Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)

22:23I know how to hire people to solve engineering challenges. and I know how to raise capital towards it, right? Our first investor deck was quite shitty though. And so it wasn't a great deck. It's like we have no deal with Harvard. We have no IP. We have no scientists. This guy thinks he can bring back a mammoth and we had no monetization models at that time. Well, I was going to say, you have to put money in. You have to have some monetization scheme. Otherwise, what are we doing? Like, how are we funding this? You know, there's no money in bringing back the mammoth unless you have a theme park, I guess.

22:52You should have sent it to Dax. his deck. Well, many celebrities are his first round investors. Chris Hemsworth, Peter Jackson, Paris Hilton. But they came to us, which is crazy. We've been very fortunate. In the early days, we went to investors, some of which I'd worked with in the past, some of which just had our long-term views. And our original pitch was, hey, look, this is a systems model, no different than building software. It's a systems model, no different than building space hardware. If we are going to bring back a mammoth, we are going to engineer solutions and technologies along the way to build a synthetic biology platform that the same platform that can make you a mammoth can make you a bunch of other species, but it can also create disease-resistant cattle or drought-resistant plants, or we will advance the technologies to do this, the number of edits that we have to make.

23:42We will advance all of the genome engineering and DNA synthesis tools to the point that it's now viable for humans. So if we are successful. It feels like the product's the mammoth, but really the product is the tools that can get you the mammoth. It's the technology, it's that end-to-end kind of developmental biology, genetic engineering and cellular engineering and computational biology stack. It is that infrastructure and then the innovations and inventions that come along that path. You know, I was thinking of the perfect parallel model is really in the automotive space, which is you race on Sunday.

24:18There's no reason to race. It's a huge money loss for all the manufacturers. But the tech discovered through racing funnels down into the production car, and they always justify racing to stockholders as like what we learn on Sunday, we put in the car on Monday. And that's kind of the model, really. Yeah, I didn't know that. We would talk to investors early on about like Apollo. It's like, hey, a lot of stuff came out of humanity going to the stars. We believe that here, and we believe that the total addressable market for programmable life, being able to engineer life the way we want, will have a massive ripple effect for the world.

24:52And in agriculture, food security, environmental cleanup, human health care. And so that market and those opportunities actually are significantly larger than we initially anticipated. Okay, so walk me through from 2021 when you formed the company, what are the baby steps and accomplishments along the way kind of in order? Like what's the first thing you guys are successful at doing? Pre-launch, the first thing that I think we were pretty successful on was we hired a chief animal officer. We were four days out from launching the company, and a buddy of mine that had bought one of my previous companies was like, hey, do you have anyone that's ever raised an elephant on your team?

25:29You know you have these moments where people say something to you that you're like, wait i called george i was like hey we should hire someone that's like birthed an elephant and like knows like what they eat what they need to what they need to like not just survive but to thrive and george was like oh that's a really good idea we should he's very thoughtful and he's very hilarious he's like we should think about this i was like no i got a guy and so one of the first things we did was i think we've been smarter enough to know and listen to feedback you'll see this theme i think through all of colossal we've got a lot of feedback and a lot of feedback has been really helpful.

26:01Like someone saying, do you have someone on the team that's ever raised an elephant? We're like, no, I got to go because I can find that person. And we got a great guy doing that now. But since the launch of the company, the most important thing is we have built, and you should come see the labs and you should bring your kids if you want. They're in Dallas. Yeah, we're in Dallas. So we have a lab in Melbourne, Australia, but the one in Dallas is cooler, but you go to both if you want. We have built a team of 260 scientists and a collaboration with 17 of the top academic universities around the world.

26:30And we fund 80 postdocs in academia. And then we have about 75 conservation partners around the world. So I would say that before we get into like scientific or any major milestones, the thing I'm big is it's the team, right? It's unfair, right? Like if you look at your alternative for genome engineers or synthetic biologists, it's you go into academia, which has a lot of brokenness to it right now, right? It's underfunded, it's highly competitive. You have to publish. It's papers, not progress, right? You know, we had this argument a lot with people where it's like why don't you publish papers more and i was like well we'd have to do 10 papers for every press release we do i'd have to hire 200 people just writing papers yeah and if i stack up a bunch of papers that's not going to make a dodo right and so yeah that's one and then two they can go into like biopharma or work on yeast models if i'm like hey come with us and i need you to go to the arctic with me and we're going to extract DNA, like Indiana Jones style.

27:22And then we're going to go to like the basement and like sub basement for Smithsonian and get ancient DNA. And then you're going to help build the AI models to do all the comparative genomics and work with mammoth cells. You're going to be the Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. That's so much better. That's so much better. It's great. And you can see the product of it. And when we really start to talk to our recruits as scientists, we always talk about its value and creation for our shareholders and impact from our conservation issues but inspiration and we're like we want to do this in a way that gets people stoked about science again because i think we've lost that in america and it's a big passion of mine now with my young kids and so it gives us an unfair recruiting advantage for kids like i got best shapiro who was our chief science officer who literally wrote a book saying how to clone a mammoth and it ends with you can't and so i was like she's perfect because she's thought about all this right and so when I sat down with Beth, she's like, you read my book.

28:18I was like, no, but I know how it ends, so we're good. And I was like, you cannot clone a mammoth, but you can engineer one from scratch. Quickly, why did she say you can't clone one? Well, because there are no living cells, right? So you can't just do an exact duplicate of what exists. And even theoretically, there's no mammoth that's been frozen perfectly. Perfect. In Jurassic Park, they use the MacGuffin, the device of the mosquito frozen in amber who has sucked the blood from a dinosaur. And by the way, I don't want to break hearts, but there is most likely, George and I don't like to say impossible, but most likely there's no dinosaur DNA because it's about 65 million years old.

28:54There's been lots of very warm periods of time between now and then. And amber forms is very porous, so it's not a great DNA store. Not that we've tried. It forms in hot, wet places. DNA likes cold, dry places, right? And so that's the best preservation. So if something could like die in like the perfect cave, that's what's best for us. Okay, okay, okay. So you've got the team. That's the first thing you're happy about now. What are the incremental? Big milestones are, from an editing perspective, we're now doing about 300 edits at a time all over the genome. Just put that in perspective, the two most genetically modified multicellular organisms in the world, like animals, are woolly mice, which are objectively the cutest mice on the planet if you haven't seen them.

29:35They look like little hamsters, Monica. They have kind of the woolly mammoth hair. Oh, really? But they're on a mouse. You would like it. Yeah. We like mouse, mice here. We like mouse, not mice. Mice means infestation. Mouse is a friend. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but these mouse are great. And so we identified the core colors, the hair texture, the length, the density. And it was about eight genes that we put all into a mouse. There's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between a mouse and an elephant. We have a huge animal welfare team. We spend a lot of time with American Humane, Sighted, and others.

30:06And so we're not going to go do anything super weird. So we're not going to take a elephant gene and stick it into a mouse because we know it's probably not compatible with life because there's too much genetic divergence. This is what's so amazing about the Wally Mouse Project, besides their objective cuteness, is that we did it all in 30 days. So we took our mammoth edits, right, which are editing into an Asian elephant cell because it's the genetic donor that we work with. And I'm sure we'll talk about the process at some point. We took those edits, found the functional equivalents in mice, right?

30:35So we're putting mice edits into mice that are the equivalent of the mammoth edits in elephants. I was going to say, is this where now AI has very helpful in this? And we had to build all this bespoke. At the time, like OpenAI and Claude were like great at like helping kids cheat on term papers. Ancestral state reconstruction models was not on the menu. And so we had to build all these comparative workflows and comparative genomics models. And so we took that, made the prediction, made the edits. 30 days later, the mice were born and 100 % they were healthy. 100 % had exactly the phenotype or physical attribute that was expressed from the genes, meaning that it looked exactly as we predicted.

31:13And it worked within 30, like we didn't have to do lots of trials and errors. Yeah, and not to get bogged down in biology, but yeah, you can be genotypically something and then phenotypically something else. So there are steps between what the recipe says and what comes out of the oven. And what actually comes out of like when it gets expressed. Yeah, it's now interacting with the epigenome and all these other things that it could not produce the phenotype you were looking for. 100%. You can only get half excited when you have the genotype figured out. I know, exactly. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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36:10and then just compress it with like the force of God down in this crazy ball. And then you have proteins that come off. It's very complicated. The folding of it and where you actually have connection points, all of those things matter in epigenetic expression. There's a project we haven't announced yet. And I was walking one of our government friends through it and I was showing them the progress on this thing. And I was showing them the edits and they were like, oh, that's Greg. Yeah, but let me show you what we actually had to do. And then there was like down to the organic chemistry level of like this is the compound that we had to figure out how to produce we had to then go do an analysis and all these other species to figure out how they produce those what are the common genes how can those be activated and then how do we model that engineer that including engineering the binding sites and the activation to get the expression yeah it's crazy like people sometimes are like can't they you're just taking like a mammoth gene you found the mammoth gene, you're like, oh, that's a mammoth gene.

37:09You just stick it in. Right. Control C, control V. Exactly. Are we cutting and copying? And again, back to the AI, for you to have compared all the other animals. 50 plus years. Right, yeah. For humans to go through or even look at the speed that they mapped the first human genome. Yeah. That was like a 25-year project or something. Yeah, and billions of dollars. You've mapped this woolly mammoth in a few years with shitty scraps. With very shitty broken DNA, not like taking hours like fresh out of the kitchen, right? And then we have multiple species going on, and then we have a lot of research species going on.

37:42So there's a ton that we are constantly mapping. Okay, so let's talk about the dire wolf. We had the mice. I was sitting, getting interviewed at South by, people were losing their mind on it. The mice were on Saturday Night Live. The mice were on John. So they were everywhere. I wish you brought one. Nah, sorry. They're in a pretty controlled, like these wolves are good luck finding. Yeah, yeah. Do you know about these geolocators? Someone was just telling me about this, that there's these contests. They show people like a five-second snippet of a live feed cam from somewhere. And these geolocators will figure out.

38:16It's insane. I'm not going to challenge them. We have taken very thoughtful measures to the point of like planting non-indigenous trees. Flora. We've been pretty thoughtful about it. No one will find our stuff. There's red herrings everywhere. Okay. But I'm sitting there and everyone's losing their mind. And I'm like, well, the direwolf project is going to be interesting. Because at this moment, we had direwolves. We had the first most genetically modified multicellular organism in the world is the direwolf with 20 edits. So we're sitting there like, we thought people were going to be excited about the woolly mouse.

38:47Yeah, yeah. The direwolf. I remember being on South By, being interviewed, kind of zoning out for a second saying, what is going to happen in three weeks when we announce this? Yeah. And that fear was massively realized three weeks later. It was just three weeks later you announced the direwolf? Yeah. So tell Monica about the direwolf. Yeah, other than what I know from Game of Thrones. Well, that's what everyone. Yeah, so we recognize that. And so we have this multidimensional model of how we think about why to bring back a species. What does the indigenous people groups care about? Why did they go extinct?

39:18Can they survive today? What's their environmental impact? Can any of the technologies that are developed on the path to de-extinction of that species help existing species, right? And the direwolf checked pretty much. The direwolf was not on our initial list, right? It was like mammoth dylos, a Tasmanian tiger. And that's why the Hemsworths got involved, because they heard they were working on the Tasmanian tiger. And for us, dyer wolf just wasn't on the list. It just wasn't a top thing. Because people had sampled La Brea tarpits, got zero DNA due to heat and acidification. So nothing they could find.

39:48We started this process. We started having conversations with indigenous people groups here in the U.S., a few others. And we were with Chairman Fox of MHA Nation up in North Dakota. And he told us this whole story. We were on his land. And they were walking us through everything. told us a story about the great wolf. And he's like, you know, they were dire wolves. And like you said, with high conviction, I was like, really? And so we started talking all about it. He goes, yeah, we as tribes always think that our ancestors communed with the dire wolf. And it was this big white wolf. And I was like, maybe we should bring back the dire wolf.

40:15They died off like 10 ,000 years ago. 10 to 12 ,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah. And they're just much bigger than a wolf. Six feet, nose to tail, and 150 pounds. So fucking big. Yeah, so about 30 % bigger than a normal wolf. Okay. We knew all of what Dax said from the fossil record. What we didn't know is there are certain things, like there were specific gene variants that we could tell that made them white. So we had two direwolf samples that produced viable DNA, a tooth that was about 13 ,000-ish years old, 12 ,000 years old, and then a skull that was 73 ,000 years old. And just an ear bone in the skull.

40:50That's 72 ,000 years old. We had 60 ,000 years of genetic diversity. I mean, think about that for a second. Wow, yeah. There's more genetic divergence between those two samples than our most recent sample and wolves today. Yeah. Right? Also, their fecundity rate and how long they live, the amount of generations within that 60 ,000 would be the equivalent of probably 300 ,000 human years of evolution. We got so much data from that. That's insane. Okay. So we took that data and we mapped it. At the time, people believed that direwolves were closely related to jackals because it's Game of Thrones.

41:24as we wanted to study, and they only got about a fraction of the DNA. The fragments that they got aligned mostly to Jackal because we had about 500 times more DNA than anyone ever seen on direwolves. We actually found like, oh, they actually map closer to wolves, gray wolves specifically, which is what you would think. There were things we didn't know. Like one thing we didn't know is we knew the fur was white. We knew the specific genes, but we didn't know exactly what the texture was going to be like. They had this like mane to them, which I know sounds crazy. Take like a lion and then take like a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog, and it's somewhere in between.

41:57Or Chows even have that kind of a bit of a mane. It's crazy. At the end of the day, we took a 73 ,000-year-old skull and a 12 ,000-year-old tooth and made puppies. And before we announced them to the world... Romulus and Remus. Robus and Remus were the first two. How small were they? Oh, they looked like little pandas. They were small, but they were pretty big at the time. At six months old, they were already 80 pounds. Yeah. Oh, my God. The photos I've seen are from when you allow time to look at them. I didn't see that mane. Has that mane come in? It's come in more, yeah. Oh, wow. Are there more recent photos?

42:28Yeah, we put them out online. Oh, you do? Yeah. So when was this? How old are they? We showed them to the world when they were about seven months old. And the little girl was two months old, so we couldn't see her. She's Khaleesi. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my. Which, by the way, we got a lot of feedback where they were like, well, you know, Khaleesi was not, was a Targaryen, not House Stark. True. And I was like, no. We are not that dumb. We do understand that. But we were trying to be like. It sounds cooler than Ned Stark for a girl. No, but it could have been Arya. Ooh, that would have been nice. Yes, we got.

43:02Okay, all right. We already felt. You already fucked up. No, but our thought process was. We actually had a thought process. Our thought process was on this. Was that, hey, we already have dire wolves. So the Stark lovers will already be in this. Let's give something for the Targaryen. Interesting. So we were trying to be thoughtful about this. You might need to do dragons for them. So Peter Jackson is one of our investors. This is a crazy stat. This is actually one of the things I'm most proud of about this company. 30 % of our investors come to us from their kids. Oh, I bet. So their kids see it.

43:34Their kids get excited about it. They tell them, right? And they reach out to us. So Peter reached out to us. And basically my first call with Peter and his partner, Fran, he basically cussed me out because I was not working on the MOA, which he as a Kiwi felt very strongly that I was not working on the MOA. 12 foot tall bird. Yeah, no wings. When I say no wings, not like little stubs or flightless, no wings. The feathers are almost like hair-like. When you're thinking of the ethics of this, we know for certain that humans caused the extinction of the megafauna. Like they were thriving in the Americas.

44:09The Homo sapiens arrived. There is a inverse relationship you can track pretty much one-to-one. Yes, and same with the arrival of people in Australia. They killed off all this megafinal. We killed off the giant sloth here. So humans got rid of all these animals that we don't know. Maybe they would have made it. Maybe they wouldn't have. But certainly we caused the extinction of so many of these animals. So many of these things. And then recent extinctions, like with the Tasmanian tiger and thylacine, the Australian government, I don't want to say we because people are like, wait, Colossal killed off the thylacine, they're right back.

44:40The Australian government actually put a bounty on the head of killing Tasmanian tigers. Wow. So they were paying people to eradicate this species. This is like the buffalo here. Yeah. Get them out of the way for the railroad. They were probably eating something. They were pests. No, they believed that they were killing sheep and eating sheep. Okay. There's no data. Go talk to all the Tasmanian tiger experts. There's no data they ever did that. What was happening is they were stealing each other's sheep and then blaming it on the Tasmanian tigers, right? Also, they now had canines probably involved.

45:10Yeah, they had the dingoes and other stuff that came in, right? And so you have this movement across the world. And so as Colossal has grown in our technology's capabilities, as well as financial support from our investors, we've broadened the horizon. So now we're working on the Tasmanian Tiger, the MOA, thanks to Peter Jackson and a handful of other species. But when I was with Peter, going back to the direwolf, when I was with Peter in his house in Auckland, I was like, hey, I want to show you something. I plugged in the computer to his little HDMI thing and showed him the first howl. It's not a highly produced clip, right?

45:42It's kind of just like with an iPhone. The first what? It was the first howl from the Dire Wolves. Oh, howl. When they were puppies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we played it for him. He's like, this is what you need to lead with. It's like, oh, we're going to do this big production. He's like, no, no. This is what you show. Trust me. I was like, I think you should probably trust Peter Jackson. Yeah. Storytelling. Yeah, he's moderately good at this. And then he's like, have you shown this to George R.R. Martin? So I said earlier, I guess slightly incorrect. The only person we did pursue in the celebrity world was we reached out directly to George R.R.

46:11Martin because Peter introduced us. And Peter told him, he's like, you just need to get on Zoom with this guy. So he got on Zoom. I shared my screen. George R.R. Martin cried on the call. He's like, is that what I think it is? I was like, yes. Very few people have seen them. I was like, you made these popular for the world. And I was like, do you want to? And he's like, can I invest? Can I be involved? I was like, sure, sure, sure. I was like, we'd like for you to come see them at an undisclosed location. So he and his wife, Paris, they flew out, they flew out, and they held them when they were babies.

46:39And he was like, he told me, like, one of the best days of his life. Wow. We have more dire wolf puppies that we've talked about that will be born in the near future. We are working on the next litter. And he texted me, he's like, are they born yet? Can I come see them? So I do need to point out at this point that you have critics, and you have a lot of people saying, you know, these aren't dire wolves. and Beth Shapiro, your head scientist, has stated pretty clearly, these are gray wolves with 20 edits. Right. Right? Yeah. It's a bit semantical. We are very clear on this and sometimes this frustrates our critics, just being transparent about it.

47:13We believe in freedom of speech and choice, right? And so like, if you want to say our mammoth is a woolly mammoth, great. And if you want to say our mammoth is a cold tolerant Asian elephant with 200 edits across 1.4 million years of genetic divergence, of alleles that are then activated epigenetically to produce the phenotypes that are cold tolerant to serve an ecological function that once mammoths and mastodons were too. You can say that too. But don't you think, so one of the definitions of a species... One of the 36. Oh, there's a lot of definitions. One of the 36, I didn't know there were 36, but one of them is that they can produce a fertile offspring, which is why a, I don't know, a mule, Whatever you cross a donkey and a horse, it's not its own species because it can't have its own children.

47:59So don't you think the debate ends when you create the woolly mammoth and it then starts having fertile offspring? Now it is its own species, no? I don't because if you go talk to a paleontologist that will not agree with that definition of speciation, the problem is we as humans like to put things in boxes. Yes. We're very good at compartmentalism. We're categorical. We love it. We like this box and this box and this box. You're like, that doesn't fit in a box. I don't understand what to do. We're very robotic in our models, right? And so I don't think that that debate will go away. But for me, I think that's okay.

48:29So for us, a gray wolf is just a genetically modified dire wolf. It just is. Like there's over 3 million edits between you and me and you and me. Like we're different by 3 million edits. For us, going from a software lens, we're going to make the edits that matter that we know drove the core phenotype. So if you look at our 104 mammoth genomes, I can't clone them because I don't have those living cells. but magically if I could clone them, which one do I clone? Which one's a mammoth? Of those 104, over 1.3 million years. Here's what I can tell you. We were all born reasonably around the same time, right?

49:01And there's 3 million as well. When you go over 1.3 million years, there's a lot of difference. But they all shared those core phenotypic expressions that gave them these like shaggy coats, fat deposits, curved tusks. Yeah, they have 10 centimeters of fat on them. And what's interesting, though, is that it's really not the sum of the parts that make something the way we acknowledge you or you or you or you. It really is the unique parts. It's not the sum of the parts. You show a kid a polar bear and a brown bear, you say, are they bears? A child's going to be like, yes, like, are they the same?

49:36And they're going to say, no. But polar bears and brown bears can intermix and produce viable offspring. By that definition, they should be the same species. But one is a giant carnivore. One is an omnivore. One's Arctic adopted in white. They're just different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I do have one more fun thing I always say. The people that want to argue on is it a mammoth, I'm like, what do you tell your kids Jurassic Park's about? Is Jurassic Park a movie about dinosaurs? Yeah. Then are mammoths are mammoths? Or are they genetically modified frog birds? Which is in the movie how the...

50:08That's how they're made. Yeah, yeah. How big are Romulus and Remus now? Romulus right now is like 140. and Remus is like I think 137, 138. I'm sorry, how old are they now? When did that happen? I guess they're two years old. Okay, two years old. 14 in dog years. Yeah, they're up to you. Sorry, they're about to be two. They're going to be two in November. Terrible dad. Like, I shouldn't know that. It's hard to keep it on. I have biological human children, so. Yeah, they're going to have to take precedent. Good, because we found out one of the red flags of a sociopath is if you ask them their children's birthdays, they don't know.

50:42We interviewed a confirmed sociopath who's also a psychologist. Fascinating. She could detect when there's other sociopaths present by all these different things. And one of them is if you ask them when their child's birthday is, they won't know. Yeah, pretty bad. Keep knowing it. Yeah. Okay. You have, though, declared that you're going to have a woolly mammoth calf by 2028. Yeah. Oh. So we will not have a calf by 2028. That was our original target date. Okay. We actually just did a big story with time on this. We spent a ton of time with Time Magazine, and our scope has significantly grown. So we've gone from one mammoth, one cell line, about 65 edits, to 14 cell lines, and we've already done 130 edits today.

51:27So double what we anticipated, and that's because we had better access to data. We've also had two governments that have reached out to us saying, we do not want you to make a mammoth. We want you to make viable herds of mammoths to your interbreeding comet. That's what they want. Is it top secret who those countries are? Top secret is a classification, right? And we do work with the government. It's not a classified thing, but these are government's choices of when they want to talk about their programs. Okay. And we have larger partners in the program now. You can see where suspicion and scrutiny would arise when we don't know what countries are funding these things.

52:01Well, ours is, right? Yes. So our government, we're very transparent with our investors. We don't have any secret investors. We've had state governments in the United States invest in us. We've had the federal government invest in us. We've had the UAE invest in us. Those are the only government entities. I can't imagine the UAE is a great place for a mammoth. The UAE is not one of our partners on the mammoth project. Okay, so you're no longer saying 2028. Is there some time frame? Our goal was to have births and announce the births. I don't know if we will announce the births. Kind of how like the direwolves were a little bit older and there were multiple.

52:37I think that's a more likely yeah this is similar to like you don't want to tell anyone you're pregnant in case something happens yeah so it's like yeah if you get these mammoths out and the whole world knows and now they want updates and then they have like three extra trunks we spend so much time and one of the things that I think we do a really good job in our pipeline is we do genetic screening and computational analysis in full genome sequencing after every editing pass and embryo pass so we don't take anything to even potential term that has an off-target effect, meaning an unintended consequence in the genome, or could have any effects that are negative for the animal welfare.

53:16So we have IACUC protocols. We work with USDA. One of the things that most people think about when they think about Colossal, like, oh, those are the guys that are like doing mammoth stuff and dire wolves and dodos, but they don't realize that like the lab work that we do is half of it, right? We consult with indigenous people groups, private landowners, FDA, USDA, all regulatory bodies, the intelligence community here in the U.S. We spend a lot of time with a lot of these folks. Okay. So now let's get into some of the, I'm going to call them off-label discoveries that you've amassed along the way in pursuit of these, what's the term?

53:50De-extinction. I think it's highly likely you're going to see more species. I think you're going to see more woolly mouse type moments in the near future around things that prove out phenotypes in model species like mice are. And I think you're also going to see other extinct species, some of which we've mentioned. And then I think maybe you'll have more direwolf like moments of stuff we haven't told anybody. If we get a saber tooth. That's what you want. I'm trying to think what I want. Well, I want a lot of things. What is the wish list? And I'll tell you how it compares to the general wish list.

54:21What's yours? Australopithecine giganticus. So for the layman. So you call it that gigantopithecus. You will not get that from us because we have drawn a line in the sand with Colossal that we do not work and non-human primates are over. Right. So I was an anthropology major. So of course, I want to see how big the Australopithecine giganticus is in real life. I would love to see that. Of all the hominids. They might kill us. I would love to see that too. But what do you do with them? That's the ethical thing. It's like, now you got something that's cognitively we spin out technologies and build hold companies and license out our technologies for human health care but even at colossal we do not do things with human health care because it's like the last thing you want is like they're already doing stuff there's already enough weird conspiracies we don't want to push the bounds to the point there so we just said hey we're not doing anything non-human departments or anything humans yeah yeah that's probably we get the intertall question quite a bit yeah but they're already here they're with us we've absorbed them so they're present in your DNA yeah yeah but I want to see the elephant bird very badly I do too we're not working on it saber-toothed tiger of course not working on it but I'd like to see it I don't know enough have you ever been to the La Brea Tar Pits or the Natural History Museum and you see the skeleton of the giant swath that would be like 1500 pounds to do an extinct species depending on level of engineering you've got to have a viable genetic donor so something close enough genetically that you can edit from like Asian elephant for mammoth you've got to have a way to gestate it we are now working on artificial wombs we kind of broke the internet again this year when showed off the artificial egg this year which was like straight out of a movie that's one of my three like offshoot things you've discovered along the way but there are species like right now we have an academic partner that's got 30x coverage you need about a minimum of 10x coverage but about 30x coverage so well within the capabilities of three different lineages of giant sloth so i would love to put giant sloth on there i'd love to put a stellar sea cow on there that's It's one of my favorites.

56:16A sea cow? Well, so think of like a dugong or a manatee that's bigger than a whale. What? It's amazing. So it's a mammal. Yeah. It was amazing. It was killed off, to your point. Yeah, good. Killed off within like 30 years of discovery, right? Oh, my. We just can't gestate those things yet. So there's things that aren't on the list. You need a womb. You need another animal. We're working on artificial wombs. We have three artificial wombs projects. We're not there yet. We're making progress. Wild. What's on your list? I need to, like, look up the list. I don't know enough. Like, I didn't know about a sea cow.

56:48Yeah. This just goes to show my bias for things that are huge because it's all the megafauna. That's what I'm most interested in. I love megafauna. Yeah, I want miniatures. Right. I want little things. Got a lot of pygmies we could work with. Yeah. And I would love the pygmy hippo. It would be so fun. That would be so cute. It's just like a pig, but it looks like a— But they're buck bastards, too, those hippotomies. They're aggressive. Wait, have the woolly mice mated? Yeah, I think we're on Gen 3. Oh, my God. And so then what's the ethics around people having them? So we don't sell anything. We've been asked, like, the Smithsonian reached out to us, and they're like, mice don't live forever.

57:21We could taxidermy them and have them here. We've had museums and zoos call us asking us to have them. It's just not our model. Are you watching Monsters of God? Huh. You must. It's by Eric Good, the guy who made Tiger King and Chimp Crazy. And now it's about the illegal reptile trade. But a lot of the things you're talking about are very present. Yeah, they are. and the ethics behind all of it. Yeah, we have bioethicists. We spend a lot of time on that. We're trying to do this in a very collaborative, communal way. Yeah, you're trying to build as much consensus as possible, probably knowing you will never have full consensus.

57:54You've got the guy from Columbia who's quite mad about a lot of the stuff. Yeah, we do. Okay, let's talk about some of the fun things that you've discovered along the way. And I know one of them is a company you spun off called Breaking, but tell me about X32. This is amazing. And this kind of goes back to taking away de-extinction in species preservation. And I'd like to talk about the species preservation part because no one talks about it as much as they should. That should be like what everyone's talking about because we're losing so many species. But the same platform that can do directed evolution and accelerated evolution through genome engineering can be applied in a lot of other categories.

58:29This incredible team at the Wiesb Institute discovered a microbe. Or they thought it was a microbe. We'll get to that in a second. that works very slow that breaks the chemical bonds of plastics. And so it doesn't make smaller plastics, right? A lot of these plastic degradation solutions that you see pop up in the news occasionally from a scientific paper, they either require preheating, pretreatment, and the chemicals a lot of times are worse than even plastic. They're actually a lot of times making microplastics. They're making smaller plastics, which is not what we want. Stuff that'll penetrate your cell membrane.

58:59Yeah, exactly. We are ingesting like a credit card size of microplastics every week. Yeah. It's disgusting. I don't believe that. I've heard you say that. Where did you get that? The interwebs. Yeah. You can factor. You guys should factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's extreme. I hear that consistently. I know. There's a lot of moral panic about it all, and I think this, to me, reeks. That is the stat that's out there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to know where it originated. I don't know that that's actually figureoutable. I hope it's a fraction of that, but we know it's a fraction of it.

59:27We know for a fact that people are getting tested, and it's showing up everywhere in the body, and in embryos and in sexual organs. It's getting passed on. Like we know for a fact that microplastics is in all three of us. Yeah, yeah. And everyone listening to this. I don't doubt that. Just to push back on the panic about it. It's like, A, I don't know about how they came to that figure. B, they are observed. We don't know that they're bad yet. They're starting to do tests. There are published peer-reviewed tests where they do believe that they have higher issues of cancer rates and other things.

1:00:00So that is coming and that is out there. There are some studies about it. Immediately can see the impossibility of figuring it out, which is what is your control? Yeah, your control. We're all on planet Earth eating plastic. So you're going to say what I'm going to compare this person's cancer rate to whose. There's no control. It's a really, really good point. It's like saying, what does oxygen do to the human body? Yeah, different variables, right? I don't want plastics on Earth, regardless of what I'm saying. Let me make it clear. I want them out of the ocean. I think that any conflict disclosures need to happen on this.

1:00:31It's very apparent that Tax is very invested in a plastic company. I own a petroleum refinement facility that's making polyurethane as we speak. Yeah. So now that we have disclaimed our affiliates. But look, plastics is a big issue, right? Yes. So they discovered this thing. Incredible scientist, Sukanya. And it just leaves it behind carbon and some biomass. Yeah, and some biomass, right? And so they came to us. They didn't know what to do with it. We took it into our system. We have a very robust AI and computational biology core to understand it. And what we found is it's actually a concert of microbes making this enzyme.

1:01:05But when you modify the individual microbes, they can produce more or less of the enzyme. Which can then break down different plastics. 20 months. It was much further than that. We've now got it down to 20 months. But things that take never to 800 years to 20 months. That's now. Now we are working on applications to broader use cases other than industrial wastewater and textiles and composting. You're focusing on textiles, right? So we were focusing initially on textiles. Water treatment and composting are now things. Because you go to like Whole Foods and they'll have like wrapped lettuce. is they can't just go throw that in the composter, right?

1:01:44And so they have to separate it. Or a lot of times, a lot of food waste is being thrown because of plastic contamination. Not microplastics because it's wrapped in plastic. They'll just throw it away, which leads to methane and all these other things. So composting is now a use case. We are looking, we have nothing yet to announce yet, but that team, that company, is deeply looking into humans and how it could be helpful. Releasing the enzyme in the humans somehow. I don't think the enzyme would work in the humans. I think you get quite sick from it. Okay, okay. Some other. Yeah, that's the power of synthetic biology, right?

1:02:13It's like scientific discovery still takes hundreds of years. What do I do with it? We put it through a pipeline. We, one, understand it. And then we figure out how we edit it and regulate it. So this does remind me, and I listened to some great piece on it. I wish I could remember and credit them. But it was really about the issue of whether or not we can give patents to genomes, right? And it was driven by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. and there was an engineered organism that they created to eat the oil. Yeah. What was that biological engineering versus what you're doing? Do you know that case?

1:02:48I don't know that case. I saw another case that was a naturally occurring enzyme that was discovered that was being used for a river cleanup. Different but similar. Yeah, yeah. And the current landscape of our regulatory framework with the USPTO, which we work very closely with, is around intentionally genetically modified organisms. Right. So if you discover something in nature, in my view, and you sequence it, you should give that to the world. Totally agree. Someone can't own the genome of a chimpanzee. You can't protect that. Or a human. The first people, if they had patented that. There were companies that tried to.

1:03:23I think originally they thought there was like a million genes, and then they found out there's 25 ,000 genes. They're like, fuck, these companies don't have them. No, no, you can't do that, right? Yeah. You can't patent those genes. Now, if you go spend money and time and effort to understand, if I take this microbe and I supercharge it, you can't take the microbe and patent it. But that supercharged microbe that you've invested time and used your technologies to make, that does not naturally occur in nature, you can patent or lease out the technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's a really cool thing.

1:03:50And then tell me about germ line editing. There's a general moratorium on it. Moratorium meaning there's a pause right now. There's a global consistent, well, I wouldn't argue it's consistent. There is a public-facing global moratorium saying there's a pause on germline editing, meaning that you will not do edits in a human that will be passed on into the general population pool, right? Isn't this most prescient in the mosquito debate right now? So that gets into gene drives, which we'll talk about. But on germline editing in humans, so when you make an edit, let's say that you have sickle cell anemia, And we could make an edit that then gets passed on to your offspring so that your offspring doesn't have a germline.

1:04:33Now, that's different than you doing IVF and having full genome sequencing with someone like Orchid or one of these other companies to test. And then you choose not to choose an embryo that has that mutation in there. It's not removing it. Like I did that. We went through IVF. We used Orchid. There were certain things that I had that we didn't want to pass on. Germline is when you edit it and it gets passed on to the broader pool. And I think the fear of that is like super intelligent, very eugenics-y. Eugenics. Physically. I only want my kids to be this tall. So there is that. I still think that there is a category that everyone can agree on that if we can eradicate sickle cell, Tay-Sachs.

1:05:11Exactly. If we can eradicate these specific diseases from the gene pool, all of humanity benefits. And I think we'll get there. I think we as humanity will get there. The problem is, is that you have these rogue nation states like China, where they're like, we made edits to make these kids immune to HIV. We didn't tell anybody. We is China, not us or America. And then, you know, like they do in China, if they don't like things, they locked him up. But he only was like locked up for like a handful of months. So it doesn't feel like everyone was that really mad at him for doing it. But the technologies are here.

1:05:43The technologies exist today. The work that Colossal is doing is significantly harder than solving those problems. Well, if I could get on my soapbox for half a second, I was just having a conversation with a couple that did very extensive embryo selection. And I said, my issue with it is simply, if you were evaluating me as an embryo, you would have seen like dyslexic ADHD addicts, name the shit. Well, some of those are environmental. Let's say you find the gene for the ADHD or you find the genes for this. There are other people that didn't have those things. There are a lot of people that you would have bet on a different embryo.

1:06:18And like, I turned out pretty good. We know all of the downside of a lot of these things, but we've really yet to understand, well, what is the huge upside? The dyslexia thing growing up, I always learned you're twice as likely to be incarcerated. Well, then as I got older, I learned you're four times as likely to be a CEO. So how do we? Yeah, like I'm dyslexic and I have ADD. There you go. And you got all kinds of money and you're changing the world. But someone might have selected. Yeah. I just don't think we know actually. Maybe too personal, but it's true. I want to hear it. With our kids, we did, because you can do the testing, the morphologic.

1:06:48We actually had a miscarriage. My wife just didn't want to go through it again. Yeah. I didn't want to go through it, didn't want her to go through it. So we went through IVF, went through the process of selecting Ambrose. There's certain morphological grading and testing, and there's only so much the IVF clinic will do. Yeah. But then you can go to this next step. We hired a company and used a service company called Orchid. Full disclosure, I ended up investing in the company only because I was so happy. Yeah. George Church was involved, so we recommended them. And they do full genome testing.

1:07:14To your point, I have a mutation on my Titan gene. I got really sick during COVID because of, so I wanted to screen for that because it is a mutation that creates a truncated protein for your heart. So I did not want to pass that on. So I wanted to make that decision, right? My wife and I agreed on that. Secondly, though, to your point, they do a very good job because it's a bell curve and they give you this distributed score. There are some things like schizophrenia in others that we know you have a low disposition to it. And so you're probably not going to be schizophrenic. You have high creativity markers.

1:07:44Like they've seen that in populations. Well, it's a dopamine dysregulation disorder. What we did is said, hey, this is all really interesting. We are going to make a first round of selections based on if it's compatible with life, A, and then B, if it doesn't have this particular mutation that we don't want to pass on. And then C, we're going to look at the data. And we looked at things like Alzheimer runs in my wife's family. So we looked at that one. Yeah. Right. And we said, that's a pretty big one. So we weighted that in our score and how we came with it. But some of the other ones that have high environmental factors, we didn't factor those in.

1:08:15Now, once again, you get the burden of knowledge, right? Right. Exactly. We're getting all these knowledge. I will make the argument that by the time my kids are old enough to have a disposition to have Alzheimer's, more than likely that will be cured. But we made some decisions from there. Sure, sure, sure. But to your point, if we would have done all that, we wouldn't have had any kids. Yeah, exactly. There was no, like, perfect model out there. So it is an interesting question as it relates to germline editing. But I think that over time, the world will agree that there are certain things that we should use our powers for good to eradicate that all, you know, ethnicities, all genders and all religious affiliations would agree on.

1:09:00I think there are some of those. Of course. Yeah, yeah. I would hope so. As we said. I don't know why anyone would be against being able to edit out sickle cells. Yes. I think that's coming. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Living your best life means being extra where it counts and skipping the extra where you don't need it. Like in your cleaning products. That's where 7th Generation comes in. Their bio-based cleaning power delivers a powerful clean with nothing extra in the bottle. Need a dish soap that cuts through the tough grease? A detergent that tackles the worst stains and odors?

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1:10:33okay tell me then about gene drives so i'm very pro gene drives but i'm only for them for invasive species so the most famous example is using a genetically modified insect they also work for vertebrates which we'll get into using a genetically modified insect to then put a gene that then gets distributed through the population for population suppression and control the mosquito is the big The mosquito example was there's this thesis of like in Africa, you get malaria, you get all these disease states. That's bad. Everyone agrees that it's bad. With that said, they didn't actually use a gene drive.

1:11:04They actually used a form of kind of got marketed as a gene drive. It was more irradiated mosquitoes that lowered the populations. But the problem is in Africa, mosquitoes are a part of the food web. They are not an invasive species. I totally agree that there's badness that comes from the spreading of disease. And mosquitoes are a major spreader of disease. In other cases where you have invasive species, where they are eradicating other species and having an effect on the landscape or on food production, that their removal only benefits the land, I'm pro that. But how do we know? Like the other one that said the extinct one was eating all the sheep, they would say that was an invasive species.

1:11:43Well, it was indigenous to Tasmania. This is more like when you bring in the brown trout to this stream and it displaces all of the fish. So you have Asian carp in the Great Lakes and it's destroying the Great Lakes ecosystem. The U.S. government has a$3 billion environmental remediation program that will not kill them. We're dealing with invasive species right now. Texas is pretty bad. There's this thing that came from Panama because global warming, it's gotten hotter. And then also we as humans are just translocating more and more and more, right? So we have actually brought in the screw worm, which is this fly that lays larvae that literally screws down it, spreads disease, kills cattle.

1:12:20It multiplies like crazy in hot weather. Texas was like 104 when I was there the other day. Yeah. Not great. New Zealand, it's either the possum. Yeah, it's the bushed up possum. They're not supposed to be there. They come over on ships and cargo holds. They get into the population or someone brings them as a pet. And like everywhere in New Zealand, it's like if you see one call, they got to get rid of these fuckers. Same thing for cats in Australia, right? I'm not anti-cats. I am. I have two dogs. I'm fine. Okay. Let Monica take the hit on this one. So I'm sort of anti-cats. But in Australia, people are poisoning cats because the largest mammalian extinction rates that are occurring in the world are in Australia of unique species of marsupials because of cats.

1:13:01Cats are great predators. No one followed Bob Barker and like Spade and Neuterum. They just released them out there, right? Yeah. And so people are actually shooting. And that's an animal welfare disaster. And also we have this history of it too, Monica. It's like the snakes got into Ireland. So then they bring in mongoose to kill the snake. Now the mongoose is like, yeah, yeah. So the idea with gene drives is you can introduce a gene. It's not going to jump species. We spent a lot of time with this administration educating them on genetic engineering and showing that like with your choice on the screwworm, you have three choices.

1:13:33You can release tons of irradiated flies that will slow the population. And they're spending a billion five right now in Texas of doing that. Not efficient. Not going to solve the problem. will slow it and then they're going to have to do it again and again like this is a repeat thing forever it's like the war on drugs yeah or you can inoculate the cows nobody wants to do that right you can accept higher beef prices because you're gonna have less cows start to import beef which they're doing and you're seeing the feedback on that or you can use a gene drive that eradicates just the species from where it's not supposed to be wow and it's eight months to eradicate species versus 12 years.

1:14:11Wow. Eight months. Are there any pilot programs where this is happening? Ours. Okay. And it's going to be for this worm? We're trying. We have gotten approval from different groups within the intelligence community and in the defense. Okay. Are mosquitoes part of the food web here? Yeah. I hate them so much. Bats are chowing down on them. Spiders are eating them. Mosquitoes are absolutely key to most food webs, except in certain island states like Hawaii. Avian malaria is being spread by mosquitoes and killing a lot of these amazing, like the Hawaiian honeycour, a lot of these amazing birds. So you could eradicate mosquitoes.

1:14:48You could eradicate them on certain islands. So if you do everything right from a conservation perspective and you don't eradicate invasive species, you're like, we're not going to drill over here. We're not going to produce over here. You're going to protect all these lands. You're going to protect all these species. And you don't get rid of invasive species. You don't even make a dent in environmental remains. Yeah. Like invasive species are the biggest threat to disease spread, environmental collapse, and environmental remediation efforts. And again, we're responsible for bringing these species.

1:15:19Yeah, we move all this stuff around. We've caused it. Or change the climate for them. Okay, let's talk about artificial eggs, the synthetic womb, and just synthetic biology in general. Like what's happening there? We have three artificial womb projects. We have a marsupial roller culture system. So all of the pursuit of these is how do we grow animals fully outside of needing a surrogate? So we have that. We also have a second project, which is a placental interface, which sounds weird. We're making uterine walls. The way it works is the embryo hatches. And then we actually have a placenta that invades into the uterine wall.

1:15:56It's pretty amazing. It's like right out of a sci-fi movie. That's how biology works. So we're making a synthetic uterine wall so that we can make a synthetic uterine sack that you can grow them to turn in. And we've had successful invasions. So you track these on, there's this thing called the Carnegie scale of development, and we've tracked them through it. And we're pretty close on both of those. And then we had a third one for the avian because there's no bird big enough that can grow, definitely an elephant bird, but definitely a South Island giant moa. So what we did, because we're working with the Naitahu people, we're working with Peter Jackson and the Maori.

1:16:27The eggs are still eight times bigger than that of an emu. So you're going to have to birth it through an emu, then transfer it into an artificial egg. Oh. Yeah, so we birthed the world's first birds fully ex-utero using this repeat artificial egg process. It looks like a more fun version of alien. Yeah, sure. Wow. What is the actual synthetic, like, what is the cell made of? Is it made of carbon? Yeah, so we take the cells from the chickens, and we put them into this matrix. It's like a little infrastructure that it grows around? And then we actually had to develop a polymer. It just looks like plastic when you watch the video, where it allows the right level of permeability of oxygen and whatnot.

1:17:05And so people had tried to grow chickens and other birds outside of an egg or womb, and they would plug in oxygen. They do all these stuff that were developmentally lethal, right? The eggs actually pour, eggs actually breathe. How do you recreate that? But also then if you're going to recreate it, how do you re-engineer it so you can do more? So artificial lights, you can hook up to microscopes. We actually created a visible and non-visible spectrum lighting system. So you can put it in a cradle and truly understand it and have different lights. But if you point directional, even these high-frequency lights, into the developing embryo, it can destroy the embryo.

1:17:40So we actually had to create channels and refractive mirrors so that you dissipate the light. Oh, my God. So a lot went into it. And then eggs actually, based on the shape and the pressure and gravity, help form the developing chicken. So the actual cells are derived from chickens? Yes. And across all, even if you were doing like a mammal wound? Oh, no, no, no. Those are just for that. How do you get the mammal cell? So the mammal cells are whoever the genetic donor is. It's the fat-tailed dunnart for the thylacine. It's a respective genetic donor. It's the gray wolf or the dire wolf. It's the roan antelope for the blue buck.

1:18:17Making sure I don't say anything that we haven't said. Yeah, no, you said bluebuck. Because these are the closest matches. Yeah, they're the closest genetic matches. Okay. Wow. Because we're not just doing somatic cell nuclear transfer for serocity, the cloning step. We're doing interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is crazy. You have mitochondrial rejection. There's a lot of things that go into the engineering of this. Well, also, I just know this from humans, right? That 50 % of all pregnancies self-terminate. Yeah. Because 50 % of the time during meiosis, there's like disjunction.

1:18:49There's so many errors that happen that the body's great at detecting, screening, and then aborting. Exactly. And so if our own average is 50 % success. And we're pretty good at it. Yeah, exactly. We've been evolving for this long. Cloning efficiencies are somewhere between 2 % and 4%. We bought a company called Viogen last year that most famously cloned a bunch of celebrities' dogs, including Tom Brady's dog, which like broke the internet. Celine Dion was the first. No, Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand. I'm sorry, Barbra Streisand. Yeah. Sorry, Selene. That was a big deal. She did that before we acquired them.

1:19:20They do horses, cats, and dogs. Did they do this? I saw a great 60 Minutes on the world's most famous polo player. I think he's from Argentina. Yeah, they did their horses too. And he's got eight of the same horses, Monica. The horse he won the most on, they just made eight of. That is their main. Yeah. We bought them because there's another like 18 species that have ever been clung. They're at 78%. We didn't say that. Yeah, versus 2%. Yeah. That's one of the reasons we bought them. We support their consumer business. People are worried. We actually got a lot of emails where people are like, are you going to not allow them to clone the dogs?

1:19:50I was like, no, you keep doing that. We're using their tech for native species production. Because I do think that we can productionize native species. Yeah, because people's moral issue with cloning the animals is interesting because we've discussed this, I think, on here as well. It doesn't come at a real ethical cost, but for some reason it does strike people, I think. There's two common pushbacks. One is legitimate, which is like all the people that are in the rescue a dog. It's like, if you want a dog, there's all these dogs that need a home. Go get one of those. So that's bulletproof. That's a good criticism.

1:20:20People have asked me, I have two dogs, Barbie and Ken, before the movie came out. They're much older. But if you're like before the dolls. They're 95 years old. They're quite old dogs. They're not cloned, but we have. We have super enhanced. We have ended their cynicism. But they're both rescues and they're amazing, right? Yeah. So I'm very pro-rescue. Sure. We work with American Humane Society around it. But at the same time, I can see the other argument, right? So people ask me, would you clone your dogs? And I'm like, I don't know. If my kid was like, I would just go adopt another dog because I love to point.

1:20:49But if my kid's like, I don't know. I'm not in that position yet. Yeah. Well, the other criticism is you're playing God. So if the argument is semi first, you're required to believe. I don't agree with that. No, I know. I'm just saying if the prerequisite for the argument is you must first believe in God, I'm already out. But then secondly, guess what, y 'all? we've already been playing God by fucking eradicating. You're playing God when you take cholesterol medication. Yes. On yourself. Or when you eradicate the dodos. Or when you cut down the rain for it. Get rid of, yes. Or overfish the oceans.

1:21:21Like, we play God every day. Yeah. So why don't we play God for some good? Yeah. But part of it is like, okay, so if your kid is like, it has to be Barbie. Are we then teaching them the right lesson? Exactly. I don't know. How will they process grief? I understand our dogs are like a part of our family. And I think some people take that even further. I don't know. It's a good question. It's tricky. I have not cloned my dog yet. Here's the other issue is like, just because I want to do something, I don't understand why I think that should apply to everyone. So no, I think the beauty of dogs is what you teach the kids is that they don't live that long.

1:21:55It's a crazy endeavor. Come fall in love with this thing. And in nine years, you'll be heartbroken. I don't want one. But that's a great experience for people to have. And then lo and behold, they get another dog and do it again. There is a beautiful life lesson. It is worth the pain to experience a love. I do not have to screw with that at all. But I don't need that to apply to everyone else because that's what I think my kids should learn. But they're not going to experience the pain if they just have the same dog again. That's my point. Like, it wouldn't be for me because we all miss Lola. If ever there was a dog we would have cloned, it would have been Lola.

1:22:27That's part of human life. That's right. And it teaches them it's still worth it to put yourself out there for these other dogs. Yeah, and love is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I say this about Viagin. And like my goal is, you know, we're standing up outside of the de-extinction work and the technologies that can be applied to humans and some of the other stuff we talked about. We open source all of our technologies for conservation, right? And so we have a foundation, we raised$100 million for our foundation. And we just say, use our technologies for free for conservation, right? And we've been standing up these like Noah's Ark 2.0 bio vaults all around the world because we're eradicating species so fast as humanity.

1:22:58We've got to have a backup plan because conservation doesn't work at the speed of which we are eradicating these species. And so why I bought Viagen was I think people should have those conversations. I told you, I don't know what I would do. And I own Viagen. I don't know if I would clone my dog. But that's just me being transparent about it. I'm very interested because not just that cloning efficiency, but of the like 18 species that have ever been cloned, like 16 of them were done by Viagen, right? Blackfooted ferrets, Svorsky's horse. We worked with them on some of our work on the red wolves.

1:23:25And so when you start to go talk to these governments, if you can have those capabilities and you have genetic engineering where you can engineer and loss genetic diversity, so you don't have bottleneck and you have these bio vaults, that one plus one plus one isn't three. That is a key backup model for life. Now, that doesn't mean we should go hunt things and kill things off, but we are in a spot where we are losing species. And some of these national pride species, ecological function species, these keystone species, or if they're important to indigenous people groups, we should do everything to accelerate their recovery.

1:24:01And the current recovery models, they're just not working. We are slowing an inevitable end. And that's why about viaging, because one of the things we've been educating this administration on is like, hey, let us go back everything up. We're not going to ask any money from this administration or taxpayers. We'll do it on our dime and we'll give all of that data to the world. We're not keeping any secret data. And then the next thing we're going to ask them to do is like, can we pick a couple species and can we clone them for you so that we can like build a population where they actually can survive on their own, not in a captive managed model.

1:24:34That's where I think that the cross-functional integration of these technologies through the lens of synthetic biology gives us so much more than just a mammoth. Whoa, so fast. Okay, my last question, you'll hate. You are a business at the end of the day. Yeah. And you've raised, I think,$600 million and you're valued at$10 billion. Ish. Those are rough numbers we can agree on. What's the big revenue stream? Why is it worth$10 billion? Where is money being made? So right now, we're not focused on revenue. The technologies for us are key to the revenue. And so in the short term, we've produced viable spin-out businesses.

1:25:10Our drug discovery platform company, FormBio, is worth over$100 million. Our plastic degradation company is worth over$100 million. Astromech, which is our computational biology, ancestral reconstruction business, we just raised a$3.8 billion valuation, right, is one of our spin-offs. We have two other spin-offs we haven't announced yet that we're very excited about. But I guess my curiosity is, do you think ultimately you'll be licensing or performing procedures? I think we'll be doing four things. I think we will spin off and license technologies for new businesses, which we've gotten pretty good at in a very short period of time.

1:25:44We've only been around for four and a half years. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of insane. That's wild. We're the number one genome engineering company by at least a decade in four and a half years. So I think that's quite interesting. So we've proven the license and spin out model of the technologies for new sectors. Licensing the technologies directly into human health care stuff is kind of another phase of it. Invasive species is a$6 trillion global economic impact. Oh, really? Yeah, it's huge. Okay. We are the only company in the world that has invertebrate and vertebrate gene drives that can work across species.

1:26:15Okay, so that's a big— So government will be another vertical. And then I do think there will be a component, which I say all the time, around working with governments in ecotourism and carbon credit models. If we can restore ecosystems in the Arctic by putting mammoths back in there, we will get annuitized carbon and nature credits from that. Okay. Fucking fascinating, man. I mean, talk about being on the brink of all this biology, AI. It's fun. This confluence of all the things that are exciting. This was very, very fascinating. Thanks for coming. This was great. Yes. He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time.

1:26:51Thank God Monica's here. She's got to let them have the facts. Is that your tea or hers? Mine. You know, it's not a common pattern. Tell me. Collecting mugs. That's just me. Did you like magnets as a kid? Yeah. Did you? Well, I mean, if my mom would let me buy it, like if we're on vacation or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I liked doing that. And keychains. Key chains as well. I love collecting. Yeah, you're a collector. I'm a, what do we call it? A magpie. Not a hoarder. Fuck you and thank you. What do we call it? A hoarder. I think it's called a magpie. Yeah, well, a magpie collects little trinkets.

1:27:40I think I'm a magpie. Yeah. But... Do you know, it's a huge industry. I've just been educated on this. I had no idea. They're pretty. Magpies? Oh, sure. Oh, my God. And they're very smart, I believe. Oh, shit. Sure. Yeah, it says highly intelligent, long-tailed birds. You got to be intelligent to want to collect stuff, I guess. Yeah. Oh, my God. Magpies rank among the world's smartest animals. Oh, boy. Maybe you need a magpie tattoo, like my crow tattoo. That's actually cute. But you know, I'm not getting a tattoo. Yeah. Where would you get a tattoo if you were going to get one? Neck? yeah head head tattoo what if i got one and so you never saw it because it was on my head my hair was covering you well you'd first have to shave your head ouch i'm not doing that um i would get one probably here commonplace that for the listener this is my form but like right in the crook of your elbow there below just below like when you're playing the game with your eyes closed and someone's running their finger up where you think it yeah right when you think it's there but it's not.

1:28:51When you say stop, but you're not there yet. It'd be there. You know what's fun about that game is you already know that you're going to say stop too early. I know. And so you do let it go further than you think and then still it's not there. What a game. What a game. What a game. Universal game. Or like here. It would be I think on my arm. I'm not getting one though. No. What would be the price? Oh, God. But I could still get whatever I wanted? Or what's the price for like a bad tattoo? Yeah, a dick on your neck or something. No, it's a magpie on your crook of your elbow there. One million dollars?

1:29:33No, this is a bad game. Okay. Because then people, whatever I say, people will get mad at me. You won't get one for$400? Yeah, exactly. Like David Sedaris' thing. Remember, he's talking about COVID and people yelling at other people. and if you were just to write like I am the sun was on my face and it made me smile today oh it must be nice I don't even have a face

1:30:01yeah I don't even have a face but it really that parasocial thing is I it is as bad as you know when people say like I constantly bring it up this podcast or that podcast that is me almost anything anyone says it triggers a sadera story yes and then they got to hear it well Well, luckily, his stories are fantastic. So they're good ones to bring up, I would say. That's true. Well, you just told it on an episode. So maybe you don't want to. But I was going to say, do you want to talk about your hosting? Because you did bring up that you were going to host, not host, sorry. You were going to present at the Prop Master Awards.

1:30:38Oh, yeah, I did on Saturday. Yeah, yeah. I can tell that. Okay. First, I have to say that Jeffrey Johnson is. Shout out. Is one of the greatest human beings in all of show business. Of all the different crew members I've ever worked with. I just love him like you can't imagine. He was the prop master on Parenthood for six years. And chips. And then he did chips. And I think he had another job. And I think he really did me a favor by doing chips. He's incredible. And we had so much fun. And so at any rate, they have an award show on Emmy weekend. And for themselves, which is warranted and adorable.

1:31:14Yeah. they get to have a glitzy night like all the other departments and so each year I present and we he and I usually do some kind of a bit and he always thinks of it so it was I think last year because you know your prop person has a bag with all your props in it they've got your watch they've got you know all the bullshit you gotta wear and they come up to you before the scene and they put your watch on you and they hand you your ring and all this crap yeah and so he had to speak. And I stood next to him last year and had his prop bag and I was constantly doing things to him and putting stuff on and blah, blah, blah.

1:31:50So anyways, this year, his idea was that I would carry him across this stage, set him on the other side, then come back to the microphone to do my presenting of the category. And it was last minute idea. And he said, you know, and then you come back to the mic, say, you know, prop department always carries the actors on their shoulders, thought I could return the favor. So it didn't go as planned. Right. I was like, yeah, that's no problem. I can definitely carry you across the stage. I do nothing but train. For God knows what, this is it. Yeah. So I pick him up. I'm holding him, waiting for them to go through the, whatever they call that when they are saying, he's a podcaster and an actor.

1:32:29Oh, they're introducing you. In the introduction, right? And again, I'm holding him and I'm like, skip the act. You know, whatever. Just get to one thing. This is too many things because I'm holding them. And then I walk across the stage and then the stage is longer than I think it is. Big stage. And slash I haven't carried a man like a baby ever. I'm just assuming, yeah, I can live away. So anyways, it's a pretty long walk across the stage. I think people get a little chuckle out of it. Sure. They know Jeffrey's being carried like a baby. Yep. I set him down and now I'm hyper aware of like I got to run back to the microphone because it's like they're now waiting for a while.

1:33:04They had to watch me carry him. so then I run back to the microphone and then when I get to the microphone it is starting to occur to me like I need to really kind of bend over and breathe like I've just done 20 squats right I'm like I'm the category of you know and I start reading and I'm like oh my god I'm so out of breath yet I'm having to read it's getting so bad that I can I'm getting blasts of light in my eyesight. Yeah. You know, like little sparklers are going off in my Aurora. Yeah. And to the point where I have to, I have to acknowledge it. Like I can't carry on. It's like three pages, this, this, this category intro, maybe more.

1:33:46And so finally I go, Oh, okay, gang, I'm just going to acknowledge, I'm going to admit that I am, I am winded. Okay. I shouldn't be, but I, I've really lost my breath. Yeah. And so laughing, laughing, laughing. And then I somehow thought that got me the breaths I needed. But really I needed to sit there and I needed to breathe for about 10 or 15 seconds of silence. I wasn't going to do that. I just acknowledged the thing and then I went back into it and then I was proceeding through and there were some hard names to read. Really hard. I feel so ashamed that I know I butchered this name. I'm hopeful the person wasn't actually there.

1:34:27Okay. Because I said, I'm butchering this. I acknowledge it. I'm so sorry. Oh, sure. Like offering like... Is this televised? No. Okay. Thank goodness. Although it is being recorded, so God knows where this exists. But all to say, I really was teetering on consciousness by the end of it. Sure. Trying to hold in tight, make my talking voice normal while hyperventilating. Yeah, that's hard. Did you have an identity crisis? because you're like, and did you also think people were watching and like, how is he having a hard time carrying? He's so big. Exactly. If I were them, I'd be like, what's, what's all this about?

1:35:07If you can't carry a guy across the stage and then talk. Yeah. I'm having the same feeling. That's what I'm saying. Did you have a crisis? But I do urge someone to carry 190 pound man, you know, what it's like for me to try to get your body off the train tracks. Okay. It's not as easy as you think. Okay. That's the lesson I learned Don't worry No I had a very healthy Response Which is like that didn't go well I didn't do a good job presenting I didn't do a good job reading I fucked up some names And on the ride home Which in the past I would have really been Lashing myself over I was like Jeff Still knows I love him And that I'm always around If he calls You showed up.

1:35:55And that was the goal. Yes. The goal wasn't to be spectacular. Exactly. Or to have perfect cardiovascular training. I know. I'd like to see if anyone could really do what I did and not be out of breath. I think even if you train. I think if like, who's the best? Lance Armstrong could probably do it. He had the best cardio probably of anyone. Right, but he might not have the strength. Oh, let's hope. You need both. I need something on him. I think John Cena could do it. Well, that would be a good challenge. Okay. Yeah. I'd like to challenge. Like the new like – you know that old show they used to have on NBC?

1:36:28It was like Contest of the Stars or whatever. And they'd have TV stars competing against athletes. Oh. Do you know that famous show? It would be like on a Saturday. This would be a good show. So you have – it's a game show. Yeah. And you have to carry someone across the stage and then you have to come back and you have to make some kind of speech. And then that's somehow evaluated and that's how you win or lose. And it would basically just be John Cena and I, I guess, competing. No. We could – no. There's other people. Like – Alan Richson. Oh, yeah. He would be great. I mean, for old time's sake, Schwarzenegger could come.

1:37:02He's a little older now. Well, but we don't know what he's capable of. I don't like to dabble in gossip, but I will say I did see a little headline that Katherine Schwarzenegger had posted some pictures this summer, and there was a picture of Marie and him together having a lovely time. Uh-huh. And it made me very happy because I had seen that doc of him, and I was very sad. He seemed really lonely. Oh. In the doc. I felt the heartbreak that he had, you know, wasn't with this woman. Oh. Yeah. I think he very much would like to have stayed with his. That's my guess. I have no inside information.

1:37:39Yeah. But to see that they were enjoying each other's company. Yeah. I don't know. It gave me an abnormal amount of happiness. That's good. Yeah. I think families, if they can. Yeah. I mean, your mom and dad were around each other. They were spectacular at it. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people strive for that if they can. It's hard. I tip my hat to Dave Barton, my stepdad. Did Arnold cheat? Oh, very publicly. He had a child with the housekeeper. Oh, wow. I'm really out of the loop. Who is now competing in bodybuilding competitions. The housekeeper? Son. His son. Oh, the son. That was a beautiful part of the doc.

1:38:18He's like, this is a great embarrassment to me, but I would never deny my son. I want to be proud of the fact this is my son. Yeah. His name is such and such. I would never hide from that as much as this is painful. I want the world to know I couldn't be more proud to have him as a son. Yeah, that's. And now he's a bodybuilder. Wow. He just competed in like a natural bodybuilding contest, which if you want to see the difference between using steroids and not, look at one of these natural bodybuilding shows versus the steroid ones. It's not even the same. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. I'm glad he, that would be really horrible if he like didn't want anything to do with them.

1:38:56So I'm, I'm glad that like he brought this person into this world who has no choice, you know? So like, I'm very glad to hear that. It's shrouded in a lot of public embarrassment. Sure. Yeah. Again, that this person's born into like, and they themselves are now a part of this narrative that they didn't choose. Yeah. So on top of it, if your parent was like, I don't want anything to do with you because you're reminding me of this, that's actually horrible. Or I don't want to talk about it. That would be an understandable thing for him to go, I don't want to talk about this in public. So I think it is an act of integrity to go like, yeah, I don't want to talk about this.

1:39:36But of course, I am going to talk about this because I am very proud to be his father. Yeah, that's nice. I think it's nice. Yeah, it is. It's definitely nice. A lot of people would just go like, I don't want to talk about this. Yeah. Yes, they would. And I guess I'm saying like for that other person, actually for both the other people involved, the mother and the son, that's like horrible. So I'm glad. I'm happy to hear that. And I think the kid, I wonder if the kids hang out. All of his children. I don't know that, but I think so. I feel like I've seen photos. That would be so nice. I mean, again, it's like.

1:40:16They're a lovely family. Like, again, I was lucky enough to be around that family 20 years ago. Yeah. They're lovely, lovely folks. Yeah. I love Maria. Yeah. Yeah. She's radical. I think you could be lovely and still be like, eh. Yeah. I don't know. But, again, well, I guess we don't know for sure. But my hope is that they've embraced this person. That's nice. Maybe they all have Thanksgiving. Perhaps. A lot of things getting together. Yeah, I can't put too fine a point on how much I love Maria. She's so smart and fun to talk to. Right. It's a great debater. She could be part of it. Carrying the – in the competition show.

1:41:01Do you think Maria Shriver could be a part of carrying – We don't know. Of all of her many virtues, which there are probably too many to list, carrying a 190 pound man across the stage might not be what she could do. Okay. Do you think she could lift you off the tracks? I don't know. Okay. We just don't know. We don't know. I don't know how she feels about me. I don't know if the adrenaline, you know, like the superpowers might not hit her. She doesn't care enough about me. Yeah. Well, we don't know until we're in this position. None of us know. As we know, practice doesn't make perfect in this case.

1:41:34But I do have a hunch you are capable of more if you care about the person a lot. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so I just don't know how I rank out of 10 how much I would enact her super human strength. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah. I care about Jeff a ton, so I could carry him forever. It's just I can't make a speech afterwards. Understandable. Gosh. Do you think you'd risk your life? Or who? For a stranger. If a stranger was on the tracks. this is really a hard question. It's almost a useless question because there's what you think you would do and then there's what you do. Yeah. I will say my track record shows that when I see stuff that I think I can change, I act very instinctually to get involved.

1:42:21That's true. In the past, I have. Right. Again, do I want to run into the apartment of my neighbor who's getting beat by this guy who's twice my size? If I think about that, no. Right. But I did. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't know her well. I just was more like said hi to her on the sidewalk occasionally, you know. But yeah, I hear a woman screaming. And I'm glad. I'm go. I'll go. I feel bad because I just don't want to go. You don't want to have to go into the apartment. Yeah. Again, it's not. I won't go. But I'll call 911. Yeah. That's Bree handled the 911 of it all. Yeah. Well, I ran up the staircase and I came tumbling down the staircase.

1:43:12I know. I know. I know. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:43:28But you know what I'll do? I'll have a hard conversation with anyone You know When those people are in jail They're handcuffed so they can't hurt me This guy was straight out of a Guy Ritchie film He had a head the size of a microwave Shaved Thick, thick fucking cockney accent Yeah He looked like a rugby player Yeah Did he go to jail? I have no idea Well, he was not arrested in that moment He wasn't? No, I came, you know, we got into a wrestling match on the top of the stairwell. My elbow went through the fire extinguisher. You know, it's got the glass break. So my elbow went through that. And then now all of a sudden we're like we're tumbling down this very tall staircase.

1:44:20Yeah. And she then locks, deadbolts her door. Okay. So she's now good. We separate enough. If he runs back up the stairs to her, he's pounding on the door, but it's now deadbolted. Yeah. I am now at the bottom of the stairs just making sure he can't get in. I'm like, I gotta fucking please don't get in the stairs. I gotta go back up. And then as he starts coming down the stairwells, when he finally realizes, and I'm yelling, dude, the fucking cops are on their way. So I'm like letting him know the cops are on their way. He recognizes he's not going to get in there. And as he starts coming down the stairs, I now come down the sidewalk to my stairwell, which is the next one over.

1:44:57Bree's standing there with the cordless phone on with 911. And then she takes a few steps up. I stand between her and him because I don't know what's next. And then he walks by and he does not want round two with me. And he goes, you wouldn't understand. She's a fucking cunt. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was his last words. And then he disappeared. And I never saw him again. Yeah. She did I was doing laundry at one point A week later And I was coming out of the little shared laundry room And she thanked me That's nice The worst it would be If like Two days later you saw him back in there I mean that's the pattern sadly I know So good for her Yeah she did not invite him back over Gosh Yeah Life is so hard It really is It really is hard I gotta tell you That was an action packed apartment building Yeah There was something happening About once a month something happened there Yeah You know Watch the one neighbor OD Right below her apartment Yeah Yeah it was fucking action packed You got out of there Mmhmm Bree was there for another By herself Year and a half or so Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:46:23That's, she's, she is tough. Like, she could definitely, she could definitely play in the competition. She was pretty comfortable in chaos. Yeah. Yeah. But that's different, like, yeah, I guess. But physical violence is different than, like. It is. Chaos. But at that point in our relationship, she had already witnessed a pretty good deal of it. I mean, you know, one of the, we were just like, we weren't even really dating. I had a girlfriend. She had a boyfriend. Carrie was in town. We went over to her house to hang with her. We all got drunk. Yeah. And this is when the roommate is, I'm in a conversation with the roommate.

1:47:10Who? His roommate? Breeze. Oh, Breeze. Carrie's visiting from Michigan. Oh, okay. You go over to Breeze's house. Go over to Breeze's house. She lived with like four people. Okay. One of the dudes and I are talking. Apparently, we're in a fight, but I truly don't recognize that. Tim Lovestead's there, too. Oh. And I'm sitting cross-legged on my hands, sitting on my hands, leaning against a dresser. And in the middle of, like, I think we're just having, like, kind of a friendly debate. Oh, boy. And he stands up. And then I'm like, oh, this guy's leaving the room over this? And as he crosses me, he just starts fucking punching me in the face.

1:47:47And this is when I got my nose broken. and I like I can't use my hands to get up because I got to use my hands to cover my face and then he runs out of the room and it's like someone poured a gallon of milk it's the most blood I've ever seen that came out of my nose during this and then I get up and I run to his room, he's deadbolted the room then I hear his side door open then I hear his car drive down the driveway Bree's pretty alarmed there's a lot of blood and Carrie Carrie's there and she's so stubborn. She goes, this is nothing. This is nothing. This is fine. Like she's. She's like, don't even.

1:48:26Yeah, this is nothing. This is standard. This is nothing.

1:48:32And she's still, you know, she still dated you after that for nine years. I wonder what. Not to do. Sorry. Go ahead. I just wonder. I want to know what the conversation, the debate was. I want to know what led to that like I know because in your head you're like what we're just but obviously it was about his girlfriend okay and um yeah okay yeah and I told you he broke every bone in his wrist he ended up having surgery and he was supposed to leave to go on tour with his band oh shit it was a big loss for everyone and I had that commercial I had booked oh yeah we both lost jobs over it I was 21.

1:49:15Like that story is from when I was 21. I can't even like. Yeah, 21. So young. Isn't it weird to think about you took such a left turn in life? Like really? You're so different. Your life is so different than it was. My life is so different. Yeah, not you're so different necessarily. But your life is like completely different. You live in a nice house. A beautiful, nice house. Beautiful children. Incredible children and, like, a wife who's, like, America's sweetheart. Like, that is so different. Yeah. Suffice to say, if I got my nose broken in the living room, no. Kristen would not be like, oh, it's not.

1:49:59Right. This is fun. This is fun. No, but you're not getting your nose broken in the living room. No. That's my whole point. Like, you're not doing that anymore. I'm not. I'm an old man. Yeah, and I wonder if it's interesting for people who were around you back then to see this, to see this version of you. I hope they are happy for you. Well, you got to also, you have to paint a full picture. So that's happening. Sure, these things are happening on the weekends. Yeah. I'm also doing incredible in college. Sure. I'm going through the groundlings. I'm doing well. like I'm still the like very ambitious motivated dependable person yeah and then yeah I'm getting wild on the weekends that's yeah but that's a big part of it that's a big part of it like it is it is but I guess what I'm pointing out is I don't think anyone would be like I'm shocked he's made it he was such a fuck up that's not the vibe that's not what I mean yeah I guess I mean like there was so much chaos Yeah.

1:51:05Yes. And now there's not much. And partying and like being so short. Like there's just a lot. Like now your life just looks very different. You're a 51-year-old man with a family. I never leave this house. Yeah. I work at the house. Yeah. Yeah. It's a much, much different existence. And I just. That's why that wedding was so fun. Because I got to be my kind of wild, crazy self. But in a very safe now way. Yeah. Yeah. But I got to tap into like that energy source I used to have at my disposal all the time, which is like, yeah, let's go to that thing and let's let's try to Mexico tonight. And let's, you know, all that stuff that I used to be game for.

1:51:50Yeah, I don't think too many people, I mean, I'm sure a lot of addicts have this similar story, but if you're not one, I don't think you have that kind of life changing. You know, I don't know. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm wrong. I just feel like the shift is much bigger. Seismic. You know, the great thing is, is we could ask Tim Lovestead. Right. Because he was there the whole time and he's still here. Oh, I don't mean people wouldn't be around anymore. Oh, no, no. I know. But you were saying like I wonder what the people then think now of this domesticated life you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like Tim would be an easy person for us to ask because he was present that night and present during a lot of the stuff or some of it.

1:52:39Tim was a good boy. So he wasn't present during. Right. That's what I'm saying. There's versions. There is. And there's levels. Because then when I was in Detroit with Aaron, then it was like the stuff that was happening in Hollywood is like child's play. Exactly. To what Aaron and I were seeking out at all times. Yeah. Funny. Yeah. You're an interesting person. Oh, thank you. I was trying to become one. Yeah. You are. I think if anyone, myself included, this is weird to say, but I remember I watched you on Punk'd and I was like Punk'd is so funny. blah blah blah that guy's crazy yeah all of them are crazy um and then when i moved here and we had the same circle but i hadn't met you yet yeah and i remember some friends saying something about you and i was like huh like you were that you were in a conversation about blah blah and i was like oh and they're like he's really smart oh well that's nice and i was like really?

1:53:46I did. I was like, oh, I had no idea. Why would, how could anyone have had any idea? Right. You were on Punk'd and Baby Mama and Plank Dump, but I was definitely like, oh, he is? Oh, okay. Unexpected. I was unexpected. And then I met you and I was like, he is. Yeah. Wow. Wow. This is all a big surprise. Oh, funny. Speaking of being smart, let's do some facts. Okay. This is for Ben. Very interesting. No, it couldn't get more interesting. I can't believe this is happening. I know. Really crazy. I can't wait to have a pygmy mastodon. Where are you going to keep it? In my bedroom. Where? On my bed.

1:54:35He's going to live there? With huge tusks. How big will he be? I think even a pygmy one, like I think the pygmy mastodons on the Channel Islands were about the size of cows. Oh, that won't fit in your room. Well, it would, but it'd make things tight for sure. I've worked with cows a lot on TV when I was on the ranch. Oh, yeah. And I got to tell you, they're so sweet. I am blessed as mess. But I was really close on the ranch because it's a small stage and there's a cow. Yeah. And you're right there. And their eyeballs are so sweet. That's nice. You can like learn. You can look in them. Yeah. They're like whales.

1:55:18You know, when you see a whale's eye, you're like, yeah, there's a person in there. Oh, that's sad. Yeah. But they're sweet. Because people are, I know, but like people are mean to them and kill them. Cows, I'm part of the problem. Me too. Yeah. What would you think the ethics are if Ben could figure out how to grow a cow with no brain? Like no head. Oh, and then we eat those. Yeah, because there's like, there's not, all it is is this meat producer. I bet people would be mad about it, even though that would make no sense. Well, there's something about engineering. I mean, there is just something about engineering a new being.

1:55:52Well, aside from that, I think even the people would think it was cruel to kill something that's not even sentient. Oh, that. You know what I'm saying? Well, you do. Remember Coco? Well, Coco's got a big face and a smile. Coco is not sentient. Well, kind of. He can get around town. He's not sentient. Yeah. So will that cow be able to get around? I don't know if it will. Well, yeah. Don't you need a brain to tell it to move? This is kind of a computer chip that tells all the organs to work. It'll have a chip that also makes it walk around. Probably to get exercise. Build muscle and get, yeah. Yeah, get yummier.

1:56:28Can you imagine seeing a field full of cows with no heads? No, see, that's what irks me That's very scary Yeah, it's sci-fi It's M. Night Shyamalan And I don't want that Wes Craven It's a little more M. Night Shyamalan to me Is it? Okay He would definitely make a movie Where there's all these cows with no heads That someone engineered But you wouldn't see it to the last frame of the movie No, what you see is Okay, in the last frame You, okay, in the last frame. Paint the picture for me. He walks into the basement. Oh, they're in the basement. Walking Phoenix. He walks into the basement. Oh, Walking Phoenix walks into Phoenix.

1:57:08And he sees a little, like, crack in the ground. And he gets his tool and he's like, oh, oh, the floorboard is loose. Oh, okay, it's a wooden floor. Yeah. Okay. And then he lifts it and he's like, oh, what's that smell? Oh, okay. Okay. Pungent. Yeah. And then he sees on the back of the floorboard, there's blood. Okay. Then he looks and it's the heads of all the cows. They weren't engineered headless. They were real cows. Oh, they were just decapitated. Yes. Okay. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a sad ending. I want them to just be able to grow ribeyes with no suffering. Speaking of the movie I just wrote, I watched a scary movie with Adam Scott on.

1:57:59Oh, he was in it. He's in it. Uh-huh. It's him, Michelle Monaghan, Robert De Niro. Ever heard of him? Okay. I have. And it is good. What's it called? It's called The Whisper Man. It's scary. Is it on Netflix? I think it is on Netflix. Is it a series or a? It's a movie. It's a film. Yeah. Okay. And it's not too long. Great. That's your new criteria. Passed my test. Anything above 90 gets, you're in trouble. You better have a great film. But it was good. I enjoyed it. Okay, so I looked up the words for grandma and grandpa in other cultures. Okay, great. Babushka? Yeah, for Russian, babushka and dedushka.

1:58:45Oh, daddy is a dedushka? Grandpa. Grandpeppy? Spanish Abuela, Abuelo. Yeah, we love that. We know that. Italian, Nona. Mama Mia. No. Nona and. Nona and Nono. Nona and Nono. I don't think I knew Nono. German is Orna. Wow, Orna is. I know. Oh, no, it's not. Her name is Grandma. No, it's not. Okay. It's Oma. Oma. See, now do you see what happened? The M to me was an R and an N. That makes sense. Yeah. Because you're bad eyesight. Oma and Opa. Oma, no, that's cute. Greek is Yaya. Maybe it's Yaya. Yeah, that's what Peggy calls her grandma, her Yaya. Okay, but it's Y-I-A. So I do think it's Yaya, but that's interesting spelling.

1:59:35And then Papu. Pupu. Papu. French? Ooh. Mimi and Pippi. No. I mean, sure. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what I was taught to call my French grandparents. It's a grand mare. Oh, I love it. That must be official. Grand Mare is grandma and Grand Père is grandpa. I love it. I just want to know where Mimi and Pippi went. Irish is... Oh, my... Irish is hard. It's Gaelic or something. My mayo? Maymay? Meemaw. May-me-o? My Meemaw. Meemaw is like a Southern thing sometimes. Meemaw, yeah. I know a lot of friends who have Meemaws. Meemaws, yeah. Yeah. It's true. Meemaw and Pawpaw. Yeah. A lot of people have Pawpaws.

2:00:27My dad might go by Oshie. Oh, is that Grandpa and... Nope, it's just since his name is Ashok. Oh, okay. Well, we're going to try. It's really close to, not Ashi, but who is the Bhagwan? What did he become? He became. No, that he became Osho. Osho. Osho. Osho. Tough titties, Osho. Yep. I think we're going to, he's going to try to push for that, but you know, Memphis gets to decide ultimately. Sure, yeah. That's the first born gets to decide what the grandparents are called. That's why my papa Bob was papa Bob. Because of David. My brother David. But were there any other grandkids? Yeah, but they all came after David and I.

2:01:10They did. Okay. Jamie and Jason are like two years and four years respectively younger. Okay, got it. So David was the first born grandchild. Oh, he sure was. He was the belle of the ball for five whole years he got to be doted on. So cool. Yeah. It sucks when the other one comes. You. When Dax arrives. He's deaf and colicky. He grunts. Do you think that's why Delta wants to learn sign language? Because my dad was deaf. Deaf, yeah, maybe. Oh, there's, okay, there's a lot. This says in India, in Hindi specifically, though. So my parents don't speak that. Yeah, so I don't know. But it says nani and nana.

2:01:51Well, I like that. Oh, this is funny because I always say they're close to Italians. Oh, yeah. That's my observation. Oh, well, okay. It's specific for maternal grandma, maternal grandpa. Too complex. No, we're smart. Paternal grandma. I feel like it reeks of the caste system. I think Spanish has that too. It's part of the caste system. Oh, God. Okay. Oh, in Swahili, it's Bibi and Babu. Oh, I love it. Bibi and Babu. Actually. These are clearly set up for babies to be able to say. You notice the pattern here? They're all like baby talk. Oh, yeah. In Hawaiian, tutu. There you go. A baby could say that.

2:02:29Okay, Dr. Death. Baylor, yeah. He held surgical privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas starting in 2011. And then 2012 is when he was suspended and then resigned. He wreaked havoc in a short amount of time. His name is Christopher Dunch. Yeah. First physician in United States history to be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for criminal acts and gross malpractice committed directly inside the operating room during surgery. He also, look at him. He kind of looks familiar, though. He's a big lug, right? He's a football player, but he wasn't as. Oh, like, ooh. Yeah, he looks like a, he looks like Fred Flintstone.

2:03:19Oh, fuck me. Look at that photo. I mean, you shouldn't ever judge a book by its cover. No, you shouldn't. But I'm telling you, if I shook my surgeon's hand and that's what he looked like, I'd be like, I'm going to pass. But remember, people called him Dr. Swagger. They did? I'm just reading that. I don't remember that detail. Well, I do remember them saying at first, like, he was really cool. Like, everyone, like, thought he was cool. It turned. Because he partied. Okay, so I just was looking up the extinct animals because I'm just not well-versed. Okay. What have you said? I'm just not convinced.

2:03:58Oh, my God. Whoa, that would be crazy. Yeah, what a revelation. Yeah. So I'm just going to read some that we—these are kind of obvious, I guess. Well, Dodo is the Dodo, flightless bird. stellar sea cow. He mentioned the sea cow. He's hot to bring that one back. Yeah. Okay, there's the quagga. It's a South African subspecies of the plain zebra hunted for meat and skin. But it looks like that. But that kind of looks like a regular zebra. Yeah. So I don't care about it. I'm just kidding. I care. Passenger pigeon. That's cool because... Well, we lost it though, right? Yeah, but if we could bring it back.

2:04:43This is like an immoratorium at the Oscars for animals. Like there should be music playing and then you just read the dodo bird. The Shishwan pony mule. The passenger pigeon. And then you're, oh. Yeah. I love the passenger. The passenger pigeon made me want to get into animals.

2:05:08Tasmanian tiger. I mean, I do want one of those. Do you? Actually, no. They look kind of ugly because they look kind of like coyotes. I saw two coyotes yesterday. Okay. Chinese paddlefish. Ew. I think the problem is I just don't like animals very much. Right. That's going to pose a problem when asked to be sympathetic probably. Well, I'm sad. I don't think animals should be extinct. Right. But. But you don't need to see them other than that. Yeah. Except there's a Pinta or Pinta Island tortoise. 2012 it went extinct. No. 2015. Kind of recent. Yeah. Well, the plow, the one that's a big part of Monsters of God, ding, ding, ding, is the plow something.

2:06:00Mm-hmm. Tortoise from Madagascar. And they're now extinct in the wild. They still exist, but only in captive breeding sitches. Yeah. And then, of course, we got the woolly mammoth. We got the saber-toothed cat. Oh, they don't want to call it a tiger anymore? I guess. It's called a smilodon. Oh. Aurochs. Now, this is a type of cattle. The moa. The great auk. Also a flightless seabird. Okay. All right. That's a... I was just thinking about who I'd want to bring back. Mm-hmm. There's Irish elk, which was a gigantic deer from the Pleistocene. Yeah, I want to see anything that's gigantic. Yeah. That's what I'm drawn to.

2:06:42I want to see. The megafauna. I want to. Yeah, elephant bird. Thousand pounds. That's a thousand pounds. Madagascar. Yep, exactly. Home of the pygmy hippo. Wooly rhinoceros. Ooh, that sounds fun. Hold on, the Caspian tiger. I want to look at this. Okay. It looks regular. You're like a six-year-old. You're learning about animals right now, real time. You're like leafing through a National Geographic book. Oh, this reminds me. Okay, the game that I taught you guys about, Impostor. Uh-huh. When we were playing, the word was clownfish. And so someone said Nemo and then whatever. Jess said, he said circus.

2:07:28He said circus, okay? and then Anthony, once we were done, Anthony was like, it's Jess, circus. And I was like, no, it was like, that makes sense. The clowns are at circuses. Yes, it was like, that makes sense. And then Jess was like, well, I don't know what this is. Okay, all right. And then Anthony was like, oh, it's definitely Jess. Like, who wouldn't know what that is? And I was like, some of us don't know animals that well. I was like, he's from Sweden. No. I mean, if you're from India. He's from Burbank, but he did spend some time in Sweden. If you're from India, he was born in France and he lived in Sweden for a long time.

2:08:03When you're learning about animals. Yeah. Okay? And if you're from Sweden, you don't know clownfish. If you're from Georgia, India. If you're from India, you don't know seahorses. Right. And I'm going to make a collective list. Of your observations. Of, yeah, of the holes in animal learning. Uh-huh. According to cultures. It'd be fascinating if you had some real data. I think it's real. Remember I asked that other Indian man and he didn't know about sea horses? Do you think it's part of like, do you think it's a product of great wealth that like you have the free time? There's like less pressing issues.

2:08:44It's like you just have, you know, you're in a house and you have all this free time and you have books and all these national. I learned all these at my papa and grandma's house because they had the whole encyclopedia of animals for me, the National Geographic. and I just looked at them endlessly. Yeah. Like, do you think it could be some reflection or related to wealth? Yeah. Wealth of nations. It could. Adam Smith. I mean, it's like, what other cultures have like aquariums in their house? Do we think that's common? I doubt in like sub-Saharan Africa, there's a lot of aquariums. Or in Asian, maybe, because like at Chinese restaurants.

2:09:20Okay, let's just slow down before we get into trouble. In the South. in the south of the United States in the Chinese restaurant. Sure. There are aquariums. Right. Anyway, okay, well, that's it. That's everything. Yeah, and I guess I still don't know. Oh, okay, maybe I want to bring back the Barbary lion. Oh, tell me about that one. A majestic North African lion subspecies that vanished from the wild in the mid-20th century. I like that it said majestic. Yeah. What if it was called the majestic rat? Would you be interested in that? Well, I am part mouse, so I have to, like, I can't hate rats that much.

2:10:01You can't sell out your species so quickly. Exactly. Sister species. Well, I look forward to you getting a pygmy. A pygmy, woolly mammoth, or mastodon. Yeah. Yeah. I look forward for you. I wouldn't want a pygmy giant sloth, because then that would just be a sloth. Be a three-toed sloth, right? That's true. So we already have that. That's not of interest. Okay, actually this rhino does look cool. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah, big old fucking horn. Really big horn. Big, big, girthy horn. I mean, really? I would love to see like one dinosaur. Yes, of course. We all would. Okay. All right. That's it.

2:10:40Love you. Love you.

2:10:54Thank you.