.

00:16:59.000 So samples, poop, stuff like that.

00:17:00.000 Samples, just everything.

00:17:01.000 Using camera traps.

00:17:03.000 And nobody's...

00:17:03.000 I think they officially say that the thylacine went extinct in 1936.

00:17:09.000 But... Probably into the late 40s and early 50s they still existed.

00:17:14.000 But, I mean, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists.

00:17:18.000 It'd make our lives a lot easier.

00:17:19.000 Forrest really believes in it.

00:17:20.000 He does.

00:17:21.000 He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.

00:17:23.000 And because of sightings.

00:17:25.000 Yeah, he thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea in the mountains.

00:17:29.000 And also incredibly remote.

00:17:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:17:31.000 Very difficult.

00:17:32.000 And the separation of that topography separates the Papua New Guinea.

00:17:38.000 Singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator prey from where the thylacine sightings were.

00:17:44.000 What's a singing dog?

00:17:46.000 It's just another large canid that has a unique howl.

00:17:49.000 Oh, wow.

00:17:50.000 It still exists.

00:17:51.000 I'm sure Jamie can find a video.

00:17:54.000 I want to hear that.

00:17:55.000 I've never heard of this.

00:17:55.000 Singing dog.

00:17:57.000 Papua New Guinea singing dogs.

00:17:58.000 By the way, folks, we're teasing you because...

00:18:01.000 This is not just theoretical.

00:18:04.000 This is what's going to get crazy.

00:18:06.000 It's going to get weird. 1.00

00:18:07.000 This podcast is going to blow your fucking mind. 0.99

00:18:09.000 Go ahead, Jamie. 1.00

00:18:14.000 These rare animals have a knack for holding a tune, even to an exact key.

00:18:23.000 Aw, they're so cute.

00:18:25.000 Do people keep them as pets?

00:18:28.000 That looks like a dog dog.

00:18:30.000 Yeah, that looks like a dog dog.

00:18:30.000 That looks like a dog that would be at the park.

00:18:32.000 They're wild dogs in Papua New Guinea, but I'm sure people have domesticated them.

00:18:36.000 Wow. Pretty fucking cool dogs. 0.99

00:18:39.000 And hanging out with a fox. 0.95

00:18:40.000 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.

00:18:52.000 But I'm from software, so I just assume there's like the...

00:18:57.000 We've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt, right?

00:19:00.000 So we should assume that the government or someone backed up and had the 23andMe of all species.

00:19:07.000 That doesn't exist.

00:19:09.000 Wow. Which is insane.

00:19:10.000 There's no back, there's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life.

00:19:15.000 Kind of like the seed vaults.

00:19:16.000 That doesn't exist.

00:19:17.000 And so we're actually petitioning the U.S. government to help put a massive project together to help biobank.

00:19:23.000 It's starting with just American megafauna and keystone species.

00:19:26.000 So that doesn't exist at all.

00:19:27.000 So then Colossal had to go out and go build reference genomes.

00:19:32.000 For all the species, like the closest living relatives for all the species that we're working on.

00:19:36.000 So this is the question.

00:19:37.000 If you have, say, let's go to woolly mammoth.

00:19:39.000 So if you have woolly mammoth and you have 99%, how do you bridge that gap?

00:19:44.000 How do you create?

00:19:46.000 That's synthetic biology.

00:19:47.000 So you never have to get to 100%, right?

00:19:49.000 You need to get to probably...

00:19:51.000 Synthetic biology.

00:19:52.000 That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools.

00:19:56.000 Probably you've heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is, it knocks out, it breaks the DNA.

00:20:02.000 Always the best tool.

00:20:03.000 We 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.

00:20:13.000 We can change the letters.

00:20:14.000 That's how precise we can be.

00:20:16.000 We can say at spot 4,000,008, I need to change that letter.

00:20:20.000 And so you change that letter.

00:20:22.000 And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA.

00:20:26.000 So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference.

00:20:31.000 And 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?

00:20:53.000 It's still a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that.

00:20:55.000 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?

00:21:02.000 Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.

00:21:05.000 Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size?

00:21:07.000 Because they're larger than...

00:21:09.000 So mammoths were about the same size.

00:21:11.000 They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants.

00:21:14.000 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.

00:21:23.000 And so there were 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different ways, and some of them were larger.

00:21:29.000 But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing, that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of an Asian elephant.

00:21:39.000 But to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes.

00:21:42.000 We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well.

00:21:48.000 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?

00:21:58.000 We made wooly mice.

00:22:01.000 See if you can find that. 1.00

00:22:02.000 The only unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck. 1.00

00:22:07.000 People lost their minds, right? 1.00

00:22:09.000 I was on the phone recently with a moderately aggressive Journalist.

00:22:17.000 And it was going quite poorly, as some calls go.

00:22:20.000 Moderately aggressive?

00:22:21.000 They were being aggressive in what way?

00:22:23.000 Like, why are you doing this?

00:22:24.000 Some people, yeah, everyone likes to cut it.

00:22:26.000 Look how cute! 0.86

00:22:28.000 My daughter actually found this online and wants one.

00:22:31.000 Yeah, so we get that a lot from kids.

00:22:32.000 She wants a woolly mouse. 0.98

00:22:33.000 So every week...

00:22:35.000 Every week.

00:22:35.000 I don't have my laptop.

00:22:36.000 Look how cute! 0.86

00:22:38.000 Oh my god, they're adorable.

00:22:41.000 So these woolly mice aren't just adorable. 0.59

00:22:43.000 We basically said, look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a mammoth?

00:22:52.000 From an Asian elephant to a mammoth.

00:22:53.000 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.

00:23:00.000 We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.

00:23:04.000 So we look for the mouse equivalent, right?

00:23:06.000 So we look for, like, all of us have similar genes.

00:23:09.000 And so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could...

00:23:22.000 Wow. 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.

00:23:51.000 And that's really important and really hard.

00:23:52.000 So we did it with 100% efficiency.

00:23:55.000 Yeah, that's the difference.

00:23:56.000 One of them, if it was in a trap, you'd be so sad.

00:23:59.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:24:00.000 Like the little guy on the left, if he was in a trap, he'd be like, oh, what could we do?

00:24:04.000 Isn't that funny?

00:24:05.000 Just a little.

00:24:08.000 Wow. Interesting.

00:24:18.000 you 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.

00:24:26.000 They actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur.

00:24:32.000 Wow. Interesting.

00:24:34.000 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.

00:24:40.000 I'm like, they're not illegal.

00:24:41.000 And 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.

00:24:49.000 Yeah. A meme account.

00:24:50.000 Oh, wow.

00:24:51.000 So that's mammoth fur.

00:24:52.000 Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on X that these are a bioweapon.

00:25:00.000 So the weirdness of the woolly mouse went crazy viral.

00:25:04.000 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.

00:25:11.000 Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live.

00:25:15.000 From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations.

00:25:21.000 We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time.

00:25:25.000 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.

00:25:46.000 So we try to spend a lot of time on that because we're certified by American Humane Society.

00:25:51.000 It's the oldest humane organization in the world.

00:25:54.000 And if you've seen the film, it's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

00:25:58.000 That's those guys.

00:25:58.000 So we've ended up...

00:26:00.000 So we really care about kind of not just the...

00:26:04.000 De-extinction efforts, genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out.

00:26:09.000 And so the woolly mouse was a really interesting proof of concept.

00:26:12.000 It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right, and we're getting exactly what we predicted.

00:26:18.000 Is there any plans to sell those?

00:26:19.000 No, everyone keeps asking us that.

00:26:20.000 But you know what?

00:26:22.000 Museums actually are now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice?

00:26:27.000 They're like, it'll drive so much value.

00:26:29.000 It'll teach people about genetics and whatnot.

00:26:31.000 So, 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.

00:26:39.000 Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone, even at a zoo, who decides, I want more of these?

00:26:47.000 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.

00:26:58.000 I think we'd do it more in the case of a museum.

00:27:00.000 Do you plan on keeping this?

00:27:02.000 Batch alive?

00:27:03.000 Yeah, they're going to live out their normal lives.

00:27:04.000 But you're not going to make new ones?

00:27:06.000 We may make new ones.

00:27:08.000 What if they breed?

00:27:09.000 They're all separated.

00:27:10.000 They're all separated by sex. 0.66

00:27:11.000 So we're not going to have a Jurassic Park moment where they change.

00:27:14.000 They're all separated by sex. 0.66

00:27:16.000 But 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.

00:27:28.000 They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them.

00:27:32.000 Yeah, we spared no expense.

00:27:37.000 Cool little house.

00:27:38.000 Yeah, and they're big, and we put fun stuff in them to play with like this.

00:27:41.000 And what's been crazy is we only named two of them, And now, even on X, people are like, we need pictures of Chip.

00:27:55.000 Where is Chip?

00:27:56.000 We've only seen pictures of Dale.

00:27:57.000 And there's like these incredible internet sleuths that are like...

00:28:00.000 That's not Chip.

00:28:01.000 That's Dale.

00:28:02.000 We need a picture of Chip.

00:28:03.000 You can't get involved.

00:28:05.000 Don't get involved with those people.

00:28:07.000 We've not leaned in.

00:28:09.000 You cannot.

00:28:10.000 We're excited.

00:28:10.000 They're excited, but we just can't.

00:28:11.000 We're busy.

00:28:13.000 So this is a new thing.

00:28:15.000 The woolly mouse is a new thing.

00:28:17.000 Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things?

00:28:22.000 It's more of a proof of technology.

00:28:24.000 I think that the mouse model, because it's a 20-day gestation versus 22 months in elephants, it's a great Great way to test phenotypes.

00:28:31.000 Because with a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right.

00:28:36.000 One, you can do molecular tests.

00:28:37.000 You can do DNA sequencing to see if it worked.

00:28:40.000 Two, I guess there's four.

00:28:42.000 Two, you could grow a mammoth and see if it looks like it, but that's a lot of work in 22 months.

00:28:46.000 A lot of gestational time.

00:28:48.000 a lot of money.

00:28:49.000 I think there's a lot of risk in that.

00:28:51.000 The third, and this is a little weird, we created what's called induced pluripotent stem cells.

00:28:56.000 So we created cells that you can then turn into any type of tissue.

00:29:00.000 So we actually do have mammoth hair follicles growing in a lab.

00:29:03.000 So we have hair growing in Petri dishes in the lab, which is pretty cool.

00:29:07.000 If you come see the lab, you'll get the whole Willy Wonka tour of it, which is pretty cool.

00:29:11.000 And then the fourth way is mice, right?

00:29:13.000 'Cause it's like, if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately within 24 hours I think.

00:29:19.000 were working if there were any unintended consequences that would be detrimental to the animal.

00:29:24.000 Wow. So we'll probably make more iterations of the woolly mice.

00:29:27.000 The thylacine's closest living relative is the fat-tailed dunnart, which is a mouse-sized marsupial.

00:29:32.000 And it actually gestates in 13 and a half days versus 20 days.

00:29:35.000 So there's no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model.

00:29:39.000 Yeah. Okay.

00:29:41.000 So... How did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?

00:29:48.000 So we're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo for different reasons.

00:29:53.000 We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and indigenous people groups.

00:29:57.000 And a project that we announced through our Colossal Foundation about two and a half years ago is...

00:30:03.000 Doing a population genomics map.

00:30:05.000 We talked about biobanking a little bit.

00:30:06.000 So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity?

00:30:11.000 What's been lost?

00:30:12.000 You know, what's the number of inbreeding?

00:30:14.000 So we go through this whole process to try to understand.

00:30:17.000 And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation.

00:30:20.000 Chairman Fox, it's one of the largest indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota.

00:30:25.000 So we're giving them a report out on this.

00:30:27.000 We went to their nation, wanted to share this.

00:30:30.000 And then, you know, we're curious.

00:30:32.000 What other projects would you work on that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison?

00:30:38.000 And they said that we needed help with wolf conservation.

00:30:41.000 They brought up that.

00:30:42.000 They said that we needed help with more bison conservation.

00:30:45.000 They said if we could do stuff around eagles and fish.

00:30:48.000 And so we kind of got that feedback.

00:30:50.000 And when Chairman Fox was walking me through their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf.

00:30:59.000 And he said, you know, that's the great wolf.

00:31:02.000 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.

00:31:10.000 And I was like, from Game of Thrones?

00:31:11.000 That's cool.

00:31:12.000 I love the show.

00:31:13.000 That's interesting.

00:31:13.000 So we did that.

00:31:14.000 We talked about that.

00:31:16.000 And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing.

00:31:24.000 And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up.

00:31:27.000 I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster.

00:31:30.000 You know, it's the That's only endemic to America.

00:31:34.000 It's a red wolf.

00:31:34.000 It's beautiful.

00:31:36.000 And there's like 15 left in the wild.

00:31:40.000 With massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck.

00:31:44.000 And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation.

00:31:47.000 We can't save our own.

00:31:48.000 When you think of like the American West, right?

00:31:50.000 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.

00:31:57.000 The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons like...

00:32:01.000 We were like, we have to do something about this.

00:32:03.000 We have to figure something out.

00:32:04.000 And so we put that kind of on the list.

00:32:06.000 And 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.

00:32:15.000 Or dodos or tile scenes.

00:32:16.000 Like, we get, like, boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool.

00:32:20.000 So we're going to make a colossal kids corner at our new labs.

00:32:24.000 And in that, we've had all this, some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business.

00:32:30.000 They're just excited about it.

00:32:31.000 Most of them learned about it through their kids.

00:32:32.000 Kind of like with the Willie Mouse with you.

00:32:34.000 And so everyone's excited about it.

00:32:36.000 And then we talked again to MHA Nation.

00:32:38.000 They brought up the dire wolf again.

00:32:40.000 And so we thought.

00:32:42.000 Maybe 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.

00:32:52.000 And 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.

00:33:09.000 But we had no idea if we could pull it off.

00:33:12.000 Is there dead direwolves that were trapped in permafrost?

00:33:17.000 No. Most of the direwolf skulls out there, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tarpret.

00:33:22.000 So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall.

00:33:25.000 But because of heat and acidification, there isn't anything that's protected.

00:33:30.000 Like there's nothing you can get from that.

00:33:31.000 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.

00:33:41.000 Right. And in that tooth, they actually found a they actually got point one five X or coverage of the genome.

00:33:49.000 So they got about 15 percent of the genome.

00:33:51.000 But that's not really enough.

00:33:52.000 You need to get up to about 10 X, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times so that even if you're not.

00:33:59.000 You understand enough of the core kind of...

00:34:04.000 that animal.

00:34:05.000 Is this done by AI?

00:34:06.000 It's done by AI and software, yeah.

00:34:08.000 So 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.

00:34:28.000 So you have this tooth, you have 1.5 Yeah, 0.5, so 15% of the genome.

00:34:34.000 And so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, could you resample the tooth?

00:34:39.000 And she's like, it's like, you know, half an inch long.

00:34:42.000 She's like, it's destructive sampling, like it's going to ruin it.

00:34:44.000 I was like, well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible?

00:34:49.000 So we lucked out, and that tooth's 13,000 years old.

00:34:52.000 The skull itself is 72, 73,000 years old.

00:34:56.000 Not exactly sure.

00:34:57.000 But it was found in a riverbed.

00:34:59.000 And it wasn't found in a riverbed at the mouth of a cave.

00:35:02.000 So it wasn't found like...

00:35:03.000 In the permafrost, but it also wasn't found in heat and acidification.

00:35:08.000 So there's a bone in all of us called the petrous bone, which is insanely dense, and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born.

00:35:16.000 It's a great DNA storage.

00:35:18.000 Better than teeth, better than anything.

00:35:19.000 It's like in the inner ear kind of head area.

00:35:23.000 And so we got permission from the museum to very carefully drill into the underside of the skull and remove And we got really lucky.

00:35:36.000 Between resampling the first and the skull, we ended up getting about 13 to 14x coverage.

00:35:42.000 So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the dire wolves.

00:35:46.000 And then what'd you do?

00:35:48.000 Well, and then...

00:35:49.000 Then we got a knock on the door.

00:35:52.000 So we took that DNA...

00:35:54.000 Can I ask you before we even start with this?

00:35:56.000 The aggressive reporters, is it you're playing God?

00:36:02.000 How do you have the right to do this?

00:36:03.000 So it's been a journey, okay?

00:36:05.000 So the journey that we've had is when we started the business, we didn't have any scientists.

00:36:09.000 We just didn't, right?

00:36:10.000 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.

00:36:17.000 Ha ha.

00:36:18.000 So that was phase one.

00:36:19.000 And then we're like, oh, well, as an entrepreneur, my job is to hire much smarter people than me.

00:36:24.000 Do you smoke cigars?

00:36:25.000 I do not.

00:36:27.000 Gary's got me on quite a kick.

00:36:29.000 A health kick?

00:36:29.000 Yeah. Cigars aren't bad for you?

00:36:32.000 Well, I'm not saying they're bad for you.

00:36:33.000 I'm just saying that...

00:36:34.000 Allegedly? Yeah.

00:36:35.000 I don't care.

00:36:37.000 This is the last of the things that I partake in that are probably bad for you.

00:36:42.000 Yeah, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

00:36:44.000 Everyone's got their vices.

00:36:45.000 I like a little cigar.

00:36:46.000 So 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?

00:37:00.000 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.

00:37:12.000 In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right?

00:37:18.000 Every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we...

00:37:21.000 Drink hydrogenated water.

00:37:22.000 We are, you know, playing God on some level, right?

00:37:25.000 Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.

00:37:30.000 Now, the good news is, is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be.

00:37:38.000 And 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.

00:37:51.000 Right. And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed.

00:37:55.000 Like, it changed the shape of rivers.

00:37:56.000 You know, because the elk population were just, you know, they were getting fat, they were getting lazy, they weren't migrating.

00:38:02.000 The sick and the old and the weak weren't getting killed off.

00:38:05.000 They were spreading disease.

00:38:06.000 They were eating all of the willows and everything along the banks.

00:38:09.000 So therefore, the beavers went away.

00:38:11.000 Beavers are like the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist.

00:38:16.000 Because they make wetlands, they cause the rivers.

00:38:20.000 That documentary's fascinating.

00:38:31.000 It's so fascinating.

00:38:34.000 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.

00:38:47.000 That's the reality of it.

00:38:48.000 Yeah. But they were telling me that they had so many elk that were living.

00:38:54.000 They had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available that they had all these...

00:39:01.000 No. No, it's not. Right. I have a good friend who lives in Colorado.

00:39:23.000 He has a ranch in Colorado.

00:39:25.000 And we were at his place approximately two weeks after they reintroduced wolves.

00:39:31.000 So they actually reintroduced wolves on his property.

00:39:33.000 Oh, yeah.

00:39:34.000 And he didn't know it was going to happen before it happened.

00:39:37.000 And all the people around there are ranchers.

00:39:39.000 Yeah. So already, these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said, killed over a dozen cows and calves.

00:39:47.000 So the problem is, they've killed elk as well.

00:39:49.000 In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground that the wolves had killed.

00:39:55.000 I'm not a big fan of people getting to vote on whether or not you should do something with wildlife.

00:40:00.000 I'm a big fan on having real wildlife biologists assess situations.

00:40:06.000 And in the case of Colorado, Colorado obviously borders Wyoming, and Wyoming has wolves.

00:40:11.000 Wolves were making their way into Colorado already, and they are protected.

00:40:16.000 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.

00:40:24.000 At an imaginary border, it doesn't exist.

00:40:26.000 There's no border.

00:40:27.000 They go hundreds and hundreds of miles.

00:40:28.000 The idea that you're doing this and you're doing this where there's ranches is crazy. 1.00

00:40:34.000 And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife. 0.99

00:40:42.000 So they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they... 1.00

00:40:47.000 Killed wildlife.

00:40:48.000 Excuse me, I'm saying wildlife.

00:40:51.000 What I really meant to say was animals, agriculture.

00:40:55.000 They're killing domesticated cows. 0.99

00:40:58.000 They're killing these calves and they're having a real fucking problem with that. 0.99

00:41:04.000 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? 0.99

00:41:12.000 We just can't let people vote on that.

00:41:14.000 Too many people live in these high population areas.

00:41:17.000 I couldn't agree more, right?

00:41:19.000 And so we as humanity, if you look at the third leading cause of death of elephants, it's human-elephant conflict, right?

00:41:27.000 We have to figure these things out.

00:41:29.000 We don't want degraded ecosystems.

00:41:32.000 We don't want to lose species, but you have to You have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way, right?

00:41:36.000 With Yellowstone, they're like, this is...

00:41:38.000 Big enough ecological preserve.

00:41:40.000 We're tagging the animals.

00:41:41.000 We're going to walk and measure it.

00:41:43.000 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.

00:41:52.000 We have to understand that some of these areas not are lost, but have already been changed for a different reason.

00:41:59.000 Yes, and they've achieved homeostasis.

00:42:02.000 Homeostasis. They've achieved a balance.

00:42:04.000 Yeah. Which is the big issue with Colorado right now.

00:42:08.000 It's going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce an animal that used to be there and is no longer there.

00:42:12.000 And I think in the case of Montana...

00:42:15.000 I think you're right, and I think that there is an argument that maybe the wolves being there is better.

00:42:21.000 Obviously not if you're a rancher.

00:42:22.000 Well, the Colorado stuff is completely going to destroy all of the stats.

00:42:27.000 So pre-Colorado, right?

00:42:28.000 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.

00:42:39.000 There's been less than five...

00:42:42.000 ...confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last hundred years.

00:42:46.000 You mean humans?

00:42:46.000 Humans, humans.

00:42:47.000 Are most of them in Alaska?

00:42:49.000 Most of them are in Alaska or in Canada.

00:42:51.000 And then...

00:42:53.000 It's before Colorado, so I'm not saying...

00:42:56.000 I don't know if the data has...

00:42:57.000 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?

00:43:08.000 And all livestock, not just cattle.

00:43:09.000 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.

00:43:21.000 So I think that is a...

00:43:23.000 Because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.

00:43:25.000 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.

00:43:36.000 And 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.

00:43:51.000 They're amazing.

00:43:52.000 We all love wolves.

00:43:53.000 It's an incredible animal.

00:43:54.000 I'm so happy it exists.

00:43:55.000 Don't put it near where there's a ranch.

00:43:57.000 Exactly. You can't vote on that if you live in Denver.

00:43:59.000 That's crazy.

00:44:00.000 Yeah, 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.

00:44:06.000 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.

00:44:12.000 His husband, apparently, is the one who really wanted it to happen.

00:44:15.000 And, you know, you have a mandate, so you have to get wolves out by a certain time. 1.00

00:44:20.000 And when you're doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill livestock, so you're like, fuck it. 0.99

00:44:25.000 Yeah, it's just not. 0.96

00:44:26.000 So the project that we'll probably eventually talk about is...

00:44:33.000 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.

00:44:43.000 Okay, so we'll just get to it. 1.00

00:44:45.000 You made a fucking dire wolf. 0.99

00:44:47.000 I didn't. 1.00

00:44:48.000 Our team, our incredible team, made three dire wolves so far.

00:44:54.000 Let's see the photos.

00:44:54.000 Jamie, bust out some photos.

00:44:56.000 Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself, because this is truly fucking crazy. 0.98

00:45:01.000 That's the pup. 0.98

00:45:03.000 So that's actually Romulus.

00:45:05.000 So we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome.

00:45:09.000 And then we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl.

00:45:13.000 So this is Romulus and Remus.

00:45:15.000 So funny story about this.

00:45:17.000 So Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings.

00:45:20.000 Jamie. Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings was actually one of our investors.

00:45:27.000 And he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props.

00:45:31.000 And he's like, I was sitting in Peter's house with he and his partner Fran.

00:45:36.000 And I was like, you know, I showed him the video of them howling.

00:45:41.000 He started tearing up.

00:45:41.000 He goes, this is the first time I've heard a direwolf or anyone's heard a direwolf in 10,000 years.

00:45:45.000 Well, he like...

00:45:46.000 He physically, emotionally got chills and started crying.

00:45:49.000 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 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?

00:46:18.000 They do get...

00:46:19.000 Because of viruses...

00:46:21.000 from the soil.

00:46:23.000 At eight weeks, they do get basic vaccines.

00:46:28.000 Were you concerned about that?

00:46:31.000 I mean, you have this animal that you're just...

00:46:33.000 Yeah, so these are staying on...

00:46:35.000 These are not going back into the wild, right?

00:46:37.000 Not yet.

00:46:37.000 Right now, they're on a 2,000-acre secure, expansive ecological preserve with 24-7 care.

00:46:44.000 We have an animal hospital that we built.

00:46:46.000 People are always like, you guys raised so much money.

00:46:48.000 And I was like, well...

00:46:52.000 You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities.

00:46:54.000 Yeah. Let's see the photo of the actual grown ones because they're fucking nuts. 1.00

00:47:01.000 Yeah, so this is Ramos and Remus playing in the snow on the preserve when they are three months old. 0.99

00:47:10.000 So three months, how big are they?

00:47:12.000 Three months, they were north of 45 pounds.

00:47:15.000 Wow. Look at that face.

00:47:18.000 God, they're so beautiful.

00:47:19.000 As they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful.

00:47:24.000 So let's go to the adults, because the adults have crazy characteristics that you were saying that you didn't even know.

00:47:30.000 We didn't know, right?

00:47:31.000 We ended up getting a...

00:47:35.000 Is this a full-grown one?

00:47:37.000 They're still five months old, so they're 80 pounds at five months.

00:47:40.000 Wolves typically grow 12 to 14 months, so they're not full-grown yet.

00:47:45.000 Wow, and how big is it already?

00:47:46.000 80 pounds, about 5 1⁄2 feet.

00:47:50.000 And the mane?

00:47:51.000 Yeah, and so a couple things about the wolves.

00:47:53.000 So we didn't know this, right?

00:47:56.000 We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf.

00:47:58.000 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 dryness kind of cooling period.

00:48:09.000 They went extinct as well, right?

00:48:12.000 And we knew – all we know, because all we have is we don't have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples.

00:48:17.000 We literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25 percent larger.

00:48:23.000 They were stockier.

00:48:25.000 They probably weren't as fast based on kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be.

00:48:29.000 But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium and whatnot.

00:48:34.000 And 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.

00:48:46.000 Doesn't it make sense for natural selection?

00:48:48.000 Yeah. They're an Arctic hunting animal. 0.96

00:48:50.000 Yeah. And they have this beautiful – we didn't know this.

00:48:52.000 They have this beautiful like mane-like quality to them.

00:48:54.000 And when they're babies, you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears.

00:49:01.000 The females as well? 0.98

00:49:14.000 Well? Well, the female, she's only six weeks old, so it's two years old.

00:49:18.000 Oh, okay.

00:49:18.000 So if you keep going through a couple other photos.

00:49:20.000 Wow. Yeah, I mean, they are just, They're just beautiful.

00:49:23.000 I mean, it's funny.

00:49:25.000 Someone actually said on our team, they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point, right?

00:49:29.000 Right. They're so stocky.

00:49:32.000 They're stocky.

00:49:33.000 They're thicker.

00:49:35.000 They're absolutely beautiful.

00:49:39.000 So this is Khaleesi, who looks like a baby. 1.00

00:49:42.000 And we nailed it.

00:49:44.000 We named her.

00:49:46.000 Can we hear it?

00:49:47.000 Let me hear.

00:49:51.000 We named Khaleesi for George R.R. Martin, obviously.

00:49:53.000 Obviously. Who's an investor in Colossal.

00:49:56.000 Oh, wow.

00:50:00.000 Aww. Nature's cute little murderers. 1.00

00:50:09.000 Well, everything in nature murders something, right?

00:50:11.000 Well, cows murder grass. 1.00

00:50:14.000 And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants scream.

00:50:17.000 Yeah, they scream.

00:50:19.000 So I guess we all are bad.

00:50:22.000 Life eats life.

00:50:23.000 I mean, that's the reason why plants have chemicals to... 0.74

00:50:28.000 What are they eating there?

00:50:30.000 So they love to chew on horns. 1.00

00:50:33.000 So we have different phases.

00:50:35.000 We built a 145-page animal guide.

00:50:38.000 These are actually different horns from different elk and other species that we're putting out there.

00:50:43.000 And they chew on them like a dog does.

00:50:46.000 So are you letting these animals kill things?

00:50:49.000 So we're feeding them still.

00:50:51.000 So they eat a combination of bison meat.

00:50:53.000 Horse meat and some...

00:50:55.000 Do you plan on letting them kill things eventually?

00:50:56.000 So we're just about to introduce carcasses to them.

00:50:58.000 So giving them part of a carcass, letting them feed, building in that dynamic between the two brothers for now.

00:51:05.000 And they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.

00:51:09.000 Are you going to let them hunt?

00:51:10.000 I mean, they are on a seemingly wild 2,000 acre preserve with just them.

00:51:15.000 So they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve.

00:51:18.000 But they're not doing it yet.

00:51:20.000 They're starting to exhibit the first inklings that it will trend toward that.

00:51:25.000 But we want them to live.

00:51:26.000 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.

00:51:35.000 Wow. It's cool.

00:51:37.000 But the other thing that's equally cool to it, going back to the Red Bull story, can you...

00:51:42.000 Which is crazy to me that you have reignited these 10,000-year-old hunting genes.

00:51:47.000 Yeah. Including size.

00:51:49.000 We understand more about like...

00:51:52.000 We looked at what genes made really a dire wolf a dire wolf, like what was separated.

00:51:57.000 And 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.

00:52:05.000 With 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.

00:52:15.000 If you and I are 50,000 years apart, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period.

00:52:21.000 But if we can then really say, okay, what made Ben and what made Joe Joe?

00:52:25.000 Oh, here's the overlaps.

00:52:26.000 It allowed us to really understand.

00:52:27.000 Wow. It's just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are kind of baked into those genes.

00:52:33.000 They're baked in, yeah.

00:52:33.000 And they just were dormant for 10,000 years.

00:52:35.000 And now these things are waking up.

00:52:37.000 And so I was like, so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed.

00:52:42.000 Romulus. And Romulus was partly raised with me.

00:52:45.000 I could go out to the preserve.

00:52:46.000 I'd check on him quite frequently.

00:52:48.000 It's in the northern United States where we don't say where it is.

00:52:50.000 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.

00:53:00.000 Our labs are not open to the public.

00:53:02.000 And we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice.

00:53:10.000 Oh, yeah.

00:53:17.000 Oh, the internet sleuths will try to find you.

00:53:20.000 Yeah, so we've done...

00:53:21.000 I'm not trying to challenge them, but we've done everything we can to protect it.

00:53:25.000 Yeah, I understand.

00:53:26.000 I mean, you have to.

00:53:28.000 Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf.

00:53:30.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:53:31.000 Somebody wants a dire wolf. 0.80

00:53:32.000 We already get a lot of weird calls.

00:53:36.000 Oh, I bet you do.

00:53:38.000 Someone with deep pockets?

00:53:40.000 Make me a dire wolf, my friend.

00:53:43.000 I have everything in my collection.

00:53:46.000 We get a lot of weird calls.

00:53:48.000 Yeah. Yeah, from people that are like...

00:53:49.000 Those people that have private zoos.

00:53:51.000 Oh, yeah.

00:53:52.000 Yeah, like enormous...

00:53:53.000 Like in India. 1.00

00:53:54.000 Yeah. Yeah.

00:53:55.000 That family has the largest private zoo and preserve.

00:54:00.000 It's just so wild.

00:54:01.000 It's so crazy.

00:54:02.000 Yeah. Well, you know Texas' history with animals, right?

00:54:05.000 Yeah. There's more tigers in captivity and private collections in Texas.

00:54:08.000 In Texas than in the wild.

00:54:09.000 Than in the wild of the world. 0.95

00:54:10.000 Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.

00:54:12.000 But I was in the...

00:54:16.000 Of 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.

00:54:23.000 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 videos of them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly more contained area.

00:54:37.000 It's funny.

00:54:38.000 Two weeks ago, I was up there and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of those pictures and Remus came.

00:54:43.000 Romulus, who I Sent the most amount of time with.

00:54:46.000 Remus came up, came pretty close, and I was able to touch him again.

00:54:51.000 But I thought at that moment, and he kind of skittished away, I was like...

00:54:54.000 That's the last time I'm touching Remus.

00:54:56.000 Like, what am I doing?

00:54:57.000 And 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?

00:55:09.000 And they probably hunted humans. 0.52

00:55:11.000 Yeah, I don't, we don't know, right?

00:55:14.000 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.

00:55:33.000 That's kind of...

00:55:34.000 I think the answer is probably a combination.

00:55:37.000 Could have there been an astrological event?

00:55:40.000 There's starting to be more and more data around that.

00:55:44.000 I'm sure you've seen Randall Carlson talk about this. 0.98

00:55:46.000 Yeah, I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it, Graham Hancock talk about it, and they just got the shit beat out of them. 0.97

00:55:51.000 Yeah, but not anymore.

00:55:52.000 The Younger Matthias Impact Theory is well-respected now.

00:55:55.000 It happened.

00:55:57.000 Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right?

00:56:00.000 Because you see different, which also tracks to the theory.

00:56:04.000 So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but there was also a massive glacial lake and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied that then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns.

00:56:21.000 So you went from a period in that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of...

00:56:28.000 Insanely accelerated cooling.

00:56:30.000 Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was brought to...

00:56:35.000 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.

00:56:55.000 He was on acid.

00:56:56.000 He was on acid and this idea came to him.

00:56:58.000 He was looking out over a ridge.

00:57:01.000 He was looking at this enormous gorge and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed.

00:57:08.000 And then he started noticing that there's...

00:57:11.000 These huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere, that were just moved by this immense amount of water.

00:57:17.000 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.

00:57:27.000 And it's like, this is crazy.

00:57:29.000 And it all tracks.

00:57:31.000 It tracks all over the world.

00:57:32.000 It reminds me of those stories where they show people the side of the Sphinx, and they're like, oh man, that's a lot of water erosion.

00:57:39.000 And then they...

00:57:40.000 Flip the photo and then you see the head of the thing.

00:57:42.000 It's like, that's not water erosion.

00:57:44.000 It's Dr. Robert Chalk from Boston University.

00:57:46.000 I've interviewed him.

00:57:47.000 He was the first guy to propose this.

00:57:50.000 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.

00:57:58.000 So 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?

00:58:09.000 No one wants to let that go.

00:58:12.000 I'm not a scientist, and I don't come from academia.

00:58:15.000 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?

00:58:21.000 And what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non-academic, I'm sure I'll get...

00:58:28.000 I'm crucified for this, but I don't read the comments.

00:58:30.000 Don't read the comments.

00:58:31.000 Let's go, Ben.

00:58:31.000 Trust me, I don't read the comments.

00:58:33.000 Good for you.

00:58:34.000 I sleep quite well.

00:58:35.000 Nice. But, you know, the academics, we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot.

00:58:43.000 We fund 17 academic universities, right, all over the world.

00:58:47.000 We fund 40 postdocs, right, all over the world, right, and they're doing this.

00:58:52.000 So we're very integrated with different ideas from academia and these scholars.

00:58:56.000 And our top people, I don't have to write a paper on anything ever.

00:59:23.000 We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with...

00:59:30.000 Yeah. Fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there.

01:00:00.000 We have another probably 40 advisors.

01:00:04.000 They're like, we love you.

01:00:06.000 You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me.

01:00:10.000 If 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.

01:00:19.000 So it's a complete scam of a system, right?

01:00:22.000 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.

01:00:29.000 So we went through this whole philosophical perspective of all these things that people threw at us.

01:00:35.000 Of course.

01:00:41.000 Well, the problem is not the scientific community.

01:00:45.000 The problem is weak men.

01:00:47.000 It's this...

01:00:47.000 What you see in these squabbles, these, like, ultra-personal squabbles, where, like...

01:00:55.000 Horrible vitriolic statements made about people.

01:00:59.000 They're just not happy people.

01:01:01.000 Exactly. It's the same problem with all of life.

01:01:04.000 It's these Bitchy little people. 1.00

01:01:07.000 These bitchy little monsters. 1.00

01:01:09.000 And they have taken over something that's incredibly important. 0.99

01:01:12.000 And their work, their work, these bitchy little people, their work is incredibly important. 1.00

01:01:17.000 Yes. But at the core of their being, they're a bitchy little person. 1.00

01:01:21.000 And that is why we don't have flying cars, we don't have mammoths, and until Elon, we were not going to live on Mars, right?

01:01:27.000 And so, like, we didn't have...

01:01:29.000 Well, it takes time.

01:01:30.000 Yeah, but it doesn't come...

01:01:32.000 But also academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems, right?

01:01:36.000 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.

01:01:42.000 Whereas 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.

01:02:01.000 Like, it's not just as simple as let's follow data.

01:02:05.000 It's all got to be attached to this very left-leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects, ideology. 0.98

01:02:13.000 And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true. 0.98

01:02:19.000 You should just follow the scientific method. 0.98

01:02:20.000 I'm not a scientist, but we should just...

01:02:22.000 And guess what?

01:02:22.000 When new data shows up that...

01:02:24.000 You know, changes your old data.

01:02:26.000 You shouldn't get mad about that.

01:02:27.000 You should celebrate it.

01:02:28.000 Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data.

01:02:30.000 You 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.

01:02:43.000 Which 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. 1.00

01:02:56.000 You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.

01:03:04.000 I just wish we could get philosophy.

01:03:06.000 We separate philosophical perspectives from science.

01:03:09.000 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 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?

01:03:35.000 It's not a mammoth.

01:03:36.000 It's not a dire wolf.

01:03:37.000 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.

01:03:45.000 So are they saying that it's not because it didn't come straight from nature?

01:03:48.000 It's something that you've recreated by piecing this together with that?

01:03:52.000 What are the genes that you had to use to create a dire wolf?

01:03:56.000 We didn't totally explain this.

01:03:57.000 So you have CRISPR, you have these gene editing tools, you have a good sample of DNA.

01:04:03.000 How do you turn that into a wolf?

01:04:05.000 Map them next to it.

01:04:07.000 And there was a study that came out about, and once again this goes back to the status quo of scientists, of academic scientists.

01:04:14.000 There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data.

01:04:19.000 They said that dire wolves weren't closely related to wolves.

01:04:23.000 They were close related to jackals.

01:04:25.000 And that's because at the time, they only had 0.15% of the genome, right?

01:04:29.000 They just didn't have all the data.

01:04:30.000 That's not a negative.

01:04:31.000 They just didn't have all the data.

01:04:32.000 Now we know that they actually were close related to wolves because we have more data.

01:04:35.000 Which wolves?

01:04:36.000 Gray wolves or the precursor to gray wolves, right?

01:04:39.000 So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group.

01:04:45.000 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.

01:04:52.000 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?

01:04:59.000 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?

01:05:05.000 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.

01:05:13.000 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.

01:05:31.000 And is this a 100% dire wolf, or is this a new thing?

01:05:36.000 So this goes into the philosophical thing.

01:05:38.000 So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically, the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species.

01:05:44.000 So 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.

01:05:51.000 Like, if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species.

01:05:54.000 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.

01:06:02.000 But then you have other paleontologists who just hate us.

01:06:04.000 And 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.

01:06:10.000 paleontologist recently that hates us.

01:06:12.000 I 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.

01:06:24.000 And she's like...

01:06:27.000 Yes, but that doesn't matter.

01:06:28.000 And I'm like, well, we'll do it.

01:06:30.000 Why does she hate you guys?

01:06:32.000 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.

01:06:40.000 But this is heavily bold.

01:06:42.000 I wouldn't say this is moderately bold. 1.00

01:06:43.000 You made three fucking direwolves. 0.99

01:06:45.000 That's not moderately bold. 1.00

01:06:47.000 It's really kind of one of the craziest things that a human being's ever done.

01:06:50.000 It's definitely in the realm.

01:06:53.000 This falls into religious...

01:07:09.000 realms. Well, it's, it's, it's, there's philosophical and religious.

01:07:13.000 And 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.

01:07:20.000 And a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a cold, aquatic adapted, cold adapted bear.

01:07:26.000 Right. And so I always ask people that they, their, their offspring are, they.

01:07:31.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:07:35.000 So there's different ways to characterize it.

01:07:40.000 And so, you know, we are not the same, right?

01:07:42.000 I don't know what percent, you probably from 23andMe or something have some percentage Neanderthal.

01:07:47.000 You don't say that you're an admixture or a hybrid.

01:07:49.000 You just say you're human.

01:07:50.000 You don't really...

01:07:51.000 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.

01:07:59.000 But that's it.

01:08:00.000 But like I said, there's six different ways.

01:08:01.000 There's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographics.

01:08:05.000 And there's a funny paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through.

01:08:11.000 And the same toads live on both – on two sides of the street.

01:08:14.000 And they're different species.

01:08:17.000 Just because there's a road.

01:08:22.000 It's called Geographic Isolation of Speciation.

01:08:24.000 So it's just crazy.

01:08:25.000 So the only arguments that we now have is, but is it a mammoth?

01:08:29.000 And it's like, well, then don't call it a mammoth.

01:08:30.000 I asked people, did you see Jurassic Park?

01:08:33.000 And they're like, yeah.

01:08:34.000 And I was like, what was Jurassic Park about to you?

01:08:39.000 To me?

01:08:40.000 Yeah, if you're going to take your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about?

01:08:43.000 Dinosaurs. Is it?

01:08:45.000 Because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff.

01:08:48.000 Are they dinosaurs?

01:08:49.000 Or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things?

01:08:57.000 Or are they dinosaurs?

01:08:58.000 If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functionality extinction.

01:09:02.000 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.

01:09:11.000 So 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.

01:09:22.000 So what was the argument?

01:09:24.000 How did they present it?

01:09:25.000 By their own definition, they're like, well, it doesn't have enough DNA.

01:09:30.000 So I said, but the second dire wolf that we have, the second genome that we have from the tooth has less of the same DNA than the skull.

01:09:40.000 Does that mean that it wasn't a dire wolf?

01:09:42.000 And it just turns into an you're missing the point conversation.

01:09:45.000 I'm just asking questions.

01:09:46.000 I would like to know the point, though.

01:09:47.000 What is her point?

01:09:48.000 What is her overall argument?

01:09:51.000 The general point of the people is that they want to pick one speciation definition and adhere us to that.

01:09:57.000 And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species, right?

01:10:01.000 It's just people that are using the framework.

01:10:04.000 That they set that isn't consistent based on the argument that they want to make.

01:10:10.000 Interesting. So species is just something...

01:10:13.000 It's a human construct.

01:10:14.000 And it's just a thing if it can breed with another thing.

01:10:18.000 Well, I mean, that is one definition.

01:10:20.000 There is another definition saying that it's only a species if it can't breed with another thing.

01:10:24.000 So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves, does that mean they're now their own species? 0.96

01:10:28.000 It just gets into this dumb... 0.98

01:10:31.000 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? 0.78

01:10:45.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:10:46.000 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?

01:10:55.000 I could see it from her perspective.

01:10:57.000 100%, right?

01:10:58.000 But I think that if we don't do big, bold things, it's important.

01:11:02.000 You know, one of the things we should definitely show is the rich.

01:11:04.000 This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park.

01:11:06.000 This is basically the same conversation.

01:11:09.000 Don't worry.

01:11:10.000 But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was No, they just want to make an attraction.

01:11:21.000 Well, let's explain the red wolf to people, because you were saying before, I didn't even know how few of them there are.

01:11:37.000 One more, yeah.

01:11:38.000 So this is a red wolf.

01:11:39.000 That's Hope.

01:11:40.000 That's the world's first cloned red wolf.

01:11:42.000 So I've actually made more red wolves than I've made dire wolves.

01:11:45.000 So I've made four red wolves, one female. 0.99

01:11:47.000 Are you just releasing these fuckers? 0.99

01:11:48.000 No, no, they're in an ecological preserve as well. 1.00

01:11:50.000 And so, but you're gonna...

01:11:52.000 You're going to die when you hear what I went through on this.

01:11:55.000 So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free, right?

01:12:03.000 Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals.

01:12:09.000 They don't pay us a dime.

01:12:10.000 It's all open source.

01:12:11.000 It's all free.

01:12:12.000 We have 48 conservation partners.

01:12:14.000 The team that's running the Northern White Rhino Project, we're their exclusive genetic rescue partner. 0.80

01:12:19.000 We're working with elephants in Botswana, working with elephants in Kenya.

01:12:22.000 So anybody can use our technologies for free, right?

01:12:24.000 We're working on chytrid, a terrible fungus in Australia.

01:12:27.000 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.

01:12:37.000 So I met with the upcoming governor.

01:12:39.000 Are they in other states as well?

01:12:40.000 No, we'll get to that.

01:12:41.000 So they're only recognized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife there.

01:12:46.000 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.

01:12:59.000 So she started darting them, taking samples.

01:13:01.000 And what she found is they actually have more, quote unquote, red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina.

01:13:10.000 And is it part of the problem they're inbreeding with coyotes?

01:13:12.000 Yeah, but they've all been like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes.

01:13:16.000 All the red wolves have some coyote in them.

01:13:19.000 They look like coyotes.

01:13:20.000 Well, because every, well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes.

01:13:24.000 Really? Yeah, because the reality is every single species is what's called an admixture.

01:13:29.000 Everything is inbreeding with everything on some level, right?

01:13:32.000 And so everything in life is an admixture. 0.82

01:13:36.000 It goes back to Neanderthal. 0.95

01:13:37.000 So this binary idea that we have is silly.

01:13:39.000 No, it's a human cause construct, right? 0.98

01:13:42.000 And it's insane.

01:13:44.000 So I went to some folks from the last administration, right?

01:13:49.000 And I took some data with me.

01:13:52.000 And I said, hey, we really want to help this Red Wolf program.

01:13:54.000 We don't need any money.

01:13:55.000 We open source all of our technologies.

01:13:56.000 And we've used a technology that's non-invasive for cloning, where we actually take a vial of blood.

01:14:04.000 We isolate what's called endothelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right?

01:14:09.000 Because there's no nucleus in blood cells.

01:14:11.000 So we catch those.

01:14:13.000 And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right?

01:14:19.000 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.

01:14:25.000 You have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.

01:14:28.000 It's actually a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning.

01:14:31.000 We can simply do it.

01:14:32.000 Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot.

01:14:37.000 And so it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right?

01:14:41.000 And 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.

01:14:56.000 We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using this thing.

01:15:02.000 So I went out to Washington with my team.

01:15:05.000 I showed them Hope as a baby in little videos of – and you may have videos of Hope, Jamie.

01:15:11.000 I don't know if it's in the folder.

01:15:12.000 I 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.

01:15:25.000 So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves than what's alive in the population.

01:15:31.000 And we said we'd like for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana.

01:15:37.000 And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead?

01:15:42.000 And we'll just give them to you.

01:15:44.000 There's no cost.

01:15:45.000 Here was the feedback.

01:15:47.000 We need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend $22 million to see if it's possible to clone wolves.

01:15:53.000 And I was blown away.

01:15:55.000 I was like, oh, I'm so sorry.

01:15:56.000 I wasn't very clear.

01:15:57.000 This is a cloned wolf.

01:15:59.000 Like, here, you can fly with me to the preserve.

01:16:00.000 You have to sign an NDA, but you fly with me to the preserve.

01:16:02.000 And they're like, we need to spend five to six years and $20 plus million to go understand this.

01:16:10.000 We'll give you all of the technology.

01:16:12.000 And if you tell me you want 100 wolves, I'll just make you 100 wolves.

01:16:15.000 We'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you.

01:16:20.000 And the response was, we'll get back to you.

01:16:22.000 We tried to have three other meetings.

01:16:25.000 No showed and canceled.

01:16:26.000 Every time.

01:16:26.000 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.

01:16:36.000 Which has been pretty amazing.

01:16:37.000 That's great.

01:16:38.000 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.

01:16:56.000 Only about 3% ever come off, and we're really good at putting them on, and we celebrate putting them on.

01:17:00.000 So 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?

01:17:17.000 And I was like...

01:17:18.000 Wiped out the previous folks and they said that we need, you know, five years and $20 million.

01:17:23.000 They were going to spend it internally.

01:17:24.000 They weren't going to ask us to do the feasibility.

01:17:25.000 They were going to spend it internally on this.

01:17:28.000 And we're like, we'll just do it for free.

01:17:30.000 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.

01:17:39.000 So when will you start reintroducing these soulless red wolves from hell?

01:17:47.000 You've created a lab. 0.88

01:17:48.000 They're going to start eating people.

01:17:50.000 We just met with them last week.

01:17:54.000 They're beautiful.

01:17:55.000 God, they're so beautiful.

01:17:56.000 We shouldn't be afraid of innovation, right?

01:17:59.000 No, but you know the real question is, where do you stop?

01:18:02.000 Because 90-what percent of all animals that have ever existed, all species, are extinct?

01:18:08.000 I think you focus on the species that are critically endangered and our keystone species, meaning the environment, needs them.

01:18:17.000 But the ones that we drove to extinction.

01:18:21.000 Right? Okay.

01:18:22.000 So it's debatable whether or not we drove dire wolves to extinction.

01:18:25.000 We don't really know what happened 10,000 years ago.

01:18:28.000 I'm inclined to think that when you see the death of 65% of North American megafauna that happened really quickly.

01:18:35.000 Really quickly.

01:18:36.000 Yeah, I'm inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a common impact are correct.

01:18:41.000 I think most likely it's a combination.

01:18:45.000 We do know that when early...

01:18:47.000 That anthropologic effects from humans, that when early man went onto a landmass at scale, that we start to see that.

01:18:55.000 We see that in Australia and other places.

01:18:57.000 But to your point, it's much slower.

01:18:59.000 It's much, much slower.

01:19:00.000 This is a different thing.

01:19:01.000 Are you going to bring back saber-toothed tigers?

01:19:04.000 Everyone seems to have their favorite animal up for us to save, right?

01:19:08.000 Dire wolves would be my favorite.

01:19:09.000 Dire wolves, you've got to come maybe at some point you see them.

01:19:14.000 I want to.

01:19:15.000 Amazing. I mean, they're just beautiful animals.

01:19:18.000 So Sabertooth Tiger is a class.

01:19:24.000 We put that as a class.

01:19:26.000 Most commonly, people think of the Smilodon as the Sabertooth Tiger.

01:19:30.000 There's not to date been a really great smilodon DNA.

01:19:34.000 There is great homotherium DNA, which is another type of saber tooth cat.

01:19:39.000 Oh, I didn't know there was more than one type of saber tooth.

01:19:41.000 They classify them differently, you know, based on it.

01:19:44.000 Obviously, you've been studying this.

01:19:45.000 So you're thinking about doing it.

01:19:46.000 I'm not.

01:19:47.000 I mean, we like to study ancient DNA, right?

01:19:50.000 Like, like, you know, one of the things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is 100% right is people say.

01:20:00.000 That's just an incorrect statement.

01:20:01.000 There were probably no smilodons there, but there are homotheriums, which are a saber-toothed cat. 0.52

01:20:07.000 Yeah, he's found things that were not supposed to be there.

01:20:10.000 I've held things in his...

01:20:13.000 I've held a direwolf skull in his...

01:20:16.000 I hope he's fine with me saying that.

01:20:18.000 In his facility.

01:20:21.000 Yeah, I think he's talked about that.

01:20:23.000 But they found cave bears, short-faced bears.

01:20:26.000 Wow, look at that.

01:20:26.000 Yeah, so Homotherium is still a saber-toothed cat.

01:20:29.000 But what happens is, this goes back to that philosophical perspective.

01:20:34.000 They think that only, so if you look up Smilodon in comparison.

01:20:38.000 Oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still.

01:20:41.000 Can you give me that CGI image of it again, Jamie, and I'll laugh? 0.96

01:20:44.000 That's so fucking cool.

01:20:45.000 Yeah, and I don't think...

01:20:47.000 I don't think you should bring something like that back, but if you do, I'm going to visit it.

01:20:51.000 I mean, I want to see that thing take down a bike.

01:20:54.000 Look at its paws, man.

01:20:55.000 There was a...

01:20:56.000 I mean, wait till you see the Daryl paws.

01:20:57.000 Bro, but that would be so crazy.

01:21:00.000 Now all of a sudden I want you to do it.

01:21:02.000 Give me another large picture of it, Jamie.

01:21:04.000 There's some other pictures of those.

01:21:06.000 So Smilodon's the one that has the largest teeth?

01:21:08.000 It has the largest known teeth.

01:21:11.000 But when people think of saber-toothed tiger, this is what, or saber-toothed cat, this is what they think of.

01:21:17.000 Those are crazy.

01:21:18.000 I wonder why nature wanted you to have that.

01:21:20.000 I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides unless they're quite thick.

01:21:24.000 It has to be, right?

01:21:25.000 Something where there's a genetic advantage.

01:21:27.000 And their jaw hinges. 0.65

01:21:28.000 Look at that one on the right, lower right, Jamie.

01:21:31.000 Below that, below that to the right, to the right.

01:21:33.000 Yeah, right there.

01:21:34.000 Click on that.

01:21:35.000 Look at that, man.

01:21:38.000 CGI is so incredible.

01:21:39.000 You know what's amazing?

01:21:41.000 We don't have the DNA from it, so we have no idea what the color pattern is, which you can see here.

01:21:46.000 It's got a short tail, it's got a long tail, it's got a leopard, it's got stripes, right?

01:21:49.000 We don't even know if they had long tail or short tail.

01:21:51.000 They could have been white.

01:21:53.000 Wow, that would be wild.

01:21:55.000 So we do have, there have been some really well-preserved pups and others in the permafrost of Homotherium.

01:22:04.000 Whoa. A homotherium we know has that kind of coloration to it?

01:22:09.000 I don't want to say we do or don't.

01:22:12.000 We have not done the analysis on the homotherium yet.

01:22:15.000 Look at that little guy.

01:22:16.000 We do have the genome of it, though.

01:22:19.000 Not that we're going to work on it.

01:22:20.000 Okay, so that one has brown hair.

01:22:21.000 Have you seen the American short-faced bear?

01:22:25.000 Yeah. That's the thing I'm probably the most scared of.

01:22:28.000 Yeah, you can't bring that back.

01:22:29.000 17 or 18 foot giant bear.

01:22:31.000 You can't bring that back.

01:22:32.000 We're not working on it, I'm just saying.

01:22:33.000 But somebody might, that's the problem. 0.99

01:22:35.000 There might be some fucking crackhead out there that's got 40 billion dollars that's out of his mind. 0.99

01:22:39.000 Well, I also think that... 1.00

01:22:41.000 Like some crazy dude who's...

01:22:43.000 Just got the resources to do that. 0.86

01:22:46.000 That to me is megalodon scary.

01:22:48.000 That's a land megalodon.

01:22:51.000 Yeah, that is an enormous animal.

01:22:53.000 And they think that's one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the Bering Strait.

01:22:59.000 I read that.

01:23:00.000 It's a theory, but it's a pretty good one.

01:23:03.000 If you knew there was a lineage of super polar bears out there, I would go near it.

01:23:09.000 And it is essentially a super polar bear, which is really scary.

01:23:13.000 Are terrifying.

01:23:14.000 And completely carnivorous.

01:23:16.000 And they don't care. 1.00

01:23:17.000 They'll just walk right up to you and kill you. 0.90

01:23:18.000 Oh yeah, there's a great video of these guys that are behind a fence. 0.84

01:23:23.000 Somebody sent it to me yesterday. 1.00

01:23:26.000 Oh, fuck. 1.00

01:23:27.000 I'll find it. 1.00

01:23:28.000 I know where it is.

01:23:29.000 Someone sent it to me yesterday of these guys that are right behind a fence where this polar bear is trying to get through the fence.

01:23:35.000 There's three of them.

01:23:36.000 And they're...

01:23:37.000 You know, they're talking to her like, hey, big guy, you can't come in here. 0.95

01:23:41.000 Hey, fella. 0.98

01:23:42.000 And then she's calmly walking towards like, I'm going to get in there. 0.87

01:23:44.000 Exactly. Yeah.

01:23:45.000 It's very spooky.

01:23:48.000 Well, they're spooky because they don't eat anything but meat.

01:23:51.000 So we're on the menu.

01:23:52.000 Yeah. All humans are on the menu.

01:23:54.000 Anything that walks and breathes is on the menu.

01:23:57.000 I got it here.

01:23:59.000 Where is it? 1.00

01:23:59.000 Shit. It'll take me a few minutes. 1.00

01:24:01.000 Sorry. Jamie, pause for a second.

01:24:04.000 Let me find this because it's good.

01:24:05.000 Okay. I'll just send it to you.

01:24:07.000 So, um, it looks like they're in...

01:24:10.000 I don't know where they are.

01:24:11.000 I think it'll say on the video.

01:24:13.000 So these guys...

01:24:14.000 Here, give me some volume.

01:24:16.000 Polar bears.

01:24:17.000 That's an oil rig.

01:24:19.000 So it's probably Canada.

01:24:21.000 Look at these guys.

01:24:26.000 That sound.

01:24:27.000 Yeah. They're just trying to eat you.

01:24:33.000 Look at this.

01:24:33.000 I have two more behind it.

01:24:35.000 Yep. Hey.

01:24:38.000 Go on.

01:24:43.000 Probably not going to work.

01:24:44.000 They're just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you.

01:24:47.000 Hey, sweetheart. 1.00

01:24:48.000 Hey. Sweetheart. 1.00

01:24:52.000 Sweetheart wants to rip your liver out. 1.00

01:24:55.000 Hey. Go on. 1.00

01:24:58.000 They're so beautiful.

01:24:59.000 They are beautiful.

01:25:00.000 It's interesting that they're the most dangerous ones because they're the ones we use for Coca-Cola and Klondike bars.

01:25:05.000 Yeah. Isn't that wild, though?

01:25:06.000 You have them just like playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying.

01:25:09.000 Yeah, you were saying the Younger Gyrus is really interesting.

01:25:11.000 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.

01:25:21.000 I would love to have seen what it looked like.

01:25:25.000 When all those animals were around.

01:25:27.000 We 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.

01:25:36.000 What did it look like in Kansas 15,000 years ago?

01:25:40.000 What was it like?

01:25:42.000 You know there's an extinct bison species that is the bison latifrons.

01:25:47.000 Have you seen those guys?

01:25:48.000 They have like 8 foot long Texas longhorns on like, you know, Super HGH bison. 0.87

01:25:57.000 Yeah, our bison are small compared to the extinct bisons, right?

01:26:01.000 Were they the largest of the North American bisons?

01:26:03.000 Yeah, the bison Lada Francoise.

01:26:06.000 Let's see if we can get a photo of that.

01:26:08.000 I didn't know about them until a few years ago.

01:26:10.000 I didn't even know that was a thing.

01:26:12.000 I mean, there were so many different things.

01:26:14.000 Giant sloths, there's the saber-toothed tiger, the American lion, which is...

01:26:19.000 There's an American cheetah.

01:26:20.000 Yes. The American cheetah is, you know, we actually have a full genome of it.

01:26:23.000 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.

01:26:31.000 Have you seen the stellar sea cow?

01:26:33.000 No. What is that?

01:26:35.000 Think of, like, a manatee or dugong, right, that's the size of, like, a large whale.

01:26:40.000 What? Yeah.

01:26:41.000 And the sad thing is it died off.

01:26:43.000 It actually died off before.

01:26:45.000 It died off in, yeah.

01:26:47.000 Whoa! It died off, though, within 100 years of its discovery.

01:26:51.000 When was that? 0.96

01:26:53.000 We killed them all, huh? 1.00

01:26:54.000 Yeah, we killed them all. 1.00

01:26:55.000 They probably turned them into candles or something. 0.99

01:26:56.000 Yeah, or burned their fat, yeah.

01:26:58.000 Yeah. But it was actually really important.

01:27:03.000 Serenian. To ever exist. 1.00

01:27:06.000 It was hunted to extinction only 30 years after being described in the 18th century.

01:27:10.000 Wow. What a bunch of fuckheads people are. 1.00

01:27:13.000 We have a full genome of this too, which is pretty cool. 0.99

01:27:15.000 You gonna bring it back?

01:27:16.000 We can't just.

01:27:16.000 I would bring this back in a heartbeat.

01:27:18.000 It was hugely important to the kelp forest of the Pacific Northwest.

01:27:22.000 It was great.

01:27:23.000 It's not scary.

01:27:24.000 It's huge.

01:27:25.000 Right, but then if you bring that back, why wouldn't you bring back a Megalodon?

01:27:29.000 There is no Megalodon DNA.

01:27:31.000 There's none?

01:27:31.000 No. I will say that the CEO of the largest...

01:27:35.000 The president and CEO of the largest free museum in America really wants me to do Megalodon.

01:27:46.000 But he's like, I can never say that publicly.

01:27:48.000 I think he just outed him.

01:27:50.000 Yeah, but there's a lot of museums.

01:27:52.000 I could be wrong on the size.

01:27:53.000 Yeah, whatever.

01:27:53.000 He's great, though.

01:27:54.000 But there is no DNA.

01:27:56.000 He would have to eat a lot.

01:27:58.000 We've already killed everything in the ocean, unfortunately.

01:27:59.000 So one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal.

01:28:04.000 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.

01:28:25.000 You could then reintroduce them with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts, right?

01:28:30.000 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.

01:28:38.000 We are really just kind of focused on kind of the core science that supports their initiatives.

01:28:42.000 But if we are successful with our artificial wombs and we are quite – I would not be surprised if eventually you see a... 1.00

01:28:55.000 We have to get a mouse first.

01:28:56.000 Have you guys had these conversations where you sit down, you go, how does this scale outward?

01:29:01.000 What does this look like, this technology in 100 years? 0.98

01:29:04.000 Did we just fuck up?

01:29:05.000 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... 0.99

01:29:15.000 People having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people freezing their embryos, all of that's massively on the increase.

01:29:27.000 It's all going up to the right, right?

01:29:28.000 And we also know that globally, sperm and fertility and others is going down to the right, right?

01:29:35.000 So it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general.

01:29:39.000 And so I think though, especially, and then we also have And, uh...

01:29:45.000 I think it is harder to grow a rhino.

01:30:12.000 in an artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human.

01:30:17.000 Not ethically or through an FDA process, but it is scientifically harder to gestate some of the animals we're trying to gestate ex-utero.

01:30:25.000 So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population.

01:30:29.000 But that's where it gets really weird, right?

01:30:32.000 You could create a child with no mother or father.

01:30:37.000 I think it's about optionality, right?

01:30:38.000 I think that there are certain situations where that would be a blessing.

01:30:42.000 You know, I just had my first kid, so we did not grow up in an artificial womb.

01:30:48.000 Yeah, but I mean, the people that are skeptical about this stuff, this is what they point to.

01:30:52.000 It's like, what is involved in the creation of life?

01:30:56.000 Well, it's been people having sex, and then a sperm fertilizes the egg, a child is born.

01:31:04.000 They raise the child.

01:31:06.000 It gets some of their behavior characteristics.

01:31:08.000 It gets the genetics.

01:31:09.000 And then we integrate it into a community.

01:31:12.000 But if you could just make life without any of that, like, what is that?

01:31:17.000 Where is that?

01:31:19.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:31:20.000 No, it's a great philosophy.

01:31:22.000 How much of the child's development is taking place while it's in the mother and sharing?

01:31:29.000 That shared experience, the hormonal cues and whatnot.

01:31:32.000 I wouldn't have a child that way.

01:31:34.000 Right, what if you're making a sociopath? 0.84

01:31:36.000 Like, what if you're making a completely unempathetic...

01:31:38.000 Because there's no...

01:31:39.000 No empathy.

01:31:40.000 There's no connection.

01:31:41.000 No connection to people.

01:31:42.000 They come out, out of the gate. 1.00

01:31:43.000 Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up. 1.00

01:31:45.000 Like, really? 1.00

01:31:46.000 No, it's a fair point.

01:31:48.000 We don't know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman's body. 0.96

01:31:52.000 And there's people that are working on this technology specifically for humans.

01:31:55.000 Like, right now, we're focusing on it for extinct species and endangered animals.

01:31:59.000 The question was, when this scales out, when you scale out 100 years from now, what did you just do?

01:32:06.000 Well, I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if...

01:32:10.000 If we had a world where we...

01:32:12.000 If Colossal gets ultimate success, I'd say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.

01:32:18.000 that 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.

01:32:44.000 It can actually keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter so it sequesters more carbon.

01:32:50.000 So I think this idea of nature-based and living with nature in a ecological...

01:32:56.000 In an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at.

01:33:00.000 And I hope that, you know, Colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the endangered species list.

01:33:07.000 So what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoths specifically in this study that showed that it would help.

01:33:12.000 But they've already done it with like musk ox, horses, and a few other species up there.

01:33:17.000 So they're doing it right now.

01:33:19.000 They've been doing it for over 20 years.

01:33:21.000 And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia.

01:33:29.000 Yeah, that was something that Sergey and Nikita Zimov wanted to do.

01:33:36.000 How long before some Russian oligarch hunts a mammoth?

01:33:39.000 Yeah, I mean, look, given the geopolit, you know, we see, going back to your wolf example, we see boundaries and geopolitical lines, right?

01:33:48.000 The animals don't, right?

01:33:50.000 And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoths in Siberia for many Um... But you think you will rewild a mammoth.

01:33:58.000 Yeah, I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at colossal.com forward slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around, like, everyone from academia to private landowners to indigenous people groups, governments, to understand, like, we don't have a thylacine. 0.99

01:34:19.000 I think we'll have a thylacine in the next eight years.

01:34:21.000 I really do.

01:34:22.000 I 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?

01:34:33.000 But we actually, if you just kind of scroll through into the people...

01:34:36.000 So it's a wolf-like marsupial.

01:34:38.000 Yeah. Does it actually have a pouch?

01:34:39.000 It does.

01:34:40.000 It actually also has a backward pouch.

01:34:42.000 So most pouches, other than, like, the wombat, are forward-facing.

01:34:47.000 It is backwards because it was, they think, because it was a burrowing animal.

01:34:51.000 Ah, so to protect the babies.

01:34:53.000 Yeah, like, absolutely suffocate them.

01:34:54.000 God, nature's fascinating.

01:34:56.000 But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, and just, like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines.

01:35:07.000 We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania.

01:35:10.000 Around rewilding the thylacine.

01:35:12.000 And one of the groups that we have involved in it is the Logging Commission.

01:35:16.000 Going back to your, you know, how do we live with nature?

01:35:19.000 Kind of like with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers.

01:35:21.000 Well, the biggest economic driver right now in Tasmania is actually the Logging Commission.

01:35:30.000 So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a...

01:35:35.000 And into the forest without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world.

01:35:41.000 And so we, going back, like the thylacine and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups.

01:35:48.000 So that people can get excited about, you know, what are the challenges?

01:35:53.000 What are the unintended consequences?

01:35:55.000 And that's not our job to persuade them.

01:35:57.000 It's just our job to kind of listen to them and then figure it out.

01:35:59.000 And, you know, that approach of like listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities.

01:36:06.000 has helped us, I think, traumatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.

01:36:10.000 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 be?

01:36:18.000 I mean, you haven't done any rewilding, let's be clear to everybody.

01:36:21.000 Yes. They're not releasing dire wolves.

01:36:22.000 And the woolly mice are not getting released.

01:36:24.000 Right, right, right.

01:36:25.000 So this is all theoretical.

01:36:26.000 Yes. But if you do have one, what would you look at specifically?

01:36:32.000 How do you take into account all the differences?

01:36:35.000 The amount of animals it's going to eat.

01:36:42.000 But these animals are not conditioned.

01:36:45.000 They haven't evolved to be around this thing.

01:36:47.000 It's been almost 100 years since the last one was there.

01:36:50.000 So on the evolved part, this is actually kind of weird.

01:36:52.000 So you do ecological field studies.

01:36:55.000 So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land.

01:37:03.000 So you have to work with these kind of big working groups.

01:37:04.000 We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.

01:37:09.000 And 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?

01:37:16.000 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.

01:37:25.000 other things.

01:37:25.000 And we put them out near camera traps in central Tasmania.

01:37:28.000 And 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.

01:37:39.000 They'll see a cat and they'll kind of look at it when they see it.

01:37:41.000 And remember, to your point, there's hundreds For them, it's multiple generations, right?

01:37:45.000 Because these animals don't live hundreds of years.

01:37:47.000 And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze and they absolutely freak out.

01:37:55.000 Wow. Yeah.

01:37:56.000 So we've been collecting this data for 18 months and we're publishing a paper on it.

01:38:01.000 That is so cool.

01:38:02.000 There's like generational trauma that is baked in to their DNA.

01:38:08.000 To avoid a thylacine.

01:38:10.000 That's the only way they survive.

01:38:11.000 I mean, without a language to pass down information.

01:38:14.000 It makes you wonder how much of that is in us.

01:38:18.000 When people have aphidiophobia or arachnophobia, fear of snakes and spiders, what is that from?

01:38:25.000 Because it's crippling.

01:38:26.000 I've seen people that have crippling fear of spiders where it doesn't even make any sense.

01:38:30.000 Well, they probably, somebody got almost killed by a spider.

01:38:35.000 And that's inside of them.

01:38:36.000 Those genes passed on.

01:38:39.000 And you see a spider.

01:38:41.000 They freak out, man.

01:38:42.000 When I was doing Fear Factor, if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what?

01:38:48.000 That's on the show.

01:38:50.000 That's like me and Heights.

01:38:51.000 Every episode you had back in the day of Heights.

01:38:53.000 That's because you're smart. 1.00

01:38:55.000 It's fucking terrifying. 0.99

01:38:57.000 Whenever I'm in a fucking hotel and I'm on the 50th floor, I'm like, why? 0.99

01:39:02.000 Why? Because I don't have, like, road noise. 0.99

01:39:04.000 I'm like, but it's going to be really hard to get out of here.

01:39:06.000 This is so sketchy.

01:39:07.000 It's so scary.

01:39:08.000 It's just like the building moves a little bit when it's windy.

01:39:11.000 Yeah. Fuck all this. 1.00

01:39:12.000 I saw my toilet water shaking the other day. 1.00

01:39:14.000 Fuck that! 1.00

01:39:14.000 No. Here? 1.00

01:39:16.000 Yeah, Jamie lives way up high.

01:39:18.000 Jamie sends me pictures from his house.

01:39:20.000 I freak out.

01:39:20.000 Like, no.

01:39:21.000 No, I can't.

01:39:22.000 No, no, no, no.

01:39:22.000 I'm not.

01:39:23.000 I wouldn't.

01:39:23.000 I just, I like to be on the ground.

01:39:25.000 I like to be on the ground.

01:39:26.000 Well, I hate flying, too, which sucks, because I fly all the time. 0.99

01:39:30.000 I'm just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit. 0.99

01:39:33.000 Because the worst is when you're sitting there, and there's now been these renders of planes that have glass or plexiglass. 0.99

01:39:39.000 I'm like, I don't want to see that.

01:39:40.000 I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don't shut the windows.

01:39:46.000 I'm in the tube.

01:39:47.000 It's lit on fire.

01:39:49.000 I just want to go.

01:39:50.000 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, there's not that much.

01:39:58.000 There's like 10,000 feet.

01:40:00.000 3,000 feet below me.

01:40:02.000 When 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.

01:40:07.000 A Delta Airlines life.

01:40:09.000 Yeah. It wasn't like crazy airline you've never heard of.

01:40:13.000 It was a person who was not that good at flying and kind of recent.

01:40:16.000 Yeah. Like, hey.

01:40:17.000 Yeah. Hire someone better.

01:40:20.000 Yeah. And I go to D.C. a decent amount.

01:40:22.000 And so, like, the whole D.C. thing, like, absolutely freaked me out.

01:40:25.000 Oh, yeah.

01:40:25.000 Yeah. Because sometimes I stay at some of those hotels that are right on the river, and you see the choppers fly.

01:40:30.000 You see the choppers fly.

01:40:31.000 You see the choppers fly.

01:40:32.000 The D.C. one.

01:40:33.000 But look how much the water is shaking at this pool.

01:40:35.000 Oh, yeah.

01:40:36.000 Do you see the one in Thailand?

01:40:37.000 This is where it was.

01:40:38.000 Oh, did you see the water that's flying off the roofs in Thailand?

01:40:41.000 Yeah, in the...

01:40:41.000 Flying off the roofs, where you see, like, from the ground, it looks like it's raining.

01:40:47.000 It's crazy.

01:40:48.000 Anyways. Yeah, well, that would be the last day I would spend in that fucking room. 1.00

01:40:53.000 Yeah, you're out. 1.00

01:40:54.000 Like, that's it.

01:40:55.000 Done. Bye-bye.

01:40:57.000 If I saw a ghost, I'm like, alright, I'm moving.

01:40:58.000 Yeah, bye-bye.

01:40:59.000 Maybe. Maybe the ghost is cool.

01:41:01.000 I'm not totally scared of ghosts, because I don't think ghosts have ever killed anybody.

01:41:05.000 You know, I'm scared of thylacines. 0.57

01:41:07.000 I'm not scared of thylacines.

01:41:09.000 They start off the size of a grain of rice.

01:41:11.000 It's gotta be really nice to them.

01:41:13.000 It's kind of like AI.

01:41:14.000 You gotta be really nice to it.

01:41:15.000 Yes. I saw a great gift.

01:41:18.000 I saw this great image on X the other day that is like, it's got all the robots lining up to kill humans.

01:41:24.000 And it's like, no, not this one.

01:41:25.000 It said thank you in its request.

01:41:27.000 Oh, boy.

01:41:28.000 So I was like, I'm going to be very nice on all of my requests on Croc.

01:41:32.000 Well, I have a weird situation going on at my house because I have chickens, but I eat chicken.

01:41:36.000 And I don't eat the chickens that I have.

01:41:38.000 I eat their eggs.

01:41:40.000 But they're cute.

01:41:41.000 I'm like, hey, girls, what's up, ladies?

01:41:43.000 I have no desire to harm them.

01:41:44.000 I try to protect them.

01:41:45.000 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. 1.00

01:41:52.000 Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs...

01:41:59.000 I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but if you have at least two eggs a week, that lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%.

01:42:06.000 Yeah. It turns out Alzheimer's is connected to a lot of stuff that's in your diet.

01:42:11.000 Or an inflammation.

01:42:11.000 Yeah. Yeah.

01:42:12.000 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.

01:42:24.000 Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that.

01:42:26.000 Yeah. Which is really weird to think of it that way.

01:42:29.000 But it's just so much, I mean, obviously you know this now because you're on a health path.

01:42:34.000 Yeah. And you feel much better.

01:42:36.000 Isn't it nuts? 1.00

01:42:37.000 How many people are just running around out there feeling like shit? 1.00

01:42:40.000 Well, I was. 1.00

01:42:41.000 I was.

01:42:41.000 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...

01:42:48.000 I built a handful of different technology companies.

01:42:50.000 My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it.

01:42:55.000 And this was in early, late 2019, early 2020.

01:42:59.000 I had to be in Tokyo and I had to be in Shanghai.

01:43:02.000 So I came back.

01:43:03.000 I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in Vegas. 0.99

01:43:06.000 Saw everyone in the world, right, that's there, because it's stupid big. 0.86

01:43:09.000 A 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. 0.92

01:43:17.000 And I was with my number two at the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer.

01:43:23.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:43:35.000 sudden cardiac event.

01:43:37.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:43:38.000 And so that for me was a big wake-up call because I got really sick during COVID.

01:43:42.000 Like I was on that early strain of COVID.

01:43:44.000 And there's definitely multiple strains.

01:43:46.000 I don't care what anyone tells you.

01:43:47.000 There's definitely multiple things that came out of the thing.

01:43:51.000 And so I got super, super sick.

01:43:54.000 And, you know, I now rarely drink.

01:43:57.000 I rarely have caffeine.

01:43:58.000 You know, I've kind of tried to cut out some exercise regularly.

01:44:02.000 And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light.

01:44:10.000 I do that every day now.

01:44:11.000 Every day.

01:44:12.000 Every day.

01:44:12.000 Yeah, that's beautiful.

01:44:13.000 That's awesome, man.

01:44:14.000 You're lifting weights, too?

01:44:15.000 Yeah, lifting weights on a regimen, everything.

01:44:17.000 That's so important.

01:44:18.000 Yeah. So important.

01:44:19.000 And I tell people it's not even a vanity thing.

01:44:21.000 Don't do it because you want big muscles.

01:44:23.000 Preserve your tissue.

01:44:24.000 Preserve your bone mass.

01:44:26.000 I don't want to be like I now have a nine-month-old son, right?

01:44:29.000 And he wants to hang out.

01:44:30.000 And he's going to get bigger.

01:44:32.000 And if I can't pick him up, that's a sad day.

01:44:35.000 And I've kind of gotten this mindset of like I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can't walk.

01:44:42.000 It's kind of a blessing to walk.

01:44:45.000 So why would I squander that blessing?

01:44:48.000 Why would I not lean into it and make sure that when I'm 90 I can walk?

01:44:52.000 Yeah, it's a blessing to be healthy.

01:44:54.000 It's a blessing.

01:44:55.000 We're so concerned about our day-to-day existence that we lose track of this big picture.

01:45:01.000 Yeah, you have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn't possible You would wish it was possible and that is get healthier 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.

01:45:17.000 Diet doesn't change it.

01:45:18.000 This is just who you are as a being and it goes away.

01:45:21.000 But that's not even remotely true.

01:45:23.000 It's actually the opposite.

01:45:25.000 There's friends that I have that are my age and they look like they're my dad.

01:45:29.000 Yeah. And that's...

01:45:31.000 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. 0.68

01:45:39.000 Yeah, and I'm not, like, I'm on the journey. 0.79

01:45:41.000 I'm not at the end, right?

01:45:42.000 It is a constant journey.

01:45:43.000 I'm on the journey.

01:45:44.000 We're all on the journey.

01:45:45.000 But, like, since I started working with Gary, like, I did, have you seen this function test?

01:45:50.000 Have you done the function test?

01:45:51.000 What is the function test?

01:45:51.000 It's like function health.

01:45:53.000 It's just a suit.

01:45:54.000 It'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.

01:46:03.000 It's like two tests twice a year.

01:46:05.000 And so I do that test.

01:46:08.000 And after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my biological age or my actual age is 43.

01:46:15.000 My biological age is 35.

01:46:18.000 And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients.

01:46:24.000 You know, I buy, and you can actually taste a difference, right? 0.98

01:46:27.000 If 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. 0.99

01:46:35.000 It tastes better than something that you buy that's terrible at a store. 0.94

01:46:38.000 But 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.

01:46:52.000 You can taste the difference in the nutrient density.

01:46:54.000 It's insane.

01:46:56.000 Have you had a lot of wild game?

01:46:58.000 Yeah, so that's what I order now.

01:46:59.000 So I do elk steaks, I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary recommended to me.

01:47:07.000 It's just great.

01:47:08.000 Is it bison?

01:47:08.000 Do they have bison as well?

01:47:09.000 They do have bison too, yeah.

01:47:10.000 It's Parker Pastures.

01:47:12.000 When I have a steak from these guys, you can taste it.

01:47:17.000 I've had my brother-in-law and my father-in-law I had friends.

01:47:20.000 I was like, no, no, we're going to try these steaks out of the freezer.

01:47:22.000 I was like, we're not just going to buy something.

01:47:24.000 Well, it looks different.

01:47:25.000 It looks different.

01:47:25.000 Yeah, it looks different.

01:47:26.000 The coloration.

01:47:27.000 You get a pink steak from the grocery store, which is fine.

01:47:30.000 You cook it.

01:47:31.000 It tastes great.

01:47:31.000 But if you get a grass-fed, grass-finished steak.

01:47:34.000 Grass-finished, 100%.

01:47:35.000 A lot of ranches out here.

01:47:37.000 Texas is a great place.

01:47:39.000 There's a lot of ranches out here that use regenerative agriculture, and they sell.

01:47:43.000 The animals that they kill, and it's like a dark red meat.

01:47:47.000 Yeah, it looks completely different.

01:47:48.000 It tastes different.

01:47:49.000 You want to eat more of it.

01:47:51.000 I feel full, but I want to finish it, and I also feel like... 0.98

01:47:56.000 My body likes this because it's getting shit that it hasn't been getting. 0.95

01:47:59.000 You feel better when you eat it. 0.98

01:48:00.000 You literally feel energized.

01:48:02.000 I've given people elk before and one of the things they say is, I do have so much energy.

01:48:06.000 I'm like, yeah.

01:48:07.000 Welcome to my world.

01:48:08.000 It's awesome.

01:48:09.000 It is so great.

01:48:11.000 In the early days of Colossal, that was one of the things that we got asked by heads of state.

01:48:17.000 Not by just random people.

01:48:20.000 Random people on the internet do it.

01:48:21.000 Some people at large at different locations.

01:48:24.000 They're like, Can we eat him?

01:48:27.000 Can we eat a mammoth? 0.91

01:48:28.000 What's it taste like?

01:48:29.000 That question came up faster than we thought.

01:48:32.000 Jesus Christ.

01:48:33.000 I know.

01:48:33.000 That was in the first...

01:48:34.000 People are so weird.

01:48:35.000 Like, they just don't...

01:48:36.000 I imagine wanting to eat something that's been extinct for 10,000 years, you just bring it back.

01:48:40.000 Not even yet.

01:48:42.000 Yeah, and that was the first question.

01:48:43.000 Can I eat this?

01:48:44.000 Yeah. I won't bully my mistake, my friend.

01:48:47.000 It was also domestic, the question happened domestically.

01:48:50.000 Oh, domestic.

01:48:50.000 Yeah. Like, people in very big states.

01:48:53.000 Yeah, I know.

01:48:54.000 They have too much money.

01:48:54.000 Yeah. Fucking psychos.

01:48:56.000 Yeah, it's been... 1.00

01:48:57.000 Go buy a car, you retards. 1.00

01:49:00.000 I don't want to eat a mammoth. 1.00

01:49:01.000 That's so crazy.

01:49:03.000 We get that.

01:49:04.000 We get so many weird questions.

01:49:06.000 We get the dinosaur question.

01:49:08.000 Probably the number one question we get is the dinosaur question.

01:49:12.000 Do you think if they brought Jurassic Park, if Spielberg did it today, they'd have feathers?

01:49:17.000 We know that some dinosaurs had feathers.

01:49:21.000 We know some had hair.

01:49:24.000 And we know some that were just scaly.

01:49:26.000 We have preserves of them.

01:49:27.000 We can see in the fossil record whether they had it, right?

01:49:30.000 Have you seen the one that's in the Montana University?

01:49:33.000 There's a university in Bozeman that has a museum.

01:49:37.000 Isn't the university?

01:49:39.000 It might just be a museum.

01:49:40.000 But 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.

01:49:51.000 And, you know, you look at it and you go, oh. 0.99

01:49:54.000 It's just like, oh, that's a fucking... 0.99

01:49:55.000 It's a bird. 0.99

01:49:57.000 Yeah. Like, no, it makes sense.

01:49:58.000 Like, it makes more sense with its little stupid arms. 1.00

01:50:00.000 Like, it makes more sense that it's a bird. 1.00

01:50:02.000 Have you seen the Watson?

01:50:04.000 No. Can we pull up a Watson?

01:50:06.000 So this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon.

01:50:09.000 And it is...

01:50:10.000 It's called a...

01:50:11.000 I don't know how you spell it, but it's like H-O-A-T-Z-E-N or something like that.

01:50:17.000 We can find it.

01:50:17.000 Yeah. Apparently it also smells terrible.

01:50:19.000 But if you click...

01:50:21.000 If you type in...

01:50:22.000 Oh yeah, it's the Hotzen.

01:50:24.000 And then if you click in and find a baby picture, it's got these little creepy hands.

01:50:29.000 It looks like kind of like a bird-like dinosaur.

01:50:33.000 We did the Gina one that's for fun. 0.98

01:50:34.000 Oh yeah, you can see it.

01:50:35.000 It climbs.

01:50:37.000 So before it ever climbs, it actually climbs up everything.

01:50:40.000 Well, when you look at an eagle's talon, you're like, what the hell is that?

01:50:44.000 And then it evolves.

01:50:45.000 Like if you – the first kind of like quote-unquote dinosaur bird out there, it actually – yeah, it crawls.

01:50:54.000 It crawls like it doesn't fly.

01:50:57.000 You know, most birds just sit there with their little like wing nubs and just don't do anything.

01:51:01.000 What about terror birds?

01:51:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:51:06.000 Those are scary.

01:51:07.000 That's a crazy animal. 0.62

01:51:08.000 Like, what the hell was that thing? 0.53

01:51:10.000 And that was, what was that?

01:51:11.000 How many...

01:51:12.000 Years ago, did those things go extinct?

01:51:13.000 Oh, those were millions.

01:51:14.000 Millions, right?

01:51:15.000 The oldest DNA that we have is about 1.5 million years old.

01:51:19.000 That's it?

01:51:20.000 Yeah. So dinosaurs are out of the picture.

01:51:21.000 So you can...

01:51:23.000 A guy you should talk to about, not that, but that's interesting, is Kenneth Lacovara.

01:51:28.000 He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including Dreadnoughts, which is just...

01:51:33.000 It's the craziest thing ever.

01:51:35.000 Dreadnought. Dreadnoughtus.

01:51:37.000 And going back to the issues that...

01:51:39.000 What is Dreadnoughtus?

01:51:40.000 Oh, Dreadnoughtus is amazing.

01:51:42.000 So, I don't know if it looks like that.

01:51:44.000 Whoa! Imagine if it did.

01:51:47.000 Yeah, go to that.

01:51:47.000 What cool colors.

01:51:49.000 Yeah. So it's a plan eater.

01:51:50.000 Yeah, it's a plan eater. 1.00

01:51:52.000 It's the size of a fucking 737. 1.00

01:51:54.000 It's almost as big as a 737. 1.00

01:51:56.000 That's so crazy.

01:51:57.000 Going back to this crazy notion of museums...

01:52:02.000 He found it in Argentina.

01:52:04.000 And he's amazing.

01:52:06.000 Kenneth Lacovara, he's amazing.

01:52:08.000 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.

01:52:20.000 The government changed, and they yanked it back.

01:52:23.000 You know the old school, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark?

01:52:26.000 That's where it is.

01:52:27.000 It's basically in a warehouse.

01:52:29.000 So it's on display for...

01:52:30.000 People in a museum.

01:52:31.000 It's literally, this goes back to some of these governments and these museums.

01:52:36.000 It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in Western Argentina.

01:52:40.000 Really? Yeah.

01:52:41.000 And it's like the coolest thing ever.

01:52:44.000 This is, yeah.

01:52:44.000 So yeah, that's Lacovara's lab.

01:52:46.000 And so.

01:52:48.000 But it's truly, truly amazing.

01:52:50.000 So with these, like, that's one of the things about dinosaurs in museums, right?

01:52:54.000 Like, a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks.

01:52:59.000 Yeah, fill in a lot of the blanks.

01:53:00.000 Sometimes they'll get, like, a jawbone, and they're like, and here's the reconstruction.

01:53:04.000 Right. It's weird, because you go to see it, and you think you're going to see a dinosaur bone.

01:53:09.000 And it's only a percentage complete.

01:53:10.000 Yeah, and sometimes they're real clever.

01:53:12.000 And sometimes they're not.

01:53:14.000 Sometimes it'll be different colors for the real bone.

01:53:16.000 And you're like, how much of this do you have?

01:53:19.000 And they're like, 4%.

01:53:20.000 How did you guess what it looked like?

01:53:23.000 And a lot of the images of the soft tissue overlay, like when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it.

01:53:30.000 Have you ever seen what rabbits look like if you take away their--Yeah, they did this with whales It looks like an alien monster.

01:53:52.000 Yeah, like an alien monster.

01:53:54.000 So I wonder what we were looking at.

01:53:56.000 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.

01:54:05.000 Yeah. A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid. 0.99

01:54:09.000 When did that thing die off? 1.00

01:54:10.000 I don't know.

01:54:11.000 It would probably be in the late Pleistocene.

01:54:15.000 One of the things I learned through Rinella is that at the...

01:54:19.000 Founding of this country in the early days.

01:54:20.000 The richest man in the world was selling beaver pelts.

01:54:23.000 Oh, really?

01:54:24.000 It was the richest guy in the world.

01:54:25.000 Yeah. Here at the Pleistocene.

01:54:28.000 Well, on the dinosaur boat.

01:54:30.000 So this beaver, giant beaver, enormous, bear-sized beaver that lived in North America during the Pleistocene.

01:54:37.000 Wow. So when did these die off?

01:54:39.000 What year?

01:54:40.000 What was the Pleistocene officially?

01:54:43.000 So about...

01:54:44.000 13,000 years ago.

01:54:46.000 Wow, so it probably died off with American Lion and all that other stuff.

01:54:51.000 You know the pronghorn?

01:54:54.000 You know the whole story about that?

01:54:55.000 Yeah, that's why they're so fast.

01:54:57.000 Oh, because of the American lion?

01:54:59.000 No, American cheetah.

01:55:00.000 American cheetah.

01:55:01.000 Like, they're the last of these animals.

01:55:03.000 They're a bizarre animal.

01:55:04.000 Have you ever seen one in real life?

01:55:05.000 No, I've never seen one in real life.

01:55:06.000 I've only seen it through binoculars.

01:55:08.000 I've never seen one, you know, on the ground real close.

01:55:11.000 I've only seen it from a few hundred yards away.

01:55:13.000 But when you look at images of them, they have insane eyesight.

01:55:17.000 They have almost 360-degree vision.

01:55:20.000 Their eyes are on the side of their heads.

01:55:22.000 Yeah, I've seen the pictures.

01:55:23.000 And they can run.

01:55:24.000 55 miles an hour.

01:55:25.000 That's amazing.

01:55:26.000 And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don't exist anymore.

01:55:29.000 Yeah. So the cheetahs died off in the Younger Dryas Impact Theater or whatever happened, but these pronghorn antelopes remain, and they are... 0.81

01:55:38.000 There's nothing like them in terms of speed.

01:55:41.000 That's awesome.

01:55:42.000 Like, it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone.

01:55:48.000 They remain.

01:55:49.000 Yes. Can anything catch them now?

01:55:50.000 Nothing. Once they're done, like, once they're grown, good fucking luck. 0.99

01:55:55.000 They have insane eyesight. 0.99

01:55:58.000 But you know one of the ways that people hunt them? 1.00

01:56:00.000 They're really dumb. 0.99

01:56:01.000 One of the ways people hunt them is on horsebacks. 1.00

01:56:03.000 Like, that dog has zero chance. 1.00

01:56:05.000 But the cheetah, the cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down. 1.00

01:56:09.000 So it's like another, you know, different kind of antelope. 0.99

01:56:13.000 But a super fast, they're quite a bit faster, I bet, than these antelope. 0.77

01:56:17.000 They're crazy fast.

01:56:18.000 There's like nothing like them in North America.

01:56:20.000 It's awesome.

01:56:21.000 But the vision that these things have, give me a photo of one of their heads, Pronghorn's eyes.

01:56:27.000 They're so weird looking.

01:56:28.000 They look archaic.

01:56:30.000 Like if you see their face, they don't look like, it looks like they're from another time.

01:56:35.000 It looks like from a Star Wars movie.

01:56:37.000 Yeah. They look like they're from another time.

01:56:40.000 And they are.

01:56:41.000 They're literally on the side of that.

01:56:42.000 This is what would have been so amazing to look at what the Earth looked like 12,000 years ago.

01:56:49.000 It is cool.

01:56:50.000 To 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.

01:57:07.000 Like, at dusk, you've got, like, echidnas running around, and you've got wallabies jumping through.

01:57:13.000 And they all just come through, and you're like...

01:57:15.000 It's like that scene in, like, Ace Ventura, right? 0.98

01:57:18.000 Where he sings, and, like, everything fucking comes to him. 0.96

01:57:20.000 And I remember the first... 0.98

01:57:21.000 I was like, this isn't real.

01:57:23.000 Like, are these animatronics?

01:57:24.000 Like, there's no way there's this much life in biodiversity.

01:57:27.000 And it was all just, like, you know, the echidnas are running, the wallabies are jumping.

01:57:31.000 You've got, like, wombats, like, kind of...

01:57:34.000 I wonder what would be different had the thylacine survived.

01:57:52.000 Because that was kind of the only thing that was...

01:57:54.000 It was the only apex predator for Tasmania and lower Australia.

01:57:58.000 And have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person?

01:58:02.000 Not in person.

01:58:02.000 They're awesome.

01:58:03.000 They look cool as shit. 1.00

01:58:05.000 They're cool as shit. 0.99

01:58:05.000 They're awesome. 0.99

01:58:06.000 They've eaten these little packs.

01:58:07.000 And the reason why they call them Tasmanian Devils is because they make the weirdest...

01:58:12.000 I mean, they make...

01:58:12.000 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.

01:58:19.000 This is crazy.

01:58:20.000 Yeah, they're crazy.

01:58:20.000 See if we can hear something.

01:58:26.000 Ew, cute face.

01:58:27.000 If you find them eating, they just sound terrible.

01:58:29.000 Find Tasmanian tiger noises.

01:58:34.000 I don't think I know what they mean.

01:58:35.000 Excuse me.

01:58:36.000 Tasmanian devil noises.

01:58:37.000 Sorry. Have you seen this video, though?

01:58:40.000 I have, yeah.

01:58:42.000 We can go to that in a second, too.

01:58:43.000 I just want to hear this. 1.00

01:58:47.000 Look at that fucker. 1.00

01:58:50.000 Look at his face. 1.00

01:58:53.000 So cool.

01:58:56.000 Isn't that terrifying?

01:58:58.000 You know they give each other cancer?

01:59:00.000 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:59:01.000 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...

01:59:11.000 But they go after the sick.

01:59:12.000 There's an energy expenditure ratio, right?

01:59:14.000 They're not just sitting there grazing.

01:59:16.000 They're not getting sedentary.

01:59:17.000 They have to go make the kill. 0.99

01:59:19.000 They have to decide, I'm going to go kill stuff. 0.99

01:59:21.000 So they kill the young, so they're thinning out the weakest. 1.00

01:59:24.000 They kill the old, then they kill the sick. 0.99

01:59:26.000 An environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.

01:59:34.000 And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate It's disgusting.

01:59:48.000 It's really gross.

01:59:49.000 What are we looking at here?

01:59:52.000 Oh, feeding frenzy?

01:59:53.000 Give me some volume.

01:59:56.000 It's doing it right in front of people, too, which is crazy.

01:59:58.000 I fed them like this.

02:00:00.000 It's crazy.

02:00:01.000 They're just not scared.

02:00:03.000 They are capable of consuming this.

02:00:06.000 They're like piranhas of the world.

02:00:07.000 These are Tasmanian devils, the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera.

02:00:13.000 And next to Tasmania...

02:00:15.000 It's so cool that they're not remotely scared of people.

02:00:20.000 Yeah, they don't even notice you're there.

02:00:22.000 It's crazy.

02:00:23.000 So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of...

02:00:26.000 Whose video is this, Jamie?

02:00:27.000 Coyote Peterson's.

02:00:28.000 Brave Wilderness is the channel. 1.00

02:00:30.000 Look at these little fuckers go. 1.00

02:00:31.000 And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights, and that fighting is when they... 1.00

02:00:36.000 That's when they do the transmission.

02:00:40.000 Oh, right, we've seen that.

02:00:41.000 No, I mean like...

02:00:43.000 Wow. But they literally scratch and bite each other, and then they...

02:00:49.000 It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of.

02:00:51.000 So then it latches onto the next phase.

02:00:54.000 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 off by predators first.

02:01:06.000 Right. 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.

02:01:17.000 Ugh. I can't even look.

02:01:18.000 Oh, God.

02:01:19.000 We're looking for people listening.

02:01:21.000 We're looking at tumors.

02:01:22.000 On Tasmanian Devil's Faces.

02:01:24.000 Yeah, which was terrible.

02:01:25.000 That was a perfect inspiration for a comic book character.

02:01:29.000 Or for a cartoon character, rather.

02:01:31.000 Yeah, Tasmanian Devil.

02:01:32.000 He was amazing.

02:01:33.000 They'll be sitting there, not making those sounds.

02:01:36.000 They start eating or they get threatened and they make those death sounds.

02:01:39.000 It is a terrible...

02:01:41.000 If you've never heard it before in person, it just catches you by surprise and it blows you away.

02:01:47.000 It was a pretty weird experience the first time I did it.

02:01:50.000 Yeah, I'd imagine.

02:01:51.000 That's such a cool little animal.

02:01:53.000 So the idea of ultimately eventually releasing thylacines.

02:01:59.000 How would that be done?

02:02:01.000 And what kind of study would have to be done?

02:02:03.000 Because you're talking about all these animals that come out.

02:02:05.000 Look at all the animals.

02:02:05.000 That probably won't be the case if you reintroduce some of those.

02:02:08.000 They'll start thinning it out and it'll achieve a balance.

02:02:12.000 So they've done a lot.

02:02:14.000 Let's just keep people up to date on Australia.

02:02:17.000 Most people don't know that they've introduced cats.

02:02:20.000 So house cats.

02:02:21.000 You want some water?

02:02:22.000 They introduced house cats.

02:02:25.000 Like just feral house cats in Australia to combat certain species.

02:02:30.000 And they start decimating all the other species.

02:02:33.000 It's literally the worst.

02:02:34.000 It's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate in Australia.

02:02:39.000 And it's because it's an invasive species.

02:02:42.000 Would there be a similar problem if you reintroduced the Tasmanian tiger?

02:02:48.000 Would there be...

02:02:50.000 Potentially, would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct?

02:02:53.000 The good news about the Tasmanian and the southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right?

02:03:02.000 Hopefully they'd eat the cats. 0.98

02:03:03.000 If you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats, outside of the cats that they actually own.

02:03:07.000 They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials.

02:03:10.000 They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are wild, non-domestic cats.

02:03:16.000 Yeah, people hunt them.

02:03:17.000 Yeah, people hunt them.

02:03:18.000 Like, you have a...

02:03:20.000 I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, and they have this magazine.

02:03:23.000 It's like a bowhunter magazine in Australia, and he gave me a copy of it.

02:03:25.000 I was reading it on a plane, and this guy's holding up a dead cat he shot with a bow and arrow. 0.99

02:03:29.000 I'm like, hey, man, what the fuck? 0.99

02:03:32.000 They hold them up like trophies. 0.99

02:03:34.000 Well, because it's a huge problem, right?

02:03:36.000 It goes back to the invasive species.

02:03:37.000 One of the projects that we're working on with the thiocene, because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation, is have you ever seen a northern coal?

02:03:46.000 No, what is that?

02:03:47.000 Northern Quoll.

02:03:47.000 It kind of looks like a mink or like a ferret, but way prettier.

02:03:51.000 It's amazing.

02:03:52.000 How do you spell it?

02:03:53.000 Q-U-O-L-L. 1.00

02:03:55.000 Yeah. I mean, they're absolutely beautiful.

02:03:58.000 I mean, their coats are beautiful.

02:04:00.000 But they're another type of carnivorous marsupial. 0.78

02:04:03.000 But, you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity, introduced cane toads.

02:04:11.000 Have you ever seen a cane toad?

02:04:12.000 It's like the Jabba the Hutt. 0.99

02:04:13.000 I mean, it looks fucking evil, right? 1.00

02:04:14.000 They're monsters. 0.99

02:04:15.000 And so we introduced, we as humanity, introduced cane toads into Australia.

02:04:21.000 And they have a neurotoxin.

02:04:24.000 Well, guess what most quolls and small marsupials love to eat?

02:04:27.000 Frogs and toads.

02:04:28.000 This is actually, I think, about our work.

02:04:30.000 This actually is about our work.

02:04:33.000 Actually, I think this is part of our work.

02:04:36.000 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.

02:04:52.000 And they don't die of the neurotoxin.

02:04:53.000 They don't completely stroke out and die, which is what happens in northern Australia.

02:04:59.000 And so the cane toads, they reproduce in an insane rate.

02:05:04.000 They're having thousands of babies.

02:05:05.000 There's making more and more of them.

02:05:06.000 So guess what?

02:05:07.000 More and more coals and others are eating these cane toads and dying.

02:05:11.000 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.

02:05:21.000 That make them cane-toed toxin resistant.

02:05:24.000 And here's what we found.

02:05:25.000 This is amazing.

02:05:26.000 One letter in 3.5 billion base pairs.

02:05:29.000 So one letter, a one-letter change, conferred, had no other, you know, deterioration, had no other effects that were negative.

02:05:35.000 And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane-toed.

02:05:41.000 Wow. 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.

02:05:48.000 We 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.

02:06:04.000 And 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.

02:06:21.000 They probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature.

02:06:26.000 Wow. And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation.

02:06:33.000 And so then you could like make these super quolls that eat the cane toads. 0.97

02:06:37.000 And 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.

02:06:49.000 I hope you don't have to bring in big toads to eat the quolls.

02:06:54.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:06:56.000 Have you seen those toads and frogs that latch out and they'll eat anything in front of them?

02:07:01.000 Yeah, they're terrifying.

02:07:02.000 There was a giant one of those toads back in...

02:07:07.000 I don't know, thousands of years ago.

02:07:08.000 How big was it?

02:07:09.000 I don't know.

02:07:09.000 I've seen a 3D render of it, and it, like, grabs, like, you know, deers and stuff.

02:07:14.000 It's crazy.

02:07:14.000 Whoa! We've played videos of toads eating mice.

02:07:17.000 I had no idea.

02:07:18.000 Yeah. Before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice.

02:07:23.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

02:07:23.000 So they put them in this bin with a bunch of mice, and this toad is just going ham, just snatching mice up and swallowing them.

02:07:30.000 And you'd think that they're just sitting there docile, and then they just absolutely, they throw their whole bodies at them.

02:07:34.000 Well, they sit there.

02:07:34.000 They have the creepiest...

02:07:36.000 Dead eyes. 0.82

02:07:37.000 They're just machines to eat.

02:07:38.000 You ever seen them fight with each other?

02:07:40.000 That's pretty wild too.

02:07:41.000 They bite each other's heads and they throw each other through the air.

02:07:44.000 Yeah, I've seen them toss each other.

02:07:46.000 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.

02:07:53.000 Yeah, that's just part of the fight.

02:07:55.000 That's totally, like, within the rules.

02:07:57.000 That's what creeps me out about reptiles.

02:07:59.000 There's this lack of emotions.

02:08:01.000 Like, at least a wolf has emotions, you know?

02:08:04.000 It's like there's something going on there.

02:08:05.000 There's an intelligence. 1.00

02:08:06.000 There's something really creepy about getting eaten by something stupid. 1.00

02:08:10.000 Like a crocodile. 1.00

02:08:11.000 Yeah. Like a crocodile.

02:08:13.000 Or like a toad.

02:08:14.000 There's a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting, but it turns out to not be true.

02:08:19.000 That they would lie on their back and put their arms in the air to sit.

02:08:25.000 Yeah, I saw that video.

02:08:26.000 Apparently that's not...

02:08:27.000 What they're doing.

02:08:28.000 Apparently that's a normal characteristic that they do. 1.00

02:08:31.000 But from a natural selection perspective, stupid people are like, I have to save that. 1.00

02:08:35.000 Yeah, I gotta go save that dude. 1.00

02:08:37.000 And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart, but in reality, he just got a free meal.

02:08:41.000 Yeah, well, you would think, though, if they have gotten those meals before, that that would be a learned behavior.

02:08:46.000 They do have some learned behavior.

02:08:49.000 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 So what they had done was...

02:09:13.000 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.

02:09:22.000 Because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up. 0.99

02:09:27.000 These fucking crocodiles went around the fence. 1.00

02:09:30.000 They walked around the fence and slid into the water. 1.00

02:09:33.000 So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to.

02:09:37.000 So they hunt people.

02:09:38.000 They absolutely do.

02:09:39.000 And 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.

02:09:49.000 So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know.

02:09:52.000 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.

02:10:00.000 So 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.

02:10:13.000 And they actually, that actually makes our lives very difficult.

02:10:16.000 And that's why we had to create stem cells for elephants.

02:10:19.000 Because anytime we try to, we had to figure out how to regulate P53.

02:10:22.000 Because anytime you go to edit that one cell, it just says, looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell.

02:10:29.000 Right? It's like...

02:10:30.000 So we have to be able to turn that down because we're in the editing phase on the Mammoth Project, right?

02:10:36.000 So there's about 85 genes.

02:10:37.000 If you turn that down, does that make them more susceptible to cancer?

02:10:39.000 So you've got to turn it back up after you make the edits.

02:10:41.000 Whoa! So these are the things that we are learning.

02:10:45.000 I'm with that lady doctor.

02:10:46.000 That lady scientist, you guys are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

02:10:49.000 No, we're learning about things, right?

02:10:51.000 We're learning about things, right?

02:10:52.000 I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding.

02:10:53.000 If I was her, I would probably have the same opinion.

02:10:55.000 Yeah. I'd probably say, especially if I found out you guys weren't really scientists, like, what are you doing?

02:11:00.000 Yeah. Why are you doing this?

02:11:01.000 Well, I mean, the good news is about Colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and our 95 scientific advisors.

02:11:08.000 90% of the company are scientists.

02:11:09.000 I fall in the very few.

02:11:11.000 I'm kind of kidding about you're not a scientist.

02:11:13.000 I'm definitely not a scientist.

02:11:14.000 I'm not kidding about the technology getting into someone else's hands.

02:11:17.000 This is where it gets weird.

02:11:19.000 China, Russia, some other...

02:11:21.000 It is getting weird.

02:11:23.000 CRISPR and these genome engineering tools are outside of the bottle.

02:11:27.000 It's like the genie out of the bottle.

02:11:28.000 It's out there.

02:11:29.000 You can't put it back in.

02:11:31.000 I think that...

02:11:33.000 More and more people in other countries are going to be doing things with these technologies for humans.

02:11:38.000 That's why Colossal just said, we will never do anything for humans.

02:11:41.000 If someone else wants to use our technologies for humans, we'll evaluate it.

02:11:44.000 But that gets so weird, right?

02:11:46.000 Like the China story.

02:11:47.000 You can't explain to people what they did.

02:11:49.000 They said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is...

02:11:52.000 Yeah. They actually were engineering babies and editing their embryos to confer a resistance to HIV.

02:12:02.000 Now, still to this day, so they were cloning them and then they were genetically modifying them.

02:12:08.000 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.

02:12:15.000 So anything that could be passed on to the next generation, right?

02:12:19.000 So 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.

02:12:31.000 So anything that could be affected into the germline so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be, like, you know, umbrella corporation type moment, right?

02:12:41.000 Right. So we don't want that.

02:12:42.000 The scary thing was they didn't just do that.

02:12:46.000 They also...

02:12:48.000 Well, so that part's like, that part's quoted under debate.

02:12:56.000 There's people that say that happened.

02:12:58.000 There's people that say it doesn't happen.

02:13:00.000 If you look at BGI or Beijing Genomics Institute, right, they did this thing that from an affairs perspective was And publicly,

02:13:24.000 the CEO of BGI has said, which is funded by the CCP, has said, That they are looking at genes with humans.

02:13:36.000 They are looking at what makes humans more intelligent.

02:13:39.000 They don't shy away from this.

02:13:40.000 This is not like some conspiracy theory like, is it a Sasquatch or is it just a man in an ape suit?

02:13:46.000 This is something that is very real.

02:13:48.000 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.

02:13:57.000 That's not a hidden thing.

02:13:59.000 So that is the problem.

02:14:00.000 But they supposedly did with these children.

02:14:02.000 How old are these kids now?

02:14:04.000 I mean, when did that happen?

02:14:06.000 Yeah, so they've been like six or seven.

02:14:09.000 Are they already winning chess championships?

02:14:11.000 We should find out.

02:14:12.000 We should find out.

02:14:13.000 These kids are probably in a lab somewhere with a headset on.

02:14:16.000 Teaching them how to be psychic.

02:14:18.000 I don't know how public it's...

02:14:20.000 It was also one of those weird things that was like, he's in trouble.

02:14:24.000 He's going to jail.

02:14:27.000 Yeah. And then he's like...

02:14:28.000 And then he got out.

02:14:28.000 And then he's out.

02:14:29.000 Yeah. Always forgiving.

02:14:31.000 He's a good guy.

02:14:31.000 Yeah. But meanwhile, if you go to jail in China, you fucking vanish.

02:14:35.000 Forever. Yeah. 0.99

02:14:36.000 Yeah, except for this guy.

02:14:37.000 You're making iPhones until you drop dead of starvation.

02:14:40.000 Yeah, it's 100% true.

02:14:43.000 And so it is weird that he got in trouble for a few months.

02:14:47.000 Right. And he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place.

02:14:51.000 Well, they funded his lab.

02:14:52.000 His lab was funded by the party.

02:14:54.000 And this is what we found out about. 0.98

02:14:56.000 I guarantee you there's some shit that they're doing somewhere that we haven't found out about yet. 0.98

02:15:01.000 And if you were going to do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that Russia... 0.99

02:15:06.000 Well, that's what separates us.

02:15:07.000 You know what Russia was attempting to do during, was it World War I or World War II?

02:15:12.000 They were trying to make a chimpanzee-human hybrid for war. 0.64

02:15:15.000 Oh, I saw that.

02:15:15.000 I read about that.

02:15:16.000 For war. 0.66

02:15:17.000 A chimp-human hybrid for war. 0.99

02:15:19.000 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.

02:15:32.000 With other mammalian genes.

02:15:34.000 Like, what kind of genes?

02:15:35.000 Like, woolly mammoth genes in a person?

02:15:38.000 No, we are not doing that.

02:15:39.000 People ask us if we could solve hair loss with woolly mammoths.

02:15:44.000 That would be the first thing people want. 0.99

02:15:45.000 Hair loss, next thing, bigger dicks. 1.00

02:15:47.000 Those are consistent questions. 0.98

02:15:49.000 Well, you can't engineer once a person's already born, right?

02:15:52.000 With the current technology.

02:15:53.000 With the current technology.

02:15:54.000 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.

02:16:03.000 I think one of the projects that's the furthest along is around sickle cell anemia.

02:16:12.000 It's a single CRISPR knockout, right?

02:16:14.000 So it's a single knockout.

02:16:15.000 It's not multiplex editing.

02:16:17.000 And now it's about can you target that in all of the tissue types that are the most affected?

02:16:21.000 And then over time, how do you deliver that gene therapy to everything?

02:16:25.000 And you could do that to a person who's already born?

02:16:27.000 To someone that's already born.

02:16:28.000 It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage.

02:16:30.000 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?

02:16:39.000 Yes. Whoa.

02:16:40.000 Yeah. This is what I predicted.

02:16:42.000 Everyone's going to look like Thor.

02:16:43.000 It's going to be a bunch of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Momoa's and no more people look like you and me.

02:16:49.000 Wait, so Chris is one of our investors and I always think we look just like each other.

02:16:53.000 Oh yeah, for sure.

02:16:55.000 Luke invited me to go to Byron.

02:16:57.000 If I was from another planet, I'd think you're different species.

02:16:59.000 Yeah, 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.

02:17:06.000 That's exactly what's never going to happen.

02:17:08.000 And I just made up an excuse of why I couldn't go because they We want to go surfing.

02:17:12.000 Sure you do.

02:17:14.000 I'm not going surfing with you two.

02:17:16.000 Measure Cox too?

02:17:17.000 I'm going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible.

02:17:20.000 You've got to imagine if that becomes a reality.

02:17:23.000 What we're doing today just with plastic surgery.

02:17:29.000 Let's take South Korea for example.

02:17:32.000 That's achievable.

02:17:35.000 What GLP-1s are doing is achievable through hard work. 0.99

02:17:39.000 But, like, what they're doing in South Korea with eye surgery.

02:17:42.000 Like, it's ubiquitous.

02:17:43.000 Like, so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these K-pop eyes. 0.98

02:17:47.000 Yeah. You know?

02:17:48.000 It's a strange thing.

02:17:50.000 It's a strange thing.

02:17:50.000 And that's just primitive cutting and sewing tissue artistically, right?

02:17:56.000 But if people can decide what they're going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like...

02:18:02.000 Yeah, it's a eugenics world. 0.96

02:18:03.000 Now we're really playing God.

02:18:04.000 No, no, no.

02:18:05.000 That's playing God to another level, right?

02:18:06.000 And that's this eugenics world where we know, right? 0.99

02:18:09.000 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 along the pregnancy, right?

02:18:21.000 And when they put the embryo in, they look at the morphological grade.

02:18:24.000 Well, now there's...

02:18:25.000 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.

02:18:31.000 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.

02:18:39.000 They culture those cells, and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right?

02:18:43.000 And so we had a handful of embryos.

02:18:45.000 And so not selecting, they don't let you just select for like eye color or height or anything.

02:18:49.000 But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue or is it compatible with life, which is what most people test for?

02:18:56.000 You can now, you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things?

02:19:03.000 Right. So, like, you know, if diabetes or cancer and type of disease.

02:19:06.000 Wow. 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.

02:19:32.000 So I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID that was a lab leak that attacked my heart.

02:19:41.000 Wow. And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on.

02:19:44.000 So we screened for that, right?

02:19:45.000 But that's not a standard thing.

02:19:46.000 But that's a today thing.

02:19:48.000 Like, you know, Two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.

02:19:54.000 So you understand the technology better than most.

02:19:57.000 Conceivably, 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?

02:20:10.000 I think it starts with...

02:20:12.000 You 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.

02:20:26.000 But I think it starts with things like healthspan, where it's like the very vain stuff.

02:20:32.000 So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that, eye color, I think all of that is changeable.

02:20:40.000 And not, like, What?

02:20:59.000 Wow. So you can have 30-year-old looking skin when you're 85 years old.

02:21:05.000 Yes. And the same thing for hair, right?

02:21:07.000 The reason why our hair...

02:21:08.000 That's going to be real soon?

02:21:10.000 Yes, I mean, the speed of which...

02:21:12.000 I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process and not the technology.

02:21:24.000 I think it will be a process problem.

02:21:26.000 We saw that with Operation Warp Drive, right?

02:21:28.000 We saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to.

02:21:31.000 So I think that's number one.

02:21:33.000 So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles, but right now the technology exists.

02:21:40.000 Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of...

02:21:43.000 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.

02:21:51.000 So they're not getting NIH funding.

02:21:54.000 All that funding is going to other random stuff.

02:21:57.000 But people aren't focusing on longevity.

02:22:00.000 That's why you've got...

02:22:00.000 You've seen anything that Bob Nelson's done.

02:22:03.000 Bob 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.

02:22:12.000 That's what Jeff Bezos and them have.

02:22:14.000 They're doing it at Altos Labs.

02:22:16.000 George Church has another company called Rejuvenate Bio.

02:22:18.000 They're doing the same things, and they're smart.

02:22:20.000 They did it in dogs first.

02:22:21.000 Yeah, I know.

02:22:26.000 There's a lot of people cloning their dogs now.

02:22:29.000 Yeah, I didn't bring Marshall to the studio.

02:22:34.000 We did clone one person's dog.

02:22:37.000 I couldn't do it.

02:22:37.000 I love him too much.

02:22:39.000 I couldn't do it.

02:22:40.000 I would feel so weird around this fake Marshall.

02:22:43.000 Yeah. I wouldn't want to do that.

02:22:45.000 Yeah. And that's how people feel about it.

02:22:47.000 Dogs are unique little creatures.

02:22:49.000 They have their own little personalities.

02:22:50.000 I know.

02:22:51.000 I've got two and they're amazing.

02:22:52.000 And, you know, I did...

02:22:54.000 My wife is... 0.95

02:23:00.000 Just in case?

02:23:03.000 Wow. Devastated because his dog was dying.

02:23:26.000 And they didn't want to put her in any harm.

02:23:29.000 They didn't want to go to one of these dog cloning companies and do like, they didn't want to put her to sleep.

02:23:33.000 They didn't think she'd wake back up.

02:23:34.000 So we did a blood draw.

02:23:36.000 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.

02:23:47.000 Could we do it for her?

02:23:49.000 And we did it for him.

02:23:51.000 We're not in that business.

02:23:52.000 That's not our business.

02:23:54.000 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.

02:23:59.000 His biggest issue was they couldn't let go of that dog, number one.

02:24:04.000 And number two, but they didn't want that dog to suffer.

02:24:07.000 They didn't want to say, for our selfish means, you're already suffering. 0.91

02:24:11.000 We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken, like Frankenstein, pieces of you. 0.61

02:24:15.000 And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw. 0.62

02:24:18.000 I was like totally awake, just sitting right there while we did it.

02:24:21.000 He was happy with that.

02:24:23.000 What if that dog is going to be reincarnated into a higher level of existence and you stop it and put it on this downward business?

02:24:33.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:24:34.000 We don't really exactly know what life is.

02:24:37.000 No, we don't.

02:24:38.000 We definitely don't know life.

02:24:39.000 Here's one thing that his assistant told my chief of staff.

02:24:44.000 He said to her, he's like, you know what's weird?

02:24:46.000 I didn't think it was the same dog at all.

02:24:47.000 It's definitely not the same dog.

02:24:49.000 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?

02:24:55.000 I don't know the exact place, but it would always go sit in the exact same place the other dog sat.

02:24:58.000 So there's weird stuff.

02:24:59.000 We don't understand this.

02:25:00.000 That would creep me out.

02:25:01.000 It would creep me out, too.

02:25:02.000 Because Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps.

02:25:05.000 And if that happens, yeah.

02:25:06.000 It would creep me out.

02:25:07.000 Yeah. Because I've had other dogs stay at my house.

02:25:10.000 I had my older daughter's dog stay at my house, and that dog didn't go to that same spot.

02:25:14.000 It's not like this is one spot that's warmer or cooler.

02:25:17.000 Yeah, same thing.

02:25:18.000 My dog, Ken, if he gets on, he only wants to sleep on my feet.

02:25:23.000 If I fall asleep on the couch, he's cool.

02:25:25.000 He won't sleep on my feet.

02:25:26.000 He just wants to sleep on me.

02:25:27.000 And that's not comfortable for him because I'm kicking him and everything, but that's just where he wants to sleep.

02:25:30.000 They want to be in contact with you.

02:25:32.000 My dog watches TV with me.

02:25:33.000 Yeah, that's awesome.

02:25:34.000 Yeah. Yeah.

02:25:36.000 They're the best.

02:25:36.000 Yeah, and we didn't even teach it this, but when we say security at our house, our dogs just lose it.

02:25:41.000 Like, Ken just loses his mind.

02:25:42.000 He just runs to the door.

02:25:44.000 He runs to the front door, runs to the back door, runs to the side doors.

02:25:46.000 What kind of dog?

02:25:48.000 They're just mutts.

02:25:48.000 So I have Barbie and Ken.

02:25:50.000 They're just two little weird mutts.

02:25:51.000 But we named them before the movie.

02:25:53.000 It's just a weird thing to take that dog.

02:25:56.000 And I think also for kids, like, the thing is, like, kids, the loss is so devastating.

02:26:01.000 Yeah. But it's also good to teach them those things.

02:26:03.000 Yeah, I think loss is important.

02:26:05.000 I think loss is important.

02:26:07.000 I'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.

02:26:19.000 I think that in his lifetime it will be massively accelerated.

02:26:22.000 But I think that's important.

02:26:24.000 That is one of the things, though, I think having a kid...

02:26:27.000 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.

02:26:37.000 Because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right?

02:26:39.000 So 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.

02:26:51.000 And 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.

02:27:00.000 And in that letter she goes, I think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good.

02:27:19.000 We can use technologies for conservation for good.

02:27:22.000 We can help ecosystem with bringing back extinct species, but I think that we can also inspire the next generation.

02:27:27.000 Don't we want to preach hope?

02:27:29.000 We're on this 24-7 psycho news cycle, right?

02:27:33.000 That wasn't around when I was a kid.

02:27:36.000 Do you know when C.S. Lewis first started talking about this?

02:27:38.000 What year was C.S. Lewis alive?

02:27:41.000 But he had a quote about I might have saved it.

02:27:44.000 He 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.

02:27:58.000 That was a completely new thing.

02:28:00.000 And this idea of these 24-hour news cycles, right?

02:28:04.000 There's actually a law in the UK.

02:28:06.000 This blew my mind.

02:28:08.000 And 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.

02:28:19.000 I 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. 0.74

02:28:25.000 Oh, that's so ridiculous. 0.80

02:28:30.000 Yeah, I think you're going to have very lively debate. 0.96

02:28:38.000 That's always going to happen with something that's so groundbreaking like what you're doing.

02:28:41.000 But I also think it's inevitable.

02:28:43.000 I think human beings have this inescapable desire for innovation.

02:28:49.000 Right. And it's going to apply to biology just like it applies to electronics.

02:28:53.000 And you can't do anything about it.

02:28:55.000 You can have debates about it, and we should.

02:28:58.000 What you guys are doing is great.

02:29:01.000 You've got the direwolves fenced off.

02:29:03.000 You're very careful.

02:29:03.000 You're monitoring them.

02:29:04.000 It's great.

02:29:05.000 It's going to happen.

02:29:06.000 It's going to happen.

02:29:07.000 And at least you're transparent about it.

02:29:09.000 At least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans. 1.00

02:29:14.000 Yeah, and they train them with DNA to only eat Americans. 0.66

02:29:17.000 But that's probably going to happen too.

02:29:20.000 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.

02:29:30.000 Yeah, synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute, AI, Yes.

02:29:48.000 It's like discovering fire.

02:29:50.000 It's the god camp.

02:29:51.000 It's all falling into the same thing.

02:29:54.000 And then when you add to that incredible computing power that's going to be available with quantum computing.

02:30:00.000 And then you have new technologies that are going to emerge from AI using quantum computing.

02:30:05.000 And then the interface at all, like the neural link stuff and everything.

02:30:08.000 It's just going to get...

02:30:09.000 The interfaces are crazy.

02:30:11.000 Because we had that gentleman, Noah, the first guy who got it, and he said he has an aimbot in his head.

02:30:16.000 So when he plays games, he's got a crazy advantage.

02:30:19.000 Because where he looks is where the cursor goes.

02:30:22.000 Instantaneously. So he could shoot things. 0.94

02:30:25.000 He's not going to miss.

02:30:26.000 We are living in a weird time.

02:30:28.000 It's the weirdest time.

02:30:30.000 It's the weirdest time that people have ever been through and we're at the door.

02:30:34.000 We haven't even gone into the great wild.

02:30:36.000 That's what I say about synthetic biology.

02:30:38.000 The ability to engineer drought resistant crops or a vaccine or regrow our hair or make mammoths.

02:30:47.000 That's today.

02:30:48.000 We can't even think about what's tomorrow.

02:30:50.000 We 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.

02:31:04.000 And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical – that's why I named it breaking.

02:31:11.000 It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing.

02:31:16.000 Well, guess what?

02:31:17.000 So it takes things that have broken down never and has got it down into years.

02:31:22.000 We use now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it so now that it's in 22 months.

02:31:30.000 And I think that we can get it down to two weeks.

02:31:39.000 We still have the existing plastics here.

02:31:40.000 We have to do something about it.

02:31:41.000 So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that, like, 10 years ago, if someone said, we can give you a magic 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.

02:31:59.000 Yeah. 10 years ago.

02:32:00.000 That's so crazy.

02:32:02.000 And so now, you said it's down to a couple months?

02:32:04.000 Yeah, it's 22 months right now.

02:32:06.000 So. 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.

02:32:17.000 We're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it. 1.00

02:32:19.000 What about those stupid fucking windmills? 1.00

02:32:22.000 That they have to change every few years. 1.00

02:32:24.000 Oh, they actually have a bigger...

02:32:25.000 Landfill for windmills.

02:32:27.000 And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make, yeah.

02:32:30.000 And they don't barely make any electricity.

02:32:32.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:32:33.000 They kill livestock, or they kill animals, kill birds.

02:32:35.000 They disrupt...

02:32:36.000 Whales. They also disrupt migratory patterns of birds.

02:32:40.000 Of course they do.

02:32:41.000 Yeah, you can't fly into that.

02:32:43.000 Yeah, and they're all made with plastic and plastic polymers.

02:32:46.000 And then they have to get rid of them.

02:32:47.000 And then the only place to put them is in a landfill.

02:32:50.000 Yeah. Exactly.

02:32:51.000 So that's why we started breaking.

02:32:54.000 Wow. So these microbes would be able to break that down.

02:32:56.000 Yeah. I mean, we haven't tested on that specific, but like one of the biggest ones that we tested on was nylon, just because there's so much, if you look at like what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets.

02:33:09.000 Oh, that makes sense.

02:33:10.000 So we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases.

02:33:12.000 And then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others.

02:33:14.000 So if we get to the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right?

02:33:20.000 Because all that's passing through right now, like in our drinking water and everything.

02:33:23.000 That's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like the three-layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water.

02:33:29.000 You've got to do, Gary, you got me in new water.

02:33:34.000 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...

02:33:42.000 So when you're doing this, is this something that you could release, like, in the ocean itself?

02:33:46.000 Or would you have to worry then about the effect, like, bringing the house cats to Australia?

02:33:51.000 No, it dies.

02:33:52.000 It only eats this, like... 0.98

02:33:54.000 This is what they always say right before it fucks up. 0.72

02:33:57.000 Oh, don't worry about it.

02:33:58.000 But with a distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA.

02:34:02.000 There's a lot of testing that you have to do, right?

02:34:04.000 But you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

02:34:09.000 So I don't know, based on heat and...

02:34:12.000 Right now it's working in bioreactors, so I don't want to overpromise and say we can just go sprinkle it and call it a day.

02:34:17.000 But that's the long-term goal.

02:34:19.000 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 quolls, right?

02:34:31.000 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?

02:34:42.000 Like, this is where sometimes people get confused about, like, the yells and stuff.

02:34:45.000 They didn't just open the gate and throw some wolves in there.

02:34:47.000 I mean, it sounds like they did more of that in Colorado.

02:34:49.000 But there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through, right?

02:34:54.000 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.

02:35:01.000 Yeah. Synthetic biology is that it's an AI-level thing that we need to be worried about.

02:35:07.000 And how many different nations are working on this stuff?

02:35:11.000 So I think that the U.S. is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective.

02:35:17.000 It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and biobanking, because they're biobanking.

02:35:22.000 We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here.

02:35:26.000 That's one of the things I...

02:35:28.000 I was meeting in Washington about.

02:35:31.000 But China does.

02:35:32.000 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. 0.98

02:35:39.000 You guys are cool, right?

02:35:40.000 So they are doing this, right?

02:35:41.000 So they're looking for insights in animals.

02:35:43.000 They're looking for that data.

02:35:44.000 They're also trying to build, like, today's Noah's Ark.

02:35:46.000 And so China is for sure. 0.94

02:35:48.000 There's some countries it's harder, like the European Union's Bro, people are going to have dire wolves guarding their house.

02:36:13.000 No. In 100 years?

02:36:15.000 They're not open to the public.

02:36:16.000 100%. 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 they're dying.

02:36:22.000 Firewolves guard their house.

02:36:24.000 Yeah, that's not the future that I hope for.

02:36:26.000 I'm more of an optimist, so I kind of believe in the general good of humanity.

02:36:30.000 Of course, it's your company. 0.98

02:36:32.000 Your company is fucking the whole world up. 0.99

02:36:33.000 You have to think that way. 0.99

02:36:34.000 I'm just kidding.

02:36:35.000 But it is weird.

02:36:36.000 It's a weird...

02:36:38.000 I mean, you're going down a very bizarre path, but it's so fascinating.

02:36:41.000 I'm so glad you're doing it because it's so interesting.

02:36:44.000 And we're learning a lot, right?

02:36:45.000 And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right?

02:36:49.000 Yeah. And I think that— Do you think there could ever be a time—well, there's no DNA from the dinosaurs, right?

02:36:55.000 So would it be possible that with future technology there would be some way to get around that?

02:37:02.000 The closest you could get from a dino DNA perspective is that there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids.

02:37:12.000 So like the smallest building blocks possible, you don't know where they go, right?

02:37:15.000 I think that it's not possible to de-extinct a dinosaur.

02:37:19.000 I do think at some point...

02:37:20.000 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.

02:37:28.000 So you could make one?

02:37:30.000 Wasn't that one of the things they did in Jurassic Park?

02:37:32.000 That's what they did.

02:37:33.000 They made a dinosaur that didn't exist before, the big giant one?

02:37:35.000 The Adominus rex, yeah.

02:37:38.000 Right. That was something they created, correct?

02:37:39.000 That's something they created, right?

02:37:41.000 And so I think from a technology and genome engineering perspective, Ooh.

02:37:48.000 So they could easily make a T-Rex without having...

02:37:52.000 Not easily.

02:37:52.000 I wouldn't say easily, yeah.

02:37:53.000 But they could, potentially.

02:37:54.000 At some future state.

02:37:56.000 At some future state, I think we'll have, like, you know, the CAD software biology where you can engineer almost anything.

02:38:01.000 Oh, my God.

02:38:01.000 I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right?

02:38:04.000 The better...

02:38:04.000 And you said it best when you brought up quantum.

02:38:06.000 You know, quantum's only two years away every two years, I hear.

02:38:09.000 But eventually when it works and works at scale and you have that coupled with where some of these companies like X.ai and others are taking it, I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff.

02:38:24.000 And look, it will be in nefarious hands.

02:38:27.000 Let's just be real.

02:38:29.000 Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right?

02:38:31.000 Nuclear weapons are in good guys'hands, right?

02:38:34.000 And so this is nuclear weapons.

02:38:36.000 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.

02:38:43.000 And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like five years, no, no longer than that.

02:38:47.000 It was like seven years ago.

02:38:49.000 People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of a certain subset of race, right?

02:38:59.000 And they were doing bad things with facial recognition.

02:39:02.000 Well, 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.

02:39:17.000 We're going to ban investing in facial recognition technology.

02:39:20.000 Well, that's just dumb, right?

02:39:21.000 Because 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? 0.93

02:39:29.000 That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns.

02:39:31.000 We should never develop guns, right?

02:39:33.000 It's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology.

02:39:36.000 And so, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology.

02:39:39.000 The world is currently the United States is the leader in synthetic biology.

02:39:43.000 And we've got national treasures like George Church, my co-founder and others.

02:39:47.000 And I hope that we continue to be the world's leader.

02:39:50.000 But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do.

02:39:53.000 And they will experiment.

02:39:55.000 But it's interesting also that you're a company.

02:39:58.000 This isn't the government.

02:39:59.000 This is just a group of people and investors that have decided to do this.

02:40:05.000 And you've been able to do it here in America.

02:40:07.000 But do you know?

02:40:09.000 What is going on in other countries, or is this a tightly guarded secret?

02:40:15.000 Obviously, you have people in your company as well, and I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing.

02:40:25.000 You must be being studied by other countries.

02:40:29.000 Yeah, we definitely have investment by In-Q-Tel, so I'm sure that makes us more of a target.

02:40:36.000 Yeah. So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and ICE.

02:40:41.000 When 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.

02:40:50.000 That's so strange.

02:40:51.000 It's so strange to think that for four plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern.

02:40:58.000 Just on rails.

02:41:00.000 Yeah, and then one day.

02:41:01.000 And now we say we can take the railway where we want.

02:41:04.000 Ooh, boy.

02:41:05.000 And you know, that's the grandest of all conspiracy theories.

02:41:09.000 That's how humans were created.

02:41:11.000 Yeah, the panspermia.

02:41:13.000 Well, either panspermia or that we were engineered in places.

02:41:16.000 The great one is the Anunnaki, right? 1.00

02:41:18.000 Oh, yeah.

02:41:18.000 It's the Sumerian type stuff.

02:41:20.000 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 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...

02:41:33.000 I mean, you can't objectively...

02:41:36.000 It's like the guy with the Sphinx, right?

02:41:39.000 Yep, that's water.

02:41:40.000 I'm an expert on erosion.

02:41:42.000 That is water.

02:41:42.000 And then they're like, head of the Sphinx, like, that's not water, right?

02:41:46.000 It's the same thing as this.

02:41:47.000 You cannot look at some of this stuff and say...

02:41:49.000 That's not weird, right?

02:41:50.000 You 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.

02:42:00.000 It's like, you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more.

02:42:04.000 Especially 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.

02:42:12.000 It's very weird.

02:42:13.000 It looks exactly the same.

02:42:14.000 Have you been to Peru?

02:42:16.000 No. Machu Picchu?

02:42:39.000 Between. You know, you can't see, and you see it, and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw.

02:42:44.000 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.

02:42:49.000 You can't sit there and say, well, that's weird.

02:42:52.000 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.

02:42:58.000 You can't say it's not weird.

02:43:01.000 To say it's not weird is actually denying science.

02:43:04.000 Yeah, it's the weird...

02:43:05.000 So you should put Peru on your... 0.94

02:43:08.000 Because when you see it, there's nothing like it.

02:43:10.000 I've been fortunate to be able to travel all over the world.

02:43:13.000 You see it, and you're just like, that just doesn't make sense.

02:43:16.000 The coolest thing I've ever seen is Chichen Itza.

02:43:18.000 Yeah, I've been to Chichen Itza.

02:43:19.000 And you go there, and you're like, what did you do?

02:43:22.000 What'd you do?

02:43:23.000 How'd you do this?

02:43:24.000 Yeah. How'd you guys do this?

02:43:25.000 You know what's crazy about Chichen Itza?

02:43:26.000 They don't let you go there anymore.

02:43:27.000 But I don't know where, but you know, you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chichen Itza.

02:43:32.000 Well, there's, in the jungles there on the Yucatan Peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids.

02:43:39.000 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.

02:43:46.000 But now, guess what?

02:43:48.000 It's not open to the public.

02:43:50.000 I've seen that.

02:43:50.000 I've been there.

02:43:51.000 Oh, it's so frustrating.

02:43:53.000 It is such a weird world, right?

02:43:56.000 Yeah. 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.

02:44:06.000 A lot, yeah.

02:44:07.000 And there's no way you can know a lot. 0.99

02:44:09.000 And any time you suggest something new, you get shit for it. 0.99

02:44:12.000 Yeah, you get a rash of shit, and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Graham Hancock. 0.99

02:44:17.000 Yeah. 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. 0.98

02:44:32.000 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.

02:44:37.000 You've seen the Reichardt structure?

02:44:38.000 Uh-uh.

02:44:39.000 You ever seen that?

02:44:40.000 Uh-uh.

02:44:40.000 This is what, there's a lot of people like Jimmy Corsetti, who's this famous YouTube, I guess you would call him...

02:44:48.000 I guess he'd be like an ancient... 0.98

02:44:49.000 Can we pull up the structure?

02:44:50.000 Sure. He'd be like an ancient history enthusiast.

02:44:53.000 He's a guy who studies these things and does YouTube videos on them.

02:44:56.000 But the Reichardt structure is essentially Atlantis.

02:44:58.000 Oh, this is in the desert.

02:45:00.000 Yes. It looks like Atlantis.

02:45:01.000 There's salt all around it.

02:45:03.000 It has the rings that Plato described.

02:45:05.000 And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean.

02:45:08.000 It literally looks like Atlantis.

02:45:10.000 And people dispute it.

02:45:11.000 Have people gone and studied it there?

02:45:13.000 Well, it's a very difficult place to get to, and it's also very dangerous.

02:45:16.000 So people have studied it, but there hasn't been large-scale archaeological digs there.

02:45:23.000 The whole sub-Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating.

02:45:26.000 They find whales there.

02:45:28.000 They know that it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.

02:45:33.000 And there hasn't been large-scale exploration.

02:45:39.000 I 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...

02:45:53.000 The 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.

02:46:01.000 Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.

02:46:05.000 Anthropologic meaning human beings killed them.

02:46:07.000 Yes, humans had some impact on it, right?

02:46:10.000 I think that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that was a – could have been a global-level flood with sea rising – with rushing waters and sea rising –

02:46:25.000 No, that's, iridium is actually different.

02:46:45.000 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 that's what yes Yeah, that's the stuff from the Trinity explosion.

02:46:58.000 They discovered it there.

02:46:59.000 They find these little microglades.

02:47:01.000 There's 100% there was impacts.

02:47:03.000 That's a fact.

02:47:05.000 And they also know like when the meteor shower, and this is a thing that they study, like when we go through this comet shower.

02:47:11.000 And that that's...

02:47:12.000 But you remember like probably...

02:47:14.000 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 who can't talk to you ever again.

02:47:20.000 Exactly. Water canopy, you're weird.

02:47:22.000 Don't talk to me again.

02:47:23.000 I know.

02:47:24.000 And now it's like...

02:47:26.000 Well, maybe there was a giant flood.

02:47:27.000 Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right?

02:47:29.000 Maybe it was done by impact of comments, right?

02:47:33.000 That's what brings me to the weird ones when you go back to the Vedic texts.

02:47:37.000 And you're like, what was the Vemanas?

02:47:39.000 What were these flying vehicles that they had?

02:47:43.000 What was Ezekiel talking about in the Bible?

02:47:45.000 Have you seen that stuff when...

02:47:47.000 Have you seen those videos in the last...

02:47:49.000 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.

02:47:58.000 It almost looked like those things that you'd put your hands on your head and stand up, right?

02:48:01.000 And then they'd compare some of those to paintings from like 500, 700 years ago.

02:48:09.000 Let me stop you there because a lot of those crazy balls of light...

02:48:12.000 We're all fake.

02:48:13.000 No, you can just zoom in on Venus and that's what you get.

02:48:17.000 Cool. You zoom in...

02:48:18.000 If you zoom in on stars and you get this sort of bizarre distorted image.

02:48:23.000 Have you seen those?

02:48:24.000 Find zoomed in stars.

02:48:29.000 I think they did it with the North Star.

02:48:31.000 They've done it with several stars.

02:48:32.000 But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth, you can get that sort of distorted weird effect.

02:48:41.000 Because you're looking through the atmosphere.

02:48:44.000 I've always seen this stuff on the internet until I was in Wellington, New Zealand.

02:48:48.000 When I was with Peter.

02:48:49.000 Peter, his house in Wellington is on a body of water, everyone's aware.

02:48:53.000 And we were talking, of course, the conversation went to ghosts and UFOs.

02:48:58.000 Oh, you've seen them?

02:48:59.000 No, I haven't seen them in person.

02:49:01.000 I've seen them on his iPhone.

02:49:03.000 This wasn't like a telescopic lens.

02:49:06.000 This is an iPhone, and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom lens.

02:49:10.000 But that's the thing about zooming in.

02:49:13.000 See, the thing is...

02:49:15.000 Like, these are planets that people have zoomed in on.

02:49:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:49:18.000 But there's weirder ones where, like, there's video of it, and so it looks like it's moving.

02:49:25.000 Yeah, here we go.

02:49:26.000 Like, look at that.

02:49:28.000 Okay. I'll have to see.

02:49:29.000 But you see what I'm saying?

02:49:30.000 Yeah. Like, this is a perfect example.

02:49:32.000 Exactly. So this is a star in the night sky with a Nikon P900.

02:49:36.000 So is that 900X, Jamie?

02:49:39.000 No. What is that?

02:49:41.000 Can you talk in the mic?

02:49:42.000 It's just the model number.

02:49:43.000 I have no idea what that means.

02:49:44.000 So what would you think that the amount of...

02:49:47.000 100x? I have no idea.

02:49:49.000 Okay. But do you see how they're having a hard time zooming in on it?

02:49:54.000 Because it's a handheld, I think.

02:49:56.000 But look how weird it is.

02:49:57.000 It looks so weird.

02:49:58.000 It's how it's moving around.

02:49:59.000 Like you say, oh my god, you found a UFO!

02:50:00.000 But it's not.

02:50:01.000 It's just a star.

02:50:02.000 Well, I do hate that every UFO video is...

02:50:05.000 It's blurry.

02:50:06.000 Well, you know, I mean, that could be, if you want to get into the whole Hal Puthoff perspective, who's this brilliant physicist.

02:50:14.000 Yeah, he's on a lot of papers.

02:50:16.000 Yeah, he explained it to me.

02:50:17.000 He thinks there's some sort of gravity distortion that's around it.

02:50:21.000 So this is the camera.

02:50:21.000 Well, isn't that the...

02:50:22.000 This is that particular camera.

02:50:23.000 So this is, is this not a very...

02:50:26.000 No, it's like a handheld DSLR camera.

02:50:27.000 But isn't that...

02:50:28.000 So that's a $749 camera on Amazon.

02:50:32.000 83x optical.

02:50:33.000 I'll see if Peter...

02:50:34.000 I'm sure he would and I'll send it to you because it's just weird to see.

02:50:37.000 Oh, they're weird.

02:50:38.000 No, I'm not saying that they're not real.

02:50:40.000 This was like not zoomed in, his wife's next to him.

02:50:43.000 I am not denying that people are seeing things.

02:50:46.000 I'm not denying that they're real.

02:50:48.000 What I'm saying is... 0.99

02:50:50.000 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. 0.99

02:50:58.000 Look at that. 0.99

02:50:59.000 It's undeniable.

02:50:59.000 Look at the energy around it.

02:51:00.000 What 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.

02:51:09.000 That's all they're like.

02:51:12.000 Zero point energy and moving and gravitational wave type stuff.

02:51:18.000 Do you go deep on this?

02:51:19.000 I get bored.

02:51:20.000 I get a little bored.

02:51:21.000 It gets boring because there's no real resolution.

02:51:23.000 You 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.

02:51:37.000 I did a call with Hal.

02:51:39.000 I got into that crowd for a while before I started Colossal, and I knew a bunch of those folks.

02:51:48.000 So I talked to Lou, I talked to Hal, I did a Zoom with Hal.

02:51:52.000 If you imagine what we are now...

02:51:55.000 Where we are, what you're describing in terms of technology that's emerging right now.

02:51:59.000 And we have dire wolves today in 2025.

02:52:01.000 Yes. And now imagine this 5,000 years advanced.

02:52:05.000 And you're probably looking at that.

02:52:07.000 If we are being visited, that's what you're probably looking at.

02:52:10.000 If you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve, it's...

02:52:14.000 It's not that far.

02:52:15.000 Now, imagine the monkeying that you guys have done with dire wolves.

02:52:19.000 I wouldn't say it's monkeying.

02:52:20.000 It's a little monkeying.

02:52:21.000 The selective precision genome engineering.

02:52:23.000 Amazing stuff you've done with dire wolves. 0.94

02:52:25.000 I'm just being silly.

02:52:26.000 But imagine doing that to primitive hominids. 0.99

02:52:30.000 Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is, and you're a million years more advanced than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australopithecus, I told you one edit makes 5,000.

02:52:53.000 you know, confers 5,000 resistance to neurotoxins.

02:52:57.000 So it's like a couple little edits here does a lot.

02:52:59.000 And 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.

02:53:11.000 Yeah, and our heads are getting bigger.

02:53:13.000 Yeah, that's them.

02:53:14.000 Yeah, I mean I read that I read that.

02:53:16.000 It's a bizarre archetype.

02:53:18.000 It's a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again.

02:53:22.000 It's very weird that there's a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see.

02:53:29.000 I go down those rabbit holes because I just think, once again, going back to the stuff of Kuku-Kan and Anunnaki and all this stuff. 1.00

02:53:39.000 The Anunnaki stuff is the most interesting. 0.95

02:53:40.000 It's just so strange.

02:53:42.000 And how you have certain things that are aligned to celestial Insanely detailed.

02:54:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:54:02.000 How? Yeah.

02:54:03.000 And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space.

02:54:08.000 Yeah, and also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps. 1.00

02:54:12.000 Yeah. Like, what are you saying?

02:54:14.000 Yeah, there's weird...

02:54:15.000 The cool thing about this, but take a step back.

02:54:19.000 Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, and we get ridiculed even for the...

02:54:25.000 I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out.

02:54:36.000 Every day is amazing and we're figuring out amazing things.

02:54:40.000 Well, unlike you, I don't have the burden of being taken seriously. 0.86

02:54:46.000 And that's great for discussing ridiculous... 0.53

02:54:48.000 I have a ghost hunter on here. 0.61

02:54:50.000 That's awesome.

02:54:50.000 It is great.

02:54:52.000 It's super interesting.

02:54:53.000 I love it.

02:54:53.000 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 the ancient flood than anyone in the world.

02:55:04.000 And that's cool.

02:55:05.000 It is cool.

02:55:06.000 It's very fascinating.

02:55:07.000 Because we should have conversations.

02:55:09.000 Yes! And the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time.

02:55:14.000 And it's almost impossible...

02:55:15.000 I mean, and you can get lost, like we were talking about with the C.S. Lewis quote.

02:55:19.000 Did you ever find that?

02:55:19.000 No, I don't.

02:55:20.000 I couldn't.

02:55:21.000 You talked about getting the news.

02:55:23.000 What year was C.S. Lewis alive?

02:55:26.000 1898. Yeah.

02:55:27.000 I started tracking down, like, there's a bunch of misquoted C.S. Lewis quotes.

02:55:32.000 It could be one of those.

02:55:33.000 It could be one of those.

02:55:34.000 I could figure it out.

02:55:36.000 We're being inundated by the worst news of the day because that's the news that's going to ensure that you watch it.

02:55:42.000 And there's so many cool things that are happening at the same time.

02:55:45.000 And I think it gives people a distorted perception of the hope that we have for mankind.

02:55:49.000 You hear about wars, like, oh my God, but most people aren't going to war.

02:55:53.000 Most people are cool with each other.

02:55:54.000 Most interactions between human beings are positive.

02:55:57.000 And they're fascinating.

02:55:59.000 And human beings are a fascinating creature.

02:56:01.000 And we're so lucky to be alive at this time where the...

02:56:05.000 Innovation is reaching this bizarre tipping point where we're, you know...

02:56:11.000 I mean, I love it.

02:56:12.000 I'm working more hours than I've ever worked in my life.

02:56:15.000 And I've been fortunate before this business.

02:56:18.000 And I will just tell you, I just love it.

02:56:20.000 Every day I wake up, it's awesome.

02:56:22.000 That's so cool.

02:56:23.000 It's the coolest thing in the world.

02:56:24.000 Well, I'm glad you're doing it, man.

02:56:25.000 I really appreciate you.

02:56:27.000 And thank you so much for coming in here and showing people the dire wolves and the red wolves.

02:56:33.000 And I hope more.

02:56:35.000 We'll keep you up to date on fun stuff.

02:56:37.000 I want to go see them.

02:56:38.000 I want to see them.

02:56:39.000 Alright, we'll talk offline.

02:56:40.000 Okay, we'll talk offline.

02:56:41.000 Thank you very much.

02:56:42.000 Oh, 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.

02:56:55.000 Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow, I can't wait to see that one day. 0.98

02:57:00.000 Yeah, it's cool.

02:57:01.000 It's cool.

02:57:01.000 And I mean, look, the cool thing about Colossal is we have so many people.

02:57:06.000 That, you know, we have 170 people over 135 scientists just that wake up and they work 24-7.

02:57:11.000 Like, we've got four labs.

02:57:13.000 People are just, you know, in love with it.

02:57:16.000 That's cool.

02:57:16.000 It's amazing.

02:57:17.000 Thank you very much.

02:57:18.000 I really appreciate it.

02:57:18.000 I will.

02:57:19.000 Thank you.

02:57:20.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 07, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm

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Transcript