Julian Dorey Podcast - #297 - Dire Wolf Creators on Resurrecting Woolly Mammoth, Jurassic Park & Playing GOD | Colossal

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

WATCH REACTION EPISODE ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Ben Lamm is an American serial entrepreneur & billionaire. He is best known for founding Colossal Biosciences with Harvard Geneticist George Church. Colossal utilizes genetic engineering and reproductive technology to attempt the de-extinction of extinct species. They recently recreated genetically modified dire wolves and seek to re-create the Woolly Mammoth in the next 5 years. Matt James is an exotic animal expert, zoologist & Chief Animal Officer of Colossal Biosciences. BEN & MATT's LINKS - Ben IG: https://www.instagram.com/benlamm/?hl=en - Ben X: https://x.com/benlamm?lang=en - Matt IG: https://www.instagram.com/m_walkerj/?locale=en_AE%2B2&hl=en - Colossal YT: https://www.youtube.com/@itiscolossal - Colossal Website: https://colossal.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Intro 1:23 - Paul Rosolie Tape Measure Story 3:24 - The 6th Global Extinction, Restoring Dire Wolf & Woolly Mammoth 13:43 - De-Extinction & Science / Tech Behind It, Red Wolves 23:15 - Rewilding New Species & Effect on Genes, Ancient DNA Coding Breakdown (White Rhino) 30:35 - Northern Quoll Extinction, Jabba the Hutt Toads 35:08 - GMOs are good? 37:24 - How Colossal Makes Money 43:18 - The net value of a Whale, “Jurassic Park” & “I Am Legend” Risk 52:02 - Lab Creation Debate vs Natural / Organic, Chinese Gene-Edited Child Controversy 58:12 - How Matt joined Colossal Biosciences team, $50 Million to Elephant conservation 1:02:00 - How Colossal turned Scientist “Haters” into Supporters & Why, Science “Semantics” 1:09:56 - Colossal Would NOT Exist without AI, Talking to critics 1:14:05 - Working on Extinct Species vs Endangered Species 1:17:06 - Woolly Mouse De-Extinction & How They Did It (EXPOSED) 1:23:59 - Colossal NOT Cloning, How Species are designated, Dire Wolves vs Gray Wolves 1:32:28 - Julian & Ben explain Built-in Media Manipulation of Colossal 1:39:20 - You can’t clone a Woolly Mammoth, Colossal’s Animal Safety Measures 1:43:15 - How Colossal Edited Dire Wolf Genes 1:47:28 - “Playing God” Debate 1:54:10 - Ben & Matt REACT to Paul Rosolie’s Criticism of Colossal 2:04:26 - Artificial Wombs (Ex-Utero) 2:06:28 - Can Colossal Rebuild EVOLUTIONARY Behaviors? (Extinct Elk Example) 2:09:53 - Ben & Matt want to visit Paul Rosolie, Julian remarks on his Amazon Jungle visit 2:11:55 - Colossal’s Re-Wilding Plan for Animals, Tasmanian Tiger 2:16:48 - Ben & Matt invite Julian to visit Colossal CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 297 - Ben Lamm & Matt James (Colossal Team - Dire Wolf) Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you ever sit up at night and wonder if you're playing God here? You know, it's forecasted that we could lose up to 50% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. Not as many people talk about the species preservation side and the conservation aspects of kind of what we're trying to do. If you look at technology as humans' apex innovation, access to computing AI, synthetic biology, and all of these tools, this kind of blows people's mind, but we could bring back extinct species, rewild them into the ecosystem. And here's what's crazy and what people don't realize.

Red wolves is the most endangered wolf in the world. It's the only wolf that's only endemic to the United States. There's 15 left in the wild. 15, 15, one, five. And so that is the world that we live in. We now have the tools where we are going to move from scientific experiments to... There's people that have already used these things in an unregulated way.

There was a Chinese doctor that created it. He got in a lot of trouble for it. A lot of trouble. Wait, wait, wait. You guys made a f***ing dire wolf. Like, what the hell is going on here? Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. I still like this album. I think it's cool. Thank you. Thank you. Like with the random tape measure. Actually, there's a story behind that tape measure. Oh, really? So I went down to visit my buddy Paul Rosely in the Amazon like a year ago.

He's been down there for 19 years conserving areas within like the Peruvian Amazon near the Brazilian border. He's got over 100,000 acres now that he has. He's like the only American on the team. He co-founded it with guys who have literally lived in the jungle their whole lives and it was really cool because I owe a lot of my like the reason I'm here to him because he gave me a shot he had never been in a podcast studio before he went to my parents house also like three years ago and then we did a nuclear podcast and the rest was history and it worked out but when I went down to visit him one day he said to us he said you want to take a quick boat ride upstream? We're like, yeah, yeah.

Fuck it. Let's do it. He's like, we can only go up there. We'll get out for 20 minutes. Then we got to come back before the sun's down. And so he takes us up to this spot and we walk up through the brush and suddenly it's just destruction. It's like you just see acres of the Amazon fucking gone. And we're all just like, it was probably 10 of us us we're all looking at this like what the fuck and he and he comes up behind us and

he goes what you see here looks really bad but this is actually a victory and i'm like malaka what are you talking about a victory everything's gone he's like listen this is like 10 acres or whatever behind there is all good he said you see these spots where all these, these like wood sheds were set up with tape measures like that sitting on it. He goes, there's still fire burning around here. Congratulations. We just bought this off these guys. This is what going on podcasts and like raising money to actually get awareness on this lets us do. So he said that the 50,000 acres back there, no one's going to touch that. And he said said we'll use the bolsa wood here to build a new research station that's all so i brought back the the tape measure there because i was like damn that really like kind of

symbolically brings it home that's awesome but enough for me you guys made a dire wolf like what the hell is going on here yeah i mean our i think i our team did and i don't know what matt actually does but uh we uh yeah uh our team did so you know we've spent. I don't know what Matt actually does, but we – Nobody does. Yeah. Our team did. So, you know, we've spent – most people don't know this, but, you know, Colossal is the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company. People get really stoked about the de-extinction side and want to talk about it, want to debate it, want to get excited about it, which I'm sure we'll go into. Not as many people talk about the species preservation side and the conservation aspects of kind of what we're trying to do let's talk about this yeah so your story you know resonates with us because you know it's forecasted that we could lose up to 50 percent of all biodiversity between now and 2050.

and when we started the business i went back and looked at our original deck the forecast was 15 one five that that's not the best trend line when was that when did you start 2021 yeah so it's kind of been crazy and so um George and I had this idea and I really gotta credit George is mostly George churches I don't know if you've ever had George George would be a fun guy to have on the podcast yeah he's the co-founder yeah yeah he's he's six seven head of genetics at Harvard uh got narcolepsy, super weird and interesting. And ultimately – I had a little bit of – Yeah, audio good? Yeah.

It's just the headphones. We should be good, right? Yeah. Go ahead. And so George was – is the head of genetics at Harvard. He's like one of the kind of godfathers of synthetic biology. And I met with him, and his whole idea was we could bring back extinct species, rewild them into the ecosystem, help the ecosystem, and also build technologies for conservation,

which he thought was pretty exciting. And I thought that was the wildest an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Between client meetings, managing your business, and everyday tasks,

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Kinsta. Simply better hosting. And so I kind of challenged him on it in our second meeting, and his response was this. At the time, he was like, you know, we could lose 15 to 20% of species between now and 2050. And then it just has gotten worse and worse and worse in terms of deforestation, overfishing, just eradicating species and putting bounties on their heads, doing all these different things. So we thought we could do this like super flashy different way of conservation because all the tech we make on the path to de-extinction, we open source and give to the world for free for conservation. Real quick, I just want to double check the audio, but I want to dig into this.

Hold on a second. All right, we're back. So if the headphone keeps going out, we'll just take them off. Yeah, that's cool. But anyway, so I actually really do want to talk with you about the conservation side today. Because I also know that's where like the controversy comes from because I think the first question would be, even before we get to dire wolves and why he started there, like the excitement of saying we're going to bring the fucking woolly mammoth back. Yeah.

Like that gets the people going. It gets people excited. I'm excited about that. I think it's really cool. Then you look at the fact that the woolly mammoth has been gone for maybe it's like 14,000 years, something like that. 4,000. 4,000. 4,000 years.

Most people don't know this, but they were – like this kind of blows people's mind. But we were building – we as humanity, not colossal. We don't have like super anti-aging drugs yet. We can take credit for it. Yeah, we can take credit for it. But we were building the pyramids while mammoths were still on the earth. Like that's crazy to me. That's actually – Somebody was building the pyramids while mammoths were still on the earth. Like that's crazy to me. That's actually –

Somebody was building the pyramids. Well, I don't know. I just – I thought we were taking credit for it. Oh, my God. But either way, like they've been out of our food chain, out of our environments for a very long time. Yeah. a very long time. So why start with something that is already long extinct that has, you know, nature's already evolved past in a lot of ways versus starting with, you know, one of the 50% of species that's endangered right now and trying to use, and we'll get into CRISPR and all that and

what you do, but trying to use some of this technology to do that. Yeah. So we started, you know, I, when I started the, at the time we had no scientists. Before we even hired Matt, we were like, I don't know, four weeks out from launching the business. And I called George and I was like, you think we should hire someone that's like taking care of elephants and knows a lot about elephants? And George was like, oh, that's a really good idea. That's a great idea. And I was like, well – and so then I had – I was like, my job, I'm not a scientist, right? I'm not a conservationist. I'm trying to learn it very, very quickly because I'm passionate about it. But my job as an entrepreneur

is to build the team of the smartest people. So then I was like, okay, I have to go on the hunt to go try to find the number one elephant guy in America and then talk to him about mammoths and genetics and engineering, right? And so we started with the mammoth for a couple reasons. One, George had already been working on it. And, you know, George likes to blame the media for the reason why he's working on the mammoth. But I think if you watch George Church's, like, before Colossal, like, watch him on the Colbert Report, watch him on 60 Minutes, watch him on all these things, there's this

mammoth through line and you can hear an inflection in his voice you can totally hear him change and george cares a lot about elephants and you know elephants aren't model species they're not really studied in the like in labs and environments there's not a lot of assisted reproductive technologies for elephants there's not a lot of people that are studying elephants and building technologies for elephants so george's view was if we bring back this charismatic megafauna being the mammoth, we'll get kids excited, we'll get people excited about conservation, and we can help the ecosystem as well as we can, you know, make technology to help elephants. And he was already eight years in the process, right? So he had been sampling mammoths, he'd gone to Siberia and gone out on

these excursions in Russia and actually taken mammoth DNA and brought it back to his lab. He was doing all the computational analysis to understand more about the mammoth. And so George's technologies and some of the technologies we needed to license from Harvard to get George and to get the technologies, the mammoth was a good place to start. And it's probably one of our longer, harder projects. So it's better to start that and get that going. We have about a 40-person team on just the mammoth. Wow. Yeah. That's, that's escalated quite quickly. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. And you, and you think we're within like five years or so maybe of the mammoth of

what you can do. Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, you know, the mammoth is really sort of heavily driven by George's work on the gene editing genomics front. And now we're sort of accelerating and kept catching up to George on the reproductive front because there's sort of two sides to the de-extinction equation, right? You're starting with gene editing and ancient DNA and trying to figure out what was a mammoth versus an elephant and then how can you re-engineer the elephant to become the mammoth. But then you also need to be able to create embryos, put those embryos into surrogates and then take care of them. And that's a lot of what my team's doing. And so we're still playing catch up because George had a great head start. Also, elephant reproduction is really hard, but the pace and scale at which we're making advancements

right now, I feel really good about the next five years. When you say the elephant reproduction is really hard, are you really referring to like the length of the gestation period? Everything, right? Everything from longest known gestation for any mammal in the world, right? A really difficult anatomy. Elephants are big. Their ovaries are really high up in there. Actually, their reproductive track from their ovaries down to their vaginal opening is three meters.

Whoa. Yeah. That's a fun fact. Yeah, get deep in there. That's actually a more fun fact than the pyramids. So there's a really long pathway that you have to travel to do a lot of those things. And we don't know a lot about physiology. They're reproductive physiology.

If you think about human IVF, you probably know somebody that's gone through it. And they've been on hormonal injections to help stimulate follicular development. Or how can you get them to sort of go into estrus or menstruate at the right time we need to do all those things but the difference is in humans you could study people all around you with elephants we don't have that luxury right there's we're losing elephants every single year we have a fewer than 250,000 left in Africa, fewer than 25,000 left in Asia. So it's a resource issue. But what's amazing about Colossal is that we put money into a place that was in desperate need of money. We brought more eyeballs and more attention into a place that needed and deserved

more attention. And so even what we've done in the first couple of years for elephant conservation by helping accelerate and develop a vaccine against the deadliest virus. This to me is the craziest thing. And like Matt, I had no idea, right? Because like Matt, his whole life has lived in conservation and the team that he's brought in has lived in conservation and been fighting this kind of like uphill battle to save species. And I always thought, you know, just not, not being fully educated on it was that the number one reason why elephants die is just poaching. Like people want their ivory, right? People want their ivory or people want their ivory. And it is a big driver,

but the number one killer is actually this terrible disease called EEHV. So when I learned about it, it's like it kills 20% of elephants a year. And, E-E-H-V. E-E. Elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus. It's a latent herpes virus. It's called E-E-H-V. Yeah. Yeah. It's much easier. Yeah.

I'm going to stay with that too. But yeah. Okay. Yeah. But it literally, and it kills the babies at the time of weaning. So it also kills baby elephants, right? So it's like the worst disease. Like you can't make the story worse and worse.

And so we've been working with a couple of different groups, some AZA accredited zoos, Dr. Pauling at the Baylor College of Medicine, ourself and Harvard have been working to come up with a vaccine. So we're not going to cure it, right? But we want to do two things. One, we want to understand the disease because if you're going to bring back mammoths, you should engineer in a resistance to this, right? Because you want 20% of your population to be susceptible to this disease, number one. And then number two, it has this halo effect of helping elephants today that we're open sourcing, right? We're just doing it. And I'm really excited that our first, like the most deadly form of EEHV, which kills the vast majority of elephants, we actually have

a vaccine that is being tested in elephants right now. In elephants. In elephants, in conferring resistance. So if Colossal, this is what I always like to talk about from the conservation side, because I'm not as deep as Matt, but if Colossal does nothing else in the world, right? We didn't make woolly mice. We didn't make dire wolves. Let's assume nothing else we ever do ever works. And we just solved that. And we saved more elephants than all of the elephant conservation for the last 200 years, then I think we sleep pretty well at night. I would agree with that. That's the outcome. Yeah. So you, if I'm understanding correctly, and sorry if I asked some stupid questions there, but I really want to get to the nitty gritty so we can all understand. But you effectively can

use the experimentation of building a mammoth to then simultaneously work with elephants and solve the same problem because they come from a similar yeah exactly i think i think of de-extinction people always say well why don't you focus more on conservation you go no no no de-extinction and conservation are intrinsically linked you cannot undo that like they are together because the research and development that goes into de-extinction is directly applicable to the conservation of currently imperiled species. And that's what we do. So if you think of de-extinction like a massive freighter, like a tanker going down the middle of the ocean, it's creating this huge wake. And in its wake, it's pulling elephant conservation.

It's pulling conservation awareness. It's bringing conservation science. It's ancient DNA. It's being, you know, genomics is being brought along with it so we're creating attention we're raising funds right 435 million dollars in four years i spent 15 years working in non-profit conservation i don't think i got to 10 of that number right that doesn't include our we also started which most no one wants to talk about this is crazy we also we we've seen so so much success in a short period of time on the application of our de-extinction technologies for conservation.

So it's not like you have to get to a mammoth and then you're like, okay, what did we build and what can be used, right? It's like on the path we're making technologies. And it's being applied in real time. But we also raised $50 million for the Colossal Foundation. So we started a separate foundation saying we shouldn't be the only ones innovating in not just de-extinction sciences but new innovative technologies. So we started a foundation whose entire purpose, which we raised $50 million separate for, whose entire purpose is funding researchers as long as the technologies they develop are new for conservation and open to the world. And so we're now funding all that. It doesn't get quite the

headlines as like mammoths and direwolves, but we think it's moderately important. Yeah, it's extremely important. And I think it's representative of maybe the new conservation funding model. I think people are a little uncomfortable with this idea that this tech startup, this for-profit startup is in the conservation space, a place not traditionally seen by for profit industry. But what we're doing is injecting momentum and money and eyeballs into the space. And I think that that's only good for conservation. So I think sometimes when we get some of the pushback from the really conventional conservationists, I say, I get it. We could talk all day about, you know, what you may or may not believe

is is great about what colossal is doing but what you cannot disagree on is that today there's more money and more attention on conservation than there was four years ago yeah i'll give you i'll give you this weird stat and then and then we go or i was trying to pull it up because i don't i want to give you the actual stat but we um that wild shirt, by the way. I can't stop looking at that. We don't sell anything. People are like, do you sell those or our T-shirts? Because people like our apparel. I was like, no.

And then it kind of dawns us we actually don't sell anything. But we do lose quite a bit of money. We do see colossal swag in the most random places. Our buddy Forrest Galante sent us a text, and it was a picture of a tuk-tuk driver in Indonesia, and he was wearing a colossal shirt. And you go, how the hell did it get out there? Yeah, so – Hopefully not in the losing Super Bowl category. No, we did this thing.

So with every species that – so outside of the conservation aspects that we're opening and sourcing our technologies for and the de-extinction projects we're working on, we try to open source or we try to pair every single de-extinction with a species preservation. So not just like, how can we theoretically potentially maybe one day use these technologies for conservation? How do we use them today? Like, so obviously it's the Asian elephants with the mammoth. With the dire wolves, it was the red wolves. And I'm trying to find this stat because it's amazing. I sent it to Bridget, so I'll pull up Bridget.

Here it is. So this is amazing. Red wolves in the – so no one is really talking about red wolves. It's the most endangered wolf in the world. It's the only wolf that's only endemic to the United States. How many of them are left? There's 15 left in the wild. Yeah. the only wolf that's only endemic to the United States. How many of them are left? There's 15 left in the wild. Yeah.

15. 15, 1, 5. There's about a hundred. They're technically extinct in the wild. Yeah, I was going to say. In 1980, they were declared extinct in the wild. There was a captive population of some red wolves that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had the foresight of going, we better just capture what's left and put them into captive

breeding situations. So there's 15 left in the wild that have been reintroduced uh the population got up into the you know 150 range about 10 15 years ago and then it's had a huge crash again and but here's here's what's crazy about like the direwolf and what people don't realize is that uh and so i'm just reading these stats and i'll put my phone away uh there's been seven billion media impressions around Red Wolves. On our videos and videos attached to Red Wolf, there's been 5.7 million views, 380,000 unique engagements. And it's over 1,000x fold when we went and looked at Google on people searching for Red Wolf or Red Wolf conservation on the first day. On one day.

That we launched the Dire Wolf. So no one's taught, and then, you know, the Today Show a week after the Dire Wolf, we were on the Today Show the week before, a week afterwards, they did a whole special on saving the Red Wolves. They weren't talking about Red Wolves, you know, no one was talking about Red Wolves. And so this is, you know, we care a lot about the technologies, but, you know, there's, to Matt's point, we actually – Colossal, I think we do a really bad job of saying this. We are bringing awareness to things. Like when I saw these Red Wolf stats from our marketing team, I was like, this is incredible. So we sent it to all of the big – all the various teams that are working on Red Wolves around the United States, and they're like, you've brought more attention to the Red Wol wolves in one day than we've had in the last 10 years.

Now, that's cool. Yeah. That's not going to save red wolves, but it at least starts the conversation. It's an important step because in conservation, we talk about behavior change is one of the key steps for conservation. And the way that you affect behavior change is there's this sort of chain of events. And you say care, connect, and then conserve, right? If you can get people to – or I'm sorry, it's connect, care, and then conserve, right? If you can get people to, or I'm sorry, it's connect, care, and then if you can connect people to the issue and show them what it is, make them care about that issue, then they'll take conservation action. And so what we're doing represents that first step,

that connection to tell people that the red wolf exists, to tell people it's America's endemic wolf and to let them know about this horrible, you know, persecution the red wolf is based in the wild. Yeah. What's happened there? Like how did, you said it reignited to like 150 and then went back down to 15 in recent years. What's that over? Sort of the drive towards civilization and development in the United States

led to some persecution of wolves all over our continent. Unfortunately, gray wolves and red wolves included. There were bounties on gray wolves and red wolves included. There were bounties on red wolves. There was everything. Red wolves also tended, now that coyotes have sort of been pushed into their habitat, tend to coexist with coyotes. And unfortunately, a lot of people are really excited about shooting coyotes. So also red wolves tend to get shot as well. So in the 60s and 70s, we realized, oh shit, this species is about to go extinct. And U.S. Fish and Wildlife took that really bold action to capture the remaining animals,

or what they thought were the remaining animals, and start a captive propagation program. Starting in the early 90s, they started reintroducing wolves to this small part of northeastern North Carolina. That just was sort of on the heels of what was really successful with gray wolves going back into Yellowstone. So as they were doing that, they saw some early success. Um, but unfortunately, you know, societal attitudes towards wolves took a turn in that area and people started not just shooting them, but then there's also a lot of development. There's roads that go through their habitat. They're getting hit by cars. That's sort of their biggest driver of mortality right now. And even though in about 2012, 2013,

there were more than 150 today, there's probably less than 15 in the wild. Now, were they released them in Northeastern North Carolina? Are there any mountains there or anything? What's the terrain like? Yeah, it's sort of like that piney coastal terrain. So it's kind of a damp temperate forest. But there's also significant development. I mean, North Carolina is a beautiful place. People want to live there, right? So there's a lot of human activity in the area. One of the things that U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Service has talked about for years is setting up separate and sort of parallel efforts to reintroduce them to other areas, see if's more success so hopefully that's where we're going but the big issue is the stock of animals that they're using for this reintroduction is from the captive breeding program that captive breeding program was founded by 14 individual wolves so when the u.s fish and wildlife went in and grabbed what they thought was left of red wolves. It was 14 animals. Now there's about 200, 250 in this captive program. So you imagine 250 animals came out of 14. That's a very narrow level of genetic diversity. Right. So now they're seeing issues that could be related to genetic erosion, genetic inbreeding. And so we have identified working with Bridget Von Hold of Princeton and Chris Imbreski of Michigan Tech, they've sort of identified,

hey, that area in Louisiana where these red wolves were caught in the 60s and 70s actually still is a hotspot for red wolf ancestry. And actual DNA that's like not present in red wolf DNA that's not present in the existing founder lines in North Carolina. Okay. So a, couple questions here. Number one, does it affect like when you take a population captive and now you're doing it in an enclosed area where they're not in their evolutionary environment to continue to evolve and roam freely? Does it affect also the genes of the incoming, you know, breeds that

you're going to make? Let's start there. So, I mean, being in a, we call it ex situ setting. So sort of outside of their normal, of their, of the wild, basically think of captivity. Yep. It affects everything from behavior to the genetic expression of their genes, right? Epigenetics change change the sort of intergenerational heredity changes so yeah the answer is yes you can't unfortunately it's unavoidable you can't do that however there are great strategies for how to get around those things how you can manage animals from a behavioral standpoint how you can manage the population genetics of a captive

you know there's a lot of people around the world like you know sometimes like just a misunderstanding around colossal is's a lot of people around the world, like, you know, sometimes like, just a misunderstanding around colossal is they, a lot of times people just put us in the bucket of like soup to nuts, right? Where it's like, we're going to take ancient DNA, make the animals, put them back in the wild. We're going to do it without oversight, without working with the government,

without working with indigenous people groups, without working with ecologists, without working with conservationists. And that's just not the case, right? So like, we have to rely on all of those people right and so like the current red wolf uh recovery team which made made up of like 25 plus uh different organizations they've been doing a great job of like in a captive place you know bringing red wolves there they need more land they need more strategies for rewilding which they're working on but you know the genetic bottleneck scenario where we can come in right and

so de-extinction and some of the technologies that we're developing around genetic rescue is not a, uh, replacement for conservation. It's just a new tool in it. Right. And so if we can, if we can work with like the, you know, Bridget von Holt, she's amazing, but she's the number one red wolf expert in the world. Okay. Especially from a genetics perspective. So she can tell you like this population over here that's not categorized as a red wolf actually has more red wolf DNA in it than the population that we're actually recovering in North Carolina. And so if we can isolate those genes, if we can isolate that DNA, we can actually engineer

in genetic diversity. We're doing the same thing on the Northern White Rhino project. So a lot of people talk about the Northern White Rhino, another great example. They're functionally extinct. There's two left. They're both female, no matter how much they love each other. I don't want to break hearts and minds and create haters here. It's like no matter what, they are not going to have babies.

They just are not. I'm sorry. This is not a life finds a way thing. They are gone. And so we work with BioRescue and Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt. And Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt is amazing. He's insane. He's super smart. And he's leading a lot of these next gen assisted reproductive technology innovations, you know, like we talked about how we need those for elephants. We're working with him on elephants

around the world. We're also working, he also is leading the charge to save the northern white rhino. And so with that, you know, they think about extreme bottleneck, right? They only have two. So they have about 18 embryos that they've harvested from two of those, from two of the remaining females. Well, over time, we've got to go back to museum samples, frozen zoo samples, all these different samples, and really build like this entire population genomics map. Can you explain how you do that? If you don't mind what goes into that? Yeah. A lot. So, and once again, I'm not a scientist, so I'll do the best I can. Today you are. Definitely not. I just, I, I like to learn from smart people, right? It's kind of, this is like, I weirdly think this is my, I don't have hobbies. So I kind of feel like

colossal is my only hobby. I mean, that's a good hobby. It's a cool hobby, right? Yeah. It's kind of, this is like, I weirdly think this is my, I don't have hobbies. So I kind of feel like Colossal is my only hobby. I mean, it's a good hobby. It's a cool hobby, right? Yeah. It's like every day I get to work with people that are much smarter than me and learn. It's an expensive hobby. Yeah. It's not the cheapest hobby.

You got a few billion. Golf would have been easier though. So, but that's boring as shit. So now I'm going to get, now. Just for everybody else out there i golf i love it don't listen so you've recovered species recovery of golf for me thanks um so what we do is uh we don't make these sequencing machines but what we do is we go take samples whether it's ancient dna samples like in the case of the dire wolf or the mammoth or the thylacine

or other species uh or existing uh dna and we run it through a system, right? So there's PacBio, there's Illuma, there's all these different machines that you can use. And it basically reads the code. So it spits out – my background is in software, so it's like – I used to think that biology was just software. Now I realize it's the shittiest, weirdest software that's like borderline magic that you've ever seen. It's just crazy. So it spits out a code, right? And tells you roughly kind of like what letters go where in the full end-to-end genome. So you kind of get the genetic map of that species. So then you can use software

and we built a lot of models around understanding what's called comparative genomics. So that does, we do a lot of that for our ancient DNA comparison to understand what genes made a mammoth a mammoth or what genes made a dire wolf a dire wolf compared to their closest living relatives. So that's the easiest place evolutionary to start. Well, with existing species like the northern white rhino, we can look at a lot of the big regions that drive morphology are the same, right? So you don't have like a rhino with like five horns, right? You see the exact same kind of patterns, but then you can look in different parts of the genome that aren't driving the morphological effects that actually have genetic diversity baked into them. So then we can engineer in that lost genetic diversity

into cell lines and create embryos or into existing embryos through microinjection so that you actually get, so these embryos that now are 18 from two founder lines, now could be 18 from 18 different founder lines. And so that's the power of like this concept of biobanking and genetic rescue is like we can actually engineer in genetic diversity. So you could literally have a species that's on the brink of extinction or is functionally extinct, and you can engineer in that. And so like Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt and the biorescue team, you know, they're not coming to Colossal saying, oh, we can't solve this, go solve this. They, they've, they're, they're very close to solving, you know, making more Northern white rhinos, but they're going to have the same genetic bottleneck issue. So we're now working, we're, we're assuming success on all the reproductive issues that

they're solving and all the IVF issues that they're solving in rhinos. And assuming that success, we're over here working on, okay, how do we... Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Bank is much genetic material from all over the world, from all these different places, including museums, right? It's no different than how we're thinking about ancient DNA.

And then how can we do all of these studies so that we can get all this data into a computer, do the comparison, and then engineer that into future cell lines? And that, you know, these are data problems, right? Like, unfortunately, it's expensive to harvest this data in order to do this ancient DNA extraction and sequencing, using all the computational tools needed to analyze that data and then make it publicly available. But, you know, that's what I think

just Colossal being present in the area and researching these things, we create all this data and we just keep uploading it to the cloud and we're making it available for other conservationists. So in a way, we're accelerating other people's research efforts. As a for-profit though, I don't want you to forget that for-profit, but I want to say this other thing about the data. So another conservation project we're working on is the Northern Quoll. Have you ever seen a Northern Quoll? No. Yeah. Northern Quolls are like the cutest little, I don't know if you pull it, but yeah, let's pull it up. Q-U-O-L-L.

Q-U-E-L-L. Q-U-E-L-L. O-L-L. O. Yeah. Oh, it's like a little squirrel. Yeah, it's a little carnivorous marsupial from the northern territory. Oh, it's carnivorous. Yeah.

It's awesome. Yeah. Meatheads. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it's, yeah. My kind of guy.

Yeah, he's, they're awesome. So they're going extinct in northern Australia. They're actually, like, the pictures don't even, I mean, they're cute in the pictures. Pictures don't do it justice. They're unbelievable when you see them in person. And what's crazy about this, How big are these little fuckers?

Oh, they're, you know, whatever that is. Oh, okay, so they're bigger than a squirrel. Oh, yeah, yeah, bigger than a squirrel. Bigger than a squirrel. And, you know, they're carnivorous marsupial. They're only found in Australia. And what what we once again not colossal we didn't build the pyramids and we did not do this a long time ago but we as

humanity brought in cane toads somehow some way uh probably stowed on ships and whatnot from south america cane toads have a neurotoxin it was an intentional introduction it was to try to remove the cane beetle oh it was that was an invasive species yeah. Yeah, so they introduced these cane toads, right? Which you should look these up. These are like, you know, Jabba the Hutt motherfuckers. They're ugly. Yeah, and so...

Oh, yeah. And there's even... I mean, I think those are... I think some of these photos are like glamour shots. That's what they actually look like. They're just these mean... No! Yes, we should win the war against toadzillas.

And so... Oh, that's the apocalypse right there. You just upset a lot of amphibian conservationists out there. No, no, no, no. Toadzilla. Toadzilla. But I mean, look, I think amphibian conservationists will also agree they should not be in northern Australia. And so they are introduced there.

They have a lot of babies really, really quick. And when, if you look at the diets of quolls and other carnivorous marsupials, frogs are on the menu. They have a lot of babies really, really quick. And when, if you look at the diets of quolls and other carnivorous marsupials, frogs are on the menu. They love frogs. They love toads. It's a big portion of their diet, but they have not co-evolved next to these toads, like the, like some of these snakes and, um, and other mammals in South, in South America. So when they eat them, they die. So, so the quolls are going extinct because they're eating. Yeah, the cane toad excretes a bufotoxin. Bufotoxin.

Yeah, and it's a neurotoxin that kills most things that try to predate on it, except for these species that co-evolved with them in South America. And this goes back to that data. So we found, so this is the importance of biobanking, sequencing, all these things, not just for genetic rescue,

but what we found in collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia, who's incredible, and Dr. Andrew Pass, we actually identified the specific, there's one single change, one change on that three and a half billion letters, right? One single change confers a 5,000 times resistance to cane totoxin. What does that even, that's like crazy, the numbers to hear about, but what does that even look like? Like you say it's one change, like you're literally putting a number in there and that's changing a letter. Yeah. If you think about DNA, DNA codes for proteins typically. So this sequence codes

for a specific protein. Proteins, their function are based on the shape of the protein that's developed. Got it. So if you change one base pair, it can change the way the protein folds. That changes the function and the ability of that protein to perform its function. What do you guys say? It's like DNA is the software, protein is the hardware,

and then the cells are the factory, something like that? I think that's a great analogy. That's pretty spot on, yeah. I'll be here all week. You're like, well, I'm actually starting a colossal on Tuesday. Yeah, so we do have to, I think, express conflicts now that you're part of the team. Yeah, that's right. But what's interesting about this is, and so that goes back to the power of this DNA, right?

So we need to be doing this, right? And so some people say, oh, genetic rescue or biobanking, we just need to save what we have. We do need to save what we have. Like I said, this is not a replacement for modern conservation. But what we do need to do is we need to look at these types of things. Because now we can make super quolls. We don't have to engineer. We don't have to just eradicate every single cane toad in Australia.

And we don't have to genetically modify every single marsupial in Australia. We just have to make super quolls. It'll make the quoll population come back. They will eat the cane toads. It'll suppress the cane toad population. Will they eat them all? Who knows? But at least suppress that population

so that then it has this halo effect to the ecosystem of other marsupials. And I don't know about your, you know, when you were coming up through school but for ben and i when we were in school everybody villainized gmos like oh my god they're just horrible thing about they also told me that water i was also told i was the generation that was like water is the most amazing thing in the universe there's no aliens there's only water this water is only here it's magic fast forward like 20 years it's like it's it's you know in the atmosphere of

venus it's frozen on the moon it's underwater it's in the atmosphere of Venus. It's frozen on the moon. There's like entire lakes on Mars. The aliens are here. Yeah, there's water moons in our solar system. People are like, well, what we knew back then was different. But so we know more now, right? Like GMOs aren't just used for corn. They had terminator seeds and things like that.

Now we have found ways to harness the power of genetically modified organisms to help recover ecosystems, to help protect endangered species. And so we're trying, we're out there trying to pump up the GMO thing, which is a little counterintuitive to some health nuts out there, you know, probably. But what's their main criticism? Well, there was just a real fear of transgenic things and this idea that somebody has altered the genome of this thing so you shouldn't eat it because you don't know what the effects of that could be. We know a lot more now than when I was in college, you know, 20 years ago. And now I think we understand the power of GMOs and using not just completely made up genes, right? We're going and

identifying genes that exist that co-evolved with some of the problems we have, like, like cane toad predators in South America. And we can use those and we already know the effects of those genes. Is there still like, just, I guess, like strawmanning this a little bit. Is there still the possibility though, that, you know, let's say you make a hundred different things you could be wrong about one in terms of edits yeah and then and then it does cause a problem that's a great question right and so we do a lot of screening on all of this before we go so it's like going back to coding for example and in this once again i think this is an educational opportunity i don't i don't i'm a big like two big rules that i have is like i don't like i i believe in freedom and i believe people can believe whatever they

want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone and so i think that also creates opportunities for education uh and so for me i think it's important for us to educate people on the fact that like you know we have colossal i'd say if you take a step out of the extinction out of conservation what is colossal, I'd say if you take a step out of de-extinction, out of conservation, what is colossal? Because I know you had questions on that in a second. But we are arguably the number one computational biology and genetic engineering company that's using what's called multiplex editing to be able to edit all over the genome, as well as DNA synthesis, being able to synthesize parts of the genome and replace it. If you just look at our core technology stack, that is who we are kind of at a company. And those technologies, regardless of your application to conservation or application to, you know, human healthcare or making a mammoth, those technologies are fundamentally transformative for the world

and people need to be innovating on them. And you're going to have IP on that. Yeah. And we have IP on that. So, you know, part of our business model is we've actually spun out, we spun out three companies. We've only announced two. The first was a computational biology platform called form bio, and it's all about identifying and doing genome analysis. So look at our genome, you know, tools to start and looking at how we can identify areas of the genome that could be used for drug therapeutics. And so we have a whole healthcare team that got spun out, raised separate different capital. That company's valued over $100 million and just growing, which is amazing. We spun out a second company called Breaking, which is breaking.com. Huge shout out to Sukanya,

she's amazing. But basically, they discovered a microbe that emits an enzyme that destroys plastic. And not makes like smaller microplastics, right? Like actually, we call it breaking because it breaks the chemical bonds of the plastics, right? Which is incredible. So it truly disintegrates it. And then we use computational biology plus synthetic biology we have the engineer and kind of speed up that process so that it can actually eat plastic and destroy it instead of plastic and never to 22 months we're trying to get it down to 22 days and we have 11 pilots

already with that business because so many companies textile water treatment all these all these places have plastics or micropl. So there's huge industrial outside of conservation. There are huge industrial applications and human healthcare applications to some of the work that we're doing. Right. Cause my, I mean, my question was going to be a little bit ago and you pretty much just answered it. Like what the business is and how, and how you plan to make money. Because what you've talked about and correct me if I'm wrong here is like when it comes to rewilding and things we'll talk about here at some point, you know, you're going to give this away for free. free it's not like it's not like you're selling a dire wolf for fucking you know 10 billion dollars yeah we're not yeah we're not getting like yeah so

you say 10 10 billion yeah i don't know it saves a lot i don't have that money so so i so um we will make so this just because we always want to be really, really transparent, we learn stuff every day. So two other things – so that was kind of like our phase one monetization was all about that. It was like very Apollo program-esque, right? Like you build technologies to go to the moon. You build a lot of cool stuff along the way because it's a systems model that you can innovate that can help the world like in conservation or you can make money. So that was kind of our phase one. There's two other phases that we found that we didn't even know about right and so the second phase uh george talked about

this in the beginning we didn't you know it was early and but that's how george short george is like like george will talk to you about like alpha centauri like that this is how smart george is and he'll just assume that we can solve all the technologies of how to get to alpha centauri right that's just how george's brain works and so he's already assuming that we have 10,000 mammoths. So he's like, if I model it out, this is how what the impact of carbon will be in the ecosystem. And this will also be the impact of what you can get carbon credits or biodiversity credits. So what's interesting about George is sometimes he's called crazy, but he's proven a lot of people wrong for quite a long time, right? For like, you know, 50 years, he's proven a lot of people wrong for quite a long time, right? For like, you know,

50 years, he's proven a lot of people wrong. Well, first they call you crazy. That is always how it goes. Yeah. And so, and George is awesome. And so, and so we looked at these things and my view is, oh, we can make money in technology. George's idea is kind of a rewilding species, making money from the rewilding. So yes, we're not charging the conservation community, but there is actual money in the rewilding process, right? So you've probably heard in, you know, I think some of your conservation friends have probably talked about carbon credits. So there's actually, there's a way to subsidize protecting forests and whatnot through this whole idea of carbon credits. Well, that's actually, it's been kind of like crypto. It's

kind of gone up and down. People have abused it. There's been, you know, there needs to be more regulatory oversight. That's all starting to happen. But now you've got people like PwC, the big consulting firm, and auditors. You've got even TPG, which is a huge venture private equity firm that raised $8 billion around this. You've got Lloyds of London endorsing this. And so you now are starting to build certification processes. And what we're seeing in that model is that people are looking at carbon credits.

They're also looking at biodiversity credits because they're actually being able to put a value on the animal. You know the whole hunting adage where people are like, well, if I buy a ticket to kill a lion, then we're putting a value in the lion. So therefore, people won't. That's part of the – that's what some people in the hunting world kind of. Yeah, I don't love that logic when it comes to the exotics. I love, but I love the idea of valuing the animal, right? That was their model of doing it, right? Right.

They're trying to backdoor. Yeah, because the reality is, you know, most people don't have the same intrinsic value for animals or nature as you do or as I do or Ben does, right? And so we have to find ways to show and value i understand nature and if you're living in the city sometimes it's hard to understand that in the upstate right the the forest and the biodiversity up there is is performing nature based services that make humanity possible listen we got a lot of biodiversity right here i don't want to hear it there's a lot of wolves running around but but sometimes you're a little detached from nature and you forget that it impacts you

so one of the things that we've been talking about is how can we begin to show and evaluate nature-based activities how can you put a value on a whale there's this brilliant economist ralph chami that we that we work with who uh wrote a really cool paper a couple years ago and said, how much is a whale worth? And they literally went out into nature, studied all the impacts that one whale, one blue whale, would have in the nitrogen cycle and carbon cycle and biodiversity lifts and ecotourism and every aspect you can imagine. And they found that a blue whale every year performs about two million dollars worth of ecosystem services how did they and what was that based on so it was everything like i said ralph who's who's this amazing economist can kind of look at every bit and say well we know that you know that air quality has a certain value that that you know

that and he'll he'll break down everything. And the paper is incredible and anybody can go read it. It's not an overly technical paper. I think people should look at it. But that's interesting because if you are driving a giant tanker ship through the middle of the ocean and you see a whale spout ahead, you have two options. You can say, well, I'm going to divert course so that I don't accidentally strike this whale, or I can stay on my course and risk hitting the whale. Well, today it's a lot cheaper as a captain of that ship to just stay on course, arrive to your destination on time and not pay penalties or have losses of product. However, if that whale's worth $2 million and your insurance provider has to

cover the damages that you've inflicted on that whale to whatever country that whale's waters is in, then suddenly you go, well, it could cost me $100,000 to divert or $2 million to hit the whale. And they're doing this in Gabon too. So people have taken this research and applied it now. So carbon credits around protecting forests and whatnot has been a thing. This new concept of biodiversity credits and protecting the animals. So it's that same, it's not about hunting the animal, it's about protecting the animal and keeping them alive. And so they're doing this in Gabon with forest elephants. And they're like, they've done a study about how much the forest elephants in Africa do in terms of how much carbon value and ecosystem value they have. And it's half a trillion dollars. It's insane. It's half a trillion dollars. Half a trillion. Half a trillion dollars, which is crazy. And this isn't our math. These are all these scientific peer-reviewed things. And so our view is that if we can make mammoths and we make our thylacines, we make our dodas and reintroduce them back in collaboration with ecologists, conservationists, indigenous people groups, and governments, and even private landowners in some cases, if we are able to do that and we're successful at that, we can help restore these ecosystems. And in that process, we can get governments to issue us biodiversity and carbon credits, which we can go sell to the people that need to be carbon negative, that can't be carbon negative. We as humanity still live in some form of an extractive economy, right?

And so we take oil from the ground. We take rare earth minerals from the ground. We take lithium. Our electric cars are you know based on yeah yeah we get these every every year we're doing right and so the these are the types of things that you know we've got to find those balances and so there's now an entire uh economy that's being built around helping companies uh while the apples of the world and uh you know the mitsubishis and the exons of the world try to become more green over time, they do have certain standards they can't meet. So they have to spend

money on carbon offsets and investing. Because if you think about extractive industry, and this isn't to villainize anybody, these things are important to make the world go round. We came to your podcast based on extractive industry. Yeah, 100%. We could have made it. But if you think about extractive industry, we all basically subsidize their, first we buy their product

and then we also underwrite all of the things that happen in nature. That's right. Because as they cut down forest, we lose some of the earth's lungs and that impacts us and impacts health. And then we start, right? All these things are us subsidizing them and then paying them on the other end.

So what's interesting about carbon and biodiversity credits, and I understand it makes people uncomfortable to put a value, a monetary value on nature, but that's a little over idealistic because the pragmatic, the real approach is we need to find ways that you can truly cost account for the impact of the work. And then that person or that entity is responsible for helping to float the repair and the restoration. You know, I hate to say this line, but I used to say this before I did this. I worked on Wall Street, believe it or not. Yeah. But I used to have this line to people where I'd say, what are the two most important things to you in the world? And usually they'd say like family and health. And I'd say, don't money pays for both.

It sucks to say that, but it is unfortunately the way the world works. So I understand like what, like you say, look at it pragmatically. You have to, you have to start with that. And even like some of the stats you were talking about earlier, where you're talking about getting attention on certain things, which relates to monetary currency as well like that makes sense yeah and our and our elephant conservation groups like one i have openly told you i i didn't know ehv was a thing right our elephant you know we work with the top elephant conservation groups in the world and they're like you have brought more attention to this terrible disease than no one ever even knew about it outside the core community

right i'm very passionate about the poaching i know all the stats on that i followed that for years done podcasts on that i haven't talked about this before the eehv yeah that's like and that and that coach is show you wait just be clear oh yeah he's fucking terrible yes yes but i'm saying like even someone like me who's pretty locked in on this kind of stuff that's not something i was really familiar with and that's that's the cool like that that's the cool thing about it like i obviously we're here so i can't i can't show you but it's like every single week we get like kids and parents sending us like pictures of mammoths and dodos of stacks no no just i mean like stacks of stuff right and so the like we can talk about the the halo we can talk about the measurable effects to ecosystem restoration in the monetization of that, right?

We can talk about the technology spinoffs. But then there's this weird halo effect around colossal, right? Where it's like, yes, there's things that people want to debate about colossal. But no one can argue that we are bringing attention to two things. One, wildlife conservation and issues that we need to talk about. Gene editing issues, re need to talk about, gene editing issues, rewilding issues, conservation issues, as well as we're getting kids super stoked, right? Like literally every single week we get letter, like last week I was finally back

in my office and I had a whole stack of letters and papers. And I actually had this incredible, I mean, I need to take a photo of input on, on Instagram or something that they, there's this person that wrote me a three page letter. I feel terrible i haven't read it yet but a three-page letter you shouldn't admit that no it's on it is on my day it is literally on my desk a little long-winded six-year-old no but i am gonna read it uh and i it's it's from it's from Europe. And then this person made me this incredible mammoth etching on wood. And it's just incredible. And talking about how they want to grow up and be a geneticist because of what Colossal is working on. And we all talk shit about it and make fun of it.

We get the Jurassic Park comparison occasionally. Yeah. Once or twice. Once or twice a day. Took the words out of my mouth but if you but if you go talk to some of the world's leading geneticists that movie at that time got people excited about genetics and a lot of people that are into the genetics field went into genetics because they saw giraffes park not because they want to make fucking dinosaurs they just thought it was awesome

they're like this is cool let's also not get eaten by them you know what i mean like we gotta we gotta keep this in the box like Like I think of that first scene in I Am Legend all the time where the blonde lady comes out and goes, we cured cancer. And then like five years later, everyone's fucking dead. They're all zombies.

And I'm like, you know, the road to hell sometimes we notice can be paved with really good intentions. Like it's not like you guys are fucking Bond villains out here. Like yeah, fuck everyone. But the reason I Am Legend is fiction is because that lady came out

and said I cured cancer and then they just pretended like they could release this cure to the world. When in reality, we live in a world of regulation, right? The work that we do every day is regulated by so many agencies, EPA, USDA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Department of Interior. Yeah. Yeah, they don't do the best job, though, sometimes. Let's be honest about that.

I'll tell you. I lived through COVID. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But from our side, it is, you know,

it's onerous to have to be able to be responsible to all these people. So there are a lot of steps, a lot of forethought that goes into these things. We work in a lab. That's where most of our stuff is happening right now. Well, that's what people think. That's where all the stuff was a lab too.

I'm just saying. Well, that I think that lab had some, some issues. Well, you's what, but people think that's where all the stuff's happening. I mean, Wuhan was a lab too, I'm just saying. Well, I think that lab had some issues. Well, you said you took creatine this morning. That was also made in the lab. Yes, it was. Yeah, so lots of good stuff

comes from a lab. Yes. No, and that's where we gotta be careful in society and not throw the baby out with the bathwater stuff, right? Like we can, there's this weird thing

that's been happening that I feel like I'm always in the middle of having a show like this where you have like the pure establishment people versus the fuck everybody people. And it's based off of one, two, or three things that were just like an enormous clusterfuck that then everything else below that that's related to that must be bad. 100%. Or like we're going to trust the experts on everything.

And I like to look at things on a case-by-case basis. 100%. And you can be doing really good things that also have negative implications, right? For sure. And so, and you have to weigh all of that, right? And so those are the things that we have to do. You know, these technologies, you know, a lot of the core technology around genome engineering, we did not, like Colossal did not invent those. Those, that genie's out of the bottle. There's people that are going to use these technologies for nefarious cases, right? There's people that have already used these things in an unregulated way. There was a Chinese doctor that created a gene-edited child. Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait. What? Yeah. I must have missed this one. Yeah, it was a few years back. He got in a lot of trouble for it, but he was – Alleged trouble. Yeah, allegedly.

Yeah, yeah. He's a hard – You got a stern talking type. Yeah, he was off the grid for a couple months grid that's a whole nother podcast by the way like this guy is so he made a gene edited child yeah it's like real it talks yeah well apparently it's it's in china so obviously we don't have as much transparency into it as get him on the podcast yeah he probably would yeah he's out there man um but he got in a lot of trouble supposedly he went to jail allegedly uh he's out right now but he uh but you know that is yeah he did germline editing

yeah in a weird series of events there's a meme account of his on x and that follows colossal i we're not certain it's a meme account no i know it did get uh uh antonio from um mit has exposed believe it or not has exposed uh who it is you won't believe uh who it is but it's another that's all another podcast too but uh but so it's not him it's not him actually on x right it's so good though yeah when we when we came out the woolly mice he it was just a picture of him and it said, woolly mice are a bioweapon. Yeah, it said woolly mice. So he's just been trolling us, right? It's so good. It's so funny. But this is the kind of stuff that –

This is the guy though, right? That's the actual guy. But this is the stuff where, you know, to your point about intended and unintended consequences and negativity. Like, you know, people – there's a general moratorium on doing germline editing meaning edits that can be passed on the next generation in humans right they're now starting a good rule yeah it's a good rule and um but you know what he did obviously violated that right in china and um and so uh but this is where the technologies go right like you know a single like a disease like sickle cell anemia is a single gene mutation so you can do a single knockout for that

and you can get rid of uh uh you can you could literally get rid of um sickle cell anemia right and so that there are now people that are looking one universal adjustment you're saying one one universal adjustment yeah so well to people that have it but obviously that that would be effective and right yeah if you're a carrier yeah you would end it yeah and so and so those are the things that now uh biotechnology companies and the u.s government and kind of the world uh world health organization they're all looking at this right because like how do we where do we draw the line where do we help right where do we eradicate disease like um gary brekker will probably punch me in the face for this, but Gary's awesome.

I don't know if you know Gary. I'm aware. Yeah, yeah. So I love Gary. He's done a lot to like change my life and how I look at stuff. But one thing that I haven't totally subscribed – not subscribed to is I do take a drug that basically turns off a PCKS9, which lowers – which significantly lowers LDL. Just my family has crazy high LDL, right? Even if we had just nothing but like kale, we'd have crazy LDL.

That was your thing too, right, Alessi? Wasn't Louisa saying you had like crazy LDL? Yeah. So you can take this shot, call it Repatha, and I take it. I'm not a shareholder and I just take it. And it does lower it by about 60%, just the LDL. It doesn't fuck with triglycerides or doesn't fuck with HDL. So it was great.

Now, there are people that look at kind of the whole system. Gary is one of those people. So we're like, I'm still looking into it, but right now I have been taking it. But that's an example where one medication, like I didn't take a gene therapy to change that. I'm taking a medication to just silence that gene. And so that's the power though of where we're going with this technology. And I think that most diseases are multigenic in nature, meaning that there's multiple genes that have to work together to cause a disease state. Some of those are genetic diseases. Some of those are in concert with environmental factors if you have core genetic

dispositions to them. And so for us, Colossal won't ever do that. But to your point on technology, we are working on multiplex editing. So being able not to just do that single edit to sickle cell anemia or that single PCKS9 edit, but being able to edit multiple genes at the exact same time with high efficiency. So I do think that some of the multiplex editing technologies that we're developing will have massive pharma implications. Now, the good thing for us is we're just going to license those and we'll spin those out into other companies. And then there's other people that need to work with FDA. So it's not your fault. Yeah, we are just, the lawyers are happy. It then there's other people that need to work with FDA. So it's not your fault. I assure you.

The lawyers are happy right now. It's a really good example that, you know, in this anti-GMO world that we sort of were living in, I think we're coming out of now, is that people had this complete distress of anything GMO. But you could take a random chemical and put it in front of somebody and they'd say, oh, you have a headache, just take that. And they're like, yeah, pop it. Right? Yeah.

That's kind of crazy. Yes. Yeah. A hundred percent. When, when Ben first came to you with this though, Matt, like what, what were your thoughts? Cause you're coming at it from the more. It was over drinks. Just, yeah.

If I do anything, it was probably a drink. Know your audience. A little GHD in there. Know your audience. What were your thoughts? Ben did some recon. He knew that the safest place to approach me was in a bar uh so he did um so ben and i had this uh mutual friend that sort of connected us about and he and i was playing playing golf with this guy and he goes hey i know

this guy that's bringing back mammoths what the fuck and if you know this mutual friend that's exactly how he talks yeah yeah like and then he would bring it up so i i i could see adrian rain up just that weirdly it was just like yeah i know a guy bringing back mammoths i was like would you i'm trying to get the fuck out of here right uh and then he's like no seriously you should talk to him so he connected us on text and ben's like hey you meet me at this place for drinks and and we'll talk about this thing at the time do you remember where our first date was I don't it was uh at that outdoor cafe I don't remember what it was that's cute you remember yeah yeah I do there was a candle um it's two candles yeah but but they uh you know the the funny thing was that um it won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients.

Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added. Neutral. Refreshingly simple. We were coming out of COVID, and I had been running a zoo in Dallas, all the animal care for the Dallas Zoo. And I was burnt out, right? It was sort of that time of like self-reflection.

I mean, that's when you sort of pivoted too, like you kind of have this same same yeah you have this weird you're isolated and you're thinking a lot about yourself and yeah the the impacts that you're gonna have in your life and uh and I was like I was just honestly dissatisfied with the level of impact I was making on conservation and the fight against biodiversity loss. Why though? Like, because you felt like a zoo wasn't enough or it was just like, there's more out there? There's more out there. There's ways to have a larger scale impact. I thought I had a very satisfying career. I'd worked at big zoos in Miami and Dallas and Tampa, and I'd done a lot of fun things, met incredible people, some of the most passionate, incredible conservationists in the world. But for me, I thought, I want a larger, more lasting impact.

That's just who I am. I'm driven by some of that, by saying, I want to have a fingerprint on a big piece of something, right? And at that time, Ben's like, I'm making mammoths. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. But you said drinks. i'll meet you there and so i go out we have drinks and he brings it up and i think you know the first reaction was sort of like

yeah okay that's cool george church is an impressive guy i get it you guys have money which was interesting i think at that time it's just a seed round yeah and uh and and it is more expensive than 15 million dollars it is a lot turns out that was a massive underestimate but uh problem but but ben you know to i challenged a few things i had a few questions is have you thought about x y or z to ben's credit because we haven't thought about that we know nothing about animals uh any animals but here's a mammoth. And he says, but I think you understand what this means for conservation. I said, absolutely.

And we started talking about the conservation impact. Ben, to his credit, was like, we're going to change the world for conservation. You're going to get to do it. We're going to get more money. We're going to make more technologies. We're going to have larger impacts. And I was like, fuck it. I'm in.

Let's just do it i asked i asked you i was like um the truth is we didn't know anything about animals at the time we knew that we had some software uh nerds and we had some geneticists and we could try to figure some stuff out but um i i think that's one of the things that we're really good at is also saying what we don't know and we're not afraid to be like oh we don't have a solution to that but it's good it's a good feedback in the whole course of our our company like our chief science officer beth shapir was like one of the negative most negative people on the planet towards colossal when we launched she actually wrote a book yeah so we wrote a she wrote a book before we started that says how to clone a mammoth i don't know if you're gonna read it so don't spoiler alert but it ends

with you can't so i was like she's perfect right our head of bioethics how much did you pay no no no we went to her because she i mean i'm a ball break no no it's fine it's fine you're in jersey yeah yeah so yeah it's first time in jersey uh the uh really yeah you've never been to jersey he goes to the city all the time and doesn't cross the river i'm offended i i but i i i've been to brooklyn one time so don's not Jersey. No, I understand it's not Jersey. I'm just saying. I just try to. Get out.

Yeah. So, but I was, yeah, it is Cuny Road. But the, but I did say to Matt, I said to Matt, you know, we don't know these things. And we want these, we want to solve these things. And I asked him, I said, what if we could give you $50 million a year for elephant conservation? And Matt looked at me and he goes, you would completely change elephant conservation more than any. I was like, for $50 million? And I was like, can we do $50 million a year?

And he goes, it would completely change everything. I was like, okay, we just need to get to the point where the company is making $50 million a year profit. And then let's just change all elephant conservation. And I think that part of one of my issues in my, I guess, the brokenness in my, or non-brokenness in my neuroplasticity is that to me doesn't seem that hard. Like, we just have to go build a business that can make $50 million. You've done it before. And then we can just give it to conservation. Yeah, how many companies have you, like, spun off? From Colossal? No, no, no, no, no. You've done it before. And then we can just give it to conservation. Yeah, how many companies have you spun off?

From Colossal? No, no, no, no. Yourself before this. This is my sixth company that I've founded and ran. Yeah, you've done this. You're not missing any meals. You've been around this block. Yeah, I understand why you think that way.

So I was like, could we raise, we could just make, all we have to do is make $50 million. You're telling me if we make $50 million in profit and I give it to you, you can help fix elephant conservation? And he's like, yeah. I was like, could we raise – we could just make – all we have to do is make $50 million. You're telling me if we make $50 million in profit and I give it to you, you can help fix elephant conservation? He's like, yeah. I was like, all right. That doesn't seem that hard to me. But Beth, who to your point wrote a book literally saying at the end like you can't.

She ends up coming around. So what does that? So the other thing is – well, let me give you two other examples and we'll loop them all together. Our head of bioethics, Alta Charo, she's amazing. She's like, she's literally the best. Well, best. They're all the best. But she's awesome. And she debated- She's a New Yorker. Yeah. She debated George Church and was like, we should never bring back mammoths. And when I talked to her the first time, she's like, have you thought about making a tomato? And I was like, well, this is giving me an uphill battle. But, but it's like, but you want

the people that have, so the way, the way I think about it is you want the people that have thought about all the bad shit, right? You don't want the people that just say, fuck yeah, we should go do this. This is amazing. We can get a lot of those. We need a lot of those. We got a lot of people that love this business, right? But we want the people that are at the top of their field that have challenged this for years, because that means they've thought about it for years. The person that just gets some random interview that's at like Western Cincinnati state, that's like never fucking never done anything in their life. That person isn't the top of their field. So let's go find the top of their field that are also not pro this. And so like our,

so another person that was not very nice to us when we launched was a guy named Luva Dolan. He's the number one mammoth researcher in the world. Number one, he's the university of Stockholm. How do you rank like mammoth? There's an official world. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got, yeah, he's, he's, he's at,

he's at the top. It's like, it's good for marketing. No, no, he is. He is like, I mean,

he's no, but he's highly published, highly respected. We're going to get a get hubub for mammoth people that's a good idea no it's a great idea actually but he's done more mammoth research more mammoth publications he's he's driven the research in understanding the evolutionary tract and all the genetics of mammoths more than anyone in the world and when we launched he was pretty negative and we called him and i think he was a little confused when we called him he's like you know he's like i just talked shit about you in the press why are you calling me and it's like you're the number one guy in the world and so now 59 of our like 65 ish uh

mammoth genomes come from luba how did you turn him how did you take it's not ours call i don't think it's that hard it's not it's not that hard and people ask that it's like people say oh you sold them you persuade them it's like we people think it's money all the time half these guys don't get a dime out yeah but what it is is like i think everybody has the same superficial reaction right they all go well have you thought about these five bad ideas they go yeah we thought about this this is and they go okay well and then they start to stretch what about these three things and then you go yeah here's how we're addressing it and then suddenly they go i I'm comfortable with this. What about, have you thought about trying this and doing this? And suddenly the excitement comes out. So with Alta, with Alta, I actually said, she gave me some feedback about like ethical frameworks

and all this other stuff. And so I came back and I wrote some and I just sent her an email. I was like, are these good? Are these a bad idea? And she was like, I think the fact that we are not just open to criticism, but listening to the experts, right? There's a lot, you know, this, there's a lot of difference between the ex-couch experts that know everything, right? In the world about every topic, right? We've got those people, those people are just annoying, right? But people that are like the top of their field, head of leaderboards, that are negative, you should at least hear them the fuck out. And I think the fact that we don't just listen to them, but then we try to implement what they say. So Alta and I started this conversation where we were going back and forth, and she was like helping us think through regulatory and ethical.

And by the way, at the time, super anti-colossal. But I think the fact that we were listening to her and that we did the same thing with George, the same thing with Beth. And with Beth, I said, join our advisory board. Like, we're doing this. Maybe it'd be good for you to have some oversight so you can tell us what we're doing wrong or shit all over it, right? And then that led to us then saying we got some ancient DNA. I was like, we don't have the best lab to do it. She's got one of the top at the time, one of the largest ancient DNA labs in the world at UC Santa Cruz. And we

said, can we use your lab to do this? And she processed it. And I was like, and we got better results with her lab than this other lab we were using. And then we were like, how do we get better results? We ask a lot of questions. And I think that that level of vulnerability and transparency with the world leaders in these various fields has brought them in. And then our relationships with them evolved. So what do you think? So going from the last chapter, though, where she says you can't and now where she is now.

So I was sitting with her. I was sitting with her. And I was like, I agree with you. You can't bring back a mammoth. You cannot. They're not living cells. They're not clonable cells. But I was like, don't with you. You can't bring back a mammoth. They're not living cells. They're not clonable cells. But I was like, don't you think you can engineer one?

And when you ask these, like the thing about science is if you say. Yeah, it's like semantics. Well, that's all fucking science is. And so, like I can give you a thousand examples of semantic arguments in science. And the reason we don't live on the moon and the reason we don't have like trips to, you know, cold fusion and shit is because of semantics and science. So, uh, I, I truly, I truly fundamentally believe that, but, but I asked her that and I said, I said, but do you think that we can understand enough about the genome, do comparative genomics and edit and edit and engineer one? And her response was, yeah, I think the technologies are here today to do that. And so that's the thing that, that,

that that's interesting to me is I think that all of science, sometimes this is not a popular statement, but I think all of science, we are moving to a world when you look at access to compute, AI, synthetic biology, and all of these tools where we're going to move from scientific experiments to engineering. And so that is the world that we live in. We now have the tools. So it's about knowledge and understanding, access to compute and AI, and then being and having the tools to engineer. So we're moving to a scientific engineering world,

less of a scientific experiment world. Like we'll be able to run full simulations where you don't even have to do wetware experiments. What does that look like? It would be amazing. So you could figure out like, what are the potential off target effects or unintended consequences? Like you asked about in the genome that you could do that all in a simulation. Cause we'll know enough about gene

to gene interactions and the various sub pathways that that's incredible. So you leverage an AI to do that. So, yeah. Yeah. So our company would not be possible without AI. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy. because also like ai was something that in you know 2015 2016 2017 a lot of smart people in the world were really talking about and i got really into because i'm like learning about this like holy shit it's this crazy frontier and then there was like this at least publicly not you guys obviously not the people working on it but there was like this pause button yeah for like five years and no one really talked about it and then one day they're like chat gpt yeah yeah and now it's just everywhere i mean

joe's in the studio today we were we were going through like he's a script writer so he was going through like how he was able to develop like like a whole cartoon concept based on his script with what was that chat gpt for yeah that's fucking yeah it's amazing it's insane like how far it's come in the last couple years so you guys but it's almost like you guys gotta be looking at your watch going like where you've been everybody like we've been on this yeah yeah but i feel the same way about de-extinction right 10 years ago we're talking about how oh what you know you watch terminator like skynet is ai we can't we can't unleash ai on the world and now people are going well you watch drastic park we can't unleash de-extinction on the world.

My favorite on the Jurassic Park review is people, we literally get the question, like, didn't you see what happened in Jurassic Park? And there's almost this, like, assumption that it was real for a minute. And I love that. It's like, I mean, art imitates life, though. Absolutely. I think what's great about Jurassic Park is it asks some really challenging moral questions. Yes. And that's great.

And for people like Ben and I, when we get asked that all the time, it's the whole Jeff Goldblum. Your scientists were so busy wondering if they could, they forgot to ask if they should. I should make a preoccupied shirt. Yeah, you should. That would sell. We don't sell anything. I know, but I'm saying you're going to start selling stuff. No, I think that the technology, spinning off the technologies plus the long-term carbon credits, I think that we'll have a multi-billion dollar ARR business, which I think is pretty interesting.

So fuck the merch. Yeah. We'll just make it more exclusive, right? It's just loose change in the couch at that point. I do like a lot. I didn't have to ask you this and you were just running through it as with with several examples i do like that you've gone out of your way over the years of working on this to reach out to people

and say the evolutionary biology field who are not amenable at least at first to what you're doing because that was going to be a question it's like, would you wanna talk to some of the critics and the people who are not just like excited about, you know, fucking dire wolves and seeing you on Joe Rogan and seeing you on the Today Show and all the hoopla around it, you know, who may have concerns about this distracting from the things they've worked on.

I mean, I mentioned Paul Rosely, like obviously he feels that way. Actually, Aless, can we pull up, he did an Instagram post on this. Can we, do way actually alice can we pull up he did an instagram post on this can we do you have that can we pull this out because this would be good like no i love it and i mean look i'm on the board of trustees of the explorers club and there's a lot of conservationists i i i we have ecad on uh the explorers club annual dinner on um on saturday i'm sure i'm gonna have a lot of feedback from a lot of people. Oh, yeah. But that's okay.

It creates... But you take it. I like that. I mean... But I think, you know, with the whole distraction narrative that happens, Colossal is a media circus, right? Colossal brings a lot of attention, brings a lot of excitement. But the idea that it's a distraction is a false narrative because that's assuming we live in a net zero world

where there's only so much attention that can be put on conservation. But what we know is that there hasn't been enough attention. So we're bringing more attention. So we can still pay attention. And Colossal does a great job of highlighting conventional conservation. De-extinction does not work without habitat. So we have to work with people that protect habitats, that restore habitats. We can't bring back a northern white rhino without having a place in Uganda for that Northern white rhino. Right. And what was the, just, just to have this out there,

we talked about this at the beginning, but I want to redrive this home so you can get this out there. Right. The logic of working on things that have long been extinct versus the things that are in danger right now, which you're still working on, but it's like of saying, yo, we're going to bring back the dodo. We're going to bring back the dodo. We're going to bring back the mammoth. We're going to bring back the dire wolf. It's strictly to be able to test on your test tubes to be able to relate it to current species. I think it's three things, right?

I think one, it's a harder systems model, right? So if we work in DNA that's not ancient DNA, we are solving harder problems and it's vastly more applicable to more recent species. If you solve an end-to-end, like the de-extinction process is a systems model. So you have to solve the entire innovation around everything from ancient DNA and assembling one. Well, we have those same problems with extant species and with our DNA, right? So you're solving harder problems that implies that you're making better technologies.

So that's number one. The second thing is we're working on species. The vast majority of it, we actually are doing more conservation work than we even are doing de-extinction work. But the de-extinction work that we're doing, we're working on species that, for the most part, will have an ecological benefit to their return, a cultural benefit, a spiritual impact in some cases. And then the third is, to Matt's point, on the attention side, you'll get people excited about these technologies, right? And so there's all these different, you know, debates on everything that, you know, or not everything, but a lot of things that we do. But when you do it in that side of things, not only are you bringing the attention, but you're building technologies that are harder.

Right. You just simply are, right? And, you know, it's not our job to persuade the world about it. It's our job just to educate people what we're doing and create the conversation, right? And we don't even care if it creates the conversation. It just seems to do it, right? Yeah. Which we find, you know, moderately interesting. Which is good to have it in the public forum too where you can have – and I like that like this can be talked about publicly and it's not just like behind closed doors people bitching at each other.

The other thing though is it depends on how people want to go deep, right? If people want to go listen to a multi-hour Joe Rogan podcast or your podcast or get really, really deep. So like Time, when we launched the Dire, on with time and with New York and a few others, they went really deep. They spent hundreds of hours to understand the science, to understand where phylogenetically, uh, you know, we've had the, the, what's interesting is like, no one talked about the fact that we brought up a Pleistocene wolf back. Everyone just wants to argue what to call it and classify it. Right. And so, uh, which, which, which people call me and they're like, are you upset about that? And I was like, no, people have a right to do whatever they want.

Right. And so my view though, um, which, which I think is important is that at least to me, is it that, that regardless of what, you know, some of the quote unquote controversy, uh, is on this, we are advancing the tools and advancing the conservation and at least our conservation agenda um pretty quickly and and we actually had a lot of feedback um after the i don't know if you saw the woolly mouse i don't i don't want to get away from what you want to talk about no no but the woolly mouse i don't know if you saw that project that we worked on no um uh can we also pull up a picture of the woolly mouse because it is a what you could hate colossal yeah and not a not a real species right this is it yeah this is you could you could hate colossal these are objectively fucking cute you can't not say that right so um it's a little puffball yeah

and so and so and so what we did to do this and then i think this leads well into that one on the right kind of shows an unedited mouse versus what we did. Yeah. And so- Oh, they're little, little. Yeah, yeah. They're mice, right? We didn't make like one misconception is people think these are the size of mammoths. They are. That's false advertising.

They are not. Not yet. And so, yeah. Don't do that. What are you doing? Yeah, yeah. Don't do that. So what I'll tell you though is like, you know, we actually took, so in a, just talk a little bit about the science, and then the lead, I think, really well into the dire wolf, is that what's interesting was we've identified, and we're in the editing phase of the mammoth project.

That means that there's about 85 genes that we have to edit. We're not trying to clone a mammoth. We've been very, very clear about that. We're not trying to clone dire wolves. We're not trying to clone these animals. We're trying to make the exact replication of that, right? That's kind of silly. We think that kind of like coding, if you can write, and if you talk to anyone that's written any code, they say, oh, I can write 3,000 lines of code. And it does, and it does X. And then someone else says, I can do the same thing

in five lines of code. Everyone objectively in software will say, do it the second way, because there's less things that you can fuck up. There's less things that you can break, right? So the better we do computational analysis and the smarter we are on the comparative genomics and identifying the core genes, the less edits we have to make. We're not trying to make, I could have made a thousand. We have the technology at Colossal.

We could have made a thousand plus edits in the dire wolf, which would have blown people's mind from a genome engineering show of force perspective. Like a super animal. But it doesn't make a super animal. It's not more dire wolf. No, it's something different. It just doesn't make more, right?

If you look at it from truly a mathematical perspective, it doesn't have a true mathematical reasoning. And so with the woolly mice, for example, we made eight edits, right? Some people say only eight edits. Most people were doing it one edit at a time. I mean, they'd, they'd edit a mouse. They then edit the next generation with one edit. They'd edit the next generation and they go through eight generations of mice to what's called stack those edits using our technologies and using multiplex editing. We delivered all of those edits one time. So one generation of mice from a health perspective, we also do monoclonal screening and then we do genome sequencing, full genome sequencing on all the embryos.

How long did this take? One month. That's it. Well, because we had built the system, right? So that's the thing. We started the Woolly Mouse Project in September and October of last year. We had woolly mice. Wow. took. And so what we did, which I think sometimes is lost on people, is not only is the multiplex

editing and the fact that we had nothing but healthy mice born with exactly the physical attributes or phenotypes we wanted, was we don't want to just go test in elephants, right? Because it's non-ethical, 22-month gestation. So you have three ways to test to see if your mammoth edits are working. One, you can test them in silica and test them and do functional tests in cells, which we're doing. Two, you can grow what's called organoids. It's because it's a little science fiction. Organoids.

Organoids, which this is a little, it's cool, it's a little science fiction. We actually have hair follicles that are growing mammoth hair. Yeah, so they're alive, but they're not a full system of an animal, right? It's like a plant. I mean, it's a very, very-

Like an air plant. Yeah, a very, very, very very like an air plant yeah a very very very small plant right real quick ben can i just go pee real fast all right we'll be right back all right sorry about that this is actually the earliest podcast we've ever recorded because my bladder in the morning is so bad so apologies to everyone out there but ben you were talking about growing like just a hair yeah so so to test whether we got these phenotype, whether the genotype to phenotype, the editing is working, you know, the second way is growing organoids. So we're growing organoids and we're testing it, but that's still not a full animal.

And so we, so we came up with, uh, many people use what's called a mouse model because mouse or mice are very well studied in, in, in, um, in laboratories. And so what we did was we identified all of the genes that we're working with mammoth we then there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between elephants and mice so we're not just going to take a random gene from a mammoth and ram it into a fucking mouse and like hope it works right but there's that's also like an animal welfare and ethics thing right and we're certified by american humane society the oldest humane organization in the world and and so we have to do it.

We want to do, but we also have standards of how we do all this stuff. And so what we did is then we used AI and compute to understand what are the mouse equivalent of these mammoth genes. So to see if we're on the right track. So we took those genes, we delivered them all in one edit and one what's called multiplex edited array. It then made, we got 100% of the edits in, which is nearly unheard of in multiplex edited array it then made uh we got a hundred percent of the edits in which is nearly unheard of in multiplex editing typically these things have like 15 to 20 efficiency where i have

100 are right under 100 in most cases and what's crazy about that is then you know 22 days later our mice were born and then they grow and we got exactly the phenotypes right so what's great is we could test this in 20 days versus in 22 months in elephants with little risk. And these guys like blew people's minds and went crazy. I didn't realize they'd be the internet sensation. Yeah, I was shocked. When Ben said, hey, we're going to go public with the woolly mouse, I thought, well, that's just ridiculous, especially now. I mean, we were coming out with dire wolf soon.

But then when we broke the internet with the mouse, I was like, holy shit. What's going to happen with people? Yeah. But I will say when we came with Daryl people, some people that are, you know, there's, there's about 20 scientists that are consistently not our biggest fans, which is fine. Like we're not trying to, we don't care what they, you know, if they like us or not, I think it's our job to just keep doing what we're doing. But, uh, one of the feedbacks they got is they've lied to the world because they had this mouse and we were we were mad at them errors they were excited they literally there's quotes in from a handful of these folks about how they were excited they're ha ha ha they're only working in mice they'll never make it to a not

what's called the non-model species like a wolf and they were like the entire time they were taking this negative feedback from us when they had these secret dire wolves so then people were this community this small community was somewhat frustrated because they felt like they were laughing at the fact that we were here, even though, by the way, the woolly mice are a genetic, like they're a huge achievement for genetic engineering. They're an insane achievement for genetic engineering. And they, but they thought, oh, if they're here, that means that they won't be anywhere else for 10 years. And then we deliver 20 edits in a non-model species being a wolf, right? And so, which I'm sure we'll get into, but the woolly mice was something that, you know, we were really excited

about because it just shows kind of the application of the intended targets on genes, what the intended outcomes would be. And more importantly, all the mice were healthy. Yeah. You had said, before we pause for a second back there, you had said a line where you were you were going we're not to be clear we're not cloning these species we are engineering the engineering them right so that's and that seems to be some of the criticism with respect to the dire wolf where people are saying okay you took a gray wolf yeah which is 99.5 percent a devil right so you took something very close and they'd leave out that context to be fair to you yeah and you edited i forget what the number was eight or 14 jeans 14 jeans 20 edits

yeah okay and so it's cut it's really just like a gray wolf with some edits we can't know for sure that it's actually a dire wolf like how do you respond to that so uh i'm sure we'll both have different responses to that i think we got different responses i like this well i think we'll be additive to it because i think we look at from different perspective there's about 31 ways to classify a species just so you know this so there's not one way right like we were taught in school i assume we're both taught the same thing which was the biological ways like if things can't breed with something else, it's a species. That is what I think generally they get taught in the textbooks. But a polar bear and a brown bear, I don't know if you know this, those are different species.

And I think if you look at a polar bear and then you look at a brown bear, you're like, okay, one's aquatic and white and cold adapted and one isn't. You would be like, it makes sense those are different species. They mate all the time and have viable offspring. So by the biological definition of speciation, they should be the same species. But I think you could look at them and say, well, that's dumb, right? And so once again, I'm not a biologist. I'm not a conservationist. I just am just a person that likes to ask weird questions with smarter people than me. And so I was like, well, that's weird.

And then there's what's called the morphological definition, right, where it's like if something looks like something, it has specific – so this is where polar bears and bears trade. And ironically, so do wolves and dogs fall in this category. And to break people, dire wolves are wolves. direwolves were wolves and so um what's interesting about that is that you know there's a morphological concept which is that if it has specific traits to serve specific ecological functions that aren't found in other in other things then it's its own species that's classification and what we know about direwolves is that they were about before colossal here's what we knew about direwolves they were 20 to 25 percent bigger they had a little bit stronger they think they had a stronger job and had a little bit larger cranial facial structure and jaw and then they had um uh and then based on the bone density they think they were heavier stronger more muscle that is what

that is what is known definitively about dire wolves before colossal they didn't even know where the lineage was they didn't even know where in the Canaan family they fell. Before Colossal. Before Colossal. There was a paper that came out, which ironically, Bess Shapiro and half the people on our dire wolf paper, that are on paper, were on the original paper around dire wolves because dire wolves were popular

because of Game of Thrones. Scientists, believe it or not, really do like the limelight, I found, over the years. I thought that working with engineers in Silicon Valley was challenging. But I learn and adapt, right? We all do. But what's interesting is that the conclusion about five years ago from this paper before Klausel existed was, we don't know. That was the conclusion.

But believe it or not, the media read that it said uh because the paper mentions um the the paper mentioned jackal so then it ran with the headlines were game of thrones dire wolves uh were jackals not wolves so that was like so that got into the zeitgeist right so then everyone just read the headlines nobody read the scientific paper no one looked at the phylogenetic charts so there was just this belief that they were jackals, which was actually a media interpret, an incorrect media interpretation. They don't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're spot on. And so really smart people think they were jackals. But if you go ask anybody on that paper, even if they hate colossal, if you go ask people

on that original paper, they'll say, that was not the result our results was we don't know and that's because they had about 0.15 x of the genome uh and so they only had they didn't have a full complete genome we got 13 x meaning that we had you know we talked about the genetic code earlier and that means that we got a full read of both of our genomes because we have two genomes. One is 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull. So 60,000 years of genetic divergence between our two genomes, right? And so we got 13 reads of it. So we actually were able to identify the core genes that are what's called conserved.

So we talked about genetic diversity in the genome earlier. So the things that really made a dire wolf a dire wolf and what we know from a phenological perspective, right? Like we know about cranial facial, we know about size and we know about coat. One thing that we discovered that nobody knew because there's no hair of dire wolf to be known to exist is that they were white. And what's funny is there were all these different, because there's a season where people thought they were related to jackals, that there were paleo artists that designed them, painted pictures of them, where they were, you know, pre-generative AI, where they were red. So people were like, no, but dire wolves were jackals and they were red. Well, that's just incorrect.

And at the time, it was actually incorrect because the paper came out with it's inconclusive, right? We now know definitively that they were closer to wolves than jackals through our deep genome sequencing. And we also identified that their coat was white, which is amazing. And what people don't also realize, you mentioned the gray wolf stuff, which I know we'll get into, is that there's 60,000 years of genetic divergence between our two dire wolf samples. 60,000 years. 60,000 years. But what people don't think about is that there's less than 60,000 years between our wolves of today and our 12,000-year-old tooth, right?

So we actually understand. I think Colossal has about 500 times more data on this than anyone else in the world, which we're now starting to publish so that people can kind of go through it. And so if you, like people say, well, you're not making a mammoth. You're just making a genetically different and genetically edited Asian elephant. It's like, but that's what mammoths were. They're just different you know they were just genetically engineered by nature and in a very slow and efficient way like we have been doing you know you talked about gmos we've been doing cross breeding and genetic engineering for a long time as a society like look at a fucking pug but we've

been doing that you know like like no wolf thought one day is gonna be a fucking pug right and but we have been doing that and doing selective breeding for traits for a long time we and manually in a way yeah we've just been really shitty at it right old-fashioned way it's old-fashioned a roll of the dice right and so i i it does not bother me when people come out and say that a a uh dire our dire wolves are genetically modified wolves because that is a factual statement. We said that in our press release. We said that in our paper. We say that on our website, right? We're not secretly saying, oh, we have 400 million edits in this thing and no one will ever know. So we've been very clear about what we did. And the issue really is that even if you go talk to,

there's a DNA concept, there's a morphological concept there's there's so many different concepts and if you look at the phylogenetic tree of life of all life 99 of the classification of species and where they fall in the tree of life is morphological 99 we have not done the dna sequencing on 99.9 of what's alive let alone everything that's been extinct you know and we can't on some of those because some of them are just fossil and there's no DNA. But if you look at even just what's there, we have not sequenced less than 0.1% of the earth. So to hold this weird, so it's a little, so it is a semantic argument. Well, and we get a lot of the, is it 100% dire wolf?

And it's just, that's like, you can't even start with that question because that assumes that all dire wolves are 100 the same and to ben's point you know we have 60 000 years of divergence just between our two samples but the species persisted for hundreds of thousands of years was from southern canada all the way down into northern uh south america so if you were a dire wolf in venezuela 25 000 years, the good chance that you were not identical. You're probably very different than a dire wolf 150,000 years ago in Idaho. Here's the other thing that is not your guys' fault at all. And I have to call out everyone in my industry or in industries close to it because it is unfortunately how things work.

When Time Magazine comes out with a fucking incredible cover, I might add, it was amazing, right? They're on an even tighter restriction than we are. Like when I write a title about this, let's start there. You guys are going to be called like the Direwolf team or whatever, right? So that's going to be the back characters. I have 100 characters on YouTube. And really what I want to do is get the actual base of the title down to 60.

Yeah. Right? So I got, what do we got a lesson maybe eight to ten words to work with something like that which means i can't write out a title saying this de-extinction company has genetically engineered a dire wolf or something close to it with 14g mutation so it's not necessarily exactly the dire wolf you see what i'm saying i have to write they made fucking dire wolves yeah and when you look at time magazine they have to go de-extinct or extinct no more yeah right and so then the average person me included you know we quickly see that oh they brought the dire wolf back and

we don't get the context of you sitting down and saying here's exactly what this means here's what this translates to here's why this isn't necessarily confirmed as like a literal dire wolf but why it's actually something that can be painted to that violet or whatever. And we're talking about some really complex technical things that require a lot of nuance. And so I totally understand knee jerk reactions or some sort of, you know, superficial emotional reaction when somebody goes, that's incorrect. Totally get it. I think as a scientific community, as a conservation community, we could do a better job of communicating to the public in a way that's more understandable.

But there is a real desire for most scientists. And we talked to Beth, our colleague, about this all the time. It's like, sometimes it's OK to be a little more general because we need to bring more audience to the table. And the thing is, so a couple additional points on this is, once again, the media, some of the headlines were misleading, right? Believe it or not.

I just sit at home like, fuck. Yeah. And so what's crazy is like they're like – but scientists disagree. It's like we have 95 scientific advisors from the top universities in the top of their field. Yeah, they say it like it's everything. Yeah. And I was like, we also, but that's also discredit the 172 people we have at Colossal with 140 of them being scientists

that left academia. So we have 95 scientific advisors outside of the 140. So just to be clear, some of the scientific community disagrees, right? And those are the people that people want because people want clickbait, right? Like that's what they want.

Now to time's defense, time and even though New Yorker fucked us and broke the embargo and made my life very painful for a couple of days. I don't know about this. Oh, you don't? No. Oh, we'll talk about it.

Yeah. Okay. I'll go four fucking hours on this thing. Okay. So- I'll have to, Emily. No. She's saying yes.

But to their credit and to time's credit, they spent a hundred hours with us. They came to the lab. They came, saw the dire wolves. they spent 100 hours with us. They came to the lab. They came, saw the dire wolves. They spent time with the scientists. They understand. And the results, we didn't say, hey, go make a salacious headline or go say they're dire wolves. That was the result.

That was the conclusion that they came to after talking to experts that are affiliated with Colossal, not affiliated with Colossal. After going insanely deep on it and spending 100 hours, their conclusion is based on looking at the fact there's 31 ways to classify there's no species on the planet that falls into every 31 categories very few even fall into three so less than 10 percent of categorization works right and because that is a general view right you talk to kenneth lacovara the number one paleontologist in the world uh who discovered the largest dinosaur in the world did dreadnoughts which is fucking incredible uh what kind of dinosaur dreadnoughts largest dinosaur you like if you ever want he's he's in new jersey let's get him in here let's go he's just awesome he's i want a dinosaur podcast he's dude he's your guy

he's he's incredible but i mean he'll even argue semantics and then he's like well technically polar bear should be the same species so then he'll go down this whole thing as proper so he'll uh he'll even debate this even internally right and so so but what i'll tell you is when you spend the time with it and you understand all of it you can come to a conclusion of wow this is a scientific incredible feat for humanity that nothing's ever happened like this before a uh this is like the moon landing of genetics or and you can come to that it's a happened like this before. A, this is like the moon landing in genetics. And you can come to that. It's a dire wolf war.

It's the closest thing. We have our website pulled up. But if you go to our, I don't know if I could do this. If you go to, if you scroll up and go to our main menu, and we have to build a new website because there's so much shit on here. If you click de-extinction, if you scroll up one more time. Sorry. Top left.

Top left, yeah. If you click de-extinction, if you go scroll up one more time, sorry, top left, top left. Yeah. If you click de-extinction. So the first button on our website is de-extinction, which nobody clicks on, which is crazy. If you scroll down, well, it's a little hidden. Yeah. It's hidden. You know, it's only the first one. So if you scroll down, just scroll down a little bit for it, right? Scroll down. Cause it's about conservation. Yeah. If you stop right stop right there right so what's funny is since the direwolf launch wikipedia has been edited on the extinction page like a thousand times um but it used yeah but it used to we love the cia to be clear that was julian that was not yesterday so you know maybe we got to check the wires around here yeah so uh but but before colossal

the dire wolf the wikipedia definition was the process of generating an organism that resembles or is an extinct species you cannot we we think that if you scroll down a little if you just stop uh yeah so we think we think that that was flawed now obviously now because of the dire wolves that page has been completely rewritten to drive a certain agenda, which is interesting and weird in itself. But what's crazy is we think that engineering a species to look like another species isn't enough. You know, we can do that without ever using ancient DNA.

We use a trait engineering. The second thing is it's not possible to clone an extinct species as Beth wrote in her book. And we've said from day one, right? So if you scroll down a little bit further, we actually talked about, I've just, it's just a little bit further, we actually talked about,

I've just, it's just a little bit for the right there. Yeah. Was that we think that's perfect. We think, we think about, about rebuilding extinct species for today. And so we, we have this concept that we put out years ago. And so this is on our website.

This isn't like some, some like hidden board deck that's like not available to the public. It's functional, to extinction, right? The process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost lineage of core genes. Because we identified the core genes that made a dire wolf a dire wolf. But there's a lot of stuff in there, even between the 60,000 years of genetic divergence

between the two dire wolves that we had that aren't core genes, that weren't conserved over time. So we identified the ones that were conserved over time. And then we also want to engineer natural resilience and enhance adaptability so they can thrive in today. So if you scroll down just a little bit further and we pause here. So going back to EHE, there will be, if I could clone- The elephant disease. The elephant disease. If I clone a mammoth, which is not possible, if I clone a mammoth 100%, which is not possible, and we're not doing it because it's not fucking possible, and we've never said it's possible. But if we clone a mammoth 100%, a couple things, it's not going to have the same gut biome because it's not going to be birthed by a mammoth who ate the exact same things, number one.

So we know that the gut biome affects us. It changes how our behavior, it changes a lot of things about it. Here's the other thing. We know definitively that EEHV, that mammoths were susceptible to EEHV. That means that, so if we engineer a cure for EEHV and I do not put that in here,

that means, or if I put those edits into our mammoths and then make them confer resistance to EEHV, and it was 100% of mammoth. I got gut biome right. I used a time machine to get the right mom. I nailed everything. But I'm like, you know what? We should make the change so that 20% of mammoths don't die.

Then everyone in the world could be like, oh, then at that point, your mammoths are now no longer mammoths, right? So these are semantic arguments. But I think of it from an ethical responsibility perspective if we have the ability to rebuild extinct species which we are at our core we're a genetic engineering company yes you know we're not like we're not a genetic cloning company or a extinct cloning company we really want to think about in engineering these things and going back to the coding example if we can make less edits and we can get the core phenotypes,

if you look at our dire wolves, if we want to pull up any pictures of our dire wolves, they are- Yeah, who's your photographer, by the way? There's some good fucking pictures. There's some good ones. Yeah, there's some good ones. So he's here in New York, Andrew Zuckerman.

He's awesome. He's good. Shout out, Andrew. Please continue. But I think Ben's point is really good. And as sort of the token animal guy, we could try to edit- Token. You're right well it's chief animal officer chief animal which is a great fucking title ever right but you know one of my primary mandates that colossal is to ensure the

safety and welfare of the animals in our care right and part of that doesn't just mean once the animal's born it's my responsibility It also means that as we're designing strategies to return species from extinction, we need to have welfare as one of our paramount concerns. To Ben's point, we focused on core edits. We could have taken it further. We could take it further today. We could go to 100,000 edits.

We could go to 4 million edits. But every time we do that, we're increasing the risk of the outcome being less than optimal for that animal and we have to ensure the health and welfare of every animal so we'll take a stepwise approach and what gets missed often is that nine years ago an international independent group of people that run the iucn that's an international union for the conservation of nature and the species survival directly UN of species.

Yeah. Okay. They wrote a white paper on proxy species rewilding, which is essentially what de-extinction is today. And what we did is there was something like 36 points that go through there. If you are going to pursue this endeavor, these are the considerations that you must make. And we went point by point through that thing. And we developed strategies that aligned with exactly that and one of those is at first you need to take a cautionary

approach that ensures the health and safety of your animals nailed it you see those dire wolves i mean that it's pretty fucking yeah adorable healthy they look amazing extremely happy are they fucking eating people yet or just people we don't like okay yeah but uh you know and now yeah and and you know we'll we'll actually we decided that we're going to write up a little draft and we're going to share it with the world so they can kind of see where we align with this guideline because we took a lot of time and consideration to go into that and now people sort of dismiss that you haven't listened to any international experts bullshit we took your playbook we just did it right like if we scroll can we scroll down and see the the bigger wolves because like so uh if you keep scrolling um oh

yeah here's a little click thing also what's amazing is i now have the most famous hands in the world yeah your hands oh those are all your hands yeah yeah yeah that's funny and so and so we have we have healthy animals with genes that have not been expressed in 12 000 years but but i want to give one this goes back to rebuilding i want to give an example because no one actually talked about this it's in the fucking press release but no one talks about this so with the edits that we made there were 15 of them that were specific ancient dna variants from the direwolf right but we chose five that weren't. No one's talked about this, which blows my mind. So I mentioned earlier that

we now know definitively that dire wolves were white. I can't say that, you know, this is me being around too many scientists. I can't say all dire wolves were white, but 60,000 years of genetic divergence, both those were white. I'm going to say statistically more than likely they were white. And a significant geographical distance as well we're talking idaho and ohio yeah and and they're both and they're during the pleistocene so it kind of makes sense that they're white um but but one thing that's interesting is we know that the specific variant of the the of the gene that the direwolves have that made it white has been studied in canids so we also once in people think that this

is just colossal and they discredit the fact that we have science the number one uh a person in the world uh in uh canid genetics and canid evolution can evolution is is a woman named eleanor carlson she is uh at the brode institute the brode is most famously known for the one that like fought Jennifer Doudna and Berkeley on the whole CRISPR wars. Where did it, was it invented at the Broad? Was there? So it's like the Broad's a very, I mean, it's about as high of an echelon as you can get. And she is as high as an echelon as you can get when it comes to canine evolution and

genetics, right? And so we work with her, right? We didn't, once again, we didn't just do all this as even just the colossal people. We're not drinking our own Kool-Aid here. And we actually identified that the gene specific that made dire wolves white has been known, and this is evolution selective and natural selection, has been observed in wolves and in dogs to sometimes cause blindness or deafness. So from a purity perspective, some people would be like, we should put the fucking gene in, right? From an animal welfare perspective, that's stupid. So we actually did trait engineering on the white coat color. So we know definitively that this gene made dire was white. We know it's a hundred, or we at least know that R2, just to be fair to scientists, we at least know that our two to speak fair to scientists is that we know that at least our two samples were white. And we think that that

probably means that most were white. We then said, if we put this exact gene in, there is a it's not 100%. But there's a non zero probability that that we could cause some negative effect on the animal welfare. So what we did was just like in the woolly mouse we identified a gene that made it the same color right so all of the coat color or all our sorry all the coat thickness if you scroll back a couple if you go back like two pictures yeah like all of that that's all their genes right that make it this like crazy arctic thing like they have this like level i think it's like main like we didn't know that right from the fossil so so that's all direwolf specific stuff that we've never seen before but what i'll tell you is that that white we knew that the gene from the direwolf made it white but we know that

it comes with some risk so we didn't put it in we chose a different gene this where this is where synthetic biology comes in we chose a synthetic biology? Synthetic biology, being able to engineer life or doing full DNA synthesis where you're engineering little blocks and putting it in. So we did that, and we put in a gene that would make it the same color that we know dire wolves were without any risk to the animal. Now, from a purist perspective, people would argue that, right? Sure. You made it less dire well no you didn't like if you go to the morphological species concept it is which is still is still what 99% of the entire fossil record is based on our animal classification is what we classify our dire was on but people would some people would say well then you made it

less dire was like no we it still has the morphological thing and we did it without having any risk it's the same argument with EEHV. If we know EEHV, yeah, if we can improve the species, why not do it? Why do it? Yeah. And I mean, you know what the core question is here and I haven't asked it all day, but do you ever, and this goes to both of you actually, cause this would be anyone on the team, but obviously as a founder, do you ever sit up at night and wonder if you're playing God here? I think we play, I mean, going back to your mentor, I think we play God and you saw the force cut down and we play God every single day, right? Like we play God. I take God when I take

on some level of my body, right? I take God, you take, you play God when you add more creatine to your body, right? We play God when we, when we burn down the forest that you've seen with your own eyes, right? When we overfish, when you overfish the ocean, we as humans are playing God every single day. We just are, right? We, we, that is where humanity is. We are eradicating species like the thylacine, the Australian government put a bounty on their head to kill them. They didn't just naturally fall off the planet, right? And so we choose to do that. So we think of this as a way that we can – if you look at technology as currently humans like apex innovation, well, why don't we start using that technology to do really great things that could help the world and inspire the next generation?

Here's – real fast, Matt. I just want to make sure we hit this. Here's what I would view as the difference between what you're saying is the example of playing God and what I'm getting at. Everything you're referring to are things that we do on accordance of our own free will already created here on earth. Correct. What you're doing is getting to the beginning of the foundation of the actual creation. So it is a little, you understand what I'm saying? It's a little bit different to me. And I'm not saying it's bad.

I'm saying like, it's heavy as fuck. Heavy as fuck. And you better have people that feel that weight and feel that responsibility. And I think that was when, you know, going back to that first meeting with Ben and some of the conversations I had with people in my personal life afterwards,

when I said, am I gonna take this hard right turn out of my career into this psychopath's new company, right? You know, a study recently came out that like 40% of CEOs are psychopaths. I saw that on Instagram. In my experience, it's 100%. And I was like, I have to flip through that faster. I have to flip that faster. But, you know, you have two options there, right? Like Ben said it earlier, the cat was out of the bag on this thing.

Somebody had to do it. And somebody challenged me in my life and they said, you have two options. You can sit on the sideline and cast stones and be pissed when they do it in a way that you don't agree with. Or you can jump on that ship and help steer it and help take the helm. And that's where I feel more responsibility. Your kind of point about how heavy this is is spot on. But I'd rather be at the table helping influence that thing.

And I think that's where some of our skeptics that don't really use critical thinking, they just cast stones. They're missing out. This is a great point, too, because like anyone who we always see throughout human history, regardless of what it is, people are always afraid of the new technology. The reality is though, based on the law of numbers of population and innovation and people who are going to try stuff, someone's going to do it. So it's not to like rectify every single thing that happens, but it's like, if you can't prevent it and we know as human beings, we can't prevent innovation. It just happens. It's better if you know, in your heart, your intentions are good. It's better for you to actually, as you you say have a seat at the table and try to steer that and it is cool again like ben it's it's one thing for you to be a business guy and come at it from

that level and whatever but then you have on your team i mean your co-founders are scientists right you have on your team guys like matt who are coming at it from the conservation and ecological realm. Like that – what you're striking me today is under – is being someone who understands the important balance right there, which is what I do want to hear. Now, we'll see that in practice as this goes about. But that's cool. Actions speak louder than words, right? We can say whatever the fuck we want. Yes. But you have to like see it, right?

And I think the fact that we go towards our critics, that we are honest with everything that, you know, we, we put out there, like, I think those things speak louder than, you know, just quote unquote, trust us. Right. And, and, and I think one of the things that I, I feel like one of my superpowers is, is I, especially in today's world, I'm not afraid to say what I don't know. I don't know all of those things. I don't know all the ripple effects to the ecosystem. I don't know the ripple effects to conservation. I don't know. I don't know all of those things. I don't know all the ripple effects of the ecosystem. I don't know the ripple effects to conservation. I don't know those things. So what my job is, isn't to know those things. My job is to find and identify the smartest women and men in the world in these topics and bring them together. Have you run into any problems?

I shouldn't even say problems so far, but almost like arguments in your head where you have the capability to do something where it's not it's it's more high level i think but i'll let you decide it we're like you have the capability to do something and you want to do it and then you're talking to so many different heads whether it be from conservation or science or whatever and it's almost like you know the the motions being stopped because there's too much clutter and you're like do i push through and like is it a risk if i push through because this is taking too long or do I pull back and then we don't actually innovate here? Like, do you run into that?

I think for me, I really do trust our C-suite, right? It's like I feel like we've brought the best people together. And so I actually feel like I don't have that burden. Like there, there's not been a decision and Matt, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's not been a decision where like, you know, our chief science officer, our chief animal officer, you know, our VP of data and all these people have said, we absolutely should not do this. And I'm like, we should do it. Let's just, let's just go. So we haven't gotten that. I think that's been really good. I think for me coming from this conservation background and I know how, you and I know how typically reserved and conservative the conservation community is, I always come out as a little, I undersell it a bit. Because some audiences don't like the big, bold,

audacious brand that Ben built. I get it. So I'm always trying to temper that for them. And then often, I actually get the the inverse where I'm like, well, we could maybe think about this thing. And they go, we should do this. And suddenly the excitement comes out and then it feels better that there is a community that also supports that. Because that external validation is extremely important because we live in this insane bubble right now at Colossal and we're doing amazing things and we're getting a lot of attention. So sometimes you can get a little echo chambery, but that's where the 95 scientific advisors, the 25 conservation advisors we have on our board, all of our academic partners, all the people in my life, all the people that we get to talk to doing this, that get to ask

questions and they can validate concerns, they can validate ideas and sometimes they'll shit on things and you go, yeah, you're right. That was stupid. And also your history, though, of going to the outside of people who end up coming onto the team and whatever. And when we were on the break real fast, you were reading what we're going to read in a second about Paul. And you're like, we'd love to talk to him. I like that. Yeah, I like that. So let's actually pull that up now. Let's read that because it's going to lead into a question I have about the evolutionary aspect of this and what the capabilities are there. Do we still have that, Alessi?

Yeah. I have to... I have it pulled up. How many screens do we have pulled up? Too many. All right, there we go. All right, perfect. So this was a post he put up

with a meme of Brad Pitt from Fury talking about the news on dire wolves. And Paul's also a very funny guy and a great writer too so he's got good sarcasm in here i think but he said everyone is being fooled it's the ship of theseus with no water these are genetically modified gray wolves not dire wolves i listened to the podcast he was referring to the one you did with joe rogan i've spoken to the experts everyone feels the same amazing science project stuff. But this is not conservation.

There's a lot of amazing work being done to save species and ecosystems all over the world. So many heroes saving species. The dire wolf thing is just sci-fi clickbait. And it's robbing too much money that could be used to actually conserve the species we have here. And we've addressed some of this today already in more effective and impactful ways. These people talk of productionizing species. They are cloning dogs for rich people who can't let go of their pets. And in that was, he did talk to me about that one. That was kind of funny. And in doing so, exposing a terrifying gap in basic logic. They don't get it. You can't clone grandma and expect the meatballs to taste the same. It's a copy of of grandma not the woman you love i

totally agree same goes for animals this whole thing is exposing people's enormous amnesia for reality salmon have been hammering themselves up streams and against rocks for millions of years to become salmon only the strong survive the journey they are inextricably tied to and the product of their environment and their history and context just as each species is tied to its ecological context if you take a poison dart frog out of the jungle it ceases to be poisonous and he was explaining to me that's because the ants yeah yeah they eat certain insects that allow that yeah and an orphaned tiger can never be wild without a mother tiger to teach it how to hunt animals have complex cultures there's a sacred cycle and a natural order we must protect our species respect the wisdom of

the wild so my question's gonna be like i think i think it's really well written yeah actually let's start like what what do you think of i think i mean clearly i've listened to paul on your podcast i've read paul's books right like i like brilliant guy yeah amazing writer i wish i could express myself that way yes uh i think there's one severe flaw in the argument that he's presented here and that is assuming that de-extinction is a replacement for conservation which it just isn't and by the way we are the de-extinction company company that is saying that we don't need the conservation community so that we say that yeah we we believe that de-extinction is a part of conservation it's one of the tools in the toolkit it is an enhancing accelerating factor for conventional conservation

as i said earlier de-extinction doesn't work without habitats so we have to start with habitat preservation habitat restoration um all those points on on sort of animals and it being in situ versus ex situ, totally valid. But those same arguments could be made for things like the red wolf captive breeding program. Well, yeah, we had to. This was a last resort. This was not our first choice. Nobody said, you know, it'd be really cool. Let's just pull the wolves off the landscape so we can do whatever we want to the land and we'll just keep them in a zoo. People the same argument about biobanking this idea of creating frozen tissues that there's a moral hazard that if we can sort of put something on ice and ensure it won't ever go extinct then why should people care about extinction right well the real the real issue here is not enough people care

about extinction already i think colossal is doing a great job of bringing more eyeballs to the awareness the awareness is definitely a great argument. Extinction doesn't affect people, like in your mural there, right? Most people in there don't think about extinction every day. It doesn't affect people on a daily basis, so therefore they don't think about it every day, right? I don't come from the community, so I am not as familiar with Paul as Matt is or as you are. But this also is assuming a zero-sum game, right? So I like to say that there's one less shitty app that exists because we raise money from technology investors. We didn't go out and take money from the foundations that are giving money to conservation.

This wasn't a WWF-funded project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're not taking money away from habitat restoration. We are bringing money from technology people that invest in AI companies and technology companies. We are having them invest in this business. That is 99% of our investors are from technology investors, the long-term technology investors that invest in things like SpaceX and open AI and those types of technologies, right? And so now they're investing in a company and we've got them in our board to agree that all the technologies that we have, that we make an application to conservation, we give to the world for free. So this is new money coming into conservation. We're almost, I think of us as like a research and development lab for conservation,

right? And to your point, you said this earlier, like new technologies are scary, right? And so what I assume Paul, and I don't want to speak for Paul, but what I assume Paul and other people will say to this is they're going to say, yeah, but you know, it's not 100% direwolf. So we can't call it a direwolf. And he'll go down one speciation argument, which he's probably he's not wrong on, based on that one definition. But there's also 30 other definitions. Right. The second thing is, I think that based on what he said he's worried about, is this is going to take money away, which it's not. That implies that there's a finite supply of money.

This is shifting money from technology development into conservation. And then I think the third thing- I think you guys have made some great arguments on that today. But once again, in Paul's defense, he just read some, I have no fucking idea what article he read. He read some clickbaity article about it. Well, he did talk to 11 11 evolutionary biologists which is which is great but he should also talk to con you know

we have 48 conservation his friends with some guys who are involved with your product yeah good yeah that's great but when we'd love to talk to him right because once again you can learn a lot more paul is an informed critic right yes so you can have critics very informed they're dumb and then you can have informed critics we love informed critics Even if they don't like everything we're doing, you can learn a lot from them. And what's great is when you have those conversations with people like Paul and other informed critics, which you end up walking away with, you go 95% of the time, we're completely aligned. We're arguing about 5% of a topic here. But sometimes that 5%, we're totally wrong on, which we're cool with. We're not going to do everything right. That's not going to happen. And so in that,

we have to have these conversations and learn better. But the other thing that Paul's pointing out, which I think is very valid, is that there seems to be a concern that this is a replacement and that it's going to get people not focused on conserving land and conserving ecosystems. And he's spot on. We have to do that. But the thing that I think that Paul has missed in this, and I'm not speaking negatively, is that when we started the business, the external peer-reviewed scientists, not Colossal, Colossal has never said this outside of reference to other things, it was forecasted that we were going to lose 15 one five it's now forecasted that we're going to lose 50 so we can conserve all the land we want but i don't think it's going to trend that line so we have to do that and we have to biobank as

an insurance plan it's so fucking expensive to bring back species it's not feasible to bring back every species anyone that thinks that is insane and like paul says it's not feasible to bring back every species. Anyone that thinks that is insane. And like Paul says, it's not grandma. It's not grandma. We could create a functional replacement. Yeah, the clone and the dog thing. I think that was like sticking in them just because it's like it's not the same. You know what I mean? Yeah, we're not a dog cloning company.

Right, right. Yeah, that's more symbolic like in a way. But that's the kind of thing that maybe for someone like that, he's like, all right, come on, guys. Yeah, I totally get that. But, you know, one point Paul makes in here is that, you know, this money, you know, Ben already highlighted, this money isn't being taken away from conservation. It's additive to conservation. We get a lot of people that come to us and say, you've raised $435 million for the business, $50 million for the foundation. So $485 million.

You should be doing this with half a billion dollars. and to my argument is yeah you should you should go raise half a billion dollars and do that thing that you think is the right answer and i will support you and i'll help you raise the money but this is how we believe we can be impactful to the world this is your line expertise this is great i always say this is like this is such an existential problem that we need, like, we need an entire tapestry to solve this problem. This is an existential threat. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem collapse is an existential threat that will affect how we as humans can and live on this planet. We're one threat. And I like to say to the critics, if you hate what we're doing, that's great.

But like some of our biggest critics, I'm like, oh, like, oh, you're not doing stuff enough for Elephant Conservation. It's all good. I was like, well, how much money have you spent on Elephant Conservation? I mean, what are your checks? And we can do it a percentage of income. I'll tell you what I've spent. You tell me what you've spent. We'll do a percentage of income.

And because I don't want to be not fair to different socioeconomic statuses. But then separate. So we can do it based solely on a percentage basis that is more than fair. And then I'll say, great. If you don't have any money, which is fine, how much time have you devoted to it? And often the answer is zero. And I'm not being a dick about it. I'm just saying the reality is, is that like- It's easy to throw stones from glass houses. It really is. And by the way, we're not going to do everything right, as I just said, but this is our thread. We need a thousand, we need a million threads that are doing what we're not going to do everything right as i just said but this is our thread we need a thousand we

need a million threads that are doing what we're doing doing things are crazier than we're doing they're doing things more conservative that we're doing we need an entire tapestry of this we are not the solution we are one small thread but if you don't like what we're doing get off the couch and go do something else yeah yeah and i think uh you know we we sort of talk about uh uh conservation in in this in this funny way is that uh we say well this is how much i spent on conservation right oh the you know that we measure success by inputs well i think what colossal is doing and what i'd love to see everybody do is we want to measure by outcomes what was the outcome of your work how did you impact it how many species were saved you know and how many more elephants are there right like we like we i always sometimes this

creeps people i said this in georgia and i got a lot of weird feedback about it was like we we have not solved this yet but we do have a 17 person team working on artificial wombs eventually artificial yeah this will get paul with the productionizing idea but it's but it's talking about scaling it's honest i'm not saying everyone's going to do it but it's like if you could grow artificial if you could grow species fully ex utero in a system so you have no animal welfare issues and you can engineer and genetic diversity like we could and you can make 50 founder lines of Northern white rhinos and then work with people conserving land like Paul and work with, you know, save the rhinos and all in bio rescue and all of these teams to put them back in the wild, right? Yes, you are going to add to Paul's point, you're going to have gen one problems around

elephant or rhino socialization, right? And so one of the things that we also don't get credit for is like, we work with elephant havens in Botswana, who, who saves adopted or saves orphaned elephants and works to synthetically engineer herds and figure out the social dynamics to put orphaned elephants back into herds, right? Right. Including people – including baby elephants that don't have a mom, right? And so we are funding that research now because it helps elephants today. But that will also – lessons learned from that will teach us how we do – So we're not, once again, we're not just in a lab. A lot of people think, oh, this is crazy. We're in a lab, right? But like we're working with the top people in the

field in elephant conservation. We have a project going on in Kenya that's all focused on herd dynamics, migratory patterns, and using drones to identify specific social cues on a specific elephant so we can understand are they stressed or what not. All of that helps elephant conservation today. Like we have an AI team that's just working on that. They're not doing anything with the genetic side of our business. And I think that's super important because that also then gives us data so that when we do have mammoths, not today, but tomorrow when we do have them at some point, we will have lessons learned from elephants so that some of Paul's very valid points we hopefully have solved. Well, what about the evolutionary aspect in the sense that

you could, let's say you got it perfect, right? Let's go hypothetical world and you actually borderline, I know you say you don't do this to be clear but your borderline like cloned a a mammoth let's go with that you still actually no let's go you you cloned an elk and pretend that's extinct because it's gonna be easier for me to make this example if an elk were extinct and you were able to clone it and actually get it back elks are 11 feet tall or whatever and then you know they have this 30 foot horizontal leap that they've developed over millions of years because they're running from packs of wolves. And now you develop a clone of like this extinct elk or whatever. And it wasn't trained and hardened by Darwinism, by that environment to be able to run from

wolves and jump that far. Even if it's built the same, the muscles look the same, the tone looks the same. It's not the evolutionary animal. So I'll let matt talk about animal behavior but we are seeing that there's a lot of things from a genetic disposition perspective that's built in okay and which is pretty interesting right so like um there are certain trained behaviors that are are learned as as you're pointing out and matt will comment on but then there's other things that are just you know um that this not to go back to the life finds

a way perspective but there are things that are genetically, you know, if you are a carnivore and you are genetically a carnivore, you want to eat meat. Like our carnivorous marsupials want to eat, you know, meat, right? That is their thing. They're not going to like be alive and say, should I eat the grass? Like they don't get confused, right? Like that is, there are genetic programming in what we're building, right? In all of us, right? They're even saying that there's, there's crazy amounts of genetic stress that can be passed on generations that we're now learning that we in, in the world of epigenetics are learning about.

Oh, and so if you brought back this hypothetical elk, right? It's not as if colossal tomorrow's going to throw it in the wild and say, Godspeed godspeed right there is this sort of very stage gated process where you start small highly managed situations understand the effects of the cloning the editing whatever it is and you begin to put them in larger more semi-wild and truly wild places and observe and see what they're doing my guess is to ben's point there's a lot of intrinsic behavior and ability that's built into DNA. The nature versus nurture thing still plays a role. And so if you don't have

the nurture aspect that teaches this elk how to jump or a tiger how to hunt in Paul's example, there are ways that you can overcome. People don't train their house cats to kill mice. Yeah, but they just know how to do it.

You see a house cat sees a mouse and it's wild. But you can work and there are large carnivore rewilding efforts like the Red Wolf effort. Like there are big cat orphanages that release cats back to the wild. And so there are tactics that you can use in a management setting. But also, if you're doing it correctly, you're putting this animal in a habitat that has all the same environmental pressures and, and that are driving those behaviors. So if you give them the program, and you give them the right motivation and pressures and a little bit of

training, you can definitely get there. Paul's point still not wrong. Grandma's dead, she's not coming back, you're not gonna be able to make her the exact same person but we can create functional replacements and ecosystems that perform specific functions that help boost biodiversity and carbon sequestration in an ecosystem in a meaningful way got it emily real quick can i ask one more question we don't have to if you got the hook okay cool yeah there's a million questions i i have for you guys. This has been awesome.

But these conversations are important. So we would love to continue the dialogue. And before you ask the question, I would say tons of respect for Paul. I love the podcast that you guys have done together. Thank you. I love listening to Paul and his work. And just because I'm a fan of his, I'll challenge him and say, if there are things in conservation and the conservation space that Colossal should learn, I will fly down there

and see his work firsthand. I would love to learn from him, and I'd love to share with him what we're doing at Colossal. That would be awesome, and I really actually... I won't be as smart, but I want to go. I hope you do that because it was a life-altering experience for me because it brought it home. Like I'm just some asshole in Jersey with a podcast, right? And this guy is coming here and spilling his guts about all the shit that he was screaming about for years that no one would fucking listen to.

And it started this spark that then – now he's like a celebrity, which he would hate if I said that. But it's true because he's like – his work is amazing. But I always knew Paul was legit as fuck and then i went down there and i watched him live 150 yards into the like deeper into the jungle with no running water and like you know how when we fuck we put a sock on the door he has to put a 15 foot long industrial towel across a fucking deck yeah because he lives on a on a hardwood surface and the dude is a hundred percent about that life and it's the coolest thing like he he knows it it's i loves it what's authentic right it's like you can have once again the ex uh you know armchair

critics but when when when people that live it and they really put their money and time and effort and they're they're even in you know effort and even their physical harm potential, they're putting their money where their mouth is. 100%. He lives it. But the last question we'll get to today and we can continue the dialogue hopefully in the future. This has been really awesome today, guys. I appreciate you doing this. But the rewilding aspect, what's the earliest thoughts on that?

I know there's probably going to be a lot of changes because you're taking everything as it comes, but maybe start with the dire wolves as an example today. What would be the plan there and how would that go down? Oh, we're lucky that we have this amazing setting for these dire wolves to live in. The plan is that these dire wolves are going to stay right there. They're going to stay on this 2000 acre expansive ecological preserve that they live in. We're not planning on putting these animals out in the wild and having any sort of competition with gray wolves. However, we've got amazing rewilding plans for the other species that we're working on with mammoth, dodo, and thylacine. What would that look like? So it really starts today. People go, well, if mammoth's not here for five years,

if dodo's not here for five years. Can we pull up the, can you get one more page just as you talk about this? Can you go to colossal.com forward slash Tasmania? And we have to do a lot of work today. So what Ben's going to show you shows some of the social responsibility that we have to do, how we have to engage with stakeholders. We also need to go repair ecosystems. There were pressures that existed in these places that were drivers of extinction. We have to help address those today. That's what's really cool about Colossal is it is this engine that is supporting all this other conventional conservation work, removing invasive species, restoring habitat, ensuring that, you know, there's good coexistence measures for people in wildlife. So we're doing that right now

on habitats where we think the dodo could return to where we think the thylacine could return to where the mammoth could go. And if we just scroll down, we don't have to like read the page but we just scroll down through it while i'm talking like so we have a huge uh uh thylacine advisory committee if you just keep scrolling down you'll you'll get to them it's just that tasmanian tiger for tasmanian tiger yeah and so um it just go a little bit further so we basically uh so we went and partnered with people from you know uh indigenous representation uh uh ecologists, local conservationists. As I mentioned, people from the aboriginal community, people like Mayor Draculis, where the last thylacine was actually seen, at least observed in the wild. We even had people in there from tourism and brand Tasmania because they care about if you do something, you're worth it. We even had people in there from the Logging Commission

and people are like, that's weird. But the largest industry in Tasmania from an economic driver perspective is logging. So once again, if you think that you're gonna go do something that applies to the forest without including them and being inclusive, you're just crazy. You're just naive. And so we don't have thylacines.

We're not gonna have thylacines for a while, but we want to rewild the thylacines. So we meet with this group every single quarter. I think it's next week. This entire group's at our Melbourne lab doing- Oh, in person? Yeah, in person. So coming over from Tasmania to Melbourne, Australia on this.

But I think this is important. And then if you scroll to the very, very bottom, you'll even see that we have like input forms of like, please tell us like what we're doing wrong. What feedback do you want to be? Who do you represent? Do you want to be involved in this council? Right. And the council started off with two people.

Now it's over 30 people. And we meet every single quarter just giving them the update, hearing their concerns, getting them excited. One of the things they said, if we go to if we could plug our YouTube channel on our YouTube channel. Link in description. Yeah. And so on our YouTube channel, you'll actually see that there, we've actually have like a TAS, they asked us, the feedback that we got from the local government was, could you create a child, something that a kid would like to watch and that parents could teach them about the thylacine?

And so on our page, if you scroll down, I'm not sure where it is though, we have a whole Tasmanian tiger. Go a little bit further. A lot of these. Oh yeah. So we have a whole series that we've been creating. We don't raise money.

We don't pay. We don't ask for money for this. We're not giving government subsidies for this. We're not taking anything away from Tasmania about this. We're literally creating content. That's actually quite cool and interesting. Maybe fun for you guys to watch in your own time. But that literally is just that now

is getting into the Tasmanian ecosystem, teaching people about what the Tasmanian tiger was. How did it infect the ecosystem? How are we using genetics for this, right? And so that's kids' education that we're doing for free. But we didn't come up with that idea. The committee said, hey, we really think that we want parents to be able to talk to their kids about this and get their

future because it's the kids that we're going to affect. It's not us. It's like future generations are what will be the most impactful for this. And so that's just like an example to Matt's point. We've been, even though we don't have thylacines, we've been working for years with a committee that meets every single quarter. If we only had to just sit in the lab and put blinders on and make animals with middle fingers up to the air, that would be a lot easier. But for us, we're sitting here trying to really do community engagement and listen to critics like Paul and others learn from them. And I appreciate you doing that. We do.

We want to do it. Like I said, we're not going to do everything right. We haven't done everything right. The New Yorker fucked us. And so they broke embargo. So yeah. All right, guys. Well, I have a million other questions.

I love that we just ended on fuck the New Yorker. Yeah. It seems apropos. Wait till you see my shirt. But this is, I really appreciate the transparency in what you're doing and and going through this we'll obviously have to continue the conversation another point but the work is really fucking amazing and i hope it's all used for the intentions that you're looking to actually use it and we love to get connected uh you know you have a great relationship directly with paul so we'd love to get i can do that that'd be great i can do that yeah we'll

continue this conversation maybe one day we can sit down with Paul here. That would be very cool. Yeah, that'd be cool. And you guys should come and see the lab. I would love to do that. Yeah, if you guys ever leave Jersey, you know, come down to Texas. Yeah, I may get out sometimes, you know. It takes a while, but I'll get down there. Awesome.

But thank you for the invite. And we'll have the links down below so everyone can check this out. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.