Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences reveals how CRISPR and 109 woolly mammoth DNA samples—including 99.6% similar Asian elephant genes—could revive extinct species, with $16M funding producing 36 healthy woolly mice. His dire wolf project, backed by MHA Nation and public engagement, engineered three wolves (Romulus, Remus, Khaleesi) with Pleistocene traits, while red wolf cloning plans face bureaucratic delays despite proven feasibility. Lamm warns of unethical risks like China’s germline editing but insists Colossal’s focus on ecological rewilding—boosting biodiversity and carbon sequestration—could reshape conservation, blending science with ancient mysteries and ethical responsibility. [Automatically generated summary]
So if you ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but 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 was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could...
Engineer life.
And that we can use AI and compute to make it even better.
Like, how do we do directed evolution?
And how that can apply to, like...
So I get on the phone with George and I ask him my questions.
He answers them in like six seconds because he's a genius.
And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab.
In that process, he's like, you know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things.
I was like, wait, wait, what?
And I was like, if you had one project, is it this mammoth project?
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 kind of 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.
Well, then I stayed up all night just Googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line.
Whether it was in 60 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 kind of wanted him to do this.
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 going to try to go build a company to bring back extinct species.
Because George, you know, had been working on it for eight years.
We needed his core technologies.
We thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation.
There was some ecological modeling that had been done to show that the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem.
And so that was an easy place to start.
After we launched the company, it went crazy viral, and all these other folks from De-Extinction Research started calling us, like folks from the Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger, which looks like a mythical creature.
It's awesome.
The Beshapir with the Dodo, everyone just started calling us, and then we just started expanding our entire set.
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 enough different species there.
Okay. And so essentially, though, Wrangel Island and then there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and Russia, also is where they were.
Those are kind of the last two places that we know mammoths existed today.
You know, mammoths because they have these massive, massive tusks, right?
And, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in kind of the mammoth world.
They actually, you know, 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 kind of lose it over time.
Especially after Gary Breck has been working on me.
I'm a smaller dude, right?
And so, like, I literally get in.
I get in the car.
There's a bunch of stickers, and there's one that has butterflies on it that says, give zero fucks.
And I was like, and then he's like, just move the gun over.
So I move the gun over, and he goes, listen.
And this is the first words out of his mouth to me.
If I stop short, you hand me that gun.
And I was like, I didn't even ask a follow-up question because, like, what do you do when you get in the car with John and he says, you hand me that gun.
If I stop quick and I say, hand me that gun, you hand me that gun.
Yeah, and they'll pull out drawers that have Darwin's name on it and stuff like that.
I mean, that's how we did the thylacine.
We actually found, in a cup about this size, we actually found what we call the miracle pup, where they shot the mother, they took the three joeys, the babies, killed the three pups, and they put one of them in formaldehyde, and we got a 98% complete genome from the first sample of that pup.
Wow. But they didn't even know they had it.
They also, on the thylacine, which I'm sure we'll talk 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 the head in the bucket.
They just had a head in a bucket.
They opened it up, it was marked thylacine, they opened it 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.
So there's probably treasure troves in some of these museums that aren't being fully utilized.
So, Andrew Pask, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years.
He's amazing.
He's awesome.
He's been working on it like a shoestring budget, and that's part of the problem.
De-extinction is nobody's but real capital into it until now.
And he's been working on it for 15 years and he's had people send him, you know, poop, clippings from, you know, hair and all this stuff over the years.
So he just sent it to him and then he loves the thylacine so much he just sequences it and he's like, no, it's a dog.
You sent me more dog shit.
Thanks. I mean, it's demoralizing.
But, like, when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew.
We did a partnership with him.
We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research more than the Australian government.
We made the largest investment in research for marsupial development of anyone.
So we do this.
And then...
You get into the myth of it, right?
So you start reading it, right?
I start reading all the books on the thiocene.
I get obsessive about projects.
And so I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now.
And so got super deep in it.
And then I started calling Pascal.
I was like, hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos.
So once you have enough of that DNA, right, from all these different samples, and you can assemble it, you then have to build comparative genomic models to its closest living relatives, in the case of the mammoth, the Asian elephant.
But I'm from software, so I just assume there's like the...
You know, Google cloud of DNA.
Like, we've all done 23andMe before it went bankrupt, right?
So we should assume that, I assume that the government or someone backed up and had kind of like the 23andMe of all species.
That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools.
Probably heard of CRISPR, all these other things.
Always the best tool.
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 say, at spot, you know, four million eight, I need to change that letter.
And so you change that letter.
And then other times you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA.
So when you notice that in the mammoth and in the Asian elephant, there's a difference.
And if it's in these certain protein coding regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical attributes,
You can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right?
Because you're only really looking at that 0.4% difference, right?
It's still a lot of numbers.
But you're only looking at that.
And so the better you can be at software and the better you can be using AI and computer models, the less edits you have to make, right?
Because you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
We basically said, look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a mammoth?
From an Asian elephant to a mammoth.
And then because we want to do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants.
We didn't just want to ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens.
So we look for the mouse equivalent, right?
So we look for, like, all of us have similar genes, and so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could...
Either hurt the animal or kill them, right?
Or that may not even be compatible with life, right?
So we try to be really, really thoughtful about it.
And the woolly mice went insane.
There's people that are making t-shirts.
There's a meme coin.
And so we made 36 mice.
They're all healthy.
There's 36 mice that we made.
And what was crazy about it is we're excited about it because it shows that the end-to-end process of taking data from an ancient DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with 100% efficiency.
Because when we pull them out of the permafrost, they've been sitting in mud for quite some time.
But if you see very fresh mammoths, like from Siberia and whatnot, like in Yakutsk and other places in northern Siberia, that they actually have pretty well-preserved mammoths.
They actually have kind of a dirty blonde meets gold meets brown fur.
Wow. Interesting.
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.
I'm like, they're not illegal.
And then a meme account for the guy that did the CRISPR babies, you know, that went in trouble for, you know, making edited babies in China.
Yeah. A meme account, though, actually said on X that these are a bioweapon.
And that Colossal's made of bio.
So the weirdness of the woolly mouse went crazy viral.
What we were trying to show is that we used our multiplex editing tools, meaning that we edited all of those genes at the same time.
Most people edit one gene, let that mouse live.
From the second lineage, they'll do one more gene, let that mouse live, and then they'll stack those edits over multiple generations.
We've developed a system so that we can deliver all of those edits at one time.
All over the genome, get exactly what we want, and then we have this what's called monoclonal screening where we're screening the cells at the end, sequencing all the cells, which is expensive and sounds like overkill, but then we know that none of them have unintended consequences or off-target effects in the genome so that we know the mice that we then do cloning with,
we know that they'll be healthy.
So we try to spend a lot of time on that because we're certified by American Humane Society.
It's the oldest humane organization in the world.
And if you've seen the film, it's like no animals were harmed in the making of this film.
That's those guys.
So we've ended up...
So we really care about kind of not just the...
De-extinction efforts, the genome engineering efforts, but ensuring that the animals are healthy when they come out.
And so the 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.
Yeah, if we ever put them, I think more likely we'd put them in a museum that needs to be free like the Smithsonian or something like that from an education perspective versus something that's more attraction based.
Yeah, and they're big and we put fun stuff in them to play with like this.
And what's been crazy is we only named two of them.
And we named him Chip and Dale, because people were asking what the names were, and I was like, uh, Chip is the only thing that I could think of at the moment.
And now, even on X, people were 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...
So we're working on the Mammoth, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Dodo for different reasons.
We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and indigenous people groups.
And a project that we announced through our Colossal Foundation about two and a half years ago is...
Doing a population genomics map.
We talked about biobanking a little bit.
So we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity?
What's been lost?
You know, what's the number of inbreeding?
So we go through this whole process to try to understand.
And then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox.
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 went to their nation, wanted to share this.
And then, you know, we're curious.
What other projects would you work on that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison?
And they said 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 could do stuff around eagles and fish.
And so we kind of got that feedback.
And when Chairman Fox was walking me through their cultural heritage museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of a white wolf.
And he said, you know, that's the great wolf.
And he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost and how many people believed that it could have even been a dire wolf.
And I was like, from Game of Thrones?
That's cool.
I love the show.
That's interesting.
So we did that.
We talked about that.
And then three months later, I was in North Carolina and understanding that for a completely different meeting around financing.
And in that meeting, the Red Wolf program came up.
I don't know if you know anything about the Red Wolf, but it's kind of a disaster.
That's only endemic to America.
It's a red wolf.
It's beautiful.
And there's like 15 left in the wild.
With massive loss of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck.
And I was like, wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation?
We can't save our own...
When you think of the American West, you think of wolves, you think of eagle soaring, you think of bears catching trout, you think of bison.
The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons...
We're like, we have to do something about this.
We have to figure something out.
And so 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 and teachers and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths.
Or dodos or thylacines.
Like, we get, like, boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool.
So we're going to make a Colossal Kids Corner at our new labs.
And in that, we've had all this, some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business, they're just excited about it.
Most of them learned about it through their kids.
Kind of like with the Woolly Mouse with you.
And so everyone's excited about it.
And then we talked again to MHA Nation.
They brought up the Direwolf again.
And so we thought...
Maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species because direwolves were only found in the U.S. In North America, but predominantly in the United States, coastal United States.
And we thought if we could do something that could bring back the direwolf, also help wolf conservation and bring people from sci-fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation, we thought it was a cool idea.
No. Most of the direwolf 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 and acidification, there isn't.
Anything that's protected.
Like, there's nothing you can get from that.
But about six years ago, a group, including Bess Shapiro, our chief science officer, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right?
And in that tooth, they actually found a, they actually got 0.15x, 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 10x, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times, so that even if...
gaps, you understand enough of the core coding regions that you could bring back that animal.
So we built, part of our business model is building technologies to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than just solving them for existing species, open sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning
them out.
So our first computational analysis company was called FormBio, and we actually spun it out of the business.
And so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, could you resample the tooth?
And she's like, it's like, you know, half an inch long.
She's like, it's destructive sampling.
Like, it's going to ruin it.
I was like, well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible?
So we lucked out, and that tooth is 13,000 years old.
The skull itself is 72, 73,000 years old.
Not exactly sure.
But it was found in a riverbed.
And it wasn't found in a riverbed at the mouth of a cave.
So it wasn't found like...
In the permafrost, it also wasn't found in heat and acidification.
So there's a bone in all of us called the Petrus bone, which is insanely dense, and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born.
It's a great DNA storage, better than teeth, better than anything.
It's in the inner ear kind of head area.
And so we got permission from the museum to very carefully drill into the back, the underside of the skull and remove the petrous bone to see if we could get DNA.
And we got really lucky between resampling the first and the skull.
We ended up getting about 13 to 14 X coverage.
So that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the direwolves.
I think that we've become the apex predator on this planet.
And we inject our curiosity and choices every day that we overfish the ocean, we overhunt something.
In the case of the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on its head and killed it off, right?
Every time we cut down the rainforest, every time we...
Drink hydrogenated water.
We are, you know, playing God on some level, right?
Humans are very good at changing the natural flow of things.
Now, the good news is, is that there's been a lot of work around ecology and understanding what the impacts to rewilding can be.
And so it's been really, really helpful for us to understand, you know, one of the most successful rewilding programs of all times was reintroducing of 14 or 15 wolves back into Yellowstone.
Right. And looking at how the ecology of the system completely changed.
It changed the shape of rivers.
Because the elk population were just getting fat.
They were getting lazy.
They weren't migrating.
The sick and the old and the weak weren't getting killed off.
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 climate impact animals that probably exist.
Because they make wetlands.
They cause the rivers and ponds to get deeper, so it allows different types of fish and different types of animals.
So you have this thing called tropic downgrading, and you have this tropic cascading effect when you reintroduce.
I know people that lived in Montana before the wolf reintroduction, and a lot of people don't like that the wolves are there, but most of them are elk hunters that were used to something that's just outrageously overpopulated.
That's the reality of it.
But they were telling me that they had so many elk hunters.
They had such a large population versus the actual resources that were available.
They had all these crazy hunts that were available over the counter.
You can hunt cows in the snow.
So in the middle of the winter, where they can't move good, you can just pick them off in the snow.
Because they were just trying to cull the population.
Well, the Colorado stuff is completely going to destroy all of the stats.
So pre-Colorado, right?
So I'm talking about reintroduction into Montana, reintroduction into parts of Canada, reintroduction into Yellowstone, the Red Wolf, which is a very small population in North Carolina.
But it represents 0.02% of deaths associated with wolves and cattle and livestock.
All livestock, not just cattle.
And so the problem is when you go out there and you have a maintained balance that people can understand, and governments actually give subsidies to the ranchers when they get killed by wolves.
So I think that is a good program because you have to be fair to the people that are actually ranching.
But the problem is when you're not as thoughtful with a rewilding program and you don't
And they start encroaching in these areas.
Then the stats are going to go crazy.
And when the stats go crazy, then you're going to start looking to the animals that are the problem.
But it's not the animals that are the problem.
It was the decision that we gave that power to the masses that were really not informed to make that decision.
Yeah. And 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 12,000 years ago when a lot of megafauna went extinct, like during kind of that younger drive.
That younger Dryas kind of cooling period.
They went extinct as well, right?
And we knew, all we know, because all we have is we don't have frozen direwolves 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 kind of their body weight as a normal wolf would be.
But we knew that they had thicker skulls, larger cranium, and whatnot.
And we assumed that their...
And we did find this out in the genome, which is pretty cool, that they're white.
Because there's like this misconception for a while that they were red because some scientists wanted to make a paper and assume that they were red so they get their paper.
We looked at what genes made really a direwolf, a 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 distance, with that much genetic distance between them, we could actually understand what truly was fixed and conserved in the direwolf genome and what wasn't just population genomics.
If you and I are 50,000 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 and what made Joe Joe?
And so I was, I was like, so I was in, you know, because I bottle fed.
Romulus. And Romulus was partly raised with me.
I could go out to the preserve.
I'd check on him quite frequently.
It's in the northern United States.
We don't say where it is.
But mainly because we're not just for the animal's health, but for human health, ever since we launched the Woolly Mouse, we've had very excited people just show up.
Our labs are not open to the public.
And we've had lots of people just show up wanting to see the mice.
Showing people too much of the preserve, we're always very, very nervous about it.
We scrub all the videos and whatnot to ensure that no one can pick it out because we assume people will be moderately excited.
And it definitely also happened in kind of a regional sense, right?
Because you see different, which also tracks to the theory.
So not only do you have these different layers that you can prove from a sedimentation perspective, but there was also a massive glacial lake and some of the glaciers up there that rapidly liquefied.
They then dumped in the ocean that also changed ocean patterns.
So you went from a period in that kind of transition from Pleistocene to Holocene.
Do you know how Randall came up with that idea before it was brought to?
Like, his idea is that it was an instantaneous melting of these caps, some sort of immense cosmic event, and millions and millions of trillions of gallons of water at an insane rate ran through the land and just carved deep gouges into the earth.
He was on acid.
He was on acid and this idea came to him.
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 started noticing that there's...
These huge boulders that are just out in the middle of nowhere that were just moved by this immense amount of water.
And then the way the ground, the features of the ground looks like the features that you see on sandy beaches when the tide rolls in and out.
He's like, this is thousands of years of rainfall, and we know that the last time there was rainfall like that in the Nile Valley was 9,000 years ago.
So the whole thing is really screwy in terms of, like, what is the timeline that this stuff was actually built, and are we just assuming, because we've decided that it's 2,500 B.C., that that's it forever?
Nice. But, you know, the academics, we have 95 of the top scientific advisors in the world, Nobel laureates and whatnot.
We fund 17 academic universities, right, all over the world.
We fund 40 postdocs, right, all over the world, right, that are doing this.
So we're very integrated with different ideas from academia and these scholars.
And our top people...
That work at Colossal came from academia.
So I think we try 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 perish.
So one of the other things that people bitch about us is they're like, 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 don't have to write a paper on anything ever.
We do a couple here and there because we want to share our knowledge with...
With the community, right?
But we get this feedback of, like, if we wrote a scientific paper for every single thing that we did that went through peer review, like, we would have 3,000 scientific papers and no mammoths ever, right?
Because we'd just be sitting around writing fucking papers all day long.
Well, they want to impose their idea that they've already established and any change to that establishment.
So in addition to the public, 95 scientific advisors, and these are some of the top women and men in the world, right?
Fall in all sides of the political spectrum, all sides of every single spectrum out there.
We have another probably 40 advisors.
They're like, we love you.
You can't say anything because if I submit it, we know these other people don't like me.
If I submit a paper, and we totally agree with you and we'll help you, but if we submit a paper, they judge my paper, it gets rejected, then I don't get my grant, so then I can't continue my research, I have to fire my postdocs.
So it's a complete scam of a system, right?
And so we went through this phase where it's like we didn't have enough scientists, we didn't have labs, we didn't have money, we weren't doing anything for conservation.
So we went through this whole philosophical perspective of all these things that people threw at it.
But also, academia is really focused on point solutions, not full...
Well, it's also you're dealing with grants and enormous amounts of money that gets donated and given to these institutions along with a whole ideology.
Exactly. Well, also, you have to look at all data.
I don't want to get into this, but you have academics who are legitimate scientists and have published papers who are telling you that a man can be a woman.
Which is fine in terms of who you are, but now when you're having them compete with women in sports, you've entered into nonsense land, and you're the person we're counting on to be the most intelligent person on the subject.
You're trapped by an ideology that you're now ignoring biology in favor of sociology.
We separate, like, philosophical perspectives from science.
One of the things that we fight about all the time, you know, because it's like, once we got the scientists, and once we got the money, and once we proved that we are the most advanced, you know, synthetic biology company in the world, once In-Q-Tel, which is the funding arm of the CIA and other governments started investing in Colossal because of our technologies,
and once we started proof points, the last arguments that we have against some of those scientists are philosophical.
They're like, it's not a mammoth.
It's not a direwolf.
And it's like 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.
And there was a study that came out about, and once again, this goes back to the status quo of scientists, of academic scientists.
There was a paper that came out a few years ago because they didn't have much data.
They said that direwolves weren't closer or related to wolves.
They were close related to jackals.
And that's because at the time, they only had 0.15% of the genome, right?
They just didn't have all the data.
This is not a negative.
They just didn't have all the data.
Now we know that they actually were close related to wolves because we have more data.
Which wolves?
Gray wolves or the precursor to gray wolves, right?
So they were closer to the wolf ancestry line in kind of the broader canid group and family group.
And so what we found is once you do that, we start looking at all these genes and we start to understand what are the differences.
And we start to see that.
In certain parts of the genome that are responsible for size, for muscle, for craniofacial, that there's differences, right?
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 lot of different tools that we can then go use to make those changes from the dire wolves in a gray wolf cell line.
And then once you go through that process, we didn't talk about this earlier, you do the same process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is effectively cloning, where you take...
Take the nucleus of one cell, you put that into another egg cell, and then you take that embryo and you insert it into a surrogate.
Right. So if you look at speciation, right, there's basically, the scientists don't agree on how you classify a species.
So you've got certain people that'll say, well, a species is dictated by something that can't breed.
That's literally a definition, like, if this animal can't breed with this animal, then that's its own species.
Then you have other people, you have the paleontologists, and some of them love us, like Kenneth Lacovar, who's arguably the number one.
One paleontologist in the world that loves us.
But then you have other paleontologists that just hate us.
And they do it based solely on tooth morphology because they argue that's the only thing that is going to be persistent over time.
And I asked a paleontologist recently that hates us.
I said, if I made a mammoth that was giant with pink curly fur and it had the right tooth morphology, you're saying that based on your scientific papers that you would say that's a mammoth.
And she's like...
Yes, but that doesn't matter.
And I'm like, we'll do it.
Why does she hate you guys?
Because, why does anyone, you know, anytime you do anything in this world now that's like moderately bold or polarizing, people give you pushback.
But that's a good point, though, because Neanderthal, if you want to talk about a different species, just because they could breed with us, God, they're so different.
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.
I asked people, I was like, did you see Jurassic Park?
And they're like, yeah.
I was like, what was Jurassic Park about to you?
To me?
Yeah, if you're going to take 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.
Are they dinosaurs?
Or are they genetically modified animals, GMOs, genetically modified organisms that have inserted genes from lots of different things?
Or are they dinosaurs?
If they serve the ecological function, this is what's called functional de-extinction.
If they serve the ecological function and they have the lost biodiversity and phenotypes that made that animal unique, like the polar and a bear and a bear, they're just that animal.
So this starts the whole religious Philosophical debates, where it's funny because the scientists who should not fall into these philosophical debates when they don't like what you're doing, that's what they go to.
Right. But as a person who studies biology, which this person is, right, I kind of understand her perspective where she's like, what are you doing?
Like, what are you doing?
How is this group of people with a bunch of money and a bunch of eggheads, how are these geniuses allowed to get together, splice some genes up, and serve up a dire wolf?
But John Hammond, I don't think that they were really focused on conservation unless there was a...
No, we just want to make an attraction.
Yeah, so if we could show the Red Wolf, I think that'd be amazing, because all the technologies that we made on the path to bring back the Dire Wolf, we, one, make available to conservation.
You're going to die when you hear what I went through on this.
So I found out that, you know, we try to pair every de-extinction project with a species preservation project outside of making all of our technology for free, right?
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.
We're working with elephants in Botswana, we're working with elephants in Kenya.
So anybody can use our technologies for free, right?
We're working on chytrid, a terrible fungus in Australia.
And so if that's not enough, I found out that there's only 15 of those red wolves back in the wild in North Carolina.
So they're only recognized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife there.
But this incredible woman from Princeton, you know, top of her field, she's one of the top wolf geneticists in the world, Bridget von Holt, identified a population of wolves in Louisiana that have red wolf-like characteristics.
So she started darting them, taking samples, and what she found is they actually have more quote-unquote red wolf in them than the...
Red wolves that are being identified in North Carolina.
So I went to some folks from the last administration, right?
And I took some data with me.
And I said, hey, we really want to help this Red Wolf program.
We don't need any money.
We open-source all of our technologies.
And we've used a technology that's non-invasive for cloning.
Where we actually take a vial of blood, we isolate what's called endothelial progenitor cells, basically the inner lining of your blood vessel, right?
Because there's no nucleus in blood cells.
So we catch those, and when we catch those, we then isolate them, we grow them, and we clone from them, right?
Which is amazing because if you think about typical cloning from an animal welfare perspective, a lot of times you have to anesthetize the animal, you have to take ear punches, skin biopsies.
It's actually pretty...
It's a pretty invasive, terrible process to do cloning.
We can simply do it.
Every single zoo takes blood from their animals to check certain levels and whatnot.
We give blood all the time.
And so it's about as non-invasive as you can get, right?
And so we found a way, which we're open sourcing on Tuesday, is open sourcing this model of how you go clone from blood, which is a game changer for biobanking because now you don't have to go.
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 went out to Washington with my team.
I showed them Hope as a baby in little videos of...
And you may have videos of Hope, Jamie.
I don't know if it's in the folder.
I showed them videos of Hope.
And I said, hey, there's only a handful of...
We made these...
Four wolves from three different genetic lines.
We've 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.
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 million to see if it's possible to clone wolves.
And I was blown away.
I was like, oh, I'm so sorry.
I wasn't very clear.
This is a cloned wolf.
Like here, you can fly with me to the preserve.
You can fly with me to the preserve.
And they're like, we need to spend five to six years and $20 plus million to go understand this.
We'll give you all of the technology.
And if you tell me you want 100 wolves, I'll just make you 100 wolves.
And we'll even engineer in more genetic diversity for you.
And the response was, we'll get back to you.
We tried to have three other meetings.
No showed and canceled.
Every time.
When we were there.
I just got back from meeting with the Department of Interior, which Fish and Wildlife rolls up to.
And they're very, very focused on innovation, not regulation.
And immediately they said, we celebrate, Doug Burgum, the Secretary of Interior there who we met with, said, we celebrate, he's a huge conservationist, huge Teddy Roosevelt guy, member of the Explorers Club, and he's like, we do not have a celebration when animals come off the endangered species list.
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 He's like,
why wouldn't we do this?
And I was like...
We met with previous folks, and they said that we need, you know, five years and $20 million.
They were going to spend it internally.
They weren't giving us us to do the feasibility.
So they were going to spend it internally on this.
And we're like, we'll just do it for free.
And he's like, we will completely support the initiative, and we're going to help get you plugged in so you can help biobank our species and also help us support, you know, red wolf conservation.
Yeah, you were saying 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 mass extinction that did take place during that time.
I would love to have seen what it looked like.
When all those animals were around like what what was a you know we kind of have a sense of what because of safaris and videos we know what it looks like when lions are interacting with wildebeest in Africa like what did it look like in Kansas like a yeah like 15,000 years ago yeah like what was it like you know there's a extinct bison species that is the bison latifrons have you seen those guys yeah yeah they're like they're like eight foot long Texas longhorns crazy on like you know Super
Yes. The American cheetah, we actually have a full genome of it.
And then there was also one of my favorite animals, which is kind of a weird one probably on the list since we're talking about dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers.
So one of the things that's weird and interesting that we're also working on is artificial wombs at Colossal.
Because if you want to get to this world where you could productionize endangered species like northern white rhinos instead of having to use surrogates for an animal welfare perspective, if you can get to the point that you can engineer genetic diversity into 200 northern white rhinos, grow them in labs and bags,
and then you can control that population very well.
You can then reintroduce them with folks in the field that are the rewilding experts.
We rely on third parties on the rewilding modeling and all of our 48 conservation partners.
We really just focus on the core science that supports their initiatives.
But if we are successful with our artificial wombs, and we are quite...
We are quite far on that project.
I would not be surprised if eventually you see a...
Well, I think, I mean, my biggest thing that I think would be helpful is if...
If we had a world where we...
If Colossal gets ultimate success, I would say that we've successfully rewilded animals back into their natural habitat.
We've revitalized it.
These mosaic ecosystems that, you know, including your picture of what did the Arctic look like back in the day?
Like, how do we have that?
Because that was actually a crazy...
If you look at the work that's been done in Pleistain Park by Sergei Nikita Zimov, they've actually shown that rewilding northern Siberia with coal-tolerant megafauna...
Actually can revitalize the ecosystem.
It can add more biodiversity.
It can actually keep the ground temperatures colder in the winter so it sequesters more carbon.
So I think this idea of nature-based and living with nature in an ecological...
In an ecological model is something that, you know, I hope that we are successful at.
And I hope that, you know, Colossal is also successful at, you know, removing animals from the endangered species list.
Yeah, I think, you know, our goal, like, not to, if you, like, if Jamie, if you look at colossal.com forward slash Tasmania, for example, we actually build working groups with folks around, like, everyone from academia to private landowners to indigenous people groups,
governments, to understand, like, we don't have a thylacine.
I think we'll have a thylacine in the next eight years.
I really do.
I think based on where we are, current course in speed, there's 70 million years of genetic divergence between a fat-tailed dunnart, which is like a mouse-sized marsupial, and a wolf in this, right?
But we actually, if you just kind of scroll through into the people.
But if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see, and just, like, if you just do a quick scroll, you'll see that we actually have gone out and partnered with all these different groups, even though we don't have thylacines.
We have quarterly meetings in Tasmania around rewilding the thylacine with, and one of the groups that we have involved in it is the Login Commission.
How do we live with nature?
Kind of like with your example with the cattlemen and the ranchers.
Well, the biggest economic driver right now in Tasmania is actually the logging commission.
So if you think that you're going to reintroduce an animal back without them or their lobbyists having a And into the forest without them having a perspective, then I think that's just a naive way to look at the world.
And so we, going back, like the thylacine and mammoths and others, we try to build these working groups.
And ahead of time so that people can get excited about, 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 kind of listen to them and then figure it out.
And, you know, that approach of, like, listening to our critics and listening and being inclusive in these communities.
Has helped us, I think, dramatically think through what our rewilding strategies are.
But if you do have one, what would you look at specifically?
How do you take into account all the differences?
Do you take into account, like with the thylacine particularly because it's a large predator, the amount of animals it's going to eat, these animals are not...
They haven't evolved to be around this thing.
It's been almost 100 years since the last one was there.
So on the evolved part, this is actually kind of weird.
So you do ecological field studies.
So you work with ecologists, conservationists, predator experts, like people that understand predation, people that understand the land.
So you have to work with these kind of big working groups.
We have a project going on right now in central Tasmania, which is amazing.
You know the old school, like Looney Tunes, like Wile E. Coyote, where he's like...
Or the Kool-Aid man, right?
Well, if you had that cutout, we made cutouts and painted them of thylacines, but also of cats and dogs and wolves and other things.
And we put them out near camera traps in central 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 even a wallaby kind of walking through.
And they'll see a cat, they'll see a cutout, and they'll kind of look at it.
And remember, to your point.
For them, it's multiple generations, right?
Because these animals don't live hundreds of years.
And so when they see the cutout and shape and the coloration and size of a thylacine, they freeze and they absolutely freak out.
Wow. Yeah.
So we've been collecting this data for 18 months and we're publishing a paper on it.
Did you see that study that came out a couple weeks ago that having two eggs...
I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but you have two eggs, if you have at least two eggs a week, that it lowers the probability of Alzheimer's by like 47%.
They're saying that Gary said it was, I think it was Gary that was telling me that he thought it was like, it's now becoming a more popular belief that it's diabetes type 3. Yes.
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 COVID.
And there's definitely multiple strains.
I don't care what anyone tells you.
There's definitely multiple things that came out of the thing.
And so I got super, super sick.
And, you know, I now rarely drink.
I rarely have caffeine.
You know, I've kind of tried to cut out stuff.
I exercise regularly.
And looking at all these things that people think are weird or that used to be weird or alternative, like, you know, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, red light.
We're so concerned about our day-to-day existence that we lose track of this big picture.
You have the opportunity to do something that, if it wasn't possible...
You would wish it was possible, and that is get healthier.
Like, if it wasn't possible, if we just existed in a state, and 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.
There's friends that I have that are my age, and they look like they're my dad.
And that's...
That's because they've been drinking and smoking and sleeping late and fucking off their whole life and no exercise at all, and your body deteriorates.
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 test of blood it's like two tests twice a year
And so I do that test, and after working with Gary for a while, you know, now my biological age, or my actual age is 43. My biological age is 35. That's amazing.
And it's just been working for a year with Gary taking the right supplements, getting the right routine, giving myself nutrients.
And you can actually taste a difference, right?
If you go to a store and get a steak or chicken, even if it's free range and all that shit, it tastes great.
It tastes better than something that you buy just that's terrible at a store.
But when you order from some of these true...
Amish places and places that have actually grown the food completely natural that doesn't have just a fake...
Pre-purchased, certified organic.
You can taste the difference in the nutrient density.
To your point, when you travel and you go to these different places where you have that are truly more remote, right?
And I'm not just talking about Yellowstone, but when you said going to Kruger National Park or looking at some of these places in Africa, when you go to Central Tasmania, it's almost like a weird Disney movie.
Like, at dusk, you've got, like, echidnas running around, and you've got wallabies jumping through.
And they all just come through, and you're like...
It's like that scene in, like, Ace Ventura, right?
Where he sings, and, like, everything fucking comes to him.
And, like, I remember the first...
I was like, this isn't real.
Like, are these animatronics?
Like, there's no way there's this much life in biodiversity.
And it was all just, like, you know, the echidnas are running, the wallabies are jumping.
You've got, like, wombats, like, kind of...
Like, kind of scurrying along, 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 how we think about them, because you never see them.
But then there's just, like, this insane plethora of them.
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 decide, I'm going to go kill stuff.
So they kill the young, so they're thinning out the weakest.
They kill the old, then they kill the sick.
An environment that has the right balance of predator and prey is a healthier ecosystem, including for those prey species.
And all data that we've seen on the thylacine suggests that they actually ate...
That's kind of that mezzanine level of marsupials.
And so many people believe that the facial tumor disease would not...
Wow. But they literally scratch and bite each other, and then they...
They transmit this.
It's the only transmissible cancer that we know of.
So then it latches onto the next face.
Through biting.
And if you see an animal with a Tasmanian devil with a facial tumor disease, and you see them, like, they can't walk well, they can't really see well, those are the animals that would be picked up by predators first.
Right. And so there's a big movement within Tasmania and lower Southern Australia that if we could reintroduce a predator, being the thylacine, it would eat.
One of the projects that we're working on with the thylacine, because we like to pair every de-extinction with the species preservation, is have you ever seen a northern coal?
And what we've done is, if you go back to your point about co-evolving and evolution, if you go back to South America where cane toads evolved along snakes and mice and other small mammals, they eat cane toads all day long.
And they don't die of the neurotoxin.
They don't completely stroke out and die, which is what happens in northern Australia.
And so the cane toads, they reproduce in an insane rate.
They're having thousands of babies.
They're making more and more of them.
So guess what?
More and more coals and others are eating these cane toads and dying.
So what we did is we actually did a study where we understood what are the genes in the mammals and snakes even in South America.
That make them cane toad toxin resistant.
And here's what we found.
This is amazing.
One letter in three and a half billion base pairs.
So one letter, a one letter change, had no other effects that were negative.
And it created a 5,000 times resistance to cane toad.
Wow. So because, you know, coals are endangered and we don't want to work in endangered species first, you want to start with a more model species.
We worked in the fat-tailed dunnart, which is our model species for the thylacine.
And we engineered dunnarts and dunnart cells and dunnarts that can eat cane toad tissues and have zero effect, has zero effect on them, where it would typically kill them.
And so now we're in the next phase of trials showing that we want to enter, we like to engineer in this one.
Because if quolls would have most likely, through this concept of convergent evolution, if you would have put the quoll next to the kanto, they would have co-evolved together.
They probably would have had that resistance already built into them through nature.
Wow. And so that's showing the power of this concept of genetic engineering and biotech in conservation.
And so then you could, like, make these super coals that eat the cane toads.
And then not only does that help the population, lower the population of cane toads, it has this – and help the population of the coals.
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.
Imagine you're fighting with a dude, and he literally bites half your torso and throws you through the air, and they don't even look like it bothered them.
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.
They're actively targeting people in this village.
When he went to the village, everybody was missing a foot, a chunk taken out of their leg.
And while he was there, a crocodile took a woman who was washing clothes.
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.
Because you can't see them in the water and then they just explode out and snatch you up.
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.
And it's weird how some of those It's very strange as we start to study.
Because, like, one of the things that Colossal is doing is we're studying a lot of what's called non-model species.
So we're learning a lot about weird things that we just didn't know.
There's some things that are known.
Like, elephants get cancer a fraction of what they should due to an overexpression of a gene called P53.
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 what they probably should, based on how old they get and what their body size is.
And that actually makes our lives very difficult, and that's why we had to create stem cells for elephants.
Because any time we try to...
We had to figure out how to regulate P53, because any time you go to edit that one cell, it just says, looks like a mutation, could be cancer, kill cell, right?
It's like...
So we have to be able to turn that down.
Because we're in the editing phase on the Mammoth Project, right?
Yeah, they actually were engineering babies in editing their embryos to confer a resistance to HIV.
Now, still to this day, so they were cloning them, and then they were genetically modifying them.
And so they're doing lots of things that are, there's a general moratorium in the world on some of these things around humans, anything that's considered a germline edit.
So anything that could be passed on to the next generation, right?
If you engineer something into the genome, the fear is, you know, from a germline.
So all your cells in your body are somatic cells except for your egg or sperm.
Those are germ cells.
So anything that could be affected into the germline so that you pass it on to the next generation, that could be like, you know, umbrella corporation type moment, right?
And that's this eugenics world where we know, right?
I just had a child.
And typically, I'd say if you go through the IVF process, which we went through, you typically can test for certain types of issues along the pregnancy, right?
And when they put the embryo in, they look at the morphological grade.
Well, now there's...
There's new tests, new companies out there, one of which I use, which after I used it, I was so impressed.
I invested in it called Orchid Health.
And they actually take cells from the developing neuro on the very outer derm, right, on this thing that doesn't affect the embryo development.
They culture those cells, and then they're doing full genome sequencing, right?
And so we had a handful of embryos.
And so not selecting – they don't let you just select for, like, eye color or height or anything.
But outside of the kind of the core, you know, is there a mental issue or is it – Compatible with life, which is what most people test for.
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 diabetes or certain types of cancers or Alzheimer's relates in your family, you can now get a lot of that's environmental, but you can still get a distribution score to it so you can understand what are the genetic factors in that.
So that's today.
So that's not, like, 20 years in the future.
That's not Gattaca.
That's today.
Wow. And I mean, we did that.
We did that because I found out during that sick period that I have a gene mutation which affects the Titan gene and I create a truncated protein.
So I am more susceptible to diseases, including the first true round of COVID that was a lab leak, that attacked my heart.
Wow. And so I didn't want to be able to pass that on.
So we screened for that, right?
But that's not a standard thing.
But that's a today thing.
Two years ago, that technology existed and is now prevalent and people are using it.
So you understand the technology better than most.
Conceivably, what could be done that would, in the future, allow people to change their very shape and literally change everything about them, change their intelligence, change everything?
You know, neuro-enhancers, and I think this is the biological perspective.
This is not even the computer brain interfaces merging with AI, that whole world, which I think that world has a lot of traction and is scarily getting a lot of traction pretty quickly.
But I think it starts with things like HealthSpan, where it's like the very vain stuff.
So like, you know, skin, skin elasticity, hair, all of that, eye color, I think all of that is changeable.
There's a company right now, I forgot the name of it, that's spun out of Harvard that is making patches, using microneedling patches that you can't even feel the needles, right?
And delivering a custom stem cell for you that can help, like, replace your melanocytes for hair and for skin.
Wow. So you can have 30-year-old-looking skin when you're 85 years old.
And so I did, full disclosure, we did do a blood sample on that one.
Just in case?
I just don't know what the meltdown could look like.
But the other one we haven't.
Because you have environmental factors, you have personalities, we don't understand all of that.
But I won't say who it is, but someone that's very well known in the world, when I was showing him some of our Direwolf and Red Wolf tech, his kids were...
Devastated because his dog was dying.
And they didn't want to put her in any harm.
They didn't want to go to one of these dog cloning companies and do ear...
They didn't want to put her to sleep.
They didn't think she'd wake back up.
So we did a blood draw.
He called me over Christmas or before Christmas last year and told me that they think the dog's got days to weeks to live.
Could we do it for her?
And we did it for him.
We're not in that business.
That's not our business.
But he was just happy because his choice wasn't he didn't want this other dog or his family didn't want another dog.
His biggest issue was they couldn't let go of that dog, number one.
And number two, but they didn't want that dog to suffer.
They didn't want to say, for our selfish means, you're already suffering.
We want you to go be put to sleep and have pieces taken out, like Frankenstein pieces of you.
And so the fact that we could just take a blood draw, the dog didn't even notice we took the blood draw.
I was like totally awake, just sitting right there while we did it.
I'm new to this whole father thing, but I think it's important that they understand.
There's real things, and there's consequences to decisions, and we're going to age, and we've got a limited time.
I think that in his lifetime, it will be massively accelerated, but I think that's important.
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 direwolves is something that's exciting because we get these handwritten notes from kids, right?
So like on our shittiest day at Colossal when someone says whatever or whatever and we get or an experiment doesn't work or whatever bad happens and you look at this pile of kids.
And teachers, like, we have this, there's a teacher named Katie from Florida who sent us a letter and literally like 40 pictures of mammoths.
And in that letter she goes...
My kids won't be quiet.
We're in this, like, attention war with everything.
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.
So, like, the ability to, like, engineer drought-resistant crops or a vaccine or regrow our hair or, you know, make mammoths.
That's today.
We can't even think about what's tomorrow.
We spun out a company from...
Colossal called Breaking last year.
And this incredible group at the Wies Institute discovered an enzyme from the Amazon that actually breaks down any type of plastic you give it to.
And not making smaller plastics, not making microplastics, which are fucking terrible, but actually breaks the chemical.
That's why I named it Breaking.
It actually breaks the chemical bonds of plastic and just produces biomass as a thing.
So it takes things out of...
Broken down never and has got it down into years.
We have used now computational biology and synthetic biology to engineer it so now that it's in, you know, 22 months.
And I think that we can get it down to two weeks.
And so that will be huge for the plastic problem because we can all say that we're going to change hearts and minds and use different types of plastics.
We still have the existing plastics here.
We have to do something about it.
So I do think there's even industrial use cases coming out of synthetic biology that like 10 years ago, someone said, we give you a magic microbe that you can put in a vat and you can just throw any of your plastics in there and you can throw salads and other stuff there and it won't even touch it.
That would have sounded like science fiction 10 years ago.
And we're talking about, like, not just, like, 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.
Like, we're throwing some pretty hard stuff at it.
So we looked at nylon as one of our first use cases.
And then we're doing water treatment plants and a few others.
So if we get the point that we could do filtration on microplastics at the treatment level, right, because all that's passing through right now, like in our drinking water and everything, that's why you have to have these massive, you have to have like the three-layer osmosis devices and whatnot for water.
You've got to do, Gary, you got me a new water?
Machine. 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...
Right now it's working in bioreactors, so I don't want to overpromise and say we can just go sprinkle it and call it a day.
But that's the long-term goal, right?
Wow. But that's the power of, you know, we used AI and computational analysis of this microbe that's found in nature, and then we said, let's supercharge it, just like supercharging the quals, right?
but that's but the process of using it outside of contained uh systems like a bioreactor has to be done uh very thoughtfully and measured just like rewilding right like this is where sometimes people get confused about like the yelts and stuff they didn't just open the gate and throw some wolves in
there i mean 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 there's intended consequences which you get excited about but then there's a shit ton of unintended consequences if you're not
Synthetic biology is an AI-level thing that we need to be worried about.
So, I think that the U.S. is by far the most advanced from a synthetic biology perspective.
It is a major directive of China, you know, not just sequencing and biobanking, because they're biobanking.
We do not have a nationalized biobanking process here.
That's one of the things I...
I was meeting in Washington about, but China does.
China is going, like, we see them in Africa where they'll make donations to a university or a school and say, oh, but we're going to take blood samples from all of your animals around here.
You guys are cool, right?
So they are doing this, right?
So they're looking for insights in animals.
They're looking for that data.
They're also trying to build, like, today's Noah's Ark.
And so China is for sure.
There's some countries it's harder, like the European Union's...
Harder to do anything because they've kind of put a moratorium on GMOs or genetically modified organisms.
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?
We can be smarter and actually have a better understanding of those intended consequences now through AI and software.
The closest you 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.
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.
I mean, that's just where the technologies go, right?
And you said it best when you brought up quantum.
Quantum's only two years away every two years, I hear.
But eventually, when it works and works at scale, and you have that coupled with...
With where some of these companies like X.ai and others are taking it, I think the merger of that plus synthetic biology will allow us to do all kinds of stuff.
And look, it will be in nefarious hands.
Let's just be real.
Nuclear weapons are in nefarious hands, right?
Nuclear weapons are in good guys' hands, right?
And so this is nuclear weapons.
And I think that you have to be – just because it exists, we can't put our head in the sand and say, oh, we just can't.
Let it be because it does exist.
And I don't know if you saw this, but this was like five years ago.
No, no longer that.
It was like seven years ago.
People in China, companies in China and the government in China were using facial recognition technology to profile people, right, of a certain subset of race, right?
And they were doing bad things with facial rec.
Well, the San Francisco government, where a lot of the funding came from Silicon Valley for a lot of tech startups, they said, Not at a nationwide level, but in Silicon Valley, San Francisco says, we will not at all support any technology.
We're going to ban investing in facial wrack technology.
Well, that's just dumb, right?
Because we now know there's things like deepfakes and all this stuff.
But it's like, that's setting American innovation back because someone's doing something bad with it, right?
That's like saying, oh my gosh, they have guns.
We should never develop guns.
It's a bad philosophy when it comes to technology.
I think the same way about synthetic biology.
Currently, the United States is the leader in synthetic biology, and we've got national treasures like George Church, my co-founder, and others.
And I hope that we continue to be the world's leader.
But I do think other countries have different ethical boundaries than we do, and they will experiment on kids.
When you think about it a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, when you scale this out, there's no limit to what could be done with life.
That's so strange.
Yeah. It's so strange to think that for four plus billion years, life has evolved in a very specific pattern.
Yeah, but I will say that if you look at, you know, not to get too weird, but if you do look at the, it's like Cuckoo Khan and folks in, if you look at some of the carvings from all over the world resembling their sky gods.
There's a lot of weird similarities.
You can't objectively...
It's like the guy with the Sphinx.
Yep, that's water.
I'm an expert on erosion.
That is water.
And then they're like, head of the Sphinx, that's not water.
It's the same thing as this.
You cannot look at some of this stuff and say...
That's not weird, right?
You can't look at like, you know, the incredible pyramids we have all over the world that seem to now, there's like more and more discoveries and then they get silenced out of you.
It's like, 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.
Yeah. I mean, I'm talking to you about hardcore genetic science, but then when you start to look at all the craziness in archaeology, we don't know a lot.
Yeah. I think Graham Hancock in the end, I don't know if they're, you know, kind of this advanced civilization or whatnot, but I think really smart people said things like Plato and others that were probably real.
Yeah. I don't think they were just like playing around and like, oh, we're going to write something that's going to be in history as a joke forever.
I do think that the Younger Dry stuff is also a combination of – I think generally speaking, if you break down the Younger Dry period into that rapid cooling, I think – The vast majority of people will say some of it, some of the destruction or some of the destruction around megafauna was anthropologic,
which I'll give it some percentage.
Then I think a lot of people agree on this flood theory.
10, 20 years ago, people, if you brought up the idea of a worldwide flood, they would just be like, oh, you're a fundamentalist Christian who can't talk to you ever again.
Now, if you were an insanely advanced species from another dimension, another planet, whatever it is, and you're a million years more advanced than human beings, and you come down here and you see Australopithecus.
You know, trying to figure out how to make a spear.
Yeah. And you say, listen, let's put a little bit of this, edit a little bit of that.
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 less and less reliant on muscle.
Even though a lot of times people like Graham Hancock and others are ridiculed about it, and we get ridiculed even for the actual signs that we're doing and proving every day, at the end of the day, it is still cool.
I don't want to live in a society or a universe where everything's figured out.
Every day is amazing, and we're figuring out amazing things.
I think that's why so many people subscribe to your podcast is because one minute you'll talk to a comedian and a UFC fighter and the next time you're talking to someone that knows more about the ancient flood than anyone in the world.