Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Ben Lamm (on de-extinction)

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, serial technology entrepreneur, and pioneer in de-extinction. Ben joins Armchair Expert to discuss being raised by his mom and grandparents in Texas, starting his first company while at Baylor, and why a conversation with geneticist George Church changed the course of his life. Ben and Dax talk about building a team to engineer a mammoth from scratch, creating woolly mice in 30 days, and turning 73,000-year-old DNA into dire wolf puppies. Ben explains why de-extinction is really about developing new technologies, how humans should take responsibility for species we’ve eradicated, and why inspiring people about science is as important as the animals themselves.Start your 2 month free trial today: https://youtube.com/premium . Terms Apply. Cancel Anytime.Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/Take printer ink off your to-do list with HP Smart Tank | http://www.hp.com/SmartTankSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. What a thrilling and exciting topic we have today. We have Ben Lamb, who is the co-founder and CEO of colossal biosciences, and what are they doing? Well, they're bringing back and have the dire wolf. Yep.

You know, they're focused heavily on a woolly mammoth. Yes. They have woolly mouse. They've created woolly mice. Yep. And the list goes on. Yeah. This is impossible.

This is where we're at. This is a really wild episode. This is mind-blowing. It feels sci-fi, but we're living it. Yes, it's present-day sci-fi. Please enjoy Ben Lamb. He's an object square. He's an ultra-exper.

Ben? Yeah. Great to meet you. We met briefly. Yes, we did. Brought you guys. Colossil shirts. Oh, can you.

You're a kid. Everybody. Friends, grandparents. We love shirts. Anybody you want to give it away to? Can you imagine if I still had grandparents? That would be lovely. I have one grandma.

You do? How old is she? She's 96. Oh, wow. Good for her. Let's Matt Hurd's mom. No, she's amazing. She's my Gigi.

She, like, helped raise me. She's the best. Hold on, don't tell me. I know. I have friends who call their grandma Gigi. I'm trying to think what ethnicity. Greece. No, it's just like weird Texan.

It's a Texan. I mean, I don't know. I think I just couldn't say, so like my son can't say dad-da yet. I mean, I've young kids. So he calls me Gaga. Oh, nice. Yeah, so I was like, maybe like, like, this genetic. Did I, like, not be able to say grandmother?

So I said, Gigi. Like, I don't know. Gaga. They all have fun names, grandparents. Yeah, our kids call all of their grandparents Gaga. Oh, really? Yeah, it's universal. I went to the library a couple weeks ago with my wife and my two kids.

And I was just taking the bathroom or? No, just to hang out of library, right? And so, like, we do that in Texas. So I was, like, playing with this fake frying pan with him. He's two and a half, so he's at this stage where he's saying things that you're like, where did you learn this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he, like, ran over to this other mom in the library and he was like,

ho Gaga. He, like, points back at me and, like, when did you learn that? Like, that's a weird, that's an interesting and funny interaction where he's, like, making fun of me to this other parent. Wow. He's already back to him. Yeah, he's already embarrassed by him. He's like, rolling his eyes.

It was amazing. Yeah, creating new alliances with the other people. Well, you've got to practice early. But let's be honest, you just said it like you're always at the library. You have a two and a half year old. The shit I was doing, I was at Travel Town every week, the miniature train music. Yeah. I haven't been back since they were six.

Yeah. Yeah, but you're just trying to pass the minutes. The library is a babysitter's friend. I would always circulate between the park and the library. For some reason, the minutes just would not pass. Yeah. I couldn't understand time. Yeah, sometimes, like, the bath time, like, when I was like, you've had bath time for two hours.

He's like, he loves it. Just kidding. He's in it. He's happy. Yeah, anything that they're happy doing, you'll do until they're no longer happy. How many do you have? Two, a two and a half and a eight-month-old. Oh, Lord.

So I'm in it. And are you originally from Texas? I know you went to Baylor. Yeah, born in Austin. One of the rare people who was actually born there. Yeah, okay. And did your parents move there? So my parents lived there when they had me.

they got divorced so I was very young. Yes. And then I left Austin when I was five. Then later in my life, I made it back for a few years. And I went to Dallas and I kind of bounced all over. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents. Yeah, yeah. Same.

By Gigi. Yeah. By Gigi, yeah. By Gigi and my grandfather, Poppy, who's no longer with us. You know, my brother just kind of reframed our childhood in the most beautiful way, which was he said, you know, thank God dad was an addict. Because otherwise we would have never had every single weekend with Papa and Grandma. and then the summers was helping grandma.

And they were who you'd want to be raising. Oh, yeah. They had the time and the resources. I'm an only child. My wife is the youngest of five. Only girl, all the rest are boys. Oh, my God. And they're from Nebraska.

So they're like Omaha, like hardcore. Five o'clock, they're like watching sports, drinking Budweiser, and the whole nine. They're the best. Salt of the Earth. I love it. So we did the same thing. They did retire. We just got them to move down to Dallas to be near us.

Yes. because I grew up with my grandparents. They had a farm outside of Dallas, and so I'd go and, like, catch frogs. I did the whole super small town thing as a kid. I loved it, and I really wanted that for my kids. And so now that they're here, it was funny, I came back from a trip two weeks ago,

and my father-in-law was there with my son, and my son kept saying hop, hop, and I was like, what are you talking about? And they had caught a fraud and put it in, like, a little baby boy and swam around. And I was like, I was like, I used to catch frogs with my grandpa. And so it was cool.

I feel very blessed. about the childhood I had. I want our kids to be around their grandparents. Yeah, yeah. Being on a multi-generational is really cool. A lot of wisdom to observe. Now, really quick, did you listen to Dr. Death? No.

Best podcast of all time. And it was about a Baylor-educated surgeon who then practiced at Baylor. And he was completely incompetent. And he decapitated many people, including one of his friends. He was a raging addict. I was in the business school, so I didn't learn.

Too bad. skill set was not. He was stowed upon me. Yeah. But he was like your friend. Yeah, it would have been exciting if you knew who that guy was. I think at that time,

he was the first doctor to ever be convicted and sent to prison for crimes committed in the operating room. Because he was drunk and stuff. Yeah, well, let's hope my story is slightly different. That'd be great. Okay. And probably Baylor's like, God damn, and stop talking about that guy.

Yeah. Okay, so by the time you're a senior at Baylor, you already start a company. What was the first one? Simply interactive. It was an e-learning? E-learning, yeah. What does that even mean?

My uncle was on the board of Baylor. He was amazing. And he's like, look, you go to school and you pick a major that I agree with so that we believe you'll have a job. I don't think you ever really realized that was massively unemployable. Okay. Over time, I think you probably realize that. He's like, you do these things.

You take out loans. And then I'll pay for your college, right? So it's like, it's amazing, right? Like single parent. Like, it's an amazing gift that was given to me. And so I was a finance and accounting major because that was one of the checkmarks in my arrangement with my uncle. And then I had this great teacher.

Dr. James Moschinsky, who just happened to be, in Waco, Tex of all places, one of the world's top cognitive psychologist. Whoa. And he had built a lot of the fundamental models for instructional design to help people, like, how will people learn on computers? Just to, I guess, kind of date me in my time, this is when the internet was moving with this thing called Flash, Macromedia Flash, if you remember the days of the internet where everything was, like, dancing around.

Oh. I learned that, just kind of self-taught myself that, and partnered with Dr. Moschinsky and started an e-learning company because at the time, all of these corporations were trying to take training online. It was more e-reading than e-learning, and you were just like flipping the pages. And we wanted to add games and unification. Yeah, multimedia.

Yeah, and like, yeah, it was like, if you were doing something with industrial wastewater disposal, that's boring. It sounds boring. We did it for Genentech, a big biotech in South City, San Francisco. So if you go take photos of Marin, and you build this emotional connection to the content. A video game. Yeah, if you could play, if you could make it more interactive and emotional,

where it's like, hey, if you throw this water away the wrong way, it's going to ruin this park you play with your kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you can make it like hyper-localized and emotional, that's kind of our thesis. And we grew the company. What year was that? That was 2004.

22 years ago. Okay, so you exited that thing, and then I'm just going to speed through. You created and sold five or so companies from gaming to there's all kinds of. We made a lot of shitty games. Okay, that's all it takes is one good game. Yeah, we made it. like 11 shitty games and then the last one was pretty good.

Yeah. How do you end up meeting or approaching George Church? And then let's just talk about who George Church is. So George's amazing. He's somebody, I'm shocked we haven't had on. You should have him. You should have him. He is, look, you could say, oh, you're biased.

But he is the most interesting person in the world. He's six, seven. Oh, he is? Yeah, he's huge. Massive beard. Looks like Santa Claus has narcolepsy. Oh. But he literally will talk about superpowers.

where he'll fall asleep and his brain, like the RAM, the rain of access memory, it's still working. And so he'll fall asleep and like totally like mop it out. But then he'll like jump back in and be like, well, the solution's X, Y, Z. And you're like, what just happened? It's like, it's incredible. And he thinks that it's like you're getting into a save state like in a video game like when you're sleeping. And then it comes back. He's awesome. So George has got a very prolific lab. He's seen as like the father of synthetic biology using directed evolution and genetic engineering and computational biology to engineer

life in a direction that we want, right? That's what his lab is like prolific for, right? Did we say he's a professor at Harvard? Yeah, he's a professor at Harvard. Professor at Harvard, he's a geneticist, he's a molecular engineer, he's a chemist. If we have him on, I hope he falls asleep in the field. Oh, he will.

Oh, this is fantastic. This is comfy. I always try to keep him uncomfortable when I'm around. I'll have rubbed him the light slowly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he was also somehow involved early with CRISPR now? Yeah, yeah.

So he, in Walter Isison's book, right? Walter's Amazing, who wrote a book about Jennifer Doudna, who's also equally amazing. George is actually a supporting character throughout it. And those CRISPR wars were so interesting between the Brod and Berkeley and nothing ever really seems to ever get solved. But George is actually one of the first people to use genetic and CRISPR specifically in mammals. So he was using it in mammal and human cells and publishing it before anyone. What were the first things?

I don't know what the first edits were that he did, but this is what you'll love about George, is that he truly believes in like open source software. He's like, how do we democratize these things so that everyone's genome should be sequenced, not just the super rich. Or if you sequence the genome for a woolly mammoth, he wants that accessible to anyone who would be studying. Anyone. So we very much saw, like in our first meeting, which I'll get to, it was very clear

how aligned we were, like philosophically. I personally am biased, but I think that George should have gotten a lot more credit. on some of the Christopher Nobel Prize type work. But George is like, they're amazing. They really did the work. He is the most, like, I just want to work with everybody. I just want to collaborate. I want to share information.

We as humanity need to go faster. We're not going to go faster by holding stuff in. I was running another company in mine. And we were at this moment where it looked like we were going to be bought. It was a defense company. A big defense contractor was going to buy us. It was right before COVID. Spoiler, they ended up not buying us.

I'm sorry. Sounds like it would have been lucrative. I'm sorry. Well, it ended up getting bought later, so it was funny. It all worked out the way I was supposed to. So I reached out to George because I was really interested in synthetic biology. And my thesis, when I called them, was a myriad of these tools exist for genome engineering, DNA synthesis, being able to synthesize DNA. Cloning was getting better from an efficiency perspective.

Where will AI access to compute? And then eventually technology is like quantum be able to take our ability to use software to program life. Like how do we go from 90% discovery in a new? academia to 90% engineering and 10% discovery because so much can be done through simulations or whatnot on the computer. So I was really fascinating with that. George is a genius. So he answered that question like seven seconds on the call. And he was like, you know, this is where I think the opportunity is going. I was like, oh, that's awesome, amazing. And then I'm like, stupid level curious. And I'm like, what else you got? What is this going on in this weird lab of yours? And he started

telling me about all these crazy things that was so technical, so over my head. And I just asked him, I was like, okay, with all this stuff, if you had one project with unlimited capital, what would you do? Because you have a lot going on in your lab, 100 postdocs and all this crazy stuff. And it was like a mic drop moment. He's like, I would just work to bring back to Woolly Mammoth. I'd reintroduce it back into the tundra. And I'd use those technologies to help conservation and also apply them to human health care. I have to go to my next meeting now.

I have to take a six minute nap and then go to my next week. Yeah. And so the call was over and I was like, is that real? In what year is this? 2019. Okay, this is 2019. So by 2019, I had already read this compelling article in nature or something that they had found some woolly mammoths in the permafrost in Siberia and that they were optimistic that there

was sperm in the testicles that could be harvested and potentially bred with the Asian female elephant, which you can breed an African in an Asian female, but not an Asian male in an African female. But very few people know that what you just said. That's where I bowled out. and I was very excited about this notion of impregnating an Asian female with the sperm of a found woolly mammoth in the permafrost. So what happened with that?

I know about that thing. So George Prius having our first call, and then I was in his lab a week later for a meeting. Before all of that, that was 2019. Since 2008, journalists and others had, there are these discoveries on fully mummified baby mammoths. All of these discoveries are happening as people were... As climate...

Yeah, as the perforumpt. Yeah. Which is really bad. One of the very few silver lines. Yes, if the only one. So as that's happening, they just keep coming back to George and saying, can you do it? And George is like a mathematical guy.

He's like, well, there are no scientific gates. There's engineering challenges, but we kind of have everything we need to put this together to make this happen, right? Yeah. And so it was amazing. He blames journalists in the community for why he's working on the mammoth, but on the cover of his book, his only book, there's a mammoth. So I don't know if I totally buy that.

So he was aware of that. They never actually did find. sperm. They found a lot of tissues. And what happens is when they go into this tissue that starts to be like emulsified and like bleaky and something like that, they think that there's viable cells there. There are no viable cells there. Really? Even when they have the full carcass. Yeah, even when they have the full carcass. Because DNA degrades at such a crazy rate. Because it's in the nucleus of the cell. It's in the nucleus of the cell. And you'll get some mitochondrial DNA. You'll get pieces of the DNA from the cells, but you're not going to get a living

cell. So if you wanted to impregnate through sperm, you're going to need living sperm, which they did not have, or you're going to need, if you're going to clone it, a lot of times people are like, get on with it with you guys, right? Why are you guys taking so long? Because they just think that we could just clone a cell, right? But there are no living cells. We have about 104 mammoth genomes across 1.3 million years of genetic divergence. And they're all massively fragmented. They're all super broken DNA pieces because they did great over time. If you had to assign percentages, each of these samples is what? Is it 2% of the DNA? So I think we have now assembled a fully complete woolly mammoth genome at this point. By piecing together all these different samples over a 1.2 million

year horizon. In aligning it to the Asian elephant, which is the closest genetic match, right? Right, 99.4. It's 99.6. It actually depends technically on how you measure it. It's 99.9.6. It can be as low as 99. 99.2 because there's a mass variety. 99 plus. Are they smaller? They are. Yeah. Most people, most people, think that mammoths were like these giant things, but they're actually woolly mammoths, which are about the same size as Asian elephants, which are a little bit smaller than African elephants. You did have straight test elephants. You had some other stuff that was like quite big. They're still very large. They're just not, sometimes people think them was like the size of like

buildings. Yeah, I don't think I knew they were even as big as elephants. You thought they were smaller? Yeah. There's pygmy one man. Pigmy on Channel Islands. Yeah. That's what I want replicated is the pygmy one. So I can have one. in my house. You're not alone. That request comes in more often than you would think. I bet. Everybody wants a pig bee. I was like, let's get to Ah, Mammoth, right? And so, George is getting all of this data over the years.

He'd got a $100,000 gift from Peter Thiel, who is not a investor in our business, but he'd given a $100,000 grant to the church lab to work on the Mammoth. And George stretched that out over like six years, right? He's like spending $12,000 a year just keeping it alive. And this ended up being this project where people knew that George was working on it. But it wasn't, like, funded to the way of, like, one of his big sponsor. And it's not on the front burner for me. I'd say it's probably the front of his mind.

Yeah, not allocation of lab time and resources. How old is he? 72. Now, I know, hurry. No, he's the best. It scares me. He just had a birthday. He's the best.

He's taking his name. He should just, you know, maybe like vitamins. He's going to pass Gigi. Yeah. He's going to pass Gigi. Not to mention if anyone's going to. going to get the epigenome anti-aging. He'll be the first to dial up.

He's definitely working on all of the anti-aging stuff. So he's great. So he had been working on it for a long time. That's not why I called him. But then I hung up the phone and I went through this like weird introspection. You've talked to other tech CEOs. If they say they didn't say this, they're just completely lying. Every tech CEO and founder I ever know has talked about, oh, I'm doing this,

when I make an impact, I want to change the world. But most companies, they fail. They get bought. They go public. I don't know how many of them really put a dent in the universe. Like Steve would always talk about it. They put like really a change. I left the call really inspired.

And I left the call thinking, is this an opportunity that's being presented to me by the universe? And if I don't take it, I can say I'm building this company that's going to create a lot of shareholder value. It's going to make money. And it's going to provide jobs and services function. But I don't think I could ever hear myself say. And I think this is going to leave an impact on the world. Right. Like I really felt this was like, hey,

do you want this is your once in a lifetime swing that's how i viewed it and i was like look i built it sold six software companies and i was like if it all fails i could just go do that there's no risk how's the call back to the next day i literally called it the next day i literally called it the next day i stayed up all night i was at my house in austin stayed up all night couldn't figure out there was this mammoth through line you could hear this different inflection in his voice how passionate was about it so i called him back the next night and literally i talk to was like i think i just need to come see you. Which if I were going to be like, this guy's weird.

I talked to him yesterday. So I went up there a week later. Within a week, I was in his lab, spent the whole day with him. We couldn't be more philosophically aligned. And it was funny. I was in his little office. He came in. He's like, I'm not going to sit down because I may fall asleep.

And I was like, I didn't know some of these attributes about him at the time. So I was like, is that because he's just like, is this one of those like power plays where it's like, I'm going to bail if I'm not interested? It's just easier for me to walk out. Like, I didn't know what I was working with here. Sure. I brought one of my lawyers at the time to see what are the requirements of doing a deal like this and how do we work with Harvard. And then I brought a scientist and we went in, talked about it.

We talked more philosophically, like how we think about things. I left that meeting 400 times more excited than going into it. And you must have told him, I have the capacity to bring to you quite a bit of funding. We actually ended the meeting with, I was like, I think there's no one less qualified than me to do this. So it makes perfect sense that I should go do this. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking. From his point of view, what are you offering that he's even interested? I said, look, I'm very good at building teams of people that are much smarter than me.

Your science teams are much smarter than me, number one. Number two, if you have a plan that you believe we can get there and you think these are engineering challenges, I know how to solve engineering challenges. Yeah. I know how to hire building to solve engineering challenges. And I know how to rise capital towards it, right? Our first investor deck was quite shitty, though. And so it wasn't a great deck.

because, like, we have no deal with Harvard. We have no IP. We have no scientist. This guy thinks he can bring back a mammoth, and we had no monetization models at that time. Well, I was going to say, you have to put money in. You have to have some monetization scheme. Otherwise, what are we doing?

Like, how are we funding this? You know, there's no money in bringing back the mammoth unless you have a theme park, I guess. You should have sent it to Dax. His debt. Well, many celebrities are his first round investor. Okay, I was going to say. Chris Hemsworth, Peter Jackson,

yeah. Because they want the piggy pets. But they came to us, which is crazy. We've been very fortunate. In the early days, we went to investors, some of which I'd worked with in the past, some of which just had our long-term views. And our original pitch was, hey, look, this is a systems model, no different than building software. It's a systems model, no different than building space hardware. If we are going to bring back a mammoth, we are going to engineer solutions and technologies along the way to build a synthetic biology platform that the same platform

that can make you a mammoth, can make you a bunch of other species, but it can also create disease-resistant cattle or drought-resistant plants, or we will advance the technologies to do this, the number of edits that we have to make, we will advance all of the genome engineering and DNA synthesis tools to the point that it's now viable for humans. So if we are successful... It feels like the product's the mammoth,

but really the product is the tools that can get you the mammoth. It's that end-to-in kind of developmental biology, genetic engineering and cellular engineering and computational biology stack. It is that infrastructure and then the innovations and inventions that come along that path. You know, I was thinking of the perfect parallel model is really in the automotive space, which is you race on Sunday. There's no reason to race. It's a huge money loss for all the manufacturers.

But the tech discovered through racing funnels down into the production car and they always justify racing to stockholders is like what we learn on Sunday we put in the car on Monday. Yeah. And that's kind of the model. Yeah. I didn't know that. We would talk to investors early on about like Apollo. It's like, hey, a lot of stuff came out of humanity going to the stars. We believe that here. And we believe that the total addressable market for programmable life, being able to engineer life the way we want will have a massive ripple effect for the world. And in agriculture, food security, environmental cleanup, human health care. And so that market and those opportunities actually are significantly larger than we initially

anticipated. Okay, so walk me through from 2021 when you formed the company, what are the baby steps and accomplishments along the way, kind of in order? Like, what's the first thing you guys are successful at doing? Pre-launch, the first thing that I think we were pretty successful on was we hired a chief animal officer. We were four days out from launching the company in a buddy of mine that had bought, one of my previous companies was like, hey, do you have anyone that's ever raised an elephant on your team?

You know, you have these moments where people say something to you that you're like, wait, I called George as like, hey, we should hire someone that's like birthed an elephant and like knows like what they eat. What they need to survive. What they need to like, not just survive, but to thrive. And George's was like, oh, that's a really good idea. He's very thoughtful and he's very hilarious. So he's like, we should think about this. I was like, you know, I got a guy.

And so one of the first things we did was I think we've been smarter enough to, know and listen to feedback. You'll see this theme, I think, through all of Colossal. We've got a lot of feedback. And a lot of feedback has been really helpful. Like someone saying, do you have someone on the team that's ever raised an elephant? We're like, no, I got to go because I can find that person, right?

And we got a great guy doing that now. But since the launch of the company, the most important thing is we have built, and you should come and see the labs. And you should bring your kids if you want. They're in Dallas? Yeah, we're in Dallas. Yeah. So we have a lab in Melbourne, Australia, but the one in Dallas is cooler. But you go to both if you want. We have built a team of 200

60 scientists and a collaboration with 17 of the top academic universities around the world. And we fund 80 postdocs in academia. And then we have about 75 conservation partners around the world. So I would say that before we get into like scientific or 80 major milestones, the thing I'm big is it's the team, right? It's unfair, right? Like if you look at your alternative for genome engineers or synthetic biologists, it's you go into academia, which has a lot of brokenness to it right now, right?

It's underfunded. It's highly competitive. You have to publish. It's papers, not progress, right? Yeah. You know, we had this argument a lot with people where it's like, why don't you publish papers more? And I was like, well, we'd have to do 10 papers for every press release we do.

I'd have to hire 200 people just writing papers. Yeah. And if I stack up a bunch of papers, that's not going to make a dodo, right? And so that's one. And then two, they can go into like biopharma or work on yeast models. If I'm like, hey, come with us and I need you to go to the Arctic with me, and we're going to extract DNA, like Indiana Jones style. Yeah, yeah.

And then we're going to go to, like, the basement and, like, sub-baseman-forcesonian and get ancient DNA. And then you're going to help build the AI models to do all the comparative genomics and work with mammoth cells. You're going to be the Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. That's so much better. It is. It's so much better. It's great. And you can see the product of it.

And when we really start to talk to our recruits and scientists, we always talk about its value and creation for our shareholders and impact from our conservation issues, but inspiration. And we're like, we want to do this in a way that. it's people stoked about science again. Because I think we've lost that in America. And it's a big passion of mine now with my young kids. And so it gives us an unfair recruiting advantage for kids. Like I got Beth Shapiro, who was our chief science officer, who literally wrote a book saying,

how to clone a manmuth. And it ends with, you can't. And so I was like, she's perfect. Because she's thought about all this, right? And so when I sat down with Best, she's like, you read my book. I was like, no, but I know how it ends. So we're good. And I was like, you cannot.

clone a mammoth, but you can engineer one from scratch. Quickly, why did she say you can't clone one? Well, because there are no living cells, right? So you can't just do an exact duplicate of what exists. And even theoretically, there's no mammoth that's been frozen perfectly. In Jurassic Park, they use the mcuffin, the device of the mosquito frozen in amber who has sucked the blood from a dinosaur. And by the way, I don't want to break hearts, but there is most likely, George and I don't like to say impossible.

But most likely there's no dinosaur DNA Because it's about 65 million years old There's been lots of very warm periods of time Between now and then In amber forms is very porous So it's not a great DNA store Not that we've tried It forms in hot, wet places

DNA likes cold dry places, right? And so that's the best preservation So if something could like die In like the perfect cave That's what's best for us Okay, okay, okay So you've got the team That's the first thing you're happy about now

What are the incremental? Big milestone are from an editing perspective, we're now doing about 300 edits at a time all over the genome. Just put that in perspective, the two most genetically modified multicellular organisms in the world like animals are woolly mice, which are objectively the cutest mice in the planet if you haven't seen them. They look like little hamsters, Monica. They have kind of the woolly mammoth hair, but they're on a mile.

You would like it. Yeah, even you. We like mouse, not mice. Mice means infestation. Mouse is a friend. That's true. A mouse are great. And so we identified the core colors, the hair texture, the length, the density.

And it was about eight genes that we put all into a mouse. There's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between a mouse and an elephant. We have a huge animal welfare team. We spend a lot of time with American Humane Society and others. And so we're not going to go take, do anything super weird. So we're not going to take an elephant gene and stick it into a mouse because we know is probably not compatible with life because there's too much genetic divergence. This is what's so amazing about the Woley Mouse Project, besides their objective cuteness,

is that we did it all in 30 days. So we took our mammoth edits, right, which are editing into an Asian elephant cell, because it's the genetic donor that we work with. And I'm sure we'll talk about the process at some point. We took those edits, found the functional equivalence in mice, right? So we're putting mice edits into mice that are the equivalent of the mammoth edits in elephants. I was going to say, is this where now AI has very helpful in this. And we had to build all this bespoke.

At the time, like, Open AI and Claude were, like, great at, like, helping kids cheat on term papers. Incentral state reconstruction models was not on the menu. And so we had to build all these comparative workflows and compared to genomics models. And so we took that, made the prediction, made the edits. 30 days later, the mice were born. And 100% they were healthy. 100% had exactly the phenotype or physical attribute that was expressed from the genes, meaning that it looked exactly as we predicted.

And it worked within 30 days. Like, we didn't have to do lots of trials and errors. Yeah, and not to get bogged down in biology, but yeah, you can be genotypically something and then phenotypically something else. So there are steps between what the recipe says and what comes out of the oven. And what actually comes out of, like, when it gets expressed. Yeah, it's now interacting with the epigenome and all these other things that it could not produce the phenotype you were looking for. 100%.

You can only get half excited when you have the genotype figured out. No, exactly. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your teeth before walking into a meeting. You smiled at six people in the hallway, confidently, full teeth. You felt great about it until you caught your reflection and realized you'd been carrying a piece of spinach like an accessory since lunch.

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Most people, when they think of DNA, they think of that twisted ladder, which is great, right? Like the Jurassicport did a great job for us. The people understand these things. The double helix. The double helix, right? But people are like, oh, that's what looks like. So take that double helix and then just compresses. it with like the force of God down into this crazy ball and then you have proteins that come off.

It's very complicated. The folding of it and where you actually have connection points, all of those things matter in epigenetic expression. There's a project we haven't announced yet and I was walking one of our government friends through it and I was showing them the progress on this thing and I was showing them the edits and they were like, oh, that's great. I go. Yeah, but let me show you what we actually had to do. And then there was like down to the organic chemistry level of like this is the compound that we had to figure out how to produce. We had to then go do an analysis and all these other species to figure out how they produce those.

What are the common genes? How can those be activated? And then how do we model that, engineer that, including engineering the binding sites and the activation to get the expression. Yeah. Jesus. Like people sometimes are like, can't they, you're just taking like a mammoth gene. You found the mammoth gene.

you're like, oh, that's a mammoth machine, you just stick it in. Right. Control C, control V. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we cutting and copying? And again, back to the AI, for you to have compared all the other animals. 50 plus years.

Right, yeah, for humans to go through. Or you even look at the speed that they mapped the first human genome in. That was like a 25-year project or something. Yeah, and billions of dollars. You've mapped this woolly mammoth in a few years with shitty scraps. With very shitty broken DNA, not like taking hours, like fresh out of the kitchen, Yeah. And then we have multiple species going on.

And then we have a lot of research species on. So there's a ton that we are constantly mapping. Okay, so let's talk about the dire wolf. We had the mice. I was sitting, getting interviewed at South by, people were losing their mind on it. The mice were on Saturday Night Live. The mice were on. John, so they were everywhere.

I wish you brought one. Eh, sorry. They're in a pretty control. Like these wolves are good luck finding. Yeah, yeah. Do you know about these geolocators? Someone was just telling me about this, that there's these contests, they show people like a five-second snippet of a live feed cam from somewhere.

And these geolocators will figure out. It's insane. I'm not going to challenge them. We have taken very thoughtful measures to the point of, like, planting non-Indigenous trees. Flora? Yeah. We've been pretty thoughtful about it. No one will find our stuff.

There's red herrings everywhere. Okay. But I'm sitting there and everyone's losing their mind. And I'm like, well, the Dyerwolf project's going to be interesting. Because at this moment, we had Dyer Wolf. We had the first most genetically modified multicellular origins of the world is the Dyer Wolf for 20 edits. So we're sitting there like, we thought people were going to like be excited about the Wully Mouse. Yeah, yeah.

The Dyer Wolf. I remember being on South By being interviewed, kind of zoning out for a second saying, what is going to happen in three weeks when we announced this? Yeah. And that fear was massively realized three weeks later. It was just three weeks later. You announced the DyerWil? Yeah.

So tell Monica about the DyerW. Yeah. Other than what I know from. Game of Thrones. Well, that's what everyone. Yeah, so we recognize that. And so we have this multi-dimensional model of how we think about why to bring back a species.

What is the indigenous people groups care about? Why did they go extinct? Can they survive today? What's their environmental impact? Can any of the technologies that are developed on the path to de-extinction of that species help existing species, right? And the Dyerwolf checked pretty much,

that Darwold was not on our initial list, right? It was like mammoth, Dile was Tasman and Tiger. And that's why the Hemsworth got involved because they heard they were working on the Tasman Tiger. Right. And for us, Dyer Wolf just wasn't on the list. It just wasn't a top thing.

Because people had sampled La Brea Tarpitz. Got zero DNA due to heat and acidification. So nothing they could find. We started this process. We started having conversations with indigenous people groups here in the U.S., a few others. And we were with Chairman Fox of MHA Nation up in North Dakota. And he told us this whole story.

We were on his land. And they were walking us through everything. Told us the story about the Great Wolf. And he's like, you know, they were Diererwolves. And like, you said, with high conviction. I was like, really? And so we started talking all about it.

He goes, yeah, we as tribes always think that our ancestors communed with the dire wolf. And it was this big white wolf. And I was like, maybe we should bring back the dire wolf. They died off like 10,000 years ago. 10 to 12,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah. And they're just much bigger than a wolf. Six feet, nose the tail and 150 pounds.

So fucking big. Yeah, so about 30% bigger than a normal wolf. Okay. And we knew all of what Dax said from the fossil record. What we didn't know is a... There are certain things, like there were specific gene variants that we could tell that made them white. So we had two dire wolf samples that produced viable DNA, a tooth that was about 13,000-ish years old, 12,000 years old, and then a skull that was 73,000 years old. And just an earbone in the skull.

That's 72,000 years old. Yeah. We had 60,000 years of genetic diver. I mean, think about that for a second. Wow. Yeah. There's more genetic divergence between those two samples than our most recent sample and wolves today. Yeah.

Right? Also, their fecundity rate and how long they live, the amount of generations within that 60,000 would be the equivalent of probably 300,000 human years of evolution. We got so much data from that. That's insane. Okay. So we took that data and we mapped it.

At the time, people believe that diaryotes were closer related to Jackals because it's Game of Thrones. People wanted to study. And they only got about a fraction of the DNA. The fragments that they got aligned mostly to Jackal. Because we had about 500 times more DNA than anyone ever seen on Darywell. we actually found, like, oh, they actually map closer to the wolves, very well specifically, which is what you would think.

There were things we didn't know. Like, one thing we didn't know is we knew the fur was white. We knew the specific genes, but we didn't know exactly what the texture was going to be like. They had this, like, main to them, which I know sounds crazy. Take like a lion and then take like a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog, and it's somewhere in between. Or Chowes even have that kind of a bit of a mane. It's crazy. At the end of the day, we took a 73,000-year-old skull and a 12,000-year-old.

all tooth and made puppies. And before we announced them to the world. Romulus and Remus. Robes and Remus were the first two. How small were they? Oh, they looked like little pandas. They were small, but they were pretty big at the time. At six months old, they were already 80 pounds.

Yeah. Oh, my God. The photos I've seen are from when you allow time to look at them. I didn't see that main. Has that main come in? It's coming more, yeah. Oh, wow. Are there more recent photos?

Yeah, we put them out online. Oh, you do. Yeah. So when was this? How old are they? We showed them to the world when they were, about seven months old. And the little girl was two months old, so we couldn't see her.

She's Calisi. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my. Which, by the way, we got a lot of feedback where they were like, well, you know, Colisi was not, was a Targaryen, not House Stark. True. And I was like, no, we are not that dumb. We do understand that.

But we were trying to be like. It sounds cooler than Ned Stark for a girl. No, but it could have been Aria. Ooh, that would have been nice. Yes, we got. We already felt. You already fucked up. No, but our thought process was, we actually had a thought process.

Our thought process was on this was that, hey, we already have Dyerwolves. So the Stark lovers will already be in this. Let's give something for the Targary lovers. We were trying to be thoughtful about this. You might need to do dragons for them. So Peter Jackson is one of our investors. This is a crazy stat. This is actually one of the things I'm most proud of about this company.

30% of our investors come to us from their kids. Oh, I bet. Yeah. So their kids see it. Their kids get excited about it. They tell them, right? And they reach out to us. So Peter reached out to us.

And basically my first call with Peter and his partner, Fran, he basically cussed me out because I was not working on the Moa, which he, as a Kiwi, felt very strongly that I was not working on the Moa. 12-foot-tall bird. Yeah. No wings. When I say no wings, not like little stub or flightless, no wings. The feathers are almost like hair-like.

When you're thinking of the ethics of this, we know. for certain that humans cause the extinction of the megafauna. Like they were thriving in the Americas, the homo sapiens arrived. There is a inverse relationship you can track pretty much one to one. Yes, and same

with the arrival of people in Australia. They killed off all this megafauna. We killed off the giant sloth here. So humans got rid of all these animals that we don't know. Maybe they would have made it. Maybe they wouldn't have. But certainly, we caused the extinction of so many of these animals. So many of these things.

And then recent extinctions, like with the Tasmanian tiger and thylacine, we, the Australian government, I don't say we because people are like, wait, colossal killed off the silencing. They're righted back. The Australian government actually put a bounty on the head of killing Tasmanian tigers. Wow. So they were paying people to eradicate this piece. There's like the buffalo here.

Yeah. Get them out of the way for the railroad. Why? They were probably eating something. No, they believed that they were killing sheep and eating sheep. Okay. There's no data. Go talk to all the Tasmanean Tiger experts.

there's no data they ever did that. What was happening is they were stealing each other's sheep and then blaming it on the Tasman Tigers, right? Also, they had now had canines probably involved. Yeah, they had the dingoes and other stuff that came in, right? And so you have this movement across the world. And so as colossal has grown in our technology capabilities, as well as financial support from our investors,

we've broadened the horizon. So now we're working on the Tasmanian Tiger, the Moa, thanks to Peter Jackson and a handful of other species. But when I was with Peter, going back to the Dyerwell, when I was with Peter in his house in Auckland, I was like, hey, I want to show you something. I plugged in the computer to his little HTML thing and showed him the first howl. It's not a highly produced clip, right? It's kind of just like with an iPhone. The first what?

It was the first howl from the Dyerwolves. Oh, howl. When they were puppies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we played it for him. He's like, this is what you need to lead with. It's like, oh, we're going to do this big production. He's like, no, no, this is what you show. Trust me.

I think you probably trust Peter Jacksonville. Yeah. He's moderately good at this. And then he's like, have you shown this to George R. Martin? So I said earlier, I guess slightly incorrect. The only person we did pursue in the celebrity world was we reached out directly to George R. Martin because Peter introduced us.

And Peter told them, he's like, you just need to get on Zoom with this guy. So you got on Zoom, I shared my screen. George R. Martin cried on the call. He's like, is that what I think it is? I was like, yes. Very few people have seen them. I was like, you made these popular for the world.

And I was like, do you want to? And he's like, can I invest? I'm like, sure, sure. I was like, we'd like, we'd like for you to. come see them at an undisclosed location. So he and his wife Paris, somewhere in the world. They flew out, they flew out, and they held them when they were babies. And he was like, he told me, like, one of the best days of his life.

Wow. We have more dire wolf puppies that we've talked about that will be born in the near future. We are working on the next litter? And he texted me, he's like, are they born yet? Can I come see them? So I do need to point out at this point that you have critics and you have a lot of people saying, you know, these aren't dire wolves. And Beth Shapiro, your head scientist.

has stated pretty clearly, these are gray wolves with 20 edits. Right. Right. Yeah. It's a bit semantical. We are very clear on this. And sometimes this frustrates our critics, just being transparent about it. We believe in freedom of speech and choice, right?

And so, like, if you want to say our mammoth is a woolly mammoth, great. And if you want to say our mammoth is a cold tolerant Asian elephant with 200 edits across 1.4 million years of genetic divergence of alleles. of alleles that are then activated epigenetically to produce the phenotypes that are cold tolerant to serve an ecological function that wants mammoths and mastons will do. You can say that too. But don't you think, so one of the definitions of a species,

one of the 36. Oh, there's a lot of definitions. Okay. One of the 30s, I didn't know they were 36, but one of them is that they can produce a fertile offspring, which is why a, I don't know, a mule. Whatever you cross a donkey and a horse, it's not its own species because it can't have its own children. So don't you think the debate ends when you create the woolly mammoth and it then starts having fertile offspring?

Now it is its own species, no? I don't because if you go talk to a paleontologist that will not agree with that definition of speciation, the problem is we as humans like to put things in boxes. Yes. We're very good at compartmental. We're categorical. We love it. We like this box and this box and this box. You're like, that doesn't fit in a box.

I don't understand what to do. We're very robotic in our models, right? And so I don't think that that debate will go away. But for me, I think that's okay. So for us, a gray wolf is just a genetically modified dire wolf. It just is. Like, there's over 3 million edits between you and me and you and me. Like, we're different by 3 million edits.

For us, going from a software lens, we're going to make the edits that matter that we know drove the core phenotype. So if you look at our 104 mammoth genomes, I can't clone them because I don't have those living cells. But magically, if I could clone them, which one do I clone? Which one's a mammoth? Of those 104, over 1.3 million years. Here's what I can tell you. We were all born reasonably around the same time, right? And there's three million.

When you go over 1.3 million years, there's a lot of difference. But they all shared those core phenotypic expressions that gave them these like shaggy coats, fat deposits, curved tus. Yeah, they have 10 centimeters of fat on them. Yeah. And what's interesting, though, is that it's really not the sum of the parts that make something the way we acknowledge you or you or you or you. it really is the unique parts.

It's not some of the parts. You show a kid, a polar bear, and a brown bear. You say, are they bears? A child's going to be like, yes, like, are they the same? And they're going to say, no. But polar bears and brown bears can intermix and produce viable offspring. By that definition, they should be the same species. But one is a giant carnivore.

One is an omnivore. One's Arctic adopted in white. They're just different. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I do have one more fun thing I always say. Yeah. The people that want to argue on, is it a mammoth?

I'm like, what do you tell your kids Jurassic Park's about? Is Jurassic Park a movie about dinosaurs? Yeah. Then are mammoths or mammoths? Or are they genetically modified frogbirds? Which is in the movie how the... That's how they're raid, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. How big are Romulus and Remus now? Romulus right now is like 140. And Remus is like, I think, 137, 138. And sorry, how old are they now? When did that happen? I guess they're two years old. Okay, two years old.

14 and dog years. Yeah, they're up. Sorry, they're about to be two. They're going to be two November. Terrible dad. I don't know that. It's hard to keep it on. I have biological human children, so I know there.

Good, because we found out one of the red flags of a sociopath is if you ask them their children's birthdays, they don't know. We interviewed a confirmed sociopath, who's also a psychologist. Fascinate. She could detect when there's other sociopaths present by all these different things. And one of them is, if you ask them when their child's birthday is, they won't know. Yeah, pretty bad. Keep knowing it. Yeah. Okay. You have, though, declared that you're going to have a woolly mammoth calf by 2028.

Yeah. Oh. So we will not have a calf by 2028. That was our original target date. Okay. We actually just did a big story with time on this. We spent a ton of time with Time magazine. And our scope has significantly grown. So we've gone from one mammoth, one cell line, about 65 edits, to 14 cell lines. and we've already done 130 edits today. So double what we anticipated, and that's because we had better access to data. We've also had two governments that have reached out to us saying,

we do not want you to make a mammoth. We want you to make viable herds of mammoths to your interbreeding comment. That's what they want. Is it top secret, who those countries are? Top secret is a classification, right? And we do work with the government. It's not a classified thing,

but these are government's choices of when they want to talk about their programs. Okay. And we have larger partners in the program now. You can see where suspicion and scrutiny would arise when we don't know what countries are funding these things. Well, ours is, right? Yes, to our government, we're very transparent with our investors. We don't have any secret investors.

We've had state governments in the United States invest in us. We've had the federal government invest in us. We've had the UAE invest in us. Those are the only government entities. I can't imagine the UAE is a great place for a mammoth. The UAE is not one of our partners on the mammoth. Okay, so you're no longer saying 2028, is there some time frame? Our goal was to have births and announce the births.

I don't know if we will announce the births. Kind of how like the dire wolves were a little bit older and there were multiple. I think that's a more likely stress. Yeah, this is similar to like, you don't want to tell you when you're pregnant. In case something happens. Yeah, the first. So it's like, yeah, if you get these mammoths out and the whole world knows and now they want updates and then they have like three extra trunks. We spend so much time.

And one of the things that I think we do a really good job in our pipeline is we do genetic screening and computational analysis in full genome sequencing after every editing pass and embryo pass. So we don't take anything to even potential term that has an off-target effect, meaning an unintended consequence in the genome, or could have any effects that are negative for the animal welfare. So we have IACUC protocols. We work with USDA. One of the things that most people think about when they think about colossal, like, oh, those are the guys that are like doing mammoths, of stuff and dire wolves and dodoes, but they don't realize that, like, the lab work that we do is half of it, right? We consult with indigenous people groups, private landowners, FDA, USDA, all regulatory bodies, the intelligence community here in the U.S., we've spent a lot of time

with a lot of these folks. Okay, so now let's get into some of the, I'm going to call them off-label discoveries that you've amassed along the way in pursuit of these. What's the term de-extinction? I think it's highly likely you're going to see more species. I think you're going to see more woolly mouse type moments in the near future around things that prove out phenotypes in model species like mice are. And I think you're also going to see other extinct species, some of which we've mentioned. And then I think maybe you'll have more dire wolf-like moments of stuff we haven't told anybody. Yeah. If we get a saber tooth. That's what you want? I'm trying to think what I want. Well, I want a lot of things.

What is the wish list? And I'll tell you how it compares to the general wish list. What's your... Austro-opithecine giganticus. So for the layman. So you call that giganticus. You will not get that from us because we have drawn a line in the sand with colossal that we do not work in non-human primates are over.

Right. So I was an anthropology major. So, of course, I want to see how big the australopithecine gigantus is in real life. I would love to see that. Of all the hominids. I would love to see that too. But what do you do with them?

That's the ethical thing. It's like, now you've got something that's cognitively. We spin out technologies and build, hold companies, and license out our technologies for human health care. But even at Colossal, we do not do things with human health care because it's like the last thing you want is like, they're already doing stuff. There's already enough weird conspiracies. We don't want to push the bounds to the point there.

So we just said, hey, we're not doing anything, non-human apartments or anything to humans. Yeah, yeah, that's probably. We get Neanderthal question quite a bit. Yeah. But they're already here. They're with us. We've absorbed them. So they're present in your DNA.

Yeah. Yeah. But I want to see the elephant bird very. very badly. I do too. We're not working on it. Sabreto Tiger, of course. Not working on it, but I'd like to see it.

I don't know enough of that. Have you ever been to the Librea Tarpitz or the Natural History Museum and you see the skeleton of the giant swath? Now, these bonkers. They're like 1,500 pounds. To do an extinct species, depending on the level of engineering, you've got to have a viable genetic donor. So something close enough genetically that you can edit from, like Asian elephant for mammoth.

You've got to have a way to gestate it. We are now working on artificial wounds. We've got to broke the internet. And again this year, when it showed off the artificial egg this year, which was, like, straight out of a movie. That's one of my three, like, off-shoot things you've discovered along the way. But there are species, like right now, we have an academic partner that's got 30-X coverage. You need about a minimum of 10-X coverage, but about 30-X coverage, so well within the capabilities of three different lineages of giant sloth. So I would love to put giant sloth on there.

I'd love to put a stellar sea cow on there. That's one of my favorites. A sea cow? Well, so think of, like, a dugong or a manatee. that's bigger than a whale. What? It's amazing. So it's a mammal.

Yeah. It was amazing. It was killed off, to your point. Killed off within like 30 years of discovery, right? We just can't gestate those things yet. So there's things that aren't on the list. You need a womb. You need another animal.

We're working on artificial wombs. We have three artificial wombs projects. We're not there yet. We're making progress. Wild. What's on your list? I need to like look up the list. I don't know enough.

Like, I didn't know about a sea cow. Yeah. This just goes to show my body. for things that are huge because it's all the megafauna. That's what I'm most interested in. I love the megafauna. Yeah, I want miniatures. Right.

I want little things. Got a lot of pygmies we could work with again. I would love the pygmy hippo would be so fun. This is like a pig, but it looks like a... But they're plucked bastards too, those epitomite. They're aggressive. Wait, have the woolly mice mated? Yeah, I think we're on gin three.

Oh my God. And so then what's the ethics around people having them? So we don't sell anything. We've been asked like the Smithsonian reached out to us and they're like mice don't live forever we can taxidermium and have them here we've had museums and zoos call us asking us to have them it's just not our model are you watching monsters of god huh you must it's by eric good the guy who made tiger king and chimp crazy and now it's about the illegal reptile trait but a lot of the things you're talking about are very present yeah they are

and the ethics behind all of it yeah we have bioethesis we spend a lot of time on that we're trying to do this in a very collaborative communal way yeah You're trying to build as much consensus as possible, probably knowing you will never have full consensus. You've got the guy from Columbia who's quite mad about a lot of the stuff. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about some of the fun things that you've discovered along the way. And I know one of them is a company you spun off called Breaking, but tell me about X32. This is amazing.

And this kind of goes back to taking away de-extinction in species preservation. And I'd like to talk about the species preservation part because no one talks about it as much as they should. That should be like what everyone's talking about because we're losing so many species. But the same platform that can do directed evolution and accelerated evolution through genome engineering can be applied in a lot of other categories. This incredible team at the VICE Institute discovered a microbe, or they thought it was a micro, we'll get to that a second, that works very slow, that breaks the chemical bonds of plastics. And so it doesn't make smaller plastics, right? A lot of these plastic degradation solutions that you see pop up in the news occasionally or scientific paper, they either require preheating, pre-treatment, the chemicals a lot of times are worse than even plastic.

They're actually a lot of times making microplastics. They're making smaller plastics, which is not what we want. Stuff that'll penetrate your cell membrane. Yeah, exactly. We are adjusting, like, a credit card size of microplastics every week. Yeah. I don't believe that. I've heard you say that.

Where did you get that? The interwebs. Yeah. You can fact you. You guys, you should. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's extreme. I hear that consistently.

I know. There's a lot of moral panic about it all, and I think this, to me, reeks. That is the stat that's out there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to know where it originated. I don't know that that's actually figure outable. I hope it's a fraction of that, but we know it's a fraction of it. We know for a fact that people are getting tested and it's showing up everywhere in the body and in embryos and in sexual organs.

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

So that is coming and that is out there. There are some studies about it. Immediately can see the impossibility of figuring it out, which is what is your control? Yeah, your control. We're all on planet Earth eating in plastic. So you're going to say, I'm going to compare this person's cancer rate to whose. There's no control. It's a really, really good point.

It's like saying what does oxygen do to the human body? Yeah. Different variables, right? I don't want plastics on Earth regardless of what I'm saying. Let me make me clear. I want them out of the ocean. I think that any conflict disclosures need to happen on this. It's very apparent that tax is very invested in a plastic company.

I own a petroleum refinement facility that's making polyurethine as we... Yeah, so now that we've disclaimed our affiliates. But, look, plastics is a big issue, right? So they discover this thing. Incredible scientist, Sukanya. And it just leaves it behind carbon and some biomass. Some biomass, right? And so they came to us, they didn't know what to do with it.

We took it into our system. We have a very robust AI and computational biology core to understand it. What we found is it's actually a concert of microbes making this enzyme. But when you modify the individual microbes, they can produce more or less of the enzyme, which can then break down different plastics. 20 months. It was much further than that. We've now got it down to 20 months.

But things that take never to 800 years to 20 months. Yeah. That's out. Now, we are working on applications to broader use cases other than industrial wastewater and textiles and composting. You're focusing on textiles, right? So we were focusing in the shit on textiles, water treatment and composting are now things because you do to like whole foods and they'll have like wrapped lettuce. They can't just go throw that in the composter, right?

And so they have to. is separated or a lot of times a lot of food waste is being thrown because of plastic contamination, not microplasticism because it's wrapped in plastic. They'll just throw it away, which leads to methane and all these other things. So composting is now used case. We are looking, we have nothing yet to announce you have that team, that company, is deeply looking into humans and how it could be helped. Releasing the enzyme in the humans somehow.

I don't think the enzyme would work in the humans. I think you get quite sick from it. Okay. But some other. Yeah. That's the power of synthetic biology, right? It's like scientific discovery still takes hundreds of years. What do I do with it?

We put it through a pipeline. We one, understand it. And then we figure out how we edit it and regulate it. So this does remind me, and I listen to some great piece on it, I wish I could remember and credit them. But it was really about the issue of whether or not we can give patents to genomes. Right. And it was driven by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And there was an engineered organism that they created to eat the oil.

Yeah. What was that biological engineering versus what you're doing? Do you know that case? I don't know that case. I saw another case that was a naturally occurring enzyme that was discovered that was being used for a river cleanup. Different but similar. Yeah, yeah. And the current landscape of our regulatory framework with the USPTO, which we work very closely with, is around intentionally genetically modified organisms.

Right. So if you discover something in nature, in my view, and you sequence it. you should give that to the world. Totally agree. Someone can't own the genome of a chimpanzee. You can't protect that. Or a human. The first people, if they had patented that.

There were companies that tried to. I think originally they thought there was like a million genes. And then they found out there's 25,000 genes. Like, fuck, these companies don't have them. No, no, you can't do that, right? Yeah. You can't patent those genes. Now, if you go to spend money and time and effort to understand,

if I take this microbe and I supercharge it, you can't take the microbe and patent it, but that supercharged microbe that you've invested time and use your technologies to make, that does not naturally occur in nature, you can patent or lease out the technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's a really cool thing.

And then tell me about germline editing. Okay. There's a general moratorium on it. Mortaratorium meaning there's a pause right now. There's a global consistent, well, I wouldn't argue it's consistent. There is a public-facing global moratorium saying there's a pause on germline editing. Okay. meaning that you will not do edits in a human that will be passed on into the general population pool, right?

Isn't this most prescient in the mosquito debate right now? So that gets into gene drives, which we'll talk about. But on germline editing in humans, so when you make an edit, let's say that you have sickle cell anemia, and we could make it edit that then gets passed on to your offspring so that your offspring doesn't have germline. Now, that's different than you doing IVF and having full genome-search. sequencing with someone like Orchid or one of these other companies to test and then you choose not to choose an embryo that has that mutation in there. It's not removing it. Like I did that.

I went through IVF. We used Orchid. There were certain things that I had that we didn't want to pass on. Generally, I usually when you edit it and it gets passed on to the broader pool. And I think the fear of that is like super intelligent, very eugenicsy. Physically. I only want my kids to be this tall. So there is that.

I still think that there is a category that everyone can agree on. that if we can eradicate sickle cell, Tay Sachs, exactly, if we can eradicate these specific diseases from the gene pool, all of humanity benefits. Yeah.

And I think we'll get there. I think we as humanity will get there. The problem is, is that you have these rogue nation states like China, where they're like, we made edits to make these kids immune to HIV. We didn't tell anybody. We is China, not us or America.

And then, you know, like they do in China, if they don't like things, they locked him up. But you only was like locked them up. for like a handful of months. So it doesn't feel like everyone was that really mad at him for doing it. But the technologies are here. The technologies exist today.

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

There are a lot of people that you would have bet on a different embryo. And like, I turned out pretty good. We know all of the downside of a lot of these things, but we've really yet to understand, well, what is the huge upside? The dyslexia thing growing up, I always learned you're twice as likely to be incarcerated. Well, then as I got older, I learned you're four times as likely to be a CEO. So how do we? Yeah, like, I'm dyslexic and I have ADD. There you go.

and you got all kinds of money and you're changing the world. But someone might have selected. Yeah. I just don't think we know actually. Maybe too personal, but it's true. I want to hear it. With our kids, we did, because you can do the testing, the morphologic. We actually had a miscarriage.

My wife just didn't want to go through it again. Yeah. I didn't want to go through it. I didn't want her to go through it. And so we went through IVF, went through the process of selecting Ambrose. There's certain morphological grading and testing. And there's only so much the IVF clinical do. Yeah.

But then you can go to this next step. We hired a company and used a service of a company called Orchid. Full disclosure, I ended up investing in the company only because I was so happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. George Church was involved, so we recommended them. And they do full genome testing. To your point, I have a mutation on my Titan gene. I got really sick during COVID because of, so I wanted to screen for that because it is a mutation that creates a traumatic protein for your heart.

So I did not want to pass that on. So I wanted to make that decision, right? My wife and I agreed on that. Secondly, though, to your point, they do a very good job because it's a bell curve. And they give you this distributed score. There are some things like schizophrenia. and others that we know you have a low disposition to it

and so you're probably not going to be schizophrenic you have high creativity markers like they've seen that in population. Well it's a dopamine dysregulation disorders. What we did is that hey this is all really interesting we are going to make a first round of selections based on if it's compatible with life A and then B if it doesn't have this particular mutation

that we don't want to pass on. And in C, we're going to look at the data and we looked at things like Alzheimer's runs in my wife's family. So we looked at the. that one. Yeah. Right?

And we said that's a pretty big way. So we weighted that in our score and how we came with it. But some of the other ones that have high environmental factors, we didn't factor those in. Now, once again, you get the burden of knowledge, right? Right. Exactly. We didn't get in all these knowledge. I will make the argument that by the time my kids are old enough to have a disposition to

have Alzheimer's more than likely that will be cured. But we made some decisions from there. Sure. But to your point, if we would have done all that, we would have had any kids. Yeah, yeah. There was no, like, perfect model out there. So it is an interesting question as it relates to germline editing. But I think that over time, the world will agree that there are certain things that we should use our powers for good to eradicate that all, you know, ethnicities, all genders and all religious affiliations would agree on.

I think there are some of those. Of course. Yeah, yeah. I would hope so. As we said. I don't know why anyone would be against being able to edit out sickle cell. Yes. So I think that's coming.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Okay, tell me then about gene drives. So I'm very pro-gene drives, but I'm only for them for invasive species. So the most famous example is using a genetically modified insect. They also work for vertebrates, which we'll get into, using a genetically modified insect to then put a gene that gets distributed through the population for population suppression and control. The mosquitoes the big example is right. The mosquito example was there's a thesis of like in Africa, you get malaria,

get all these disease states, that's bad. Everyone agrees that's bad. With that said, they didn't actually use a gene drive. They actually used a form of kind of got marketed as a gene drive. It was more irradiated mosquitoes that lowered the populations. But the problem is in Africa, mosquitoes are a part of the food web. They are not an invasive species. I totally agree that there's badness that comes from the spreading of disease and mosquitoes are a major spreader of disease.

In other cases where you have invasive species, where they are eradicating other species and having an effect on the landscape or on food production, that their removal only benefits the land. I'm pro that. But how do we know, like the other one that said the extinct one was eating all the sheep, they would say that was an invasive species? Well, no. It was indigenous to Tasmania. This is more like when you bring in the brown trout to this stream and this places all other fish. So you have Asian carp in the Great Lakes and it's destroying the Great Lakes ecosystem. The U.S. government has a $3 billion environmental remediation program that won't kill them.

We're dealing with invasive fees right now in Texas pretty bad. There's a thing that came in from Panama because global warming, it's gotten hotter. And then also we as humans are just translocating more and more and more, right? So we have actually brought in the screw worm, which is this fly that, lays larva that literally screws down it, spreads disease, kills cattle. It multiplies, like, crazy and hot weather. Texas is like 104 when I was there the other day. Yeah.

Not great. New Zealand, it's either the possum. Yeah, it's Bushtown possums. They're not supposed to be there. They come over on ships and cargo holds. They get into the population or someone brings them as a pet. And, like, everywhere in New Zealand, it's like if you see one call, they've got to get rid of these fuckers.

Same thing for cats in Australia. I'm not anti-cats. I have two dogs. I am. I'm fine. Okay. Let Monica take the hit. So, sort of anti-cats.

But in Australia, people are poisoning cats. Because the largest mammalian extinction rates that are occurring in the world are in Australia of unique species of marsupials because of cats. Cats are great predators. No one followed Bob Barker and, like, spayed neuterum. They just released them out there, right? And so people are actually shooting. And that's an animal welfare disaster.

And also we have this history of it too, Monica. It's like the snakes got into Ireland. So then they bring in mongoose to kill the snake. Now the mongoose is surprised like, yeah, yeah. So the idea with gene drives is you can introduce a gene. It's not going to jump species. We spend a lot of time with this administration educating them on genetic engineering and showing that like with your choice on the screw arm, you have three choices.

You can release tons of irradiated flies that will slow the population. And they're spending a billion five right now in Texas of doing that. Not efficient. Not going to solve the problem. will slow it, and then they're going to have to do it again. And again, like this is a repeat thing forever. It's like the war on drugs. Yeah, well, you can inoculate the cows.

Nobody wants to do that. Right. You can accept higher beef prices because you're going to have less cows, start to import beef, which they're doing, and you're seeing the feedback on that. Or you can use a gene drive that eradicates just the species from where it's not supposed to be. Wow.

And it's eight months to eradicate species versus 12 years. Wow. Eight months. Are there any plans? pilot programs where this is happening. Ours. Okay. And it's going to be for this worm?

We're trying. We have gotten approval from different groups within the intelligence community and in the defense. Okay. Are mosquitoes part of the food web here? Yeah. I hate them so much.

Well, bats are chowling down on them. Spiders are eating. Mosquitoes are absolutely key to most food webs, except in certain island states, like Hawaii. Avian malaria is being spread by mosquitoes and killing a lot of these amazing, like the Hawaiian honey crew, a lot of these amazing birds.

So you could eradicate them on certain islands. So if you do everything right from a conservation perspective and you don't eradicate invasive species, you're like, we're not going to drill over here, we're not going to produce over here, you're going to protect all these lands, you're going to protect all these species, and you don't know how invasive species.

You don't even make a dent in environmental remedies. Like invasive species are the biggest threat to disease spread, environmental collapse and environmental remediation efforts. And again, we're responsible for bringing these species. Yeah, we move all this stuff around. We've caused it. Or change the climate for them.

Okay, let's talk about artificial eggs, the synthetic womb, and just synthetic biology in general. Like, what's happening there? We have three artificial womb projects. We have a marsupial roller culture system. So all of the pursuit of these is how do we grow animals fully outside of needing a surrogate? So we have that.

We also have a second project, which is a placental interface, which sounds weird. We're making uterine walls. The way it works is the embryo hatches. And then we actually have a placenta that invades into the uterine wall. It's pretty amazing. It's like right out of a sci-fi movie. That's how biology works. So we're making a synthetic uterine wall so that we can make a synthetic uterine sack that you can

grow them to turn in. And we've had successful invasions. So you track these on. There's this thing called the Carnegie sale of development. And we've tracked them. through it and we're pretty close on both of those. And then we had a third one for the avian because there's no bird big enough that can grow definitely an elephant bird, but definitely a South Island giant moa.

So what we did, because we're working with the Naitahu people working with Peter Jackson and the Maori, the eggs were still eight times bigger than that of an emu. So you're going to have to birth it through an emu, then transfer it into an artificial egg. Oh. Yeah, so we birthed the world's first birds fully exudero using this repeat artificial egg process. It looks like a more fun version of a little.

Yeah, sure. What is the actual synthetic, like, what is the cell made of? Is it made of carbon? Yeah, so we take the cells from the chickens, and we put them into this matrix. It's like a little infrastructure that it grows around. And then we actually had to develop a polymer. It just looks like plastic when you watch the video, where it allows the right level of permeability of oxygen and whatnot. And so people had tried to grow chickens and other birds outside of a bag or womb,

and they would plug in oxygen. They do all these sets that were developmentally lethal, right? The eggs actually pours, eggs actually breathe. How do you recreate that? But also then, if you're going to recreate it, how do you re-engineer it so you can do more? So artificial lights, you can hook up to microscopes. We actually created a visible and non-visible spectrum lighting system.

So you can put it in a cradle and truly understand it and have different lights. But if you point directional, even these high-frequency lights into the developing embryo can destroy the embryo. Yeah. So we actually had a curve. create channels and refractive mirrors so that you dissipate the light. Oh, my God.

So a lot went into it. And then eggs actually, based on the shape and the pressure and gravity, help form the developing chicken. So the actual cells are derived from chickens? Yes. And across all, even if you were doing, like, a mammal wound? Oh, no, no, no. Those are just for that.

How do you get the mammal cell? So the mammal cells are whoever the genetic donor is. It's the fat-tale Dunnart for the thylacine. It's a respective genetic donor. It's the gray wolf for the dire wolf. It's the Rhone antelope for the Blue Buck. Making sure I don't see anything that we haven't said. Yeah, no, you said Blue Buck.

Because these are the closest matches. Yeah, the closest genetic matches. Okay. Wow. Because we're not just doing somatic cell nuclear transfer for Ceresi, the cloning step. We're doing interspecies of somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is crazy. You have mitochondrial rejection. There's a lot of things that go into the engineering of the cloning.

Well, also, I just know this from humans, right, that 50% of all pregnancies self-terminate. Yeah. Because 50% of the time, during meiosis, there's, like, disjunction. Yeah. There's so many errors that happen that the body's great at detecting, screening, and then aborting. Exactly. And so if our own average is 50%, except. And we're pretty good at it.

Yeah, exactly. We've been evolving for this long. Cloning efficiencies are somewhere between 2 and 4%. We bought a company called Viagen last year that most famously cloned. a bunch of celebrities' dogs, including Tom Brady's dog, which, like, broke the internet. Celine Dion was the first. No, Barbos Streis. I'm sorry, Barba Streis.

I'm sorry. Sorry, Celine. That was a big deal. She did that before we acquired them. They do horses, cats, and dogs. Did they do this? I saw a great 60 minutes on the world's most famous polo player. I think he's from Argentina.

Yeah, they did their horses too. And he's got eight of the same horses, Monica. The horse he won the most on, they just made aid of. That is their main. Yeah. We bought them because there's another, like, 18 species. that have ever been cloned. They're at 78 percent.

We didn't say that. Yeah, versus 2%. Yeah. That's one of the reasons we bought them. We support their consumer business. People are worried. We actually got a lot of emails where people are like, are you going to not allow them to clone the dogs?

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

go get one of those. So that's bulletproof. That's a good criticism. People have asked me, I have two dogs, Barbie and Ken, before the movie came out, they're much older. But if you're like before the dolls, they're 95 years old. They're quite old dog. They're not cloned, but we have, we have super enhanced men. We have ended their cynicism. But they're both rescues and they're amazing, right? Yeah. I'm very pro-rescue. We work with American Humane Society around it. But at the same time, I could see the other argument, right? So people ask me, would you clone her dogs?

And I'm like, I don't know. If my kid was like, I would just go adopt another dog because I love to the point. But if my kid's like, I don't know, I'm not in that position yet. Yeah. Well, the other criticism is you're playing God. So if the argument is semi first, you're required to believe. I don't agree with that. No, I know.

I'm just saying if the prerequisite for the argument is you must first believe in God, I'm already out. But then secondly, guess what, y'all, we've already been playing God by fucking eradicating. You're playing God when you take cholesterol medication. Yeah, 100%. Or when you eradicate the dodoes or when you cut down the rain torts. Or overfish the oceans. Like, we play God every day.

Yeah. So why don't we play God for some good? Yeah. But part of it is like, okay, so if your kid is like, it has to be Barbie, are we then... Teaching them the right level. Exactly. I don't know. How will they process grief?

I understand. Our dogs are like, go. part of our family. And I think some people take that even further. I don't know. It's a good question. It's tricky. I have not cloned my dog yet. Here's the other issue is like just because I want to do something, I don't understand why I think that should apply to everyone. So no, I think the beauty of dogs is what you teach the kids is that they don't live that long. It's a crazy endeavor. Come fall in love with this thing and in nine years you'll be heartbroken. I don't want. But that's a great experience for people to have. and then, lo and behold, they get another dog and do it again.

There is a beautiful life lesson. It is worth the pain to experience a love. I do not. I do not disagree with that at all. But I don't need that to apply to everyone else because that's what I think my kids should learn. Yeah. But they're not going to experience the pain

if they just have the same dog again. That's my point. Like, it wouldn't be for me because we all miss Lola. If ever there was a dog, we would have cloned to have been Lola. That's right. And it teaches them it's still worth it to put yourself out there for these other dogs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I say this about my dog. And my goal is, you know, where we're standing up outside of the de-extinction work and the technologies that can be applied to humans and some of the other stuff we talked about, we open source all of our technologies for conservation, right? And so we have a foundation, we raise $100 million for our foundation. And we just say use our technologies for free for conservation, right? And we've been standing up these like Noah's Ark 2.0 biovolts all around the world because we're eradicating species so fast as humanity. We've got to have a backup plan because conservation doesn't work at the speed of which we are eradicating to these species. And so why I bought Viagen was I think people should have those conversations. I told you, I don't know what I would do.

And I owned Viagen. I don't know if I would clone my dog. But that's just me being transparent about it. I'm very interested because not just that cloning efficiency, but of the like 18 species that have ever been cloned, like 16 of them were done by Viagin, right? Blackfooted ferrets, Saborski's horse. We worked for them on some of our work on the Red Wolves.

And so when you start to go talk to these governments, if you can have those capabilities and you have genetic engineering where you can engineer and lost genetic diversity so you don't have bottleneck and you have these bio vaults, that one plus one plus one isn't three. That is a key backup model for life. Now, that doesn't mean we should go hunt things and kill things off, but we are in a spot where we are losing species

in some of these national pride species, ecological function species, these keystone species, or if they're important to indigenous people groups, we should do everything to accelerate their recovery. and the current recovery models, they're just not working. We are slowing an inevitable end. And that's why about Viaging, because one of the things we've been educating this administration on

is like, hey, let us go back everything up. We're not going to ask any money from this administration or taxpayers. We'll do it on our dime and we'll give all of that data to the world. We're not keeping any secret data. And then the next thing we're going to ask them to do is like, can we pick a couple species and can we clone them for you so that we can, like, build a population where they actually can survive on their own, not in a captain-managed model.

That's where I think that the cross-functional integration of these technologies through the lens of synthetic biology gives us so much more than just a mammoth. Whoa. So fast. Okay, my last question, you'll hate. You are a business at the end of the day. Yeah. And you've raised, I think, $600 million and you're valued at $10 billion. Ish.

Those are rough numbers we can agree on. What's the big revenue stream? Why is it worth $10 billion? Where is money being made? So right now, we're not focused on revenue. The technologies for us are key to the revenue. And so in the short term, we've produced viable spin-out businesses. Our drug discovery platform company, form bio,

it's worth over $100 million. Our plastic degradation company is worth over $100 million. Astromack, which is our computational biology, ancestral rate reconstruction business. We just raised a $3.8 billion valuation, right, is one of our spinoffs. We have two other spinoffs. We haven't announced yet that we're very excited about. But I guess my curiosity is, do you think ultimately you'll be licensing or performing procedures?

I think we'll be doing four things. I think we will spin off and license technologies for new businesses, which we've gotten pretty good at in a very short period of time. We've only been around for four and a half years. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of insane. That's wild. We're the number one genome engineering company by at least a decade in four and a half years.

So I think that's quite interesting. So we've proven the license and spitout model of the technologies for new sectors. licensing the technologies directly into human health care stuff is kind of another phase of it. Invasive species is a $6 trillion global economic impact. Oh, really? Yeah, it's huge. Okay. We are the only company in the world that has invertebrate and vertebrate gene drives that can work cross species.

Okay, so that's a big. So government will be another vertical. And then I do think there will be a component, which I say all the time, around working with governments in ecotourism and carbon credit models. Like if we can restore ecosystems in the Arctic by putting mammoths back in there, we will get anuitized carbon and nature credits from that. Okay. Fucking fascinating, man. I mean, talk about being on the brink of all this biology, AI.

It's fun. This confidence of all the things that are exciting. This was very, very fascinating. Thanks for good. This was great. Yes. He is an armchair expert, but he makes mistakes all the time. They got Monica's here.

She's got to let him have the. Is that your tea or hers? Mine. You know, it's not a common pattern. Tell me. Collecting mugs. That's just me. Did you look magnets as a kid?

Yeah. Did you? Well, I mean, if my mom would let me buy it, like if we're on vacation or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I liked doing that. And key chains. Key chains as well. I love collecting.

Yeah, you're a collector. I'm a, what do we call it, a. Magpie. Not a hoarder. Fuck you and thank you. What do we call it? A hoarder. I think it's called a magpie.

Yeah. Well, a magpie collects little trinkets. I think I'm a magpie. Yeah. But do you know there's, it's a huge industry. I've just been educated on this. I had no idea. They're pretty.

Magpies, oh sure. Oh, my God. And they're very smart, I believe. Oh, shit. Sure. Yeah, it says highly intelligent, long-tailed birds. You got to be intelligent to want to collect stuff, I guess. Yeah.

Oh my God. Magpies rank among the world's smartest animals. Oh, boy. Maybe you need a magpie tattoo, like my crow tattoo. That would, that's actually cute. But you know, I'm not getting a tattoo. Yeah. Where would you get a tattoo if you were going to get one?

Neck? Yeah. Head, head tattoo. What if I got one? And so you never saw it because it was on my head. My hair was. was covering it. Well, you'd first have to shave your head.

Ouch, I'm not doing that. I would get one probably here commonplace. For the listener, this is my forearm, but like... Right in the crook of your elbow there? Below. Just below. Like when you're playing the game with your eyes closed and someone's running their finger up, where you think it...

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

or something. No, it's a magpie on your crook of your elbow there. One million dollars. No, this is a bad game. Okay. Because then people, whatever I say, people will get mad at me. Yeah, exactly. Look, I- David Sedaris's thing. Remember he's talking about COVID and people yelling at other people. And if you were just to write, like, I, um, the sun was on my face and it made me smile that I, oh it must be nice I don't even have a face Yeah I don't even have a face

Boy it really that parasycial thing is It is as bad as you know when people say like It constantly bringing up this podcast or that podcast That is me almost anything anyone says It triggers a Cedar's story Yes And then they gotta hear it Well luckily his stories are fantastic

So they're good ones to bring up I would say That's true Well, you just told it on an episode, so maybe you don't want to, but I was going to say, do you want to talk about your hosting? Because you did bring up that you were going to host, not host, sorry, you were going to present at the Prop Master Award. Oh, yeah, I did on Saturday. Yeah, yeah.

I can tell that. Okay. First, I have to say that Jeffrey Johnson is... Shout out. Is one of the greatest human beings in all of show business of all the different crew members I've ever worked with. I just love him like you can't imagine. He was the prop master on Parenthood for six years. And chips.

And then he did chips. And I think he had another job. And I think he really did me a favor by doing chips. He's incredible. And we had so much fun. And so at any rate, they have an award show on Emmy weekend. And for themselves, which is warranted and adorable. Yeah.

They get to have a glitzy night like all the other departments. And so each year I present and he and I usually do some kind of a bit. And he always thinks of it. So it was, I think last year, because you know, your prop person has a bag with all your props in it. They've got your watch. They've got, you know, all the bullshit you got to wear. And they come up to you before the scene and they put your watch on you and they hand you your ring and all this crap. Yeah.

And so he had the speak. And I stood next to him last year and had his prop bag. And I was constantly doing things to him and putting stuff on and blah, blah, blah. So anyways, this year, his idea was that I would carry him across this stage. set him on the other side, then come back to the microphone to do my presenting of the category. Yeah. And it was last minute idea. And he said, you know, and then you come back to the mic, say, you know, prop department always carries the actors on their shoulders, thought I could return the favor.

So it didn't go as planned. Right. I was like, yeah, that's no problem. I can definitely carry you across the stage. I do nothing but train. Yeah. For God knows what, this is it. Yeah.

So I pick him up. I'm holding him waiting for them to go through the. whatever they call that when they are saying he's a podcaster and an actor. Oh, they're introducing you. In the introduction, right? And again, I'm holding him and I'm like, skip the heck, you know, whatever. Just get to one thing. This is too many things because I'm holding them.

And then I walk across the stage and then the stage is longer than I think it is. Sure, big stage. And slash, I haven't carried a man like a baby ever. I just assume, yeah, I can live away. So anyways, it's a pretty long walk across the stage. I think people get a little chuckle out of it. Sure. They know Jeffrey's being carried like a baby.

Yep. I set him down and now I'm hyper aware of like I got to run back to the microphone because it's like they're now waiting for a while. They'd watch me carry him. So then I run back to the microphone. And then when I get to the microphone, it is starting to occur to me like I need to really kind of bend over and breathe. Like I've just done 20 squats.

Right. I'm like the category of, you know, and I start reading and I'm like, I'm like, I start reading and I'm like, oh my god i'm so out of breath yet i'm having to read it's getting so bad that i can i'm getting blasts of light in my eyesight yeah you know like little sparklers are going off in my aurora yeah and to the point where i have to i have to acknowledge it like i can't carry on it's like three pages this this this this category intro maybe more and so finally i go oh okay gang i'm just gonna i'm gonna admit that i am i am winded okay i i shouldn't be but i i I've really lost my breath.

Yeah. And so laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing. And then I somehow thought that got me the breaths I needed. But really, I needed to sit there and I needed, I needed to breathe for about 10 or 15 seconds of silence. Yeah. I wasn't going to do that. name. I'm hopeful the person wasn't actually there. Okay. Fingers off. Because I said, I'm, I'm butchering this. I acknowledge it. I'm so sorry. Like offering like, like, please.

Is this televised? No. Okay. Thank goodness. Although it is being recorded, so God knows where this exists. But all to say, I really was teetering on consciousness by the end of it. Sure. Trying to hold in tight, make my talking voice normal while hyperventilating. Yeah, that's hard. Did you have an identity crisis because you're like, and did you also think people were watching and like, how is he having a hard time carrying? He's so big. Exactly. If I were them, I'd be like, what's, what's all this about? If you can't carry a guy across the stage and then talk. Yeah, then like, why? I'm having the same feeling. That's what I'm saying. Did you have a crisis? But I do urge someone to carry a 190 pound man, you know, a couple hundred feet. Well, now you know what it's like

for me to try to get your body off the train tracks, okay? It's not as easy. as you think. Okay. That's the lesson I learned. Yeah, yeah. Don't worry. No, I had a very healthy response, which is like, that didn't go well. I didn't do a good job presenting.

I didn't do a good job reading. I fucked up some names. Yeah. And on the ride home, which in the past, I would have really been lashing myself over. Beving yourself up. Mm-hmm. I was like, Jeff still knows I love him. Yes.

And then I'm always around if he calls. You showed up. And that was the goal. Yes. The goal wasn't to be spectacular. Exactly. Or to have perfect cardiovascular training. I know.

I'd like to see if anyone could really do what I did and not be out of breath. I think even if you train. I think if, like, who's the get? Lance Armstrong could probably do it. He had the best cardio probably of anyone. Right. But he might not have the strength. Oh, that's all.

I need something on them. I think John Cena could do it. Well, that would be a good challenge. Okay. Yeah. I like to challenge it. Like, you know, that old show they used to have on NBC. It was like contest of the stars or whatever.

And they'd have TV stars competing against athletes. Oh. Do you know that famous show? It would be like on a Saturday. This would be a good show. So you have, it's like, it's a game show. And you have to carry someone across the stage. And then you have to come back and you have to make some kind of speech.

And then that's somehow evaluated. And that's how you win or lose. And it basically just be John Cena and I guess competing. No. No. other people like Alan Richson. Oh, yeah, he would be great. I mean, for old times sake, Schwarzenegger could come.

Well, but we don't know what he's capable of. I don't like to dabble and gossip, but I will say I did see a little headline that Catherine Schwarzenegger had posted some pictures of summer, and there was a picture of Marie and him together having a lovely time. And it made me very happy because I had seen that doc of him. and I was very sad. He seemed really lonely. Oh.

In the dock. I felt the heartbreak that he had, you know, wasn't with this woman. Oh. Yeah. I think he very much would like to have stayed with his. That's my guess. I have no insight information. Yeah.

But to see that they were enjoying each other's company. Yeah. I don't know. Gave me abnormal amount of happiness. That's good. Yeah. I think families, if they can. Yeah.

I mean, your mom and dad were around each other. They were spectacular at it. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people strive for that if they can. It's hard. I tip my hat to Dave Barton, my stepdad. Did Arnold cheat? Oh, very publicly.

He had a child with the housekeeper. Oh, wow. I'm really out of the loop. Who is now competing in bodybuilding competitions? The housekeeper? He just son, his son. Oh, the son. That was a beautiful part of the dock.

He's like, this is a great embarrassment to me, but I would never deny my son. I want to be proud of the fact this is my son. Yeah. His name is such and such. I would never hide from that as much as this is painful. I want the world to know I couldn't be more proud to have him as a son. Yeah, that's... And now he's a bodybuilder.

He just competed in a like a natural bodybuilding contest, which if you want to see the difference between using steroids and not, look at one of these natural bodybuilding shows versus the steroid ones. It's not even the same. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. I'm glad he...

that would be really horrible if he, like, didn't want anything to do with them. So I'm glad that, like, he brought this person into this world who has no choice, you know? So, like, I'm very glad to hear that. But it's shrouded in a lot of public embarrassment. Sure. Yeah. Again, that this person's born into. Uh-huh.

Like, and they themselves are now a part of this narrative that they didn't choose. Yeah. So on top of it, if your parent was like, I don't want anything to do with you because you're reminding me of this. That's actually horrible. Or I don't want to talk about it. That would be a understandable thing for him to go, I don't want to talk about this in public. So I think it is an act of integrity to go like, yeah, I don't want to talk about this. But of course, I am going to talk about this because I am very proud to be his father.

Yeah. I think it's nice. Yeah, it is. It's definitely nice. A lot of people just go like, I don't want to talk about this. Yeah. Yes, they would. and I guess I'm saying like for that other person,

actually for both the other people involved, the mother and the son, that's like horrible. So I'm glad. I'm happy to hear that. And I think, I wonder if the kids hang out. All of his children.

I think so. That's nice. That would be so nice. I mean, again, it's like. They're a lovely family. Like, again, I was lucky. to be around that family 20 years ago. Yeah.

They're lovely, lovely folks. Yeah. I love Maria. Yeah. Yeah. She's radical. I think you could be lovely and still be like, eh, I don't know. But I, again, well, I guess we don't know for sure.

But my hope is that they've embraced this person. That's nice. Maybe they all have Thanksgiving. Perhaps. All of Thanksgiving together. Yeah, I can't put too fine a point on how much I love Maria. She's so smart and fun to talk to. Right.

It's a great debater. She could be part of it. Caring in the competition show. Do you think Maria Shriver could be a part of carrying? We don't know. Of all of her many virtues, which there are probably too many to list, carrying a 190-pound man across the stage might not be what she could do. Okay.

Do you think she could lift you off the tracks? I don't know. Okay. I don't know. We don't know. I don't know how she feels about me. I don't know if the adrenaline, you know, like the superpowers might not hit her because she doesn't care enough about me. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we don't know until we're in this position. None of us know. As we know, practice doesn't make perfect in this case. But I do have a hunch you are capable of more if you care about the person a lot. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

So I just don't know how I rank out of 10. Yeah. How much I would enact her super. for human strain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah. I care about Jeff a ton,

so I could carry him for a versus. I can't make a speech afterwards. Understandable. Gosh. Do you think you'd risk your life? Or who? For a stranger. If a stranger was on the tracks,

this is really hard question. It's almost a useless question because there's what you think you would do and then there's what you do. Yeah. I will say my track record shows that when I see stuff that I think, think I can change. I act very instinctually to get involved. That's true.

In the past I have. Right. Again, do I want to run into the apartment of my neighbor who's getting beat by this guy who's twice my size? If I think about that, no. Right. But I did. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't know her well. I just was more like said hi to her on the sidewalk occasionally, you know. But yeah. hear a woman screaming and I'm glad I go I'll go I feel bad because I just don't want to go you don't want to have to go into the apartment yeah again I won't go but I'll call 911 yeah that's Bree handled the 911 of it all I yeah I ran up the staircase and they came tumbling down the

staircase I know I know I know Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. But you know what I'll do? I'll have a hard conversation with anyone, you know? Yeah. When those people are in jail, they're handcuffs so they can't hurt me. This guy was straight out of a Guy Ritchie film. Yeah.

He had a head the size of a microwave, shaved, thick, thick fucking cockney accent. Yeah. It looked like a rugby player. Uh, yeah. Did he go to jail? I have no idea. He, well, he was not arrested in that moment. He wasn't.

No, I came, you know, we got into a wrestling match on the top of the stairwell. My elbow went through the, um, the fire extinguisher, you know, it's got the glass break. So my elbow went through that. And then now of a sudden we're like, we're tumbling down this very tall staircase. Yeah. And she then locks dead. bolts her door. Okay. So she's now good. We separate enough. He runs back up the stairs to her. He's pounding on the door, but it's now deadbolted. Yeah. I am now at the bottom of the stairs just making

sure he can't get in. I'm like, I got to fucking please don't get in this. Yeah. Go back up. And then as he starts coming down the stairwells, when he finally realizes, and I, and I'm yelling, dude, the fucking cops are on their way. So I'm like, letting him know the cops are on the way. He recognizes he's not going to get in there and as he starts coming down the service i now um come down the sidewalk to my stairwell which is the next one over breeze standing there with the cordless phone on with 911 and then she takes a few steps up i stand between her and him because i don't know what's next and then he walks by and he does not want round two with me and he goes you want to understand she's a fucking Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that was his last words. And then he disappeared. And I never saw him again. Yeah. She did. I was doing laundry at one point a week later and I was coming out of the little shared laundry room and she thanked me. That's nice.

Yeah. The worst it would be if like two days later you saw him back in there. I mean, that's the pattern sadly. I know. So good for her. Yeah. She did not invite him back over. Yeah.

Life is so hard. It really is. It really is hard. I gotta tell you, that was an action-packed apartment building. Yeah. There was something happening. Once a month something happened there. Yeah.

You know, watch the one neighbor OD right below her apartment. Yeah. Yeah, it was fucking action-packed. You got out of there. Mm-hmm. Bree was there for another year and a half or so. Yeah, yeah. That's, she's, she is tough.

Like, she could definitely, she could definitely play in the competition. She was pretty comfortable in chaos. Yeah. Yeah. But that's different, like, yeah, I guess. But physical violence is different than like, it is. It is. But at that point in our relationship, she had already.

witnessed a pretty good deal of it. I mean, you know, one of the, we're just, like, we weren't even really dating. I had a girlfriend. She had a boyfriend. Carrie was in town. We went over to her house to hang with her. We all got drunk. Yeah. And this is when the roommate is, I'm in a conversation with the roommate. Okay. One of the dudes and I are talking. Apparently we're in a fight, but I don't, I truly don't recognize that.

Tim Lovsted's there too. Oh. And I'm sitting cross-legged on my hand, sitting on my hands leaning against a dresser in the middle of like, I think we're just having like kind of a friendly debate. Oh, boy. And he stands up. And then I'm like, oh, this guy is leaving the room over this. And as he crosses me, he just starts fucking punching me in the face. And this is when I got my nose broken.

Oh. And I like, I can't use my hands to get up because I got to use my hands to cover my face. And then he runs out of the room. And it's like someone poured a gallon milk on the house. It's the most blood I've ever seen that came out of my nose during this. Yeah. And then I get up and I run to his room. He's deadbolted the room.

Then I hear his side door open. Then I hear his car drive down the driveway. Bree's pretty alarm. There's a lot of blood. Of course. And Carrie. Carries there. And she's so stupid.

She goes, this is nothing. This is nothing. This is fine. Like, she's, she's like, don't even.

Yeah, this is this is a standard. Yeah. This is nothing. And she's still, you know, she's still dated you after that for nine years. I wonder what,

not to do. Sorry. Go ahead. I just wonder. I want to know what the conversation, the debate was. I want to know what led to that. Like,

I know, because in your head, you're like, what we're just, but obviously. It was about his girlfriend. Okay. And, um, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And I told you he broke every bone in his wrist. He ended up having surgery. Yeah, that's so. And he was supposed to leave to go on tour with his band. Oh, shit. It was a big loss for everyone. And I had that commercial I had booked.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we both lost jobs over it. I was 21. Like, that story is from when I was 21. God, I can't even like. Yeah, 21. So young. Isn't it weird to think about, you took such a left turn in life?

Uh-huh. Like, really? You're so different. Your life is so different than it was. My life is so different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But your life is like completely different. You live in a nice house. A beautiful, nice house with the incredible children and like a, like, a wife who's like America's sweetheart. Like that is so different. Yeah. And suffice to say if I got my nose broken in the living room, no. Um, Kristen would not be like, oh, it's not.

Right. This is fun. This is fine. No, but you're not getting your nose broken in the living room. That's my whole point. Like, you're not doing that anymore. I'm not. I'm an old man.

Yeah. And I, I, I wonder if it's interesting for people who were around you back then to see this, to see this version of you. I hope they are happy for you. But. Well, you got also, you, you have to, um, paint a full picture. So that's happening. Sure. These things are happening on the weekends. Yeah. Um, I'm also doing incredible in college. Sure. I'm going through the groundlings. I'm doing well. Like, I'm still the like very ambitious, motivated, dependable person. Yeah. And then yeah, I'm getting wild on the weekends. That's, yeah. But that's a big. part of it.

That's a big part of it. It is. It is. But I guess what I'm pointing out is I don't think anyone would be like I'm shocked he's made it. He was such a fuck up. That's not the vibe. That's not what I mean. Yeah.

I guess I mean like. There was so much chaos in my life. Yeah. Yes. And now there's not much. And partying and like being so sure. Like there's just a lot. Like now your life just looks very different.

You're a 51 year old man with the family. I never leave this house. Yeah. work at the house. I, yeah. Yeah. It's a much, much different existence. And I, I just, I, I don't.

That's why that wedding was so fun. Because I got to be my kind of wild crazy self, but in a very safe now way. Yeah. Yeah. But I got to tap into like that energy source I used to have at my disposal all the time, which is like, yeah, let's go to that thing. And let's, let's try to Mexico tonight. That's, you know, all that stuff that I used to be game for.

Yeah. I don't think too many people, I mean, I'm sure a lot of addicts have this similar story. But if you're not one, I don't think you have that kind of life-changing. You know, I don't know. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm wrong. I just feel like the shift is much bigger. Seismic.

You know, the great thing is. is we could ask Tim Lovsted. Right? Because he was there the whole time and he's still here. Oh, I don't mean people wouldn't be around anymore. Oh, no, no, I don't. I know. But you were saying like, I wonder what the people then think now of this domesticated life you have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, Tim would be an easy person for us to ask because he was present that night and present during a lot of the stuff or some of it. Tim was a good boy. So he wasn't present during. Right. That's what I'm saying. There's versions. There is.

And there's levels. Because then when I was in Detroit with Aaron, then it was like, the stuff that was having in Hollywood is like a child's play. Exactly. So what? Aaron and I were seeking out at all times. Yeah. Funny. Yeah.

You're an interesting person. Oh, well, thank you. I was trying to become one. Yeah. You are. I think if anyone, myself included, this is weird to say. But I remember. I watched you on Punked and I was like Punked is so funny blah blah blah

That guy's crazy Yeah All of them are crazy And then when I moved here And we had the same circle But I hadn't met you yet And I remember Some friends saying something about you

And I was like huh Like you were that you were in a conversation about blah And I was like oh And they're like he's really smart Oh, well, that's nice. And I was like, really? I did. I was like, oh, I had no idea.

Sure. Why would, how could anyone have had any idea? You were on punked and baby mama and playing dumb. But I was definitely like, oh, he is? Oh, okay. Unexpected. I was unexpected. And then I met you and I was like, he is.

Yeah. Wow. This is all a big surprise. Oh, funny. Speaking of being smart. Let's do some facts. Okay. This is for Ben.

Very interesting. No, it couldn't get more interesting. I can't believe this is happening. I know. Really crazy. I can't wait to have a pygmy mastodon. Where are you going to keep it? In my bedroom.

Where? On my bed. He's going to live there? Huge tusks. How big will we be? Yeah. I think even a pygmy one. Like, I think the pygmy masadons on the Channel Islands were about the size of cows.

Oh, that won't fit in your room. Well, it would, but it'd be make things tight, for sure. I've worked with cows a lot on TV when I was on the ranch. Oh, yeah. And I got to tell you, they're so sweet. I am blessed this mess. But I was really close on the ranch because it's a small stage and there's a cow right there. And their eyeballs are so.

That's nice. You can like learn. You can look in them. Yeah. They're like like whales. You know, when you see a whales I, you're like, yeah, there's a person in there. Oh, that's sad. Yeah, but it's, they're sweet. Because people are, I know, but like people are mean to them and kill them. Cows, I'm part of the problem. Me too. Yeah. What would you think the ethics are? If Ben could figure out how to grow a cow with no brain. Like no head. Oh, and then we eat those? Yeah, because there's like, there's not, all it is. is this meat producer. There's just some people would be mad about it even though that would make no sense. Well, there's something about engineering. I mean, there is just something about engineering a new being. Well, aside from that, I think even the people would think it was cruel to kill something that's not even sentient.

Oh, that, you know what I'm saying? Well, you do, remember Coco? Well, Coco's got a big face and a smile. Coco is not sentient. Well, it kind of, he can get around town. He's not sentient. Yeah. So will that cow will be able to get around?

I don't know if it will? Well, yeah. Don't you need a brain to tell to move? This is kind of a computer chip that tells all the organs to work. It'll have a chip that also makes it walk around. Probably to get exercise. Yeah. Yeah, get yummer.

Can you imagine seeing a field full of cows with no heads? No, see, that's what irks me. That's very scary. It's sci-fi. Yeah, it's sci-fi. It's, it's, um, it's, um, I don't want that. West Graven. It's a little more M-night Shyamalan to me.

Is it? Okay. He would definitely make a movie where there's all these cows with no heads at someone engineered. But you wouldn't see it to the last frame of the movie. No, what you see is, okay, in the last frame, you, okay, in the last frame. Paint the picture for me. He walks into the basement. Oh, they're in the basement.

Walking Phoenix. He walks into the basement. He walks into the basement. And he sees a little, like, crows. in the ground. And he gets his tool. And he's like, oh, oh, the floor board is loose. Okay.

Okay. It's a wooden floor. Yeah. And then he lifts it. And he's like, oh, what's that smell? Oh, okay. Pungent. Yeah.

And then he sees on the back of the floorboard, there's blood. Okay. Then he looks, and it's the heads of all the cows. They weren't engineered headless. They were real cows. They were just decapitated. Yes. Okay.

Yeah, that's a bummer. That's not what I want to happen. That's a sad ending. I want him to just be able to grow rib eyes with no suffering. Speaking of the movie I just wrote, I watched a scary movie with Adam Scott on. Oh, he was in it. He's in it. Uh-huh.

It's him, Michelle Monaghan, Robert De Niro ever heard of him? Okay. I have. And it is good. What's it called? It's called the Whisper Man. It's scary. Is it on Netflix?

I think it is on Netflix. Is it a series or a... It's a movie. It's a film. Yeah. And it's not too long. Great. That's your new criteria.

Pass my test. Yeah. And... Anything above 90 gets... You're in trouble. You better have a great film. But it was good. I enjoyed it.

Okay. So I looked up the words for grandma and grandpa in other cultures. Okay, great. Babushka? Yeah. Yeah, for Russian babushka and dedushka. Oh, daddy is a didushka? Grandpa.

Spanish abuela, boilo. Yeah, we love that. We know that. Italian. Nona. Mama Mia. No. Nona and Nona and Nona.

Nona. I don't think I knew no-no. German is Orna. Wow, Orna is... I know. Her name is Grandma? No, it's not. No, it's not.

Okay. It's OMA. Oma. Ohma. See, now do you see what happened? The M to me was an R and an N. That makes sense because you're bad eyesight. Oma and Opa.

Oh, no, no, that's cute. Greek is Yaya. Maybe it's Yaya. Yeah, that's what Peggy calls her grandma, her yaya. Okay, but it's Y, I, A. So I do think it's Yaya, but that's interesting spelling. And then Papu. Poo-Poo.

Papu. French? Mimmy and Pippi. No. I mean, sure. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what I was taught to call my French grandparents. It's a grommaire.

Oh, I love it. That must be official. Grand Mare is grandma and grandpere is grandpa. I love it. I just want to where Mimi and Pippi went. Irish is, oh. My, I, Irish is hard. It's Gaelic or something.

My mayo. Me-me-me-o? M-M-M-M-M-O. My-M-A. M-M-A's like a southern thing sometimes. M-M-A, yeah. I know a lot of friends who have M-M-Mas. M-Mas, yeah.

Yeah. It's true. Mim-M-M-A and Papa. Yeah. A lot of people have pa-paws. My dad might go by Ashi. Oh, is that Grandpa in... Nope, it's just since his name is Ashok.

Oh, okay. Well, we're going to try. It's really close to... Not Ashi, but who... was the baguan what did he become he became oh oh shah oh show oh show oh show oh show oh show up tough titty's oh show yep um i think we're gonna he's gonna try to push for that but you know Memphis gets to decide ultimately yeah um that's the first born gets to decide what the grandparents are called that's why my papa bob was papa bob because of david my brother david but were there any

other grandkids? Yeah, but they all came after David and I. They did. Okay. Yeah, Jamie and Jason are like two years and four years respectively younger. Okay, got it. So David was the first born grandchild. Oh, he sure was. He was the bell of the ball for five whole years he got to be doted on. So cool. Yeah. It sucks when the other one comes, you.

When Dax arrives, he's deaf and colicky. He grunts. Do you think that's why Delta wants to learn sign language? Because he said, my dad was dead. Yeah, maybe. Oh, there's, okay, there's a lot. This says in India, in Hindi specifically, though. So my parents don't speak that. Yeah, so I don't know. But it says Nani and Nana.

Well, I like that. Oh, this is funny because I always say they're close to Italians. Oh, yeah. That's my observation. Oh, well, okay. It's specific for maternal grandma, maternal grandpa. Too complex. No, we're smart.

Paternal grandma. I think Spanish has that too. It's part of the caste system. Oh, God. Okay. Oh, in Swahili, it's BB and Babu. Oh, I love that. Bibi and Babu.

Actually. These are clearly set up for babies to be able to say. Like, you notice the pattern here. They're all like baby talk. Oh, yeah, in Hawaiian tutu. There you go. A kid baby could say that. Okay, Dr. Death.

Baylor, yeah. He held surgical privileges at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, starting in 2011. And then 2012 is when he was suspended and then resigned. He wreaked havoc in a short amount of time. His name is Christopher Dunch. Yeah. First physician in United States history to be convicted and sentenced to life in prison for criminal acts and gross malpractice committed directly inside the operating room during surgery. He also look at him

He kind of looks familiar though He's a big lug right He's a football player But he wasn't his Yeah he looks like a It looks like Fred Flintstone Oh fuck me Look at that photo

I mean you shouldn't You shouldn't ever judge a book by its cover But I'm telling you if I shook my surgeon's hand And that's what he looked like I'd be like I'm gonna pass But remember people call him Dr. swagger? They did?

I'm just reading that. Oh, I don't remember that detail. Well, I do remember them saying at first, like, he was really cool. Like, everyone, like, thought he was cool. It turned. Because he partied. Okay, so I just was looking up the extinct animals because I'm just not well-versed. Okay.

What if you said? I'm just not convinced. Oh, my God. Whoa, that would be crazy. Yeah, what a revelation. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just going to read some that we, these are kind of obvious, I guess.

Well, Dodo is the Dodo. Fightless Bird. Stellar Sea Cow. He mentioned the sea cow. He's hot to bring that one back. Yeah. Okay, there's the Quagga. It's a South African subspecies of the plain zebra hunted for meat and skin.

But it looks like that. But that kind of looks like a regular zebra. Yeah. So I don't care about. I'm just kidding. I care. Passenger pigeon. That's cool.

Well, we lost it, though, right? Yeah, but if we could bring it back. This is like an emmortatorium at the Oscars for animals. Like, there should be music playing, and then you just read the dodo bird. The Shishuan pony mule. The passenger pigeon. And then you hear, oh. Yeah, I love the passenger.

The passenger pigeons made me want to get into animals. Tasmanian tiger. I mean, I do want one of those. Actually, no, they look kind of ugly because they look kind of like coyotes. I saw two coyotes yesterday. Okay, Chinese paddlefish. Ew.

I think the problem is I just don't like animals very much. Right. That's going to pose a problem went asked to be sympathetic probably about. Well, I'm sad. I don't think animals should be extinct. Right. But.

But you don't need to see them other than that. Yeah. Except there's a Pinta, Pinta or Pinta Island tortoise. 2012, it went extinct. No, 2015. Kind of recent. Yeah, well, the plow, the one that's a big part of Monsters of God, Ding, ding, ding, is the plow something. Tortoise from Madagascar.

And they're now extinct in the wild. They still exist, but only in captive breeding, sitches. Yeah. And then, of course, we got the woolly mammoth. We got the saber-tooth cat. They don't want to call it a tiger anymore? I guess. It's called a Smilodon.

Oh. Oroaks. Now, this is the type of cattle. The Moa, the Great Ock, also a flightless seabird. Okay. All right. That's a... I was just thinking about who I'd want to bring back.

There's Irish elk, which was a gigantic deer from the Pleistocene. Yeah, I want to see anything that's gigantic. Yeah. That's what I'm drawn to. The megafauna. I want to. Yeah, elephant bird. Thousand pounds.

A thousand pounds. Madagascar. Yep, exactly. Home of the pygmy hippo. Woolly rhinoceros. Ooh. That sounds fun. Hold on.

The Caspian tiger. I want to look at this. Okay. You're like a six-year-old. You're learning about animals. is right now real time. You're like leaving through a National Geographic book. Oh, this reminds me.

Okay, the game that I taught you guys about, imposter. Uh-huh. When we were playing, the word was clownfish. And so someone said Nemo and then whatever. Jess said, he said circus. He said circus, okay? And then Anthony, once we were done, Anthony was like, it's just circus.

And I was like, no, it was like, that makes sense. Clowns are at circuses. Yes, I was like, that makes sense. And then just like, well, I don't know what this is. Okay. All right. And then Anthony was like, oh, it's definitely Jess. Like, who wouldn't know what that is?

And I was like, some of us don't know animals that well. I was like, he's from Sweden. No. I mean, if you're from India. He's from India. He was born in France and he lived in Sweden for a long time. learning about animals. Yeah.

Okay? And if you're, if you're from Sweden, you don't know clownfish. If you're from India, India, if you're from India, you don't know sea horses. Right. And I'm going to make a collective list. Of your observations? Of, yeah, of the holes in animal learning. Uh-huh.

According to cultures. It'd be fascinating if you had some real data that proved that. I think it's real. Yeah. Remember I asked that other Indian man and he didn't know about sea horses? Part of like, do you think it's a product of great wealth that like you have the free time? There's like less pressing issues. And it's like you just have, you know, you're in a house and you have all this free time and you have this books and all these national. I learned all these at my papa and grandma's house because they had the whole encyclopedia of animals for me, the National Geographic.

And I just looked at them endlessly. Yeah. Like, do you think it could be some reflection or related to? wealth. Yeah. Wealth of nations. It could. Adam Smith.

I mean, it's like what other cultures have like aquariums in their house? Do we think that's common? I doubt in like sub-Saharan Africa there's a lot of aquariums. Or in Asian culture. Maybe because like at Chinese restaurants. Okay. Let's just slow down before we get into trouble. In the south.

In the south of the United States in the Chinese restaurant. Sure. There are aquariums. Right. Anyway, okay, well, that's it That's everything. Yeah, and I guess I still don't know. Oh, okay, maybe I want to bring back the Barbarry Lion.

Oh, tell me about that one. A majestic North African lion subspecies that vanished from the wild in the mid-20th century. I like that it said majestic. Yeah. What if it was called the Majestic Rat? Would you be interested in that? Well, I am part mouse, so I have to, like, I can't hate rats that. much.

You can't sell out your species so quickly. Exactly. Sister species. I look forward to you getting a pygmy woolly mammoth or mastodon. Yeah. Yeah. I look forward for you. I wouldn't want a pygmy giant sloth because then that would just be a sloth.

Be a three-toed sloth, right? That's true. So we already have that. That's not of interest. Okay. Actually, this rhino does look cool. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Big old fucking horn. Really big horn. Big, big girthy horn. I mean, really? I would love to see like one dinosaur. Yes, of course. We all would.

Okay. All right. That's it. Love you.