The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 564: De-extinction: Can We Make a Mammoth, and Why Should We?

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Matt James of Colossal Biosciences, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan,  Brody Henderson, and Randall Williams.  Topics discussed: Explaining de-extinction; bringing back the woolly mammoth, dodo bird, and Tasmanian tiger; bringing back Mingus, or Mingus 2.0; watch our Bull Boat race video between Steve and Cal; gene editing with CRISPR; how do you manage habitat for an animal that hasn’t been around for 400 years?; nature-based solutions for restoring ecosystems; developing technologies to create artificial wombs; eradication; and more.  Connect with Steve, MeatEater, and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Hey guys, if you like watching the podcast from the Meat Eater Podcast Network on YouTube, you need to get your little butt over to the Meat Eater Podcast Network, which is a whole new channel on YouTube. Different from the normal meat eater YouTube channel. You need to take action here.

Go to the meat eater podcast network on YouTube and subscribe. Keep your subscription to the other thing and you'll be subscribed to both. And you'll get all of our podcast videos there going forward. They will not be where they used to live. Go to the new place. Thank you. Brody, they're going to do... We've talked about this in the past. It's looking more and more likely that Colorado

will have a Wolverine reintroduction. It's in the works, for sure. At the same time, this whole ESA thing is going on. Colorado has approved a reintroduction. I don't think it's going to happen overnight. Um, but it, but it's the, the plans are in the works. They got to go through some hoops to get it done. Um, and like you said, you know, they belong there. It's a native species, right? Yeah. I'd like to see it happen. I don't like, I'm not a fan of who's doing it, but I'd like to see it happen i don't like i'm not a fan

of who's doing it but i like to see it happen right like if someone you don't like gave you 500 bucks it's still 500 bucks so how's that fall in line with your uh with your feelings on them being listed i don't think that they i i i just don't see that they should have been listed here because there's never a lot of them in the first place. Yeah. It's like, there's just not a lot of historic data of what they were going on. They're largely going on some, you know, they're largely going on some findings from BC extrapolating that that will happen here. It's like a future.

It's like a future listing. It's like, well, I could see there being problems in the future based on gut. Um, therefore, and then I just, I also know how to be levered. Like I already know how it'll be leveraged. Yeah. Well, I think it's, it's a, I think it's a proxy fight. Yeah. And that leverage is the same concern I have.

Like I'm all for the reintroduction in Colorado. Where are they pulling wolverines from like where did they determine the population is so robust right because it can't be a pen right they probably haven't even thought about that i don't think they've gotten that far yet they didn't put a lot of thought into the wolf reintroduction but they eventually got them yeah they got them um they'll get them but the leverage you're worried about is the same leverage I'm worried about with an administration like the Polis administration. Like leveraging that against hunting, against trapping, being like, oh, this area is closed now. You can't go in there.

It's a refuge for an endangered species. Right. Which means we're going to prohibit human travel or trapping or anything that could conceivably harm that uh, species. Yeah. I mean, that administration has made it clear that that's their angle. So we'll see.

Yeah. I think it'll be, it's like, I fear that it'd be become a proxy thing where they're, they're like, like what's happening here is they're kind of talking about Wolverines, but they're kind of not yeah they're talking about backcountry travel yeah right they're talking about snowmobile use trapping restrictions yeah i mean it's kind of like like you've talked about it before the links thing here like there's links up in northwestern montana but down here in southwestern montana where

there's not really like there's this low elevation habitat that's like potential lynx habitat where you can't trap bobcats like yeah i could see some version of that happening down in colorado i don't know yeah they they drew it with a um they drew the lines what's the thing i'm looking for? Like, uh, not surgically. Right. Um, like the, the links recovery area wound up including a lot of stuff that never had,

never has had, and never will have a lens. Yeah. But I think there's probably, there's work on that being done. I don't know if it'll be applied. Right. But. For the Wolverines though,

like those boundary lines of, of Wolverine habitat, right. It should be like pretty close proximity to like permanent snow fields, glacial areas. A convenience store in Washington state. Downtown Louisville, Montana. Right.

Downtown Louisville. Well, they like to walk, you know. Yeah. Yeah. What, what spurred a lot is I recently got a trail cam photo of a, um, I got a trail cam photo of a Wolverine, which is cool. You haven't seen that i don't know no dude i got a magic i got i got a camera hanging on one tree did you put a set right there by the camera no i got a camera hanging on

a tree and on that camera i've gotten uh gray wolves coyote red fox bobcat mountain lion black bear now wolverine martin long-tail weasel a lot of predators man i'm waiting i don't know i'm waiting for a grizzly and uh i'm waiting for a grizzly and a lynx that's amazing that's cool yeah same freaking tree that's really cool they like that tree yeah i had that and that wolverine came through so i posted that picture and um generated a lot of discussion i posed the picture and used that occasion to gripe about use that occasion to gripe about the the move to threatened and how the state of montana is suing yeah against it and now and then uh you know people guy wrote a guy wrote in what i thought was going to be a well a guy wrote in where he starts out pretty good attacking my position.

But then he lost all credibility with me because in the end, he uses discrete population segment when in fact it's distinct population segment. And I'm like, this guy doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. He even capitalized it. So he doesn't know what a dps is so sorry man it was out the door the way he better change your email before you're right back in it was out the door with what he thinks um no a lot of people griping about that but i'm i'm not giving an inch dude i'm not giving an inch on it stick to your guns man like i don't uh um i'm a big-time wilderness advocate

big time yep i pointed out in this thing like i have come out all the time like i you know continued protections for anwar in opposition to Ambler road. We just did a podcast celebrating the Gila wilderness area and the creation of the wilderness system, which we've done a bunch of times. And it's like, don't come at me about it from that angle. In this case, I just think, I think the Wolverine thing is bullshit. Well, obviously we have a big issue with wildlife populations, right? When we talk about scientific management, which is a conversation we have all the time, right? It's like, it can be used for, for good and bad from my perspective where it's like, well, we don't know how many animals there are.

So we need to figure that out, but then we can set our regulations. It's like, but we never do know how many animals there are. Like we never, we never will. Yeah. When they started doing the population work on wolverines and when they started the population work on wolverines in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming,

the biggest takeaway was Jesus, wolverines all over the place. And all of a sudden out of that came this. I just, I don't, I think it's, I don't think it's a good use of time. Well, and there's, there's always a focus on, uh, did it exist? I haven't introduced you yet. I'm just going to jump in. No, you're going to talk for two hours.

I didn't know we had such formal rules here. No, please get started. There's always this focus on where had it existed in there and there's usually little focus on what what did it perform for the ecosystem what good does it do back to the ecosystem and i think that's where the narrative needs to be going not historically where did it range and because we're usually taking snapshots that could be you know completely out of context for why the animals were pushed into a certain area. Um, but we need to be focused on how do we bring species back into

ecosystems that perform specific functions to improve biodiversity, to improve ecosystem health and be less focused on, did it exist there one day, 250 years ago? Or 500 years from now? Did it show up in Lewistown, Montana one day? Yeah. Conven convenience store in washington right somebody's like oh look look at the data like i mean yeah it ranged in the dairy aisle so we got to put it back that would be a day time is that uh ladies and gentlemen you hear you just heard the voice of matt james from colossal laboratories and biosciences um the company this i don't want to i don't want to

trivialize okay i don't i'm going to titillate people without trivializing what you do okay should be interesting um this is this is this is the company these are these these are the people leading the charge uh with you know the the most likely path forward on this idea which we discussed before of cloning a woolly mammoth of uh resurrecting the tasmanian tiger of perhaps one day putting dodo birds back on the landscape what was their island mauritius mauritius so we're going to talk about um de-extinction and again when i said i want to trivialize it because we're also going to talk about um preventing extinction exactly so a lot of emphasis in this world gets put on in in the news it always gets like cloning a mammoth cloning a mammoth cloning a mammoth um but out of that work and

it's almost become shorthand for a collection of it's become shorthand for like a this a collection of technological advancements that are applicable around biodiversity and applicable around preventing extinction and then and then if need be de-extinction exactly de-extinction is sort of the intersection of this amazing set of technologies that are all emerging at a similar time and we sit at that intersection today which has given us the ability to not exactly clone a woolly mammoth right we know we cannot do that i think you had best shapiro on years ago and she talked about this problem exactly but to be able to engineer genomes to begin to mirror extinct species and bring that species back in a way that is as representative of the extinct animal as it could be and what we talked about last night

maybe i'm gonna have you start with this real quick this is not going to be the focus of our conversation but uh let's say a fella had a once in a lifetime hunting dog let's say that okay let's say this yanni has a beloved dog and it fell off a cliff recently it's fine that that's a real story that's true i'm sorry okay let's say that yanni's dog had fallen off that cliff and wasn't okay can you walk through how quickly walk through how he might wind up with um in the it's possible now it's expensive but possible how he might wind up with that dog all over again well i mean this kind of goes back to the late 90s when we talked about dolly the sheep and cloning right this is just basic cloning technology and de-extinction is an advancement of thereof. But so for this

example, we're really talking about cloning. So whether you had a living dog or a dog that, you know, unfortunately just passed away. Like fresh dead. Yeah. Unfortunately, I hate to say it that way, but you need a fresh dead animal or a living animal and you can, you can extract living cells either from skin tissue, or there's even some novel technologies, um, that might include being able to do this from blood. And, and what you do is you take those cells or those tissues and you, and you put them into a Petri dish essentially, right? You're going to culture this and you find out what are the culture conditions

so that we can begin to, um, take that one tissue and proliferate into this living cell line, and then we go and select very specific cells. We're going to look for things like epithelial cells, and we can begin to take that one tissue and proliferate into this living cell line. And then we go and select very specific cells. We're going to look for things like epithelial cells, and we can make something called a fibroblast line. Once you have that, we just freeze it. You put it on liquid nitrogen, it will live forever in a biobank. Excuse me. So Mingus is in a biobank.

Now Mingus is on ice in a biobank. And one day you say, you know, I really want to see Mingus again. Um, we have the ability to be able to go back to Mingus, take his cells, put them into the oocyte or the egg of a dog and fertilize an embryo, culture that embryo in vitro, and then eventually transfer it into a surrogate dog. That surrogate would gestate 65 days later, you know, little day zero Mingus is born and it is an exact living replica of the dog or whatever animal you were looking for.

Now, obviously there's. But with the crazy bloodlust, right? There's one thing that I think is always important with cloning is we have to talk about nature versus nurture, right? Your dog might not end up being, you know, Mingus 2.0 might not be Mingus 1.0 because the way you raise the two might vary. And that plays a big role, especially in hunting dogs, as you

guys know well better than I do. That training that happens really early on, that sort of life experience is as important as genetics often. Well, dog wise, right? Like the way I was able to train a dog 10 years ago is a lot different than the way I was able to train a dog two years ago. So like that. Because you changed. Because I changed. Because you've improved as a trainer.

And my circumstances have changed. Right? No, I'm way busier now. Oh, so you're actually much worse at this. So I'm way worse. So he centered us so much. Way worse. Yeah.

On that, on that thing, like the nature versus nurture thing, but on this idea that pretty soon you would be able to just get your, you know, get your best hunting dogs cloned. Instead of just going back to the same sire, the same bitch and getting another dog out of that litter you're gonna wind up with something closer right you're gonna because right every time you breed you're sort of shuffling genetics and uh you know the the sire and the bitches dna will mix and you'll get a different or you know a set of of phenotypes than you might have just from the original just like you might have siblings that are not exactly the same as you um it's because it was a reshuffling

of the genomic information by cloning you're actually taking that full genome and just doing it again like how okay how much would it look like how much would would Mingus 2.0 look like Mingus? Are the spots in the same place? So, yeah, if it's a spotted dog. So this is a great question because there are several things that control the way that our genes are expressed into phenotypes, right? So one of them is obviously the genetics. What are the genetics telling the cells to make? But the other is a process called epigenetics. So

basically, what are the environmental forces around the expression of those genes? There's regulatory pathways. Maybe, you know, say you were supposed to be six foot four, but you were undernourished as a child. You're not going to grow to be six foot four. That's an epigenetic effect, right? So you could clone three mangas right right now and each of them would show up and look very, very similar, but those, those spots might end up in slightly different sizes or areas. And, and, uh, sometimes you see that drift, you know, there's, uh, there they've been cloning race and not race horses, sorry, but like polo horses and dressage and horses like

that. And you can go into a barn and you can see, you know, a lot of these sort of Brown horses with a nice white spot on their, on their their face and it's slightly different on each one it's the trippiest thing you've ever seen yeah but from afar they are identical animals how much do you think you capture it's it's um let's say you take mingus Okay. And you give Mingus a stimuli. Okay. Um, like,

like Mingus is, and I don't know if this is true or not, but Mingus is the sort of dog that, that if he gets up on the table, okay. And eats leftovers off the table when you're, you know, out of the room and he's the kind of dog that, man,

you tell him one time that ain't good. He ain't gonna do it again. Right. Like if that's a response to stimuli, what would you expect to see about the cloned dog's response to stimuli? Well, it just depends on, on how it was raised. I would expect, um, you know,, that's really operant conditioning, right? When we talk about sort of how can you show a stimuli and then get a required behavior and provide a consequence.

Sometimes it's positive, like you fed the dog, you know, you gave them a treat because they did what you wanted. And other times maybe yelled at the dog and the dog ran off. So negative conditioning there, right? If they were raised the same way, I bet it'd be identical. But if one was raised by a really great dog trainer and the other by somebody who just let

his dog feed off the table, those two Minguses would probably behave very differently. Go in different directions. Yeah. Is there another version of this where you can like put add-ons into Mingus 2.0? Like let's say he had a weak bark. Well, now you're getting into what we're doing, right?

Like, Giannis wanted a Mingus with a stronger bark. Yeah, obviously, we're not enhancing. You said that. We're not enhancing. You know, we'd call those, like, genetic enhancements or something. We're not really doing that for dogs or for things. We're focused on the conservation side. But, you know, to that point, yes, you could say,

we want to confer a specific disease resistance to this animal right distemper in dogs is an issue and they found you know like with wolves if you see a black wolf that's actually a sign that there's been dogs that have intergressed into that dog's genetic line but it also is closely correlated with a resistance to distemper, which dogs naturally. Is that right? Yeah. So if you see a black wolf, now it has to be a heterozygous. You're looking at old dog DNA.

You're looking at old dog DNA. Yeah. Wolves did not evolve. Yeah. I've read that. Yeah. But it also is highly correlated with distemper resistance. So you could identify that gene and find a dog that doesn't have it.

And using genetic editing tools, you know, the most famous being CRISPR, you could drop that in there and then, you know, reasonably when the dog's born, it will be resistant to distemper. All right. Can we move on from the pet project? Oh no, that was a warm up.

That was a warm up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to do a couple of things that we're going to get into, that we're going to get into all the big, all the big crazy stuff. Yeah. That's like your boutique making money on the side spinoff. We're not even doing it, but I think it's an easy example for people to understand. Okay.

Let's close that conversation out with this. When you crystal ball it, do you picture in 10 years, do you picture that becoming kind of how we're producing hunting dogs, how we're producing specialty dogs, how we're producing drug sniffing dogs where you have these like, you know, one in a hundred attributes? I, yeah, I think in, you know, maybe 10 years is too soon just because there's some social acceptance, but in the working dog class, especially hunting dogs and, and, you know, say police dogs. Um, yeah, absolutely. Like the military is like, no, I want that. Why would you want a bunch of those? I don't want to go through thousands of dogs to find that. Exactly. If this is a business for you, you're going to find a way, how can we most efficiently produce the, you know, uh, reliably reproduce that phenotype? Um, absolutely. And the science is there today and it'll just in 10 years time be so scalable and cheaper that I think it'll

be widely accepted. I asked you yesterday to throw me a ballpark on what the, uh, this Mingus project. Are you comfortable doing this? Sure. Yeah. I said like, give me a ballpark. Like Yanni wants a new Mingus. What's he looking at? If you just put it at fair market, you know. 75K. I think just because, you know, and that's a number I just kind of pulled out. Yeah. It's a roundabout number when we were talking last night.

And you were talking about cost. That's at cost. Yeah. That's not retail markup. No, because there's just so many. Yeah, there are so many. Oh, retail markup. The sky's the limit.

Yeah. I mean, just looking at the duck hunting world, like what guys will pay for a finished Labrador retriever or a German short hair pointer that somebody else has gone through the raising of

with a good background and that good background typically just means everybody thinks that the dogs coming out of this kennel are the best. Yep.

I mean, you can put whatever price tag you want on that. What are some numbers you heard that people are paying for those dogs? Basically anything under a quarter of a million. Wow. For the right person, yeah. Matt, I'm going to put you in an awkward position. Oh, great, yeah. I want to clarify, this is not what you do.

Correct. This is not what your company does. But I'm starting to get an idea. It's not what you do. It's not what your company does. I've got an idea. Like layout, like just take a wild ass guess. Take a wild ass guess.

Let's put it in this case. Like the military, you know, they have dogs they use in combat operations, whatever. And they want to order like a whole bunch of these dogs. What would that be? Wild-ass guess. I mean, you just think about government spending. I think you could go north of a million or two million on them. Right if you had the right animal.

Yeah, the right, yeah. Think of the falconry and racing pigeon world. Like sultans of Duke. We're into money that, like... I mean, we're dancing around racehorses. Let's change the subject. We're going to talk about what Matt actually does. What Clausen... Disclaimer, everything before just now is hypothetical.

It's just going to be the price is right for animals. Okay, Matt. Alright, we're going to get into what he actually does. Don't go over it. Because what they're actually doing is fascinating. We're going to get into what they're actually doing in just one second. That was just a little warm-up. Hey, folks.

Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of you know, sucking high

and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club,com slash meet. Welcome to the, to the on X club. Y'all. Uh, the kids podcast. We keep talking about starts July 5th, right?

On this podcast feed. We've said it a bunch of times. How many are we making? Five. We're making five kids podcasts. Whether we make number six depends on if your kids like it. Yeah. I can't say any plainer than that. each episode of the kids podcast goes like this they're quick how long are they what are they

coming in at phil 20 uh 15 to 20 okay it's a three-act structure there's why it's the way it is where we explain why something is the way it is. It could be, why are teddy bears called teddy bears? It could be, what is an anadromous fish? It could be, when you say nocturnal, what's the opposite?

And is there a middle ground? I like it. Asking the important question. And yeah, there is. It's called crepuscular. Okay. That's what crepuscular. Okay. That's what you can take that topic of. What are other why it's the way it is that we're doing? Oh, what exactly did Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett do for a living?

Why it's the way it is. What exactly were they up to? Why does everybody know about those guys? What did they do for a living? Can you think of more why it's the way it is? Or we just do i think you just listed all of them okay so why it's the way it is i host why it's the way it is i tell your kid why it's the way it is what's my credential i've been telling my kids why it's the way it is for 14 years and everyone else so that's why i took that's why that's my job and then there's guess

that critter guess that critter which corinne works on but it's hosted by my lovely wife who hosts she just she does the read on guess that critter where we do wild we come we use animals that have the craziest vocalizations the the most varied, craziest vocalizations, and we play vocalizations, and then we start providing a bed of clues. The earlier your kid gets it, the smarter your kid is. You'll be able to take that score to your Montessori school in the future. And you'll also know whether you want to pull blood from that kid and send it to me. Then the final thing is kids trivia.

And we bring in a bunch of actual live kids. They record trivia. Not genetically modified kids. Not fresh dead. It's the Henderson, Koutelis, and Rine live kids. They record trivia. Not genetically modified kids. Spoiler alert. Not fresh dead. It's the Henderson, Putellis, and Rinella kids. Yeah. Plus some friends.

Heavily staffed by our old children. And some neighbors, stray neighborhood kids we've brought in. Rampant nepotism. We brought in my primary care providers kids, didn't we? Yep. Just bringing some stray kids. They play trivia, but they play trivia in this way. You know, keeping hollow.

Kids these days days there's no winners and losers they're all winners so what the kids do is they build a pot of money for conservation yeah meaning it's our normal it's a trivia show for kids but every time any of the kids get to like every right answer generates more revenue into the pot which goes to a conservation organization that's a kids-focused conservation group or a kids-focused charity. And so they're building the pot. Meaning when you ask all 10 of them a question, it's not that some of them win and lose.

It's that the right answers build a pot of money. So it's a cooperative effort. There are weak links in the chain that I'm sure reveal themselves over time. Well, the fun part randall is you know in terms of the the nature versus nurture uh host spencer new hearth definitely has found some personality similarities between uh our our colleagues and their children and he chooses to point them out each time like like like brody's kids just quietly have the right answer yeah i mean he definitely he definitely picked on uh

mabel one of yanni's daughters for having a similar trait of uh seeing if anyone but that was only because mabel called him out and i think I think he was embarrassed by being called out by a 10-year-old. The video component is there's a tube that shoots out a marshmallow to the person with the right answer. And that's where it really cranks up visually. Yeah. If you don't feel like you know us well already from listening to us for hours every week. Now you'll get another layer of who we are because you're going to get to study who our kids are. And those of us without children will remain mysterious. That's right.

Which was the point the whole time. June 27th, tune in on YouTube for our latest experiment. Not latest. We don't do that but yeah i guess we've done a few experiments uh yesterday two days ago we went out and made bull boats so we went and got um a bull boat as you know um or maybe you don't is a temporary use watercraft that can be made using nothing but the hide off of a buffalo it's called a bull boat because you need a pretty good size critter to make it we used a couple thousand pound roughly thousand

pound bulls i mean three year old three year old yeah um we have a friend that north bridger bison matt scoglin north bridger bison who does he does all he has a bison ranch um he's explained to me before his his animals are born on his ranch and they die on his ranch all grass-fed field harvested and what you do is when you want to buy from him you buy the animal right it's custom slaughter you buy the animal you're buying the meat on the animal you don't go on a website and buy a cut of this a cut of that you're going to buy a portion of percentage of an animal that's currently living on his ranch he field harvests the animal it's custom cut to your specifications anyhow we got hides from him and made boats and we made boats using nothing but native materials so we went into a willow patch

and used willow bark um which i didn't love used willow bark braided buffalo hair which i didn't love and cuts of rawhide thong not thongs strip of strips of strips of yeah strips of raw hide for rope so willows willow bark buffalo hair buffalo strips of buffalo hide as rope and crafted bull boats i i think it's important to point out to and r. Are. Kinda. Raw hide in this context means it is a fresh hide. Not like your raw hide dog juice. It's the same thing. It's just at a different stage of. This was fresh.

Green. Slicker and snot. Wet. Hard to work with hide. I was actually very impressed with the bark because when if it, the stuff that dried when it was tied and wrapped was tough.

It was real tough. Braided hair is a bitch. If you got like a daughter with long hair, try to tie her hair in a knot. Like try to throw a granny into your daughter's hair. Or hell, Corinne's hair. It doesn't grab. It doesn't. It doesn't grab.

It doesn't hold a knot. Yeah. Oh, brutal. So I braided all, I took all my time braiding all this hair up, giving myself an, you want to talk about an arthritic ache, braiding big, long strands of hair together. And then you go throw a granny in it and it just unravels in front of your eyes. But, but there's a thing I'd recommend. If you take a picture, you take a picture, take a deer hide, just for you

listeners out there, take a deer hide and start. So lay the deer hide out. Ideally you'd scrape the hair off, lay the deer hide out and start a cut in and start cutting a quarter inch thick strip parallel to the edge. And imagine you go in concentric circles. Oh, like peeling an orange. Like a hundred feet of rope.

Like peeling an orange would be a great idea. Go around. Keep going quarter inch. All the whole periphery. And then come in and do concentric circles. You could stretch that. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it. Go to the moon.

Remember, we had a guy write in and said that he used to do that with squirrel leather. And he said that you'd use that for shoelaces and it would outlast the boots. Yep. No way. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, he did take a squirrel hide and make leather laces out of squirrel hide. And I'll tell you what, anybody's ever tried to clean a squirrel? Corinne, that's right up your alley.

Oh, that's totally right up my alley. Leave the hair on there. Add a little flair to your shoes. Make me a couple thin pieces for dental floss, bro, because what I've been using lately has not worked. That popcorn yesterday. Would you leave the hair on for the dental floss to get a little extra abrasion? It's a brush. Brush

and floss at the same time. And we raised them. We raised them. It wasn't like we raised them. I, uh... People gotta watch. I, uh. People got to watch. You got to watch. But this comes out after the. Don't give it all away. Yep.

Yeah, this comes after the deal, but people still need to watch. But it was, uh, it was a group learning effort with a race at the end. How's that? Yeah. Highlight of my day is all day I kept thinking we were going to find morels because of where we were. I walked around a lot looking. Well, you hear what happened to me? On the way out?

On the way out. I'm sitting in the back of a truck. I look over just plain as day. It was a morel. It grew while we were drinking. Driving by. No, we hadn't gone in that area. Did he stop?

Driving by. Yeah. Chili thought someone fell out and got hit. Stop! Stop! He jumps out. He thought someone got rolled over. hit stop he jumps out he thought someone got rolled over like there's a morale he's like oh my god you guys give me a heart attack um we'll talk about breeding mule deer later oh we use thousand pound animals and then in the historic record people talk about a bull boat that's eight feet in diameter but matt scoglin was talking about

you know if you really let them go we were using hides off three-year-old animals you know if you let them go you could get a you know there's such a thing as a close to a one ton bull yeah if you look at like old beef bowls um old beef bowls get to a point that they can't really be managed. They can't, they get so big and dangerous that they kind of just do what they want. So if you see an old beef bowl out there on the range, um, they just, they do, they just get bigger and bigger. So I imagine. Bigger round. Yeah.

The muscle bulk and everything is next get enormous and bigger. So I imagine. Bigger round. Yeah. Yeah. The muscle bulk and everything is next get enormous and yeah. Uh, the last thing I'll point out is my boat, my personal vessel was, uh. Did you christen it? No. In fact, it's no. Hmm.

It's got, it's, I meant to grab some of that hide for a thing I want to make, and I had Matt and Brady go back out, and they cut a chunk of hide off the boat, so as you find it laying on the bank, it's got a hole in it now. But no, it's still sitting there, right? It's just sitting in a willow patch right now. Like it would be back in the day.

Apparently with a hole in it. Oh, it was so stable, you could cast a fly rod out of it floating down the river. Impressively stable. Yeah, worked very well. All right, Matt, let's dig into Colossal Biosciences. Talk about how you got started in zoo. You managed zoos. Yeah, so before-

Walk us through the career real quick. Before Colossal started, I had studied biology and chemistry, ecology. I went to a master's program in South Carolina studying wetland ecology. And when I finished up there, I sort of realized... What about wetland ecology? So it was sort of marine and wetland ecology. I was more on the marine side. So I was studying sea turtle nesting in South Carolina at Estow Beach. What species of studying sea turtle nesting in South Carolina. Oh, okay. In Edisto Beach. What species of sea turtle?

Those are loggerheads. Loggerheads. Yeah. Yeah. And it was great, you know, as a 22 year old grad student, I was living on a beach for a week or two in a tent with my 140 pound St. Bernard. And, you know, just trying to walk the beach

every morning to see where sea turtles were crawling, mark their nest and, and study basically thermal dynamics. Boy, you painted a very sandy tent picture. Humid, slobbery. And then there was a dog, you know, but, uh, but it was great. I loved it, but I realized quickly that most of the people in my sort of path were going to work for DNR fishing game or something like that. And as you know, when I was a kid, that was appealing. But by that point, I thought, well, I want to do something a little bit more that I own, that I can manage. And literally took a runner on a Craigslist ad and up and moved to Miami, Florida, and started working with bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions and working and studying animal behavior.

So I started doing that. That eventually led to a job working with elephants in Tampa, Florida, trying to help change the way that we manage elephants in human care. Because when you look at the wild, we understand that a lot of these species are facing some level of extinction and elephants have had a massive decline over the last hundred years. So one of the solutions to prevent extinction is to create captive breeding populations. And so if you're going to create a captive breeding population, you need to figure out how do you manage these animals? How do you take care of them? And so I sort of had a job, um, doing that at, at, at a zoo. And, and we were focused on that for years and, and I just sort of worked my way

up through the zoo system. And I was managing animal care and conservation at zoos in Miami. And then most recently in Dallas, Texas. And, uh, about that time has been, uh, that that's, you know, I started there in 2018 in Dallas and by 2020 COVID hit and sort of made you, uh, really sort of start to question everything. You know, you're locked at your house, you're, you're wondering what's happening and you're trying to really had a lot of self-reflection in 2020. And for me, I realized, you know, it's one thing to sort of put your finger in the dam and try to prevent a leak of a species extinction. It's another thing to try to refill that well. And so I was really looking for ways that I could personally be more impactful to the biodiversity crisis. And about that time, my phone rang and this lunatic, Ben Lamb, who's our CEO, who's an absolute genius, uh, you know, serial entrepreneur, tons of success. He,

he met a, uh, um, he met an amazing guy named George Church who worked at Harvard medical, uh, school as a, uh, and he runs the genetics lab. They're really famous for creating, you know, next generation genomic sequencing technologies. And he's sort of a legend in the genetics world. And they've had this, George has had this idea around restoring woolly mammoths to the Arctic for years. And Ben is being the business-minded one, was sort of able to formulate a business plan around that. And 2021, Colossal Biosciences launched and they called me to come on and help with animal care, animal management, welfare, and wildlife conservation. And was the pitch like the mammoth project?

That was it. At that point, that's all we had. Just make a mammoth. Yeah. We need, if we were to make a mammoth, how do you do that? Well, there's a lot of work that requires, you know, before the mammoth is restored and then tons of work after the mammoth is restored. How do you take care of them? How do you eventually create sustainable populations that could go back into the the arctic somewhere and and and all of those require different skills in animal management where care and welfare but also you know conservation planning how do you go and prepare an ecosystem for a species that hasn't existed in 4 000 years how do you go and figure out how to do this ethically legally right you know hand in hand with regulators things like that so it's been my last two and a half years it's just really been off to the races and

meanwhile to that we've quickly expanded from woolly mammoths to also Tasmanian Tigers who went extinct off the island of Tasmania in 1936 and the dodo which is sort of you know the world's most iconic extinction event in the 1600s, the dodo was discovered and 80 years later was extinct due to Dutch sailors that were introducing predators and invasive species into Mauritius. So all of those have different levels of challenges on the de-extinction side. And then I have a lot of challenges on the conservation side for how do we prepare habitats and do a lot of that, uh, that, that prep work ahead. But also on the Y side, right? Yeah. That's a big one. You're not just doing it because you can. It's not a novelty. Because it's cool. No, the, right. We're facing this enormous biodiversity crisis and we're missing species. I think the Tasmanian tigers, such a great example of this and, and sitting here in Montana, uh, you know, on the doorstep of Yellowstone,

you could sort of draw some parallels to wolf recovery in Yellowstone. The loss of an apex predator led to, you know, certain imbalances in Tasmania. Things like wildlife disease are running rampant today. Things like predator, or sorry, prey population, overpopulation is happening. And, you know, there's, you know,abies and and brushtail possums in in uh in tasmania aren't really fun to hunt so nobody's really regulating those populations and uh and so they need this predator that can come in and provide ecosystem stability it can help remove sick and injured animals that might be spreading wildlife disease like if you've ever heard of tasmanian devils are on the brink of extinction because of this facial tumor disease. And it's literally a contagious cancer. So when they bite each other, which is very much in their social network is how they

communicate. They spread this, this, uh, contagious cancer that ends up creating these massive tumors in their face. And they eventually starve to death and die. That would have, with the right predator present, would, as that animal got sick, it would have been predated and would not have had the chance to pass on that disease. And so, you know, finding solutions, nature-based solutions for how we can restore ecosystems is really the focus of what the company's doing. And we're doing it in a really fun, flashy way, like woolly mammoths. We came out of the gate so hot and got a lot of attention is really fun. But I think now, you know, I'm running around trying to help spread the word on really here's the why, because sometimes the what is so distracting that, that we don't get to the why.

And, and, and that's a, that's been a great part of the last two and a half years. But I feel like on the case of the man with the y is an after effect like the y is searching for a y after the inception of the idea well there's i don't think that like i don't think it's fair to say that um i mean let's be frank i mean the the race to do a mammoth is because it'd be super cool to make a mammoth i i think it's sort of yeah there's sort of two fronts to that. Or, you know, the first one is that moonshot idea of this really amazing, attractive project that's brought tons of investment, right? In three years, we've raised $225 million for conservation technology. In my

15 years prior, we probably raised $5 million, you know? So the scale has been really helpful because of the moonshot aspect. And then also along the way of this amazing project, we're developing technologies and innovations that are applicable every single day to currently imperiled species. And so it really becomes this engine of innovation and investment for endangered species conservation. The other side is there is really strong evidence that shows that restoring mega vertebrates to some of these areas um in the arctic like what's happening in siberia at pleistocene park is using mega vertebrates to try to re-engineer an ecosystem in an ecosystem that's better at insulating permafrost and so that's sort of the big idea

the scale in which to make you know to for that to happen in the arctic and be this massive global solution to climate change would be, you know, really untenable. But, but I think that's the idea is that we can find, you know, targeted areas where we can help impact those things. Uh,

you laid out how you'd make a mangus. Yeah. Completely different path. Yep. On a mammoth. Cloning as compared to de-extinction is easy. Right. Yeah.

And I think that's why a lot of people came out of the gates with the mammoth idea was always we should clone it and you know same same same idea with the mingus example but because we have mammoth flesh and dna and exactly but we don't have living flesh and dna and you can't clone a dead cell right you just can't that's the unfortunate reality but what we can do is we can use genetic editing and engineering tools to basically replicate. So the process for de-extinction sort of starts with paleogenomics. So what Beth Shapiro probably talked about on her, when she, when she appeared years ago. I got to interrupt you for a minute.

Because as you do this, keep this in mind. We were talking about what, what's about, what's that marine mammal, the very small Sea of Cortez? The vaquita. Yeah, okay. It's headed to extinction. Correct. But you guys are devising a plan

by which you'll capture living tissue of things. You could capture living tissue of things, and down the road, de-extinction would be entirely different because you'd have capture living tissue of things and down the road de-extinction would be entirely different because you'd have captured living tissue in the biobank yeah so let's yeah so let's and talk about de-extinction there's cases where you could take a different path to de-extinction if you had the foresight to capture living tissue of white rhinos, whatever, right? It'd be different. So we're talking right now about stuff where there's no, without a time machine,

there's no way to capture living tissue. Exactly. Okay. With living tissue in biobanks. So one of our biggest focuses right now is to improve biobanking throughout the world. So that means we want to go out and collect living tissues of critically endangered species. We want to create cell lines of those and freeze those down. And that is sort of the insurance policy against extinction in the future, because that gives us an ability to go back and do cloning, which is much easier than the

extinction pathway. So a great example of just that is what's happening with northern white rhinos. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but northern white rhinos are native to East Africa, sort of Uganda, CAR, DRC area. And back in 1900, there were about 2,000, 3,000 of them in the world. By the 60s, that number was pretty stable. And by 1975, there were only 500 of them. In 2008, the last ones went extinct in Garamba National Park. But luckily, there were a few left in human care. So there's this amazing zoo in the Czech Republic that had four animals.

They sent them to Kenya in this last-ditch attempt to try to breed the last remaining northern white rhinos. And unfortunately, it turns out because it was the genetics of those animals were bad or they were too far down the path, they weren't able to breed. So now there's this effort using all those biobanked Northern white rhino tissues to create embryos and then use Southern white surrogates to make more Northern white rhinos. And actually just this last month we announced,

so we're part of this international consortium called BioRescue that's leading this charge. Last month we announced the first ever successful in vitro fertilization of a rhino species. So this was a Southern white embryo into a Southern white female, but that was the sort of proof point we needed to say, okay, now we can use the really valuable tissues. So the next step is we're going to put Northern white embryos into Southern white females and make more northern white pinos. So that's sort of the conservation. That's the Mingus model.

That's the Mingus model. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Now let's talk about the model of shit that died 10,000 years ago.

Well, even, unfortunately, things like 1936, the thylacine went extinct. We don't have living tissues of that. There were no biobanks back there. So what we do there is we go and find the extinct species, whether it's a mammoth or a thylacine or a dodo, and we use high quality, the highest quality reference genome. The thylacine is the Tasmanian tiger. Tasmanian tiger, yeah, sorry. And what we do is we sequence the genome of this lost species.

And then we use some comparative analysis to try to determine who's the current closest living relative to that species. So in the case of the Tasmanian tiger, that's this little mouse-sized marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnert. Or in the case of a mammoth, it's an Asian elephant. Or the dodo, it's a Nicobar pigeon. Really? Yeah. So what we can do then is we take that genome of the living animal,

we design editing targets using the genomic analysis tool. So you sort of lay them over each other, see where is one genome different than the other. And we create editing tools to begin to edit the living species into the lost species. What percent different, I don't know how you express it.

What percent different is a woolly mammoth from an Indian elephant? This is a really, a common question is really challenging to answer because the, you and I are both human and our genomic difference is somewhere around 99.8%, right? There are similar, similarity. We are about 99.6% related to a chimpanzee. An Asian elephant.

I heard someone say we're about 77% related to a carrot. Yeah, exactly. Because there's a lot of stuff in there, right? We have a lot of Neanderthal in our genome as well, right? Because we all have these common genes that might be responsible for the basis of life. But a woolly mammoth to an Asian elephant is 99.6% similar. So there's only a 0.4% difference between the two. Okay.

What about the, what about the thylacine to the mouse? To that, that one is. Not the mouse, but sorry. To the, yeah, to the fat-tailed dunner. That one, I can't recall the exact percentage, but it is much more distantly related. So it's not in the 99s. It's not in the 99s, no. So when we talk about editing for, for woolly mammoths, we're really looking at, you know,

several hundred edits, which really in the grand scheme of things is not massive. And then, okay, let's take this Indian elephant and the mammoth. Um, if you just took a, someone who's somewhat well-informed about animals and laid the two of them out, they're going to look and they're going to point to probably the size of the ear. Yeah. Smaller ears on a mammoth tusk length big curved tusk on a on a on a mammoth as well the pelage the hair yeah very hairy what else are they seeing they have a brown fat so right they need to have these sort of cold tolerant phenotypes i mean they lived in a much colder so i got to cut into them to find out yeah so there's this brown adipose layer that you put in them sort of like if you thought about blubber it'd be similar to that and then um there's also things like uh you know physiological changes that you need so one of the things that you have to do to live in extreme cold temperatures is you have to be much better at oxygen transfer

so we need to we need to target things that that provide those adaptations and we have all those targeted and the edits are happening today in the lab. Meanwhile, to that, we're doing all the reproductive side. So when the moment we have our edited mammoth cells, we'll pull the nucleus out of that and we'll put it into the egg of an Asian elephant. That Asian elephant egg then is fertilized and becomes a woolly mammoth embryo. And then from there you use artificial reproduction reproduction not too dissimilar to things like ivf and artificial and uh and artificial insemination those those are the basis basic tools that we start and we go to somatic cell nuclear transfer which is cloning and we clone that embryo um and transfer it into an asian elephant or when you really want to get to the

real sci-fi stuff that we're doing, an artificial womb. So we're building technologies to develop artificial wombs for these species as well. Because if you're ever going to scale a population, you'll always be most limited by how many females are in that population. So if we wanted to make 500 northern white rhinos, we would need 500 southern white rhino females. But if we had artificial wom booms the sky's the limit how long until this man with his to grow well i i gotta ask too and i can see this argument

coming from a guy who's sitting immediately to my left um push back because it's not the same right oh you want a de-extinction well the animal's not the same well you'd be able to be like that's what it looked like right but it's not it right absolutely but i guess my my question would be you know let's talk about uh pumas are a good example yep right what makes a puma a puma we're talking about the florida panther florida panther if i go to if i go to south florida and i find a florida panther or i come up here and i find a cougar they're the same species but they are completely different well were well because they supplemented because they well okay this is supplemented out i'm glad you brought this up yeah the florida panther they got down to less than 50 and they had

extreme genetic bottlenecking issues. And some folks said, well, let's bring in some other ones. And the argument was, well, no, because we're going to lose that little special something that makes them the Florida Panther. And it says, you know what you're going to lose is the whole thing. Right? you know what you're going to lose is the whole thing, right? You can hang on to something by bringing in new animals. But if you take the path of, you know, if you take your current path, they're just going to blink out and be gone. And it's one of my favorite examples because I think conservation for a long time

has stood in its own way with this idea of perfection ahead of good, right? This whole perfection is the enemy of good. The idealism that we should have exactly what was represented in that range, which is a false narrative because we don't even know truly. We can guess really well. But I think the Florida panther genetic rescue project is an amazing example that you don't have to have exactly the same thing. You need very specific phenotypes that help it perform that ecosystem function that helps improve the health of the ecosystem and helps restore

a population. And then the environmental factors that still exist in these ranges will push that animal back into more of what you might consider 100% a pure of that species. And in the meanwhile, it's eating what they ate. It's using the landscape. Is it going to do the same job?

Well, isn't that true that the bison you guys working, the hides you were working on, those bison aren't 100%. Yeah. Right. Like cattle. That's a case where, what was the expression you used? Perfection is the enemy of good. Yeah. That whole discussion about, I think this whole discussion about cattle introgression into bison as being where it becomes

like an obstacle to bison restoration. I think it's such a distraction. It is. And you could line up a thousand humans and be like, what is that animal? Buffalo. And be like, nope, gotcha. Gotcha. It's 0.2% cattle. You know, it's like, come on.

And our chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, who you know, she like come on and our chief science officer beth shapiro who you know um she has for a long time studied um bison genetics and she's got this amazing grad student jonas who they are just published a paper that shows the cattle integration narrative is completely false if you go back historically and you look at bison before the presence of of domestic cattle they had the same level of representation of what we think today is cattle in them, but it's just because it's a, they evolved from a similar place. Yeah. So there is actually very good evidence to suggest that beefalo is kind of BS. Yeah. I've talked to her

about that. Yeah. Because there's actually a reproductive block for future generations once you hybridize the two species so it's really interesting we don't fully understand it but jonas's research shows that if you go back in time and you can see the same representation of cattle in their genome that you would today which from like the base of the exactly tree yeah they sort of evolved from a similar ancestor so they'd have similar dna yeah yeah i guess to be similar with how you know um all everybody of western european descent has some trace element of neanderthal exactly yeah but that doesn't mean we hybridize with neanderthologists we had a common ancestor doesn't

mean we're still doing it yeah i've seen a few examples so let's talk about that though. I want to go back to this, the, the, the set of the steps you do. Um, well, the most obvious question is, uh, what's your, what's your guess? When does this thing hit? When does the first one hit the ground? Science is so hard and, and I hate to put pressure on our scientists and, but I can, because I'm not in the lab doing this, right? I'm just the stupid animal guy that talks about this stuff. Uh, you know, we're really moving forward quickly. because I'm not in the lab doing this, right? I'm just the stupid animal guy that talks about this stuff.

You know, we're really moving forward quickly. We just had this amazing announcement that we've been the first people to ever achieve this pluripotent stem cell line of elephants that's never been done, which is sort of an integral step along the way. So we're looking, you know, 2028 is what we're targeting right now. I would say we have to also acknowledge

that there's two-year gestation for these. So I would always put plus or minuses on these things. But I think this is much sooner than people expect. There's so many challenges ahead that one step could delay us, but that's the course so far. That's what we've painted and we're on target. And when it does, sorry, Brody, real quick.

Is it a multi-step process or does the first one that hit the ground be like, that's what you're aiming for? We don't. I would say we're always going to be improving, right? It's not that this is an iterative process that requires multiple steps, but it is likely that you learn something that changes the next sequence of events. Right. So as we see the first one, we say, Oh, actually, you know, maybe this phenotype needed to be tweaked, or maybe we have a better understanding of what we call genotype to phenotype relationships. Uh, and then that would, that would inform a different type of editing strategy. Who do you guys, um, who you guys answer to as far as like legality i mean there's like obviously like ethical and moral questions that some people are going to have about this

whole thing but like where's the where's the oversight like because you guys are like international right like or is it just u.s no No, well, the operation is U.S. based. We also have some partners in Australia. So, so there's some of that as well. But it's, with anything, especially in U.S. regulatory environment, it's a mess, right? There's so many competing forces for jurisdictional power that we don't really have all the answers yet.

What we are doing today is we're working to help support the IUCN, if you're familiar with the IUCN, right? Oh yeah, we've talked about them. Right. So we're supporting the IUCN Species Survival Commission to really start to drive forward policy statements and really begin to build that roadmap. So we want to help facilitate those things, but in a third party independent fashion so that these groups can help say this is the exact pathway

that has legal regulatory and ethical considerations already baked into it and then that's sort of the gold standard that most governments are looking to to help inform their their domestic regulation here in the u.s we're certainly subjected to things like usda which and aphis which has oversight over over animals in human care, especially mammals, right? And then U.S. Fish and Wildlife, because we're talking about endangered species, some CITES listed, some ESA listed species. And then we have things like FDA. When you're intentionally altering the genome of an animal, technically, there are aspects of that that could fall under FDA jurisdiction. But what's really interesting is there's groups that have been going through this same process

on the ag side already. So there are some guardrails in place, but we just want to be the subject matter expert to provide responsible regulation and move forward together. But I think Aqua Advantage Salmon, had you guys ever seen that? A genetically engineered line of salmon that are meant to be healthier in farm race scenarios they were given um genetic editing tools to essentially help them heal faster because there's so much trauma in farm farm race fishing um and and that took 20 years to get approved so and is it is it approved for human consumption it's just last year it received a thumbs up

really yeah is that off atlantic salmon i actually don't know which salmon they based it on it's got to be yeah i would think so all right let me ask you this this is the thing we've talked about um in private conversation we've discussed this why if you look at why the mammoth and why the thylacine with the the thylacine you could kind of look and be like one it just happened it just went extinct some people argue not entirely crazy people argue that it didn't go extinct true and it did for a while have a lazarus that it was regarded as a lazarus species referencing lazarus from the bible where it was like they thought they were gone and they weren't another really famous lazarus species of

the black-footed ferret it was people thought they were gone but but they weren't. So it's so fresh. There's people thinking that one might turn up. Okay. So here you have like an ecosystem that's ready to receive it. You have, you can point to why it went extinct. The prey base is there. Right. So you could, you could put it back and it's all and it's like it's it just it just wound up missing a beat like that to me seems so constructive and would be so would enjoy such

public support with a mammoth it's like there's some argument that the ship has sailed it's like uh it's like brooks and shawshank redemption the world just got so damn fast it was like clay at the end of the live tour yeah he's like you know i was gone but the world kept going you know he couldn't reintegrate uh yeah so like you know when when they were around, have you seen all this stuff that's come out of that? Were they able to look at stable isotopes and the mammoth tusk and they realize how much this, I mean, how much this mammoth in Alaska was moving during its lifetime. I mean, some bitches like in the Yukon, he's South of the Brooks range. He's North of the Brooks range.

He basically traveled the length of California in a life that was, he died at what? 20, 20 years old or something like that so it's like that ain't there anymore do you know i mean so how do you begin dealing with that like how do you begin dealing with that you you you wind up with the sort of world's most lonely animal well hopefully it won't be lonely because they'll be in a population right this is not a one-off novelty where you just have one of these. The focus is to really create sustainable populations with the idea of re-engineering what today is a tundra ecosystem that doesn't support a lot of biodiversity or life.

Looking at what the Zimovs achieved with Pleistocene Park where they rewilded large vertebrates like musk ox and wild horses and even bison. How many acres is that? It's small. I don't want to give you the wrong number, but it's not massive. Something like 800 hectares or something like that. How do you get around the argument, though, that the animals that are on the tundra now are the ones that belong there now?

Well, I think what we find is that, and there's a lot of evidence that shows this in West Africa with forest elephants, is that the presence of a large mammal like that, a proboscidean, actually opens up more ecological niches. So it's not really displacing species. It's creating more niches to bring more biodiversity.

The mammoth steppe grassland ecosystem that existed 4,000 years ago was as biodiverse as the African savanna. And today it is, you know, sort of a Martian landscape, right? It's really barren. So this idea that we could create more habitable ecosystems for more biodiversity is really compelling in a time when we're facing the world's largest biodiversity crisis. We talk about climate change all the time, and people can debate that to their blue in the face. What you can't debate is that the extinction rates we see

across the world are only accelerating. By 2050, there are some people that estimate we could lose up to 50% of all mammal species. We need to find solutions. We need to begin to say, how can we support nature to be more resilient? Because nature, given time, space, opportunity, will evolve. And it's shown us that. That's why we have the amazing ecosystems we have today. That's why we have Yellowstone National Park.

Nature has provided something amazing. But when we continue to layer pressure upon pressure upon pressure, we're really painting nature into a corner in a place where now it cannot respond fast enough. Evolution cannot keep up. And so what we're looking to do is to provide engineering solutions to accelerate evolution, to provide nature a chance to keep up with humanity, which is really difficult. But, you know, I think restoring ecosystems is the start of that. Removing invasive predators right we're using technologies like genetic biocontrols to remove an invasive predator from say mauritius so that it can prepare prepare an ecosystem for the dodo is amazing i think everybody agree that rats cats and monkeys

don't belong on mauritius and a genetic biocontrol would be um making everybody male yeah that would be one form of a genetic biocontrol. Gene drives is another form, right? So we sort of have these multiple ways that you can create a deleterious allele within an animal's genome, but also give them a biological fitness advantage. So they go into an ecosystem, they spread that allele, that gene throughout the population, and that helps suppress the population or in some cases completely exterminate it. So, you know, there are these amazing opportunities.

They're just emerging technologies that don't have the regulatory guardrails yet, that don't have the social understanding to really support those. And so that's one of the things is we want to help socialize those ideas and help bring these debates to the forefront. Because for us, it's important that people that we acknowledge, we don't have all the answers. We have some amazingly powerful tools, but we need to have debates about these things because the fact of the matter is the status quo is losing. We're falling behind every year and we need to do something maybe a little more drastic.

And that's what Colossal is providing right now. So with the case of the mammoth, like the roadmap, right? So Steve just talked about this one individual that enjoyed this giant historic range and it's just not going to have those types of freedoms. So you would try to find a suitable habitat with a lot of controls, right? Exactly. And also that first mammoth is going to be, uh, pretty valuable. It's going to have quite the price tag attached

to it, right? You know, I think what they ought to do, and I've said this, we need to make nice with Russia again. I'm not saying, I'm not talking about, I'm not wading into geopolitics. Let's say there's a world in which we made nice with Russia again, and we went to Wrangell

Island, which was the last place they existed. They didn't blink out till 4,000 years ago on Wrangell Island. The great pyramids of Gaza were under construction when the woolly mammoth went extinct. Like, I think that a lot of people don't have that context of time, right? They feel like this is such an ancient thing.

Yeah. No, the Egyptians were a highly civilized group at the same time that mammoths walked this earth. Remember Trump was talking about buying Iceland? No, he was going to buy Greenland. He's like, well, we'll buy Greenland. Yeah. Which people tease him about. But I thought I was like, that's a good idea.

Maybe we can buy Wrangell Island. Uh, absolutely. But yeah, like a situation like that, right. It's got its own fence. Um, I think that's how you pilot these things, right? These, these have to be this, a very thoughtful stage gated process of rewilding you cannot just make a woolly mammoth and say godspeed here's the arctic right it's similar

it's similar what happened to that thing no we have to talk about like you know where how does it start in a highly managed situation with with caretakers and then generationally that that level of care is decreased and the ecosystems are broader and broader. And eventually we'll get to a point of what we would call a soft release, which is sort of this vast ecosystem. It's probably fenced or has some sort of physical barrier that allows us to say, okay, here is the experimental

condition that people need to understand what's happening. And then one day you would open that gate and truly rewild. And then just a crazy amount of consistent data on what's happening to the landscape because of the presence of the animal. And that's what's so exciting is there's all

these sort of things that have to happen in 10, 20, 30 years for this to happen. And today we're building technologies to answer those questions. And you also have the EIS. What's the EIS? The Environmental Impact Statement. Oh, yeah. That's why we should do it in Russia. Yeah. Well, it's like that. you also have the eis what's the eis the environmental impact statement oh yeah that's

why we should do it in russia yeah well it's yeah it's like i pick isla mirada like doing an environmental impact statement on it is going to be arduous absolutely but i think there's a lot of opportunity um in in many of these efforts because there's emerging economies around conservation that help drive and support sustained effort. If you were able to improve biodiversity in an area that currently has a low baseline of diversity and you could create this African savanna-like diversity in the Arctic, you could eventually begin to apply for things like biodiversity and carbon credits that become sustainable ways to protect nature. And it's investing in the preservation, restoration of nature

rather than extracting resources from nature. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all let's take a another example um and and talk about the the uh ivy build woodpecker yeah okay the ivy build woodpecker went extinct maybe another lazarus right i'm talking to your yeah it's gone well it's something everybody that sees one in cuba i think it's oh in cuba yeah yeah or louisiana right that was the last one anything from louisiana woodpecker yeah there's the thing of ivory bill woodpecker people see it it's a pileated woodpecker and then i went and held ivory bill billed woodpecker. Um, remember at Cornell, who was there? Yeah. You guys,

that's a big bird. Yeah. But I felt, I used to kind of like in my mind, tease people who screwed, mixed them up. And when I held it, I'm like,

okay, I'm never going to tease anyone again. It's not blurry. Big foot footage. No, it's just like not when I picked up the ivory billed woodpecker, I was thinking I'd be picking up like a, like a eagle. Do you know what I mean? know i mean like like and i and it was just it was kind of like oh

it's a delicate yeah it's a woodpecker it's got a different build by me it's like it's it's not this i just in my mind i had them just enormous you know i had them like like uh i don't know man i just pictured them like giants and you see a pileated woodpecker it's a good size bird but it's not that and then i held one and i'm like okay i see it now i see how you'd screw this up like i wasn't i was under no discredit to the ivory bill woodpecker what i'm trying to say is i was underwhelmed by his size and felt sympathetic toward people that screw it up when they see a pileated woodpecker. But point being, it went extinct during, for many of you listening, it's true of me, it went extinct during your parents' lifetime. We know, someone could take you out and show you the tree where they were last known to exist.

The Singer, you heard of Singer sewing machines yep singer had a forest that they were they held a forest it had ivy build woodpeckers on it um they went to do a timber cut people begged them not to they did the timber cut they actually cut a tree that ivy build woodpeckers were using they saw them fly out as the tree was. I'm not joking. And then they were extinct. The biggest problem they have is just needing large old growth trees with cavities.

Yeah. And it's, it's a really challenging one because it is a reliant on that old growth hardwood. And I brought it up to you being like, let's like focus on that and you talked about how birds are a pain in the ass yeah birds are why is that why are birds a pain in the obviously we're focusing on birds because we have this dodo project right a 40 pound flightless

pigeon essentially from mauritius um what's amazing about that is it's also this sort of engine that's driving investment into avian conservation science that hasn't really been there so far. In the late 90s, we figured out cloning with Dolly the sheep, and now we've improved it vastly in mammals. But mammal reproduction is very different, as you would imagine, from avian reproduction. So typically, we would, like I mentioned with mammalian cloning, we would take a skin cell and pull the nucleus out and put it into an egg. Well, you can't just drop a nucleus into a bird egg because it's a calcified egg. You need to fertilize it while it's still in the body. So what you can do is when you have, say in the case of the dodo, a Nicobar pigeon egg, that is within about three days of fertilization,

so early incubation stage, you can actually window the egg. And using really small tools, you can pull a couple microliters of blood out. And what's really unique about avian reproduction and development is that the cells that predate sperm and egg, we call them primordial germ cells, they're floating around freely in the bloodstream, and then they migrate to the gonads, and that's where they begin to make adult sperm and egg.

While they're still floating within the bloodstream, we can pull those microliter to a blood out and culture those, we call them PGCs, primordial germ cells, and use those to edit. And then we take those edited PGCs that are now not making chicken or pigeon, they're making dodo, sperm and egg, and put them back into the surrogate egg of a sterilized, like say, chicken or pigeon line. And then those cells will migrate into their gonads and suddenly you have this Nicobar pigeon that's actually creating dodo sperm or egg. Wow.

The two pigeons will mate and they'll make a dodo. Oh my goodness. How are they making a dodo? Yeah. I was picturing the vent. So this is why one of the things we talk about is, you know, pigeons probably, Nicobar pigeons will be the genomic donor. The actual animal surrogate would be a large hen, a chicken.

It's not even that big. I mean, there are domestic breeds of chicken. Oh, yeah. Because that's way too, yeah. You don't need nearly that big. No. So we could use a chicken like that. A domestic chicken that could handle an egg like that uh it just dawned on me that you have got to be spending as much time

if not more on eradicating species yeah as opposed to creating because like think of the the big island of hawaii you're gonna have to get rid of introduced mongoose. You're going to have to get, which they've proven that they can't. Right. Um, you're going to have to get rid of mosquitoes. Right. You're going to have to get rid of snakes. You're going to have to get rid of feral cats, which people are going to love. My crowd is at least.

Um, I mean, all of that has got to get done before you put this new experimental species back on the ground. Right. But they're developing tools that as they're developing tools that could be helpful for that. Right. Yeah.

Which are also subject to all kinds of scrutiny. Bio controls. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say we would regionally or targeted eradications, right? Just to be clear. Um, you know, we don't want to just make all, any, uh, mongoose species, but poof off the face of the earth, right?

It needs to be in Hawaii. And so, uh, the, the habitat remediation work that has to occur ahead of rewilding or species reintroduction is, is as important as the de-extinction. And that's why we have such a large conservation focus of the company. That's why a big part of the job that me and my team have been tasked with is going and forming partnerships with local stakeholders, local NGOs and governments and international NGOs, so we can begin to prepare habitats. In three weeks time, I'm jumping on a plane and flying to Mauritius. I'm going to go there to meet with our partners at Mauritian Wildlife Foundation

to talk just about this. What are the islands surrounding Mauritius that currently have invasive species that we would need to remove? And it's not just animals. It's also plants. Plant invasives are as bad as you can imagine. I mean, in order to begin grooming the landscape for dodos. Yeah.

You can't, there's no sense in putting a dodo, which is a ground dwelling, ground nesting bird in a place that the macaque was, which was introduced by the Dutch is that monkey is still present where it's going to raid the nest and eat the eggs. We need to remove the macaques before we introduce the dodo. So those are sort of the issues, but also the dodo had specific dietary requirements and native plants are important, but they, you know, there's been a lot of introduced plant life there. So we have to also work with the amazing work that Mauritian Wildlife Foundation has been doing to date. We're just trying to provide more tools,

more funding, more, more resources so that we can really make a difference before our dodo. Cause the worst thing we could do is sit there with a dodo and not have a place to put it. That's as much of a failure as missing the target altogether. Well, the flip side of that is in some way having that dodo ready to go incentivizes that work in a way that there isn't currently maybe a strong impetus to take those steps. Yeah, I'm happy you called that out because I think one of the really

amazing things about the dodo in particular, but all the species that we're working on, is this idea that they become these shining lights of inspiration and to really help focus efforts back into habitat remediation and invasive removals and things like that. So people say, well, what ecosystem function did the dodo provide? Well, it's not as critical as say an apex predator like the Tasmanian tiger, but it does bring interest to a biodiversity hotspot to help bring funding, to help bring attention to, to, to repairing those ecosystems and preparing and preparing them for a dodo means also improving life for so many other endemic species of the

island of Mauritius. Well, I mean, just think of the eco tourism dollars, right? Like, so there's incentive there, but there's also going to be the battle of like, uh, we can't build a hotel right there. Yeah. You know, what's funny about the eco tourism

aspect of it is, uh, you know, kids trip out about dinosaurs. They were so big. Jurassic were so drastic part well yeah but you'd be like but i'm like but you know what man the biggest animal to ever exist on earth exists right now yep yep and why are you not eager to go look at that it's there right now because it's the biggest animal to ever exist on earth is alive right now. And everybody wants to tell me how big dinosaurs were. Because dinosaurs are around. Not as big as that. Not as big as a blue whale.

Right? Yeah. You've kind of gotten at this a little bit, but why, instead of Tasmanian tigers and dodos, instead of making them, why not make a bunch of California condors and Siberian tigers? Like now, to help them now. Obviously it's not like right now, but. Yeah. I would say it's not an either or proposition for us. It is use these really compelling case studies to help drive the research, drive the investment, to be able to apply it immediately to California condor. We've been know we have we'll be making this big

announcement about some of our focus on north american species coming up here probably about the time this podcast drops and one of those is also to work with native american tribes and and work in indian country where they're already doing amazing conservation and uh and and what's happening with california condor now there's reintroduction efforts that are being focused on in Idaho with Nez Perce. And I think that's where we want to begin to focus. So we have these toolkits, and there are already amazing groups working on California condor. There's so much attention on tigers, right? We can focus other places that create tools that then begin to bleed over

and can be optimized back to those other species. So we're creating open-source tools that are free to the conservation conservation world as we unlock primordial germ cell derivation and editing we'll just give that to the california condor people or we'll help support it ourselves when i'm having when i'm talking about with with friends about colossal uh i never use this term but in explaining it immediately everybody says oh jurassic park yeah the fact that we're what an hour into this and this is the first time it came up might be a world record i've been holding my tongue i've been holding my tongue i'm not bringing it up to have that conversation but i am bringing up to do this we we talked about mingus oh hold on did you want to say more about holding your tongue no no i i just been wanting to say that word oh i can talk

well i'm gonna all right can i please please if you don't like my approach no i'm telling him not to answer it i'm i'm i'm following along i thought we were just going to dig in. No, we're going. We're going right now. I'm following. A part of it. We talked about Mingus, where we go pluck blood from Mingus. We talked about a marine mammal, an imperiled marine mammal, where you go and just shoot, get a plug out of it. Like some kind of little surgical thing that you fire from a blow gun or a drone or whatever and get a little thing, plug a hide off them.

And you got that. So living, we talked about what we have when we find a frozen, you know, come thawing out of the permafrost, a mammoth that maybe froze within hours of death or within days of death has been frozen ever since right and we get it and you'd still see like blood clots where something bit it and you see what it ate last and it's still got vegetation in its teeth right um but what happens when we get back to the t-rex

like what don't you have? And what is the likelihood you'd ever find it? Well, the first thing we don't have is an interest in dinosaurs, just to be clear. Okay, I don't mean you. I don't mean, I mean a collective we. What would stop somebody? Just a big donor comes in.

Okay, yeah. With a private island. Human understanding. Of course. Like, what is not, I know something. Of course. Like what is not, I know something's not there, but what is not there? We don't have DNA.

Okay, and why? You just don't. So even if, you know, typically most of the dinosaur specimens we would uncover are fossils. So those are rocks

that took the place of a bone, right? So there's no DNA in that rock. So you can't even sequence it. If you were to find a very well-preserved 65 million year old specimen, time is still an enemy. UV and temperature and bacteria contamination is still an enemy to DNA integrity. So even if, when we talk about 1936, we talk about highly degraded DNA, It takes incredible amounts of genomic sequencing and so much brute force to sequence that over and over.

If you think about over time, DNA starts as a single strand, just as an oversimplification. It starts as a single strand. Over time, it just cuts in half once, cuts in half twice, and that process repeats. So you go from maybe in 1936, we had a 500 piece puzzle that we had to use artificial intelligence and computational biology to put back in order to make that puzzle. If you go back 65 million years ago, it might be a 5 trillion piece puzzle. You just have dust. Yeah. It's so hard.

The other side of it is we don't actually have a reference genome. So you'll hear us talk about reference genomes a lot of a living relative. One of the ways that we solve those puzzles when we have these highly degraded DNA samples is we find something that's closely related and we go, oh, so it's sort of like a cheat sheet. You know what the puzzle should look like.

So you know, oh, well, the green section's up here, so I'm gonna put this over here. And that's what the AI is doing and the computational biologists are working on, um, with, with dinosaurs that just doesn't, doesn't exist.

So this is not, um, acknowledging that this is not your area of focus. I mean, this is not a thing that's good. This is not a problem that's going to be overcome.

No, no, not, not tried looking for dino blood in mosquitoes preserved in amber and then using the DNA of a West African tree frog to splice it in. And what was that? A leucine. You know, you give them a leucine dependency.

Dr. Henry Wu figured all that out under the tutelage of John Hammond. I think Beth Shapiro from our team has actually shown that ambers are really poor preserved. She said that. She told me that. It's not a good way to me that. I think she actually looked into it, which is amazing. I think that's why she's so cool. So people can put that out of their minds.

Take it out of your mind. In the case of the Vicky, you know, the plight of that little marine mammal is tied to fishing practices. Do you know about this thing yeah i was so embarrassed he was showing me i'd never even heard of the son of a bitch

oh no way i looked at a picture and i'd never seen it oh i mean yeah there's a lot of yeah it's what a lot of people um can't say eat live and breathe but they live and breathe that animal i've never heard of it it It's clocks ticking so fast. It's the world's most endangered marine mammal. And it is, you know, like anime level charisma. Right. It's one of the cutest things you'll ever see in your life.

Um, but you know, like if, if I were in your shoes and you're like, okay, we have it in the, in the bank. What would, there's no point in, in bringing it back right now until these fishing practices change. No, but that's the beauty of biobanking is the idea is we need to take snapshots today. What is the biodiversity that exists? And not just the Noah's Ark of one by one. We don't need one male and one female.

We need the largest population representation we can get. Unfortunately, with this species of Akita, there's only 13. But ideally, somebody could go out and get all 13 biobanked. And that would give us the opportunity that if in 10, 20, 100, 1,000 years, we finally figured out all of the sociopolitical pressures that are driving the extinction of this species, then it could be restored, which is amazing. Um, but the human apathy conundrum, right. Is like, if you have that approach of like, okay, we got them biobanked. These people aren't going to change. We'll wait until it changes. Will it change with the absence of that animal?

Oh, I think similar to what we're talking about the dodo, it actually provides an inspiration to accelerate the change and push. Um, you know, we talk about the moral hazard hazard a lot which is this idea that if we have a technology that can mean extinction is not forever will people care less about extinction oh yeah we'll get to it later yeah yeah but my argument is they're already doing that right the the level of care about the biodiversity loss is shockingly low. So we need to figure out tools to make sure that we can begin to reverse extinctions because nobody else cares. And I know that's a very broad statement. But to be fair, the amount of investment that goes into conservation is just, we should all be ashamed. The Paulson Institute did this amazing research study into conservation spending a couple of years back.

And what they found is that on average, annually, between philanthropy and government spending on the conservation of endangered species, the globe, globally, we spend about $175 billion a year. They also did an estimate of what would the investment take to stop the biodiversity crisis or reverse it. And that's $900 billion a year, which really, if you think about defense spending or some other, you know, you can find another way to contextualize that. It's not a ton of money. You know, Stefano on my team gave me this amazing quote that every year the globe spends $480 billion on soda. What would you rather have? Yeah.

That's not to acknowledge maybe all the downstream healthcare costs, right? Oh, yeah. And things like that. So it just shows you that, unfortunately, the level of interest and investment is so low today that I don't think the moral hazard is a real valid argument

because people do not care enough today. If you had... Oh, go ahead, bro. I was going to say, if you want to get hunters interested, you need to look into the Irish elk, put that on your list. Yeah. So I've got to get behind that one. I've got just to get a look at one.

I've got this dream list going and, you know, if you could do anything in the world, it's not for me, it's not dinosaurs. It is. It's ungulates. That's where I found my passion for conservation, primarily in Africa. But, you know, Irish elk is, you know, you look at a 12-foot span of antler, right?

Like just insane. So tall and so big that when the forest started growing in, that's what was pushing them out of their habitat because they couldn't even fit between trees. Like just an amazing space. The shed hunting world would just poop their way out you'd need tractors hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle

or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it.

Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the, to the on X club. Y'all let me hit you with one here. Uh, cause we would, Brody mentioned like, why not go focus on Siberian tigers? Okay.

Um, so let's talk about Siberian tigers from it. How many are there? Roughly. I, you're less than a thousand correct yeah i think it's way easily yeah yeah so let's say you um did cultivate a population and you and you worked up where you got a dozen of them cloned siberian tigers could you ever get so comfortable with what you'd created

that you would not as a that you would um cut them loose and let them integrate into that population and breeding yes you could you could get so you could get comfortable that you weren't having some reticence that like, dude, I don't know. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing. And this is going to be the final death knell. And relatedly, are you able to fiddle around enough that you don't have concerns about genetic bottlenecks? If you're bringing 12 tigers out of a lab, like you're going in there and kind of buzzing around the edges because if they're all gone you know you talked about like like de-extinction if they're all gone there becomes like a what's to lose like you know if if you do the dodo and you you want to find

appropriate habitat you do all the work you put dodos out and you end like there's a thing you hadn't thought of which is totally possible and it didn't work you'd be like oh we didn't have them before we don't have them now what can we try but in the case it's like with this question about the siberian tiger it's like what's to lose is we don't know yet that there remains a chance so by helping it what's the risk of yeah and i think that risk has to be put in context of what is the current risk of extinction, right? Just because it is still present doesn't mean it will be present in 10 years' time. So I think that is an important comparison. But not only am I comfortable with it, I mean, that's my dream.

That's why I work here. I want to go and find these amazing programs where we can go make a difference in that way. But it's also important to note that this is such a thoughtful and long process that it's not just, like I said earlier, you don't just make them and let them loose. We'd have to work in concert with NGOs, with government agencies to figure out how can we build a reintroduction program that allows us to answer all these sort of risk mitigation questions before we get to that release point but yes a hundred percent my goal in life is that before I die I want to see an endangered species saved by this

technology not save not not read not de-extincted but preventing extinction about I mean for us it's both you know we view the extinction as a conservation tool and and I think you know I we view de-extinction as a conservation tool and and i think you know i i can see ways that we can fix habitats using de-extinction from lost species and that we can save currently imperiled populations of animals knowing what you now know did they do the right thing on the florida panther or like we had current technologies would you have approached the Florida Panther question differently? I mean, using today's tools, we could have done it differently.

And you wouldn't need to go to Texas to get them. More expensively. And this is a, uh, an amazing toolkit we're building. And this goes back to that Northern white Rhino example is one of the things we're doing, and this should be right up Hunter's alleys, right? Is, is we're going back into people's private collections. We're going back into museum collections and understanding if you hunted a northern white rhino in the 50s, 60s, 80s, whatever it was, and you have this specimen, we want to sequence it. We want to go in and we want to figure out

what was the genetic diversity representative of this species before it became extremely bottlenecked, functionally extinct. And now we have 12 lines of northern white rhinos. So essentially you only have 12 founders for the population. When we talk about Florida panther, it was a couple hundred in that and they were so inbred.

So it tells you that there's a really low level. But what we can do is take those 12 lines and leave them sort of what we call wild type and then start to use the genetic diversity information we found from those samples and edit that diversity back in. So we're actually artificially building more founder representation into the population. So that's what's happening right now for us with Northern White Rhino. That's our key role in that project. We're going to Mauritius to talk about doing this with pink pigeons, which were a highly bottlenecked

population that went extinct in the wild. And now we're looking at where else could we apply that? So for the Florida panther question, we could have done the same thing, or we could just go into the Western cougar and identify what parts of the genome would be most impactful back. So without taking all of the Western cougar and mixing it in, you could take pieces of it and be more deliberate or intentional about what you want to do. Obviously that's more high tech and sciencey. So it becomes more expensive than just translocating Western cougars. But, but it is a way to sort of, I think, answer some of the concerns about, are you diluting, um, an endemic subpopulation? Yeah. And is there any temptation to alter these

gene sequences, like to find these like, like Jurassic Park type ways of being like, oh, instead of like eradicating all the rats, can we make it so that ground nesting bird, uh, doesn't smell. Yeah. Like to where the rats don't even see the nest because they can't. So we just announced this amazing project, um, a couple of weeks ago, I think.

And, um, so there's this, a species in Australia comes from the Northern territory of Australia called the Northern Quoll, Q-U-O-L-L. It's a Dazzy Urid. So it's closely related to tasmanian devils um years and years ago cane toads marine toads were introduced to australia as some attempt to control other invasives and just became an invasive in and of themselves right uh cane toads uh uh excrete bufotoxin bufotoxin you know so these are animals native to south america bufotoxin. Bufotoxin, you know, so these are animals native to South America. Bufotoxin is a neurotoxin that kills animals that do not have a resistance to it. So when the cane toad was

introduced to Australia, it really impacted the quoll because it's a perfect size and sort of niche for the quoll to predate. And when the quolls predate on them, they eventually die. And so it's really impacting the population. So what we're doing sort of in that same light is we've identified that animals that co-evolved with the bufo toad, marine toad in South America, actually have this natural resistance to that toxin. And as it turns out, it's a very simple edit. It's like one base pair change um so we're we just announced that we are going and making that change in northern coal lines so that we can release those genetically edited coal back into the northern territory and that that's amazing because it does two things it saves the northern coal from this imminent extinction which almost certain extinction and they can start mowing those

children down there a nature-based way to remove an invasive species. It's, you know, it's so exciting. And I think that, so to your question, yeah, we want to continue to find solutions like that. Wow. That's wild.

Are there regulatory hurdles on that one? That's what I was going to say. People got to be freaking out. I mean, you talk about, there's a big fear about genetically modified organisms, right?

And I think there is also a... I got news for everybody. You're eating them. Yeah, exactly. That was going to be what I was going to say. I think there is also a i got news for everybody you're eating them yeah exactly that was gonna be what i was gonna say is i think there's this unwillingness uh anybody vacation in like florida right and it's like you see helicopters spraying stuff everywhere yeah chemicals are much worse yeah right and you're like do you want that or do you want well that's you have three. Get absolutely eaten alive by mosquitoes. Have them aerial sprayed everywhere. Or you can have a genetically modified mosquito in there that makes everybody male, right?

Yep. Males don't bite. Yeah, that would be one way to do it. But, you know, I think to your point, there's an unwillingness to acknowledge that we have been domesticating our dogs. We've been domesticating our agriculture crops for tens of thousands of years, right? Like that's sort of what we've done. That tomato that you eat every day isn't representative of what a tomato really is. That's what we've made it.

But we did it through traditionally through, you know, artificial selection, backbreeding, crossbreeding, things like, you know, sort of that Mendelian idea of genetics. If we like this phenotype and this one, we're going to breed them and see what happens. We're doing the same thing. We're trying to get this gene from that target that we like, but we're just going to do it in an accelerated way in a lab. So we're still going to pull the same gene and put it in there as you would, might achieve through selective breeding. But we're going to do it much faster and with, uh, with fewer, uh, maybe, uh, uh, unintended consequences.

And isn't there an example of, um, a species of zebra that they, the quagga that, that they brought back by doing sort of the Mendelian you pick out there's two efforts underway so the quagga which is um is is a closely related zebra and sort of it's very phenotypically different has no stripes it's like a more brown and spotted uh and the auroch from europe right there are two efforts to use back breeding to do that and they're making headway and they can do so with much less fanfare and and maybe criticism because people are really comfortable with breeding. Because it looks like what people were doing. Yeah. Tens of thousands of years ago. But the process, when you really get down to it, if you really want to oversimplify it

is essentially the same. You're targeting very specific phenotypes in breeding. Instead, we're figuring out what gene makes that phenotype. And then we're trying to get that to be expressed in our line of interest. So we can do it much faster and much intentional, more intentional. I think that's probably what scares people though, like without leaning too far into like the paranoia and conspiracy theory

thing, like it's like, who's making sure they're not going too far with this, right? Yeah. Or in the case of the, the tiger, right? And it's like somebody in labs like, but we want them a little more pissed off. You know? But I think that's why, you know, we invite

the regulatory environment. We want to be the subject matter expert that builds those guardrails because frankly, there are very few people in the world that understand the true power of this technology more than the people at Colossal. So we need to sit down with the world leading experts in ethics and regulation to say, this is how we think we can use this. And here's

how we think it could probably go wrong. Right. And let's build a guardrail that keeps us on this path. Because when we have this first breakthrough, when we blow all your minds with this first restored species from extinction, we won't be the only show anymore and then pandora's box is wide open yeah luckily we'll be light years ahead of anybody else but somebody else can start to work from the same foundation that we built so we need responsible regulation and i want it for me the only way i could ever achieve my dream of putting a restored species back into the wild or preventing an extinction is to have really strong regulation that invites that type of work yeah you're in a you're in an interesting position of when it comes to policy and legislation you're in the interesting position of needing to point out what it is yeah

like you'd be like like hear me out i'm gonna tell you about a thing we're figuring out how to do that you're probably not aware of. And then I'm going to tell you some things that you might want to do in order to get your hands around the thing I'm going to tell you about. Exactly, yeah. And that's why you've, I don't, if you've looked into us a bit, you know, one of the groups that's invested in Colossal is the venture capital arm of the intelligence community here in the U.S. Because they want to understand more of that. So we can work in concert and show them sort of what are the capabilities of today. And so that's why they've invested in us because they understand that it's also important to national security that the United States leads this effort.

If we're not doing it, somebody else is doing it, we better be the best at it. Yeah, you may have put a chimp into outer space, but you haven't put a but you haven't put a colossal because if our enemies come out with a psychic war elephant right they're gonna look to you and be like well how come i don't have a psychic war elephant you know what you know you'll be you'll be pleased to know i just thought of how to tackle the dinosaur deal oh great let's hear it check it out everybody now knows that like uh you know birds people are like well dinosaurs didn't really go away because some of them became birds somewhere deep in that bird's blood i mean a turkey specifically yeah turkey probably i'd start maybe a crane somewhere deep in that turkey is probably the secret of what you're looking for.

Deep in his blood. All of Steve's best ideas begin with everybody knows X. But deep down in his blood. I mean, the blood in the middle of his heart. Yeah, we might have just been looking in the wrong part of the anatomy. Is probably some clue. Have you seen a Watson? A Watson? It's a South American a watson it's a south american

bird it looks like a tiny velociraptor oh yeah that might be where even better than the crane yeah yeah that might be where it's there they're terrifying looking they have little claws on their wings oh they do yeah oh i like the fact that nature has sort of put up a roadblock according to you that is going to hopefully prevent us from doing what you're talking about too far back too far back yeah or that it just and to me in a way like i've said this for a long time i get a lot of like frowns and like weird looks when i say it but extinction if it happened way back then we lost all these species it was a crazy place it was a very diverse world and then all of a sudden like something hits the earth and it changes all

the shit goes wrong it would lose everything but look right now or 100 years ago wow we have another very diverse cool place and there's nothing to say that as bad as we fuck it up in the next 500 to a thousand years and we are gone gone, that 10,000 years after that, it won't be another beautiful place. I look forward to us all being gone. Humans, all gone. And then let millions of years go by. And then come back and look. It'll be cool.

Like, good Lord. Yeah, I'm certain that the earth and- They're going to put you in the biobank so you can come back. So I can come back and live. Ted Williams. Just your head, yeah. Yeah, Ted Williams style. I'm certain that in, you know, nature and earth will survive.

It just won't be the nature or earth that we know and we're pretty attached to. Right? So it'd be nice. I think you're a little optimistic to think that civilization will last 500 or 1,000 years, though, at this rate that we're chasing down biodiversity loss. People think that biodiversity loss is only about the intrinsic value of nature. It's important to your food security, your health, everything. Without a balance in nature, humanity will not thrive. That's why we have people looking at figuring out how to go to mars yeah i think that i mean just our increasing understanding of the microbial structure of soil um yeah like i don't know we talked about aldo leopold the other day his idea of of uh someone that doesn't really understand a watch looking at a disassembled watch and being like, well,

I don't see what good this part is. Right. It's not obvious to me what that part does and flick it out. And then later be like, God damn it. That's the one part. That was the part that does the. And we do that every day when we say,

you know, you know, commercial fishing is overfishing our seas and we're seeing different, you know, sizes of fish or different populations of fish out there just because of industrialized fishing. You know, we talk about when we are even doing, you know, development for human housing, you know, we're just digging up pieces of land that we got. Well, nothing that we know of today was important there. A great example to that was there's this small lizard from Australia, again, in Victoria called the Victorian grassland earless dragon. It went extinct in 1969 and never seen again. And then one guy was digging up some land in Victoria to put up a housing development, had to do an ecological survey and they discovered the victorian grassland earless dragon while they were destroying its

what's great about that is our partners at zoos victoria and in australia called us and they said you know unfortunately the the australian economy is not strong right now with all the stagnations the stagflation issues down there and they unfortunately, there's no money to save this animal. We ended up funding it. We ended up supporting all the genetics and genomic research. And Zoos Victoria has done an amazing job. Maybe one of the best species recovery stories I've ever heard of. They're the most prepared.

They thought, one day somebody's going to find this lizard. So they went and found a closely related lizard and perfected its husbandry. In the first year that we put that animal at Zoos Victoria, they laid eggs. And now there's, we went from 16 animals to about 70 or so. Yeah. So, I mean, just amazing, right? Absolutely incredible story. And I think that's just goes to show you that, you know, just because things aren't obvious, you know, there's a lot to nature that we don't understand or that we just that that that you kind of miss and couldn't have these insane ripple effects well that was great thank you for coming on thanks for having me i mean this is uh

you got a lot of fans at colossal uh yeah yeah i'd be remiss if i didn't give a shout out to our head of animal husbandry steve metzler he's the biggest fan of you guys so uh he was jealous he couldn't be here but we really appreciate the audience with you and and uh and and getting to share a little bit of what we do we hope we have some exciting updates for you coming up yeah i want to i want to make my final clarification here like we had we joked a little bit and had some laughs about things right right? But I do think that when we had dinner last night, we talked about that I used to have this, I had the wrong idea that I always thought people justified the space race by pointing to Teflon, you know?

And then someone pointed out Teflon didn't come from, I thought it came from our efforts to land on the moon. Either way, I was bringing up this idea that you chase a thing, right? And, and, and, and, and maybe it's not clear what the, why we have this desire at a time where this desire to go to the moon. Right. And it's kind of like, well, what are you gonna do when you get there? And it's an open question, but it leads you down this path. And for us, it led down this path of set, you know, eventually satellite technology, um, internet, whatever, it opens up all these things.

And I do really appreciate in the conversations that we've had, I do really appreciate that, that there's this kind of like North Star idea that's very arresting about like that we would make a mammoth, right? We would de-extinct a mammoth. And I appreciate that for its, it looking at that North Star, the way in which that has created and will continue to create strategies and technologies that would be like applicable to real world current problems is like, it's noteworthy. Yep. I totally agree. I'm like, I'm supportive. I'm supportive of the pursuit. Mostly as much as I'd love to see a mammoth, I'm supportive of the pursuit because of the, the, all the implications that you discussed about ways in which you can be currently, currently helpful on real problems of species blinking out.

You know? Absolutely. The journey is as important as the destination in this case right we are we are doing amazing things along the way if we ever get to the point where we've had so much success that your concerns about the destination come into play we've hit such a home run that we have made such a difference to the natural world that i think people really understand you know in retrospect why this pursuit is so important. When it comes time to find out the regulatory structure on mammoth hunts.

I would appreciate if you guys came and talked to us. Yeah, definitely. The tag draws. Governor's tags. No hunter's orange necessary. All right. Matt James from Colossal Biosciences. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Well, it's a fresh set of eyes We'll always find more beans crawling in the garden on your hands and knees well i don't mind being the one to tell you you done wrong But come on, baby, that's not tonight So listen to my song

Honey, I'm a hot puss in the pot with you There's nothing that I can do So feed the flame honey I love you I'm your puss in the pot Aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran aran Well, I'm a hawk Puss in the park With you

There's nothing That I can do So feed the flame, honey, I love you I'm your puss in the pot I'm your puss in the pot You don't believe me, honey I'm your puss in the pot Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.