#2301 - Ben Lamm

7 Apr 2025 · 3 h 7 min

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Podcast Episode Notes: The Joe Rogan Experience #2301 - Ben Lamm

Summary In this episode of *The Joe Rogan Experience*, Ben Lamm, CEO and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, discusses his work on de-extinction and species preservation, specifically focusing on bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and thylacine (Tasmanian tiger). The conversation delves into the science of genetic engineering, ethical implications, conservation efforts, and the potential future of synthetic biology.

Key Topics and Discussions

  1. Introduction to Colossal Biosciences
  2. Purpose: Colossal is dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects.
  3. Mission: To bring back extinct species and enhance conservation through biotechnology.
  1. The Journey to De-Extinction
  2. Background: Lamm was not initially involved in de-extinction; he was curious about synthetic biology.
  3. Collaboration with George Church: Lamm's interest piqued during a conversation with Church, a leading figure in synthetic biology.
  1. The Woolly Mammoth Project
  2. Starting Point: The mammoth was chosen first because of existing research by Church.
  3. Ecological Role: Discussed the potential ecological benefits of reintroducing mammoths to the Arctic, such as preserving ecosystems.
  4. Process:
  5. Collect and analyze ancient DNA samples.
  6. Use AI to map mammoth DNA to that of the Asian elephant, its closest living relative.
  7. Genetic editing through CRISPR and other technologies to create a hybrid mammoth.
  1. Genetic Engineering Techniques
  2. Challenges: Extracting ancient DNA is difficult due to degradation over time.
  3. AI's Role: AI helps to reconstruct incomplete genomes from ancient samples.
  4. Woolly Mice Experiment: Colossal's proof of concept for genetic editing, resulting in successful woolly mice that show traits similar to woolly mammoths.
  1. Thylacine and Other Conservation Efforts
  2. Thylacine's Importance: The thylacine serves as another major project indicating the potential for restoring ecosystems.
  3. Red Wolf Project: Efforts to preserve and clone the red wolf, emphasizing the importance of biodiversity and preventing extinction.
  1. Ethical Considerations and Public Perception
  2. Controversy: Discussions on the ethical implications of de-extinction and genetic engineering.
  3. Public Response: Mixed reactions from the scientific community and the public regarding synthetic biology and its applications.
  4. Regulation: The balance between innovation and ethics, particularly concerning human applications of genetic engineering.
  1. Future of Synthetic Biology
  2. Vision: Potential to solve major ecological problems, such as plastic pollution through the development of microbial solutions.
  3. Global Competition: Other nations, particularly China, are investing heavily in synthetic biology, raising concerns about ethical standards and applications.
  1. The Impact of Technology on Humanity
  2. Evolution of Humans: Discussion on how technology and genetic engineering could reshape human development.
  3. Cultural Reflection: The episode highlights societal fears and fascination with the potential to reshape life itself, ultimately leading to deeper philosophical questions about existence.

Key Quotes

  • "If you had one project, what is it, this mammoth project?" – Ben Lamm
  • "You have to maintain some level of healthy distance." – Lamm discussing human-animal interactions.
  • "We have to figure these things out." – Lamm on human-wildlife conflict.

Conclusion Ben Lamm's insights into de-extinction through Colossal Biosciences indicate a transformative period for conservation and genetic engineering. The discussions raised questions about ethics, the future of humanity, and the intricate balance between innovation and the natural world.

Additional Resources

  • Colossal Biosciences: [colossal.com](https://www.colossal.com)
  • YouTube and X Accounts: Follow Colossal on social media for updates on their projects.

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This episode presents a fascinating look into cutting-edge science, the ethics surrounding species preservation, and the potential future shaped by synthetic biology.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:03The Joe Rogan Experience.

0:12It's up, Ben. Hey, thanks so much for having my pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man. So why don't you, instead of me, explain to people what you do. So I'm the CEO and co -founder of a company called Colossal Bio Sciences where the world's first de -extinction and species preservation company. Yeah, and that is a wild thing. I mean, this is essentially, literally wild. This is essentially real life Jurassic Park. Yeah, we get this Jurassic Park occasionally, like believe it or not. We get that. Of course. I mean, I dropped my hydrogen tablet in there. Oh, you do the Gary Breckler. Oh, yeah. I'm also great.

0:50Yeah, so I love those. I just didn't want you to think it was, we're going a different direction. How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this? So I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan. I didn't wake up and say, I saw Jurassic Park. I'm super stoked. I love animals. I want to go work on this. I'm just a weirdly curious person. So there's this guy named George Church. If you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biology at Harvard University. He's six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right? So if you ever had a Monty, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's the absolute best.

1:23He's a genius. And I thought my background is in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better. How do we do directed evolution and how that can apply to crops and animals and all kinds of stuff? So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions. He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab. In that process, he's like, I've also been working on mammoths and other things.

1:56I was like, wait, wait, what? And I was like, if you had one project, what is it, this mammoth project? And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human health care. And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that the smartest man I've ever met on the phone with was a joke. Well, then I stayed up all night just googling George and there was this weird mammoth through line, whether he was in 60 minutes or Stephen Colbert, whatever he's in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths and everyone wanted him to do this.

2:31So I called him back the next day, seven days later, I'm in his lab and we were off to the races on, okay, we're going to try to go build a company to bring back six weeks. So how do you decide what to start with? So we started with the mammoth first, right? Because George had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. There was some ecological modeling that had been done to show us that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. And so that was an easy place to start.

3:04After we launched the company, it went crazy viral and all these other folks from the extinction research started calling us like folks from like the dialocene or tazware antiger, which looks like a mythical creature. It's awesome. The best should appear with the dodo. Everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding our entire set. So how does one do this? Like, let's, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing. Before that, how does one do this? Like from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth?

3:38Yeah, let me walk through the whole process. So first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade and then insanely rapid rate. So we definitely need to find a lot of samples. So we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3 ,000 years old to 1 .2 million to a year's old, which is awesome. But it's also fragment. It's like, it's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is and someone stolen part of the puzzle and then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there.

4:11So there's all kinds of problems with that. So this is really an AI and compute problem. It's not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first. And then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative. And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So Asian elephants are 99 .6 % the same as mammoths. They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants. Really? Yeah, which always blows people mind. That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids.

4:42Like, literally, humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people's mind because they always think of them as in this like weird, like prehistoric, like 65 million years old dinosaur. When did they go extinct? So the last one went extinct about 4 ,000 years ago on Rangol Island. Yeah. Wow. So they've been around for a long time. 4 ,000 years ago? I know. I mean, now they appeared about 2 and a half million years ago as far as we understand. And they were mostly a plycestine species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed.

5:17They existed all the way up until they had this like small genetic bottleneck on Rangol Island. Wow. And where's Rangol Island? It's northeast of Siberia. Whoa. And they just was it a small island? They just ran out of resources there. Like what happened? Well, there's a couple different theories, right? One of the theories with Rangol Island is that they actually, there's lots of inbreeding. So there's lots of like genetic bottleneck which happened because there's not a different species there. How large is Rangol Island? I'm not quite sure. Can you give me a photo again, Jamie? I'll follow up on that one.

5:51Okay. And so essentially though, Rangol Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island which is also between Alaska and in the United and Russia. Also is where they were. There's kind of the last two places that we know Mammus existed today. And they died out 4 ,000 years ago. Yeah. And now some actually there is actually another working hypothesis that they actually ran out of water. They ran out of access to fresh water on the island. Oh, wow. So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred. Wow. 4 ,000 years is so recent. I know. It's crazy recent, right? Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus an African elephant?

6:33And they're actually Mammus because there's, you know, Mammus themselves, yeah. Mammus themselves are close related to the Asian elephant. They have that. Which is on the left? Yeah, which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium. They have the small ears. They have a little bit of a hump structure. You know, Mammus because they have these massive, massive tusks, right? And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world. They actually, you know, moved their heads quite slowly. They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that.

7:07But one of the things that's awesome also about the Asian elephants is some Asian elephants. Some of the ones that are born actually have, they look, they're not mammoth like, but they have a lot of fur on them and they kind of lose it over time. Wow. So are those the ones that you would find like in Thailand? Yes. And Thailand and then parts of different parts of India and the Indian subculture. I actually rode one of those ones with my family. I don't recommend that. Did you get one of those places that you like to take care of on them? You have to like get a relationship with them. So you feed them sugarcane and you wash them.

7:40Yeah. You know, you play nice with them for like a while. Yeah. A couple of hours. It was like at least an hour. You're just hanging out with them, petting them. And then once they decide you're cool, they let you ride them. Yeah. But my whole family rode them and I was like totally opposed to it. I was like, I'm doing it just because you guys want to do it. I just want to feed them. Yeah. Just want to hang out with them. They just felt weird. My daughter fell off. I think twice. One of my youngest daughter fell off once at least. And I was like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding? You know what I mean?

8:13It's kind of a weird thing. It's a weird thing, right? Yeah. And then afterwards you get in the water and you wash them. Yeah. And everything. And I just kind of hung out with them. I'd be cool. They're very sweet. I don't think I want to ride one. I would just, I like being around them. I'm just feeding them on my Instagram of it. Yeah, there is. They definitely is because she was eating a log. I was like, why are you eating a log? Yeah. It's just weird. They're so enormous, but they're really peaceful and chill. And incredibly smart. And they have incredible packed dynamics, right? Yeah. They live in a herd.

8:47They've even had all these different examples where they also adopt other animals. I don't know if you've seen any of these videos, but yeah, so here it is. So this is a few years ago in Thailand. And this is an Asian elephant. Just chilling with this elephant.

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10:15Yeah, 2018. Okay. There it is. It was really cool. Yeah, it's all. It's just cool to be around them. They're just a fascinating animal. Yeah. The biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists is enormous. Yeah, this enormous thing with this robotic pretensile art. Yeah, it's crazy. As long as you're cool to them, they're cool to you. Yeah, they sense it, right? Yeah. I mean, we see that nature with a lot of animals, right? If you sense it and they don't feel like they're being backed into a corner or fearful, then they're not going to be around that. Right. Some of our animals I've been around and they're starting to get quite large, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point.

10:51Yeah. That, yeah, at some point though, you're still kind of like they are wild animals. So you have to maintain some level of healthy distance. Yeah. So let's just get right to it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you want to finish the process? Yeah, yeah, please. So, okay, so we have the ancient genome, so you have to collect an assemble. Right. And that's a lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab. But that's like some Indiana Jones shit. Like, we're literally going into the permafrost and like collecting dead samples from the permafrost, which you know, you've had, you know, John reason here, it's disgusting.

11:23Yeah. It smells like death. It literally, I mean, it makes it his death. It's just over time piled up death. Have you visited John? Yeah. Yeah, I've visited John. Do you want to the bone yard? Yeah, I want to the bone yard. What's the like there? It's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect. I didn't know John. So I'm on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club. So we take these expeditions. We didn't expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval. And then we're also doing some cultural studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoth. Like, do you want mammoth back? This is a good idea, right?

11:53Because we tried to be pretty inclusive. And they're like, oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska. John, and I was like, okay, great. I'm excited. So go meet him. We pull up. He's in a different car. And he's like, and I think he wanted us to follow him. He's like, get in. I was like, okay. And he's big. He's enormous. I'm not that big of a dude, right? Especially after John. Especially after Gary Breck has been work on him, a smaller dude, right? And so like, I literally get in, I get in the car. There's a bunch of stickers. And there's one that has butterflies on it that says, give zero fucks.

12:26And I was like, and then there's, and he's like, just move the gun over. So I move the gun over and he goes, listen, and this is the first words out of his mouth to me. If I stop short, you hand me that gun. And I was like, I didn't even ask a follow up question because like, what do you do when you get in the car with John? And he says, you hand me that gun. If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun. I was like, that's awesome. And he showed me around the book kind of gun. Was it? It was just some type of rifle. So just grisly. I assume it was for grisly, yeah. Or bears or something large.

12:53Yeah. But then he showed me around the bone yard and showed me his collection. And he was completely, I mean, he didn't know us from anybody. He just opened up everything to us, right? And he's like, let me show you all this. Showed us his skull. He actually has a warehouse. I don't know if he ever disclosed where it is, but he is a warehouse where he is some of the greatest specimens ever. So it's cool. You should go. It's cool. I do want to go to an amazing guy. He's a cool guy. And then being in the mammoth researcher business, we're like, oh, we'd love to, we'd love to take you somewhere. Sam was coming to take him and he's like, no.

13:26And he was very honest. And he told us, and that's like before your podcast with him, we kind of learned that story, right? And so that's what sucks is how like some people can ruin it for everybody. Yeah. No, because he's, you know, outside of Fairbanks, it's not the easiest place to build a, you know, bio containment level three lab. Right. But he's like, but he is over. He's like, you build a lab here. You can use it every one. But he's like the bones stay here. So he is very consistent with his messaging. Well, you know, the whole deal with the museum in natural history, right? Mm -hmm. And I totally believe it.

13:56I totally believe it. Well, it's a fact. Yeah. They found these bones in the East River, exactly where they told them to drop it off. They have stepbison, fragment. I've seen it. Well, he mammoth fragments. So they know that they're there. Yeah. And well, I mean, you built a relationship with John. He's just a normal, no bullshit kind of guy. He's like, you stole this stuff. Give it back. Yeah. Or he's also like, hey, if you want to come work on it, come on. Like he's very collaborative. It's also it's like, what do you guys have? Like why are you keeping that shit in a basement? Like what is that?

14:26I mean, when we do work, you know, outside of the expeditions of collecting ancient DNA, DNA, when we do work, we also work with museums, right? And so we go to like the catacombs of the museums. And it's exactly what you think of as like the Vatican archives, right? You go down to like sub basement four of the Smithsonian and it's just rows and rows and rows of taxidermy amuls that you've never seen. It's got like the little drawers and boxes and they're like, oh, this is giant sloth poop. And I was like, I didn't know there was giant sloth poop, they're, yes. And we think there's DNA. And I was like, well, this is like, you know, the card catalog of like all speed of all like dead species.

15:02Yeah. But it's not on display for the public. It's just in a basement. And is it extensively archived? They know where everything is or is there some stuff down there? I mean, they're, I know what it is. I wouldn't say that they are the, at least any museum, they have, I think they have a lot more than they know. I don't see it in like massive computer systems because we asked for inventory less. And you know, like what's also the, what's the shopping list? It's been over a hundred years they've been doing this. Yeah. So people have come and gone. Oh, they'll pull out, yeah, they'll pull out drawers that have like Darwin's name on and stuff like that.

15:30What? I mean, that's how we did the thylacene. We actually found in a cup about this size, we actually found what's called, we called the miracle pup where they shot the mother. They took the three joys, the babies killed the three pups and they put one of them in from aldehyde and we got a 98 % complete genome from the first sample of that pup. But they didn't even know they had it. They also, on the thylacene, which I'm sure we'll talk about more later, they also found a head in the bucket. They didn't even, it was the mom's head. So we actually knew we could actually look at the genetic relation between the two and they actually found, they didn't know they had the head in the bucket.

16:07They just had a head in a bucket. They opened it up as marked thylacene, they opened up and there was a full thylacene skull in there. There's pictures of it online and everything. And we use that to get to a 99 .9 % complete genome because we also had the ancestry of the two of the pup and mother. Wow. Yeah. So there's, there's a, probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being you know, fully utilized. So if you have 98 % and you have 99 % what's the process of going from that? So here's the head. There's the head in the bucket. So Andrew Pask who leads our in partnership with the University of Melbourne leads our thylacene work.

16:47And yeah, that's the head in bucket. I mean, there's soft tissue, there's teeth, there's petrace bones, which we'll talk about. Do you buy into any of these sightings? No, I did. So Andrew Pask for years, he's been working on for 15 years. He's amazing. He's awesome. He's been working on it like a shoestring budget. And that's part of the problem with the extinction is no of these, but real capital into it until now. And he's been working on for 15 years and he's had people send them, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years. They just send it to him and then he loves the thylacene so much.

17:20He just sequences it and he's like, no, it's a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's moralizing. But like when I got into the thylacene, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with him. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than else right in government. We made the largest investment in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we do this. And then you, you get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? You start reading, I start reading all the books on the thylacene. I want to be at, I get obsessive about projects.

17:47And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now. And so got super deep in it. And then I started calling pass goes like, Hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos and I kind of think they're still there and pass like, no, no, stop it. Don't go down that rabbit hole. I so I don't believe that why did he say that? Well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years, all of her Tasmania, right? So not just Southern Australia, but all of her Tasmania. So samples, pool, just everything using camera traps and nobody's. I think that they officially say that the thylacene went extinct in 1936.

18:22But probably into the late 40s and early 50s, they still existed. But I mean, I think it's very unlikely that one success in make our lives a lot easier. For us really believes in it. He does. He thinks they're in pop and new Guinea. And because of sightings. Yeah. He said he thinks in the Western part of pop and new Guinea in the mountains. And also incredibly remote. Yeah. Very difficult. In the separation of that topography separates the pop and new Guinea singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for a predator prey from where the thylacene sightings were singing dog. It's just another large canad that has a unique owl.

19:01Yeah. So this is still exists. Oh, I mean, I'm sure Jamie can find a video. I want to hear that. I never heard of this. Yeah, singing dog. Wow. Pop and you get any singing dogs. By the way, folks, this is where teasing you. Because there's a this is not just theoretical. Yeah. So this is what's going to get crazy. Yeah, this is going to get weird. This podcast is going to blow your fucking mind. Go ahead, Jamie. opera singers. That's these weird animals have a neck for holding a tune even to an exact key.

19:34opera singers loving. Oh, they're so cute. Yeah. They're so cute. The people keep them as pets. That looks like a dog dog. Yeah, it looks like a dog that they're wild dogs in pop and you get any, but I'm sure people have domesticated them. Wow. Pretty fucking cool dogs and that was a fox. So once you have enough of that DNA, right, from all these different samples and you can assemble it, you then have to build comparative genomic models to its closest living relatives in the case of the mammoth, the the age of elephant. But I'm from software. So I just assume there's like the, you know, Google cloud of DNA.

20:09Like we backed out like we've all done 23 and me before went bankrupt. Right. So we should assume that I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of like the 23 and me of all species. That doesn't exist. Wow, which is insane. So there's like, there's no back. There's no like Noah's Ark bio vault for life, like kind of like the seed vaults that doesn't exist. And so we were actually petitioning the US government to help put a massive project together to help bio bank. It's starting, which is American megafauna and keystone species. So that doesn't exist at all. And so, so then you, so then colossal to go out and go build the reference genomes for all the species, like the closest living relatives for all the species that work on.

20:48So this is the question. If you have, say let's go to one, wooly mammoth. So if you have wooly mammoth, you have 99%. How do you bridge that gap? How do you, how do you create that synthetic biology? So you never have to get to 100 % right? You need to get to probably synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools, probably heard of CRISPR, all these other things. Genetics, you know, which is it's not, it breaks the DNA. It's not the always the best tool. We can now actually make individual edits to when you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right?

21:21In those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like that's how precise we can be. We can say at spot, you know, 4 ,000 ,000 ,000, eight, I need to change that letter. And so you change that letter. And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the, in the, Asian elephant, there's a difference. And if it's in these certain like coat protein coding regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical, like attributes like, you know, curved tasks, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, and then hair and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right?

22:01Because you're only looking, you're only really looking at that point 4 % difference, right? It's still a lot of numbers. But you're only looking at that. And so the better you can be at software and the better you can be using AI and the, and computer models, the less edits you have to make, right? Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes. Right. Are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they're larger than that. It's a, it's a, it's a, so mammoths were about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants.

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22:26So, um, there were 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it's stupid concept that humans made, not nature made. And so there were 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different, in different ways in some of them were larger, but the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing that has that woolly phenotype, it was about the size of a Asian elephant. And, but there to your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes. We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across all species as well. And so there's specific characteristics that these animals have, one of them being the big furry coats that you guys, what did you do with mice?

23:10We made woolly mice. See if you can find that. The only, the only like unintended consequences was they were cuties fucked. Like people lost their minds, right? Like we're, there's, there's, I was, I was on the phone recently with it, you know, moderately aggressive journalist and it was going quite poorly as some calls go. Moderately aggressive, not being aggressive in one way. Like why are you doing this? Some people, yeah, they, they, everyone like to cut it. Cute. So my daughter actually found this online and wants one. Yeah. So we get that a lot from the world. So every week, every week, I don't have my laptop, I should look at it here.

23:49Cute, but every week, oh my God, they're adorable. So this, so these woolly mice aren't just adorable. We basically said, look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a, of a mammoth from an Asian elephant to a mammoth? And then because we want to do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants, we didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens. So we look for the mouse equivalent, right? So we look for like all of us have similar genes. And so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're they're not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them, right?

24:31Or they may not even be compatible with life, right? So we try to be really, really thoughtful about. And the, the, the woolly mice went like, it went insane. There's people that are like making tissues of meme coin. And so we, we made 36 mice. They're all, they're all healthy. There's 36 mice that we made. And what was crazy about it is we're excited about it. Because it shows that the end in process of taking data from an ancient DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with a hundred percent efficiency. And that's really important and really hard. So we did it with a hundred percent efficiency.

25:07Yeah, that's the difference. Well, so the one of them, if it was in a trap, you'd be so sad. Yeah, exactly. The little guy on the left, if he was in a trap, like, oh, look, we killed. Isn't that funny? Just a little bit of fur makes you love them. And that's the color that we think most mammoths were. Really? They were like a blonde. They were like a golden brown color, right? Because when we pull them out of the promo frost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time. Oh, but if you see very fresh mammoths like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yucuts and other places in northern Siberia, that they actually have pretty, pretty well preserved mammoths, they actually have kind of a dirty, blonde meat, gold meets brown fur.

25:44Wow. And so we did that. And now there's people that are making t -shirts that aren't us. And pillows that are like legalized, will they mine? So I'm like, they're not illegal. And then there's a meme account for the guy that did the like the CRISPR babies, you know, that went to the trouble from, you know, making edited babies in China. Yeah. A meme account. Oh, wow. So that's mammoth fur. Yeah. A meme account though actually said on X that these are a bio weapon. And that colossal made a bio. So the weirdness of the willy mouse went crazy viral. What we were trying to show is that we used our multi multiplex editing tools, meaning that we edited all of those genes at the same time.

26:23Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live. From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live. And then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations. We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time, all over the genome, get exactly what we want. And then we have this motto, it's called monoclonal screening. We're screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds like overkill. But then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off target effects in the genome. So that we know the mice that we then do cloning with, we know that they'll be healthy.

26:58And so we try to spend a lot of time, you know, on that because we're certified by American human society. It's the oldest human organization in the world. And if you've seen the film that's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film, that's those guys. So we've ended up, so we really care about kind of not just the de -extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out. And so the, the WoW mouse was a really interesting proof of concept. It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right and we're getting exactly what we predicted.

27:29Is there any plans to sell those? No, everyone keeps asking us that. But you know what? Museums, actually you're now calling us saying, and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the WoW mice? They're like, it'll drive so much value. It'll teach people about, you know, genetics and whatnot. So, you know, it's not our business model to sell. Our animals are to sell, you know, woolly mice, but it's kind of gone crazy. Is it dangerous so to leave these mice in the hands of someone even at a zoo who decides I want more of these? Yeah, if we ever, if we ever put them, I think more likely to put them in a museum for that needs to be free, like this Smithsonian or some of that from an education perspective versus something that's more attraction based.

28:10I think we do it more in the case of a museum. Do you plan on keeping this batch alive? Yeah, they're going to live out their normal lives. And, but you're not going to make new ones. We may make new ones with new, these won't, they're all separated. They're all separated by sex. So we're not going to like a Jurassic Park moment where they change. They're all separated by sex. But if you, if Jamie finds a picture of their habitats, they actually live, they live a couple years, but they don't live like traditional lab mice that live in like a small little cage and all on top of each other. They actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them.

28:44They're all, yeah, like we made a spare no expense. Cool little house. Yeah, and they're big and we, you know, we put fun stuff in them to play with like this. And what's been crazy is we only named two of them and we named them Chip and Dale. Because we, people were asking what the names were and I was like, Chip, it is the only thing that I could think of at the moment. And now even on next people are like, we need pictures of Chip. Where is Chip? We've only seen pictures of Dale and there's like these incredible internet slews that are like, that's not Chip, that's Dale. We need a picture of Chip.

29:15So again, Paul. Yeah. So we've just, yeah, we don't, don't involve those people. We've not, we've not leaned in. You cannot work. Side of there excited, but we just can't. Yeah, we're busy. So, so this is a new thing. The, the woolly mouse is a new thing. Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things? So it's more of a proof of technology. I think that the mouse model because it's a 20 day gestation versus 22 months in elephants. It's a great way to test phenotypes because with, you know, with a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right. One, you can do molecular tests.

29:49You can do DNA sequencing to see if it worked. Two, I guess there's four. Two, you could grow a mammoth and see if it looks like it. That's a lot of work in 22 months, like a lot of gestational time, a lot of money. I think there's a lot of risk in that. The third and this is a little weird. We created what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. So we created cells that you can then turn into any type of tissue. So we actually do have mammoth hair follicles growing in a lab. So we have hair growing in petri dishes in the lab, which is pretty cool. If you come see the lab, you'll get the whole woolly wonkittora, which is pretty cool.

30:23And then then the fourth way is mice, right? Because it's like if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately within 20 days. If the edits were working, if there were any unintended consequences, that would be detrimental to the animal. Wow. So we'll probably make more iterations of the woolly mice. The thylacene's closest living relative is the fat tell done art, which is a mouse size marsupial. And it actually gestates in 13 and a half days versus 20 days. So there's no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model species. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?

31:01So we're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian Tiger and the Dodo for different reasons. We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments and indigenous people groups. And a project that we announced through our colossal foundation, about two and a half years ago, is doing a population genomics map. We talked about bio -baking a little bit. So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity, what's been lost, you know, what's the number of inbreeding. So we go through this whole process to try to understand. And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox, one of the largest indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota.

31:38So we're giving them a report out on this. We went to their nation, wanted to share this and then, you know, we're curious. So he said, what are their projects? Would you work on if that you that we could do that's helped lots of helping bison? And they said that we needed help with wolf conservation. They brought that. They said that we needed help with more bison conservation. They said if we do stuff around eagles and fish. And so we kind of got that feedback. And when Chairman Fox is walking me through their their heredal, their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf.

32:11And he said, you know, that's the great wolf. And he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost in how many people believed that it could have even been a dire wolf. And I was like, from Game of Thrones, it's cool. I love the show that's interesting. So I did that. We talked about that. And then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up. I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster. You know, it's the only endemic wolf to America.

32:44It's only a dimming to America. It's a Red Wolf. It's beautiful. And there's like 15 left in the wild with massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation. We can't save our own. When you think of like the American West, right? You think of wolves. You think of like, you know, Eagle Soaring, you think of like trout bears catching trout. You know, you think of bison. The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like we're like, we have to do something. We have to figure something out. And so we put that kind of on the list.

33:19And then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years, in teachers, in parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths or dodoes or pilates. And it's like, we get like boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So we're going to make a colossal kids corner at our new labs. And in that, we've had all this some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business. They're just excited about it. Most of them learned about it through their kids. Kind of like with the woolly mammoths with you. And so everyone's excited about it.

33:48And then we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the diar wolf again. And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species, because diar wolves were only found in the US, a little in North America, but predominantly in the United States, coastal United States. And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the diar wolf, also help wolf conservation and bring people from like sci -fi, fantasy and kids more into science and into the conversation or on conservation. We thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off. This episode is brought to you by Zippercruder in a survey, 76 % of employers plan to grow their teams in 2025.

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36:30Right now my listers can get exclusive 40 % off your entire order. Just go to blinds .com. Use the promo code Rogan 40 at checkout limited time offer rules and restrictions apply. Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost or? No, most of the dire wolf skulls out there. There's thousands of them in La Brea tariff. So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall, but because of heat and acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like there's nothing you can get from that. But about six years ago, a group, including Best Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth.

37:13And in that tooth, they actually found a, they actually got .15 X or coverage of the genome. So they got about 15 % of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10 X meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times. So that even if there are gaps, you understaff, understand enough of the core kind of coding regions that you could bring back that animal. Is this done by AI? It's done by AI and software. So we built part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems. They're much harder to solve than just solving them for existing species, open sourcing that for conservation for free.

37:52But then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out. So our first computational analysis company was called Form Bio and we actually spun it out of the business. So you have this tooth, you have 1 .5. Yeah, 1 .5. So 15 % of the genome. Okay. And so I went to Beth who's only an advisor at the time and said, could you resample the tooth? And she's like, it's like, you know, half an inch long. She's like, it's destructive sampling. It's going to ruin us. Well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible? So we we lucked out in that two 13 ,000 years old.

38:23The skull itself is 72, 73 ,000 years old, not exactly sure. But it was found in a riverbed and it wasn't found in a riverbed at the mouth of a cave. So it wasn't found like in the permafrost, but it also wasn't found in like heat as a certification. So there's a bone in all of us called the petris bone, which is insanely dense. And it doesn't change a lot from after you're born. It's a great DNA storage better than teeth better than anything. It's on the it's like in the inner ear kind of head area. And so we got permission from the museum to very carefully drill into the back of the underside of the skull and remove the petris bone to see if we could get DNA.

39:07And we got really lucky between resampling the first and the in the skull. We ended up getting about 13 to 14 X coverage. So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the dioros. And then what you do. Well, and then we got knock on the door. Yeah. No, so we took that DNA. Can I ask you before we even start with this? Yeah. The aggressive reporters are is it you're playing God? How do you have the right to do this? So it's been a journey. Okay. So the journey that we've had is when we started the business, we didn't have any scientists. We just didn't write. They're like, this is tech bros wanting to see cool animals.

39:46And oh, they've only got $16 million of funding. They don't have any scientists. Ha ha. So that was that was phase one. And then we're like, oh, well, you know, as an entrepreneur, my job is to hire much smarter people than me. Do you smoke scars? I do not. Gary's got me on quite a kick. So health kick. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I'm sorry for being bad for you. Well, I'm not saying they're bad for you. I'm just saying that I allegedly. Yeah. I don't care. So this is the last of them, the things that I partake in that are probably bad for you. Yeah, but you got to, yeah, do what you got to do. I was got their rights.

40:16I like it a little cigar. So my question, if I was going to grill you, if I was a reporter, I'd be like, what, what right do you have to invade the natural process of nature and to inject your curiosity and your ability to create new life? I think that we've become the apex predator on this planet. And we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfished the ocean, we overhunt something. In the case of the thylacene, we, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off. Right. Every time we cut down the rainforest every, every time we drink hydrogenated water, we are, you know, playing God on some level.

40:56Right. We are, we are, we are, humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things. Now, the good news is is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be. And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand, you know, you know, one of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back in the Alston. Right. And looking at how the ecology, the system completely changed. Like it changed the shape of rivers, you know, because the elk population were just, you know, they're getting fat, they were getting lazy, they weren't migrating.

41:34The sick and the old and the weak weren't getting killed off. They were spreading disease. They're eating all of the willows and everything along the banks. So therefore the beavers went away. Beavers are like the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist because they make wetlands. They make, they, they cause the rivers and ponds to get deeper. So it allows different types of fish and different types of animals. So you have this thing called tropic downgrading. You have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce these species. That's documentary fascinating. It's so fascinating.

42:04How wolves change rivers? Yeah. I know people that lived in Montana before the wolf reintroduction and a lot of people don't like that the wolves are there. And but most of them are elk hunters that were used to something that's just outrageously overpopulated. That's the reality of it. Yeah. But they were telling me that there was, they had so many elk that were living. They had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available. They had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter. You can hunt cows in a snow. So in the middle of the winter where they can't move good, you just pick them off in the snow.

42:43Because they were just trying to call the population. They were trying to diminish them. And that's and that's not good for the elk population. No, no, it's not good for the ecosystem. It's not good for the elk population itself. Right. I have a good friend who lives in Colorado. He has a ranch in Colorado and we were at his place approximately two weeks after they reintroduce wolves. They actually reintroduce wolves on his property. Oh, yeah. And he didn't know what was going to happen before it happened and all the people around there are ranchers. Yeah. So already these five wolves that they've reintroduced, he said killed over a dozen cows and calves.

43:18So the problem is they've killed elk as well. In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground that the wolves had killed. I'm not a big fan of people getting to vote on whether or not you should do something with wildlife. I'm a big fan on having real wildlife biologists assess situations. And in the case of Colorado, Colorado, obviously, border borders Wyoming and Wyoming has wolves. Wolves were making their way into Colorado already and they are protected. The problem with reintroducing them is you're essentially asking a wolf that doesn't know the territory to start killing things in that territory.

43:55Yeah, or to stop at a imaginary border. It doesn't exist. There's no border. They go hundreds and hundreds of times. But the idea that you're doing this and you're doing this where there's ranches is crazy. And in Colorado, particularly stupid because the first batch were literally animals that they had captured because they were killing wildlife. So they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they started to kill wildlife. Yeah, but I'm saying wildlife. What I really meant to say was animals, agriculture. They're killing domesticated cows. They're killing these calves and they're having a real fucking problem with that.

44:36And it is something that needs to be continually monitored that shouldn't just be on some random vote of how you feel about it. It just can't let people vote on that. Too many people live in these high population areas. I couldn't I couldn't read more. And so we as humanity, if you look at the third leading cause of death of elephants, it's human elephant conflict. We have to figure these things out. We also we don't want to grade the ecosystems. We don't want to lose species, but you have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way. With the elephant, they're like, this is big enough ecological reserve.

45:12We're tagging the animals. We're going to walk and measure it. I don't think that it's safe or smart to put any, you know, not just predators, but also like large herbivores in these heavy population dense areas. We can just we just we have to understand that some of these areas, not our loss, but have already been changed for a different reason. Yes. And they've achieved homostasis, homostasis. They've achieved the balance, right? Which is the big issue with Colorado right now. And it's going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce the animal that used to be there and is going over there.

45:43And I think in the case of Montana, I think you're right. And I think that there is an argument that maybe the wolves being there is better. Obviously not if you're a rancher. Well, the Colorado, so the Colorado stuff is completely going to destroy all of the stats. So pre Colorado, right? So I'm talking about reintroduction into Montana, reintroduction into parts of Canada, reintroduction into Yellowstone, the Red Wolf with a very small population in North Carolina. There's been less than five confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last hundred years. You mean humans humans, right?

46:19In most of the Alaska, most of the Alaska or in Canada. And then, and then it's before Colorado. So not saying with, I don't know if the data has, I don't think it has the latest from Colorado. But it represents 0 .02 percent of deaths associated with wolves and cattle in livestock, right? All livestock, not just cattle. And so the problem is when you go out there and you have a maintained balance that people can understand in governments actually give subsidies to the ranchers. When they get killed by, when they get killed by the, by a wolf. So that, that I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.

46:57But the problem is when you, you're not as thoughtful with a rewilding program and you don't, and you're not as measured as like what they did in Yellowstone. And they start encroaching in these areas, then the stats are going to go crazy. And what the stats goes crazy, then you're going to start looking to the animals that are the problem, but it's not the animals that are the problem. It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision. Exactly. The problem is people just have these ideas like wolves are beautiful. They're amazing. We all love wolves.

47:24It's an incredible animal. So happy to exist. Don't put it near where there's a ranch. Exactly. I can't vote on that if you live in Denver. That's crazy. Yeah, if it doesn't affect your livelihood, it doesn't affect your, the risk to your animals or your family. Yeah, you have to be mindful of that. There's also the getting a very skewed perspective because the governor is really interested in it. And his husband is really interested in it. His husband apparently is the one who really wanted it to happen. And you know, you have a mandate. So you have to get wolves out by a certain time. And when you're doing it, the only wolves available or wolves that kill livestock, it's like, fuck it.

47:57Yeah, it's just not. It's just, you have it in the, a lot of the, so the project that we'll probably eventually talk about is we brought in a lot of the teams, some many people that have been on your show, that know how to do the rewilding the right way over time. Okay, so this is what we'll just get to it. You made a fucking dire wolf. I didn't. Our team, our incredible team made three dire wolves so far. Let's see the photos. Jamie bust out some photos. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself because this is truly fucking crazy. Yeah, that's the pop. Yeah. So this is, so that's actually Romulus as, so we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, uh, founders from and then, uh, and then we have Colisey, who's the new girl.

48:44So this is Romulus and Remus. So funny, funny story about this. So Peter Jackson from Lord the Rings. Jamie. So Peter Jackson from Lord the Rings was actually one of our investors. And he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props. And he's like, where I was sitting in Peter's house with he and his partner, Fran. And I was like, you know, I showed him the video of them hailing. He started tearing up and goes, this is the first time I've heard a dire wolf or anyone's heard a dire wolf in 10 ,000 years started. Well, he like, he like physically, emotionally got chills and started crying.

49:21And then he's like, well, you know, I do have the throne. I was like, what do you mean he goes, I bought the throne last week at auction at a private auction for like saw the bees or someone, right? And so, so he did and it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup. Like talk about cosmic coincidence. Incredible, right? And so, um, you know, what you don't see in this photo is you don't see the fact that we have American humane society there with three veterinary people. We had six people from our, uh, animal care team. Would you say checkup? You don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?

49:50They do get, they because of viruses from that they can get from the soil at, uh, eight, eight weeks, they do get basic virus. They do, they do basic vaccines. Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you're just, yeah, so these are staying on, you know, like these are not going back into the wild, right? Not yet. Right now they're on a 2000 acre, uh, secure, expansive, ecological preserve with 24 or seven care. They were, we have an animal hospital that we built. Uh, people always like you guys raised so much money and I was like, well, it, because we didn't just spend it on the labs.

50:23You have just been on the animal care, the facilities. Yeah. Let's see the photo of the actual grown ones because they're fucking nuts. Um, yeah. So, so this is, uh, Rimes and Remus, uh, in playing in the snow on the preserve when they are, um, three months old. So there's three months. How big are they? Uh, three months, they were north of 45 pounds. Wow. So, um, look at that face. God, there's so beautiful. Oh, they just get, they just get like as they've aged, they've just got more and more beautiful. So let's go to the adults because the adults have crazy characteristics. Yeah, so we're saying that you didn't even know that we didn't know, right?

51:03And so we, we did, we, we ended up taking getting a, is this a full grown one? Uh, there's still five months old. So there are 80 pounds at five months. And so wolves typically grow 12 to 14 months. So they're not full grown yet. Wow. And how big is it already? Uh, 80 pounds, um, about five and a half feet, um, and the main. Yeah. And so, so a couple of things about the wolves, Jamie, if you're about, yeah. Uh, so we didn't know this, right? We knew that they were a Plei -Sistine wolf. We knew that they existed, uh, and went extinct about 12 ,000 years ago, um, went a lot of megafauna when extinct, like the, during kind of that younger dry, uh, period that younger dry is kind of cooling period.

51:41Um, they went, they went extinct as well, right? Um, and we knew, all we know, because all we have is, we don't have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples, we literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25 % larger. They were stockier. Uh, they probably weren't as fast based on kind of their, their body weight as a normal wolf would be. Um, but we knew that they had thicker skulls, uh, larger cranium and whatnot. And we assumed that they're, they're, and we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool that they were white, because there's like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they were red so they get their paper.

52:18Doesn't it make sense for natural selection? Yeah. They're an Arctic hunting animal. Yeah. And they have this beautiful, we didn't know if they have this beautiful, like main, like quality to them. And when they're babies, you, you talk of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It's crazy. Wow. Is it like polar bears and it's hollow or is it? But it's incredibly thick. It grows in kind of these, these clumps, but then as they've, uh, as they've grown and they've started to get this kind of like main to them, which is the females as well. Uh, well, the female, she's only six weeks old since two two years old.

52:50So if you keep going through a couple of other photos, yeah, I mean, they are just, they're just beautiful. I mean, it's funny. Someone actually said they, uh, on our two, they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point, right? Right. There's something they're so stocky. They're stocky. They're thicker. They are, I mean, they're, they're absolutely beautiful. So this is Kaleesi. So who looks like a baby. And we nailed it. We, uh, we, we named her. Can we hear it? Let me hear.

53:22We named Kaleesi for George R. Martin, obviously. Obviously. Who's an investor in Klausel? Oh, wow.

53:32Oh, nature's cute little murderers. Well, everything in nature murder is something, right? Yeah. Like we were, well, Klaus murder grass. Yeah. And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants like scream. Yeah. Yeah, they scream. So I guess, I guess we all are bad. Life eats life. This is, this is, I mean, that's the reason why plants have chemicals to dissuade us from eating them. What are they eating there? Uh, so they love to chew on horns in this state. So we have a different phases of, we built a hundred and forty five page animal guide. These are actually, um, different horns from different elk and other species that we're putting out there and they chew on like they just love like a dog does.

54:18Like a dog does, right? So are you letting these animals kill things or you feeding them? So we're feeding them still. So the decombination of bison meat, horse meat and sun, letting them kill things or just about to introduce carcasses to them. So giving them part of a carcass, letting them feed, building in that, that dynamic between the two brothers for now. And then, um, and they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior. Are you going to let them hunt? I mean, they're on it. They are on a seemingly wild 2000 acre preserve with just them. So they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve, but they're not doing it yet.

54:51They're starting to exhibit that the original, the kind of the, the first inklings that it will trend toward that. But we want them to live. We want them and we're going to probably make two or three more. We want to a solid little social pack that we can monitor, that can live a seemingly wild life that we can understand more about them. Wow. That's cool. But the other thing that's, that's equally cool to it going back to the Red Bull story. Um, can you, can you, which is crazy to me that you have reignited these 10 ,000 year old hunting genes? Yeah. That they're starting to exercise. Including size.

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56:46Black rifle coffee America's coffee. We, you know, we looked at what jeans made really a dioralfa dioralfa like what was separated in the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13 ,000 year old tooth and a 73 ,000 year old skull. So we could actually understand the genetic distance with that much genetic distance between them. We could actually understand, you know, what truly was fixed and conserved in the dioralf genome. And what wasn't just population genome. It's right. If there's, if you and I are 50 ,000 years apart, we, you know, there's a lot of different mutations in that time period.

57:19But if we can then really say, okay, you know, what may have been, been and what made Joe Joe. Oh, here's the overlaps. It allowed us to really understand that. Wow. And it's just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are kind of baked into the jeans. And they just were dormant for 10 ,000 years. And now these things are waking up. And so I was I was like, so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed Romulus. And and Ramos is partly raised with me. I could go out to the preserve. I'd check on him quite, quite frequently. It's in the northern United States where we don't say where it is.

57:48But mainly because of where we're not just the animals health, but for human health, we ever since we launched the woolly mouse, we've had very excited people just show up at our labs, not open to the public. And we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice. And so showing people too much of the preserve. We're always very, very nervous about we scrub all the videos and want to ensure that no one can pick it out because we assume people will be moderately excited. Oh, yeah. Oh, the internet sleuths will try to find you. Yeah. So we've we've done, I'm not trying to challenge them.

58:20But we've been, we've done everything we can to protect it. Yeah. I understand. I mean, you have to. Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf. Yeah. So that's a dire. We already get a lot. We already get a lot of weird calls. But the other thing though, someone with deep pockets, oh, we make me a diable for my friend. We have everything they have every collection. We get a lot of weird calls. Yeah, from people that are like, what's people that have private zoos? Oh, yeah. Yeah, like enormous in like an India. Yeah. Yeah. They have that that family has like the largest private zoo and preserve just so wild.

58:59It's so crazy. Yeah. Well, you know, Texas is history with animals, right? Yeah. There's more tigers and captivity and private collections in Texas than in the wild than in the wild of the world. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. But I was I was in the I was in. So we of the 2000 acres, we have a subsection of it. That's about six and a half acres. We have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter. We have a couple of natural dins that we've built for them as well as an animal husbandry area. So that that way when we want to take photos of them or videos of them or do blood tests, they're in a seemingly can more contained area.

59:34And it's funny. Two weeks ago, I was up there and I was actually sitting on those logs and one of those pictures in remus came. Romulus who I sent the most amount of time with remus came up came pretty close and I was able to touch him again. But I thought at that moment and he kind of skidded his way as like, that's the last time I'm touching remus. Like what am I doing? And I mean, I don't know. I had our animal. Yeah, what I have animal care teams there and everything and they have been some there's some level of habituation between the care team. They really know and love the care team. But they're still while the animals, right?

1:00:07And so they probably hunted humans. Yeah, I don't I don't we don't know, right? But the rise of kind of going back to their extinction, the rise of the change in kind of this younger driest period and the change the massive. I know that it's some of the stuff that there's like several different prevailing theories, one of which is human predation, right? That like the rise of humans led to the extinction of the megafauna. That's kind of, you know, I think I think the answer is probably a combination. Could have there been an you know, astrological event. They're starting to be more and more data around that.

1:00:41I'm sure you've seen Randall Carlson talk about it. I've seen Randall Carlson talk about it. Graham Hancock talk about it. And they just get the whole beat out of them. Yeah, but not anymore. Yeah, now I'm sorry. I just impact theories. Well, we're talking about. It's yeah, and it happened. Yeah, and it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right? Because you see different, which, which also tracks to the theory, right? So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but you know, there was also a massive glacial lake and and and some of the glaciers of that rapidly liquefied.

1:01:16They didn't dump in the ocean that also changed ocean pattern. So you went from a period, you know, in that that kind of transition from plyciting to holocene, there was this period of it's insanely accelerated cooling. Do you know how Randall came up with that idea? Before it was brought to like his idea is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps, put some sort of immense cosmic event. And millions and millions of trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ran through the land and just carved deep gouges into the earth. He was on acid. He was on acid and this idea came to him.

1:01:56Some were looking out over a ridge. He was looking at this enormous gorge and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed. And then he started noticing that there's these huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere that were just moved by this immense amount of water. And then the way the ground, the features of the ground looks like the features that you see on sandy beaches when the tide rolls in and out. And it's like this is great and it all tracks. It tracks all over the world. It's like it reminds me of those stories where they show people like the side of this thing and they're like, oh man, it's a lot of water erosion.

1:02:37And then they like flip the photo and then you see the head of things like that's not water erosion. It's Dr. Robert Choque from Boston University. I've interviewed him. He was the first guy to propose this. He's like, this is thousands of years of rainfall. And we know that the last time there was rainfall like that in the Nile Valley was 9 ,000 years ago. Yeah. So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of like, what is the timeline that this stuff was actually built? And are we just assuming because we've decided that it's 2500 BC that that's it forever and no one wants to let that go? Well, that that I'm not a scientist, but that's and I don't come from academia.

1:03:13I'm just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me. And I find cool shit interesting and I try to work on it. Right. And what's crazy to me is the academic system, you know, once again, non -academic, I'm sure I'll get crucified for this, but I don't read the comments. I don't read the comments. I don't read the comments. Trust me. I don't read the comments. It isn't good for you. I sleep quite well. But, but you know, the academics, we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot. We've got, we fund 17 academic universities, right?

1:03:44All over the world. We fund 40 postdocs, right? All over the world, right? And that they're doing this. So we're very integrated with different ideas from from academia and these scholars. And our top people that work at Colossal came from academia. So I think we tried to be very academic friendly, but they live in this world, this super kind of like fortune and glory world where it's like, it's a popularity contest. If someone has a paper, because their entire motivation is published or are par. So one of the other things that people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for every single thing you do.

1:04:16It's like, we're not an academic university. We're not a lot. I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with with the community, right? But we get this feedback of like, if we wrote a scientific paper for every single thing that we did that went through peer review, like we, we would have 3000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever, right? Because we just piece in around writing fucking papers all day long. It's interesting because they want to impose their idea of what you're supposed to and not supposed to do. Well, they want to impose your, their idea that they've already established in any change to that establishment.

1:04:47So so in addition, the public 95 scientific guys and these are some of the top women in the world, right? That fall fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there. They, we have another probably 40 advisors. They're like, we love you. We just, you can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me. If I submit a paper, they're going to totally agree with you and we'll help you. We submit a paper. They judge my paper. It gets rejected. Then I don't get my grant. So then I can't continue my research. I have to fire my postdocs.

1:05:17So it's a complete scam of a system, right? And so we went through this phase where it's like we didn't have enough scientists. We didn't have labs. We didn't have money. We weren't doing anything for conservation. So we went through this whole like philosophical perspective of these, like these all these things that people threw about throughout us from the scientific community and some of our biggest people that hate us or people that we denied, they're funding. Of course. Well, the problem is not the scientific community. The problem is weak men. It's this this what you see in these these squabbles, these like ultra personal squabbles where like horrible vitriolic statements made about people.

1:05:57Like they're just not happy people. Exactly. It's the same problem with all of life. It's these bitchy little people, these bitchy little monsters. And they have taken over something that's incredibly important and their work, their work, these bitchy little people, their work is incredibly important. Yes. But at the core of their being, they're a bitchy little person. And they can't and that's why and that is why we don't have flying cars. We don't have man this and until Elon we were not going to live on Mars. And so like we didn't have like I think it takes time. It yeah, but it doesn't come but also academia is really focused on point solutions.

1:06:32It's not full systems, right? So if you want to go to Mars or you want to bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system and you have to innovate across everything. Whereas in academia, you're you're only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved. Well, it's also you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and given to these institutions along with a whole ideology. Like it's not just as simple as let's follow data. It's all got to be attached to this very left leaning, almost preposterous in some aspects ideology. And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you know is not true.

1:07:16You should just follow the scientific method. I'm not scientific, but we should just and guess what? When new data shows up that you know changes your old data, you shouldn't get mad about that. You should celebrate it. Exactly. Well, also you have to look at all data. You know, like I don't want to get into this, but like if you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man can be a woman, and which is fine in terms of who you are. But now when you're having them compete with women in sports, you've entered into nonsense land and you're the person we're counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject.

1:07:54You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology. I just wish we could get philosophy. We separate like philosophical perspectives from science. We do one of the one of the things that we fight about all the time. You know, because it's like once we got the scientists and once we got the money and once we proved that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once in QTL, which is a the funding arm of the CIA and other government started investing in colossal because of our technologies. And once we started proof points, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical.

1:08:32It's not a mammoth. It's not a diarwolf. This concept of speciation is a human construct that we are trying to impose on nature that flows more like a river than a rock. So are they saying that it's not because it didn't come straight from nature? It's something that you've recreated by piecing this together with that. What are the genes that you had to use to create a diarwolf? We didn't totally explain this. So you have CRISPR, you have these gene editing tools, you have a good sample of DNA. How do you turn that into a wolf? So you map them next to it and there was a study that came out about and once again, this goes back to the status quo of scientists, a vacuuming scientist.

1:09:12There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data. They said that diarwolves were closely related, weren't closely related to wolves. They were closely related to jackals. And that's because at the time, they only had 0 .15 % of the genome. They just didn't have all the data. They just didn't have all the data. Now we know that they actually were closely related to wolves because we have more data which were the prey cursor to gray wolves. So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in the broader Canaan group and family group. And so what we found is once you do that, we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what the difference is and we start to see that in certain parts of the genome that are responsible for size, for muscle, for cranial facial that there's differences.

1:09:57So we can start to map and say, okay, where are the differences between gray wolves and where are the differences between gray wolves and diarwolves? And then with those, we have a lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the diarwolves in a gray wolf cell line. And so, and then once you do that process, we didn't talk about this earlier, you do the same process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively cloning, where you take the nucleus of one cell, you put it that into another egg cell and then you take that embryo and you insert it into a serigate.

1:10:29And is this a 100 % diarwolf or is this a new thing? So this goes into the philosophical thing. So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically the scientists don't agree on how you classify species. So you've got certain people that will say, well, if a species is dictated by something that can't breed, that's literally a definition, like if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species. Then you have other people, you have the paleontologists and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lackavarrows, I agree with you number one paleontologist, the world that loves us.

1:11:00But then you have other paleontologists to just hate us. And they do it based solely on tooth morphology because they argue that it's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time. And I asked a paleontologist recently that that hates us. I said, if I made a mammoth with like, that was giant, with like, paint curly fur and it had the right tooth morphology, you're saying that based on your scientific papers that you would say, that's a mammoth. And she's like, yes, but that doesn't matter. And I'm like, well, we're doing it. So we think you got to say, why does she hate you guys? Because why does anyone, you know, any time you do anything in this world now, that's like moderately bold or polarizing people give you push back.

1:11:38But this is heavily bold. I wouldn't say this is moderately bold. You made three fucking diabolos. That's not moderately bold. It's really kind of one of the craziest things that a human being's ever done. It's definitely in the realm. This is right up there with inventing the internet. Yeah. So when you see it, well, and we have more stuff to come that I think I know. There's people out there that you worry that someone is going to get, you know, because this falls into religious realms. It's it's there's philosophical and religious and so like back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species.

1:12:15Right. But they made and produced five offspring all the time in a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a cold aquatic adapted cold adapted bear, right? And so I always ask people that they they're they're offspring or they can have children. Yes. Yes. But it's not like a donkey. Yeah. Exactly. So there's different ways to characterize it. Making a mute. Yeah. But there's different ways to say is something or something, right? And so, you know, we are not the same. If I don't know what percent you probably from 23 meters something have some percentage in the intertall. You'll say that you're an ad mixture or a hybrid.

1:12:47You just say you're human. You don't you don't really. But that's a good point though because Nanderthal if you want to talk about us different species just because they could breed with us. God, they're so different. But that's it. But they're like I said, there's six different ways. There's actually a species definition that's based solely on geographic and there's a funny paper out there around one species of toad that they built a road through and the same toads live on both on two sides of the street and their different species. And they're the same fucking toad just because there's a road.

1:13:16It just because because we as humans change. It's called geographic isolation of speciation. So it's just crazy. And so, so the only arguments that we now have is put is it a mammoth? And it's like, well, then don't call it a mammoth. I asked people, like, did you see Jurassic Park? And they're like, yeah. I was like, what was Jurassic Park? What was Jurassic Park? What do you think? What was Jurassic Park about to you? To me? Yeah, if you're like, if you're going to take your kids to Jurassic Park, what is the movie about? Dinosaur. Is it because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff.

1:13:46Are they dinosaurs or they or they genetically modified animals GMOs? Genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or they dinosaurs? If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de extinction. If they serve the ecological function and they have the lost biodiversity and phenotypes that made that animal unique, like the polar bear and a bear and a bear, they're just that animal. So these goes into this starts the whole religious and philosophical debates where it's funny because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don't like what you're doing, that's what they go to.

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1:16:58Is that it? Own definition, they're like, well, it doesn't have enough DNA. So I was like, so I said, but the second dire wolf that we have, the second genome that we have from the tooth has is has less of the same DNA than the skull. Does that mean that it wasn't a dire wolf? And it just turns into it. You're missing the point conversation. I would like to know the point though. What is their point? What is she? What is our overall argument? The general point of the people is that they want to pick one species definition and adhere us to that. And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species.

1:17:35It's just people that are using the framework that they set that doesn't isn't consistent kind of against the, based on the argument that they want to make. Interesting. So species is just something. It's a human construct. And it's just a thing if it can breed with another thing. Well, I mean, that's, that is one definition. There is another definition saying that it's only a species if it can't breed with another thing. So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can't breed with wolves, does that mean they're now their own species? It just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct.

1:18:07Right. But as a person who studies biology, which this person is, right, I could kind of understand her perspective where she's like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? How is this group of people with a bunch of money and a bunch of eggheads? How are these geniuses allowed to get together, splice some jeans up and serve up a dire wolf? I could see it from her perspective. 100 % right? But I think that if we don't do big bold things, it's important. You know, one of the things we should definitely show is this is just like the gyne Jurassic Park. But we should basically the same conversation.

1:18:42Yeah, but John Henry, but John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that, you know, didn't make it the final cut. We actually don't make an attraction. Yeah. So if we could show the red wolf, I think that'd be amazing because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back the dire wolf, we won't make available to conservation. Well, let's explain the red wolf to people because you were saying before I didn't even know how few of them there are. Yeah. So if you go to the one more, yeah. So this is a red wolf. That's hope. That's the world's first cloned red wolf.

1:19:16So I've actually made more red wolves than I've made dire wolves. So I've made four red wolves, one female. Are you just releasing these fuckers? No, no, no, they're in an ecological preserve as well. And so, but you're going to, you're going to die when you hear what I went through on this. So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de -extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free. Everything that we make that has an application of conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals. They don't pay us a dime. It's all open source.

1:19:45It's all free. We have 48 conservation partners, the team that's running the Northern White Rhino project, where they're exclusive genetic rescue partner. It doesn't, we're working with elephants in Botswana, working in elephants in Kenya. So anybody can use our technologies for free, right? We're working on Kitchrid, a terrible fungus in Australia. And so, so if that's not enough, I found out that, you know, that there's only 15 of those of red wolves back in the wild in North Carolina. So I met with the upcoming governor in other states as well or in such a... Well, we'll get to that. So they're only recognized by a US Fish and Wildlife there.

1:20:20But this incredible woman from Princeton, you know, top of her field, she's one of the wolf top wolf genesis in the world, Bridget Von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have a red wolf like characteristics. So she started darting them, taking samples, and what she found is they actually have more quote -unquote red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina. And is it part of the problem they're in breeding with coyotes? Yeah, but they've all been in it. Like these guys, like the ones in North Carolina have all in bred with coyotes. All the red wolves have some coyote in them because...

1:20:53They look like coyotes. Well, because every... Well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes. And yeah, and because the reality is every single species is what's called an ad mixture. We are... everything is in breeding with everything on some level, right? And so everything in life is in ad mixture. Nothing... it goes back to the Neanderthal. So this binary idea that we have is silly? It's no. It's a human cause construct, right? And they... It's insane. So I went to some folks from the last administration, right? And I took some data with me and I said, hey, we really want to help this red wolf program.

1:21:28We don't need any money. We open source all of our technologies. And we've used a technology that's not invasive for cloning, where we actually take a vial blood. We isolate what's called indithelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right? Because there's no nucleus in blood cells. So we catch those. And when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right? Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal, you have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.

1:22:02It's actually pretty... it's pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning. We can simply do it. Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to checks certain levels and whatnot. We give blood all the time. And so it's a very non -invasive... it's about as non -invasive as you can get, right? And so we found a way which we're open to, which we're open to, on Tuesday, is open sourcing this model of how you go cloned from blood, which is a game changer for biobanking. Because now you don't have to go herd an animal, take pieces of the animal and anesthetize the animal. We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them if there's a lack of genetic diversity using the same.

1:22:36So I went out to Washington with my team. I showed them... showed them hope as a baby in the videos of... And you may have videos of hope, Jamie. I don't know if it's in the folder. I showed them videos of hope. And I said, hey, you know, there's only a handful of... We made these four wolves from three different genetic lines. We made these from three different genetic lines, right? So there's actually more genetic diversity in these wolves. Then what's alive in the population? And we said we'd like for you to help protect the work that's being done in Louisiana. And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead?

1:23:16And we'll just give them to you. There's no cost. Here was the feedback. We need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend $22 million to see if it's possible to clone wolves. And I was blown away... I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. I wasn't very clear. This is a cloned wolf. Like here is you can fly with me to the preserve. You have signed in to the A, but you've fired me. And they're like, we need to spend five to six years and 20 plus million dollars to go to go understand this. To understand the positive. We'll give you all of the technology. And if you tell me you want a hundred wolves, I'll just make you a hundred wolves.

1:23:49And we'll leave an engineer in more genetic diversity for you. And the response was, we'll get back to you. We went to, we tried to have three other meetings, no shooting cancel every time. When we flew there, I just got back from a meeting with Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife Rolls, rolls up to. And they're very, very focused on innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing. And immediately they said, we celebrate Doug Burgham, the Secretary of Interior there who we met with, said, we celebrate. He's a huge conservationist, huge Teddy Roosevelt guy, member of the Explorers Club.

1:24:23And he's like, we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list. Only about three percent ever come off. And we're really good at putting them on. And we celebrate putting them on. So we have to do something about this. And if you're saying that we could productionize species, and as long as we have the right support to rewild them, people can use your technologies for free to make more of these different species that are critically endangered, while also bio -banking the samples along the way. He's like, why wouldn't we do this? And I was like, why about the previous folks?

1:24:53And they said that we need, you know, five years and 20 million, they were going to spend the internally. They weren't going to be as fast as they do the feasibility. So they were going to spend it internally on this. And we're like, we'll just do it for free. And he's like, we will completely support the initiative. And we're going to help get you plugged in. So you can help bio -bank our species and also help us support, you know, Red Wolf conservation. So when we used to reintroducing these. So we just had that meeting last week. We had endless Red Wolves from hell. They've created a lab. They're going to start eating people.

1:25:24And so we're going to get you some out of them last week. Well, it's, it's, they're beautiful. God, they're so beautiful. Well, it's just, it's like, why, we shouldn't be afraid of innovation, right? No, but you know the real question is, where do you stop? Yeah. Because 90, what percent of all animals that have ever existed, all species are extinct? Yeah. Like, are we going to, I think you focus on the species that are critically endangered and our keystone species, meaning the environment needs them? Right. But the, but the ones that we drove back with the ones that we drove to extinction, right?

1:25:55Okay. So that's where it started. So it's debatable whether or not we drove dire wolf's to extinction. We don't really know what happened 10 ,000 years ago. I'm inclined to think that when you see the, the death of 65 % of North American megafauna that happened really quickly, really quickly. Yeah. I'm inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a common impact are correct. I think, I think it's a, I think it's a, most likely it's a combination. We do know that when early, that anthropologic effects from humans that when early man went on to, uh, onto a landmass at scale, that, that, you know, we start to see that.

1:26:29We say that in Australia and other places, but it's, but to your point, it's much slower. It's much, much slower. This is a different thing. Yeah. Um, are you going to bring back saber to tigers? We, so we get, everyone seems to have their favorite animal for us to save, right? Like, dire wolf's to be my favorite. Yeah. That was in my favorite. Yeah. Dyrals, you got to come, maybe at some point you see them, but I want to. They're amazing. I mean, they're, they're, they're just beautiful animals. Yeah. Um, so, uh, we, they're in there. So saber saber to tiger is a class of, we put it, that is a class.

1:26:59Most commonly people think of the smile on as the saber to tiger. There's not to date been a really great smile on DNA. There is great home Ethereum DNA, which is another, um, type of saber to the guy. Oh, I didn't know there was more than one type of saber to, they, they, they classify him differently, you know, based on it, but obviously you've been studying this. So you're thinking about doing it. I'm not, I mean, we, we like to study ancient DNA, right? Like, like, you know, one of things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is 100 % right is people say there were no saber to tigers in, uh, Alaska.

1:27:33That, that's just an incorrect statement. There were no, there were probably no smile on there, but there are home with theoriums, which are a saber to the cat. Yeah. He's found things that were not supposed to be, I've held things in his, he's, I've, I've held a dioralfe skull in his, um, I hope he's fine. He's saying that in his, uh, facility. Yeah. I think he's talked about that. Yeah. But they found cave bear, short face bears. Wow. Yeah. So home with theorem is still a saber to the cat. But when, what happens is it, this goes back to that philosophical, that philosophical perspective, they think that only, if you look up smile it on in comparison.

1:28:12Oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still, but you mean that CGI image of it again, Jamie on the left? That's so fucking cool. Yeah. And, and I don't think they don't think you should bring something like that back. But if you do, I'm going to visit it. I mean, I want to see that thing take down a bite. Look at what's posse. There was a, I mean, wait, you see the, the Darrell Pals. Bro, but that would be so crazy. Now, show all of the sudden I want you to do it. Now, give me another large picture of it, Jamie. There's some other pictures of those. So smile, don's the one that has the largest teeth.

1:28:42It has the largest known teeth. Um, uh, but when people think of saber to tag her, this is what, or something you can't, that's a crazy what they think of. Those are crazy. I wonder how, why nature wanted to have that? I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides. And I'm quite thick. It has to be, right? Something where you, there's a genetic advantage. All hinges, look at that one on the right and lower right. Jamie below that to blow that to the right to the right. Yeah, right there. Click on that. Look at that, man. And I love because we don't, you know, it's amazing. We don't have the DNA from it.

1:29:16So we have no idea what the color pattern is, which you can see here. Right? It's like, it's got a short tail. So long tail. It's got leopard. It's got stripes, right? Right. We don't even know if they had long tail. They don't know if they could have been white. Wow. That would be wild. So we do have, there, there have been some really well preserved pups in others of, in the permafrost of home Ethereum. Whoa. Almost there. We know how's that kind of coloration to it. We don't, I don't want to say we do or don't. We have not done the analysis on that on the Ethereum. Look at that little guy. We do, we do have the genome of it though.

1:29:52Wow. Not that we're going to work on it. Okay. So that has brown hair. Have you seen the, have you seen the American short face bear? Yeah. That's the thing I'm probably the most scared of. Yeah, you can't bring that back. 17 or 18 foot giant bear. You can't bring that back. We're not working on it. I'm just saying. But somebody might, that's the problem. There might be some fucking crack head out there that's got 40 billion dollars. It's out of his mind. Well, I also think that, like some crazy dude who's just got the resources. That's in through that. You know, that is, that to me is negligent on scary.

1:30:22That's a lot of money. That's a man, that's a land negligent. Well, that, yeah, that is an enormous animal. And they think that's one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the bearing straight. More, more, yeah. Yeah. It was, it's a theory, but it's a prop, pretty good one. Yeah. I mean, you knew that if you knew there was a lineage of like super, you know, polar bears were out there, I would go near it. And it is essentially a super polar bear, which is really scary because polar bears are terrifying and completely carnivorous. And they don't care. They'll just walk right up to you and kill you.

1:30:52Oh, yeah, this is a great video of these guys that are behind a fence. Yeah. That was somebody sent it to me yesterday. Oh, fuck. I'll find it. I know where it is. Someone sent it to me yesterday of these guys that are right behind a fence where this polar bear is trying to get through the fence. Right. There's three of them. And they're, you know, they're talking to like, hey, big guy, you can't come in here. Hey, fella. And it's just common walking towards like, I'm going to get in there. Exactly. Yeah. It's polar bears scary. Very spooky. Well, they're spooky because they don't eat anything but meat.

1:31:25So we're on the menu. Yeah. All humans are on the menu. Anything that walks and breathes on the menu. I got it here. Where is it? Shit. It'll take me a few minutes. Sorry. Jamie Paws for a second. Let me find this because it's good. Okay. I just sent it to you. So I'm, I, it looks like they're in, I don't know where they are. Well, I think it'll say on the video. So these guys here, give me some volume. Polar bears. That's an oil rig. So it's probably Canada. Look at these guys.

1:31:59That sound. Yeah. They're just trying to eat you. Look at this. I'm too more blinded. Yeah. Hey. Go on. Go on. Go on. Go on. Probably not going to work. They're just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you. Hey, sweetheart. Hey, sweetheart. Sweetheart. Sweetheart wants a rip your liver out. Hey. Go on. I bet they are. They're so beautiful. They are beautiful. It's interesting that they're the most dangerous ones because the other ones we use for Coca -Cola and Klondike bars. Yeah. And that wild don't. Yeah, I'm just like playing around in the snow, but they're actually terrifying. Yeah, you were saying the younger dryers is really interesting.

1:32:45It's very, very interesting. Because it's a fairly new theory and explains a lot. And especially when you look at the mass extinction that did take place during that time, I would love to have seen what it looked like when all those animals were around. What was a, we kind of have a sense of what, because of safaris and videos. We know what it looks like when lions are interacting with wildebeests in Africa. What did it look like in Kansas? Like a 15 ,000 year old. Yeah. What was it like? I know there's a extinct bison species that is the bison lot of fronds. Have you seen those guys? Yeah, yeah.

1:33:22They're like eight foot long, Texas long horns on like, you know, super HGH, like bison. Yeah, our bison are small compared to the extinct bison, right? Were they the largest of the North American bison? Yeah. The bison lot of fronds was. We see if we can get a photo of that. Yeah. I didn't know about that until a few years ago. Yeah. I didn't even know that was a thing. It's, I mean, there were so many different things, giant sloths. There's the saber tooth tiger, the American lion, which is an American cheetah. Yes. American cheetahs, you know, we have, we actually have a full genome of it. And then there was a, there was also one of my favorite animals, which is kind of a weird one, probably on the list since we're talking about diarwolves and saber tooth tigers.

1:34:05Have you seen the stellar sea cow? No. What is that? Think of like a manatee or dogon, right? That's the size of like a large whale. What? Yeah. And the sad thing is it died, it actually died off before it died off and yeah, it died off though within a hundred years of its discovery. When was that? We killed them all, huh? Yeah, we could probably turn them into candles or something. Yeah, there's dick burn there fat. Yeah. So, but it was actually really important. It was the serenian to ever exist. It was haunted extinction only 30 years after being described in the 18th century. Wow. Yeah. And it was, and we actually have a, we have a full genome of this too, which is pretty cool.

1:34:49You want to bring it back? We can't just, I would bring this back in heartbeat. It was hugely important to the kelp forest, the Pacific Northwest. It was great. It's a great, it's not scary. It's huge. It's like, but then now the ring manatee went back, why wouldn't you bring back a megalodon? There is no megalodon DNA. Does none? No. I will say that the CEO of the largest, the president and CEO of the largest free museum in America really wants me to do the megalodon. But he's like, I can't ever say that publicly. I think he just outed him. Yeah, but there's a lot of museums. I could be wrong on the size, whatever.

1:35:27He's great though. But there is, there is no DNA. It would have to eat a lot. But I've already killed everything in the ocean. So one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wounds at colossal. Because if you want to get to this world where you could productionize endangered species like northern white rhinos instead of having to use serigots for an animal welfare perspective, you know, if you can get to the point that you can engineer genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos, grow them in labs and bags and then work with, and then you can control that population very, very well.

1:35:58You can then reintroduce them with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts, right? And so we were really not focusing on the, we were kind of relying on third parties on the rewilding modeling and all of our 48 conservation partners. We were really just kind of focused on the core science that supports their initiatives. But if we are successful with our artificial wounds and we are quite far on that project that, you know, I would not be surprised if eventually you see a, we have to get a mouse first. But if I'm happy with that. Have you guys had these conversations where you sit down, you go, how does this scale outward, what does this look like, this technology in a hundred years, did we just fuck up?

1:36:38No, I think that if you look at the birthing crisis that we're in and kind of population to climb crisis, I think that you look at global, like people having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people freezing their embryos, all of that's massively on the, you know, on the increase. It's all going up to the right, right? And we also know that like globally, like sperm and fertility and others is going down to the right, right? So it's not a good look for the future of humanity in general. And so I think though, you know, especially, and then we also have philosophical and, you have religious, you have philosophical and then you have social issues, right?

1:37:23That people have different perspectives on like having kids, having kids, same ex couples get all these things. So we at Colossal have kind of made this mandate that we're not going to work on humans, right? Because it's just, it gets too weird. We get asked in the end or tall on the dinosaur question every fucking day. So we're just not going to like bridge that gap. What we'll do is spin up those technologies. But I do think it is harder to grow a rhino in an artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human, not ethically or through an FDA process, but it is scientifically harder to to gestate some of the animals we're trying to gestate exudero.

1:37:59So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population. But that's where it gets really weird, right? You could create a child with no mother or father. I do think that, I think it's about optionality, right? I think that there are certain situations where that would be a blessing. You know, I just had my first kid. So we did not grow an artificial womb. Yeah, but I mean, the people that are skeptical about this stuff, this is what they point to. It's like what is involved in the creation of life? Well, it's been people having sex and then asperin fertilizes the egg, a child born, they raise the child, they get some of their behavior characteristics.

1:38:41It gets the genetics and then we integrate it into a community and there's life. But if you could just make life without any of that, like what is that? That's the, where is that? You know what I'm saying? No, it's a great philosophy. How much of the child's development is taking place while it's in the mother and getting it sharing that experience, that formal cues and whatnot? Yes. I wouldn't have a child that way. Right. What if you're making a sociopath? Like what if you're making a completely positive note? Because there's no empathy. There's no connection. No connection to people. They come out out of the gate, Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up.

1:39:19Like really? No, it's a fair, it's a fair point. You know what? We don't know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman's body. And there's people that are working on this technology specifically for humans. Like right now, we're focusing on it for extinct species and endangered animals. Right. But the question was, wouldn't this scale out? Yeah. When you scale out a hundred years from now? Like what did you just do? Well I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if we had a world where we, like if it's colossal gets ultimate success, I would say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.

1:39:52We've revitalized these mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including your picture of what did the Arctic look like back in the day? Like how do we have that? Because that was actually a crazy, if you look at the work that's been done in Pleistening Park by Sergei Nikita Zimoff, they've actually shown that rewilding northern Siberia with coal tolerant megafauna actually can revitalize the ecosystem. It can add more biodiversity. It can actually keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter. So it's a cluster is more carbon. So I think this, this idea of nature based and living with nature in an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at.

1:40:34And I hope that, you know, colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the endangered species list. So what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoths specifically, the study that showed that it would help. But they've already done it with like muscox, horses and a few other species up there. So they're doing it, they're doing it right now. They've been doing it for over 20 years. And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia. Yeah. That was something that Larry or that, that, that, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Sergei Nikita Zimoff wanted to do.

1:41:10How long have you formed some Russian oligarch on some mammoth? Yeah. I mean, look, given the geopolit, you know, we see, going back to your wolf example, uh, we see boundaries in geopolitical lines, right? The animals don't, right? And so we will probably not rewild our first mammoth in Siberia for many reasons. Um, but you think you will rewild a mammoth? Yeah. I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at, uh, colossal .com, forge slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around like everyone from academia to private land owners to indigenous people groups, governments to understand like, like, we don't have a thylacene.

1:41:52We're, we, I think we'll have a thylacene in the next eight years. I really do. I think based on where we are, our current course is speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a fat tell done art, which is like a mouse size marsupial and a wolf in, in, in, in this, right? But we actually, and if you just kind of scroll through into the people, so it's a wolf -like marsupial. Yeah. Does actually have a pouch that it does. It actually also has a backward pouch. So most, most pouches, uh, other than like, um, the wombat are forward facing. It is backwards, it's because it was, they think because it was a burrowing it, burrowing it.

1:42:25So that's what you want. Like the babies. Yeah. Like that's what you suck at them. But nature's fascinating. But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, uh, and just like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually, um, have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacenes, we have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacene with, and in one of the groups that we haven't involved in is the login commission. It's going back to your, you know, how does, how do we live with nature kind of like with your example with the cattleman and the ranchers?

1:42:55Well, the biggest economic driver right now in, in Tasmania is actually the, um, uh, login commission. So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a, and into the forest without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world. And so we going back to like the thylacene and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups in a head of time so that people can get excited about, you know, um, you know, what are the challenges? What are the unintended consequences? And that's not our job to persuade them.

1:43:30It's just our job to kind of listen to them and then figure it out. And, you know, that, that approach of like listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities has helped us, I think, dramatically think through what our rewilding strategies are. So when you have a rewilding strategy, um, what experts do you bring in to have this discussion of what kind of an impact this could be, I mean, you haven't done any rewilding would be clear to everybody. Yes. They're not releasing darewolds and a woolly mice for not getting released. Right. Yes. So this is all theoretical.

1:44:00Yes. But if you do have one, what would be the, what would you look at specifically? How do you take into account all the different species? The, do you take into account like with a thylacene particularly because it's a large predator, the amount of animals that's going to eat, right? These animals are not conditioned. They haven't evolved to be around this thing. It's been, well, so almost a hundred years since the last one was there. So on the evolve part, this is actually kind of weird. So you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land.

1:44:36So you have to work with these kind of big working groups. We have a project going on right now in central, uh, Tasmania, which is amazing. And this, you know, the old school, like, loony tunes, like, like, wily coyote worries, like, and he like goes through a wall and there's a hole or the cool way man, right? Well, if you had that cut out, we made a cut, we made cutouts and painted them of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and other things and wolves and other things. And we put them out near camera traps in central Tasmania. And when we reviewed the data, you'll have like a call or a bombat or one of these animals kind of walking through or even a wallaby kind of walking through.

1:45:11And they'll see a cat, they'll see a cut on the kind of look at it when they see, and remember, to your point, this is hundreds, this is for them is multiple generations, right? Because these animals look hundreds of years. And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze, they absolutely freak out. Wow. Yeah. So we have, we've been collecting this data for 18 months. We're publishing a paper on it. So that is so cool. There's, there's like generational trauma that is baked in to their DNA to avoid a thylacine. What's the only way they survive? I mean, without a language to pass down information, how, what, you know, it makes you wonder, like how much of that is a noose?

1:45:52Like what, when people have a phidiaphobia, you know, or a racnephobia, fear of snakes and spiders, like, what is that from? Like, because it's crippling. I've seen people that have crippling fear of spiders, or it doesn't even make any sense. Well, they probably somebody got almost killed by a spider. And that's inside of them, right? Like that, those genes passed on. And you see it's just, yeah, they freak out, man. When I was doing fear factor, we had, if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what? That was on the preshow. That's on the show. Yeah. And that's like me and Heights.

1:46:25It's like every, every episode you had back in the day of Heights. That's because you're smart. Yeah. It's like, this is terrifying. I'm like, yeah, whatever I'm in a fucking hotel and I'm on like the 50th floor. Yeah. Why? Yeah. So I don't have like, the road noise. I'm like, this is going to be really hard to get out of here. It's so sketchy. It's so scary. It's just like the building moves a little bit when it's windy. Yeah. Fuck all this. So my toilet water shake. Fuck that. No. Here? Yeah. Jamie sends me pictures from his house. I freak out. No. No, I can't. No, no, no. I just, I like to bend the ground.

1:46:59I like to be on the ground. Why hate flying too? Which sucks because I fly. Yeah. I fly all the time. Just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit. Yeah. Because the worst is like when you're sitting there and there's now been like these renders of planes that have like glass or plexiglass. I'm like, I don't want to see that. I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don't shut the windows. I'm like, I'm in the bowl. I'm in the tube. Yeah. It's literally fired. I just want to go. Yeah. Just think about the point where you're sitting in a chair and then you look down and you have a floor.

1:47:29You're like, that's not, there's not that much. There's like 10 ,000 feet, you know, or 3 ,000 feet below me. When you see something like the one that happened in Canada where the plane flipped upside down to, you just like that, you can't get that one out of your head. Adelta Airlines life. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't like, yeah, whoopsies. Crazy airline you've never heard of. It was a person who was not that good at flying and kind of recent. Yeah. Like, hey. Yeah. The higher some of that. Yeah. And I got a DC, a decent amount. And so like the whole DC thing like absolutely freaked me out. Oh, yeah.

1:47:59Yeah. Because sometimes I stay at some of those hotels that are right on the river and you see the chopper's fly. You see the chopper's fly. You see the chopper's fly. That's the DC one. Look how much the water is shaking at this pool. Oh, yeah. Do you see the one in Thailand? This is where it was. Oh, did you see the water that's flying off the roofs? Yeah, in the in the, in the flying off the roofs where you see like from the ground, it looks like it's raining. It's crazy. Anyway, yeah. Well, that is, that would be the last day I would spend in that fucking room. Yeah, you're out. I like that.

1:48:28It's like in my son's. Bye. Bye. If I saw a ghost, I'm like, all right, I'm moving. Yeah, bye bye. Maybe the ghost is cool. I'm not totally scared to ghost because I don't think ghosts have ever killed anybody. You know, I'm scared of thylacines. I'm not scared of thylacines. I'm not. They start off the size of a grain of rice. I'm not. It's going to be really nice to them. It's kind of like, yeah, you've got to be really nice to it. Yes. I saw a great gift. I saw this great image on X the other day that it's like, it's got all the robots lining up to go humans. It's like, no, not this one. It's a thank you and it's request.

1:49:00Oh boy. So I was like, I'm going to be very nice on all of my requests on Grock. Well, I have a weird situation going on at my house because I have chickens, but I eat chicken. And I don't eat the chickens that I have. I eat their eggs. Yeah. But they're cute. I'm like, hey, girls, what's up, ladies? Yeah. I have no desire to harm them. I try to protect them. If I'm driving on the driveway and one of them is in the middle of the drive, I have to be very slow and let her cross. But I eat chicken. Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but you have two eggs.

1:49:35If you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%. Yeah. It turns out Alzheimer's connected to a lot of stuff that's in the eye. Right. Yeah. Unfortunately. They're saying that Gary said it was, I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was like, it's now becoming a more popular belief that it's diabetes type three. Yes. Yeah. I've heard that. So, which is really weird to think of it that way. But it's just so much, I mean, obviously you know this now because you're on a health path. Yeah. You know, and you feel much better. I feel incredible.

1:50:10I mean, isn't it nuts? Yeah. How many people are just running around out there feeling like shit? Well, I was. I was. I mean, part of the reason I started colossal, I mean, I told you the story about how I got with George, but before that, I built a handful of different technology companies. My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running it. And this was in early late 2020, early 2020. I had to be in Tokyo and I had to be in Shanghai. So I came back. I went to CES, the big consumer electronic show in Vegas. Saw everyone in the world, right? That's there because it's stupid big.

1:50:43We can have later, I'm in NASA Marshall with the director there because we're doing some work for NASA at the time of my last company. And I was with one of my number two, my number two of the company, this guy named Greg, who's our chief strategy officer. He was coughing, he wasn't feeling well. We both were kind of feeling like shit. I was like, no, we've been on the road a lot. We've been drinking. We came back on a Friday, a Friday night we had, we were going back on Slack around talking about aliens and shit. And then the next day I got a conference wife that had a sudden cardiac event. Oh, Jesus.

1:51:11And so that for me was a big wake up call because I got really sick during COVID. Like I was on that early strain of COVID. And there's definitely multiple strange. I can't wait to hear what anyone tells you. There's definitely multiple things that came out of the thing. And so I got super, super sick. And I now rarely drink. I rarely have caffeine. I've kind of tried to cut out stuff, exercise regularly. And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light. I do that every day now. Every day. Yeah, that's beautiful.

1:51:47That's awesome, man. You're lifting weights too. Yeah, lifting weights on a regimen, everything. That's so important. Yeah. So important. And I tell people it's not even a vanity thing. Don't do it because you want big muscles. Preserve your tissue. Preserve your bone mass. Well, I mean, I don't want to be like, I now have a nine -month -old son, right? And he like wants to hang out and, you know, he's going to get bigger. And if I can't pick him up, that's a sad day, you know? And I've kind of got in this mindset of like, you know, I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can't walk.

1:52:16It's like, it's kind of a blessing to walk. It is. So like, why would I squander that blessing? Why would I not like lean into it and make sure that when I'm 90, I can walk? Yeah, it's a blessing to be healthy. It's a blessing. I mean, we're so concerned about our day -to -day existence. Yeah. We lose track of this big picture. You have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn't possible, you would wish it was possible. And that is get healthier. Like, if it wasn't possible, if we just existed in a state, whatever that state was, there's no medicine that could fix it. There's no exercise that could fix it.

1:52:50Diet doesn't change it. This is just who you are as a being and it goes away. But that's not even remotely true. It's actually the opposite. There's friends that I have that are my age and they look like they're my dad. Yeah. And that's because they've been drinking and smoking and sleeping late and fucking off their whole life and no exercise at all. And your body deteriorates. I'm on the journey. I'm not at the end, right? It is a constant journey. I'm on the journey. We're all on the journey. It's like no ant. It's sort of working with Gary. Have you seen this function test? Have you seen the function test?

1:53:24What is the function test? It's like function health. It's like a, it's just a suit. It's just all, if you go to your doctor, I do quarterly blood work. But then I also then do this, the function test, which is a massively all -encompassing test, it's like two tests, twice a year. And so I do that test and after working with Gary for a while, now my biological age, or my actual age is 43, my biological age is 35. That's amazing. It's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, getting myself nutrients. I buy, and you can actually taste a difference, right?

1:54:00If you go to the store and get a steak or chicken, and even if it's free range and all that shit, it tastes great. It tastes better than something that you buy, just that's terrible at a store. But when you order from some of these true, like, omesh places and places that have actually grown the food, completely natural, that doesn't have just a fake pre -purchase certified organic, you can taste the difference in the nutrient density. It's insane. And you want to eat it? A lot of wild game? Yeah, so that's what I order now. So I order a bunch, so I do elk steaks. I do a lot of steaks from this farm that Gary recommended to me.

1:54:41It's just great. Is it bison? Do they have bison too? They do have bison too, yeah. It's Parker Pastry. It's just, like, when I have a steak from these guys, like, it's been, like, you can taste it. And I had, like, my brother -in -law and my father -in -law had friends, I was like, no, no, no, no. We're going to try these steaks out of the freezer. Like, we're not just going to buy something. Well, it looks different. It looks different, yeah. It looks like the coloration. You get a pink steak from the grocery store. Yeah. Which is fine. You cook it, it tastes great. But if you get a grass -fed, grass -finished steak, like, grass -finished, yeah.

1:55:08Grass -finished, 100%. A lot of ranch is out here. Yeah. You know, Texas is a great place. There's a lot of ranches out here that use regenerative agriculture, and they sell the animals that they kill. And it's like a dark red meat. Yeah, it looks completely different. But they taste different. They take you want to eat more of it. Like, I feel full, but I want to finish it, and I also feel like, I'm like, my body likes this because it's getting shit that it hasn't been getting. You feel better when you eat it. Like, you literally feel energized. Yeah. You know, I've given people elk before. Yeah.

1:55:38And one of the things I say is, like, do you have so much energy? I'm like, yes. Welcome to my world. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. It is so great. But in the early days of Colossal, that was one of the things that we got asked by, like, heads of state, like not by, like, you know, just random people. We're going to be all in the internet, too. It mostly, like, some people at large at different locations, they're like, can we eat them? Can we eat a mamba? What's it taste like? That was like, that question came up faster than we thought. And this isn't the, I know, that was in the first, like, they just don't, I really don't want to eat something that's been extinct for 10 ,000 years.

1:56:13You just bring it back. And that's not even yet. Yeah. And that was the first question. Can I eat this? Yeah. I want, will you memo steak, my friend? It was also domestic, the question having domestic. Oh, domestic. Yeah. Like people in very good states. Yeah, I know. They have too much money. Yeah. Fucking psychos. Yeah. It's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a, it's so crazy. We get the dime, we get that, we get, we get so many weird questions. Well, we get the dinosaur question.

1:56:41The probably the number one question we get is, is the dinosaur question. Do you think if they brought, if Jurassic Park, if Spielberg did it today, they'd have feathers? We know that some dinosaurs had feathers. We know some had hair, like hair, like kind of precursor to feathers. And we know some that work just scale. We have preserves, we can see in the fossil record whether they had it, right? If you've seen the one that's in the Montana University, there's a university in Boseman that has a museum. Isn't the university? It might just be a museum. Yeah. But when I was visiting there a few years back, they have a, like a raptor and one side of the raptor is feathered and the other side is like Jurassic Park, like Scaly.

1:57:24And you know, you look at it and you go, oh, it's just like, oh, that's a fucking, it's a bird. Yeah. Like now it makes sense. Like makes more sense. Yeah. It's a little stupid arms. Like makes more sense. I mean, have you seen the Watson? No. Can we, can we pull up a Watson? So this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon and it is, it's called a, our Hoatson. I think it's a lot, I don't know how you spot it. It's like HOA, TZEN or something like that. We can find it. Yeah. Apparently it also smells terrible. But if you click, if you type in, oh, yeah, it's a Hoatson and then if you click in and find a baby picture, it's got these little creepy hands.

1:58:03It looks like a, it looks like kind of like a bird like dinosaur. We did the genome on this for fun. So oh, yeah, you can see it. It's like, it climbs. So before there are flies, it actually climbs up everything. Well, when you look at an eagle's talent, you're like, yeah, what the hell is that? And then it evolves like if you, the, the first kind of like quote unquote dinosaur bird up there, it actually, yeah, it crawls. It crawls like it doesn't fly. You know, most birds just sit there with their little wing nubs and just don't do anything. These guys actually climb. What about terror birds?

1:58:39Oh, yeah. This is scary. That's a crazy animal. Like what the hell was that thing? Yeah. And that was, what was that? How many years ago did those things go extinct? There's one million. Millions, right? So the oldest DNA that we have is all 1 .5 million years old. That's it. Yeah. So that's where the picture is. So you can, a guy you should talk to about not that, but that's interesting is Kenneth Lackavaro. He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including dreadnoughtis, which is just, it's the, it's the craziest thing ever. And going back to the, dreadnoughtis and going back to the issues that, what is dreadnoughtis?

1:59:14Oh, dreadnoughtis is amazing. So I don't know what to do. What? What? Imagine it did. Yeah, go to that. What cool colors? Yeah. Here is so it's a planet. Yeah, it's a planet. It's a size of 7, 7, 3. But it's as big as a 7, 37. No, we don't have that. That's so crazy. Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he found it in Argentina. And he, like he's a, Kenneth Lackavaro, he's amazing. He found it in Argentina. Discovered the species, named the species. And he brought it, he brought it to New Jersey to do all the modeling and all that. The government changed. And they anchored back. You know, the old school, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

1:59:59That's where it is. It's basically in a warehouse. So it's on display for people in a museum. It's literally, this goes back to some of these governments in these museums. It's literally like not on, it's in a bunch of crates in Western Argentina. Really? Yeah. And it's like the coolest thing ever. This is, yeah, so yeah, that's Lackavaro's lab. And so, but it's truly, truly amazing. So with these, like that's one of the things about dinosaurs in museums, right? Like a lot of them, they've created artificial bones to fill in the blanks. Fill in a lot of blanks. Sometimes they'll get like a jawbone and they're like, and here's the reconstruction.

2:00:38Right. It's weird because you go to see it and you think you're going to see a dinosaur bone. And it's only a percentage complete. Yeah. And sometimes they're real clever and sometimes they're not, like sometimes they'll, it'll be different colors for the real bone versus, and you're like, how much of this do you have? And they're like four percent. Yeah. How did you guess what it looked like? Like, and a lot of the images, like of like the soft tissue overlay, like when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it, like if you're seeing like what, like rabbits look like, if you take away, there's, yeah, they did this with like whales and stuff.

2:01:09And you look absolutely, if you look at, they look like the scariest things ever. And then you put it all whale in there and you're like, oh, that's not the worst thing. Yeah, for whales, you see them and you look at them and you're like, oh, they're sweet. Yeah. Just chilling in the water. But if you see them with the teeth and everything and just the skeleton, it looks like, it looks like an alien monster. Yeah, like an alien monster. So I wonder what we were looking at. There was a, there was a one species that we don't have DNA for that would be amazing to bring back because the ecological benefit is there was a giant beaver.

2:01:39Yeah. A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid. When did that thing die off? I don't know. I'd probably have to be. It would probably be in the late Pleistastene. One of the things that I learned through Rinella is that at the founding of this country in the early days, the richest man in the world was selling beaver peltz. That really? It was the richest guy in the world. Yeah. Here at the Pleistastene. Well, on the dinosaur bus. So this beaver, giant beaver, enormous, bare -sized beaver that lived in North America during the Pleistastene. Wow. So when did these die off? What year, what was the Pleistastene officially?

2:02:17So about 13 ,000 years ago. I could have been the same thing with you. 12 ,000 years ago. Wow. So it probably died off. We're doing that same. American lion and all that other stuff. You know the pronghorn, you know, the whole story of the day. Yeah. That's why they're so fast. Oh, because of the American lion? No, American Cheetah. American Cheetah. Like, they're the last of these animals. They're a bizarre animal. Have you ever seen one in real life? No, I've never seen one in real life. I've only seen it through binoculars. I've never seen one on the ground real close. I've only seen it from a few hundred yards away.

2:02:47When you look at images of them, they have insane eyesight. They have almost 360 degree vision. Their eyes are on the side of their heads. Yeah, absolutely. And they can run 55 miles an hour. That's amazing. And the reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by Cheetahs that don't exist anymore. So the Cheetahs died off in the younger drys impact, or whatever happened. But these pronghorn antelopes remain and they are, there's nothing like them in terms of speed. That's awesome. Like, it's really bizarre because they're a remnant of an older past where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone.

2:03:22They remain. Yeah, so they can't even catch them now. Nothing. Once they're done, like once they're grown, good fucking luck. They have insane eyesight. But you know one of the ways that people hunt them, they're really dumb. One of the ways people hunt them is on horsebacks, like that dog has zero chance. But the Cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down. So it's like another, you know, different kind of antelope. But a super fast, they're quite a bit faster, I bet, than these antelope. They're crazy fast. There's like nothing like them in North America. It's awesome. But the vision that these things have, give me a photo of one of their heads, pronghorn's eyes.

2:04:01They're so weird looking. They look archaic. Like if you see their face, they don't look like, they, it looks like they're from another time. They're from a Star Wars movie. Yeah. They look like they're from another time. And they are. They're literally on the side of that. Yeah. This is what would have been so amazing to like look at what the earth looked like, you know, 12 ,000 years ago. It is cool. Like America, like to your point when you travel and you go to these different places where you have, they're truly more remote, right? And I'm not just talking about like Yellowstone, but you know, like when you've said, you would like go in a Krueger National Park or looking at some of these places in Africa, when you get a central Tasmania, it's almost like a weird Disney movie.

2:04:40Like like at dusk, you've got like a kidnas running around and you've got wallabies jumping jumping through it. And they all just come through and you're like, like it's like that scene in like Ace Ventura, right? Where he sings like everything fucking comes to him. And like I remember the first, I was like, this is real. Like are these animals trying to, like there's no way there's this much life in biodiversity. And it's all, and it was all just like, you know, the kidnas running, the wallabies are jumping. You've got like wall bats, like kind of like kind of scurrying along and you're just like, there's always weird dumb animals.

2:05:12They're just excited, you know, they're so strange to us, right? In terms of how we think about them because you never see them. But then there's just like this insane plethora of them. They're just so many. It's crazy. Well, I wonder what would be different had the thylacene survived. So they say that it was kind of the only thing that was, it was the only apex predator for Tasmania and lower Australia. And have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person? Not in person. They're awesome. They look cool. Yeah, they're cool shit. They're awesome. They're packed. They eat in these little packs. And the reason why they call them Tasmanian devils is because they make the weirdest, I mean, they make sense.

2:05:46If I heard the sounds that they make, if you're out in the woods, you hear that sound. You're like, this is a mott, this is sasklatch. Yeah, they're crazy. See if we can hear someone. Oh, Jesus, refer to tazis as their devils due to this superficial resentment. Oh, cute face. You find them eating. They just sound terrible. Find a Tasmanian tiger noises. I don't think they know what they mean. Or excuse me, Tasmanian devil noises, sorry. Sorry, not. Have you seen this video, though? I have. Yeah, we can go to that in a second, too. I just want to hear those.

2:06:20Look at that fucker. Oh, look at this face. No, wait. So cool. And so they, so they're, they're part of the reason why they're, but that, that isn't terrifying. You think they give each other cancer? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. And many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think that if the thylacine was there because this is where people give wolves and thylacines and predators bad, but they go after the say, there's an energy expenditure ratio, right? They're not just sitting there grazing. They're not getting sedentary. They have to go make the kill. They have to decide. I'm going to go kill stuff.

2:06:55So they killed a young. So they're thinning out the weakest. They killed the old and they killed the sick. A, an environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthy ecosystem, including for those prey species. And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate kind of that mezzanine level of marsupials. And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not, if you've seen, it's a, I don't know if you should just discuss it. It's really gross. But that face, what do we look at here? Oh, feeding frenzy. Oh, give me some volume. It's doing it right in front of people too, which is crazy.

2:07:31They might be talking at the time. I fed them like this. It's crazy. They just not scared. Watch how fast they are capable of consuming this. They're like piranhas, the world. And these are Tasmanian devils, the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera. And next to Tasmanian, it's so cool that they're not, is that kind of, they're not like, they're not scared. Yeah, they don't even know you're there. It's crazy. So if you feed them like this, you can put a piece of white meat. Whose videos is Jimmy? Uh, Coyote Peterson. A brave wilderness. Okay. Look at these little fuckers, guys.

2:08:05And then they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights. And that fighting is when they, that's when they do the transmission. Oh, right. You see a battle fight. No, I mean like, wow. But they literally scratch and bite each other. And then they, they transmit this. It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of. So then it latches onto the next face through biting. And, and the file, and if you see an animal with a Tasmanian devil with the facial tumor disease, and you see them, like they can't walk well, they can't really see well, those are the animals that would be picked up at predators first.

2:08:40And so they, so there's a big movement within Tasmanian in lower Australia, a southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator being the thylacene, it would eat. Oh, I can't even look at it. Oh, God, we're looking for people listening. We're looking at tumors on Tasmanian devil's faces. Yeah, there's just terrible. What, that was a perfect inspiration for a comic book character or for a cartoon character rather than the Tasmanian devil. Yeah, Tasmanian devil. I mean, they're, they're like, they'll be sitting there not making those sounds. They start eating or they get threatened and they make those death sounds.

2:09:12You were, you were at, it is a terrible, because if you've never heard it before in person, it just catches you by surprise and it like blows you away. So I was, it was a pretty weird experience for some of that. Yeah, I'd imagine there's a, that's such a cool little animal. So the idea of ultimately eventually releasing thylacines, how would that be done and what kind of study would have to be done? Because you're, you're talking about all these animals that come out, look at all the animals. That probably won't be the case if you reintroduce that. They'll start, they will start thinning out and it'll, it'll, it'll receive a balance.

2:09:46Yeah, it'll take a lot of time. So they've done a lot, it was just like, keep people of date on Australia. Most people don't know that they've introduced cats. So house cats, once water, they introduce house cats, like just feral house cats in Australia to combat certain species. And they start decimating all the other species. It's literally the worst. It's literally the number one mammalian extinction rate is Australia. And cats. And it's because it's an invasive species. Would that be a problem that would be, would there be a similar problem if you reintroduce the Tasmanian tiger? Would there be potentially, would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct?

2:10:27So the good news about the Tasmanian in the southern Australia ecosystems is they're mostly intact, right? Hopefully they'd eat the cats. If you talk to most people on Australia, they hate cats, aside of the cats that they actually own. Yeah. They actually hate cats because of what they're doing to small marsupials. They're actually looking at technologies like gene drives and others to get rid of, to fully eradicate cats that are, that are wild non domestic cats. Yeah, people hunt them. Yeah, people hunt them. Like, you have, I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, and they have this magazine.

2:10:56It's like a bow hunter magazine in Australia. Yeah, and he gave me a copy of it. I was reading on a plane. This guy's holding up a dead cat and shot with a bow and a, I'm like, hey, man. What the fuck? Yeah, they, they, they, they, they, they hold them up like trophies. Well, because it's, it's a huge problem, right? It goes back to the invasive species. One of the projects that we're working on with the thiosync is we like to pair every de -extinction with the species preservation is, have you ever seen a northern coal? No, what is that? Northern coal. It, it, it, it kind of looks like a manquer, like a ferret, but way prettier.

2:11:25It's amazing. I spelled it. Q -U -O -L. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're absolutely beautiful. They're absolutely, I mean, they're, they're very beautiful, but they're another type of carbonate, carbonate for marsupial. But you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity introduced cane toads. Have you ever seen a cane toads? It's like the job of the, let me explain to you, right? They're monsters. And so we introduced, we as humanity introduced cane toads into Australia and, and they have a neural toxin. Well, guess what? Most quals in small marsupials love to eat frogs and toads.

2:12:02Oh, no. This is actually, I think about our work. This actually is about our work. And so, no, this may be, no, actually, I think this is part of our work. And what, what we've done is if you go back to, to your point about co -evolving in evolution, if you go back to southern, to South America where cane toads evolved along snakes and mice and, and, and other, you know, small mammals, they can't toads all they've on. And they don't die of the neurotoxin. They don't like completely like stroke out and die, which is what happens in, in, in, Northern Australia. And so the cane toads are, they reproduce in, in, in sane rate.

2:12:37They're having like thousands of babies. There's making more and more of them. So guess what? More and more cane, or more and more quals and others are eating these cane toads and dying. So what we did is we actually did a study where we understood what are the genes in the mammals and snakes even in, in, in South America that make them cane toads toxin or resistant. And, and here's what we found. This is, this is amazing. One letter, in three and a half billion base fares. So one letter, a one letter change, conferred, had no other, you know, to serious, had no other effects that were negative.

2:13:09And it created a five thousand times resistance to cane toads. Wow. So, we, so, because, you know, quals are in danger, do we don't want to work in endangered species first? We want to start with a more model species. We worked in the fat tell, Dunard, which is our model species for the thylacene. And, and we engineered Dunards that, and Dunard cells and Dunards that can eat cane toad tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them. Where it would typically kill them. And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to enter, we like to engineer in this, this one, add it into quals.

2:13:46Because if quals would have, would have most likely, through this concept of conversion evolution, if you would have put the, the quals next to the cane toad, they would have resistance already built into them through nature. Wow. And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and, and biotech in conservation. And so then you could like make these super quals that eat the cane toads. And then, Dunard cells that help the population lower the population of cane toads, it has this hit, and help the population of the quals. But also as a halo effect to all these other marsupials that we don't know how many are dying from eating cane toads.

2:14:22I hope you don't have to bring this episode is brought to by my friends at Black Rifle Coffee. That's all I drink folks. If you see me drinking coffee in the studio, it's Black Rifle Coffee. It's because my friend Evan Hafer who owns a company, I love him to death and they make the best coffee in the world. They put together the best energy drink in America made with 200 milligrams of naturally sourced caffeine, low calories and absolutely zero sugar. It's available in four new delicious flavors, project mango, Ranger berry, freedom punch and white frost veteran founded and veteran led each Black Rifle Coffee purchase.

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2:16:35Yes. Yeah, they're too much. There was a giant, one of those toads back in thousands of years ago. How big was it? I don't know. I've seen a 3D render of it and it grabs like, you know, deers and stuff. It's crazy. Whoa. We've played videos of toads eating mice. I had no idea. Yeah. Before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice. Yeah, it's crazy. So they put them in this bin with a bunch of mice and this toad is just going ham, just snatching mice up and swallowing. And you think they're just sitting there docile and then they just absolutely throw their whole body up.

2:17:08Well, they sit there. They have the creepiest dead eyes. They're just machines to eat. If we've seen them fight with each other, that's pretty wild too. They bite each other's heads and they throw each other through the air. Yeah, I've seen them toss each other. Imagine you're fighting with a dude and he literally bites half your torso and throws you through the air and they don't even look like a bother to them. Yeah, they're just part of the fight. That's totally like within the rule. That's what creeps me out about reptiles. There's this lack of emotions. Like at least a wolf has emotions. It's like there's something going on there.

2:17:40There's an intelligence. There's something really creepy about getting eaten by something stupid. Like a crocodile. Yeah, like a crocodile or like a toad. There was a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting but it turns out to not be true. That they would lie on their back and put their arms in the air to simulate drowning. Yeah, I saw that video. Apparently that's not what they're doing. Apparently that's a normal characteristic that they do. But from a natural selection perspective, stupid people were like, I have to say. Yeah, I gotta save that dude. And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart.

2:18:14But in reality, it just got a free meal. Yeah, well you would think though if they have gotten those meals before that that would be a learned behavior. I mean, just to say they do have some learned behavior. I have a friend, his name is Jim Shockey. He's a professional hunter and he was actually hired to go into Africa and hunt crocodiles that were killing all these people in this village. Like they're actively targeting people in this village. When he went to the village, everybody was like, miss it a foot, a chunk taken out of their leg. And while he was there, a crocodile took a woman who was washing clothes.

2:18:45So what they had done was they'd set up this area by the water where they had driven these stakes in the ground that would prevent the crocodiles from getting in the water and getting really close to the edge. Yeah, because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up. Yeah, these fucking crocodiles went around the fence. They walked around the fence and slid into the water. So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can't get to. So they hunt people. Yeah, they absolutely do. And it's weird how some of those, it's very strange as we start to study.

2:19:20Because like one of the things that colossal doing is we're studying a lot of what's called non -model species. So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know. There's some things that are known. Like elephants get cancer, a fraction of what they should, due to an over expression of a gene called P53. So there's just think of petos paradox where, based on age and body weight, both blue whales and elephants get cancer, a fraction of what they probably should, based on how old they get and what their body size is. And they actually, they actually make our lives very difficult and that's why we had to create stem cells for elephants.

2:19:54Because anytime we try to, we had to figure out how to regulate P53. Because anytime you go to edit that one cell, it just says looks like a mutation could be cancer kill cell. It's like programment. So we had to be able to, we had to be able to turn that down because we're in the editing phase on the math project, right? So there's about 85 genes. But if you turn that down, is that make the most susceptible to cancer? And so you got to turn it back up after you make the edits. So, so these are the things that you just, that we are learning about. I'm with that lady doctor, that lady scientist, you guys are doing something, shouldn't be doing.

2:20:24No, we're learning about things, right? We're learning about things, right? I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding. If I was her, I would probably have the same opinion. Yeah, I'd probably say, especially if I found out you guys weren't really scientists, like what are you doing? Yeah, why are you doing this? Well, I mean, the good news is about colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and our 95 scientific advisors, 90 % of the company scientists, there's very few, like I, like I fall in the very few kind of kidding about you're not scientists. But I'm not kidding about the technology getting in the someone else's hands.

2:20:52Yeah, and this is where it gets weird. Like China, Russia, some other, and it is getting weird. Like CRISPR and these genome engineering tools are outside of the bottle. They're out of, it's like the genie out of the bottle, right? It's like, if it's out there, you can't put it back in. I think that more and more people in other countries are going to be doing things with these technologies for humans. That's why colossal just said, we will never do anything for humans. If someone else wants to use our technologies for humans, we'll evaluate it. That gets so weird, right? Like the China story.

2:21:21They can't explain to people what they did. They said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is... Yeah, they actually were engineering babies in editing their embryos to confer our resistance to HIV. Now, still to this day, so they were cloning them, and then they were genetically modifying them. And so they're doing lots of things that are, there's a general moratorium in the world on some of these things around humans. Anything that's considered a germline edit. So anything that could be passed on to the next generation, right? So things... So if you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, from a germline, so any...

2:22:02All your cells in your body are somatic cells, except for your like, agrosperum, those are germ cells. So anything that could be affected into the germline, so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be like, umbral adcorporation moment, right? So we don't want that. But the scary thing was they didn't just do that. They also edited something that would allow the child to have much higher intelligence. Well, so that parts, like... That parts quote, under debate. There's people that say that happen, there's people that say it doesn't happen. If you look at BGI or Beijing Genomics Institute, right, they did this thing that from an aferis perspective was brilliant.

2:22:44From an aferis perspective is also terrifying. During COVID, they're like, we'll do all the COVID testing for you free. We'll do all this COVID testing for you free. You know worries, just send us your data. We'll do it off of where you just want to help the world, right? We'll work with the World Health Organization. Just send us all your samples from all your countries, everything. And publicly, the CEO of BGI has said, which is funded by the CCP, has said that they would... That they are looking at genes with humans. They are looking at what makes humans more intelligent. They don't shy away from this.

2:23:15This is not like some conspiracy, like they're like, is it just a squash or is it just a man in an apsu? This is something that is very real. They are openly saying we are sequencing as much as we can of the world population looking for genes for intelligence. And we will act on that. Like that's not a hidden thing. So that is the problem. Supposedly did with these children. Supposedly these kids know. I mean, that would have... One of that happened to... Yeah, so they've been like... Six or seven? Are they already winning chess championships? Yeah, so I'm not... We should find out. We should find out what magnets are probably going to lab somewhere with a headset on.

2:23:51Yeah. I teach them how to be psychic. I don't know how public it's... Like, it was also one of those weird things that was like, he's in trouble. He's going to jail. And then he's like... And then he's out. Yeah. All is forgiven. But meanwhile, if you go to jail in China, you fucking vanish. Forever. Yeah. Except for this guy. He's making iPhones until you drop data starvation. Yeah, it's 100 % true. And so it is weird that like, he got in trouble for a few months. Right. And he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place. Well, they funded his lab. His lab was funded by the...

2:24:29And this is what we found out about. I guarantee you, there's shit that they're doing somewhere that we haven't found out about yet. And if you were going to do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that... Well, that's what it's up to us. That's what Russia was attempting to do during... Was it World War I or World War II? They were trying to make a chimpanzee human hybrid for war. Oh, I saw that. I read about that. A chimpanzee human hybrid for war. Well, there's been a recent publication out of Japan where they're allowing Japanese, or Japanese scientists to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes.

2:25:07With other mammalian genes. Like, what kind of genes? Like, will a mammalian... Is that person? No, we are not doing that. People ask us if we get solved by hair loss with woolly mammals. That would be the first thing people want. Hair loss, next thing, bigger dicks. Yes, these are consistent questions. We can't engineer once a person's already born, right? Well, with the current technology. With the current technology. So being able to send stuff to gene therapies and targeting it being able to deliver specifically two cells is an area that we're getting better at. Like, I think one of the...

2:25:40Probably the most... I think one of the projects that's deferred this along is around like sickle salinemia. It's a single CRISPR knockout, right? So it's a single knockout. It's not multiplexed editing. And now it's about, can you target that in all the tissue types that are the most affected? And then over time, how do you deliver that gene therapy to everything? And you could do that to a person who's already born? To someone that's already born. It's obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage. Could you have vision a world where the gene editing technology becomes so powerful that you could do it to a person who is already fully formed?

2:26:13Yes. Whoa. Yeah. So... This is what I predicted. Everyone's going to look like Thor. It's going to be much of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Mamoa's and no more people look like you and me. Wait. So Chris is one of our investors. And I always think we look just like each other. Oh yeah. So he invited me to go to... I asked him another planet. I think he different species is. Yeah. They invited me to go to Byron Bay and go surfing with them. And I was like, yeah. I'm going to go take my shirt off next to you nerds. That's exactly what's never going to happen. And I just made it an excuse of why I can go because they're like, we want to go surfing.

2:26:46And I was like, uh, like... Sure you do. You want to... Yeah, I'm not going surfing with you too. Measure Cox too? Yeah, I'm going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible. But you got to imagine if that becomes a reality. What we're doing today just with plastic surgery. Yeah. Right? Like, let's take South Korea for example. Yeah, GLP ones, but that's achievable. Right? What they're... What GLP ones are doing is achievable through hard work. Yeah. But like what they're doing in South Korea with eye surgery. Like it's ubiquitous. Like so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these K -pop eyes.

2:27:22Yeah. You know? It's a strange thing. It's a strange thing. And if that's just primitive cutting and sowing tissue artistically, right? But if people can decide what they're going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like. Yeah, it's a eugenics work. Now we're really playing. No, no, no. No, that's playing God to another level, right? And that's like this eugenics world where we know, right? Like I just had a child. And you know, typically I'd say if you go through the IVF process, which we went through, you typically can test for certain types of issues like along the pregnancy, right?

2:27:56And when they put the embryo in, they look at kind of the morphological grade. Well, now there's new tests, new companies out there, one of which I use, which after I used it, so I'm press I invested in it called Orchid Health. And they actually take cells from the developing neuro on the very outer term, right? On this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development, they culture those cells, and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right? And so we had a handful of embryos. And so not selecting, they don't let you just select for like eye color, or height, or anything. But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue, or is it compatible with life, which is what most people test for?

2:28:31You can now, you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things, right? So like, you know, if diabetes or cancer, certain types of cancers, or Alzheimer's, or all times, or organs in your family, you can now get a lot of that's environmental, but you can still get a distribution score to it, so you can understand what are the genetic factors in that. So that's today. So that's not like 20 years in the future. That's not Gatica, that's today. Wow. And I mean, we did that. We did that because I have a, I have a, I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation, which affects the Titan gene, and I created truncated protein.

2:29:07So I have, I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID, that was a lab leak, that in that attack my heart. Wow. And so, so I didn't want to be able to pass that on. So we screened for that, right? But that's not a standard thing. So, but that's a today thing, like, you know, two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent in people are using it. So you understand the technology better than most. Conceivably, what could be done that would in the future allow people to change their very shape? And it literally, like, change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything.

2:29:44I think it starts with, you know, neuron hand serves, and I think, and this is the biological perspective. This is not even the, you know, computer brain interfaces merge with AI, that whole world, which I think that world has a lot of traction, and is scared leaving a lot of traction pretty quickly. But I think it starts with things like, health span where it's like, the very vain stuff. So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that eye color, I think all of that is changeable. And not, and like, there's a company right now, I've read the name of it, that spun out of Harvard, that is making a patch using micro -needling patches that you can even feel the needles, right?

2:30:26And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help like replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin. And so, so you can have 30 -year -old looking skin when you're 85 years old. What? Yes. So in the same thing for hair, right? The reason why our hair is... That's going to be real soon. Yes, I mean, that's the speed of which, the big, I think the biggest, I think the two biggest barriers for healthcare around genetics and longevity is going to be the FDA process and not the technology. I think it'll be a process problem. We saw that with Operation Warp Drive, right? We saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to.

2:31:06So I think that's number one, and I think that you're going to have the ethical pushbacks on this. So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles for right now, the technology exists. Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing, and this is kind of, for the folks that are deep in longevity, they'll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it's not currently classified as a disease state. So they're not getting NIH funding. They're getting all that funding is one other random stuff. But people aren't focusing on longevity. That's why you've got... Like, you've seen anything that Bob Nelson's done, Bob started Arch Ventures, and he's arguably the number one biotech in the world.

2:31:42And he's working on epigenetic resets or resetting your clocks at a cellular level. That's what Jeff Bezos and them have, they're doing it, autos, labs, George Church is another company called Rejuvenate Bio. They're doing the same things. And they're smart. They did it in dogs first because people love dogs, and they can also collect a lot of data that they can then apply to clinical trials. Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people cloning their dogs now. Yeah, there's people that are cloning their dogs. And they can do it even easier now with this. Yeah, I didn't bring Marshall to the studio. But we did clone one person's dog.

2:32:11I couldn't do it. I love him too much. I couldn't do it. I would feel so weird around this fake Marshall. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that. Yeah. And that's how people feel about it. Some people are unique little creatures. Yeah, they're their own little personalities. I know, I've got two, and they're amazing. And I did, my wife is closer to one. And so I did, I did, full disclosure. I did, we did do a blood sample on that one. She's just a gaze. I just don't know what the meltdown could look like. So, but the other one we haven't. And so, because you're right, you have environmental factors.

2:32:46You have personalities. We don't understand all of that. Right. But I won't say who it is, but someone that's very well known in the world, when I was showing him some of our dire wolf and red wolf tech, his kids were devastated because his dog was dying. And they didn't want to put her in any harm. They didn't want to go to one of these dog cloning companies and do like earp, they want to put it to sleep. They didn't think she'd wake back up. So we did a drug, a blood draw. He called me over Christmas, or before Christmas last year. And told me that, you know, that they think the dogs got weeks, days to weeks to live.

2:33:21Could we, could we do it for? No. And we did for him. We're not in that business. That's not our business. But he was just happy because his choice wasn't. He didn't want this other dog. Or it's telling you didn't want another dog. His biggest issue was they want, they couldn't let go of that dog. Number one, and number two. But they didn't want that dog to suffer. They didn't want it to say for our selfish means, you're already suffering. We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken like Frankenstein pieces of you. And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw.

2:33:53I was like totally awake just sitting right there. Well, we did it. And you know, he was happy with that. So I think these, what that dog is going to be reincarnated into a higher level of existence. Do you stop it and put it on this like? Yeah. So that's not a doubt or business. So you know what I'm saying? I do. I don't really exactly know what life is. No, we don't. We definitely don't know life. And here's one thing that his assistant told my chief of staff. He said to her, he's like, you know, it's weird. I didn't think it was the same dog at all. And it's definitely not the same dog. He's like, he goes and sits in the same place, which isn't like, it's not like in front of a window on its bed, right?

2:34:30I don't know the exact place, but it always goes sit in the exact same place the other dog said. So there's weird stuff. We don't understand this. That would creep me out. It creeps me out here. Because Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps. And if that happens, yeah. It creeps me out. Yeah. So I've had other dogs stay at my house. And my older daughter's dog stay at my house. And that dog didn't go to that same spot. It's not like this is my spot. That's warmer or cooler. Yeah, like it's the same thing. It's like my dog Ken, he, if he like gets on, like he only wants to sleep on my feet.

2:34:58If I fall asleep in the couch, he's cool. He won't sleep on my feet. He just wants to sleep on me. And that's not comfortable for him. Because I'm like kicking him and everything, but that's just where you want to sleep. They wanted to be in contact with you. My dog watches TV with me. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. They're the best. Yeah. And we didn't even teach it this, but when we say security at our house, our dog just loses, like Ken just loses his mind. And he just, he just runs the door. He runs the front door, runs the back door for the side doors. Yeah. What kind of dog? They're just muts.

2:35:23So I have Barbie and Ken. They're just two little weird muts. But we named them before the movie. It's just a weird thing to take that dog. And I think also for kids, like the thing is like kids, the loss is so devastating. Yeah. But it's also good to teach them those things. Yeah, I think loss is important. Yeah. I think loss is important. I don't want to, I only, I'm new to this whole father thing. But I think it's important that they understand that there's real, there's real things and there's consequences to decisions. And we're going to age and we've got a limited time. I think that in his lifetime, it will be massively accelerated.

2:35:57But I think that's important. And that is one of the things though, I think having a kid, you know, and also all of these kids in parents that have been sending us pictures of mammoths and dialocines and dodoes and hopefully now diarwolves is something that's exciting. Because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right? So like on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or whatever, and we get, or an experiment doesn't work or whatever bad happens. And you look at this pile of kids' photos and teachers, like we have this, there's a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter and literally like 40 pictures of mammoths.

2:36:35And in that letter she goes, my kids won't be quiet. We're in this like attention war with everything. My kids won't be quiet. I start talking about Colossal. I show the woolly massive. They all want to just talk about it. They just zone in, right? Because it's interesting. It's interesting in kids. And so I think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good. We can use technologies for conservation for good. And we can help ecosystem with bringing back existing species. But I think that we can also like inspire the next generation. Like don't we want to preach hope?

2:37:04We're on this 24, seven psycho news cycle, right? Like that wasn't around when I was a kid or a night. Do you know CS Lewis first started talking about this? Like what year was CS Lewis alive? But he had a quote about, I might have saved it. He had a quote about the, just getting all the dire information of the world all the time. Sent to you all the time, which at his time back then, that was very new. That was a completely new thing. In this idea of these 24 hour news cycles, right? You know, like there's actually a law in the UK. You'll, this is this blew my mind. There's a law in the UK that they cannot tell, they cannot report on a piece.

2:37:47If it has any degree of social impact that they don't tell the negative side. I was like, so what happens is like, you know, if there's someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to get a dog's perspective. Like, and they're like, yes. And they're dead serious. Oh, that's over the good. So it's like, there can be stories that are just negative and there can be stories that are just positive. That's okay. Yeah, I think you're going to have very lively debate. That's always going to happen with something that's so groundbreaking what you're doing. But I also think it's inevitable. I think human beings have this inescapable desire for innovation.

2:38:24Right. And it's going to apply to biology, just like it applies to electronics. And you can't do anything about it. You can have debates about it. And we should have, you know, what you guys are doing is great. You've got the dire wolves fenced off. You're very careful. You're monitoring them. It's so great. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And at least you're transparent about it. Yeah. Like, at least this is not happening in Russia where they're making super wolves that only eat Americans. Yeah. And they train them with DNA. It only eat Americans. But that's probably going to happen too.

2:38:53This is just, we're going to face unique problems no matter what we do, because technologies allowing people to do things that are unprecedented, including change what it means to be an actual person. Yeah. It's synthetic biology in really kind of the intersection between compute AI and synthetic biology being able to engineer genes, engineer life. I think that we are at the doorstep of, you know, everyone's very, very worried about AI. But I do think that synthetic biology is in that camp. I think it's, yes. It's like discovering fire. It's the God camp. It's all falling into the same thing. And then when you add to that incredible computing power that's going to be available with quantum computing, and then you have new technologies that are going to emerge from AI using quantum computing.

2:39:40And then the interface at all, like the modeling stuff and everything, it's just going to get, you know, we have the interfaces are crazy, because we had that gentleman Noah, the first guy who got it. And he said he has an aim bot in his head. So like, when he plays games, he's like got a crazy advantage, because where he looks is where the cursor goes, like instantaneously. So he could shoot things like he's not going to miss. Yeah. I mean, we are living in a weird time. It's the weirdest time. It's the weirdest time that people have ever been through. And we're at the door. We haven't even gone into the, no, no, that's why I say like wild.

2:40:11That's what I say about synthetic biology, right? So like, yeah, the ability to like engineer or drop resistant crops or a vaccine or grow our hair or, you know, make mammoths, that's today. We can't even think about what's tomorrow. We spun out a company from a colossal called Breaking last year and this incredible group at the VeeC Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to. And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical, that's why I needed it breaking. It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing.

2:40:51Well, guess what? You know, so it takes things that are broken down never and has got it down into years. We have used now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it. So now that it's in, you know, 22 months. And I think that we can get it down to two weeks. And so that will be huge for the plastic problem. Because we can all say that we're going to change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics, but we still have the existing plastics here. We have to do something about it. So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, if someone said we give you a magic microbe, they can, you can put in a vet and you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw, you know, salads and other stuff there and I won't even touch it.

2:41:32You know, that would have sounded like science fiction. 10 years ago. That's so crazy. And so now it's, you said it's down to a couple of months. Yeah, it's 22 months right now. So, and we're talking about like not just like your water bottle, your water bottle, but you're also talking about things like industrial defense plastics that are like, you know, radiation hardened and whatnot for space. Like we're throwing some pretty hard stuff. What about those stupid fucking windmills that they have to change every two years? Oh, they actually have a, I'd say. Land show for windmills. And they also have a bigger negative carbon impact than they make, yeah.

2:42:05And they don't barely make any electricity. Yeah, yeah, they kill livestock or they kill animals, kill birds, they disrupt, they disrupt, they also disrupt migratory patterns of birds. Of course they do. Yeah, you can't fly into that. Yeah, and they're all made with plastic and plastic polymers. And then they have to get rid of them. And then they only place to put them as a landfill. Yeah, exactly. So that's why we started breaking. So, wow, so these microbes would be able to break that down? Yeah, I mean, we even tested on that specific, but like one of the biggest ones that we tested on was Nylon, just because there's so much, if you look at like what's in the ocean, a vast majority of it is Nylon from just discarded fishing nets.

2:42:43Oh, that makes sense. So we looked at Nylon as one of our first use cases, and then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others. So if we get the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right? Because all that's passing through right now, like I'm not drinking water and everything. That's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like the three layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water. You've got to do, Gary got me any water machine. So, but you have to do those types of things because the microplastics and then the chlorine and other stuff still passes through a lot of the existing materials.

2:43:17So when you're doing this, is this something that you could release like in the ocean itself, or would you have to worry then about the effect like bringing the house cat's to Australia? No, it dies. It only eats this like this. This is what they always say, right, before it fucks up. I don't worry, but with the distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA. There's a lot of testing that you have to do, right? But you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the great Pacific garbage patch. So I don't know based on heat and salinity and whatnot. Right now it's working in bio -reactor.

2:43:49So I don't want to over -promise and say we just go sprinkling it in the day. But that's a long -term goal, right? So, but that's the power of, we used AI and computational analysis of this microbe that's found in nature. And then we said, let's supercharge it, just like supercharging the coils, right? And so, but the process of using it outside of contained systems like a bio -reactor has to be done very thoughtfully and measured just like rewilding, right? Like, this is where some of us who get confused about like the yelts and stuff. They didn't just open the game, throw some wolves in there.

2:44:22I mean, sounds like they didn't, more of that in Colorado. But there's typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through, right? Because there's intended consequences, which you get excited about. But then there's a shit ton of unintended consequences if you're not careful. Yeah. But synthetic biology is that, is that it's an AI level thing that we need to be worried about. And how many different nations are working on this stuff? So, I think that the US is by far the most advanced from synthetic biology perspective. It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and bio -banking, because they're bio -banking, we do not have a nationalized bio -banking process here.

2:45:00That's one of the things I, I was met at a meeting in Washington about, but China does. China is going, like we see them in Africa where they'll make donations to a university or school, and they say, oh, but we're gonna take blood samples from all of your animals around here. You guys are cool, right? So they are doing this, right? So they are looking for insights in animals, they are looking for that data. They're also trying to build like, today's NOAA's art. And so China is for sure. There's some countries that's harder, like the European Union's harder to do anything, because they've kind of put a moratorium on GMOs or genetically modified organisms.

2:45:33But we've been making GMOs for a long time, like you've ever seen a pug, like we've just done it pretty inefficiently, right? We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences, now through AI and software. Brought people are gonna have dire wolves guarding their house. In 100 years? They're not open to the power. 100 % they're gonna get your technology, they're gonna sell it, and people are gonna be eating woolly mammoth steaks while the dire wolves guard their house. Yeah, that's not the future that I hope for. I'm more of an optimist, so I kind of believe in the general good of humanity.

2:46:05Of course, it's your company. Your company's fucking the whole world up. You have to think that I'm just kidding. But it is a weird venture. I mean, you're going down a very bizarre path, but it's so fascinating. I'm so glad you're doing it, because it's so interesting. And we're learning a lot, right? And the application of that learning could allow us to save many species, right? Yeah, and I think that... Do you think there could ever be a time? Well, there's no DNA from the dinosaurs, right? So would it be possible that with future technology, there would be some way to get around that? So the closest you could get from a dyno DNA perspective is that there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids, so like the smallest building blocks possible, you don't know where they go, right?

2:46:50I think that it's not possible to de -extinct the dinosaur. I do think at some point, you could use AI and software to do an ancestral state reconstruction, looking at what we know about birds, what we know about reptiles, and where they branch. So you could make one. I think you could... Wasn't that one of the things they did in Jurassic Park? That's what they all did. That dinosaur that didn't exist before, the big giant one. The... The... Adominus Raxia. Right. That was something they created. That's something they created, right? And so, I think from a gene... From a technology and genome engineering perspective, that is eventually possible.

2:47:22Ooh! So they could easily make a T -Rex without... I would say not easily, yeah, but... But they could... Potentially. Potentially, in some future state. In some future state, I think we'll have like, you know, the CAD software biology where you can engineer almost anything. Oh my god. I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right? The better. And you said it best when you brought up quantum. It, you know, quantum's only two years away every two years I hear. But eventually when it works, it works at scale. And you have that coupled with, you know, where some of these companies, like x .ai and others are taking it.

2:47:55I think the merger of that bush, synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff. And it will be in nefarious hands. Like let's just be real. Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right? Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right? And so this is nuclear weapons. And I think that you have to be, just because it exists, we can't put our head in this hand and say, oh, we just can't let it be because it does exist. And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like five years ago, no, no, no, that was like seven years ago. People in China, companies in China and the government in China, were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of certain subset of race, right?

2:48:34And they were doing bad things with facial wreck. Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said, not, not glow, not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says, we will not at all support any technology. We're going to ban investing in facial wreck technology. Well, that's just dumb, right? Because we now know there's things like deep facing all this up, but it's like, that's setting American innovation back because someone's doing something bad with it, right? That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns.

2:49:06We should never develop guns, right? It's just, it's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology. And so, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology, the world is, currently, the United States is the leader in synthetic biology. And we've got national treasures like George Church, my co -founder and others. And I hope that we continue to be the world's leader. But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do, and they will experiment on kids. But it's interesting also that you're a company. This isn't the government. This is just a group of people and investors that have decided to do this.

2:49:40And you've been able to do it here in America, but do you know what is going on in other countries? Or is this a tightly guarded secret? So I mean, we know obviously you have people, I'm sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, no, no, you go for it. In your company as well. And I'm sure there's an understanding of what they're doing. So it's good. It's, you must be being studied in other countries. Yeah, we definitely, and we have investment by Incutel, right? So I'm sure that makes us more of a target. Yeah. So, I mean, we do work closely with the DOD and IC. When you think about it 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, when you scale us out, there's no limit to what could be done with life.

2:50:25That's so strange. Yeah. It's so strange to think that for four plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern on rails. Yeah. Yeah. And then one day, and now we say we can take the railway everyone. Who, boy, and you know, that's the grandest of all conspiracy theories is that that's how humans were created. Yeah, that we were engineers. We were engineers. Well, either panseveral or that we were engineered in places. The right one is the Anunnaki, right? Samaritan. I will, yeah, but I will say that if you look at, you know, not to get too weird, but if you do look at the, it's like Kuku Kahn and folks and if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world, resembling their sky gods, there's a lot of weird, and similar.

2:51:08I mean, you can't, you can't objectively, it's like the guy with the pair, with the, with the, with the Sphinx, right? Was it, that's like, yep, that's water. I'm an expert on erosion. That is water. And then they're like, head of the Sphinx, that's not water, right? Yeah. It's the same thing as this. You cannot look at some of the stuff and say, that's not weird, right? Right. You can't look at like, you know, the, the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seemed to now, there's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced out of you. It's like, you, you can't see all that stuff and not wonder more, especially the stuff around.

2:51:40If you look at myons and then you look at, you know, stuff in the Middle East and how it looks exactly the same. It's very weird. It looks exactly the same. Have you been to Peru? No. So that, I would put it out, you know, because I, I don't, I do not want to take you away from going and visiting the Boney Arches, you totally do that, but you should also go to Peru. Peru, if you, like you can see Peru and you can, it's like standing in the Grand Canyon versus seeing on Google Maps, right? If you go to like, all in Tom, all in and Tombo, whatever it's called and you see these blocks that you can't, like put a piece of paper between, you know, you can't see, yeah, and you, and you see it and they're all put together in a perfect jigsaw.

2:52:18Oh, and by the way, they came from a type of rock and accord that's 2000 miles from here, whatever, how many thousands of miles from here, you can't sit there and say, well, that's weird. If you don't say that's weird, then it's like, like you're like one of those like, you know, people that are just like, huh, you're a denial. You can't say it's not weird. Yeah, does it not say, does it say it's not weird is actually denying science? Yeah, it's the weird, so you should put Peru on your, because when you see it, there's nothing like it. I mean, I've been fortunate in middle of the travel over the world.

2:52:47You see it and you're just like that, that just doesn't make sense. The coolest thing I've ever seen is Cheats and Neats, huh? Yeah, I've been to Cheats and Neats, yeah. And you go there and you're like, what did you do? What did you do? How'd you do this? Yeah, how'd you guys do this? You know, it's crazy about Cheats and Neats, they don't let you go there anymore. But I don't know where, but you know, you've got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Cheats and Neats, well, there's in the jungles there on the Okta, you know, the peninsula, there's actually other older pyramids, but the carvings that they have on Cheats and Neats and the carvings they have there, they're actually the older ones have more precise carvings.

2:53:21But now, guess what? It's not over the public. I've seen that. I've been there. Oh, so frustrating. But all of it is such a weird world, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm talking to you about like hardcore genetic science, but then when you start to look at all of the craziness and archaeology, it is, we don't know a lot or a lot. Yeah. And there's no way you can know a lot. And anytime you suggest something new, you get, you know, shit for it. Yeah, you get a rash of shit and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Graham Hancock. Yeah. But Graham, I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if there are, you know, kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like play to another is that we're probably real.

2:54:07Yeah. I don't think they were just like playing around and like, oh, we're going to write something that's going to be in history as a joke forever. You've seen the right -sharge structure? Uh -huh. You ever seen that? Uh -huh. This is what there's a lot of people like Jimmy Corsetti, who's this famous YouTube. I guess you'd call him, I guess he'd be like an ancient, he'd be like an ancient history enthusiast. He's a guy who's like studies these things and does YouTube videos on them. But the right -sharge structure is essentially Atlantis. Oh, this is in the desert. Yes. It looks like Atlantis.

2:54:36There's salt all around it. It has the rings that play to describe. And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean. I mean, it literally looks like Atlantis. And people disputed, a lot of people don't. Have people gone and studied it there? I guess. Well, it's a very difficult place to get to and it's also very dangerous. So people have studied it, but there's, there hasn't been like large -scale archeological digs there. Or the whole Sub -Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating. They find whales there. You know, I mean, they know that there was lush rainforests while human beings were alive.

2:55:08Yeah. And there hasn't been like large -scale exploration of what's in that ground. And it's immense. I do think that the Younger Dry stuff is also a combination of, I think, generally speaking, if you break down the Younger Dry's period into that rapid cooling, I think the vast majority of people say some of it, some of the destruction or some of the destruction around megafauna was anthropologic, which I'll give it some percentage. Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory and the anthropologic meaning of human beings killed. Yeah, yeah. Yes, the humans had some impact on it, right?

2:55:45I think that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred and that could have been a global level flood with sea rising, with rushing waters and sea rising, what not. And then you've got, you know, what caused that flood, most likely, meteorological. And then they combine that with course samples that showed large levels of erudium. Yeah, which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain, at impact. It's like that nuclear glass or whatever. No, that's erudium is actually different. Erudium is actually very common in space, but that's the layer. And there's a layer.

2:56:24Yeah, there's a silt of that. Right. The microdiamonds, as we're talking about, those two as well. Trinitite. Yeah, that's what it says. Yeah, that's what it says. Yeah, from the Trinity explosion, they discovered it there. Yeah. They find these little microgl... There's 100 % there was impacts. Yeah. That's a fact. And they also know like when the meteor shower, and this is a thing that they study, like when we go through this comet shower, and that that's... But you remember like probably 10, 20 years ago, people, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian, you can't talk to you ever again.

2:56:55Exactly. Yeah. The water can't be your weird, don't talk to me again. I know. And now it's like, well maybe there was a giant flood. Maybe it wasn't just a regional flood, right? Maybe it was done by impacts of comets, right? That's what brings me to the weird ones when you go back to like the Vedic texts. And you're like, what was the Vedic Monos? What were these flying vehicles that they had? What was the Zeke you'll talk about in the Bible? Yeah, and they show... Have you seen that stuff when... Have you seen those videos in the last... That have come out in the last year when there was the most recent UAP...

2:57:30...craze, and they'd show it and it looked like crazy ball lightning. It almost looked like those things that used to put your hands on your hands on your hands. Right. And then they'd compare some of those to paintings... ...from like 500, 700... We're gonna be stopping there because a lot of those crazy balls of light... We're all fake. No, you can just zoom in on Venus. Yeah. And that's what you get. Cool. You zoom in on stars and you get this sort of bizarre distorted image. Have you seen those? You can find zoomed in stars... I think they did it with the North Star... They've done it with several stars.

2:58:07But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth... You can get that sort of distorted weird of... So, but... So, because you're looking through the... I've always seen this stuff on the internet until I was in Wellington, New Zealand... When I was with Peter. Peter is because his house in Wellington is like on a body of water... Everyone's they wear. And we were talking, of course, like the conversation went to Ghost and UFOs... Because like... Oh, you've seen... Why not? No, I haven't seen them in person. I've seen them on his iPhone. This wasn't like a telescopic lens.

2:58:40This is an iPhone and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom ends. But that's the thing about zooming in. See, the thing is... These are planets that people have zoomed in on. But there's... Weirder ones where there's video of it and so it looks like it's moving. Yeah, here we go. Like, look at that. I'll have to see... But you see what I'm saying? Yeah, like this is a perfect example. So this is the star in the night sky with a Nikon P900. So is that 900X, Jamie? What is that? Can you talk in the mic? It's just the model number. I have no idea what that means. So what would you think that the amount of...

2:59:22I don't have 10, 900X, I have no idea. Okay, so... So, but do you see how they're having a hard time zooming in on it? Because this is a handheld, I think. But look how weird it is. It looks so weird. It's how it's moving around like you say, oh my god, you found a UFO. But it's not. It's just a star. Well, I do hate that every UFO video is blurry. Well, you know, I mean, that could be... If you want to get into the whole how put off perspective, who's just brilliant physicist, yeah, he's on a lot of papers. Yeah, he explained it to me. He thinks there's some sort of gravity distortion that's around us.

2:59:55Well, isn't that particular camera? So this is, is this not a very... No, that's like a hand in the DSLR. But is it? So that's a $749 camera on Amazon. So I'll see if Peter will give me that his... I'm sure he would, and I'll send to you because it's just weird to see. Oh, they're weird. No, I'm not saying that. But this is like not zoomed in, his wife's next to him. Yeah, I am not denonied that people are seeing things. But I'm not denonied that they're real. What I'm saying is that kind of evidence of that star. Yeah, if you didn't know any better, and someone sent it to you, oh my god, this is a UFO.

3:00:31He'd be like, holy fucking shit, it's real. Look at that, it's undeniable. Look at the energy around it. Yeah. With how put off believes is that there's some sort of distortion around these things. Yeah. That's allowing them to be transmitting them to go through the ocean. That's all the... Yeah, that's all there like zero point energy and moving and... In gravitational wave type stuff. Do you go deep on this? I get... I get a little worried. I get a little worried. It gets boring because there's no real resolution. You could lose your mind, but I had dinner with Jacques Vellet and how put off once in a couple other gentlemen.

3:01:05And they were explaining the state of the technology, like what they think is currently available and what they think these things are using. I did this guys. I did a call with... I did a call with how I got into that crowd for a while and before I started colossal. And you know, I knew a bunch of those folks. So I talked to Lou, I talked to how I did zoom with... If you imagine what we are now, where we are, what you're describing in terms of technology that's emerging right now... And we have Direwolves today in 2025. Yes. And now imagine this 5 ,000 years advanced. And you're probably looking at that.

3:01:42If we are being visited, that's what you're probably looking at. Yeah, it's not... And if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve, it's not that far. Now, imagine the monkey that you guys have done with Direwolves. Oh, it's his monkey. It's a little monkey. The selective precision genome engineering. Amazing stuff you've done with Direwolves. I'm just being silly. But imagine doing that to primitive hominids. Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension or the planet, whatever it is, and you're a million years more advanced than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australia Pythicus, you know, trying to figure out how to make a spear.

3:02:20And you say, listen, let's put a little bit of this. I told you a little bit of that. I told you a little bit of ours in there. Yeah, one at it makes 5 ,000, you know, can first 5 ,000 resistance to neurotoxin. So it's like a couple of little edits here. And then there's the other theory that what we're looking at is human beings from the future. And if you think about what's happening to human beings, we're becoming less and less stout and muscular, and we're becoming more and more... Less and less rely on muscle. Yeah, and our heads are getting bigger. Yeah, that's them. Yeah, I mean... I read that theory too.

3:02:51It's a bizarre archetype, right? It's a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again. It's very weird that there's a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see. I go down those rabbit holes because I mean, I just think once again, going back to like this stuff, like, cuckoo con and on an ockie and all that, like this, all the studs, they're just... They're just... So strange. And how you have certain things that are aligned to celestial, you're like, yeah, but they can have picked a lot of constellations. Yeah. Why did they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is, right?

3:03:27Why did they do that? And also, how did the fucking ancient Sumerians have a detailed map of the solar system? Insanely detailed. From 6 ,000 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And also be able to predict well enough of where it was going, knowing that we were moving through space. Yeah. And also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps. Yeah. Like, what are you saying? Yeah. There's weird... The cool thing about this, but think... Take a step back. Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, like, and we get ridiculed even for the actual signs that we're doing improving every day, at the end of the day, it is still cool.

3:04:05And it's interesting. Like, I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out. Every day is amazing. And we're figuring out amazing things. Well, unlike you, I don't have the burden of being taken seriously. And that's great for discussing a day off. But you can go to the solar system. But that's awesome. It is great. It's super interesting. I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcasts. Because one minute you'll talk to a comedian and you'll see, if I'm in the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about like the ancient flood than anyone in the world.

3:04:39And that's cool. It is cool. Yeah. It's very fascinating. Because we should have conversations. Yes. And the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time. And it's almost... I mean, you can get lost. Like, we were talking about with the CS Lewis quote. Did you ever find that? No, I don't. I couldn't. He talked about getting the news. What year was CS Lewis alive? Oh, 1898. Yeah. I started tracking down like, there's a bunch of misquoted CS Lewis quotes. And it could be one of those. It could be one of those figured out. But we're being inundated by the worst news of the day.

3:05:14Because that's the news that's going to ensure that you watch it. And there's so many cool things that are happening at the same time. And I think it gives people a distorted perception of the hope that we have for mankind. You hear about wars. Like, oh my god. But most people aren't going to war. Most people are cool with each other. Yeah. Most interactions between human beings are positive. Our positive. And they're fascinating. And human beings are a fascinating creature. And we're so lucky to be alive at this time. Where the innovation is reaching this bizarre tipping point. Where we're, you know, I mean, I love it.

3:05:46I'm working more hours than I've ever worked my life. And I've been fortunate before this business. And I will just tell you, I just love it. Every day I wake up, it's awesome. That's so cool. It's the coolest thing in the world. Well, I'm glad you're doing it, man. I really appreciate you. And thank you so much for coming in here and showing people the dare wolves. Yeah. And I hope more. Yeah, more. We'll keep you. Please do date on fun stuff. I want to go see him. I want to see him. All right. We'll talk offline. Okay. We'll talk offline. Thank you very much. Oh, if people want to find more information, find more about you.

3:06:21It's just it. We're colossal .com. We're colossal .com. And we're it is colossal on YouTube. And, uh, X and every. And we're at colossal on X. So fucking cool. Seeing that CGI one walking through the snow. Yeah. I can't wait to see that one day. Yeah. It's cool. It's cool. And I mean, look, the cool thing about colossal is it's we have. So many people that, you know, we have 170 people over 135 scientists. Just that wake up and they work 24 seven. Like we've got four labs. People are just, you know, in love with it. That's go. It's amazing. Thank you very much. You gotta go see the lab. I will.

3:06:53Thank you. Thank you. All right. Fire for it.

3:07:08Yeah.

From the publisher

Ben Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects. Colossal’s mission includes bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and advancing conservation efforts through cutting-edge biotechnology. 
www.colossal.com
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