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#2301 – Ben Lamm Podcast Episode Description
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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#2301 – Ben Lamm Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan hosts a guest who is deeply involved in synthetic biology and the revival of extinct species. The guest, who has a background in software and team building, shares his journey into the field, which was largely inspired by George Church, a prominent figure in synthetic biology at Harvard University. Church is known for his work on genetic engineering and his ambitious project to bring back the woolly mammoth.
The conversation delves into the potential of synthetic biology to engineer life, improve crops, and conserve wildlife. The guest discusses the use of AI and computational tools to enhance these processes, highlighting the mammoth project as a key initiative aimed at reintroducing the species to the Arctic to aid in ecosystem restoration. This project also has implications for elephant conservation and broader environmental benefits.
A recurring theme in the discussion is the importance of collaboration and listening to critics to address challenges and unintended consequences in rewilding strategies. The guest emphasizes the need for inclusive dialogue with various stakeholders to refine their approaches.
The episode also touches on advancements in health and longevity, such as neuro enhancers and personalized stem cell treatments for skin and hair, showcasing the intersection of biology and technology.
Overall, the episode underscores the transformative potential of synthetic biology and AI in addressing ecological and health challenges, while also highlighting the ethical and practical considerations involved in such groundbreaking work.
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#2301 – Ben Lamm Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Showing ai day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What’s up, Ben? Hey. Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man. So, why don’t you instead of Meeks, why don’t
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00:20
you explain to people what you do? So I’m, the CEO and cofounder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We’re the world’s first de extinction and species preservation company.
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00:31
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
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00:42
in Jurassic Park occasionally. Like, believe
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00:44
it or not, we get that. Of course.
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00:46
Ai mean I gotta drop my hydrogen tablet in here.
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00:47
Oh, you do those? The Gary Breckle ones.
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00:49
Right? Those are great.
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00:50
Yeah. So Yeah. I love those. I just didn’t want you to
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00:53
think it was we’re going a different direction.
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00:55
How did you get started even thinking about doing something like ai?
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00:59
So I kinda 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 wanna 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. He’s at Harvard University. He’s six foot seven with narcolepsy. He’s just the best. Right?
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01:19
So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he’s just he’s the absolute best. He’s a genius. And I thought, my background’s in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me. Right? And so I I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better.
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01:37
Like, how do we do directed evolution? How and how that could apply to, like, crops and animals and all kinds of stuff. So I get on the phone with George, and I ask him my questions. He answers them in, like, six seconds because he’s a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that’s coming out of his lab.
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01:52
In that process, he’s like, you know, I’ve also been working on mammoths and other things. I was like, ai. Wait. What? And I was like, if you had one project, what is it this mammoth project?
Speaker: 1
02:00
And then he went down this whole path about how he’d bring back mammoths, reintroduce them to the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human health care. And I kinda thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that, like, the smartest man I’ve ever met and been on the phone with was a joke.
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02:17
Well, then I stayed up all night just googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through ai, Whether he’s in sixty Minutes or, you know, Stephen Colbert, whatever he’s in, there was this weird mammoth through line where he was just obsessed with these mammoths, and everyone ai wanted him to do this.
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02:31
So I called him back the next day. Seven days later, I’m in his lab, and we were off to the races on, okay, we’re gonna try to go build a company to bring back extinct species. So how do you decide what to start with? So we started with the mammoth first. Right? Because George, you know, had been working on it for eight years.
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02:47
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 that shows that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild, could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem.
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03:01
And so that was an easy place to start. After we launched the company, it went crazy ai, and all these other folks from the extinction research started calling us, like, folks from, like, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature is awesome.
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03:14
Yeah.
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03:15
The, Meh appear with the dodo. Everyone just started calling us, and then we just started expanding, you know, our our entire set.
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03:22
So how does one do this? So, 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?
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03:38
Yeah. Let me walk through the whole process. Yeah. 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 at an insanely rapid rate. So we definitely need, to find a lot of samples.
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03:53
So we actually have about a hundred and nine mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1,200,000 years old, which is awesome. Wow. But it’s also fragmented. It’s ai it’s like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don’t know what the box is and someone’s stolen part of the puzzle.
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04:08
And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So there’s all kinds of problems with that. So this is really an AI and compute problem. It’s not as much a human problem. So you have to get a lot of samples first.
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04:19
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.
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04:35
Really?
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04:35
Yeah. Which always blows people ai. That and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids. Like like, literally, like, humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people’s mind because they always think of them as in this, like, weird, like, prehistoric, like, 65,000,000 years old ai.
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04:54
When when did they go extinct?
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04:56
So the last one went extinct about four thousand years ago
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04:59
Really?
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04:59
On Wrangell Island.
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05:00
Yeah. Wow. So they’ve
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05:02
been a while they were around for a long time.
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05:03
Four thousand years ago?
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05:04
I know. They weren’t I mean, now they appeared about two and a half million years ago as far as we in the they were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and ai of period that we’re in right now, they existed. They existed all the way up until they had this, like, small genetic bottleneck on Wrangell Island.
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05:22
Wow. And where’s Rangel Island? It’s Northeast Of Siberia. Woah. And they just was it a small island? They just ran out of resources there? Like, what happened?
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05:33
Well, there’s a couple different theories. Right? One of the theories, with Wrangell Island is that they actually, there’s lots of inbreeding. So there’s lots of, like, genetic bottleneck which happened because there’s not a different species there.
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05:46
How large is Wrangell Island?
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05:47
I’m not quite sure.
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05:49
Can you give me a photo again, Jamie? Okay.
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05:52
And sai, essentially, though, Wrangell Island and then, there’s another island called Saint Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and and The Ai and, Russia. Also is where they were. Those are ai of the last two places that that we know, ma’am, has existed today.
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06:07
And they ai out four thousand years ago. Yeah.
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06:09
And now now some actually small. There is actually a, another working hypothesis that
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06:14
Oh, yeah.
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06:14
They actually ran out of water. They ran out of access to freshwater on the island. Oh, wow. So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.
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06:22
Wow. 4,000 is so recent.
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06:25
I know. It’s it’s crazy recent. Right?
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06:26
Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant versus a African elephant?
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06:33
And they’re actually mammoths because there’s a you know, mammoths themselves yeah. Mammoths themselves are close related to the Asian elephant.
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06:43
Which is on the left?
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06:44
Yeah. Which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium. They have the small ears. They have a little bit of a hump structure. You know, mammoths because they have these massive, massive tusk. Right? And, you know, you’ve talked to lots of folks in in ai of the mammoth world.
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06:58
They actually, you know, move their heads quite slowly. They had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of extra muscle in order to do that. But one of the things that’s awesome also about the, Asian elephants is some Asian elephants, some of the ones that are born actually have they look they’re not mammoth like, but they have a lot of fur on them, and they kinda lose it over
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07:18
time. Wow. So are those the ones that you would find, like, in Thailand?
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07:22
Yes. And, Thailand and then parts of, different parts of India in the Indian subcut.
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07:28
I actually rode one of those ones with my family. Oh, did you go meh?
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07:32
Did you go to one of those places that you, like, take care of them? Yeah.
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07:35
Yeah. You you have to, like, get a relationship with them. So you feed them sugarcane and you wash them and Yeah. You know, you play nice with them for, like, a ai. Yeah. Like, a couple hour. It was, like, at least an hour. You’re just hanging out with them, petting them. And and then once they decide you’re cool They meh you hang. They let you ride them.
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07:52
Yeah.
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07:52
But, my whole family rode them, and I was, like, totally opposed to it. I ai, like, I’m doing it just because you guys wanna do it. I would just wanna feed them.
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08:00
Yeah. I just wanna hang out. Hang out with them. Yeah.
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08:02
It just felt weird. My daughter fell off, I think twice. One of what my youngest daughter fell off once at least. And I was like, do we know that this elephant wants us riding? Yeah. You know what I mean? It’s ai of
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08:13
a weird thing. It’s a weird thing. Right?
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08:15
Yeah. And then afterwards, you get in the the water and you wash them. Yeah. And and everything and I just kinda hung out with them. Ai be cool. They’re very sweet.
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08:23
I don’t think I sana ride one. I would just I like being, you know, around them.
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08:27
I think there’s a video on my Instagram of it. Yeah. There is. There definitely is because she was eating a log. I was like, oh, why are you eating a log? Yeah. Because it’s just weird. They’re they’re so enormous, but they’re really, like, peaceful and chill.
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08:43
Smart and they’re Yeah. They have incredible pack ai. Right? So they live in a herd. They’ve even had all these different examples where they also adopt other animals.
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08:50
I don’t
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08:51
know if you’ve seen any of these videos, but
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08:52
Oh, yeah. So here it is. Sai this is a few years ago in Ai. And this is, an Asian elephant just chilling with this elephant. Yeah. 02/2018. Okay. There it is. It was really cool. No. It’s awesome. It’s just it’s it’s just cool to be around them. They’re just a fascinating animal.
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09:12
Just the the biodiversity of Earth, the fact that that thing exists is enormous.
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09:18
This enormous thing with this, like, robotic potential aren’t yeah. It’s crazy.
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09:22
As long as you’re cool to them, they’re cool to you.
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09:24
Yeah. They sense it. Right? Like, I mean, we see that nature with a lot of animals. Right? If you sense it and they they don’t feel like they’re, you know, being backed into a corner or fearful, then they’re not gonna be around that. So 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. Yes. That, yeah.
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09:41
At some point, though, you’re still kinda like they are wild animals, so you have to maintain some level of healthy distance.
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09:46
Yeah. So well, let’s just get right to it. Wait. Wait. Wait. We didn’t
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09:49
you wanna finish the process?
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09:50
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Please. So okay.
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09:51
So we have the ancient, ancient, genome, so you have to collect and assemble.
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09:56
Right.
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09:56
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 Rees on here. It’s disgusting. Yeah.
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10:11
It’s it smells like death. It literally I mean, you’re it like I said, it is death. It’s just over time piled up death.
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10:17
And Have you visited John?
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10:18
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve Ai visited John.
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10:20
You went to the boneyard? Yeah.
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10:21
I went to the boneyard.
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10:22
What’s it like there?
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10:22
It’s it’s crazy. It’s exactly what you’d expect. I I didn’t know John. So I’m on the board of trustees of the Explorers Club. So we take these expeditions. We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval, and then we’re also doing some cultural, studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoths.
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10:38
Like, do you want mammoths back? Is this a good idea? Right? Because we try to pretty inclusive. And, they’re like, oh, we gotta meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John. And I was like, okay. Great. I’m excited. So go meet him. We pull up.
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10:50
He’s in a different car, and he’s like and I think he wanted us to follow him. He’s like, get in. I was like, okay. And he’s a big dude. He’s enormous. Ai not that big of a dude. Right? No. Especially after giant. Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me. I’m a smaller dude. Right?
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11:04
And so, like, I literally, get in. I get in the car. There’s a there’s bunch of stickers, and there’s one that has a butterflies on it, that sai, give zero fucks.
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11:13
And I was like
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11:14
and then there’s and he’s like, just move the gun over. So I moved the gun over, and he goes, listen. And this is the first words out of his mouth to me. If I stop short, you hand me that gun. And I was like I didn’t even ask a follow-up question because, like, what
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11:26
do you do when you get
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11:27
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.
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11:33
And he showed me around the What kind of gun was it?
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11:35
It was just some type of rifle. So it
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11:37
was just grizzlies.
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11:38
I assume it was for grizzlies. Yeah. Or Yeah. Bears or, you know, something large.
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11:42
Yeah. But then he showed me
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11:44
around the boneyard and showed me his collection, and he was completely I mean, he didn’t know us from anybody. He just opened up everything to us. Right? And he’s, like, let me show you all this. Showed us his skull. He actually has a a warehouse. I don’t know if he ever discloses where it is, but he has a warehouse with where he has some of the greatest specimens ever.
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12:01
Sai it’s cool. You should go. It’s cool. I do wanna go. He’s an amazing guy.
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12:04
I love that.
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12:04
And he’s a cool and he’s
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12:05
a cool guy. And then, you know, being in the Mammoth Researcher business, we’re ai, oh, we’d love to we’d love to, you know, take use some of your samples. Can we take them? And he’s like, no. And he was very sana. And he told us and that’s, like, before your podcast with him, we kinda learned that story.
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12:20
Right? And so Mhmm. That’s what sucks is how, like, some people can ruin it for everybody. Yeah. You know, because he’s you know, ai of Fairbanks, it’s not the easiest place to build a, you know, biocontainment level three lab.
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12:30
Right.
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12:31
But he’s like but he is over. He’s like, you build a lab here, you can use whatever you want. But he’s like, the bones stay here. So he’s very consistent with his messaging.
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12:39
Well, you know, the whole deal with the Museum of Natural History. Right?
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12:43
Mhmm.
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12:43
Yeah. Sai Ai
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12:44
I totally believe it. I totally believe
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12:45
Well, it’s a fact now. They found these bones in the East River Yeah. Exactly where they told them to drop it off. They have step bison fragments
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12:53
Yeah. I’ve seen it.
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12:54
Woolly mammoth fragments. So they know that they’re there.
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12:56
Yeah. And, well, I mean, you you’ve built a relationship with John. He’s just a normal, no bullshit kinda guy. Yeah. He’s ai, you stole this stuff. Give it back. Yeah. Or he’s also like, hey. If you wanna come work on it, come on. Like, he’s very collaborative.
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13:08
It’s also it’s like, what what do you guys have? Like, why are you keeping that shit in a basement? Like, what is that?
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13:14
I 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 4 of the Smithsonian, and it’s it’s just rows and rows and rows of taxidermy animals that you’ve never seen.
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13:35
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, like, yes. And we think there’s DNA. And I was, like, well, this is, like, you know, the card catalog of, like, all speak of all, like, dead speak.
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13:50
Yeah. But it’s not on display for the public. It’s just in a basement.
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13:53
And is it extensively archived? They know where everything is? Or is there some stuff down ai? I mean, they’re
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13:59
They don’t know what it is. I wouldn’t say that they are the at least any museum, they have all they I think they have a lot more than they know. I don’t see it in, like, massive computer systems because we ask for inventory list and, you know, like, what’s the shop what’s the shopping list?
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14:11
It’s been over
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14:12
a hundred years they’ve been doing this. Sai people have come and gone.
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14:14
Oh, they’ll pull out yeah. Ai pull out drawers that have, like, Darwin’s name on it and stuff like that. Woah. I mean, that’s how we did the thylacine. We actually found in a cup about this size, we actually found what’s called we call it the miracle pup, where they shot the mother.
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14:28
They took the three Joeys, the the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde, and we got a 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup. Wow.
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14:39
But they
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14:39
didn’t even know they had it. They also, on the thylacine, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about more later, they also found, a head in a bucket. They didn’t even it was the mom’s head. So we actually knew we could actually look at the genetic, relation between the two. And they actually found they didn’t know they had
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14:54
the head in the bucket. They just had a head in
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14:56
a bucket. They opened it up. It was marked thylacine. They opened up, and there was a full thylacine skull in there. There’s pictures of it online and everything. And we used that to get to a 99.9% complete genome because we also had the ancestry of the two of the, pup and mother. Wow. Yeah.
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15:12
So there’s there’s a, probably, treasure troves in some of these museums that aren’t being, you know, fully utilized.
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15:18
So if you have 98% or you have 99%, what what’s the process of Oh, yeah. Going from that? So So here
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15:26
it is.
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15:26
There’s the
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15:26
head there’s the, head in the bucket. So Andrew Pask, who leads our, in partnership with the University of Melbourne, leads our thylacine work. And, yeah, that’s the head and bucket. I mean, there’s soft tissue. There’s teeth. There’s petrous bones, which we’ll talk about as
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15:40
well. Buy into any of these sightings?
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15:43
No. I did. So Andrew Pask, for years, he’s been working on it for fifteen years. He’s amazing. He’s awesome. He’s been working on on, like, a shoestring budget, and that’s part of the problem with the extinction is nobody’s put real capital into it until now. And he’s been working on it for fifteen years, and he’s had people send him, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years.
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16:05
So he just send it to him, and then he loves the thylacine so meh. He just sequences it. See and he’s like, nope. It’s a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks. I meh, and so it’s it’s demoralizing. But, like, when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew.
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16:17
We did a partnership with him. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research more than ai in government. We made the largest investment in in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we do this, and then you you get into the myth of it. Right?
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16:30
So, you start reading it. Right? You start reading I start reading all the books on the thylacine. I wanna be at I get obsessive about projects. And so, I’m pretty obsessed about extinction right now.
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16:38
And so, got super deep in it And, then I started calling Pascals, like, hey, I’ve been watching these YouTube videos, and I kinda think they’re still there. And Pascals sai ai, no. No. Stop it. Don’t go down that rabbit hole.
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16:50
So I I don’t believe But why
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16:52
did he say that?
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16:53
Well, because he’s been testing for the last fifteen years all over Tasmania. Right? So not just Southern Australia, but all
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16:58
over Tasmania. So samples,
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17:00
poops Samples, just everything using camera ram. And nobody’s I I think that they officially say that, the thylacine went extinct in 1936.
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17:09
Mhmm.
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17:09
But probably into the late forties and early fifties, they still existed. But, I mean, I think you yeah. I think it’s very unlikely that one still exists. It’d make our lives a lot easier for us. Forrest really believes in it. He does. He thinks they’re in Papua New Guinea.
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17:23
And because of ai.
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17:25
Yeah. He sai he thinks in the Western part of Papua New Guinea in the mountains.
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17:29
They’re also incredibly remote. Yeah. Yeah. Very difficult.
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17:32
And and the separation of that topography separates the, Papua New Guinea, singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator prey, from where the thylacine sai were ai.
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17:44
Singing dog?
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17:46
It’s it’s just another large canid that has a unique howl. Oh, wow. Sai this is not still exist. Oh, I I mean, I I’m sure Jamie can find a
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17:53
a video. I wanna hear that. I’ve never heard of this. Yeah. Singing dog. Yeah. Wow.
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17:57
Hoping to get any singing dogs.
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17:58
By the way, folks, this is we’re teasing you because we there’s a this is not just theoretical.
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18:04
Yeah.
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18:04
So we’ll And this is what’s gonna get crazy. Yeah. It’s gonna get weird. This podcast is gonna blow your fucking mind. Go ahead, Jimmy. Opera singers That’s oh, they sound awful. These rear animals have a knack for holding a tune even to an exact key. Opera singers love these. Aw. They’re so cute.
Speaker: 0
18:25
Yeah. They’re so cute do people keep them as pets? That looks like a dog dog. Yeah. It looks like a dog dog.
Speaker: 0
18:30
That looks like a dog that would
Speaker: 1
18:31
be They’re wild they’re wild dogs in in Papua New Guinea, but I’m I’m sure people have domesticated them.
Speaker: 0
18:36
Wow. Pretty fucking cool dogs. And hanging out with a fox.
Speaker: 1
18:40
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 the Asian elephant. But I’m from software, so I just assume there’s, like, the, you know, Google Cloud of DNA.
Speaker: 1
18:57
Like, we we backed like, we’ve all done 23 andMe before it went bankrupt. Right? So Right. We should assume that I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of, like, the 23 and Me of all speak. Right.
Speaker: 1
19:08
That doesn’t exist
Speaker: 0
19:09
Wow.
Speaker: 1
19:10
Which is insane. So there’s, like, there’s no back there’s no, like, Noah’s Ark ai vault for life, like, kinda like the seed vaults. That doesn’t exist. And so we’re actually petitioning US government to help put a massive project together to help ai. It arya with just American megas megafauna and keystone species.
Speaker: 1
19:26
So that doesn’t exist at all. And so so then you so then Colossal had to go out and go build the reference genomes for all the species, like, the closest living relatives for all the species that we’re working on.
Speaker: 0
19:36
So this is the question. If you have sai, let’s go to woolly mammoth. Mhmm. So if you have woolly mammoth and you have 99%, how do you bridge that gap? How do you how do you create
Speaker: 1
19:46
That’s synthetic biology. So you never have to get to a %. Right? You need to get to probably Synthetic biology. Synthetic biology. That’s where you are using all of these different genetic tools. Probably, you’ve heard of CRISPR, all these other things, genetics, you know, which is it it knock out it breaks the DNA. It’s not the always the best tool.
Speaker: 1
20:03
We can now actually make individual edits, to when you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right, in those rungs of the ladder, those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like, that’s how precise we can be. We can sai, at spot, you know, 4,000,008, I need to change that letter.
Speaker: 1
20:20
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 in 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,
Speaker: 0
20:39
you
Speaker: 1
20:39
know, curved tusk, dome cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, and, and then hair and and coat color, you can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant. Right? Because you’re only looking you’re you’re only really looking at that point 4% difference. Ai a lot of numbers. You’re only looking at that.
Speaker: 1
20:55
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.
Speaker: 0
21:05
Are are there specific genes that regulate size? Because they’re they’re larger
Speaker: 1
21:08
than 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. Oh. So, there were, 11 you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation because it’s a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made.
Speaker: 1
21:23
And so there arya 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different, in different ways, and some of them were larger. But the woolly mammoth, the one that we were pursuing that has that woolly ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
21:48
And so there’s specific characteristics that these animals have, one of them being the big furry coats that you guys what did you do with mice? We we made wooly mice. See See if you can find that.
Speaker: 1
22:02
The the and the only the only, like, unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck. Like, people lost their minds. Right? Like, we’re there’s there’s I was I was on the phone recently with a, you know, moderately aggressive, journalist, And, and it was going quite poorly as some calls go.
Speaker: 0
22:20
Moderately aggressive? They were being aggressive in what way?
Speaker: 1
22:23
Like, why are you doing this? Some people yeah. They they everyone, like, got it. Cute. Cute.
Speaker: 0
22:29
Ai daughter actually found this online and wants one.
Speaker: 1
22:31
Yeah. So we get that a lot
Speaker: 0
22:32
from She wants a woolly mouse.
Speaker: 1
22:33
So every week every week, I don’t have my laptop. I actually
Speaker: 0
22:37
brought it in there.
Speaker: 1
22:38
Cute. But every week
Speaker: 0
22:39
Oh ai god. They’re adorable.
Speaker: 1
22:41
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 wanna do this in the most ethical way as possible, there’s about 200,000,000 of genetic divergence between mice and elephants, We didn’t just wanna ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.
Speaker: 1
23:04
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 then not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them.
Speaker: 1
23:19
Right? Or 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 it went insane. There’s people that are, like, making t shirts as a meme coin. And so we we we made 36 mice. They’re all they’re all healthy.
Speaker: 1
23:34
There’s 36 mice that we made. Wow. And what was crazy about it is we’re excited about it because it shows that the end to end process of taking data from an ancient gene, DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with a % efficiency. And that’s really important and really hard. So we did it with a % efficiency. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
23:55
That that’s the that’s
Speaker: 0
23:56
difference.
Speaker: 1
23:56
Well, so the the One of
Speaker: 0
23:57
them, if it was in a trap, he’d be so sad.
Speaker: 1
24:00
Yeah. Exactly. Like, the little guy
Speaker: 0
24:01
on the left, if he was in a trap, he’d be, oh, what could we kill? Ain’t that funny? Just a little bit of fur Yeah. Makes you love them.
Speaker: 1
24:07
And that’s the color that we think most mammoths were. Really? They were like a blonde. They were like they were like a golden brown color. Right? Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they’ve been sitting in mud for quite some
Speaker: 0
24:17
time. Oh.
Speaker: 1
24:18
But if you see very fresh mammoths, like, from, Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakuts and other places in Northern Siberia that they actually have, pretty pretty well preserved mammoths, they actually have kind of a, dirty blonde meets, gold meets brown fur. Wow. And so we so we did that, and now there’s people that are making t shirts that aren’t us and pillows that are, like, legalized woolly mice.
Speaker: 1
24:40
I’m, like, they’re not illegal. And then they’re they’re a meme account for the guy that did the, like, the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
24:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
24:50
A meme account Oh, wow.
Speaker: 0
24:51
So that’s mammoth for
Speaker: 1
24:52
Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on on x that that, these are a bio weapon and that Colossal is made of bio sai the the the weirdness of the woolly 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.
Speaker: 1
25:11
Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live. From the second lineage, they’ll do one more gene, let that mouse ai, and then they’ll stack those edits over multiple generations. We’ve developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time all over the genome, get exactly what we want, and then we have this what’s called monoclonal screening where we’re screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds like overkill.
Speaker: 1
25:36
But then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off target effects in the in the genome So that we know the mice that we then do cloning with, we know that they’ll be healthy. And so so we try to spend a lot of time, you know, on that because we’re certified by American Humane Society. It’s the oldest humane organization in the world.
Speaker: 1
25:54
And, if you’ve seen that film that’s, like, no animals were harmed in the making of this film, that’s those guys. Right. So sai we’ve ended up, so so we really care about ai of not just the de extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out.
Speaker: 1
26:09
And so the the woolly mouse was a really interesting proof of concept. It shows that the edits that we are working on are working right, and we’re getting exactly what we predicted.
Speaker: 0
26:17
Is there any plans to sell those?
Speaker: 1
26:19
No. Everyone keeps asking us that. But you know what? Museums actually are now calling us saying, and and zoos are calling us saying, can we display the woolly mice? They’re like, it’ll drive so much value. It’ll teach people about, you know, genetics and whatnot. So, you know, it’s it’s not our business model to sell our animals or to sell, you know, woolly mice, but it it’s kinda gone crazy.
Speaker: 0
26:39
Is it dangerous, though, to leave these mice in the hands of someone even at a zoo who decides I want more of these?
Speaker: 1
26:47
Yeah. If we ever if we ever put them I think more likely we’d put them in a museum for that needs to be free, like the Smithsonian or something like that from ram education perspective versus something that’s more attraction based. I think we do it more in the case of Do
Speaker: 0
27:00
you plan on keeping this batch alive?
Speaker: 1
27:03
Yeah. They’re gonna live out their normal lives. And, But you’re
Speaker: 0
27:05
not gonna make new ones?
Speaker: 1
27:07
We may make new ones. What if they bring These won’t they’re all separated. They’re all separated by sex. So we’re not gonna have, like, ai 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.
Speaker: 1
27:28
Mhmm. The they actually live in pretty sweet digs that we made for them. They’re all yeah.
Speaker: 0
27:33
Like, we made
Speaker: 1
27:36
we we spared no expense.
Speaker: 0
27:37
Cool little house.
Speaker: 1
27:38
Yeah. And they’re big, and we, you know, we put fun stuff in them to play with, like like this. And what’s been crazy is we only named two of them, and we named them Chip and Dale because we we people were asking me what the names were, and I was like, Chip is the only thing that I could think of at the moment.
Speaker: 1
27:52
And now even on x, 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 sleuths that are, like, that’s not Chip. That’s Dale. We need a picture of Chip. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
28:03
You can’t get involved.
Speaker: 1
28:04
Yeah. So we’ve just yeah. We don’t
Speaker: 0
28:06
Don’t get involved with those people.
Speaker: 1
28:07
We’ve not we’ve not leaned in. Yeah. You cannot. We’re excited. They’re excited, but we just can’t. Yeah. Yeah. We’re busy.
Speaker: 0
28:14
So so this is a new thing. The the woolly mouse is a new thing. Mhmm. Is there any talk about doing other kind of new things?
Speaker: 1
28:21
So it’s more of a proof of technology. I think that the mouse model, because it’s a twenty day gestation versus twenty two months in elephants, it’s it’s a great way to test phenotypes because with, you know, with a a mammoth, you have three ways to test if you got the edits right.
Speaker: 1
28:36
One, you can do molecular test. You 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, but that’s a lot of work in twenty two 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.
Speaker: 1
28:56
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 you’ll get the whole Willy Wonka tour, which is pretty cool. And then then the fourth way is mice. Right?
Speaker: 1
29:13
Because it’s, like, if we can then engineer them into mice, we can see immediately within twenty 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.
Speaker: 1
29:26
The thylacine’s closest living relative is the vatsal dunart, which is a mouse ai marsupial, and it actually gestates in thirteen and a half days versus twenty days. So there’s no reason to do it in mice when you can do it immediately in the model species.
Speaker: 0
29:39
Wow. Yeah. Okay. So how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?
Speaker: 1
29:49
So, we’re working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian ai, 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.
Speaker: 1
30:05
We talked about ai banking a little bit. So we we wanna understand from the bison that are still here in Meh, 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.
Speaker: 1
30:20
Chairman Fox, it’s one of the largest, indigenous people groups in The United States, One of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we’re giving them a report out on this. We we we went to their nation, wanted to share this, and and then, you know, we’re curious. So we said, what other projects would you work on if if that you that we could do that’s helpful outside of helping bison?
Speaker: 1
30:38
And they said that they that we needed help with wolf conservation. They brought up that. They said that we needed help with more bison conservation. They said if we do stuff around, eagles and fish, and so we kinda got that feedback. And when, Chairman Fox is walking me through their their their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of of a white wolf.
Speaker: 1
30:59
And he said, you know, that’s the great wolf. And, and he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that’s been lost and how many people believed, that it could have even been a dire wolf.
Speaker: 0
31:10
And
Speaker: 1
31:10
I was like, from Game of Thrones, that’s cool. I love the show. That’s interesting. So he did that. We 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.
Speaker: 0
31:27
I don’t know if
Speaker: 1
31:27
you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it’s kind of a disaster. Yeah. You know, it’s the only endemic wolf to meh only endemic to America. It’s a red wolf. It’s beautiful. And, there’s, like, 15 left in the wild and with with massive loss of of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck.
Speaker: 1
31:44
And And 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 you know, you think of bison.
Speaker: 1
31:57
The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like, ai, like, we have to do something
Speaker: 0
32:03
about this.
Speaker: 1
32:03
We have to figure something out. And so we we put that kind of on the list. And then in a weird series of events, we’ve had all of these kids over the last three years sana and teachers sent parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths or dodos or ai. Like, we get, like, boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So we’re gonna make a colossal kids’ corner, at our new new, labs.
Speaker: 1
32:24
And and in that, we’ve had all this some Hollywood saloni, 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, kinda like with the Willie Mouse with you. And so everyone’s excited about it.
Speaker: 1
32:36
And then, we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the ai wolf again. And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species because dire wolves were only found in in The US, a little in in North America, but predominantly in The United States, coastal United States.
Speaker: 1
32:53
And, we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also, help wolf conservation and bring people from, like, sci fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation. We thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off.
Speaker: 0
33:12
Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost? Or is
Speaker: 1
33:17
No. Most are most of the dire wolf skulls out there, there’s thousands of them in La Brea Tarfret. So if you go there, they have this beautiful wall. But because of heat sana 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 Meh Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in the cave. Just a single tooth. Right?
Speaker: 1
33:41
And in that tooth, they actually found a, they actually got point one five 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 sai that even if there are gaps, you under stuff understand enough of the core ai of, coding regions that you could bring back that animal.
Speaker: 0
34:05
Or Is this done by AI?
Speaker: 1
34:06
Is this done by Ai? Software. Yeah. So we we built, part of our business model is building technologies, to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than, you know, just solving them for, you know, existing speak, open sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out.
Speaker: 1
34:24
So our first, computational analysis company was called Form Ai, and we actually spun it out of the business.
Speaker: 0
34:29
So you have this tooth. You have 1.5?
Speaker: 1
34:32
Yeah. ai. So 15% of the genome. Okay. And so Ai went to Meh, who’s only an ai at the time, and said, could you resample the tooth? And she’s ai, it’s, like, you know, half an inch long. She’s like, it’s destructive sampling. Like, it’s gonna ruin us. Well, could we scour the other museums and see if it’s even possible? So, we we lucked out and that tooth is 13,000 years old.
Speaker: 1
34:52
The skull itself is, 72, 70 three thousand 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 in, the permafrost, but also wasn’t found in, like, heat acid acidification. So, there’s a bone in all of us called the petrous bone, which is insanely dense, and it doesn’t change a lot from after you’re born.
Speaker: 1
35:16
It’s a great DNA storage, better than teeth, better than anything. It’s on the it’s, like, in the inner ear ai 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 petrous bone to see if we could get DNA.
Speaker: 1
35:35
And we got really lucky between resampling the first and, the and and the skull. We we ended up getting about 13 to 14 x coverage. So that’s more than we needed to potentially bring back the direwolves.
Speaker: 0
35:46
And then, what’d you do?
Speaker: 1
35:48
Well, and then, then we got a knock on the door and it was yeah. No. So so we took that DNA Can
Speaker: 0
35:54
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?
Speaker: 1
36:03
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 ai. And we just didn’t. Right? They’re like, this is tech bros wanting to see cool animals. And, oh, they’ve only got $16,000,000 of funding, and they don’t have any ai.
Speaker: 1
36:17
So that was that was phase one.
Speaker: 0
36:19
Right.
Speaker: 1
36:19
And then we’re like, oh, well, you know, as an entrepreneur, my job is to hire much smarter people than me.
Speaker: 0
36:25
Do you smoke cigars?
Speaker: 1
36:25
I do not. Gary’s got me on quite a kick. So Health kick? Yeah. So yeah. I meh, I’m not
Speaker: 0
36:31
really bad for you.
Speaker: 1
36:32
Well, I’m not saying
Speaker: 0
36:33
they’re bad
Speaker: 1
36:33
for you. I’m just saying that I Allegedly?
Speaker: 0
36:35
Yeah. I I don’t care.
Speaker: 1
36:37
I’m a
Speaker: 0
36:37
take this is the last of the the things that I partake in that are probably bad for you.
Speaker: 1
36:42
Yeah. But you gotta, yeah. Do what you gotta do. Everyone’s got their license.
Speaker: 0
36:45
I like a little cigar. So ai question, if I was gonna grill you, if I was a reporter, it’d be ai, 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?
Speaker: 1
37:01
I think that we’ve become the apex predator on this planet, and we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we over fish the ocean, we over ai something. In the case of the thylacine, 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. Right?
Speaker: 1
37:25
We are we are we are chain we humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things. Mhmm. 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 tyler was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back in the Yellowstone.
Speaker: 0
37:51
Right.
Speaker: 1
37:51
And and looking at at how the the ecology of 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. The sick and the old and the weak weren’t getting killed off.
Speaker: 0
38:05
Right.
Speaker: 1
38:05
They were spreading disease. They were eating all of the willows and everything along the banks. So, therefore, the beavers went away. Beavers are, like, the most super, you know, climate impact animals that probably exist because they make wetlands. They make, they they, cause the rivers and and ponds to get deeper, so it allows different types of fish and different types of animals.
Speaker: 1
38:24
So you have this thing called tropic downgrading, and you have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce these species.
Speaker: 0
38:30
That documentary is fascinating.
Speaker: 1
38:31
It’s so fascinating.
Speaker: 0
38:32
How wolves change rivers? Yeah. Yeah. The 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.
Speaker: 0
38:54
They they had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available. That they had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter, like, you can hunt cows in the snow. So in the middle of the winter, where they can’t move good, you just pick them off Yeah. In the snow. Because they were just trying to call the population.
Speaker: 0
39:13
They were trying ai diminish them.
Speaker: 1
39:14
And that’s and that’s not good for the elk pop population. No. It’s not good for the ecosystem, but it’s not good for the elk population itself.
Speaker: 0
39:20
Right. I have a good friend who lives in Colorado. He has a a ranch in Colorado. And, we were at his place approximately two weeks after they reintroduced wolves. So they actually reintroduced wolves on his property.
Speaker: 1
39:34
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 0
39:35
And he didn’t know it was gonna happen before it happened, and all the people around there are ranchers. Yeah. So already, these five wolves that they’ve reintroduced, he said, have killed over a dozen cows and calves. So the problem is they’ve killed elk as well. In fact, I took a photo of an elk leg that we found on the ground Yeah. That the wolves had killed.
Speaker: 0
39:54
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 Yep. Assess situations. And in the case of Colorado, Colorado obviously border borders Ai, and Wyoming has wolves. Wolves were making their way into Colorado Yep. Already, and they are protected.
Speaker: 0
40:16
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.
Speaker: 1
40:23
Meh. Or to stop at a at a imaginary border. It doesn’t exist.
Speaker: 0
40:26
There’s no borders. They go hundreds and hundreds of miles. Exactly. 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 ai. Life.
Speaker: 1
40:42
Yep.
Speaker: 0
40:42
So they they moved them from Oregon to Colorado where they
Speaker: 1
40:47
Killed a lot of wildlife.
Speaker: 0
40:48
Yeah. But they’re kill excuse meh. I’m saying wildlife. What Ai what I really meant to say was, animals, agriculture. Mhmm. They were they’re killing domesticated cows. They’re they’re killing these, calves and, you know, they’re they’re having a real fucking problem with that.
Speaker: 0
41:04
And it it is something
Speaker: 1
41:05
that needs to be continually monitored that shouldn’t just be on some random vote of how you feel about it. Right? Ai, it
Speaker: 0
41:13
We just can’t let people vote on that. No. I I Too many people live in these high population areas.
Speaker: 1
41:17
I couldn’t agree I couldn’t agree more. Right? And so, like, we as humanity, like, if you look at the the third leading cause of death of of elephants, it’s human elephant conflict. Right? Like, we have to we have to figure these things out. We we also we don’t want degraded ecosystems.
Speaker: 1
41:31
We don’t wanna lose speak, but you have to be you have to do this in a very thoughtful and measured way.
Speaker: 0
41:36
Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
41:36
Like, with Yellowstone, they’re ai, this is big enough ecological reserve. We’re tagging the animals. Yeah. We’re gonna 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.
Speaker: 1
41:52
We can just we just un we have to understand that some of these areas not are lost, but have already been, changed for a different reason.
Speaker: 0
42:00
Yeah. And they’ve achieved homostasis, homeostasis. They’ve achieved the saloni. Yeah. Right? Which is the the big issue with Colorado right now. And it’s going to be the big issue whenever you reintroduce an animal that used to be there and is no longer there. And I think in the case of Montana, I think you’re right. And I think that there is an argument that maybe the wolves being there is better.
Speaker: 0
42:20
Obviously, not if you’re a rancher.
Speaker: 1
42:22
Well, the well, the Colorado so the Colorado stuff is completely gonna destroy all of the stats. So pre Colorado. Right? So I’m talking about reintroduction into Montana, reintroduction into, parts of Canada, reintroduction into Yellowstone, the red wolf, which is a very small population in North in North Carolina.
Speaker: 1
42:39
There’s been less than five confirmed fatalities in all of North America in the last hundred years.
Speaker: 0
42:46
You mean humans? Humans. Right. And are most of them in Alaska?
Speaker: 1
42:49
Most of them are in Alaska, or in Canada. And then, and then it’s before Colorado. So not saying with with I don’t know if the data has I I don’t think it has the latest from Colorado. But it, it represents point zero two percent, on of deaths associated with, wolves and cattle and livestock. Right? And all livestock, not just cattle.
Speaker: 1
43:10
And so the problem is when you go out there and you have a maintained balance that people can understand, and governments actually give subsidies to the ranchers when they get killed by when they get killed by the, by wolves. So that that I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.
Speaker: 1
43:26
But the problem is when you’re you’re not as thoughtful with the rewilding program and you don’t and you’re not as measured as, like, what they did in Yell Yellowstone and they start encroaching in these areas, then the stats are gonna go crazy. And when the stats goes crazy, then you’re gonna start looking, to the animals that are the problem, but it’s not the animals that are the problem.
Speaker: 1
43:42
It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision.
Speaker: 0
43:47
Exactly. The problem is people just have these ai, like, wolves are beautiful. They’re amazing. We all love wolves. It’s an incredible animal. I’m so happy it exists. Don’t put it near where there’s a ranch. Exactly. You can’t vote on that if you live in Denver. That’s crazy.
Speaker: 1
44:00
Yeah. If it’s and if it doesn’t affect your livelihood, if it doesn’t affect your the risk to your animals or your family, yeah, you have to be mindful of that.
Speaker: 0
44:06
There’s also they’re getting a very skewed perspective because the governor’s really interested in it, and his husband is really interested in it. His his husband, apparently, is the one who really wanted it to happen. And, you know, you you have a mandate, so you have to get wolves out by a certain time.
Speaker: 0
44:20
And when you’re doing it, the only wolves available are wolves that kill ai, and so you’re like, fuck it.
Speaker: 1
44:25
Yeah. It’s just not. It’s just It’s you in in the a lot of so the project that we’ll probably eventually talk about is, we brought in a lot of the teams, sai many people that have been on your show, that, know how to do the rewilding the right way over time.
Speaker: 0
44:43
Okay. So this is what we’ll just get to it. You made a fucking ai wolf. I didn’t. Our
Speaker: 1
44:48
our team, our incredible team, made, three dire wolf sai far.
Speaker: 0
44:54
Let’s see the photos. Jamie, bust out some photos. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself because this is truly fucking crazy. Yeah. That’s the pup. Yeah. So this is,
Speaker: 1
45:03
so that’s actually, Romulus as so we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, founders ram. And then, and then we have Khaleesi, who’s the new girl. So this is Romulus and Remus. So funny funny story about this. So Peter Jackson, from Lord of the Rings. Ram. Peter Jackson from Lord of 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.
Speaker: 1
45:31
And he’s, like, we’re I was sitting in in Peter’s, house with he and his his partner Fran. And I was, like, you know, I showed him the video of them howling. He started tearing up. He goes, this is the first time I’ve heard a direwolf or anyone’s heard a direwolf in ten thousand years.
Speaker: 1
45:44
He started well, he, like, he, like, physically, emotionally got chills and started crying. And then he’s, like, well, you know, I do have the throne. I was, like, what do you mean? He goes, I bought the throne last week at auction at a at a private auction for, like, Sotheby’s or someone. Ai?
Speaker: 1
45:57
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?
Speaker: 1
46:05
And so, you know, what you don’t see in this photo is you don’t see the fact that we have American Humane Society there. We have three veterinary people. We had six people from our, animal care team.
Speaker: 0
46:16
Checkup, you don’t vaccinate these little guys, do you?
Speaker: 1
46:18
They do get they because of viruses from that they can get from the soil, at at, eight at eight weeks, they do get basic virus. They do they do get basic vaccines.
Speaker: 0
46:30
Are we concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you just
Speaker: 1
46:33
Yeah. So these are staying on you know, like, these are not going back into the wild. Right? Not yet. Right now, they’re on a 2,000 acre, secure expansive ecological preserve with twenty four seven care. They were we have an animal hospital that we built. Wow.
Speaker: 0
46:46
People
Speaker: 1
46:47
are always ai, you guys raised so much money. And I was like, well, it because we didn’t just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities, and whatnot.
Speaker: 0
46:55
Let’s see the photo of the the actual grown ones because they’re fucking nuts.
Speaker: 1
47:02
Yeah. So so this is, Romanes and Ram, in playing in the snow on the preserve when they are, three months old.
Speaker: 0
47:10
So three months, how big are they?
Speaker: 1
47:13
Three months, they were north of forty five pounds. Wow. So, Look at
Speaker: 0
47:18
that face. God, they’re so beautiful.
Speaker: 1
47:19
Oh, they just get they just get like, as they’ve aged, they’ve just got more and more beautiful.
Speaker: 0
47:24
Sai, let’s go to the adults because the adults have crazy characteristics. Yeah. So, you were saying that you didn’t even know they’re
Speaker: 1
47:30
We we we didn’t know. Right? And so, we we meh ended up taking getting a
Speaker: 0
47:35
Is this a full grown one?
Speaker: 1
47:37
No. They’re still five months old. So they’re eighty pounds at five months. So wolves typically grow twelve to fourteen months. So it they’re not full grown yet.
Speaker: 0
47:45
Wow. And how big is it already?
Speaker: 1
47:46
Eighty pounds, about five and a
Speaker: 0
47:49
half feet. And the mane.
Speaker: 1
47:51
Yeah. And so so a couple of things about the wolves. Jamie, if you go back yeah. So we didn’t know this. Right? We knew that they were a Pleistocene wolf. We knew that they existed, and went extinct about twelve thousand years ago, when a lot of megafauna went extinct, ai, the during kind of that younger dry that younger ai kinda cooling period, they went they went extinct as well.
Speaker: 1
48:12
Right? And we knew all we know because all we have is we don’t have frozen dire wolves or frozen samples. We literally just know from skeletal remains that they were 20 to 25%, larger. They were stockier. They probably weren’t as fast based on ai of their their body weight as a normal wolf would be.
Speaker: 1
48:29
But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium, and whatnot. And we assumed that their their and we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool, that they are white ai there’s, like, this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they are red so they get their paper.
Speaker: 0
48:46
Doesn’t it make sense from natural selection? Yeah. They’re an Arctic hunting animal.
Speaker: 1
48:50
Yeah. And they have this beautiful we didn’t know it because they have this beautiful, like, mane like quality to them. And when they’re babies, you you saw a couple of pictures, their fur almost feels like polar bears. It’s crazy. Wow.
Speaker: 0
48:59
It’s so Is it like polar bears and it’s hollow?
Speaker: 1
49:01
Or is it it’s not. It’s it’s like typical wolves, but it’s incredibly thick. It grows in ai of these these clumps. But then as they’ve, as they’ve grown in, they’ve started to get this kind of, like, mane to them, which is The females as well? Well, the female, she’s only six weeks old, so it’s too too soon as well. So if you keep going through a couple other photos Wow. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
49:21
I mean, they are just they’re just beautiful. And, I mean, it’s funny. Someone actually said they, on our team was, like, they almost look like Shetland pony wolves at some point. Right?
Speaker: 0
49:30
Right. They’re something they’re so stocky.
Speaker: 1
49:32
They’re stocky. They’re thicker. They are I mean, they’re they’re absolutely beautiful. That so this is Khaleesi. So who looks like a baby.
Speaker: 0
49:42
Little face.
Speaker: 1
49:43
And, we we nailed it. We, we we named her.
Speaker: 0
49:46
Can we hear it? Let me hear her.
Speaker: 1
49:51
We named Khaleesi for George RR Martin, obviously. Obviously. Who’s an investor in Colossal?
Speaker: 0
49:56
Oh, wow. Nature’s cute little murderers.
Speaker: 1
50:09
Well, everything in nature murders something. Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
50:11
Like, we were Well, cows murder grass.
Speaker: 1
50:14
Yeah. And people are now saying you can hear grass and other plants, like, scream now.
Speaker: 0
50:18
Yeah. Yeah. They scream. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
50:19
Sai Ai guess I guess we all are bad.
Speaker: 0
50:22
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?
Speaker: 1
50:30
So they love to chew on horns in in the state. So we have a different phases of we we built a 45 page animal guide. These are actually, different horns from different elk and other species that we’re putting out there.
Speaker: 0
50:43
And they chew on it. They just
Speaker: 1
50:45
love it.
Speaker: 0
50:45
Ai a dog does.
Speaker: 1
50:46
Like a dog does. Right?
Speaker: 0
50:47
So are you letting these animals kill things? Are you feeding them?
Speaker: 1
50:50
So we’re feeding them still. So they need a combination of bison meat, horse meat, and some Do you plan
Speaker: 0
50:55
on letting them kill things, though?
Speaker: 1
50:56
So we’re 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, and and they are starting to exhibit some hunting behavior.
Speaker: 0
51:09
Are Are you gonna let them hunt?
Speaker: 1
51:10
I mean, they’re on they they are on a seemingly wild 2,000 acre preserve with just them, so they do have the ability to hunt on that preserve. But they’re not doing it yet. They’re starting to exhibit the the original the ai of the the first inklings that that it will trend toward that.
Speaker: 1
51:25
But we want them to live. We want them, and we’re gonna probably make two or three more. We sana a a solid little social pack that we can monitor, that can live a seemingly wild life that we can understand more about them. Wow. It’s cool.
Speaker: 1
51:37
But the other thing that’s that’s equally, cool to it, going back to the Red Wolf story, can can you which is crazy
Speaker: 0
51:43
to me that you have reignited these 10,000 year old hunting genes
Speaker: 1
51:47
Yeah. That they’re starting to Including size. Including size. We understand more about, like, we, you know, we looked at what, genes made really a ai or direwolf, like, what was separated. And the beautiful thing for us is that we had a 13,000 year old tooth and a 73,000 year old skull, so we could actually understand, the genetic, distant with that much genetic distance between them, we could actually understand, you know, what truly was fixed and conserved in the ai genome and what wasn’t just population genomes.
Speaker: 1
52:15
Right? If there’s if you and I are fifty thousand years apart, we you know, there’s a lot of different mutations in that time period. But if we can then really say, okay, you know, what made Ben Ben and what made Jojo? Oh, here’s the overlaps. It allowed us to really understand that,
Speaker: 0
52:28
which would be awesome. And it’s just fascinating that the behavior characteristics are ai baked into
Speaker: 1
52:32
the genes.
Speaker: 0
52:33
Yeah. And they just were dormant for ten thousand years. And now these things are waking up.
Speaker: 1
52:37
And so I was I was like so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed Romulus.
Speaker: 0
52:42
Wow.
Speaker: 1
52:42
And and Romulus is partly raised with me. I could go out to the preserve. I’d I’d check on him quite quite frequently. It’s in the Northern United States where we don’t say where it is. But, mainly because it we’re we’re for not just the animal’s health, but for human health, we ever since we launched the woolly mouse, we’ve had, very excited people just show up at our our labs are not open to the public, and we’ve had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice.
Speaker: 1
53:06
And so, showing people too much of the preserve, we’re always very, very nervous about how we scrub all the videos and ai to ensure that no one can pick it out because we we assume people will be moderately excited.
Speaker: 0
53:16
Oh, yeah. Oh, the the Internet sleuths will try to find you.
Speaker: 1
53:20
Yeah. So we’ve we’ve done not I’m not trying to challenge them, but we’ve been we’ve done everything we can to protect it.
Speaker: 0
53:25
Yeah. I I understand. I mean, you have to. Some dude from Saudi Arabia wants a wolf. Yeah. Exactly. Somebody wants a dire wolf. We already ai already
Speaker: 1
53:34
get a lot of weird calls. But the the other thing
Speaker: 0
53:38
though thing though Someone with deep pockets.
Speaker: 1
53:40
Oh, we get
Speaker: 0
53:40
we Make me a dire wolf, my friend. We would I have everything meh collection.
Speaker: 1
53:47
We get a lot of weird calls. Yeah. Yeah. From people that are like Ai
Speaker: 0
53:50
people that have private zoos.
Speaker: 1
53:51
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, enormous In ai, in India. Yeah. Yeah. They have a the, that family has, like, the largest private zoo and preserve.
Speaker: 0
54:00
Which is so wild.
Speaker: 1
54:01
It’s so crazy.
Speaker: 0
54:02
Yeah. Well, you know, Texas’ history with animals. Right? Yeah. There’s more tigers in captivity in private collections
Speaker: 1
54:08
In Texas than in the wild.
Speaker: 0
54:09
Than in the wild of the world.
Speaker: 1
54:10
Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy. But I was I was in the, I was in sai, we of the 2,000 acres, we have a subset subsection of it that’s about six and a half acres. We have an animal hospital, a storm rescue shelter. We have a a couple of natural dens that we’ve, built for them as well as an animal husbandry, arya.
Speaker: 1
54:29
So that that way, when we wanna take photos of them or videos of them or do blood tests, they’re in a seemingly more contained area. And, it’s funny. Two weeks ago, I was up there, and I was actually sitting on those logs in one of those pictures. And Remus came Romulus, who I speak the most amount of time with, Remus came up, came pretty close, and I was able to touch him again.
Speaker: 1
54:51
But I thought at that moment, and he kinda skittish away. I was like, that’s the last time I’m touching Remus. Like, what am I doing? And and, I mean, I don’t get me wrong.
Speaker: 0
54:58
I had our ai eat you.
Speaker: 1
54:59
Yeah. Well, I have animal care teams there and everything. And they have been some there’s some level of, habituation between, the the care team. They really know and love the care team, but they’re still wild animals. Right? And so They
Speaker: 0
55:09
probably hunted humans. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
55:12
I don’t I don’t I don’t we don’t know. Right? But the rise of kinda going back to their extinction, the rise of the the change in ai of this younger driest period, and the change the massive I don’t know. The it’s some of the stuff that there’s, like, several different prevailing theories, one of which is human predation. Right?
Speaker: 1
55:30
That, like, the rise of humans led to the extinction of the megafauna. That’s kind of, you know, I think I think that the answer is probably a combination. Could have there been an, you know, astrological event? There’s starting to be more and more data around that.
Speaker: 0
55:44
I’m sure you’ve seen Randall Carlson talk about it.
Speaker: 1
55:46
I’ve seen Randall Carlson
Speaker: 0
55:47
talk about it.
Speaker: 1
55:47
Ram Hancock talk about it. And and and they just got the shit beat out of them.
Speaker: 0
55:51
Yeah. But not anymore.
Speaker: 1
55:52
Yeah. You know, the
Speaker: 0
55:53
modern ai impact theory is well respected now. It’s yeah. And it It happened. Yeah. And it and it
Speaker: 1
55:58
definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense. Right? Because you see different which Yeah. Which also attracts 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 up there that rapidly liquefied
Speaker: 0
56:18
Right.
Speaker: 1
56:18
They didn’t dump in the ocean that also changed ocean pattern. So you went from a period, you know, in the that that, ai of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene, there was this period of insanely accelerated cooling.
Speaker: 0
56:31
Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was Uh-huh. Brought to like, his idea is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps, but there’s some sort of, immense cosmic event. And millions and millions of trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ram through the land and just carved deep gouges into the earth. He was on acid.
Speaker: 0
56:56
He was on acid and this idea came down. Some weird idea. He was looking out over a ridge. He was looking at this enormous gorge, and he realized the gorge was formed by water rushing at an insane rate of speed. And then he 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.
Speaker: 0
57:17
And then the way the ground the 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 ai, this is great, and it all tracks. It tracks all over the world.
Speaker: 1
57:32
It’s like it’s like those it reminds me of those stories where they show people, like, the side of the Sphinx. Mhmm. And they’re ai, oh, meh. That’s a lot of water erosion. And then they, like, flip the photo, and then you see the head of the Sphinx. Like, that’s not water erosion.
Speaker: 0
57:44
You know? It’s doctor Robert Chock from Boston University. He 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 Ai was nine thousand years ago.
Speaker: 0
57:58
Yeah. So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of, like, what is the ai that this stuff was actually built? And are we just assuming because we’ve decided that it’s February that that’s it forever, and no one wants to let that go.
Speaker: 1
58:11
Well, that that that I’m not a sai, but that’s and I don’t come from academia. I’m just an entrepreneur that knows how to build teams of smarter people than me, and I find cool shit interesting, and I try to work on it. Right? And what 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 meh.
Speaker: 1
58:29
I just don’t
Speaker: 0
58:30
read the ai. I don’t trust me.
Speaker: 1
58:32
I don’t read the comments. It isn’t Good for you. I sleep quite well. Nice. The, but but, you know, the academic so we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot. We’ve got we fund 17 academic universities, right, all over the world. We fund 40 postdocs, right, all over the world, right, and that that are they’re doing this.
Speaker: 1
58:52
So we’re very integrated with with different ideas from from academia and these scholars. And our top people that were at Colossal came from academia. So Sai think we tried to be very academically friendly, but they live in this world, this super kind of, like, fortune and glory world where it’s, like, it’s a popularity contest if someone has a paper because their entire motivation is publish or or perish.
Speaker: 1
59:13
So one of the other things that people bitch about us is they’re ai, you guys don’t write scientific papers for every single thing you’re using. We’re not an academic university. We’re not allowed. I I don’t have to write a paper on anything ever. We do a couple here and there because we wanna share our knowledge with with the community. Right?
Speaker: 1
59:27
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 3,000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever. Right? Because we’d just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.
Speaker: 0
59:39
And it’s interesting because they wanna impose their idea of what you’re supposed to and not supposed to do.
Speaker: 1
59:44
Well, they wanna impose your their idea that they’ve already established establishment. Sai Yeah. So in addition to the public ai sai advisors and these were some of the top women and men in the world. Right? That fall fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all ai so every single, spectrum out there. They, we have another ai 40 ai. They’re like, we love you.
Speaker: 1
01:00:06
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 and we totally agree with you and we’ll help you. But we submit a paper. They judge my paper. It gets rejected.
Speaker: 1
01:00:16
Then I don’t get my ram. So then I can’t continue my research. I have to fire my post docs. So it’s a complete scam of a system. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:00:22
And so we we went through this phase where it’s ai, 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 per of these, like, these all these things that people threw about threw at us, from the scientific community.
Speaker: 1
01:00:37
And some of our biggest people that hate us are people that we denied their funding.
Speaker: 0
01:00:40
Of course. Well, the the problem is not the scientific community. The problem is weak men. It’s this this what you see in these these squabbles, these, like, ultra personal squabbles, where, like, horrible vitriolic statements made about people, like They’re
Speaker: 1
01:01:00
just not happy people.
Speaker: 0
01:01:01
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 in their work. Their work, these bitchy little people, their work is incredibly important.
Speaker: 1
01:01:17
Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:01:17
But at the core of their being, they’re a bitchy little person.
Speaker: 1
01:01:21
And they can’t and that’s why and that is why we don’t have flying cars. We don’t have mammoths. And until Elon, we were not gonna live on Mars. Right? And so, like, we didn’t have, like, I think It takes time. It yeah. But it it doesn’t come but, also, academia is really focused on point solutions, not full systems. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:01:36
So if you wanna go to Mars or you wanna bring back a mammoth, you have to design the entire system, and you have to innovate across everything. Right. Whereas in academia, you’re you’re only incentivized to get that piece of paper and get that approved.
Speaker: 0
01:01:47
Well, it’s also you’re you’re dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and and given to these institutions saloni with a whole ideology. Like, it’s not just as simple as let’s follow data. It’s all gotta be attached to this very left leaning, almost preposterous in some speak, ideology. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:02:13
And everyone has to say things as a fucking scientist that you’d know is not true.
Speaker: 1
01:02:19
You you should just follow the scientific method. I’m not ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:02:28
Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data. You know? Like, I don’t wanna get into this, but, like, if you’re you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man could be a woman, and which is fine in terms of, like, who you are.
Speaker: 0
01:02:46
But now when you’re having them compete with women in sports, you’ve entered into nonsense saloni, and you’re the person we’re counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject. You’re trapped by an ideology that you’re now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.
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01:03:04
I just wish we could get philosophy. We separate, like, philosophical perspectives from science. We did one of the one of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because it’s, like, once we got the ai sana once we got the money and once we prove that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once In Q Tel, which is a a a a the funding arm of the CIA and other government arya investing in Colossal because of our technologies, and once we started proof points, the the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical.
Speaker: 0
01:03:35
Ai right.
Speaker: 1
01:03:35
They’re like, it’s not a mammoth. Right. It’s not a direwolf. And it’s ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:03:45
So are they saying that it’s not because it didn’t come straight from nature? It’s something that you’ve recreated by piecing this together with that. Like, what what are the genes that you had to use to create a direwolf? We didn’t totally explain this.
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01:03:57
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:03:57
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?
Speaker: 1
01:04:05
So you map them, next to it. And and there was a a study that came out about and once again, this goes back to the status quo of ai, of academic scientists. There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn’t have much data. They said that, dire wolves were closely related weren’t closely related to wolves.
Speaker: 1
01:04:23
They were closely related to jackals. And that’s because at the time, they only had point 15% of the genome. Right? They just didn’t have all the data. This is not negative. They just didn’t have all data.
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01:04:32
Now we know that they actually were close related to wolves because we have more data in the middle of that. Gray wolves or the the the precursor to gray wolves. Right? So, so they were closer to to to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group.
Speaker: 1
01:04:45
And so what we found is so 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 vatsal that there’s differences. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:04:59
So we can start to map and say, okay, where are the differences between gray wolves and where are the differences between gray wolves and dire wolves? And then with those, we have a a lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the dire wolves in a gray wolf cell line.
Speaker: 1
01:05:13
And so, and then once you go through that process, we didn’t talk about this earlier, you do the same process, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively saloni, 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 surrogate.
Speaker: 0
01:05:31
And is this a 100% dire wolf, or is this a new thing?
Speaker: 1
01:05:36
So this is so this goes into the philosophical thing. Right. So if you look at speciation, right, there’s basically the scientists don’t agree on how you classify ai species. So you’ve got certain people that’ll say, well, if it can’t if a species is dictated by something that can’t bryden. That’s literally a definition.
Speaker: 1
01:05:51
Like like, if this animal can’t breed with this animal, then that’s its own species. Then you have other people. You have the paleontologist, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lacovaro, who’s arguably the number one paleontologist in the world that loves us. But then you have other paleontologists who just hate us, and they do it based solely on tooth morphology because they argue that’s the only thing that is gonna be persistent over time.
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01:06:09
And I asked a paleontologist recently that that that hates us. I said, if I made a mammoth with, like that was giant with, like, pink curly fur and it had the right tooth morphology, you’re saying that based on your scientific papers that you would say that’s a mammoth. And she’s like, yes. But that doesn’t matter. And I’m like, well, let’s do it. And so so but then you Why does she hate you guys?
Speaker: 1
01:06:31
Be because Ai why does anyone you know, anytime you do anything in this world now that’s, like, moderately bold or or polarizing people give you pushback.
Speaker: 0
01:06:40
But this is heavily bold. I wouldn’t say this is moderately bold. You made three fucking direwolves. That’s not moderately bold. It’s really kind of one of the one of the craziest things that a human being’s ever done.
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01:06:50
It’s it’s definitely in in the realm. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:06:52
Ai is right up there with inventing the Internet.
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01:06:54
Yeah. So when you see well, and we have more stuff to come that Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:06:57
That I think may be equally interesting. So there’s people out there did you worry that someone is gonna meh, you know because this falls into religious realms.
Speaker: 1
01:07:10
Well, it it’s it’s there’s philosophical and religious. And so, like, back on speciation, you know, polar bears and brown bears are two different species. Right. But they mate and produce ai offspring all the time. And a bear expert will tell you that a polar bear is just a coal aquatic adapted, cold adapted bear.
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01:07:26
Right? Right. And so I always ask people that
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01:07:28
They their their offspring are they can have children. Right? Yes. It’s it’s not like a donkey.
Speaker: 1
01:07:34
Yeah. Exactly. So there’s different ways to characterize
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01:07:37
this. Making a mule rather.
Speaker: 1
01:07:38
But there’s different ways to say something of something. Right? And so, you know, we are not the same. Right? If if I don’t know what percent you probably ram ’23 and meh or something have some percentage Neanderthal. You don’t say that you’re an admixture or a hybrid. You just say you’re human. You don’t you don’t really.
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01:07:51
Robert, that’s a
Speaker: 0
01:07:52
good point though because, Neanderthal if you wanna talk about a different speak, just because they could breed with us, god, they’re so different.
Speaker: 1
01:07:59
But that’s it. But there like I said, there’s six different ways. There’s actually a a species definition that’s based solely on geographics. And there’s a 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 they’re different species.
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01:08:15
And they’re the same fucking toad.
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01:08:18
Just because there’s a road.
Speaker: 1
01:08:19
Just because because we, as humans, changed it’s called geographic isolation of speciation. So it’s just crazy. And so so the only arguments that we now have is, but is it a mammoth? And it’s like, well, then don’t call it a mammoth. You I was like, ai I asked people. I was like, did you see Jurassic Park? And they’re like, yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:08:34
I was like, what was Jurassic Park what was to your what do you think what was Jurassic Park about to you? To me?
Speaker: 0
01:08:40
Yeah. If you’re ai if you’re gonna take
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01:08:41
your kids to see Jurassic Park, what is the movie about? Dinosaurs. Is it? Because they took ancient DNA and they mixed it with a bunch of other stuff. Arya they ai? Or are they or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things? Or are they dinosaurs?
Speaker: 1
01:08:58
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 and a bear and a bear, they’re just that animal. So this goes into this starts the whole religious and philosophical debates where it’s funny because the ai who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don’t like what you’re doing, that’s where they go to.
Speaker: 0
01:09:22
So what was the argument? How did they present it? Oh, it’s
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01:09:25
just ai it’s by their own definition, they’re, like, well, it doesn’t have enough DNA. So I was, like, so if I said, but the second ai that we have or the 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 an, you’re missing the point conversation.
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01:09:45
It’s like, I’m just asking Ai
Speaker: 0
01:09:46
would like to know the point, though. What is her point? Their point What is she what is her overall argument?
Speaker: 1
01:09:51
The general point of the the people is that they wanna pick one speciation definition and adhere us to that. And if you do that, no animal, including our animals, will fall into one species. Right? It’s just people that are using the framework that they set that doesn’t isn’t consistent ai of against the there are based on the argument that they wanna make.
Speaker: 0
01:10:10
Interesting. So species is just something It’s a human construct.
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01:10:14
It’s not
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01:10:15
And it’s just a thing if it can breed with another thing.
Speaker: 1
01:10:18
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.
Speaker: 0
01:10:24
Oh.
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01:10:24
So if I genetically modify them to make it where they can’t breed with wolves, does that mean they’re now
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01:10:28
their own like, it it it
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01:10:29
just gets into this dumb philosophical perspective because we made up this construct.
Speaker: 0
01:10:34
Right. But as a person who studies biology, which this person is. Right? I could kinda understand her perspective where she’s ai, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? How is this group of people with a bunch of money and a bunch of eggheads? How are these geniuses allowed to get together, splice some genes up, and serve up a ai? I could see it from her perspective.
Speaker: 1
01:10:57
100%. Right? But I think that if we don’t do big bold things, it’s it’s important. You know, one of the things that we should definitely show is this.
Speaker: 0
01:11:04
This is just like the guy in Jurassic Park.
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01:11:06
But we should just basically the same with the reality. Yeah. But but but John Hammond worry. But John Hammond, I don’t think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a subplot that, you know, didn’t make it to final cut. We actually sana
Speaker: 0
01:11:18
make an attraction.
Speaker: 1
01:11:19
Yeah. So if we could show the red wolf, I think that’d be amazing because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back, the dire wolf, we, one, make available to conservation.
Speaker: 0
01:11:28
Will this explain the red wolf to people? Because you were saying before, I didn’t even know how few of them there are.
Speaker: 1
01:11:34
Yeah. So, if you go to, the one more. Yeah. So this is a red wolf. That’s Hope. That’s the world’s first cloned red wolf. So I’ve actually made more red wolves than I ai dire wolves. So I’ve made four red wolves, one female.
Speaker: 0
01:11:46
Are you just really freemium? No.
Speaker: 1
01:11:48
No. They’re they’re in a they’re in a ecological preserve as well. And so but you’re you’re gonna you’re gonna die when you hear what I went through on this. So I found out that, you know, we ai to pair every de extinction project with a species preservation project ai of making all of our technology for free. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:12:03
Everything that we make that has an application to conservation, anyone in the world can use to help save animals. They don’t pay us a dime. It’s all open source. It’s all free. We have 48 conservation partners. The team that’s running the Northern White Rhino Project, we’re their exclusive genetic rescue partner.
Speaker: 1
01:12:18
It doesn’t we’re working with elephants in Botswana, working with elephants in Kenya. So anybody can use our technologies for free. Right? We’re working on chytrid fun 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.
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01:12:37
So I met with the the upcoming governor.
Speaker: 0
01:12:39
Are they in other states as well or No.
Speaker: 1
01:12:40
We’ll we’ll meh to that. We’ll get to that. So they’re they’re only recognized by US Fish and Wildlife there. But this incredible woman from, Princeton, you know, top of her field, she’s one of the wolf top wolf geneticists in the world, Bridget Von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have red wolf like characteristics.
Speaker: 1
01:12:59
So she started darting them, taking samples. And what she found is they actually have more, quote unquote, red wolf in them than the red wolves that are being identified in in, North Carolina.
Speaker: 0
01:13:10
And is it part of the problem they’re inbreeding with coyotes?
Speaker: 1
01:13:12
Yeah. But they’ve all been like, these guy like, the ones in North Carolina have all inbred with coyotes. They all the red wolves have some coyote in them because
Speaker: 0
01:13:19
They look like coyotes.
Speaker: 1
01:13:20
Well, because every, every well, the ones in North Carolina even look more like coyotes. Really? And yeah. And because the reality is every single species is what’s called an admixture. They’re all we are everything is inbreeding with everything on some level. Right? And so everything in in life is an admixture. Nothing’s this goes back to the Neanderthal.
Speaker: 0
01:13:37
So this binary idea that we have is silly.
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01:13:40
It’s no. It’s it’s a human caused construct. Right? And they they it’s insane. So, so I went to, some folks from the last administration. Right? And, and I I took some data with meh, and I said, hey. We really wanna help this meh wolf program. We don’t need any money. We open sourced all of our technologies. And, we’ve we’ve used a technology that’s noninvasive for cloning, where we actually take a vial of blood.
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01:14:04
We isolate what’s called endothelial progenitor cells, basically, the the inner lining of your blood vessel. Right? Because there’s no nucleus in blood cells.
Speaker: 0
01:14:11
Uh-huh.
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01:14:11
Sai we catch those. And when we catch those, we then, isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them. Right? Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal. You have to take, ear punches, skin biopsies. It’s actually pretty it’s pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning. We can simply do it.
Speaker: 1
01:14:32
Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot. We give blood all the ai. And so it’s a very non it’s about as noninvasive as as you can get. Right? And so we found a way, which we’ve which we’re open sourcing on Tuesday, is, open sourcing this model of how you go clone from blood, which is a game changer for ai banking because now you don’t have to go herd an animal, take pieces of the animal, anesthetize the animal.
Speaker: 1
01:14:56
We can just take bloods and put them in freezers and be able to bring them back or clone them, if there’s a lack of genetic diversity using this thing. So I I went out to Washington with my team. I showed them showed them hope as a baby and little videos of and you may have videos of of of hope, Jamie.
Speaker: 1
01:15:11
I I don’t know if it’s in the folder. I showed them videos of hope, and I said, hey. You know, there’s there’s only a handful of, there we made these four wolves from three different genetic lines. We made these from we we made these from three different genetic lines. Right? So there’s actually more genetic diversity in these wolves than what’s alive in the population.
Speaker: 1
01:15:31
And we said we’d like for you to help protect the work, that’s being done in Louisiana. And then how many wolves would you like us to make using that population as well as frozen samples that are dead, and we’ll just give them to you. There’s no cost. Here was the feedback. We need to spend five to six years on an internal study and spend $22,000,000 to see if it’s possible to clone wolves.
Speaker: 1
01:15:53
And I was I was blown away.
Speaker: 0
01:15:55
I was like I was like,
Speaker: 1
01:15:55
oh, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t very clear. This is a cloned wolf. Like, here, you can fly with me to the preserve. You’re signing ai the air, but you fly with me to the server. And they’re like, we need to spend five to six years and 20 plus million dollars to go to go understand this, To to understand this policy.
Speaker: 1
01:16:10
We’ll give you all of the technology. And if you tell me you want a hundred wolves, I’ll just make you a hundred wolves, and we’ll even we’ll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you. And the response was, we’ll get back to you. We went to meh we ai to have three other meetings, no shah done vatsal every time when we flew there.
Speaker: 1
01:16:27
I just got back from, meeting with Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife rolls rolls up to, and they’re very, very focused on, you know, innovation, not regulation, which has been pretty amazing.
Speaker: 0
01:16:37
That’s great.
Speaker: 1
01:16:38
And immediately, they said, we celebrate and, Doug Burgum, the the secretary of interior there who we met with sai, we celebrate. He’s a huge conservationist, huge Teddy Roosevelt guy, member of the Explorers Club. And he’s ai, that we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list.
Speaker: 1
01:16:56
Only about 3% 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.
Speaker: 1
01:17:15
He’s like, why wouldn’t we do this? And I was like, why about the previous folks? And they said that we need, you know, five years and 20,000,000. That they they were gonna spend it internally. They weren’t gonna be able to ask to do the feasibility. So they were gonna spend it internally on this.
Speaker: 1
01:17:28
And we’re like, we’ll just do it for free. And he’s like, we will completely support the initiative, and we’re gonna help get you plugged in sai you can help biobank our species and also help us support, you know, red wolf conservation.
Speaker: 0
01:17:39
So when will you start reintroducing these
Speaker: 1
01:17:42
So we just had that meeting last night.
Speaker: 0
01:17:43
Red wolves from hell. You’ve created a lab. They’re gonna start eating people.
Speaker: 1
01:17:50
And so we’re gonna, we just met with them last week.
Speaker: 0
01:17:53
So Well, it’s it’s they’re beautiful. God. They’re so beautiful.
Speaker: 1
01:17:56
Which is it’s like ai we shouldn’t be afraid of innovation. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:17:59
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 Yeah. Are extinct? Yeah. Like, arya we gonna
Speaker: 1
01:18:10
I think you focus on the the species that are critically endangered and are keystone speak, meaning the environment needs them. Right. But the but the ones that we
Speaker: 0
01:18:19
drove back.
Speaker: 1
01:18:19
But the ones that we drove to extinction. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:18:22
Okay. So that’s really So it’s debatable whether or not we drove dire wolves to extinction. We don’t really know what happened ten thousand years ago. I’m inclined to think that when you see the the death of sixty five percent of North American megafauna that happened really quickly.
Speaker: 1
01:18:35
Really quickly.
Speaker: 0
01:18:36
Yeah. I’m I’m inclined to think that these scientists that believe it was an asteroid or a comet impact are correct. I think I think it’s a
Speaker: 1
01:18:42
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 onto, onto a meh at scale, that that, you know, we start to see that. We see that in Australia and other places. But it’s but to your point, it’s much slower. It’s much, much slower.
Speaker: 0
01:19:00
This is a different thing. Yeah. Are you gonna bring back saber tooth tigers?
Speaker: 1
01:19:03
We so we get everyone seems to have their favorite animal up for us to save. Right? Like, the Dire wolves
Speaker: 0
01:19:08
would be my favorite. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:19:10
Dire wolves would
Speaker: 0
01:19:10
be my favorite.
Speaker: 1
01:19:10
Yeah. Dire wolves, you gotta come maybe at some point you’d see them, but I
Speaker: 0
01:19:14
want to.
Speaker: 1
01:19:15
They’re amazing. I mean, they’re they’re they’re just beautiful animals.
Speaker: 0
01:19:18
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:19:19
So, we they’re in there. So saber saber toothed tiger is a class. Sai we put it that as a class. Most commonly, people think of the Smilodon as the saber toothed tiger. There’s not, to date, been really great Smilodon DNA. There is great homotherium DNA, which is another, type of saber tooth cat.
Speaker: 0
01:19:39
Oh, I didn’t know there was more than one type of saber tooth. How many ai there?
Speaker: 1
01:19:41
They they classify them differently, you know, based on it.
Speaker: 0
01:19:43
But Obviously, you’ve been studying this, so you’re thinking about doing it. I’m not I mean, we we
Speaker: 1
01:19:48
like to study ancient DNA. Right? Like like, you know, one of the things where I think that, you know, John Reeves is a % right is people say there were no saber tooth tigers in, Alaska. He that that’s just an incorrect statement. There were no there were probably no Smilodons there, but there are homotheriums which are a saber tooth cat.
Speaker: 0
01:20:08
Yeah. He’s found things that were not supposed to
Speaker: 1
01:20:10
be I Ai I’ve held things in his I he’s Ai I’ve held the Ai Wolf skull in in his, I hope he’s fine if he’s saying that, in his, facility.
Speaker: 0
01:20:21
Yeah. I think he’s talked about that.
Speaker: 1
01:20:23
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:20:23
But they found cave bear, short faced bears. Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:20:26
Yeah. So homotherm is still a saber tooth cat. But when what happens is it this goes back to that philosophical
Speaker: 0
01:20:32
Woah.
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01:20:33
That philosophical perspective. They think that only so if you look up Smilodon in comparison
Speaker: 0
01:20:38
Oh, so this has shorter saber teeth, but still But it does. That CGI image of it again, Jamie, on the left? That’s so fucking cool.
Speaker: 1
01:20:45
Yeah. And and ai I don’t think there I don’t
Speaker: 0
01:20:47
think you should bring something like that back, but if you do, I’m gonna visit it. Ai mean, I wanna see that So why don’t you take down a ai. Look at
Speaker: 1
01:20:54
this pause, bro. There was a I mean, wait till you see the Ai Bro.
Speaker: 0
01:20:58
But that would be so crazy. Now, Ai just gonna sana I want you to do it. Now Give me another large picture of it, Jamie. There’s some other pictures of those. So Ai the one that has the largest teeth?
Speaker: 1
01:21:08
It has the largest known teeth, but when people think of saber tooth tiger, this is what or saber tooth cat.
Speaker: 0
01:21:15
That’s a crazy This is what they think of. Those are crazy. I wonder how why nature wanted it to have that.
Speaker: 1
01:21:21
I mean, probably having to pierce things like mammoth hides and others. They’re quite thick.
Speaker: 0
01:21:24
It has to be. Right? Something where you there’s a genetic advantage. Look at that one on the ai. Lower right, Jamie. Below that to below that to the right to the right. There. Yeah. Right there. Click on that. Look at that, man. Shah.
Speaker: 0
01:21:36
And Ai CGI so I
Speaker: 1
01:21:39
love because we don’t you know what’s amazing? We don’t have the DNA from it. So we have no idea what the color pattern is
Speaker: 0
01:21:45
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:21:45
Which you can see here. Right? It’s like, it’s got a short tail. It’s got long tail. It’s got leopard. It’s got stripes. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:21:49
Right. We don’t even know if they had long tail. They don’t even know if they’re they could have been white. Wow. That would be wild.
Speaker: 1
01:21:55
So we do have there there have been some really well preserved pups and others of in the permafrost of, homotherium. Woah.
Speaker: 0
01:22:05
You’re saying homotherium, we know, has that kind of coloration to it?
Speaker: 1
01:22:09
We don’t, I I don’t wanna say we do or don’t. We have not done the analysis on that ai homotherium yet.
Speaker: 0
01:22:15
Look at that little guy.
Speaker: 1
01:22:16
We do we do have the genome of it, though. Wow. Not that we’re gonna work on.
Speaker: 0
01:22:20
So that one has brown hair.
Speaker: 1
01:22:21
Have you seen the, have you seen the, American, short faced bear? Yeah. That’s the thing I’m probably the most scared of.
Speaker: 0
01:22:28
Yeah. You can’t bring that back.
Speaker: 1
01:22:29
17 or 18 foot giant bear. You can’t bring that back. We’re we’re not working on it. I’m just saying it’s
Speaker: 0
01:22:34
But somebody might. That’s the problem. There might be some fucking crackhead out there that’s got $40,000,000,000 that’s out of his mind.
Speaker: 1
01:22:40
Well, I also think that
Speaker: 0
01:22:41
Like some crazy dude who’s just got the resources
Speaker: 1
01:22:45
That’s insane. Through that. You know? That is that to me is meh scary.
Speaker: 0
01:22:48
It’s a lot of money. That’s
Speaker: 1
01:22:49
a man that’s a land megalodon.
Speaker: 0
01:22:51
Well, that yeah. That is an enormous animal. And they think that’s one of the animals that probably prevented people from crossing the Bering Strait, more
Speaker: 1
01:22:59
I read that.
Speaker: 0
01:23:00
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:23:00
Yeah. It
Speaker: 0
01:23:00
was it’s a theory, but it’s a prop pretty good one.
Speaker: 1
01:23:03
Yeah. If 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.
Speaker: 0
01:23:10
And it is essentially a super polar bear, bear, which is really scary because polar bears are Are terrifying. And completely carnivorous.
Speaker: 1
01:23:16
And they don’t care. They’ll just walk right up to you and kill you.
Speaker: 0
01:23:18
Oh, yeah. There’s 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.
Speaker: 0
01:23:35
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.
Speaker: 1
01:23:42
And it’s just calmly walking towards, like, I’m gonna get in there? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:23:45
It’s it’s Yeah. Polar bears scare me. Very spooky. Well, they’re spooky because they don’t eat anything but meat. So we’re on the menu. Yeah. All humans are on the menu. Anything that walks and breathes is on the menu. I got it here. Where is it? Shit. It’ll take me a few minutes. Sorry.
Speaker: 0
01:24:02
Jamie, pause for a second. Let me find this because it’s good. Okay. I just sent it to you. So, I’m it looks like they’re in I don’t know where they are. It’ll I think it’ll say on the video. So these guys here. Give me some volume.
Speaker: 0
01:24:15
Polar bears. That’s an oil rig. So it’s probably Canada. Ai at these guys. That sound.
Speaker: 1
01:24:28
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:24:30
They’re just trying to eat you. Look at this.
Speaker: 1
01:24:33
I have two more behind
Speaker: 0
01:24:35
it. Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:24:37
Hey. Go on.
Speaker: 0
01:24:41
Go on. Go on.
Speaker: 1
01:24:44
Ai not gonna work.
Speaker: 0
01:24:44
They’re just trying to figure out how to get in to eat you.
Speaker: 1
01:24:47
Hey, sweetheart. Hey.
Speaker: 0
01:24:51
Sweetheart. Sweetheart wants to rip your liver out.
Speaker: 1
01:24:56
Hey. Go on.
Speaker: 0
01:24:58
Ai actually heard beautiful.
Speaker: 1
01:24:59
They are beautiful.
Speaker: 0
01:25:00
It’s interesting that they’re the most dangerous ones because they’re the ones we use for Coca Cola and Klondike bars. Yeah. Ain’t that wild though?
Speaker: 1
01:25:06
You have them just ai playing around in the snow, but they’re actually terrifying.
Speaker: 0
01:25:09
Yeah. You were saying about the younger gyros is really interesting. It’s very, very interesting because it’s a fairly new theory and explains a lot. And especially when you look at the the mass extinction that that did take place during that ai. I would love to have seen what it looked like when all those animals were around.
Speaker: 0
01:25:27
Like, what what was a you know, we ai of have a sense of what because of safaris and videos. We know what it looks like when lions are interacting Right. With wildebeest in Africa. Like, what did it look like in Kansas? Like a Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:25:39
Like a thousand years ago. Yeah. Like, what was it like?
Speaker: 1
01:25:42
You know, there’s a, extinct bison species that is, the bison latifrons. Have you seen
Speaker: 0
01:25:48
those guys?
Speaker: 1
01:25:48
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’re like they have, like, eight foot long Texas longhorns Crazy. On on, like, you know, super HGH, like, bison.
Speaker: 0
01:25:58
Yeah. Our bison are small compared to the extinct bisons. Right? Were they the largest of the North American bison?
Speaker: 1
01:26:04
Yeah. The the Bison waterfronts was.
Speaker: 0
01:26:06
Sai if we can get a photo of that. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:08
There there is I didn’t know about that until
Speaker: 0
01:26:10
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 There’s sana American cheetah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:20
Yes. The 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 dire wolves and saber tooth tigers. Have you seen the Steller speak cow? No. What is that? Think of, like, a manatee or dugong, right, that’s the size of, like, a large whale.
Speaker: 0
01:26:40
What?
Speaker: 1
01:26:41
Yeah. And it but the sad thing is it ai. It it actually died off before. It died off and yeah. Woah. It it died off though within a hundred years of its discovery.
Speaker: 0
01:26:51
When was that? We killed them all, Yeah. We killed them all. They probably turned them into candles or something. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:26:57
They burned their fat. Yeah. Yeah. So but it was actually really important,
Speaker: 0
01:27:03
this Cyrenian
Speaker: 1
01:27:04
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:27:05
To ever exist. It was a hunted extinction only thirty years after being destroyed.
Speaker: 1
01:27:09
Thirty years.
Speaker: 0
01:27:09
Ai in the eighteenth century. Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:27:11
Yeah. And it was and we actually a fuckhead. We have a full genome of this too, which is pretty We can’t just I would bring this back in a heartbeat. It was hugely important to the kelp forest of the Pacific Northwest. It was great. It’s a great it’s not scary. It’s huge. It’s ai Right.
Speaker: 1
01:27:25
But then another reason
Speaker: 0
01:27:26
why bring that back. Why wouldn’t you bring back a megalodon?
Speaker: 1
01:27:29
There is no megalodon DNA. There’s none? No. I will say that the the CEO of the largest, the the president and CEO of the largest free museum in Meh, really wants me to do Nickelodeon. But he’s ai, I can never say it publicly. Ai know. He just outed him. Yeah. But but there’s a lot of museums.
Speaker: 1
01:27:52
I I could be wrong on the size. Yeah. Whatever. He’s great, though. But there is there is no DNA.
Speaker: 0
01:27:56
He would have to eat a lot. And we already killed everything in the ocean.
Speaker: 1
01:27:59
So one of the things that’s weird and interesting that we’re also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal. Because if you wanna get get to this world where you could productionize endangered speak, like northern white rhinos, instead of having to use surrogates for an animal welfare perspective.
Speaker: 1
01:28:13
You know, you 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. You could then reintroduce them, you know, with, folks in the field that are the rewilding experts. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:28:31
And so we we were really not focusing on the we ai of rely on third parties on the rewilding modeling, and all of our, you know, our 48 conservation partners. We are really just gonna focus on the ai of the core science that supports their initiatives. But if if we are successful with our artificial wombs and we are quite, we arya 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.
Speaker: 1
01:28:56
But if a mouse Do
Speaker: 0
01:28:57
you guys have these conversations where you sit down, you go, how does this scale outward? What does this look ai, this technology in a hundred years? Did we just fuck up? No. I think I I think that
Speaker: 1
01:29:06
if you look at the birthing crisis that that we’re in and and ai of population decline price crisis, I think that you you look at global like, people having, women having kids later, IVF clinics, people, freezing their embryos, all of that’s massively on 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?
Speaker: 1
01:29:35
So it’s not a good look for the future of humanity in general. And so Ai think though, you know, especially and then we also have philosophical and, you have religious, you have philosophical, and then you have socio socio socio issues. Right? That people have different perspectives on, like, having kids, having kids, same sex couples get all these things.
Speaker: 1
01:29:56
So we vatsal Colossal have kinda made this mandate that we’re not gonna work on humans. Right? Because it’s it’s just it gets too weird. We get asked the Neanderthal and the dinosaur question every fucking day. So we’re just not gonna, like, bridge that gap. What we’ll do is spin off those technologies.
Speaker: 1
01:30:09
But I do think I do think it is harder to grow a rhino in a artificial womb or exogenous development system than it is a human. Not not ethically or through an FDA process, but I it is scientifically harder to to gestate some of the animals who are trying to gestate ex utero.
Speaker: 1
01:30:26
So I do think that some of those technologies could make it eventually into the human population population.
Speaker: 0
01:30:30
That’s where it gets really weird. Right? You could create a child with no mother or father.
Speaker: 1
01:30:35
I 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, you know, we we did not grow up in an artificial womb.
Speaker: 0
01:30:48
Yeah. But, I mean, the the the people that are skeptical about this stuff, this is what they point to. It’s ai, what what is involved in the creation of life? Well, it’s been people having sex and then a sperm fertilizes the egg, a child born was born. They they raise the ai. They meh some of their behavior characteristics. It gets the genetics, and then we integrate it into a community and there’s, like, a lot.
Speaker: 0
01:31:13
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? Like
Speaker: 1
01:31:21
No. It’s a good it’s a great philosophy.
Speaker: 0
01:31:22
How much of the child’s development is taking place while it’s in the mother
Speaker: 1
01:31:27
And and and getting
Speaker: 0
01:31:28
those sharing
Speaker: 1
01:31:29
that shared experience, the hormonal cues, and whatnot. Yes. I wouldn’t have a child that way.
Speaker: 0
01:31:34
Right. What if you’re making a sociopath? Like, what if you’re making a completely opposite no empathy.
Speaker: 1
01:31:40
There’s no connection.
Speaker: 0
01:31:41
No connection to people. They come out out of the gate, Ted Kaczynski, all fucked up. Like, really, that’s No.
Speaker: 1
01:31:46
It’s it’s a fair it’s a fair point, you know.
Speaker: 0
01:31:48
We don’t know what the process is while a baby is inside of a woman’s body.
Speaker: 1
01:31:52
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.
Speaker: 0
01:31:59
What I the question was when this scales out Yeah. When you scale out a hundred years from now, like, what did you just do?
Speaker: 1
01:32:06
Well, I think I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if if we had a world where we like, the if if colossal gets ultimate success, I’d say that we’ve successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat. We’ve ai these mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including you knew your your picture of what did the Arctic look like
Speaker: 0
01:32:26
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:32:26
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 Pleistocene Park by, Sergey Nikita Zimov, they’ve actually shown that rewilding Northern Siberia with cold tolerant megafauna actually, can revitalize the ecosystem.
Speaker: 1
01:32:43
It can add more biodiversity. It can actually, keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter, so it sequesters more carbon. So I think this eco this idea of nature based and living with nature in a in an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at.
Speaker: 1
01:33:01
And I hope that, you know, Colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the the, endangered species list.
Speaker: 0
01:33:07
So what you were talking about, you were talking about mammoth specifically, the study that showed that Yeah. It would help.
Speaker: 1
01:33:12
But they’ve already done it with, like, musk ox, horses, and a few other species up there. So they’re doing they’re doing it right now. There’s a they they’ve done been doing it for over twenty years.
Speaker: 0
01:33:22
And there was some talk about eventually doing this with mammoths and then releasing those mammoths into Siberia.
Speaker: 1
01:33:29
Yeah. That was one of the that was something that that Larry or that, that, Sergei Nikita Zimov wanted to do.
Speaker: 0
01:33:36
How long before some Russian oligarch hunts ram mammoth Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:33:40
I I meh, look, given the geopolitical you know, we see going back to your wolf example, we see boundaries in geopolitical lines. Right? The animals don’t. Right? And so we will probably not rewild our first ram mammoths in Siberia for many reasons.
Speaker: 0
01:33:56
But you think you will rewild the mammoth?
Speaker: 1
01:33:58
Yeah. I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at, colossal.com/tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around, like, everyone from academia to private landowners to indigenous people groups, governments to understand, like like, we don’t have a thylacine.
Speaker: 1
01:34:18
We’re we I think we’ll have a thylacine in the next eight years. Ai really do. I think based on where we are, current course and speed, there’s seventy million years of genetic divergence between a fat tyler dunnart, which is ai a mouse sai marsupial and a wolf in in in in this.
Speaker: 1
01:34:32
Right? But we actually and if you just kinda scroll through into the people So
Speaker: 0
01:34:36
it’s a wolf like marsupial. Yeah. Does it actually have a pouch that is
Speaker: 1
01:34:40
It does. It actually also sai a backward pouch. So most most pouches, other than, like, the wombat, are forward facing. His backwards was because it was they think because it was a burrowing it burrowing animal. Oh. So that way you
Speaker: 0
01:34:52
can touch the babies.
Speaker: 1
01:34:53
Yeah. Like, absolutely.
Speaker: 0
01:34:54
Them. But Nature’s fascinating. But if
Speaker: 1
01:34:56
you scroll down a little bit further, you’ll see, and just, ai, if you just do a quick scroll, you’ll see that we actually, have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don’t have thylacines. We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacine with in in one of the the groups that we have in involved in it is the logging commission.
Speaker: 1
01:35:16
It’s going back to your, you know, how does how does how do we live with nature kinda, like, with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers. Well, the biggest economic driver right now in in, Tasmania is actually the, logging commission. So if you think that you’re gonna reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a and into the forest without them having a a perspective, then I think that’s just a naive way to look at the world.
Speaker: 1
01:35:41
And so we going back, like, the thylacine in Mammoth and others, we try to build these working groups in ahead of time so that people can get excited about, you know, you know, what are the challenges? What are the unintended consequences? And that’s not our job to persuade them. It’s just our job to kinda listen to them and then figure it out.
Speaker: 1
01:35:59
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, traumatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.
Speaker: 0
01:36:10
So when you have a rewilding strategy, what experts do you bring in to have this discussion of what kind of an impact this could I mean, you haven’t done any rewilding, which would be clear to everybody. Yes. They’re not releasing dire wolves.
Speaker: 1
01:36:22
Dire wolves. And the woolly mice are not getting released. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:36:25
Right. Yeah. Meh. So this is all theoretically. Yes. But if you do have one, what would be the per what would you look at specifically? How do you take into account all the different species the do you take into account, ai, with the thylacine particularly because it’s a large predator, the amount of animals it’s going to eat.
Speaker: 0
01:36:42
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.
Speaker: 1
01:36:51
So on the evolved part, this is actually kinda weird. We’re so so you do ecological field studies. So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, ai, people that understand predation, people that understand the land. So you have to work with these ai of big working groups.
Speaker: 1
01:37:05
We have a project going on right now in central, Tasmania, which is amazing. And this you know the old school, like, Looney Tunes, like, ai, Wile E. Coyote where he’s, like and he, like, goes through a wall and there’s, like, a hole or the Kool Aid man. Right? Well, if you had that cutout, we made a cut we made cutouts and painted them of of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and and other thing and wolves and other things.
Speaker: 1
01:37:25
And we put them out near camera traps in Vatsal Tasmania. And, when we’ve reviewed the data, you’ll have, like, a quoll or a wombat or one of these animals kind of walking through or or even a wallaby kinda walking through. And they’ll see a cat. They’ll see a cut, and they’ll kinda look at it.
Speaker: 1
01:37:40
When they see and remember, to your point, there’s hundreds this is for them, it’s multiple generations. Right? Because these animals don’t live hundreds of years. And so when they see the cutout in shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze, they absolutely freak out.
Speaker: 0
01:37:55
Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:37:56
Yeah. So we have we we’ve been collecting this data for, eighteen months. We’re publishing a paper on it.
Speaker: 0
01:38:01
So that is so cool.
Speaker: 1
01:38:02
There’s there’s, like, generational trauma Yeah. That is baked in to their DNA. Oh, wow. To to avoid a thylacine.
Speaker: 0
01:38:10
What’s the only way they ai? I mean, without a language to pass down information. How what Yeah. You know, it may it makes you wonder, like, how much of that is in us? Like, what when people have aphidophobia, you know, or arachnophobia Yeah. Fear of snakes and spiders, like, what is that from? Like, because it’s crippling. I’ve seen people that have crippling fear of ai, where it doesn’t even make any sense.
Speaker: 0
01:38:30
So they probably somebody got almost killed by a bryden, and that’s inside of them. Right. You know, that those genes passed on. And then you see
Speaker: 1
01:38:40
a spider
Speaker: 0
01:38:41
just they freak out, man. We when Ai was doing Fear Factor, we had if we found out that someone had a fear of spiders or a fear of snakes, guess what?
Speaker: 1
01:38:48
That was on the show.
Speaker: 0
01:38:49
That’s on the show.
Speaker: 1
01:38:50
Yeah. And that’s ai me in Heights. It’s like every every episode you had back in the day in Heights.
Speaker: 0
01:38:53
That’s because you’re smart.
Speaker: 1
01:38:54
Yeah. It’s, like, fucking terrifying.
Speaker: 0
01:38:56
I’m like
Speaker: 1
01:38:56
It’s terrifying.
Speaker: 0
01:38:57
Yeah. Whenever I’m in a fucking hotel ai I’m on, like, the 50 Floor, like, why?
Speaker: 1
01:39:01
Why? Yeah. Why? Like, so I don’t have, like, real noise. I’m like, this is gonna be really hard to get out of here.
Speaker: 0
01:39:06
It’s so sketchy. Yeah. It’s so scary. It’s just ai the building moves a little bit when it it’s windy. Yeah. Fuck all this. I saw my toilet water shaking the other day. Fuck that.
Speaker: 1
01:39:15
No. Here?
Speaker: 0
01:39:16
Yeah. Jamie. Oh, I live up high. He lives way up high. Jamie sends me pictures from his house. I freak out. Like, no.
Speaker: 1
01:39:21
No. I can’t. No. No. No. I’m not.
Speaker: 0
01:39:23
I wouldn’t I just I like to be on the ground. Like to be on the ground. Well, I
Speaker: 1
01:39:26
hate flying too, which which sucks because I fly. Yeah. I’m like I I fly all the time.
Speaker: 0
01:39:30
Just counting on these fucking screws and bolts and shit. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:39:33
Yeah. Because because, like, the worst is, like, when you’re sitting there, and there’s now been, like, these renders of planes that have, like, glass or plexi Sai don’t wanna see that. Yeah. I want like, I get mad if I get on a plane and the people don’t shut the window. So Ai was like, I don’t I I’m in the bowl. I’m I’m in the tube. Yeah. Just close the ai. Sai just I just wanna go. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:39:50
I get Just close the glass. Think about the point where you’re sitting in a chair and then you look down and you have a floor, you’re ai, that that’s not there’s not that much there’s, like, 10,000 feet, you know, three three thousand feet below me.
Speaker: 0
01:40:02
When you see something like the one that happened in Canada where the plane flipped upside down too, you just like that. You can’t get that one out of your area.
Speaker: 1
01:40:08
A Delta Airlines life. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t ai Yeah. Whoopsies. Crazy airline you’ve never heard of.
Speaker: 0
01:40:13
Was it a person who was not that good at flying and kinda recent? Yeah. Like, hey. Yeah. Hire someone better.
Speaker: 1
01:40:20
Yeah. And I bryden and I go to DC a decent amount. And so, like, the whole DC thing, like, absolutely freaked me out. Oh,
Speaker: 0
01:40:25
yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:40:25
Because I sometimes Sai 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
Speaker: 0
01:40:32
That they’re not on
Speaker: 1
01:40:33
the ground,
Speaker: 0
01:40:33
but look how much the water is shaking at this pool. Oh, yeah. Do you see the one in Thailand? This is this is where it was.
Speaker: 1
01:40:38
Oh, did
Speaker: 0
01:40:38
you see the water that’s flying off the roofs? Yeah. In the in
Speaker: 1
01:40:41
the, in the
Speaker: 0
01:40:42
flying off the roofs where you see, like, from the ground. It looks like it’s raining. It’s crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:40:48
Anyways.
Speaker: 0
01:40:49
Yeah. Well, those that is that would be the last day I would spend in that fucking room.
Speaker: 1
01:40:53
Yeah. You’re out.
Speaker: 0
01:40:54
Ai, that’s it. It’s like in my sana. Bye bye.
Speaker: 1
01:40:57
If I saw a ghost, I’m like, alright. I’m moving.
Speaker: 0
01:40:58
Yeah. Bye bye. Maybe. Maybe the ghost is cool. I’m not totally scared of ghosts, because I don’t think ghosts tyler kill anybody. You know, I’m scared of thylacines. I’m not scared
Speaker: 1
01:41:08
of thylacines. They arya off the size of a grain of rice. I’ve not It’s sana be really nice to them. Total everything. It’s kinda like AI. You gotta be really nice to it.
Speaker: 0
01:41:15
Yes. I I I I
Speaker: 1
01:41:17
saw a great gift Ai saw this this this great image on on x the other day that is, like, it’s got all the robots lining up to kill humans. And he’s, like, no. Not this one. It said thank you in its request. Oh, boy. So I was, like, I’m gonna be very nice on all of my requests on Ram.
Speaker: 0
01:41:32
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?
Speaker: 1
01:41:43
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:41:43
Like, I have no desire to harm them. Ai try to protect them. If I’m driving on the driveway and one of them is in the middle of the driveway, I have to be very very slow and meh her cross and but I eat chicken.
Speaker: 1
01:41:54
Did you see that study that that came out, a couple weeks ago that having two eggs oh, I I I’m gonna get the numbers wrong. But you have two eggs if you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer’s by, like, forty seven percent.
Speaker: 0
01:42:07
Yeah. It turns out Alzheimer’s connected to a lot of stuff that’s in
Speaker: 1
01:42:11
the diet. Inflammation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately saying that, Gary said it was, I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was, ai, it is now becoming a more popular belief that it’s diabetes type three.
Speaker: 0
01:42:24
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard that. So Which is really weird to think of it that way. But it’s just just so much. I mean, obviously, you know this now because you’re on a a health path.
Speaker: 1
01:42:33
Yeah.
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01:42:34
You know, and you you feel much better.
Speaker: 1
01:42:35
I feel incredible. I mean,
Speaker: 0
01:42:36
I Isn’t it nuts? How many people are just running around out there feeling like shit?
Speaker: 1
01:42:40
Well, I was. I 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 I built a handful of different technology companies. My last company was a satellite software and defense company and was building it, running ai.
Speaker: 1
01:42:55
And, this was in early late ’20 ’20 ai, early ’20 ’20. I had to be in Tokyo, and I ai to be in Shanghai. So I came back. I went to CES, the big consumer electronics show in in Vegas. Saw everyone in the world, right, that’s there because it’s stupid big.
Speaker: 1
01:43:09
Week and a half later, I’m in NASA Marshall, with the director there, because we’re doing some work for NASA at the time at my last company. And I was with one of, my number two my number two at the company, this guy named Greg, who’s our chief strategy officer. We he was coughing.
Speaker: 1
01:43:24
He wasn’t feeling well. We both were kinda feeling like shit. I was like, oh, we’ve been on the road a lot. We’ve been drinking. We came back, on a Friday. On Friday night, we had we were going back on Slack around talking about aliens and shit.
Speaker: 1
01:43:33
And then the next day, I got a call from his wife that he had a sudden cardiac event.
Speaker: 0
01:43:37
Oh, Jesus.
Speaker: 1
01:43:38
And so that for me was a big wake up call because I got really sick during COVID. Like, I was on that early strain of of of COVID. And there’s definitely multiple strains. I don’t care what anyone tells you. There was definitely multiple things that came out of the thing. And and and so I got super, super sick. And, you know, I I I now rarely drink. I rarely have caffeine.
Speaker: 1
01:43:58
You know, I’ve I’ve kinda tried to cut out stuff. I exercise regularly. And looking at all these things that people think are weird or or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a, cold plunge meh light. I I do that every day now.
Speaker: 0
01:44:11
Every day?
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01:44:12
Every day.
Speaker: 0
01:44:12
Yeah. That’s beautiful. That’s awesome, man. You’re lifting weights too?
Speaker: 1
01:44:15
Yeah. Lifting weights on a regimen. Everything.
Speaker: 0
01:44:17
That’s so important. Yeah. So important. And I tell people it’s not even a vanity thing. Don’t do it because you want big muscles. Preserve your tissue. Yeah. Preserve your bone mass.
Speaker: 1
01:44:26
Well, I mean, I I don’t wanna be to like, I now have a nine month old son. Right? And he, like, wants to hang out and, you know, he’s gonna get bigger. And if I can’t pick him up, that’s a sad day.
Speaker: 0
01:44:35
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:44:35
You know? And I I I’ve kinda gotten this mindset of, like, you know, I see people that are older that are in wheelchairs or can’t walk. It’s, like, it’s kind of a blessing to walk. It It is. So so, like, why why would I squander that blessing? Ai would I not, like, lean into it and make sure that when I’m 90, I can walk?
Speaker: 0
01:44:52
Yeah. It’s a blessing to be healthy. It’s a blessing. I mean, it’s just we’re we’re so concerned about our day to day existence ai we lose track of this big picture. Yeah. You have the opportunity to do something that if it wasn’t possible, you would wish it was possible and that is get healthier.
Speaker: 0
01:45:10
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, diet doesn’t change it. This is just who you are as a being and it goes away. But that’s not even remotely true. It’s actually the opposite.
Speaker: 0
01:45:25
There’s there’s friends that I have that are my age and they look like they’re my dad. Yeah. And that’s that’s because they’ve been drinking and smoking and and sleeping late and fucking off their whole life and no exercise at all, and your body deteriorates.
Speaker: 1
01:45:39
Yeah. And I’m I’m not, like, I’m on the journey. I’m not at the end. Right?
Speaker: 0
01:45:42
It
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01:45:43
is a constant journey.
Speaker: 0
01:45:44
I’m on the journey. We’re all on the journey. There’s no end.
Speaker: 1
01:45:46
Started working with Gary. Like, I did have you have you seen this function test? Have you done the function test?
Speaker: 0
01:45:51
What is the function test?
Speaker: 1
01:45:51
It’s ai function health. It’s like a it’s just a sai. It’s just all if you go to your doctor, like, I do quarterly blood work, but then I also then do this, the function test, which is just a massively all encompassing blood. It’s, like, two tests twice a year. And, and so I I do that test.
Speaker: 1
01:46:08
And, after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my my biological age or my actual age is is 43. My, my biological age is 35.
Speaker: 0
01:46:18
That’s amazing.
Speaker: 1
01:46:18
But it it’s just been working for a year with with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients. You know, I buy and you can actually taste the difference. Right? Like, if you go to a store and get speak or chicken, you and and you even if it’s, like, free range and all that shit, it tastes great.
Speaker: 1
01:46:35
It it tastes better than, like, something that you buy just that’s that’s terrible at a at a store. But when you order from some of these, like, true, like, Amish places and in places that have actually, like, grown the food, like, completely natural that is doesn’t have just a fake pre purchased Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:46:51
Certified organic. You can taste the difference in the nutrient density. It it’s it’s insane.
Speaker: 0
01:46:56
And Have you ever had a lot of wild game?
Speaker: 1
01:46:58
Yeah. So that’s what I order now. So I order a bunch so I do elk steaks. I do I do a lot of steaks, from, this farm that that Gary, meh to me. It’s just great.
Speaker: 0
01:47:08
Is it bison? Do they have bison?
Speaker: 1
01:47:09
They do have bison too. Yeah. It’s Parker Pastures. They’re just ai, when I have a a steak from these guys, like, it’s been ai, you can taste it. And I had I’ve had, like, my brother-in-law and my my father-in-law had friends. I was ai I was like, no. No. We’re gonna try these steaks out of the freezer. I was like, we’re not ai, we’re not just gonna buy steak.
Speaker: 0
01:47:24
It looks different.
Speaker: 1
01:47:25
It looks different. Yeah. It looks like the color
Speaker: 0
01:47:26
is get a 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 ai Grass finished. %. A lot of ranches out here Yeah. You know, this 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 ai a dark red meat.
Speaker: 1
01:47:47
Yeah. It looks completely different, but the
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01:47:48
taste different.
Speaker: 1
01:47:49
The take you want to eat more of it. Like, I feel full, but I want to finish it. And I also feel like I’m like, my body likes this because it’s getting shit that it hasn’t even
Speaker: 0
01:47:58
been getting. You feel better when you eat it. Like, you literally feel energized. Yeah. You know, I’ve given people elk before. Yeah. One of the things I say is, like, dude, I have so much energy. I’m like, meh. Welcome to my world.
Speaker: 1
01:48:08
It’s awesome.
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01:48:09
It it it is it is
Speaker: 1
01:48:10
so great. But that was in the early days of of Colossal, that was one of the things that we got asked by by, like, heads of state. Like, not not by, like, you know, just random people. Random people on the Internet too. Mostly, like like, some people at large, at different locations.
Speaker: 1
01:48:24
They’re like, can we eat them? Can we vatsal mammoth? What’s it taste like? That was like that question came up faster than we thought. Jesus Christ. I know.
Speaker: 1
01:48:33
That was in the first
Speaker: 0
01:48:34
so weird.
Speaker: 1
01:48:35
And they and they like, they just don’t it remind Ai have wanted
Speaker: 0
01:48:37
to eat something that’s been extinct for ten thousand years, you just bring it back. And that’s not even yet. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:48:42
And and that was the first question.
Speaker: 0
01:48:43
Can I eat this? Yeah. I won’t will eat my mistake, my friend.
Speaker: 1
01:48:47
It was also meh, the the question. I’ve been domestic. Domestic? Yeah. Ai, people people in psychos. Ai know.
Speaker: 0
01:48:54
Too much money. Yeah. Fucking psychos.
Speaker: 1
01:48:56
Yeah. It’s it’s been it’s it’s been Go buy
Speaker: 0
01:48:58
a car, you retards.
Speaker: 1
01:49:00
It’s been sana a mammoth.
Speaker: 0
01:49:02
That’s so crazy. We get
Speaker: 1
01:49:03
the die we get that. We get we get so many weird questions. Well We get the dinosaur question. Probably ai number one question we get is, is the dinosaur question.
Speaker: 0
01:49:12
Do you think if they brought if Jurassic Park, if Spielberg did it today, they’d have feathers?
Speaker: 1
01:49:18
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 were just scalar. We we have preserves of them. We we can see
Speaker: 0
01:49:28
Yeah.
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01:49:29
In the fossil record whether they had it. Right? Have you
Speaker: 0
01:49:31
seen the one that’s in the university in Bozeman, 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. And, you know, you look at it, you go, oh.
Speaker: 0
01:49:53
It’s just ai, oh, that’s a fucking it’s a bird. Yeah. Like, now it makes sense. Like, it makes more sense with its little stupid arms. Like, makes more ai.
Speaker: 1
01:50:02
It’s a bird. Have you seen the Watson? No. Can we can we pull up a Watson? Sai this is a bird that lives today in the Amazon. And it it is Vatsal. It’s called a or Hoatzen. I think
Speaker: 0
01:50:12
it’s called a
Speaker: 1
01:50:12
I don’t know how you spell it, but it’s, like, h o a t z e n or something like that. We we can find it. Yeah. Apparently, it also smells terrible. Oh. But if you click if you type in, oh, yes. It’s the Hoatzin. And then if you click in, and find a baby picture, it’s got these little creepy hands.
Speaker: 1
01:50:29
It looks like a it looks like kind of ai a bird like dinosaur. We we did the genome on this for fun. So oh, yeah. You can see it. It’s ai it it climbs. So before it ever climbs, it actually climbs up everything.
Speaker: 0
01:50:40
Well, when you look at an eagle’s talon, you’re like, what the hell is that?
Speaker: 1
01:50:44
And then it evolves. Like, if you, the, the first kind of, like, quote, unquote dinosaur bird out there, it actually, yeah, it crawls. It crawls ai
Speaker: 0
01:50:56
Uh-oh.
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01:50:56
It doesn’t fly. You know, most birds just sit there with their little, like, wing nubs and just don’t do anything. These guys actually climb.
Speaker: 0
01:51:04
What about terror birds? Oh, yeah. This is scary. Well, 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?
Speaker: 1
01:51:14
Oh, those are millions. Millions. Right? Yeah. So The oldest DNA that we have is about 1,500,000 years old.
Speaker: 0
01:51:19
That’s it? Yeah. Is that the dinosaurs are out of the picture?
Speaker: 1
01:51:22
So so you can a guy ai should talk to about not that, but that’s interesting is, Kenneth Lacovara. He discovered the four largest dinosaurs of all time, including ai us, which is just it’s the it’s the craziest thing ever. And going back Dreadnought. Dreadnoughtus. And going back to the issues that What is Dreadnoughtus? Oh, Dreadnoughtus is amazing. So I don’t know if you’ll take that.
Speaker: 0
01:51:45
What? Imagine if you did that. What cool colors. Yeah. It was so it’s a plan eight.
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01:51:50
Yes. Yeah. It’s a plan eight.
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01:51:51
It’s a ai of
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01:51:52
seven sevens.
Speaker: 0
01:51:54
But but going back It’s almost as big as a seven thirty seven. That’s so crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:51:58
Going back to this crazy notion of museums, he founded in Argentina, and he he, like, he’s a Kent Flaccavarra, he’s amazing. He found it in Argentina, discovered the species, named the species, and, he brought it he he brought it, to, New Jersey to do all the modeling and all that.
Speaker: 1
01:52:20
The government changed, and they yanked it back. You you know the old school, like, the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That’s where it is. It’s basically in a warehouse. So it’s on display for people in a museum. It’s literally this this goes back to some of these these governments and these museums.
Speaker: 1
01:52:36
It’s literally, like, not on it’s in a bunch of crates in Western Argentina.
Speaker: 0
01:52:41
Really?
Speaker: 1
01:52:41
Yeah. And it’s, like, the coolest thing ever. This is yeah. So yeah. That’s Lacovara’s lab. And so, but it but it’s it’s truly, truly amazing.
Speaker: 0
01:52:50
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.
Speaker: 1
01:52:59
Fill in a lot of blanks. Sometimes they’ll get, like, a jaw bone and they’re, like, and here’s the reconstruction.
Speaker: 0
01:53:04
Right. It’s weird because you go to see it, you think you’re going to see a a dinosaur bone. But
Speaker: 1
01:53:09
it’s only a a percentage complete.
Speaker: 0
01:53:10
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 Yeah. Versus and you’re ai, how much of this do you have?
Speaker: 1
01:53:19
And they’re like 4%. Yeah. How did
Speaker: 0
01:53:21
you guess what it looked like? Like and a lot of the images, ai, of like the soft tissue overlay, like, when they take the bones and then they create an animal out of it. Like, have you ever seen, like, what, like, rabbits look like if you take away their
Speaker: 1
01:53:33
Yeah. They did this with, like, whales and stuff. And you look absolutely. If you look at them, they ai like the scariest things ever. And then you put a whale in there, and you’re like, oh, that’s not the worst
Speaker: 0
01:53:41
thing. Thing. Yeah. For whales, you you see them, and you look at them, you’re like, oh, they’re sweet. Yeah. Just chilling in the water. But if you see them with the teeth and everything and just the skeleton
Speaker: 1
01:53:50
It looks like it looks like an alien monster.
Speaker: 0
01:53:52
Yeah. Like an alien monster.
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01:53:53
Yeah.
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01:53:54
So I wonder what we were looking at.
Speaker: 1
01:53:56
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. Yeah. A giant beaver sounds amazing and stupid. It’s When
Speaker: 0
01:54:09
did that thing die off?
Speaker: 1
01:54:10
I don’t know. Ai probably have to be it it would probably be in the late Pleistocene.
Speaker: 0
01:54:15
One of the things Ai learned through Rinella is that, at the founding of this country in the early days, the richest man in the world was selling beaver pelts.
Speaker: 1
01:54:24
Oh, really?
Speaker: 0
01:54:24
It was the richest guy in the world. Yeah. Here at the
Speaker: 1
01:54:27
Pleistocene. Well, on the dinosaur bone
Speaker: 0
01:54:30
So this beaver, giant beaver, enormous, bear sized beaver that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Wow. So when did these die off? What year?
Speaker: 1
01:54:40
What was the Pleistocene officially? Sai about thirteen thousand years ago.
Speaker: 0
01:54:45
Could have been the same thing. Twelve thousand years ago. Wow. So it probably died off
Speaker: 1
01:54:48
During that same American lion Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:54:50
And all that other stuff. And, you know, the the pronghorn, you know the whole story about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why they’re so fast.
Speaker: 1
01:54:58
Oh, for because the American lion?
Speaker: 0
01:54:59
No. American cheetah. American cheetah. Like, they’re the last of these animal. They’re a bizarre animal. Have you ever seen one in real life? I’ve
Speaker: 1
01:55:05
never seen one in real life.
Speaker: 0
01:55:06
I’ve only seen it through binoculars. I’ve never seen one, you know, on the ground real close. I’ve only seen it from a few hundred yards away. But when you look at images of them, they have insane eyesight. They have almost 360 degree vision. Their eyes are on the side of their heads.
Speaker: 1
01:55:22
Yeah. Literally.
Speaker: 0
01:55:22
By and they can run 55 miles an hour.
Speaker: 1
01:55:25
That’s amazing. And the
Speaker: 0
01:55:26
reason why they can run so fast is because they were getting chased by cheetahs that don’t exist anymore. Yeah. So the cheetahs died off in the Younger Dryas impact fever or whatever happened. But these pronghorn antelopes remain, and they are there’s nothing like them in terms of speed.
Speaker: 1
01:55:41
That’s awesome.
Speaker: 0
01:55:42
Like, it’s really bizarre because they’re a remnant of an older past Right. Where they had to be that fast to avoid the predators, but the predators are gone, they remain.
Speaker: 1
01:55:49
Yes. Sai you even catch them now?
Speaker: 0
01:55:50
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 cheetah, the cheetahs were chasing these motherfuckers down.
Speaker: 0
01:56:09
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.
Speaker: 1
01:56:20
It’s awesome.
Speaker: 0
01:56:21
But the vision that these things have give me a a photo of one of their heads, pronghorn’s eyes. They’re so weird looking. They look archaic. Like, if you if you see their face, they don’t look ai they it looks like they’re from another time.
Speaker: 1
01:56:35
Looks like from a Star Wars movie.
Speaker: 0
01:56:37
Yeah. They look like they’re from another time. Yeah. And they are.
Speaker: 1
01:56:41
They’re literally on the side there.
Speaker: 0
01:56:42
Yeah. They this is what would have been so amazing to, like, look at what the Earth looked like, you know, 12,000
Speaker: 1
01:56:49
ago. It is it is cool, like America. Like, to 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 sai, ai, going to Kruger National Park or looking at some of these places in Africa Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:57:03
When you go to Vatsal Tasmania, it’s almost like a weird Disney movie. Like like, at dusk, you’ve got, like, echidnas running around, and you’ve got wallabies jumping jumping through. It it and they all just come through, and you’re
Speaker: 0
01:57:15
like I
Speaker: 1
01:57:15
guess, it it’s like that scene in, like, Ace Ventura, right, where he sings, like, everything fucking comes to him. And I and, like, I remember the first I was like, this isn’t real. Like, are these animatronic 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 the echidnas are running. The wallabies are are jumping.
Speaker: 1
01:57:32
You’ve got, like, wombats, like, kind of, like, kind of scurrying saloni, and you’re just, like there’s all these weird, dumb animals that are just excited. You know? They’re so strange to us, right, in terms of, like, how we think about them because you never see them. But then there’s just, like, this insane plethora of them.
Speaker: 1
01:57:46
They’re just so many. It’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:57:48
Well, I wonder what would be different had the thylacine survived.
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01:57:52
So they sai So
Speaker: 0
01:57:53
it was kind of the only thing
Speaker: 1
01:57:54
It was it was the only apex predator for Tasmania in Lower Australia. And, have you seen a Tasmanian devil in person?
Speaker: 0
01:58:02
Not in person.
Speaker: 1
01:58:02
They’re awesome.
Speaker: 0
01:58:03
They’re They look cool as shit.
Speaker: 1
01:58:05
They’re cool as shit. They’re awesome. They’re pack they eat in these little packs. And the the reason why they call them Tasmanian devils is because they make the weirdest I mean, they they make if I heard the sounds that they make, if you’re out in the woods, you hear that sound, you’re like, this isn’t my this is Sasquatch.
Speaker: 1
01:58:19
This is crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:58:20
They’re crazy. See if you can hear some. Referred to Tassies as bear devils due to this superficial Oh, cute face.
Speaker: 1
01:58:27
If you find them eating, they just sound terrible.
Speaker: 0
01:58:29
Find the Tasmanian tiger noises. I don’t think
Speaker: 1
01:58:34
we know what they make.
Speaker: 0
01:58:35
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 wanna hear those. Look at that fucker. Look at this face.
Speaker: 1
01:58:54
Sai cool. And so they so they’re they’re part of the reason why they’re but that that isn’t that terrifying?
Speaker: 0
01:58:58
You know they give each other cancer?
Speaker: 1
01:59:00
Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. That’s and many of the researchers in Tasmania and Australia think that if the thylacine was there because this is where people give wolves and thylacines and predators bad but they go after the sick there’s an energy expenditure ratio. Right? They’re not just sitting there grazing. They’re not getting sedentary. They have to go make the kill. They have to ai, I’m gonna go kill stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:59:21
So they kill the young, so they’re thinning out the weakest. They they kill the old, then they kill the sick. A an environment that has, the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.
Speaker: 0
01:59:34
Right.
Speaker: 1
01:59:35
And, all data that we’ve seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate, ai of that mezzanine level of of marsupials. And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not if you’ve see it’s a
Speaker: 0
01:59:47
it I don’t know if
Speaker: 1
01:59:47
you’re sure it’s disgusting.
Speaker: 0
01:59:48
It’s really gross.
Speaker: 1
01:59:49
Yeah. But that face
Speaker: 0
01:59:51
What are we looking at here? Oh, feeding frenzy?
Speaker: 1
01:59:53
Ai like a teaser word. Three sixty.
Speaker: 0
01:59:54
Give me some volume. It’s doing it right in front of people too, which is crazy. They might be talking
Speaker: 1
01:59:58
every time. Yeah. I fed them like this. It’s crazy. Here they go.
Speaker: 0
02:00:01
They’re just not scared.
Speaker: 1
02:00:02
Watch how fast they are capable of. They’re like piranhas, boy.
Speaker: 0
02:00:06
These are
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02:00:07
Tasmanian devils, the only carnivorous marsupial that we have ever featured on camera. And next to Tasmanian
Speaker: 0
02:00:15
It’s so cool that they’re not Is that kinda remotely scared of people.
Speaker: 1
02:00:20
Yeah. They they don’t even know she’s there. It’s crazy. So if you feed them like this, you can put a a piece of Whose video is
Speaker: 0
02:00:26
this, Jamie?
Speaker: 1
02:00:27
Coyote Peterson.
Speaker: 0
02:00:28
Brave Wilderness. Okay. Channel. Look at these little fuckers. And then
Speaker: 1
02:00:31
they just make these sounds, but they often get into fights. And that fighting Oh, yeah. They’re fighting. Ai when they that’s when they, do the transmission of
Speaker: 0
02:00:40
Oh, right. You see that will fight. No. I mean, like Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:00:45
But they literally, scratch and bite each other, and then they they transmit this it’s the only transmissible cancer that we know of. Sai then it it latches onto the next face through ai. And and the ai the and if you see an animal with a a a Tasmanian devil with the facial tumor disease and you see them, like, they they can’t walk well, they can’t really see well, those are the animals that would be picked up by predators first.
Speaker: 1
02:01:06
Right. And so they so there’s a a big movement within Tasmanian in Lower Australia, Southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator being the thylacine, it would eat. Meh. Ai can’t even look.
Speaker: 0
02:01:18
It Oh, gosh. We’re we’re looking for people listening. We’re looking at tumors on Tasmanian devils faces.
Speaker: 1
02:01:24
Yeah. They’re just terrible.
Speaker: 0
02:01:25
What what that was a perfect, inspiration for a comic book character or for a cartoon character rather,
Speaker: 1
02:01:31
the Desmian Devil. Yeah. Desmian Devil. Yeah. He was ai. 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. You were you were at it is a terror because it it if you’ve never heard it before in person, it just catches you by surprise and it, like, blows you away.
Speaker: 1
02:01:47
So I was it was a pretty weird experience for someone like that.
Speaker: 0
02:01:50
Yeah. I’d imagine. They’re just 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.
Speaker: 0
02:02:06
That probably won’t be the case if you reintroduce some No.
Speaker: 1
02:02:08
No. No. No. They’ll start They will start
Speaker: 0
02:02:10
thinning it out. And it’ll
Speaker: 1
02:02:11
and they’ll separate.
Speaker: 0
02:02:12
Achieve a balance. Yeah. It’ll keep So they’ve done a lot. Let’s just, like, keep people up to date on Australia. Most people don’t know that they’ve introduced cats. So house vatsal, you want some water? Yeah. It’s in there. They introduced house cats, like, just feral house cats in Australia to combat certain speak.
Speaker: 0
02:02:29
And they arya decimating all the other ai. Ground nesting
Speaker: 1
02:02:34
the worst. It it it’s literally the number one mammalian, extinction rate is in Ai.
Speaker: 0
02:02:39
Right. 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 ai would you have to reintroduce other species if they make them extinct? Like, could you just sai?
Speaker: 1
02:02:55
The good news about the, Tasmanian in the Southern Australia ecosystems is they’re mostly intact. Right? Hopefully, they’d eat the cats. The if you talk to most people in Australia, they hate cats outside of the cats that they actually own. Yeah. They actually hate cats because of what they’re doing to small marsupials.
Speaker: 1
02:03:10
They’re actually looking at technologies ai gene drives and others to get rid of to fully eradicate cats that are that are ai, non domestic cats.
Speaker: 0
02:03:16
Yeah. People hunt them.
Speaker: 1
02:03:17
Yeah. People hunt them.
Speaker: 0
02:03:18
Like, you have, I have a good buddy of mine, Adam Greentree, and they have this magazine. It’s like a bowhunter magazine in Australia, and he gave me a copy of it. I was reading on a plane. This guy’s holding up a dead cat.
Speaker: 1
02:03:28
He shah
Speaker: 0
02:03:28
with a bow and arrow. I’m like,
Speaker: 1
02:03:30
hey, man. Like,
Speaker: 0
02:03:31
what the fuck are you You know, they they it is They hold them up like trophies.
Speaker: 1
02:03:34
Well, because it’s it’s a huge problem. Right? It it goes back to the invasive species. One of the projects that we’re working on, with the ai, because we like to pair every with the species preservation is have you ever seen a northern quoll? No. What is that? Northern quoll. It it it it kinda looks like a manker, like a ferret, but way prettier. It’s amazing.
Speaker: 1
02:03:52
How
Speaker: 0
02:03:52
do you spell it? Q u o l l.
Speaker: 1
02:03:55
Yeah. Ai mean, they’re they’re absolutely beautiful. They’re vatsal I mean, their coats are beautiful, but they’re another type of carnivorous marsupial. But, you know, a hundred years ago or so, they got, we as humanity introduced cane toads. Have you ever seen a cane toad?
Speaker: 1
02:04:12
It’s like the job of the I mean, it looks fucking evil. Right? They’re monsters. And so we introduced we as humanity introduced cane toads into, Australia. And, and they have a neurotoxin. Well, guess what? Most quolls and small marsupials love to eat? Frogs and toads. And so this actually, I think, about our work.
Speaker: 1
02:04:30
This actually is about our work. And so, no. This meh 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 coevolving and 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 eat cane toads all day sana.
Speaker: 1
02:04:52
And they don’t die of the neurotoxin. They don’t, like, completely, like, stroke out and die, which is what happens in in, Northern Australia. And so the cane toads are they reproduce in an insane rate. They’re having, like, thousands of babies. They’re making more and more of them. So guess what?
Speaker: 1
02:05:07
More and more cane or more and more coals sana 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 South America that make them cane toad toxin resistant. And and here’s what we found. This is this is amazing. One letter in three and a half billion base pairs.
Speaker: 1
02:05:29
So one letter, a one letter change, conferred had no other, you know, deterioration had no other effects that were negative. And it, created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad. Wow. So we so because, you know, quolls are endangered and we don’t sana work an endangered species first, we wanna start with a more model species.
Speaker: 1
02:05:48
We worked in the fat tail Dunnart, which is our model species for the thylacine. And, and we engineered Dunnarts that and Dunnart cells and Dunnarts that can eat cane toad, tissues and have zero effect has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them. And so now we’re in the next phase of trials showing that we wanna enter we’d like to engineer in, this g this one edit into Coles.
Speaker: 1
02:06:12
Because if Coles would have would have most ai, through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put, the quoll next to the cane toad, they would have co evolved together. They probably would have had that, resistance already built into them through nature. Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:06:27
And so that’s showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and and biotech in conservation. And sai then you could, like, make these super quolls that eat the cane toads. And then sana only does that help the population lower the population of cane toads, it has this and help the population of the coals.
Speaker: 1
02:06:43
But it also has a halo effect to all these other marsupials that we don’t know how many are dying from eating cane toads.
Speaker: 0
02:06:49
I hope you don’t have to bring in big toads to eat the coals. You know what I’m saying?
Speaker: 1
02:06:56
Have you seen those those those toads and frogs that, like, latch out and, like, they’ll eat anything in front of them?
Speaker: 0
02:07:01
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:07:01
Yeah. They’re terrible.
Speaker: 0
02:07:02
I’ve seen one of those ai.
Speaker: 1
02:07:03
There was a giant one of those toads back in, like, I don’t know, thousands of years ago.
Speaker: 0
02:07:08
How big was it? I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
02:07:09
You you I’ve seen a pic a three d render of it, and it, like, grabs, like, you know, deers and stuff. It’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:07:14
Woah. Yeah. We’ve played videos of toads eating mice. I had no idea. Yeah. Sai before I saw those videos, only a few years ago, I had no idea toads would just eat mice.
Speaker: 1
02:07:23
Yeah. It’s crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:07:23
So they put them in this bin with a bunch of ai, and this toad is just going ram, just snatching mice up and swallowing.
Speaker: 1
02:07:29
And it’ll just and and you’d think that they’re sitting there docile, and then they just absolutely they throw their whole body out.
Speaker: 0
02:07:34
Sit there. They’re they’re they have the creepiest dead eyes. They’re just machines to eat. You ever seen them fight with each other? That’s pretty wild too. They bite each other’s heads, and they throw each other through the air.
Speaker: 1
02:07:44
Yeah. I’ve seen I’ve seen them toss each other.
Speaker: 0
02:07:46
Imagine you’re fighting with a dude, and he literally bites half your torso and throws you through the air, and they and they don’t even look like it bothered him.
Speaker: 1
02:07:53
Yeah. They’re laying That’s just part of the fight. That’s that’s totally, like, within the rule.
Speaker: 0
02:07:57
That’s what creeps me out about reptiles. There’s this lack of emotions. Like, at least a wolf has emotions,
Speaker: 1
02:08:04
you know.
Speaker: 0
02:08:04
It’s like there’s something going on there. There’s an intelligence. There’s something really creepy about getting eaten by something stupid.
Speaker: 1
02:08:10
Like a crocodile?
Speaker: 0
02:08:11
Yeah. Yeah. Like like a crocodile or like a toad. There’s a thing about crocodiles that people were suspecting, but it turns out to not be true. That they would lie on their back and put their arms in the air and simulate drowning. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:08:25
I saw that video.
Speaker: 0
02:08:26
Apparently, that’s not what they’re doing. Apparently, that’s a normal characteristic that they do. But stupid but from
Speaker: 1
02:08:32
a natural selection perspective, stupid people were, like, I have to save.
Speaker: 0
02:08:35
Yeah. I gotta save that dude.
Speaker: 1
02:08:37
And then we credit the crocodile for being super smart, but in reality, just got a free meal.
Speaker: 0
02:08:41
Yeah. Well, you would think though if they have gotten those meals before that that would be a learned behavior. I mean, it just makes sense. 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.
Speaker: 0
02:08:59
Like, they’re actively targeting people in this village. Yeah. When he went to the village, everybody was, like, missing a foot, a chunk taken out of their leg. Yeah. And while he was there, a crocodile took a woman who was, washing clothes.
Speaker: 0
02:09:11
So what they had done was they’d set up this area by the water where they had driven these stakes in the ground that would prevent the crocodiles from getting in the water and getting really close to the edge, you know, because you can’t see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up.
Speaker: 0
02:09:27
Yeah. These fucking crocodiles went around the fence. They walked around the fence and slid into the water. So they figured out that these people are in this area that they can’t get to. So they they hunt people.
Speaker: 1
02:09:38
Yeah. They they absolutely do. And it’s it’s weird how some of those, it it it’s very strange as we start to study because, like, one of the things that colossal is doing is we’re studying a lot of what’s called non model species. So we’re learning a lot about weird things that we just didn’t know.
Speaker: 1
02:09:52
There’s some things that are known, like, in like, elephants get cancer a fraction of what they should due to an overexpression of a gene called p 53. So there’s this thing called Pedos paradox where based on age and body weight, both blue whales and, elephants get cancer a fraction of of what they probably should based on how old they get and what their body size is.
Speaker: 1
02:10:13
And they actually that actually makes our lives very difficult, and that’s why we had to create, stem cells for elephants. Because anytime we try to we had to figure out how to regulate p 53. Because anytime you go to edit that one, cell, it just sai, looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell. Right? It’s, like, programmed in.
Speaker: 0
02:10:31
So we
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02:10:31
have to be able to we have to be able to turn that down because we’re in the editing phase on the mammoth project. Right? So we there’s about 85 genes. But if you turn that
Speaker: 0
02:10:37
down, does that that make them more susceptible to cancer?
Speaker: 1
02:10:39
And so you gotta turn it back up after you make the edits. So Woah. Yeah. So sai these are the things that you just that we are learning about
Speaker: 0
02:10:45
I’m with that lady doctor, that lady scientist. You guys are doing something you shouldn’t be doing.
Speaker: 1
02:10:49
No. We’re learning about things. Right? We’re learning about things. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:10:52
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 I mean, the good
Speaker: 1
02:11:02
news about Colossal is that, you know, outside of our 17 academic partners and and our 95 scientific advisors, 90 percent of the company ai. There’s very few. Like, Ai like, I fall in the very ai.
Speaker: 0
02:11:12
I’m kinda kidding about you’re not ai. But I’m definitely not science. I’m not kidding about the technology getting into someone else’s hands. Yeah. And this is where it gets weird. Like, China, Russia, some of It it and it is it’s
Speaker: 1
02:11:22
it is getting weird. Like, CRISPR and these genome engineering tools are outside of the are they’re out it’s it’s ai the genie out of the bottle. Right? It’s like Right. It’s out there. You can’t put it back in. I think that more and more people in other countries are gonna be doing things with these two these technologies for humans.
Speaker: 1
02:11:38
That’s why Colossal just sai, we will never do anything for humans. If someone else wants to use our technologies for humans, we’ll evaluate it.
Speaker: 0
02:11:44
That gets so weird. Right? Like, the China story. You can’t explain to people what what they did. They they they said they were inoculating them from HIV, which is
Speaker: 1
02:11:52
Yeah. They they actually were engineering they were engineering, babies, in in editing their embryos, to confer a resistance to HIV. Now, still to this day, so they 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 ai edit.
Speaker: 1
02:12:15
So anything that could be passed on to the next generation. Right? So things so if you if you if you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, you know, from a germline so any all your cells in your body are somatic cells except for your, like, egg or speak. Those are germ cells.
Speaker: 1
02:12:32
So anything that could be affected into the germ line sai that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be, like, you know, umbrella corporation type moment. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:12:41
So we
Speaker: 1
02:12:42
don’t we don’t want that.
Speaker: 0
02:12:43
But the 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
Speaker: 1
02:12:52
that part’s, like, that that part’s quoted under under debate. There’s people that say that happened. There’s people that say it doesn’t happen. If you look at BGI or Beijing, Genomics Institute, right, they did this thing that, from an affairs perspective, was brilliant. From an affairs perspective, it was also terrifying.
Speaker: 1
02:13:11
During COVID, they’re like, we’ll do all the COVID testing for you free. We’ll do all this COVID testing for you for free. No worries. Just send us your data. We’ll do it all for you. You just wanna help the world. Right? We’ll work with the World World Health Organization.
Speaker: 1
02:13:20
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 they they don’t shy away from this.
Speaker: 1
02:13:40
This is not ai some, you know, conspiracy, like, theory, like, is it a Sasquatch or is
Speaker: 0
02:13:45
it just
Speaker: 1
02:13:46
a man in apes? 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 that’s not a hidden thing. So Sai that that is
Speaker: 0
02:13:59
the thing supposedly did with these children. Supposedly these kids know?
Speaker: 1
02:14:04
I I mean, that would’ve when did that happen, Jay? It sai ai.
Speaker: 0
02:14:07
Yeah. So they’ve been, like, six or seven? Six. Oh, and are they already winning chess championships?
Speaker: 1
02:14:11
Meh. So I’m ai
Speaker: 0
02:14:11
We should find out. Yeah. We should find out. We’re
Speaker: 1
02:14:13
in magazines. He’s probably in
Speaker: 0
02:14:14
a lab somewhere with a headset on.
Speaker: 1
02:14:16
Yeah. I I Teach them how to be psychic. What what I don’t know how public it’s, like because it was also one of those weird things that was, like, he’s in trouble. He’s going to jail. Yeah. And then he’s like
Speaker: 0
02:14:27
And ai he got
Speaker: 1
02:14:28
out. And then he’s out.
Speaker: 0
02:14:29
Yeah. All is forgotten. Yeah. But meanwhile, if you go to jail in China, you fucking vanish.
Speaker: 1
02:14:35
Forever. Yeah. Yeah. Except for this guy.
Speaker: 0
02:14:37
This guy. IPhones until you drop dead of starvation.
Speaker: 1
02:14:40
Yeah. It’s it is it is it’s a % true. And Yeah. And so it is weird that, like, he got in trouble for a few months. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:14:47
And he got in trouble for something they probably told him to do in the first place. Well, they
Speaker: 1
02:14:51
funded his lab. His lab was his lab was, was funded by the
Speaker: 0
02:14:54
And this is what we found out about. I guarantee you there’s some shit that they’re doing somewhere that we haven’t found out about yet. And if you were gonna do something with human beings and create a super soldier, you know, we know that, Russia Us.
Speaker: 1
02:15:08
That separates us.
Speaker: 0
02:15:08
What Russia was attempting to do during was it World War one or World War two? They were trying to make a chimpanzee human hybrid for a while.
Speaker: 1
02:15:15
Oh, I saw that. Ai read about it. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:15:17
Yeah. A chimp human hybrid for a while.
Speaker: 1
02:15:19
Well, there’s been a recent publication out of Japan where they’re allowing, Japanese sold or Japanese ai to edit human cells in embryos with mammalian genes, with other mammalian genes.
Speaker: 0
02:15:34
Like, what kind of genes? Like, woolly mammoth genes in a person?
Speaker: 1
02:15:38
No. We are not doing that. People ask us if we could solve ball, hair loss with woolly mammoths.
Speaker: 0
02:15:44
That would be the first thing people want. Yeah. Hair loss. Next thing, bigger dicks.
Speaker: 1
02:15:47
Yeah. Is is it’s these are consistent. We can’t engineer
Speaker: 0
02:15:50
once a person’s already born. Right? Well, you can’t current technology.
Speaker: 1
02:15:53
With the current technology, like so so being able to send stuff to gene therapies and targeting and being able to deliver specifically to cells is an area that we’re getting better at. Like, I think one of the probably the most Ai think the one of the bryden the, projects that’s the furthest along is is around, like, sickle cell anemia.
Speaker: 1
02:16:12
It’s a single CRISPR knockout. Right? So it’s a single knockout. It’s not multiplex editing. And now it’s about, can you target that in all of the tissue types that are the most affected?
Speaker: 1
02:16:21
And then over time, how do you deliver that gene therapy to everything?
Speaker: 0
02:16:25
And you could do that to a person who’s already born?
Speaker: 1
02:16:27
To someone that’s already born. It’s obviously much easier to do it at the embryo stage.
Speaker: 0
02:16:30
Could you envision a world where the gene editing technology becomes so powerful that you could do it to a person who is already fully formed?
Speaker: 1
02:16:39
Yes. Woah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:16:41
So This is what I predicted. Everyone’s gonna look like Thor. It’s it’s It’s gonna be a bunch of Chris Hemsworth and Jason Momoa’s, and no more people look like you and me.
Speaker: 1
02:16:48
Yeah. Wait.
Speaker: 0
02:16:50
So So
Speaker: 1
02:16:50
Chris is one of our investors, and I always think we look just like each other. Okay. So he invited Luke invited me to go to, Byron ram
Speaker: 0
02:16:57
another planet. I think a different species is.
Speaker: 1
02:16:59
Yeah. They they invited me to go up to Byron Bay and go surfing with them. And I was like, yeah. I’m gonna go take my shirt off next to you nerds. That’s exactly what’s never gonna happen. And I just made up an excuse of why I couldn’t go because they’re like,
Speaker: 0
02:17:10
we wanna go surfing. And I was like, ai. I’m sure you do. You wanna
Speaker: 1
02:17:14
Yeah. I’m not going surfing with you
Speaker: 0
02:17:16
too. Measure cocks too? Yeah. I was like, I’m trying to do it.
Speaker: 1
02:17:18
I’m I’m going as far away from you with my shirt off as possible.
Speaker: 0
02:17:20
But you gotta imagine if that becomes a reality. Like, what we’re doing today just with plastic surgery.
Speaker: 1
02:17:28
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:17:29
Right? Like, let let’s take South Korea for example. Yeah. GLP ones. But that’s that’s achievable. Right? What they’re what GLP ones are doing is achievable through hard work. Yep. But but, like, what they’re doing in South Korea with eye surgery, like Yeah. It’s ubiquitous.
Speaker: 0
02:17:43
Like, so many people are getting this weird surgery where they have these k pop eyes.
Speaker: 1
02:17:47
Yeah. You know? It’s just it’s a strange thing.
Speaker: 0
02:17:50
It’s a strange thing. And if that’s just primitive cutting and sewing tissue artistically. Right? But if people can decide what they’re going to look like, what their intelligence is going to be like Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:18:02
It’s a eugenics world. We’re really playing
Speaker: 0
02:18:04
No. No. No.
Speaker: 1
02:18:04
No. That’s playing God to another level. Right? And that’s, like, that’s this eugenics world where we know. Right? Like, I just had a child and, you know, typically, Ai sai, if you go through the IVF process, which we went through, you, typically can test for certain types of, issues, like, along the pregnancy.
Speaker: 1
02:18:21
Right? Mhmm. And when they put the embryo in, they look at kind of the morphological grade. Well, now there’s new test new companies out there, one of which I I use, which after I used it, I was so impressed I invested in it, called Orchid Health. And they actually take cells from the developing neuro on the very outer derm, right, on on this thing that doesn’t affect the embryo development.
Speaker: 1
02:18:39
They culture those cells, and then they’re doing full genome sequencing. Right? And so we had a handful of embryos, and and so not selecting they they don’t meh 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.
Speaker: 1
02:18:57
You can now, you know, ethically and transparently go figure out, does it have any predispositions to certain things. Right? So, like, you know, if ai or can certain types of cancers or Alzheimer’s or rodents in your family, you can now get a lot of that’s environmental, but you can still get a distribution score that so you can understand what are the genetic factors in that.
Speaker: 1
02:19:16
So that’s today. So that that that’s not, like, twenty years in the future. That’s not Gattaca. That’s today. Wow. And, I mean, we did that.
Speaker: 1
02:19:24
We did that because I have a I have a Ai I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation which affects the ai gene, and I create a truncated protein. So I have I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID, that was a lab leak, that in that attacked my heart. Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:19:42
And so so I didn’t wanna be able to pass that on. So we screened for that. Right? But that’s not a standard thing. So but but that’s a today thing. Like like, you know, two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent, and people are using it.
Speaker: 0
02:19:54
So you understand the technology better than most. Conceivably, what what could be done that would, in the future, allow people to change their very shah? And it literally, like, change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything?
Speaker: 1
02:20:10
I think it starts with, you know, neuro enhancers. And I think in in in this is the biological perspective. This is not even the, you know, computer brain interfaces merging with Ai, that that whole world, which I think that world has a lot of traction and is scarily getting a lot of traction pretty quickly.
Speaker: 1
02:20:25
But I think it starts with things like, health span where it’s, like, the the very vain stuff. So, like, you know, skin skin elasticity, hair, all of that ai tyler. I think all of that is changeable and and and not and, like, there’s a company right now, I’ve read the name of it, that speak out of Harvard that is making, patch using, microneedling, patches that you can’t even feel the needles.
Speaker: 1
02:20:51
Right? And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help, like, replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin. Wow. So sai you can have 30 year old looking skin when you’re 85 years old. What?
Speaker: 0
02:21:06
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:21:06
So and the same thing for hair. Right? The reason why our hair
Speaker: 0
02:21:08
That’s gonna be real soon?
Speaker: 1
02:21:10
Yes. I mean, that’s the speed of which the the big I think the biggest I think the two biggest barriers for health care around genetics and longevity is gonna be the FDA process and not the not the technology. I think it’ll be a a process problem. We saw that with Operation Warp Drive. Right? We we saw how fast things could move if people really wanted them to.
Speaker: 1
02:21:32
So I I think that’s number one, and I think that you’re you’re gonna have the ethical pushbacks on this.
Speaker: 0
02:21:36
So regulatory and ethical, those are the two hurdles.
Speaker: 1
02:21:39
But right
Speaker: 0
02:21:39
now, the technology exists.
Speaker: 1
02:21:40
Yeah. Well, the other biggest thing and this is kind of on for the folks that are deep in longevity, their biggest they’ll they’ll tell you the biggest issue with longevity is that it’s not currently classified as a disease state.
Speaker: 0
02:21:51
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:21:51
It’s just and so they’re not getting NIH funding. Right. They’re getting all that funding to go into other random stuff. You know, but people aren’t focusing on longevity. That’s why you’ve got, like, you’ve seen anything that, like, Bob Nelson’s done. Bob started, Arch Ventures, and he’s, like, arguably the number one biotech, in the world.
Speaker: 1
02:22:07
And he’s working on epigenetic reset, so resetting your clocks at a cellular level. That’s what, Jeff Bezos and them have they’re doing it at Altos 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.
Speaker: 0
02:22:22
And they
Speaker: 1
02:22:22
can also collect a lot of data that then it can then apply to, clinical trials.
Speaker: 0
02:22:26
Yeah. I know. There’s a lot of people cloning their dogs now. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:22:28
There’s people that are cloning their dogs. They can do it even easier now with with this.
Speaker: 0
02:22:32
Yeah. I didn’t bring Marshall to the studio.
Speaker: 1
02:22:35
We did we did clone one person’s dog.
Speaker: 0
02:22:37
I couldn’t do it. I love him too much. I couldn’t do it. I would I would feel so weird around this fake Marshall. Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna do that.
Speaker: 1
02:22:45
Yeah. And that’s how people feel about ai. Some people
Speaker: 0
02:22:47
Dogs are unique little creatures. They have their own little personalities.
Speaker: 1
02:22:51
I know. I’ve got two, and they’re amazing. And, you know, I did my wife is closer to one. And so I did put I did just full disclosure. I Ai did I we did do a blood sample on that one just because I don’t know I don’t Ai just don’t know what the ai could look like. So so but but but the other one, we have it. And so because you’re right. You have you have environmental factors. You have personalities.
Speaker: 1
02:23:12
You we don’t understand all of that.
Speaker: 0
02:23:14
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:23:14
But, I I 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 ai wolf and red wolf tech, his kids were devastated because his dog was ai. And they didn’t wanna they didn’t wanna put her in any harm. They didn’t wanna go to one of the dog cloning companies and do, like, ear they sana put her to sleep. They didn’t think she’d wake back up.
Speaker: 1
02:23:34
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 dog’s got weeks days to weeks to live. Could we could we do it for? Oh.
Speaker: 0
02:23:49
And we and we and we did
Speaker: 1
02:23:50
it for him. We’re not in that business. That’s not our our business. But he was just happy because his choice wasn’t he didn’t want this other dog or certainly didn’t want an another dog. His biggest issue was they want they they they couldn’t let go of that dog, number one. And number two, but they didn’t want that dog to suffer.
Speaker: 1
02:24:07
They didn’t want to to say for our selfish means you’re already suffering. We want
Speaker: 0
02:24:11
you to go be put
Speaker: 1
02:24:12
to sleep and have pieces taken, like Sai pieces of you. And so the fact that we could just take a blood ai, the dog didn’t even notice we took the blood draw. Sai was, like, totally awake just sitting right there while we did it. You know, he was happy with that. So I think these When
Speaker: 0
02:24:24
that dog is gonna be reincarnated into a higher level of existence, do you stop it and put it on this, like
Speaker: 1
02:24:30
Yeah. So that’s not exactly our business.
Speaker: 0
02:24:32
Sai You know what I’m saying? I do. I do. I they Like, we don’t really exactly know what life is. No. We don’t.
Speaker: 1
02:24:38
We definitely don’t know a life. And here’s one thing that his his assistant told, my chief of staff. He said to meh, he’s like, you know what’s weird? I didn’t think it was the same dog at all. And I it’s definitely not the same dog. He’s like, it goes and sits in the same place, which isn’t ai it’s not like in front of a window on its bed. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:24:55
I I don’t know the exact place, but it would always go sit in the exact same place the other dog said. So there’s weird stuff. We we don’t understand this.
Speaker: 0
02:25:00
Ai that would creep me out.
Speaker: 1
02:25:01
It creep me out too.
Speaker: 0
02:25:02
Because Marshall has very specific places where he sleeps.
Speaker: 1
02:25:05
And if that happens, yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:25:06
It would creep me out.
Speaker: 1
02:25:07
Yeah. So so because
Speaker: 0
02:25:07
other I’ve had other other dogs stay at my house. I had my older daughter’s dog stay at my ai, and that dog didn’t go to that same spot. It’s not like this is one spot that’s warmer or cooler.
Speaker: 1
02:25:17
Yeah. Like, it’s sai thing. It’s ai meh dog, Ken, he if he, like, gets on like, he only wants to sleep on my feet. If if I fall asleep on the couch, he’s cool. He won’t sleep on my feet. He just wants to sleep on me. And that’s not comfortable for him because I’m, like, kicking him and everything. But that’s just where he wants to sleep.
Speaker: 0
02:25:30
They wanna be in contact with you. My dog watches TV with me.
Speaker: 1
02:25:33
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I taught
Speaker: 0
02:25:35
I we They’re the best.
Speaker: 1
02:25:36
Yeah. And we didn’t even teach it this, but but when we say security at our house, our our dog just lose like, Ken just lose his mind. He just He just runs to the door. He runs the front door, runs the back door, turns to the side doors. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:25:47
What kind
Speaker: 1
02:25:47
of dog? They’re just mutts. So I have Barbie and Ken. They’re just two little weird mutts. Dog But we named them before the movie.
Speaker: 0
02:25:53
It’s just a weird thing to take that dog. And Ai think also for kids, like, the thing is, like, kids, the loss is so devastating. Yeah. But it’s also good to teach them
Speaker: 1
02:26:03
those things.
Speaker: 0
02:26:03
Yeah. I think loss is important. Yeah. I think loss is important.
Speaker: 1
02:26:06
I don’t wanna I know. Ai only I’m new to this whole father thing. But, you know, I think it’s important that they understand that there’s real there’s real things, and there’s consequences to decisions. And and we’re gonna age, and we’ve got a a limited time. I think that in his lifetime, meh will be massively accelerated. But I I think that’s important.
Speaker: 1
02:26:24
And, you know, that is one of the things, though, I think having a kid, you know, and also all of these kids and parents that have been sending us pictures of mammoths and thylacines and dodos and hopefully now dire wolves, is is something that’s exciting because we get these handwritten notes from kids.
Speaker: 1
02:26:38
Right? So, like, on our shittiest day at Colossal, when someone says whatever or or whatever, and we get or an experiment doesn’t work or or or whatever bad happens. And you look at this pile of kids’ photos and teachers like, we have this this there’s a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter in in literally, like like, 40 pictures of mammoths.
Speaker: 1
02:27:00
And in that letter, she goes, my kids won’t be quiet. We’re in this, like, a tension war with everything. My kids won’t be quiet. I start talking about colossal. I shah the woolly mouse stuff. They all wanna just talk about it. They just zone in. Right? It’s interesting. It’s interesting.
Speaker: 1
02:27:14
And and kids and and so Ai I think this is a time that we can use technologies for human health care for good. We can use technologies for conservation for good. And we can help ecosystem with bringing back extinct species.
Speaker: 0
02:27:24
But I I think that we
Speaker: 1
02:27:25
can also, like, inspire the next generation. Like, don’t we wanna preach hope? We’re on this twenty four seven ai cycle. Right? Like, that wasn’t Yeah. Around when I was a kid or
Speaker: 0
02:27:36
Do you know CS Lewis first started talking about this? Like, what 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
Speaker: 1
02:27:53
All the time.
Speaker: 0
02:27:53
Sent to you all the time, which at his time back then, that that was very new. That was a completely new thing.
Speaker: 1
02:28:01
And this idea of these twenty four 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 if it has any degree of social impact that they don’t tell the negative side.
Speaker: 1
02:28:19
I’m like, so what happens if it’s like so if if there’s someone saves a kitten from a tree, you have to get a dog’s perspective? Ai, it’s like and they’re like, yes. And they’re dead serious.
Speaker: 0
02:28:27
Oh, that’s so ridiculous. So it’s
Speaker: 1
02:28:28
like it’s like there can be stories that are just negative, and there can be stories that are just positive. That’s okay.
Speaker: 0
02:28:34
Yeah. I think you’re gonna have very lively debate. That’s always going to happen with something that’s so groundbreaking Yeah. Like what you’re doing. But I also think it’s inevitable. I think human beings have this inescapable desire for innovation. Right. And it’s going to apply to biology just like it applies to electronics, and you can’t do anything about it.
Speaker: 0
02:28:55
You can have debates about it, and we should we should have you should you know, what you guys are doing is great. You’ve got the dire walls fenced off. You’re very careful. You’re monitoring them. It’s great. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen. And at least you’re transparent about it. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:29:09
Like, at least this is not happening in Russia where they’re making super wolves that only eat Americans.
Speaker: 1
02:29:14
Yeah. And they and they train and they and they train them with DNA to only eat Americans.
Speaker: 0
02:29:17
But that’s probably gonna happen too. This is just we’re going to face unique problems no matter what we do because technology is allowing people to do things that are unprecedented, including change what it means to be an actual person.
Speaker: 1
02:29:30
Yeah. It it it it’s synthetic biology and really kind of the intersection between compute, AI, and synthetic biology, being able to engineer genes, engineer ai. 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.
Speaker: 1
02:29:47
I think it’s Yes. It’s one it it it’s like discovering fire.
Speaker: 0
02:29:50
It’s the god camp. Yeah. It’s all 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 Yeah. And then you have new technologies that are gonna emerge from AI using quantum computing.
Speaker: 0
02:30:05
Like, it’s And then
Speaker: 1
02:30:06
the and then the interface at all, ai, the Neuralink stuff and everything. It’s just gonna meh, you know, we The interfaces are crazy.
Speaker: 0
02:30:11
Because we had that gentleman, Noah, the first ai got it, and he said he has an aim bot in his head. So, like, when he plays games, he’s he’s, like, got a crazy advantage because where he looks is where the cursor goes. Yeah. Like, instantaneously. Because so he could shoot things, like, he’s not gonna miss.
Speaker: 1
02:30:26
Yeah. I mean, we we are living in a weird time.
Speaker: 0
02:30:29
Yeah. It’s the weirdest time. It’s the weirdest time that people have ever been through, and we’re at the door. We haven’t even gone into No.
Speaker: 1
02:30:35
No. That’s ai I say about wild. That’s what I say about synthetic biology. Right? So, like Yeah. The ability to, like, engineer drought resistant crops or a vaccine or grow regrow our hair or, you know, make mammoths, that’s today. We can’t even think about what’s tomorrow.
Speaker: 1
02:30:50
We spun out a company from, Colossal called Breaking, last year. And this incredible group at the Wyss Institute discovered an enzyme in, from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to. And and not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical. That’s why I need it breaking.
Speaker: 1
02:31:11
It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as the as as the thing. Well, guess what? You know? So it takes things vatsal a, broken down never and has got it down into years. We have used now computational biology and, synthetic biology to engineer it.
Speaker: 1
02:31:28
So now that it’s in, you know, twenty two 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 gonna change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics, but we still have the existing plastics here.
Speaker: 1
02:31:40
We have to do something about it. So so I do think there’s even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that, like, ten years ago, if someone said, we give you magic ai a magic microbe that can you can put in a vatsal you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw, you know, salads and other stuff there and it won’t even touch it, you know, that would have sound like science fiction.
Speaker: 1
02:31:59
Yeah. Ten meh years ago.
Speaker: 0
02:32:01
That’s so crazy. And so now it’s you said it’s down to a couple months?
Speaker: 1
02:32:04
Yeah. It’s twenty it’s twenty two months right now. So and we’re talking about, like, not just, like, your, like Water bottle. Your water bottle. But you’re also talking about things that are, like, industrial defense plastics that are, like, you know, radiation hardened and whatnot for space.
Speaker: 1
02:32:17
Like, we’re throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.
Speaker: 0
02:32:19
What about those stupid fucking windmills that they have to change every year? They actually have a a bigger Ai for windmills.
Speaker: 1
02:32:27
And they also have a a bigger net a negative carbon impact than than they make. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:32:30
And they barely make any electricity.
Speaker: 1
02:32:32
Yeah. Yeah. They kill ai or they kill they kill animals, kill birds. They they disrupt, they they disrupt they also disrupt migratory patterns of birds.
Speaker: 0
02:32:40
Of course, they do. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t fly into that.
Speaker: 1
02:32:43
Yeah. And they’re all and they’re all made with plastic and and plastic polymers.
Speaker: 0
02:32:46
And then they have to get rid of them. And then the only place to to put them is in a landfill.
Speaker: 1
02:32:50
Yeah. Exactly. So break so that’s why we started breaking. So Wow.
Speaker: 0
02:32:54
So these microbes would be able to break that down.
Speaker: 1
02:32:56
Yeah. I mean, we haven’t tested on that specific. But, like, one of the biggest ones that we tested on was was nylon just because there’s so meh, if you look at, like, what’s in the ocean, a vast majority of it is nylon from just discarded fishing nets.
Speaker: 0
02:33:09
Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker: 1
02:33:10
So we looked at nylon as as one of our first use cases, and then we’re doing water treatment plants and a few others. So if we get if we get to the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at at the treatment level. Right? Because all that’s passing through right now, like, in our drinking water and everything.
Speaker: 1
02:33:23
That’s why you have to have these massive you have to have, like, the the three layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water. You gotta do Gary, you got me a new a new 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.
Speaker: 0
02:33:42
So when you’re doing this, is this something that you could release, like, in the ocean vatsal? Or would you have to worry then about the effect, like, bringing the house cats to Australia?
Speaker: 1
02:33:51
No. It die it dies. It, like, it it only eats this, ai, this is through This
Speaker: 0
02:33:55
is what they always say right before it fucks up. I
Speaker: 1
02:33:57
don’t know worry about that. But with but with the distribution in the wild of something like that, you have to go through EPA. There there’s a lot of testing that you have to do. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:34:04
So that you could do that testing and then conceivably dump it on the Great Pacific garbage patch?
Speaker: 1
02:34:09
Ai so I don’t know based on heat and and salinity and whatnot. Right now, it’s working in bio reactors, so I don’t wanna overpromise and say we can just go sprinkle it
Speaker: 0
02:34:16
and call
Speaker: 1
02:34:17
it ai day. But that that’s the long term goal. Right? Wow. So but but that’s the power of you know, we used AI in computational analysis of this microbe that’s found in nature, and then we said, let’s supercharge it just like supercharging the coals. Right? And so but that’s but the the process of using it outside of contained, systems ai a bioreactor has to be done, very thoughtfully and measured just like rewilding.
Speaker: 1
02:34:41
Right? It’s like, this this is where sometimes people get confused about, like, the yells and stuff. They didn’t just open the gate and throw some wolves in there.
Speaker: 0
02:34:47
I mean,
Speaker: 1
02:34:47
it sounds like they did more of that in Colorado. But they there’s typically a very thoughtful and measured process that you have to go through. Right? Because Mhmm. There’s intended consequences, which you get excited about, but then there’s a shit ton of unintended consequences if you’re
Speaker: 0
02:35:00
not careful.
Speaker: 1
02:35:01
Yeah. But synthetic biology is is that is that it’s it’s an AI level thing that we need to be
Speaker: 0
02:35:07
worried about. And how many different nations are working on this stuff?
Speaker: 1
02:35:11
So I I think that The US is ai far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective. It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and ai. Because they’re biobanking we we do not have a nationalized biobanking process here. That’s one of the things I I, I I was meeting in in Washington about. But China does.
Speaker: 1
02:35:31
China is is going like, we we see them in Africa where they’ll make donations to a university or school and then say, oh, but we’re gonna take blood samples from all of your animals around here. You guys are cool. Right? So they they are doing this. Right? So they are looking for insights in animals. They are looking for that data.
Speaker: 1
02:35:44
They’re also trying to build, like, today’s Noah’s Ark. And so I so China is for sure. There’s some countries that’s harder. Like, the the, European Union’s harder to do anything because they they’ve kinda put a moratorium on GMOs or genetically modified organisms. But, you know, we’ve been making GMOs for a long time. Like, have you ever seen a pug? Like, we’ve just done it pretty inefficiently. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:36:05
We we can be smarter and actually have a better intended consequences now through AI and software.
Speaker: 0
02:36:11
Bro, people sana gonna have dire wolves guarding their house.
Speaker: 1
02:36:14
No.
Speaker: 0
02:36:14
In a hundred years?
Speaker: 1
02:36:15
They’re not open to the public world. Percent.
Speaker: 0
02:36:17
They’re gonna get your technology, and they’re gonna sell it, and people are gonna be eating woolly mammoth steaks while the dire wolves guard their house.
Speaker: 1
02:36:24
Yeah. That’s not the future that I that I hope for. I’m more of an optimist, so I kinda believe in the general good of humanity.
Speaker: 0
02:36:30
Of course. It’s your company. Your company is fucking the whole world up. You have to think that.
Speaker: 1
02:36:34
Ai just kidding. I know.
Speaker: 0
02:36:35
But it is weird. It’s a it’s a weird venture.
Speaker: 1
02:36:38
I mean,
Speaker: 0
02:36:38
you’re you’re going down a very bizarre path, but it’s so fascinating. I’m so glad you’re doing it because it’s it’s so interesting.
Speaker: 1
02:36:44
And we’re learning a lot. Right? And the the application of that learning could allow us to save many species. Right? Yeah. And and I think that
Speaker: 0
02:36:50
Do you think there could ever be a time well, there’s no DNA from the dinosaurs. Right? Sai would it be possible that with future technology, there would be some way to get around that? So Ai
Speaker: 1
02:37:00
so there the closest you could get from a dino DNA perspective, is that, there is ways that you can do demineralization of bones and get amino acids. So, like, the smallest building blocks possible, you don’t know where they go. Right? I think that it’s not possible to de extinct a dinosaur.
Speaker: 1
02:37:19
I do think at some point, you could use AI and software to do an ancestral state reconstruction, looking at kind of what we know about birds, what we know about reptiles, and kind of where they branch.
Speaker: 0
02:37:28
So you could make one?
Speaker: 1
02:37:29
I think you’d I wasn’t that one of
Speaker: 0
02:37:31
the things they did in Jurassic Park? That’s what they did. Ai that that didn’t exist before, the big giant one?
Speaker: 1
02:37:35
The, the, a dominoes rex. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:37:38
Right. That was something they created.
Speaker: 1
02:37:39
That’s something they they created. Right? And so I think from a genome engineer from a technology and genome engineering perspective, that is eventually possible.
Speaker: 0
02:37:47
Oh. So So they could easily make a T meh without not easily. Easily. Yeah. But But they could At some potential
Speaker: 1
02:37:55
future state. At some future state, I think we’ll have, like, you know, the CAD software biology where you can engineer almost anything.
Speaker: 0
02:38:01
Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
02:38:01
I mean, that that’s just where the technologies go. Right? The better and and you said it best when you brought up quantum. If, you know, quantum is only two years away every two years, I hear. But, eventually, when it works, sana works at scale, and you have that coupled with, you know, where some of these companies ai X dot sai and and others are taking it, Ai think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff.
Speaker: 1
02:38:24
And it will be in and and, look, it will be in nefarious hands. Like, let’s let’s just be vatsal be real. Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands. Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:38:32
Nuclear weapons are in good guys’ hands. Right? And so this is nuclear weapons. And I think that you have to be just because it exists, we can’t put our head in the sand and and say, oh, we we just can’t let it be because it does exist. And I don’t know if you saw this, but this was, ai, it’s, like, five years no. No. No. No. That was, like, seven years ago.
Speaker: 1
02:38:48
People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of of certain subset of of race. Right? And they were they were doing bad things with facial ram. Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they sai, not not not at a nationwide level, but so but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says, we will not at all, support any technology.
Speaker: 1
02:39:17
We’re gonna ban investing in facial meh technology. Well, that’s just dumb. Right? Because we now know there’s things like deep fakes and all this stuff. But it’s like, that’s setting American innovation back because someone’s doing something bad with it. Right? That’s like saying, vatsal gosh. They have guns. We should never develop guns. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:39:32
Like, it’s just it’s a it’s a bad philosophy when it comes to technology. And so, you know, I think the same way about synthetic biology. The world is currently, The United States is the leader in synthetic biology. And we’ve got national treasurers ai George Church, my my cofounder, and others.
Speaker: 1
02:39:47
And and I hope that we continue to be the the world’s, you know, leader. But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do, and they will experiment on kids.
Speaker: 0
02:39:56
But it’s interesting also that you’re a company. You’re this isn’t the government. This is just a group of people and investors that have decided to do this. And you’ve been able to do it here in Meh, but do you know what is going on in other countries? Or is this a a tightly guarded secret?
Speaker: 1
02:40:15
Sai, I mean, we know
Speaker: 0
02:40:15
Obviously, you’re you have people I’m sorry to interrupt you. No.
Speaker: 1
02:40:19
No. No.
Speaker: 0
02:40:19
Go ahead. People in your company Yeah. As well. And I’m sure there’s an understanding of what they’re doing. Yeah. So it’s good. It’s you’re you must be being studied Yeah. By other countries.
Speaker: 1
02:40:29
Yeah. We definitely and and we have, investment by In Q Tel. Right? So I’m sure that makes us more
Speaker: 0
02:40:35
of a target. Sai
Speaker: 1
02:40:38
Yeah. So, I mean, we we do work closely with the DOD and IC frequently.
Speaker: 0
02:40:42
It’s just when you think about it a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, when you scale us out, it’s there’s no limit to what could be done No. To life. That’s so strange.
Speaker: 1
02:40:51
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:40:52
It’s so strange to think that for 4 plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern.
Speaker: 1
02:40:58
On the on rails.
Speaker: 0
02:41:00
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then one day And
Speaker: 1
02:41:01
now we say we can take the railway wherever we want.
Speaker: 0
02:41:04
Hoo, boy. And, you know, that’s the the grandest of all conspiracy theories is that that’s that’s how humans were created.
Speaker: 1
02:41:11
Yeah. That that panspermia.
Speaker: 0
02:41:13
Or that Well, either panspermia or that
Speaker: 1
02:41:15
we were engineered in places.
Speaker: 0
02:41:16
The right one is the Anunnaki. Right? Oh, yeah. Meh. I will I will yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:41:20
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 ai Cuckoo Con and folks in in if you if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods, there’s a lot of weird similar I mean, you can’t you you can’t objectively it’s like the guy with the pair with the, with, the Sphinx. Right? Was it that’s, like, yep. That’s water. I’m I’m an expert on erosion. That is water. And then they’re, like, head of the Sphinx is, like, that’s not water.
Speaker: 1
02:41:45
Right? Yeah. It’s the same thing as this. You cannot look at some of the stuff and say that’s not weird. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:41:50
You
Speaker: 1
02:41:50
got you can’t look at, like, you know, the, 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 ai suddenly. It’s, like, you you can’t see all that stuff and not wonder more, especially the stuff around if you look at Mayans and then you look at, you know, stuff in The Middle East and how it looks exactly the same.
Speaker: 0
02:42:12
It’s very weird.
Speaker: 1
02:42:13
It looks exactly the same. It’s Have you been to Peru? No. So that I would put you know, because I
Speaker: 0
02:42:19
Ai feet you?
Speaker: 1
02:42:19
I do not wanna take you away from going and visiting the boneyard. So you should totally do that. But you should also go to Peru. Peru, if you like, you can see Peru and you could it’s like standing in the Grand Canyon vatsal ai ai whatever it’s called, and you see these blocks that you can’t, like, put a piece of paper between.
Speaker: 1
02:42:39
You know, you can’t see yeah. And you and you see it, and they’re all put together in a perfect jigsaw. Oh, and by the way, they came ram, ai of rock in a quarry that’s 2,000 miles from here or whatever, however many thousands of miles from here. You can’t sit there and say, well, that’s weird.
Speaker: 1
02:42:52
If you don’t say that’s weird, then it’s ai like you’re like one of those, like, you know, people that are just ai, You’re a denier. You you they you can’t say it’s not weird.
Speaker: 0
02:43:01
Yeah. Does did not say to say it’s not weird is actually denying science.
Speaker: 1
02:43:04
Yeah. It’s the weird so you should put Peru on your because when you see it, there’s nothing like it.
Speaker: 0
02:43:10
I mean, I’ve
Speaker: 1
02:43:10
I’ve been fortunate and been able to travel over the world. You see it, and you’re just ai, that that just doesn’t make sense.
Speaker: 0
02:43:16
The coolest thing I’ve ever seen is Chichen Itza.
Speaker: 1
02:43:18
Yeah. I went to Chichen Itza. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:43:19
And you you go there, and you’re like, what did you do? What did you do? How ai you do this?
Speaker: 1
02:43:24
Yeah. How
Speaker: 0
02:43:24
did you guys do this?
Speaker: 1
02:43:25
You know what’s crazy about Chichen Itza? They don’t let you go there anymore. But, I don’t know where, but, you know, you’ve got all those paths with all the vendors and you see Chichen Itza. Well, there’s in the jungles there on the Yucatan Yucatan Peninsula, there’s actually other older pyramids.
Speaker: 1
02:43:39
But the carvings that they have on Chichen Itza and the carvings they have there, they’re actually the older ones have more precise carvings. But but but now guess what? It’s not over the public. Ugh. Ai seen that. I’ve been there.
Speaker: 0
02:43:51
Oh, it’s so frustrating.
Speaker: 1
02:43:53
But also, it is just such it is such a weird world. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:43:56
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:43:56
Yeah. I mean, I’m talking to you about, like, hardcore genetic ai. But then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, it it is we don’t know a lot. A lot. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:44:07
And there’s no way you can know a lot.
Speaker: 1
02:44:08
And anytime you suggest something new, you get, you know, shit for it.
Speaker: 0
02:44:12
Yeah. You get a rash of shah, and people try to connect you with the worst people in the world, hence Ram Hancock.
Speaker: 1
02:44:18
Yeah. But I think Graham mock ram 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 ai Plato and others that were probably real.
Speaker: 0
02:44:32
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:44:33
I don’t think they were just, like, playing around and, like, oh, we’re gonna write something that’s gonna be in history as a joke forever.
Speaker: 0
02:44:37
You’ve seen the Reichardt structure? Uh-uh. You ever seen that? Uh-oh. This is what, there’s a lot of people ai Jimmy Corsetti, who’s this, famous YouTube I guess, you’d call him, I guess, he’d be like an ancient Can we pull up the structure? Sure. He’d be like an ancient history enthusiast. He’s a guy who’s, like, studies these things and does YouTube videos on them. But the Ai Structure is essentially Atlantis.
Speaker: 1
02:44:58
Oh, this is in the desert. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:45:00
It looks like Atlantis. There’s salt all around it. It has the it has
Speaker: 1
02:45:04
the rings that Plato described.
Speaker: 0
02:45:05
And at one point in time, it was connected to the ocean. Ai mean, it literally looks like Atlantis. And people disputed a lot of people.
Speaker: 1
02:45:12
Gone and studied it there? Ai Well,
Speaker: 0
02:45:13
it’s a very difficult place to get to, and it’s also very dangerous.
Speaker: 1
02:45:16
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:45:17
So people have studied it, but it there’s there hasn’t been, like, large scale archeological digs there or any any the whole Sai Saharan Africa thing is so fascinating. Yeah. They find whales there, you know. I mean, they know that there it was lush rainforest while human beings were alive.
Speaker: 1
02:45:33
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:45:34
And there hasn’t been, like, large scale exploration of what’s in that ground.
Speaker: 1
02:45:39
And there and and it’s immense. I do think that the younger dry stuff is also, a combination of I think, generally speaking, if you break in break down the the Younger Ai period into that rapid cooling, I think the vast majority of people sai some of it some of the, destruction with or some of the destruction around megafauna was was anthropologic, which I I’ll give it some percentage.
Speaker: 1
02:46:01
Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.
Speaker: 0
02:46:05
Anthropologic meaning human beings killed.
Speaker: 1
02:46:08
Meh. The humans had some impact on on it. Right? I think that that even more people agree that there was this massive flood that occurred, and that was a could have been a global level flood with sea rising with rushing waters and sea rising, whatnot. And then you’ve got, you know, what caused that vatsal ai, most likely meteorol you know, astrological and meteorological.
Speaker: 0
02:46:32
And then they combine that with core samples that show large levels of iridium.
Speaker: 1
02:46:35
Yeah. Which which only exists when you have certain levels of heat at certain at at index. It’s it’s like that it’s like that, nuclear glass or whatever they
Speaker: 0
02:46:43
find those. Iridium is actually different. Iridium is actually very common in speak, but Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:46:48
Yeah. That’s this And there’s a layer. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:46:49
There’s a
Speaker: 1
02:46:50
silt of it. That’s right.
Speaker: 0
02:46:51
The micro diamonds is what we’re talking about.
Speaker: 1
02:46:53
But they have those too as well. Trinitite. Yeah. Trinitite. That’s what
Speaker: 0
02:46:55
it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s ai stuff Yeah. From the Trinity explosion, they discovered it there. And they find these little micro there’s 100% there was impacts. Yeah. That that’s a fact. And they also know, like, the when the meteor shower and this is the thing that they study, like, when we go through this comet shower.
Speaker: 0
02:47:11
And that that’s But
Speaker: 1
02:47:12
do you remember, like, probably ten, twenty years ago, people if you if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you’re a meh Christian. Can’t talk to you ever again.
Speaker: 0
02:47:20
Exactly.
Speaker: 1
02:47:21
Right? Oh, water canopy, you’re weird. Don’t talk to me again. I know. And then and now it’s ai, well, maybe there was a giant flood. Maybe it wasn’t just a regional flood. Right? May maybe it was done by impact of meh. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:47:33
That’s what brings me to the weird ones when you go back to, like, the the Vedic texts. And you’re ai, what was the Sana? What were these flying vehicles that they have? What is Ezekiel talking
Speaker: 1
02:47:44
about on the Bible? Did you 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 the most recent UAP, craze. And they’d show it, and it looked like crazy ball lightning. It almost looked like those things that used to put your you’d put your hands on your hand and stand up. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:48:02
And then they’d compare some of those to paintings, from, like, you know, from, like, 500, seven hundred mil
Speaker: 0
02:48:09
years ago. Stop you there because a lot of those crazy balls of light
Speaker: 1
02:48:12
We’re all fake?
Speaker: 0
02:48:13
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?
Speaker: 1
02:48:23
Uh-huh.
Speaker: 0
02:48:24
Go find, zoomed in stars. I think they did it with the North Sai. They’ve they’ve done it with several stars. But if you zoom in with the highest level of these telephoto lenses from Earth, you can get that sort of distorted weird effect. But sai because
Speaker: 1
02:48:42
you’re looking through the I I have I I’ve always seen the stuff on the Internet until I was in Wellington, New Zealand when I was with Peter. Peter is his house in Wellington is, like, on a a body of water, ones Sai wear. And, and we were talking, of course, like, the conversation went to ghosts and UFOs because, like
Speaker: 0
02:48:59
Oh, you’ve seen
Speaker: 1
02:48:59
Why not? No. I haven’t seen them in person. I’ve seen them on his iPhone. Like, these are this wasn’t, like, telescopic lens. This is an ai, and it looks exactly like what you see, I guess, on the zoom ends.
Speaker: 0
02:49:11
But that’s the thing about zooming in. Sai, is the thing is like, these are planets that people have zoomed in on. Yeah. But there’s weirder ones where, like, there’s video of it, and so it looks like it’s moving. Yeah. Here we go. Like, look at that. Okay.
Speaker: 1
02:49:29
I’ll have to see
Speaker: 0
02:49:29
But you see what I’m saying? Yeah. Like, this is a perfect example. Sai this is a star in the night sky with a Nikon p 900. So is that 900 x, Jamie? No. What is that? That’s the model number. Can you talk in the mic? It’s just the model number.
Speaker: 0
02:49:43
I have no idea what that means. So what would you think that the amount of, I don’t know. 10 x, hundred x. I have no idea. Okay.
Speaker: 0
02:49:50
I’m ai gonna Sai So So but do you see how they’re having a hard time zooming in on it? It’s a very handy It’s a handheld, I think. But look how weird it is.
Speaker: 1
02:49:57
Ai so weird.
Speaker: 0
02:49:57
It’s it’s how it’s moving around like you sai, oh meh god, you found a UFO. But it’s not. Yeah. It’s just a star. Well, I do I do hate
Speaker: 1
02:50:03
that every UFO video is is blurry.
Speaker: 0
02:50:06
Well Or a star. You know, I mean, that could be if you wanna get into the whole how put off, perspective, who’s this brilliant physicist.
Speaker: 1
02:50:14
Yeah. He’s on a lot of papers.
Speaker: 0
02:50:16
Yeah. He explained it to me. He thinks there’s some sort of gravity distortion Yeah. That’s around it. So this is
Speaker: 1
02:50:21
What isn’t that?
Speaker: 0
02:50:21
Isn’t that the This is that particular camera. So this is is this not a very, No.
Speaker: 1
02:50:26
It’s like a handheld camera.
Speaker: 0
02:50:28
Sai that’s a $1,519 camera on Amazon.
Speaker: 1
02:50:32
Eighty three x optical. So Ai sai if Peter will give me the his I’m sure he would, and I’ll send it to you because it’s just weird to see.
Speaker: 0
02:50:38
Oh, they’re weird. No. I’m not saying
Speaker: 1
02:50:39
But this is not real. Ai, not zoomed in. His wife’s next to him, and
Speaker: 0
02:50:43
it ai up. Not ai that people are seeing things.
Speaker: 1
02:50:46
But I’m never saying
Speaker: 0
02:50:48
that they’re real. What I’m saying is that kind of evidence of that that star, if you didn’t know any better and someone sana it to you, oh ai god. They found a UFO. You’d be ai, holy fucking shit. It’s real. Look at that. It’s undeniable. Look at the energy around it.
Speaker: 1
02:51:00
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:51:01
With Hal Putoff believes is that there’s some sort of distortion around these things Yeah. That’s allowing them to be transmedium, to go through the ocean.
Speaker: 1
02:51:09
That’s all the, yeah, that’s that’s all their, like, zero point energy and Right. And moving and, in in gravitational wave type stuff.
Speaker: 0
02:51:18
Do you go deep on this?
Speaker: 1
02:51:19
I get I don’t have that rabbit hole. I get a little bored.
Speaker: 0
02:51:21
It gets boring because there’s no real resolution.
Speaker: 1
02:51:23
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:51:24
You could lose your ai, but I had dinner with, Jacques Vallee and Hal Putoff once and a couple other gentlemen. And they were explaining the state of the technology, like, what they think is currently available and what they think these things are using. I did These guys
Speaker: 1
02:51:38
I did a call with I Sai did a call with I got into that crowd for a while, and before I started Colossal. And, you know, I I knew of a bunch of, the those folks. So I talked to Lou. I talked to Hal Ai did a Zoom with Hal or
Speaker: 0
02:51:52
If you imagine what we are now, where we are, what you’re describing in terms of technology that’s emerging right now.
Speaker: 1
02:51:59
Yeah. We have Direwolves today in 2025.
Speaker: 0
02:52:01
Yes. And now imagine this 5,000 years advanced. Yeah. And you’re probably looking at that. If if we are being visited Yeah. That’s what you’re probably looking at.
Speaker: 1
02:52:10
Yeah. It’s not ai if you look at the exponential rate of our technology curve, it’s it’s not that far.
Speaker: 0
02:52:15
Now imagine the monkeying that you guys have done with Direwolves.
Speaker: 1
02:52:19
I Poincidence monkeying. It’s a
Speaker: 0
02:52:20
little monkey dog.
Speaker: 1
02:52:20
The the selective precision genome engineering.
Speaker: 0
02:52:23
Amazing stuff you’ve done Yes. With dire wolves. I’m just being silly. But imagine doing that to primitive hominids. Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is, and you’re a million years more advanced Yeah. Than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australopithecus, you know Yeah. Trying to figure out how to make a spear.
Speaker: 1
02:52:45
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:52:45
And you say, ai. Let’s, put a little bit of this. Yeah. Add a little bit of that.
Speaker: 1
02:52:50
I told you a little bit
Speaker: 0
02:52:51
of bars in there. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:52:51
One edit makes 5,000, you know, can confers 5,000, resistance to neurotoxin. So it’s ai couple little edits here does a lot.
Speaker: 0
02:52:59
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 we we less and less reliant ai muscle. Yeah. And our heads are getting bigger. Yeah. That’s them.
Speaker: 1
02:53:14
Yeah. I mean I read that I read that theory too.
Speaker: 0
02:53:17
It’s a bizarre archetype. Right? It’s a very strange thing that people keep seeing over and over and over again. It’s very weird that there’s a bunch of different versions of life that they allegedly see. Ai.
Speaker: 1
02:53:29
I got one. I go down those rabbit holes because, I mean, I just think once again, going back to, like, the stuff of, like, Kukulkan and and, Anunnaki and all like, this all this stuff.
Speaker: 0
02:53:39
It’s The Anunnaki stuff is the most interesting.
Speaker: 1
02:53:41
It’s just so strange. Yeah. And how and how you have certain things that are aligned to celestial they and you’re ai, yeah. But they could’ve picked a lot of constellations. Yes. Why did they all pick the Pleiades or whatever it is? Right? Like Right. Why did they do that?
Speaker: 0
02:53:53
And also, how did the fucking ancient Sumerians have a detailed map of the solar system? Insanely detailed. From six thousand years ago. How? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:54:03
What And and also be able to predict well enough of where it was going knowing that we were moving through space.
Speaker: 0
02:54:08
Yeah. And also have these giant things with little monkey people on their laps. Yeah. Like, what are you saying?
Speaker: 1
02:54:14
Yeah. If there’s there’s weird Ai there 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 ai that that we’re doing improving every day.
Speaker: 1
02:54:28
The at the end of the day, it is still cool, and it’s interesting. Like, I I I don’t wanna live in a society or a universe where everything’s figured out. Every day Yes. Is amazing. And we’re figuring out amazing things.
Speaker: 0
02:54:40
Well, unlike you, I don’t have the burden of being taken seriously. And that’s great for discussing oh, but you can go to Hunter out there. Awesome. It is great. I
Speaker: 1
02:54:51
love it. It’s super interesting. But I I think I think that’s why so many people ai to your podcast is because one minute you’ll talk to a comedian in a in a UFC ai, and the next time you’re talking to someone that knows more about, like, the ancient flood than anyone in the world.
Speaker: 1
02:55:04
Yeah. And that’s cool.
Speaker: 0
02:55:05
It is cool. Yeah. It’s very fascinating. And the world is conversations. Yes. And the world is filled with so many fascinating things that are all happening at the same time. Yeah. And it’s almost I mean, and you can get lost, ai, we’re talking about with the CS Lewis quote. Did you ever find that? No. I don’t. I couldn’t.
Speaker: 0
02:55:21
You talked about getting the news. What what year was CS Lewis alive? 1898 to, like, 07:00. Ai I started tracking down, like, there’s a bunch of misquoted CS Lewis quotes. It could be one of those. Something like that. It could be one of those. Out.
Speaker: 0
02:55:36
But we’re being inundated by the worst news of the day because that’s the news that’s gonna ensure that you watch it. And there’s Yeah. 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.
Speaker: 0
02:55:49
You hear about wars ai, 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
Speaker: 1
02:55:56
positive.
Speaker: 0
02:55:57
Are positive, and they’re fascinating. And human beings are a fascinating creature, and we’re so lucky to be alive at this time where the innovation is reaching this bizarre tipping point where we’re,
Speaker: 1
02:56:10
you know I mean, I love it. I I I’m having I’m working more hours than I’ve ever worked in my life, and, and I’ve been fortunate before the this business. And I will just tell you, I Ai just love it. Every day I wake up, it’s awesome.
Speaker: 0
02:56:22
It’s just That’s so cool.
Speaker: 1
02:56:23
It’s the coolest thing in the world.
Speaker: 0
02:56:24
Well, I’m glad you’re doing it, man. I really appreciate you. And thank you so much for coming in here and and showing people the dire wolves and and the red wolves. And I hope I hope more. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:56:35
More. We’ll keep you I do. On fun stuff.
Speaker: 0
02:56:37
And I wanna go see him. I wanna see him.
Speaker: 1
02:56:39
Alright. We’ll talk offline. Okay.
Speaker: 0
02:56:40
We’ll talk offline. Thank you very much. Oh. Yeah. If people want to find more information, find more about you. I just it we’re colossal.com.
Speaker: 1
02:56:48
We’re colossal.com, and we’re, it is colossal on YouTube and, x sana every and we’re at colossal on x.
Speaker: 0
02:56:54
So fucking cool. Seeing that, CGI one walking through the snow Yeah. I can’t wait to see that one day.
Speaker: 1
02:57:00
Yeah. It’s cool. It’s cool. Ai, I mean, look. The the cool thing about Colossal is it’s we have so many people that you know, we have a 70 people over a 35 scientists just that wake up, and they work twenty four seven. Like, we’ve got four labs. People are just, you know, in love with it.
Speaker: 0
02:57:16
That’s right. It’s amazing. Thank you very much.
Speaker: 1
02:57:18
You gotta go see the lab.
Speaker: 0
02:57:18
I will. Thank thank you. Alright. Bye.
