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Speaker 1: We've talked about this in the past. It's looking more
Speaker 1: and more likely that Colorado will have a wolverine reintroduction.
Speaker 2: It's in the works for sure. At the same time,
Speaker 2: this whole ESA thing is going on. Colorado has approved
Speaker 2: a reintroduction. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight, but
Speaker 2: it's the plans are in the works. They got to
Speaker 2: go through some hoops to get it done. And like
Speaker 2: you said, you know they belong there. It's a native species, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like to see it happen. I don't, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of who's doing it, but i'd
Speaker 1: like to see it happen. Look, if someone you don't
Speaker 1: like give you five hundred bucks is still five hundred bucks.
Speaker 2: So how's that fall online with your uh, with your
Speaker 2: feelings on them being listed.
Speaker 1: I don't think that they I just don't see that
Speaker 1: they should have been listed.
Speaker 2: Here because there's never a lot of them in the
Speaker 2: first place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like that, there's just not a lot of
Speaker 1: historic data of what they were going on. They're largely
Speaker 1: going on some you know, they're largely going on some
Speaker 1: findings from BC extrapolating that that will happen here. It's
Speaker 1: like a future it's like a future listing. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: I could see there being problems in the future based
Speaker 1: on gut Therefore, and then I just I also know
Speaker 1: how to be leveraged, Like I already know how to
Speaker 1: be leveraged. Yeah, well I think it's it's a I
Speaker 1: think it's a proxy fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that leverage is the same concern I have,
Speaker 2: Like I'm all for the reintroduction in Colorado.
Speaker 3: Where are they pulling wolverines from? Like where did they
Speaker 3: so robust?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Because it can't be a penri.
Speaker 1: They probably haven't even thought about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think they've gotten that far. They didn't
Speaker 2: put a lot of thought into the wolf reintruction.
Speaker 1: But they eventually got them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they got them.
Speaker 1: They'll get them.
Speaker 2: But the leverage you're worried about is the same leverage
Speaker 2: I'm worried about with an administration like the Polis administration,
Speaker 2: like leveraging that against hunting, against trapping, being like, oh,
Speaker 2: this area is closed now, you can't go in there.
Speaker 3: It's a refuge for an endangered species, which means we're
Speaker 3: going to prohibit uh, human travel or whatever, trapping or
Speaker 3: anything that could conceivably harm that species.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that administration has made it clear that
Speaker 2: that's their angle.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think it'll be It's like I fear
Speaker 1: that it'll become a proxy thing where they're they're like,
Speaker 1: what's happening here is they're kind of talking about wolverines,
Speaker 1: but they're kind of not Yeah, they're talking about backcountry
Speaker 1: travel yep, right to talk about snowmobile use trapping restrictions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's kind of like, like you've talked
Speaker 2: about it before, the Lynx thing here, Like there's links
Speaker 2: up in northwestern Montana, but down here in southwestern Montana
Speaker 2: where there's not really like there's this low elevation habitat
Speaker 2: that's like potential links habitat where you can't trap bobcats.
Speaker 2: Like I could see some version of that happening down
Speaker 2: in Colorado.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they drew it with a they drew the lines.
Speaker 1: What's the thing I'm looking for? Like, uh, not surgically right,
Speaker 1: like the Lynx recovery area including a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that never had, never has had, and never will have
Speaker 1: a links But I think there's probably there's work on
Speaker 1: that being done. I don't know if it'll be applied right, But.
Speaker 3: For the wolverines are like those boundary lines of wolverine habitat, right,
Speaker 3: it should be like pretty close proximity to like permanent snowfields,
Speaker 3: glacial areas.
Speaker 1: A convenience store, and Wahhington State downtown.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: What spurred a lot is I recently got a trail
Speaker 1: cam photo of a I got a trail camp photo
Speaker 1: of a wolverine, which is sweet. You haven't seen that, No, No,
Speaker 1: I got a magic I got. I got a camera
Speaker 1: hanging on one tree. Put a set right there by
Speaker 1: the camera. I got a camera hanging on a tree.
Speaker 1: And on that camera, I've gotten gray wolves, Kyo, red fox, bobcat,
Speaker 1: mountain lion, black bear, now wolverine, Martin, longtail weasel, A
Speaker 1: lot of predators. Man, I wait, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: waiting for a grizzly and I'm waiting for a grizzly
Speaker 1: and linkstone.
Speaker 3: What's amazing?
Speaker 1: All all the same freaking tree.
Speaker 5: That's really cool.
Speaker 3: They like that tree?
Speaker 1: Yea, I had that, and that wolverine came through. So
Speaker 1: I posted that picture and generated a lot of discussion.
Speaker 1: I posted a picture and used that occasion to gripe
Speaker 1: about use that occasion to gripe about the move to
Speaker 1: threatened and how the State of Montana is suing against it.
Speaker 1: And then and then you know, people guy wrote A
Speaker 1: guy wrote in what I thought was gonna be a
Speaker 1: well A guy wrote in where he starts out pretty
Speaker 1: good attacking my position, but then he lost all credibility
Speaker 1: with me because in the end he uses discreete population
Speaker 1: segment when in fact it's a distinct population segment. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, this guy, have andy what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: He even capitalized it, so he doesn't know what a
Speaker 1: DPS is.
Speaker 3: So change your email before you ran back in it was.
Speaker 1: Out the door with what he thinks. No, a lot
Speaker 1: of people are griping about that, but I'm not giving
Speaker 1: an inch, dude. I'm not giving an inch on it.
Speaker 2: Stick to your guns man, like.
Speaker 1: I don't uh. I'm a big time wilderness advocate, big
Speaker 1: time yep, I pointed out in this thing like I
Speaker 1: have come out all the time, like you know, continued
Speaker 1: protections for anwar in opposition to Ambler Road. We just
Speaker 1: did a podcast celebrating the heal the wilderness area and
Speaker 1: the creation of the Wilderness system, which we've done a
Speaker 1: bunch of times, and it's like, don't come at me
Speaker 1: about it from that angle. In this case, I just
Speaker 1: think I think the wolverine thing is bullshit.
Speaker 3: Well, obviously we have a big issue with wildlife populations.
Speaker 3: Right when we talk about scientific management, which is a
Speaker 3: conversation we have all the time, right, it's like it
Speaker 3: can be used for good and bad. From my perspective,
Speaker 3: where it's like, well, we don't know how many animals
Speaker 3: there are, so we need to figure that out, but
Speaker 3: then we can set our regulations. It's like, but we
Speaker 3: never do know how many animals there are, Like we never,
Speaker 3: we never will.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When they started doing the population work on wolverines
Speaker 1: and and when it started the population work on wolverines
Speaker 1: in Idaho, Montana wholming, the biggest takeaway was Jesus wolvernes
Speaker 1: all over the place, and al a sudden out of
Speaker 1: that came this. I just don't I think it's I
Speaker 1: don't think it's a good use of time.
Speaker 6: Well, and there's there's always a focus on did it exists?
Speaker 1: I haven't introduced you yet.
Speaker 5: I'm just gonna jump in because.
Speaker 1: We're you're gonna talk for two hours.
Speaker 6: I didn't know we had such formal rules here.
Speaker 1: Please just started.
Speaker 5: There's always this.
Speaker 6: Focus on what where had it existed in there? And
Speaker 6: there's usually little focus on what what did it perform
Speaker 6: for the ecosystem? What good does it do back to
Speaker 6: the ecosystem? And I think that's where the narrative needs
Speaker 6: to be going, not historically where did it range? And
Speaker 6: because we're usually taking snapshots that could be yeah, completely
Speaker 6: out of context for why the animals were pushed into
Speaker 6: a certain area. But we need to be focused on
Speaker 6: how do we bring species back into ecosystems that perform
Speaker 6: specific functions to improve biodiversity, to improve ecosystem health, and
Speaker 6: be less focused on did it exist there? One day
Speaker 6: two hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 7: Mwown somebody up in Lewistown, Montana one day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, convenience store in Washington. Right, somebody's like, oh, look
Speaker 3: look at the data.
Speaker 5: I mean it arranged in the dairy aisle. So we
Speaker 5: got to put it back. That would be a daytime?
Speaker 5: Is that?
Speaker 1: Ladies, gentlemen you here, you just heard the voice of
Speaker 1: Matt James from Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences Company. This don't
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I don't want to trivialize, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm going to titillate people without trivializing what
Speaker 1: you do, okay.
Speaker 5: Should be interesting.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is the company, These are these,
Speaker 1: these are the people leading the charge, uh with you know,
Speaker 1: the most likely path forward on this idea which you
Speaker 1: discussed before, cloning a wooly mammoth, of resurrecting the Tasmanian tiger,
Speaker 1: of perhaps one day putting Dodo birds back on the landscape.
Speaker 6: What was their island, Mauritius, Mauritius.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about de extinction. And again
Speaker 1: when I said, don't want to trivialize it, because we're
Speaker 1: also going to talk about preventing extinction exactly. So a
Speaker 1: lot of emphasis in this world gets put on in
Speaker 1: the news. It always gets like cloning a mammoth, cloning
Speaker 1: a man with cloning a mammoth. But out of that
Speaker 1: work and it's almost become shorthand for a collection of
Speaker 1: it's become shorthand for like this, a collection of technological
Speaker 1: advancements that are applicable around biodiversity and applicable around preventing extinction.
Speaker 1: And then and then if need to be de extinction exactly.
Speaker 6: The extinction is sort of the intersection of this amazing
Speaker 6: set of technologies that are all emerging at a similar time,
Speaker 6: and we sit at that intersection today, which has given
Speaker 6: us the ability to not exactly clone a wily mammoth.
Speaker 6: We know we cannot do that. I think you had
Speaker 6: Best Shapiro on years ago, and she talked about this
Speaker 6: problem exactly, but to be able to engineer genomes to
Speaker 6: begin to mirror extinct species and bring that species back
Speaker 6: in a way that is as representative of the extinct
Speaker 6: animal as it could be, and what.
Speaker 1: We talked about last night. Maybe I'm gonna have you
Speaker 1: start with this real quick. This is not going to
Speaker 1: be the focus of our conversation. But let's say a
Speaker 1: fella had a once in a lifetime hunting dog.
Speaker 5: Let's say that.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say this Yanni has a beloved dog and
Speaker 1: it fell off a cliff recently.
Speaker 6: It's fine, that's a real story, that's true. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Let's say that Yannie's dog had fallen off that cliff
Speaker 1: and wasn't okay, can you walk through, how quickly walked
Speaker 1: through how he might wind up with in the It's possible, now,
Speaker 1: it's expensive, but possible. How he might wind up with
Speaker 1: that dog all over again?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean this kind of goes back to the
Speaker 6: late nineties when we talked about Dolly the Sheep and cloning. Right,
Speaker 6: this is just basic cloning technology and the extension is
Speaker 6: an advancement thereof. But so for this example, we're really
Speaker 6: talking about cloning. So, whether you had a living dog
Speaker 6: or a dog that you know, unfortunately just passed away,
Speaker 6: you fresh dead, yeah, unfortunately, I hate to say it
Speaker 6: that way, but you need a fresh dead animal or
Speaker 6: a living animal, and you can extract living cells either
Speaker 6: from skin tissue, where there's even some novel technologies that
Speaker 6: might include being able to do this from blood. And
Speaker 6: what you do is you take those cells or those
Speaker 6: tissues and you put them into a petri dish essentially, right,
Speaker 6: You're going to culture this and you find out what
Speaker 6: are the culture conditions so that we can begin to
Speaker 6: take that one tissue and proliferate into this living cell line.
Speaker 6: And then we go and select very specific cells. We're
Speaker 6: going to look for things like epithelial cells, and we
Speaker 6: can make something called the fiber blast line. You have
Speaker 6: that we just freeze it, you put it on liquid nitrogen.
Speaker 6: It will live forever in a biobank.
Speaker 5: Excuse me, and.
Speaker 1: So Mingus is in a biobank.
Speaker 6: Now Migus is on ice in a biobank, and one
Speaker 6: day you say, you know, I really want to see
Speaker 6: Mingus again. We have the ability to be able to
Speaker 6: go back to Mingus, take his cells, put them into
Speaker 6: the o site or the egg of a dog, and
Speaker 6: fertilize an embryo culture that embryo in vitro and then
Speaker 6: eventually transferred into a surrogate dog.
Speaker 5: That surrogate would just state sixty.
Speaker 6: Five days later, you know, little day zero, Mingus is
Speaker 6: born and it is an exact living replica of the
Speaker 6: dog or whatever animal you were looking for. Now, obviously there's.
Speaker 3: There's with a crazy blood lust.
Speaker 6: Right, There's one thing that I think is always important
Speaker 6: with cloning is we have to talk about nature versus nurture.
Speaker 5: Right, your dog.
Speaker 6: Might not end up being you know, Mingus two dot
Speaker 6: oh might not be Mgus one dot oh because the
Speaker 6: way you raised the two might vary, and that plays
Speaker 6: a big role, especially in hunting dogs. As you guys
Speaker 6: know well better than I do, that that training that
Speaker 6: happens really early on, that sort of life experience is
Speaker 6: as important as genetics often.
Speaker 3: Well dog wise, right, like, the way I was able
Speaker 3: to train a dog ten years ago is a lot
Speaker 3: different than the way I was able to train a
Speaker 3: dog two years ago. So like that may be changed
Speaker 3: because I changed, Am I improved as a trainer? Change?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: No, I'm way busier now, you're actually way way worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah that on that thing, like uh, the nature versus
Speaker 1: nurture thing, but on this idea that pretty soon you
Speaker 1: would be able to just get your you know, get
Speaker 1: your best hunting dogs cloned, and instead of just going
Speaker 1: back to the same sire, the same bitch and getting
Speaker 1: another dog out of that litter, you're gonna wind up
Speaker 1: with something closer, right.
Speaker 6: You're gonna be because right every time you breed, you're
Speaker 6: sort of shuffling genetics, and you know, the sire and
Speaker 6: the bitches DNA will mix and you'll get a different
Speaker 6: you know, set of phenotypes. Then you might have just
Speaker 6: from the original, just like you might have siblings that
Speaker 6: are not exactly the same as you.
Speaker 5: It's because it was.
Speaker 6: A reshuffling of the genomic information by cloning, and you're
Speaker 6: actually taking that full genome and just doing it again.
Speaker 1: Like how okay, how much would it look? Like? How
Speaker 1: much would mingus two point zero look like mingos are.
Speaker 5: The spots in the same place, So yeah, if it's
Speaker 5: a spotted dog.
Speaker 6: So this is a great question because there are several
Speaker 6: things that control the way that our genes are expressed
Speaker 6: into phenotypes.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: So one of them is obviously the genetics are what
Speaker 6: are the genetics telling the cells to make? But the
Speaker 6: other is a is a process called epigenetics. So basically,
Speaker 6: what are the environmental forces and around the expression of
Speaker 6: those genes, there's regulatory pathways. Maybe you know, say you
Speaker 6: were supposed to be six foot four, but you were
Speaker 6: undernourished as a child, You're not going to grow to
Speaker 6: be six foot four. That's an epigenetic effect, right. So
Speaker 6: you could clone three minguses right now and each of
Speaker 6: them would show up and look very very similar, but
Speaker 6: those those spots might end up in slightly different sizes
Speaker 6: or areas, and and sometimes you see that drift, you know,
Speaker 6: there's uh, they've been cloning in race and not racehorses, sorry,
Speaker 6: but like polo horses and dressage and horses like that.
Speaker 6: And you can go into a barn and you can see,
Speaker 6: you know a lot of these sort of brown horses
Speaker 6: with a nice white spot on their on their face,
Speaker 6: and it's slightly different on each one. It's the trickiest
Speaker 6: thing you've ever seen. Yeah, but from afar they are
Speaker 6: identical animals.
Speaker 1: How much do you think you capture? It's it's let's
Speaker 1: say you take Mngus okay, and you give Mingus a stimuli, okay,
Speaker 1: Like like Mingus is And I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: true or not, but Mingus is the sort of do
Speaker 1: that that if he gets up on the table okay
Speaker 1: and eats leftovers off the table when you're you know,
Speaker 1: out of the room. He's the kind of dog that
Speaker 1: man you tell him one time that ain't good, he
Speaker 1: ain't gonna do it again, right, Like, if that's a
Speaker 1: response to stimuli, what would you expect to see about
Speaker 1: the cloned dog's response to stimuli?
Speaker 6: Well, it just depends on how it was raised. I
Speaker 6: would expect you know that that's really operant conditioning, right
Speaker 6: when we talk about sort of how can you uh
Speaker 6: show a stimuli and then get a required behavior and
Speaker 6: provide a consequence. Sometimes it's positive, like you fed the dog,
Speaker 6: you know, you gave him a treat because they did
Speaker 6: what you wanted. And other times to maybe yelled at
Speaker 6: the dog and the dog ran off, so negative conditioning there, right.
Speaker 6: If they were raised the same way, I bet it'd
Speaker 6: be identical. But if one was raised by a really
Speaker 6: great dog trainer, in the other by somebody who just
Speaker 6: let his dog feet off the table, those two manuses
Speaker 6: would probably behave very different directions.
Speaker 2: Is there another version of this where you can like
Speaker 2: put add ons into mingus two point.
Speaker 5: Oh, Like, let's say, are getting into what we're doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, strong, Yeah, we're.
Speaker 6: Not enhancing that. You know, we would call those like
Speaker 6: genetic enhancements or something. We're not really doing that for
Speaker 6: dogs or for things. We're focused on the conservation side.
Speaker 6: But you know, to that point, yes, you could say
Speaker 6: we want to confer a specific disease resistance to this animal. Right,
Speaker 6: Distemper in dogs is an issue and they found you know.
Speaker 5: Like with wolves.
Speaker 6: If you see a black wolf, that's actually a sign
Speaker 6: that there's been dogs that have integressed into that dog's
Speaker 6: genetic line. But it also is closely correlated with a
Speaker 6: resistance to distemper, which dogs stand.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so if you see a black wolf, now it
Speaker 6: has to be a header. As I guess you're.
Speaker 1: Looking at old dog DNA.
Speaker 5: You're looking at old dog dna. Yeah, wolves did not
Speaker 5: evolve the black yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: And but it also is highly correlated with distemper resistance.
Speaker 6: So you could identify that gene and finding that doesn't
Speaker 6: have it and using genetic editing tools, you know, the
Speaker 6: most famous being crisper. You could drop that in there
Speaker 6: and then you know reasonably when the doug's born, it
Speaker 6: will be resistant to distemper.
Speaker 3: All right, can can we move on from the pet project? Oh?
Speaker 1: No, that was that was a warm Yeah. We're gonna
Speaker 1: do a couple of things that we're gonna get into that.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into all the big all the big
Speaker 1: crazy stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's like your boutique making money on the side
Speaker 3: spin off.
Speaker 6: We're not even doing it, but it's I think it's
Speaker 6: an easy example for people to understand.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's close that conversation out with with this. When
Speaker 1: you crystal ball it, do you picture in ten years,
Speaker 1: do you picture that becoming kind of how we're producing
Speaker 1: hunting dogs, how we're producing specialty dogs, how we're producing
Speaker 1: drug sniffing dogs. Where you have these like you know,
Speaker 1: one and one hundred attributes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think, you know, maybe ten years or too soon,
Speaker 6: just because there's some social acceptance. But in the working
Speaker 6: dog class, especially honey dogs and you know, say police dogs, Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Like the military is like, no, I want that. Why
Speaker 1: would you want a bunch of those? Yeah? If this
Speaker 1: is a business, I don't want to go through thousands
Speaker 1: of dogs to find that exactly.
Speaker 6: You know, if this is a business, fore you're gonna
Speaker 6: find a way how can we most efficiently produce that,
Speaker 6: you know, reliably reproduce that phenotype. Absolutely, And the science
Speaker 6: is there today and it will just in ten your
Speaker 6: time be so scalable and cheaper that I think it'll
Speaker 6: be widely accepted.
Speaker 1: I asked you yesterday to throw me a ballpark on
Speaker 1: what this Mingus project? Are you comfortable doing this?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I said, like give me a ballpark. Like Yanni
Speaker 1: wants a new Mingus. What's he looking at? If you
Speaker 1: just put at fair market.
Speaker 6: You know, seventy five K I think just because you know,
Speaker 6: and that's a number I just kind of pulled out
Speaker 6: a roundabout number when we were talking about Now you're.
Speaker 1: Talking about cost. That's that's a cost that's not retail markup.
Speaker 5: No, because there's there's just so many. Yeah, there are so.
Speaker 3: Many retail markum Sky's the limit. Yeah, I mean just
Speaker 3: looking at the duck hunting world, like what guys will
Speaker 3: pay for a finished Labrador Retriever or a German short
Speaker 3: hair pointer that somebody else has gone through the raising
Speaker 3: of with a good background, And that good background typically
Speaker 3: just means everybody thinks that the dogs coming out of
Speaker 3: this candel are the best.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: I mean you can put whatever price tag you want,
Speaker 3: but what are some numbers you heard that people are
Speaker 3: paying for them? Basically anything under a quarter of a million? Wow,
Speaker 3: for the right person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I'm in an awkward position. Oh great, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to clarify this is not what you do. Correct,
Speaker 1: it's not what your company does.
Speaker 6: But I'm starting to get an idea it's.
Speaker 1: Your company does. I like layout, like, just take a
Speaker 1: wild ass guess. Take a wild ass guess. Let's put
Speaker 1: it into this case, like the military. You know they
Speaker 1: have dogs they use in combat operations whatever, and they
Speaker 1: want to order like a whole bunch of these dogs.
Speaker 6: Uh Like what would that be? Wild ass guests? I
Speaker 6: mean you just think you don't discoverment spending. I think
Speaker 6: you could go north of a million or two million
Speaker 6: on them the right animal, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Think of the falconry and racing pigeon world like sultans
Speaker 3: of Like, yeah, we're into we're into money than like
Speaker 3: I mean, we're dancing around races.
Speaker 1: Let's we're gonna talk about what mad actually does.
Speaker 3: What everything before just now, that's just gonna be the
Speaker 3: prices for animals.
Speaker 1: Okay, because what they're actually doing is fascinating. We're go
Speaker 1: getting what they're actually doing in just one in just
Speaker 1: one second, I was just little. That was just a
Speaker 1: little warm up. The kids podcast, we keep talking about,
Speaker 1: starts July fifth, right on this podcast feed. We've said
Speaker 1: it a bunch of times. How many are we making?
Speaker 4: Five?
Speaker 1: We're making five kids podcasts. Whether we make number six
Speaker 1: depends on if your kids like it. Yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: say any plane or net. Each episode of the kids
Speaker 1: podcast goes like this, They're quick, how long are they?
Speaker 1: What are they? Where are they coming to? Net? Phil
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen to twenty Okay, it's a three x structure.
Speaker 1: There's why it's the way it is, where we explain
Speaker 1: why something is the way it is. It could be
Speaker 1: Why are teddy bears called teddy bears? It could be
Speaker 1: what is an anadamous fish? It could be when you
Speaker 1: say nocturnal, what's the opposite? And is there a middle ground?
Speaker 3: I like it asking the question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is. It's called crepuscular. Okay. Other Wise the
Speaker 1: way it is is that we're doing Oh what exactly
Speaker 1: did Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett do for a living?
Speaker 1: Why it's the way it is? What exactly were they
Speaker 1: up to? Why does everybody know about those guys? What
Speaker 1: did they do for a living? Can you think of more?
Speaker 1: Why it's the way it is? We just do them all.
Speaker 1: I think you just listed all of them. Okay, So
Speaker 1: why it's the way it is? I host Why it
Speaker 1: is the way it is? I tell your kid, why
Speaker 1: is the way it is? What's my credential? I've been
Speaker 1: telling my kids why is the way it is? For
Speaker 1: fourteen years and everyone else? So that's why I took
Speaker 1: That's why that's my job. And then there's Guess that Critter.
Speaker 1: Guess that Critter, which Krinn works on, but it's hosted
Speaker 1: by my lovely wife who hosts. She just she does
Speaker 1: the read and guess that critter where we do wild
Speaker 1: we come up. We use animals to have the craziest vocalizations,
Speaker 1: the most varied, craziest vocalizations, and we play vocalizations and
Speaker 1: then we start providing a bed of clues. Uh. The
Speaker 1: earlier kid gets it. The smarter kid is.
Speaker 3: You'll be able to take that score to your Montsori.
Speaker 1: School and you'll also know whether you want to pull
Speaker 1: blood from that kid and send it to me.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Then the final thing is kids trivia, and we bring
Speaker 1: in a bunch of actual live kids. They record trivia, not.
Speaker 8: Tell us heavily.
Speaker 1: Heavily staff familiar and some neighbors, straight neighborhood kids we've
Speaker 1: brought in. We brought in my primary care providers kids.
Speaker 1: Didn't we just bringing some stray kids. They played trivia,
Speaker 1: but they play trivia this way, you know, keeping hollering
Speaker 1: kids these days, there's no winners and losers. They're all winners.
Speaker 1: So what the kids do is they build a pot
Speaker 1: of money for conservation. Meaning it's our normal, it's a
Speaker 1: trivia show for kids. But every time any of the
Speaker 1: kids gets to like every right answer generates more revenue
Speaker 1: into the pot, which goes to a conservation organization that
Speaker 1: that's a kid's focused conservation group where kids focus charity
Speaker 1: and so they they're building the pot. Meaning when you
Speaker 1: ask all ten them a question, it's not that some
Speaker 1: of them win and lose. It's that the right answers
Speaker 1: build a pot of money. So their cooperative effort.
Speaker 5: There are weak links in the chain that I'm sure.
Speaker 8: Well in terms of the nature versus nurture host Spencer
Speaker 8: Newharth definitely has found some personality similarities between uh are
Speaker 8: our colleagues and their children, and he chooses to point
Speaker 8: them out each time, like like these.
Speaker 1: Kids just quietly have the right answer.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean he definitely. He definitely picked on Mabel,
Speaker 8: one of Yanni's daughters, for having a similar trait of
Speaker 8: seeing if anyone, but that was.
Speaker 9: Only because Mabel called him out, and I think that
Speaker 9: he was embarrassed by.
Speaker 3: The video component is there's a tube that shoots out
Speaker 3: a marshmallow to the person with the right answer, And
Speaker 3: that's where it really cranks up visually.
Speaker 9: You don't feel like you know us well already from
Speaker 9: listening to us for hours every week. Now you'll you'll
Speaker 9: get like a another layer of who we are because
Speaker 9: you're going to get to like study who are kids are?
Speaker 5: And those of us without children will remain mysterious.
Speaker 3: That's right, which was the point the whole time.
Speaker 1: June twenty seventh, tune in on YouTube for our latest experiment.
Speaker 1: Not latest, We don't do that many. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: we've done a few experiments. Yesterda two days ago we
Speaker 1: went out and made bullboats. So we went and got
Speaker 1: a bull boat, as you know, or maybe you don't,
Speaker 1: is a temporary use water craft that can be made
Speaker 1: using nothing but the hide off of a buffalo. It's
Speaker 1: called a bullboat because you need a pretty good sized
Speaker 1: critter to make it. We used a couple thousand pound
Speaker 1: roughly thousand pound bulls, I mean a three year old
Speaker 1: three year olds. We have a friend at North Bridger Bison,
Speaker 1: Matt Skogland, North Bridger Bison, who does he does all?
Speaker 1: He has a bison ranch. He's explaining me before His
Speaker 1: animals are born on his ranch and they die on
Speaker 1: his ranch, all grass fed, field harvested. And what you
Speaker 1: do is when you want to buy from him, you
Speaker 1: buy the animal, right, it's custom slaughter. You buy the animal,
Speaker 1: buying the meat on the animal. You don't go on
Speaker 1: a website and buy a cut of this, a cut
Speaker 1: of that. You go in and buy a portion of
Speaker 1: percentage of an animal that's currently living on his ranch.
Speaker 1: He field harvests the animal. It's custom cut to your specifications. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: we got hides from him and made boats, and we
Speaker 1: made boats using nothing but native materials. So we went
Speaker 1: into a willow patch and used willow bark, which I
Speaker 1: didn't love, used willow bark, braided buffalo hair, which I
Speaker 1: didn't love, and cuts of raw hide thong not thongs
Speaker 1: of strips of strips of yeah, strips of raw hide
Speaker 1: for rope. So willows, willow bark, buffalo hair, buffalo strips
Speaker 1: of buffalo hide as rope and crafted bull boats.
Speaker 3: I think it's important to point out too, and raised
Speaker 3: them are raw hide in this context means it is
Speaker 3: a fresh hide, not like your raw hide dog juice.
Speaker 3: It's the same thing, it's just at a different stage.
Speaker 1: Of This was fresh, green, slicker and snot wet, hard
Speaker 1: to work with hide.
Speaker 3: I was actually very impressed with the bark because when
Speaker 3: if the stuff that dried, when it was tied and wrapped, it.
Speaker 1: Tough. It was real tough, braided hair is a bitch.
Speaker 1: If you got like a dog with long hair, try
Speaker 1: to tie her hair in a knot like try to
Speaker 1: throw a granny into your daughter's hair. He kars hair.
Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't, it doesn't hold it out. So I
Speaker 1: braided all I took all my time braiding all this
Speaker 1: hair up, giving myself an arth You want to talk
Speaker 1: about an arthritick egg braiden big along strands of hair
Speaker 1: together and then you go throw a granny in It
Speaker 1: just unravels in front of your eyes. But but there's
Speaker 1: a thing I read. But if you the picture, you
Speaker 1: take a picture, you take a deer hide, just a
Speaker 1: few listeners out there, take a deer hide and start
Speaker 1: so lay the deer hide out. Ideally you'd scrape the
Speaker 1: hair off, lay the deer hide out, and start a
Speaker 1: cut in and start cutting a quarter inch thick strap
Speaker 1: parallel to the edge. And imagine you go in concentric circles,
Speaker 1: take one hundred go around, keep going quarter inch all
Speaker 1: the whole periphery, and then come in and do concentric circles.
Speaker 1: You gonna you could stretch that. I'm gonna go out
Speaker 1: on a limb and say it go to the moon.
Speaker 9: Remember We had a guy right in and said that
Speaker 9: he used to do that with squirrel leather. And he
Speaker 9: said that you use that for shoe laces and it
Speaker 9: would outlast the boots.
Speaker 3: No way.
Speaker 1: He did take a squirrel hide and make leather laces
Speaker 1: out of squirrel hide. And I'll tell you what, anybody's
Speaker 1: ever try to clean a squirrel will.
Speaker 3: In that's right up your eye.
Speaker 2: Leave the hair on there al or shoes.
Speaker 1: Made me a couple of thin pieces for dental floss.
Speaker 1: Bro because what I've been using lately is not work
Speaker 1: that popcorn yesterday?
Speaker 2: Would you leave the hair on for the dental floss
Speaker 2: to get a little It's.
Speaker 5: A brush, brush and floss at the same time.
Speaker 1: And we raised them. We raised them. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: we raised them.
Speaker 3: I Uh, people got to watch.
Speaker 1: You gotta watch.
Speaker 3: But this comes out after the don't get it all
Speaker 3: the way. Yeah, this comes after the deal. But people
Speaker 3: still need to need to watch. But it was it
Speaker 3: was a group learning effort with a race at the end.
Speaker 1: How's that highlight of my day? Is? All day I
Speaker 1: kept think we're gonna find morels because where we were
Speaker 1: I walked around a lot looking, well, here's what happened
Speaker 1: to me on the way out. On the way I'm
Speaker 1: sitting in the back of a truck. I look over
Speaker 1: just plain as day is a morele it grew wild. No,
Speaker 1: we hadn't gone in that driven by. Yeah, Chili thought
Speaker 1: someone fell out and got hit. Stop stop, he jumps out.
Speaker 1: He thought someone got rolled over. Like there's a morale.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh my god, you guys give me a
Speaker 1: heart attack. We'll talk about breeding meal deer later. Oh,
Speaker 1: we use one thousand pound animals. And then in the
Speaker 1: historic record people talk about a bull boat that's eight
Speaker 1: feet in diameter. But Matt Skoglan was talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: if you really let him go. We were using hides
Speaker 1: off three year old animals. You know, if you let
Speaker 1: them go, you could get a you know, there's such
Speaker 1: a thing as a close to a one ton bowl.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If you look at like old beef balls, old beef
Speaker 3: balls get to a point that they can't really be managers.
Speaker 3: They can't. They get so big and dangerous that they
Speaker 3: kind of just do what they want. So if you
Speaker 3: see an old beef bawl out there on the range,
Speaker 3: they just they do They just get bigger and bigger, sorry.
Speaker 1: Magic are around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the muscle bulk and everything is next get enormous
Speaker 3: and yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. The last thing I'll point out is my boat,
Speaker 1: my personal vessel was Uh no, in fact, it's no,
Speaker 1: it's got all it's I meant to grab some of
Speaker 1: that hide for a thing I want to make, and
Speaker 1: I had some, Matt and uh, Matt and uh Brady
Speaker 1: go back out and they cut a chunk of hide
Speaker 1: off the boat. So as you find laying on the bank,
Speaker 1: it's got a hole in it now, But no, I'm
Speaker 1: still sitting there right. It's just sitting in a willow
Speaker 1: patch right now, like it would be back in the day.
Speaker 1: Apparently with a hole in it. Oh, it was so
Speaker 1: stable you could cast a fly route out of it
Speaker 1: floating down the river. Worked very well. All right, Matt, Uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's dig into Colossal biosciences. Talk about how you
Speaker 1: got started in Zoo. You were you manage Zoo's.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I before walk us through the career real quick,
Speaker 6: before Colossal started, I was. I had studied biology and chemistry, ecology.
Speaker 6: I went I went to a master's program in South
Speaker 6: Carolina studying wetland ecology, and when I finished up there,
Speaker 6: I sort of realized what about wetland ecology so specifically,
Speaker 6: so it was sort of marine and wetland ecology.
Speaker 5: I was more on the marine side.
Speaker 6: So I was studying sea turtle nesting in South Carolina
Speaker 6: in Atistowe Beach of sea turtle those are loggerheads. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and uh it was great. You know, as a twenty
Speaker 6: two year old grad student. I was living on a
Speaker 6: beach for a week or two in a tent with
Speaker 6: my one hundred and forty pound Saint Bernard, and uh,
Speaker 6: you know, just trying to walk the beach every morning
Speaker 6: and see where sea turtles were crawling, mark their nests,
Speaker 6: and study basically thermal dynamics.
Speaker 3: Well, you painted a very sandy tent picture.
Speaker 6: Ye came humid, slobbery, and then there was a dog,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 5: But it was great. I loved it.
Speaker 6: But I realized quickly that most of the people in
Speaker 6: my sort of path, we're going to work for DNR
Speaker 6: fishing game or something like that. And as you know,
Speaker 6: when I was a kid, that was appealing. But by
Speaker 6: that point I thought, well, you know, I want to
Speaker 6: do something a little bit more that I own, that
Speaker 6: I that I can manage and literally took a runner
Speaker 6: on a Craigslist ad and move up and moved to Miami,
Speaker 6: Florida and started working with bottlenosed dolphins and California sea
Speaker 6: lions and working and studying animal behavior. And so I
Speaker 6: started doing that, and that eventually led to a job
Speaker 6: working with elephants in Tampa, Florida, trying to help change
Speaker 6: the way that we manage elephants in human care. Right
Speaker 6: because we look at the wild, we understand that a
Speaker 6: lot of these species are facing some level of extinction,
Speaker 6: and elephants have had a massive decline over the last
Speaker 6: hundred years. So one of the solutions to prevent extinction
Speaker 6: is to create captive breeding populations. And so if you're
Speaker 6: going to create a captive breeding population, you need to
Speaker 6: figure out how do you manage these animals, how do
Speaker 6: you take care of them? And so I sort of
Speaker 6: had a job doing that at a zoo and we
Speaker 6: were focused on that for years, and I just sort
Speaker 6: of worked my way up through the zoo system and
Speaker 6: managing animal care and conservation at Ze's in Miami and
Speaker 6: then most recently in Dallas, Texas. And about that time
Speaker 6: has when that's you know, I started there in twenty
Speaker 6: eighteen in Dallas, and by twenty twenty, COVID hit and
Speaker 6: sort of made you really sort of start to question everything.
Speaker 6: You know, you're locked at your house, You're you're wondering
Speaker 6: what's happening, You're trying to really had a lot of
Speaker 6: self reflection in twenty twenty, and for me, I realize,
Speaker 6: you know, it's one thing to sort of put your
Speaker 6: finger in the in the dam and try to prevent
Speaker 6: a leak of a species extinction. It's another thing to
Speaker 6: try to refill that well. And so I was really
Speaker 6: looking for ways that I could personally be more impactful
Speaker 6: to the biodiversity crisis. And about that time, my phone
Speaker 6: rang and this lunatic Ben Lamb, who's our ce, who's
Speaker 6: absolute genius, you know, serial entrepreneur, tons of success. He
Speaker 6: met a He met an amazing guy named George Church
Speaker 6: who worked at Harvard Medical School as and he runs
Speaker 6: the genetics lab there, really famous for creating, you know,
Speaker 6: next generation genomic sequence technologies. An he's sort of a
Speaker 6: legend in the genetics world, and they they've had this
Speaker 6: George has had this idea around restoring Willie mammoths to
Speaker 6: the Arctic for years and ben Is, being the business
Speaker 6: minded one, was sort of able to formulate a business
Speaker 6: plan around that.
Speaker 5: And twenty twenty one.
Speaker 6: Colossal Bioscience is launched and they called me to come
Speaker 6: on and help with animal care, animal management, welfare, and
Speaker 6: wildlife conservation. It was the pitch, like the mammoth project,
Speaker 6: that was it at that point. That's all we had,
Speaker 6: just make a mammoth. Yeah, we need If we were
Speaker 6: to make a mammoth, how do you do that? Well,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of work that requires, you know, before
Speaker 6: the mammoth is restored, and then tons of work after
Speaker 6: the mammoths restored.
Speaker 5: How do you take care of them?
Speaker 6: How do you eventually create sustainable populations that could go
Speaker 6: back into the Arctic somewhere, And all of those require
Speaker 6: different skills in animal management with care and welfare, but
Speaker 6: also you know, conservation planning. How do you go and
Speaker 6: prepare an ecosystem for species that hasn't existed in four
Speaker 6: thousand years? How do you go and figure out how
Speaker 6: to do this ethically legally, right, you know, hand in
Speaker 6: hand with regulators, things like that. So it's been my
Speaker 6: last two and a half years it's just really been
Speaker 6: off to the races. And meanwhile to that, we've quickly
Speaker 6: expanded from Willie mammos to also Tasmani tigers who went
Speaker 6: extinct off the island at Tasmania in nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 6: and the Dodo, which is sort of, you know, the
Speaker 6: world's most iconic extinction event in sixteen hundreds. The Dodo
Speaker 6: was discovered in eighty years later was extinct due to
Speaker 6: Dutch sailors that were introducing predators and invasive species into Mauritius.
Speaker 6: So all of those have different levels of challenges on
Speaker 6: the the extinction side, and then I have a lot
Speaker 6: of challenges on the conservation side for how do we
Speaker 6: prepare habitats and do a lot of that that prep work.
Speaker 3: Ahead, but also on the why side, Right, Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: like that's a big one. You're not just doing it
Speaker 3: because you can.
Speaker 6: It's not enough school now the right we're facing this
Speaker 6: enormous biodiversity crisis and we're missing species. I think the
Speaker 6: Tasmani tigers such a great example of this. And sitting
Speaker 6: here in Montana, you know, on the doorstuff Yellowstone, you
Speaker 6: could sort of draw some parallels to to wolf recovery
Speaker 6: and Yellowstone. The loss of an apex predator led to
Speaker 6: you know, certain imbalances in Tasmania, things like wildlife disease
Speaker 6: are running rampant today, things like like predator or sorry
Speaker 6: prey population overpopulation is happening, and you know there's you know,
Speaker 6: wallabies and brush tail possums in Tasmania aren't really fun
Speaker 6: to hunt, so nobody's really regulating those populations, and so
Speaker 6: they need this predator that can come in and provide
Speaker 6: ecosystem stability. It can help remove sick and injured animals
Speaker 6: that might.
Speaker 5: Be spreading wildlife disease.
Speaker 6: Like if you've ever heard of Tasmani devils are on
Speaker 6: the brink of extinction because of this facial tumor disease.
Speaker 6: It's literally a contagious cancer. So when they bite each other,
Speaker 6: which is very much in their social network is how
Speaker 6: they communicate, they spread this contagious cancer that ends up
Speaker 6: creating these massive tumors in their face and they eventually
Speaker 6: starve to death and die. That would have with the
Speaker 6: right predator present, would as that animal got sick, it
Speaker 6: would have been predated and would not have had the
Speaker 6: chance to pass on that disease. And so you know,
Speaker 6: finding solutions nature based solutions for how we can restore
Speaker 6: ecosystems is really the focus of what the company's doing,
Speaker 6: and we're doing it in a really fun, flashy way
Speaker 6: like Willie Mammoths, Like what we came out of the
Speaker 6: gate so hot and got a lot of attention, is
Speaker 6: really fun. But I think now you know, I'm running
Speaker 6: around trying to help spread the word on really here's
Speaker 6: the why, because sometimes the what is so distracting that
Speaker 6: that we don't get to the why and and and
Speaker 6: that's that's been a great part of the last two
Speaker 6: and a half years.
Speaker 1: So I feel like in the case of the mammoth,
Speaker 1: the why is an after effect, like the why is
Speaker 1: searching for a why after the inception of the idea. Well,
Speaker 1: there's I don't think that, Like, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: fair to say that. I mean, let's be frank. I
Speaker 1: mean the race to do a mammoth is because it
Speaker 1: be super cool to make a mammoth.
Speaker 6: I think it's sort of yeah, there's sort of two
Speaker 6: fronts to that, or you know, the first one is
Speaker 6: that moonshot idea of this really amazing attractive project that's
Speaker 6: brought tons of investment right in three years we've raised
Speaker 6: two hundred twenty five million dollars for conservation technology in
Speaker 6: my fifteen years.
Speaker 5: Prior we probably raised five million dollars.
Speaker 6: You know, So the scale has been really helpful because
Speaker 6: of the moonshot aspect, and then also along the way
Speaker 6: of this amazing project, we're developing technologies and innovations that
Speaker 6: are applicable every single day to currently imperiled species, and
Speaker 6: so it really becomes this engine of innovation and investment
Speaker 6: for in danger speceis conservation. The other side is there
Speaker 6: is really strong evidence that shows that restoring megavertebrates to
Speaker 6: some of these areas in the Arctic, like what's happening
Speaker 6: in Siberia at Plesising Park, is using mega vertebrates to
Speaker 6: try to re engineer an ecosystem and an ecosystem that's
Speaker 6: better at insulating permafrost. And so that's sort of the
Speaker 6: big idea. The scale in which to make, you know,
Speaker 6: for that to happen in the Arctic and be this
Speaker 6: massive global solution to climb change would be you know,
Speaker 6: really untenable. But but I think that's the idea is
Speaker 6: that we can find you know, targeted areas where we
Speaker 6: can help impact those things.
Speaker 1: Uh, you laid out how you'd make a mingus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: completely different path on a mammoth.
Speaker 6: Cloning as compared to the extinction is easy, right, And
Speaker 6: I think that's why a lot of people came out
Speaker 6: of the gates with the mammoth. Idea was always that
Speaker 6: we should clone it. And you know, same same, same
Speaker 6: idea with the mangus example.
Speaker 3: But because we have mammoth flesh and DNA.
Speaker 6: And exactly, but we don't have living flesh and DNA,
Speaker 6: and you can't clone a dead cell.
Speaker 5: You just can't. That's the unfortunate reality.
Speaker 6: But what we can do is we can use genetic
Speaker 6: editing and engineering tools to basically replicate. So the process
Speaker 6: for the extinction sort of starts with palaeogenomics. So what
Speaker 6: best Shapiro probably talked about on her when she when
Speaker 6: she appeared years ago.
Speaker 1: I got to interrupt you from it because as you
Speaker 1: do this, keep this in mind. We're talking about what's that,
Speaker 1: what's that marine mammal, the very small sea of Cortes,
Speaker 1: the wikida. Yeah, okay, it's headed to extinction, correct, But
Speaker 1: you guys are devising a plan by which you'll capture
Speaker 1: living tissue of things you could capture living tissue of things,
Speaker 1: and down the road de extinction would be entirely different
Speaker 1: because you'd have captured living tissue in the biobank. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's yeah, so let's and talking about de extinction.
Speaker 1: There's cases where you could take a different path to
Speaker 1: de extinction if you had the foresight to capture living
Speaker 1: tissue of white rhinos whatever, right, it'd be different. So
Speaker 1: we're talking right now about soft where there's no without
Speaker 1: a time machine, there's no way to capture living tissue.
Speaker 6: Exactly with living tissue in biobank. So one of our
Speaker 6: biggest focuses right now is to improve biobanking throughout the world.
Speaker 6: So that means we want to go go out and
Speaker 6: collect living tissues of critically endangered species. We want to
Speaker 6: create cell lines of those in freezoes down and that
Speaker 6: is sort of the assurance insurance POPU policy against extinction
Speaker 6: in the future, because that gives us an ability to
Speaker 6: go back and do cloning, which is much easier than
Speaker 6: this the extinction pathway. So a great example of just
Speaker 6: that is what's happening with northern white rhinos. I'm not
Speaker 6: sure if you're familiar, but northern white rhinos are, you know,
Speaker 6: native to East Africa sort of Uganda car DRC area.
Speaker 6: And you know, back in nineteen hundred they're about two
Speaker 6: thousand and three thousand of them in the world. By
Speaker 6: the sixties at number was pretty stable, and by nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy five they were only five hundred of them. In
Speaker 6: two thousand and eight, the last ones went extinct in
Speaker 6: Groamba National Park, but luckily there were a few left
Speaker 6: in human care. So there's this amazing zoo in the
Speaker 6: Czech Republic that had had four animals. They sent them
Speaker 6: to Kenya in this last ditch attempt to try to
Speaker 6: breed the last remaining Northern white rhinos, and unfortunately it
Speaker 6: turns out, whether because there was the genetics of those
Speaker 6: animals were bad or they were too far down the path,
Speaker 6: they weren't able to breed. So now there is this
Speaker 6: effort using all those biobanked Northern white rhino tissues to
Speaker 6: create embryos and then use Southern white surrogates to make
Speaker 6: more Northern white rhinosp And actually just this last month
Speaker 6: we announced so we're part of this international consortium called
Speaker 6: Biorescue that's leading this charge. Last month we announced the
Speaker 6: first ever successful in vitro fertilization of a rhino species.
Speaker 6: So this was a Southern white embryo into a Southern
Speaker 6: white female. But that was the sort of proof point
Speaker 6: we needed to say, Okay, now we can use the
Speaker 6: really valuable tissues. So the next step is we're going
Speaker 6: to put Northern white embryos into Southern white females and
Speaker 6: make more Northern white phinos. So that's sort of the conservation.
Speaker 1: That's the Mingus model, that's the Megus model. Now let's
Speaker 1: talk about the model of shit that died ten thousand
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 6: Well, even unfortunately things like nineteen thirty six when extinct, right,
Speaker 6: we don't have living tissues of that. There were no
Speaker 6: biobanks back there. So what we do there is we
Speaker 6: go and find the extinct species, whether it's a mammoth
Speaker 6: or a thiglyasine or dodo, and we use high quality
Speaker 6: the highest quality reference genome thi scene is a tas
Speaker 6: Madie entire tesmany tiger, yes, sorry. And what we do
Speaker 6: is we sequence the genome of this lost species and
Speaker 6: then we use, you know, some comparative analysis to under
Speaker 6: try to determine who's the current closest living.
Speaker 5: Relative to that species.
Speaker 6: So in the case of the Tasmanian tiger, that's this
Speaker 6: little mouse art mouse sized marstupile called the fat tail
Speaker 6: dinnert or in the case of a mammoth, that's an
Speaker 6: Asian elephant or the.
Speaker 5: Dodo with the nick of our pigeon. Really yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: So what we can do then is we take that
Speaker 6: genome of the living animal. We design editing targets as
Speaker 6: using the genomic analysis tool, so you sort of lay
Speaker 6: them over each other, see where is one genome different
Speaker 6: than the other, and we create editing tools to begin
Speaker 6: to edit the living species into the loss speed different.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you express it. What percent different
Speaker 1: is a wooly mammoth from an Indian elephant?
Speaker 6: This is this is a really common question, is really
Speaker 6: challenging to answer because you and I are both human
Speaker 6: and our genomic difference is somewhere around ninety nine point
Speaker 6: eight percent, right or similar similarity. We are about ninety
Speaker 6: nine point six percent related to a chimpanzee an Asian elephant.
Speaker 1: I heard someone say we're about seventy seven percent related
Speaker 1: to a carrot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, Because there's a lot of stuff in there.
Speaker 6: We have a lot a lot of Neanderthal in our
Speaker 6: genome as well, right, because we all have these common
Speaker 6: genes that might be responsible for the basis of life.
Speaker 6: But a wooly mammoth to an Asian elephant is ninety
Speaker 6: nine point six percent similar. So there's only a point
Speaker 6: four percent difference between the two.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about the what about the thile a scene
Speaker 1: to the mouse.
Speaker 6: To that that one is mouse, but to the yeah,
Speaker 6: to the fat tail dinner, that one, I can't recall
Speaker 6: the exact person, but it is much more distantly related.
Speaker 1: So it's not in the ninety nine.
Speaker 6: It's not in the ninety nine now, So when we
Speaker 6: talk about editing for for willy mammoths, we're really looking at,
Speaker 6: you know, several hundred edits, which really, in the grand
Speaker 6: scheme of things, is not massive.
Speaker 1: And then okay, let's take this Indian elephant in the mammoth.
Speaker 1: If you just took a someone who's somewhat well informed
Speaker 1: about animals and laid the two of them out, they're
Speaker 1: a look and they're going to point to probably the
Speaker 1: size of the ear.
Speaker 6: Yeah, smaller ears on a mammoth, toss length, big curved
Speaker 6: tusk on a on a mammoth as well.
Speaker 1: The pellage, the hair very hairy. What else are they seeing?
Speaker 6: They have a brown fat, so they need to have
Speaker 6: these sort of cold tolerant feed up types.
Speaker 5: They lived in a much.
Speaker 1: Colder I got cut into.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so there's this brown added post layer that you
Speaker 6: put in in sort of like if you thought about
Speaker 6: blubberd would be similar to that. And then there's also
Speaker 6: things like, you know, physiological changes that you need. So
Speaker 6: one of the things that you have to do to
Speaker 6: live in extreme old temperatures you have to be much
Speaker 6: better at oxygen transfer, so you need to target things
Speaker 6: that provide those adaptations. Then we have all those targeted
Speaker 6: and the edits are happening today in a lab. Meanwhile
Speaker 6: to that, we're doing all the reproductive sides. So when
Speaker 6: the moment we have our edited mammoth cells, we'll pull
Speaker 6: the nucleus out of that and we'll put it into
Speaker 6: that into the egg of an Asian elephant. That Asian
Speaker 6: elephant egg then is fertilized and becomes a wooly mammoth embryo,
Speaker 6: and then from there you use artificial reproduction, not too
Speaker 6: dissimilar to things like IVF and artificial and artificial insemination.
Speaker 6: Those are the basest basic tools that we start, and
Speaker 6: then we go to somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is cloning,
Speaker 6: and we clone that embryo and transfer it into an
Speaker 6: Asian elephant, or when you really want to get to
Speaker 6: the real sci fi stuff, that we're doing an artificial womb.
Speaker 6: So we're building technologies to develop artificial wombs for these
Speaker 6: species as well, because if you're ever going to scale
Speaker 6: a population, you'll always be most limited by how many
Speaker 6: females are in that population. So if we wanted to
Speaker 6: make five hundred Northern white rhinos, we would need five
Speaker 6: hundred Southern white rhino females. But if we had artificial bombs,
Speaker 6: the sky's the limit.
Speaker 3: With his diagram, Well, I got asked to and I
Speaker 3: can see this argument coming from a guy who's sitting
Speaker 3: immediately to my life pushback because it's not the same, right, Oh,
Speaker 3: you want to de extinction, Well the animal is not
Speaker 3: the same.
Speaker 1: Well you'd be able to be like, that's what it
Speaker 1: looked like.
Speaker 6: Right, But it's not it, right absolutely, But I guess
Speaker 6: my question would be, you know, let's talk about pumas
Speaker 6: are a good example. Yep, right, what makes a puma, puma.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about the Florida pan a Florida panther.
Speaker 6: If I go to if I go to South Florida
Speaker 6: and I find a Florida panther, where I come up
Speaker 6: here and I find a cougar, they're the same species,
Speaker 6: but they are completely different.
Speaker 1: Well, were well because.
Speaker 3: Because they well, okay, is this supplement.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought this up. Yeah, the Florida panther,
Speaker 1: they got down to less.
Speaker 6: Than fifty and they had extreme genetic bottlenecking issues.
Speaker 1: And some folks said, well, let's bring in some other ones.
Speaker 1: And the argument was, well, no, because we're gonna lose
Speaker 1: that little special something that makes them the Florida panther.
Speaker 1: And it says, you know, what you're gonna lose is
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Right, you can hang on to something
Speaker 1: by bringing in new animals, but if you take the
Speaker 1: path of you know, if you take your current path,
Speaker 1: they're just gonna blink out and be on.
Speaker 6: And it's one of my favorite examples because I think
Speaker 6: conservation for a long time has stood in its own
Speaker 6: way with this idea of perfection ahead of good. Right,
Speaker 6: this whole perfection is.
Speaker 5: The enemy of good.
Speaker 6: They're the idealism that we should have exactly what was
Speaker 6: represented in that range, which is a false narrative because
Speaker 6: we don't even know truly we can guess really well.
Speaker 6: But when I think the Florida Panther Genetic Rescue Project
Speaker 6: is an amazing example that you don't have to have
Speaker 6: exactly the same thing. You need very specific phenotypes that
Speaker 6: make that help it perform that ecosystem function that helps
Speaker 6: improve the health of the ecosystem and helps restore population,
Speaker 6: and then the environmental factors that still exist in these
Speaker 6: ranges will push that animal back into more of what
Speaker 6: you might consider one hundred percent of pure of that species.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And in the meanwhile, it's eating what they ate. Yep,
Speaker 1: it's using.
Speaker 3: Going to do the same job.
Speaker 2: Well, isn't that true that like the bison you guys
Speaker 2: were work the hides you were working on those bison
Speaker 2: aren't one?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Right, Like that's a case where was the expression
Speaker 1: you used? Perfection is the idea of good? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: whole discussion about I think this whole discussion about cattle
Speaker 1: intro aggression into bison as being where it becomes like
Speaker 1: an obstacle to bison restoration. I think it's such a distraction.
Speaker 1: It is, and you can line up a thousand humans
Speaker 1: and be like, what is that animal buffalo? You're like, Nope, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's zero point two cattle. You know.
Speaker 6: It's in our chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, who you know,
Speaker 6: she has for a long time studied bison genetics and
Speaker 6: she's got this amazing grad student Jonas, who they are
Speaker 6: just published a paper that shows the cattle integression narrative
Speaker 6: is completely false. If you go back historically and you
Speaker 6: look at bison before the presence of domestic cattle, they
Speaker 6: had the same level of representation of what we think
Speaker 6: today is cattle in them, but it's just because it's
Speaker 6: a they evolved from a similar release. Yeah, so there
Speaker 6: is actually very good evidence to suggest that Bfalow is
Speaker 6: kind of bs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've talked to her about that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because there's actually a reproductive block for future generations
Speaker 6: once you hybridize the two species. So it's really interesting.
Speaker 6: We don't fully understand it, but Jonas's research shows that
Speaker 6: if you go back in time, you can see that
Speaker 6: the same representation at cattle in their genome that you today.
Speaker 2: With from like the base of the exactly tree.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they sort of evolved from a similar ancestor, so
Speaker 6: they'd have similar DNA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess to be similar with how you know,
Speaker 1: all everybody of Western European descent has some trace element
Speaker 1: of Neanderthal exactly.
Speaker 6: But that doesn't mean we hybridized with neanderthalogists, we had
Speaker 6: a common answer.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't mean we're still doing it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've seen a few examples.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that. Though, I want to go
Speaker 1: back to this, the set of the steps you do.
Speaker 1: The most obvious question is, uh, what's your what's your guess?
Speaker 1: When does this thing hit? When does the first one
Speaker 1: hit the ground?
Speaker 6: Science is so hard and I hate to put pressure
Speaker 6: on our scientists, and but I can because I'm not
Speaker 6: in the lab doing this, right, I'm just the stupid
Speaker 6: animal guy that talks about this stuff. Uh, you know,
Speaker 6: we're really moving forward quickly. We just had this amazing
Speaker 6: announcement that we've been the first people to ever achieve
Speaker 6: this plary ponent stem cell line of elephants that's never
Speaker 6: been done, which is sort of an integral step along
Speaker 6: the way. So we're looking, you know, twenty twenty eight
Speaker 6: is what we're targeting right now. I would say we
Speaker 6: have to also acknowledge that there's two year gestation for
Speaker 6: these so you know, I would always put plus or
Speaker 6: minuses on these things. But we're you know, I think
Speaker 6: this is much sooner than people expect. There's so many
Speaker 6: challenges ahead that you know, one step could could delay us.
Speaker 6: But that's the course so far. That's what we painted
Speaker 6: and we're on target.
Speaker 1: And when it does, sorry Brodie, real quick, is it
Speaker 1: a multi step process or does the first one that
Speaker 1: hit the ground be like, that's what you're aiming for?
Speaker 6: We don't, I would I would say we're always going
Speaker 6: to be improving, right, It's not that this is an
Speaker 6: iterative process that requires multiple steps, but it is likely
Speaker 6: that you learn something that changes the next sequence of events. Right,
Speaker 6: So as we see the first one, we say, oh, actually,
Speaker 6: you know, maybe this phenotype needed to be tweaked, or
Speaker 6: maybe we have a better understanding of what we call
Speaker 6: genotype of phenotype relationships, and then that would that would
Speaker 6: inform a different type of editing strategy.
Speaker 3: Who do you guys?
Speaker 2: You guys answer to as far as like legality, I mean,
Speaker 2: there's like obviously like ethical and moral questions that some
Speaker 2: people are going to have about this whole thing, but like,
Speaker 2: where's the where's the oversight, like, because you guys are
Speaker 2: like international, right, like or is it just us?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 6: Well, the operation is US base. We also have some
Speaker 6: partners in Australia, so there's some of that as well.
Speaker 6: But uh, it's with anything, especially in the US regulatory environment,
Speaker 6: it's a mess, right, It's there's there's so many competing
Speaker 6: forces for jurisdictional power that we don't really have all
Speaker 6: the answers yet. What we are doing today is we're
Speaker 6: working to help support the ic N if you're familiar
Speaker 6: with to the right, So we're supporting the ic N
Speaker 6: Species Survival Commission to really start to drive forward policy
Speaker 6: statements and really begin to build that roadmap. So we
Speaker 6: want to help facilitate those things, but in a third
Speaker 6: party independent fashion, so that these groups can help say
Speaker 6: this is the exact pathway that has legal, regulatory and
Speaker 6: ethical considerations already baked into it, and then that's sort
Speaker 6: of the gold standard that most governments are looking to
Speaker 6: to help inform their domestic regulation. Here in the US,
Speaker 6: we're certainly subjected to things like USDA, which and APHIS,
Speaker 6: which has oversight over animals and human care, especially mammals, right,
Speaker 6: and then US fish and wildlife because we're talking about
Speaker 6: endangered species. Some siety is listed some of USA listed species.
Speaker 6: And then we have things like FDA when you're intentionally
Speaker 6: altering the genome of an animal, technically there are aspects
Speaker 6: of that that could fall under FDA jurisdiction. But what's
Speaker 6: really interesting is there's groups that have been going through
Speaker 6: this same process on the AG site already, So there
Speaker 6: are some guardrails in place if we just want to
Speaker 6: be the subject matter expert to provide responsible regulation and
Speaker 6: move forward to yeather. But I think uh Awkway advantage
Speaker 6: salmon if you had had you guys ever seen that
Speaker 6: the genetically engineered line of salmon that are meant to
Speaker 6: be healthier in farm raise scenarios. They were given genetic
Speaker 6: editing tools to essentially help them heal faster because there's
Speaker 6: so much trauma in farm farm raise fishing. And that
Speaker 6: took twenty years to get approved.
Speaker 1: So and is it is it approved for human consumption?
Speaker 6: It's just last year it received a thumbs up.
Speaker 5: Really yeah?
Speaker 1: Is that off Atlantic salmon?
Speaker 6: I actually don't know which salmon. They based it on
Speaker 6: it's got to be it, Yeah, I would think.
Speaker 1: So all right, let me ask you this. This is
Speaker 1: the thing we've talked about in private conversation. We've discussed this.
Speaker 1: Why if you look at why the mammoth and why
Speaker 1: the Philo scene, what the Thilo scene, you could kind
Speaker 1: of look and be like one, it just happened. It
Speaker 1: just went extinct. Some people argue, not entirely crazy. People
Speaker 1: argue that it didn't go extinct. True, and it did
Speaker 1: for a while, have a Lazarus. It was regarded as
Speaker 1: a Lazarus species, referencing Lazarus from the Bible, where it
Speaker 1: was like they thought they were gone and they weren't.
Speaker 1: Another really famous Lazarus species of the blackfooted ferret. It
Speaker 1: was people thought they were gone, but they weren't so
Speaker 1: used to it's so fresh, there's people thinking that one
Speaker 1: might turn up. Okay, So here you have like an
Speaker 1: ecosystem that's ready to receive it. You have you can
Speaker 1: point to why it went extinct. The prey base is there, right,
Speaker 1: so you could you could put it back and it's
Speaker 1: and it's like it's it just it just wound up
Speaker 1: missing a beat like that to me, seems so constructive.
Speaker 1: It would be so it would enjoy such book support. Well,
Speaker 1: the Mammoth's like there's some argument that this ship has sailed.
Speaker 7: It's like, uh, it's like Brooks and shash Ank redemption.
Speaker 7: The world just got so damn fast.
Speaker 1: It was like Clay at the end of the live tour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, I was gone with the world
Speaker 1: kept going. He couldn't reintegrate. Uh yeah. So like you
Speaker 1: know when when they were around, like have you seen
Speaker 1: all this stuff that's come out of that where they
Speaker 1: were able to look at stable isotopes and the mammoth
Speaker 1: tusk and he realized how much this, I mean, how
Speaker 1: much this mammoth in Alaska is moving during its lifetime.
Speaker 1: I mean some bitches like in the Yukon he's south
Speaker 1: of the Brooks Range. He's north of the Brooks Range.
Speaker 1: He basically traveled the length of California in a life
Speaker 1: that was he died at what twenty twenty years old
Speaker 1: or something like that. So it's like that ain't there anymore,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? So, how do you
Speaker 1: begin dealing with that? Like, how do you begin dealing
Speaker 1: with that? You want up with the sort of world's
Speaker 1: most lonely animal.
Speaker 6: Well, hopefully it won't be lonely because they'll be in
Speaker 6: a population.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: This is not a one off novelty where you just
Speaker 6: have one of these. The focus is really create sustainable
Speaker 6: populations with the idea of re engineering what today is
Speaker 6: a tundry ecosystem that doesn't support a lot of biodiversity
Speaker 6: your life. Looking at what the Zimovs achieved with Plessing
Speaker 6: Park where they rewilded you know, large vertebrates like muskox
Speaker 6: and wild horses and even bisen.
Speaker 1: How many acres is that?
Speaker 5: It's small?
Speaker 6: I don't want to give you the wrong number, but
Speaker 6: it's not. It's not massive, something like eighty or eight
Speaker 6: hundred hector or something like that.
Speaker 2: How do you get around the argument though, that the
Speaker 2: animals that are on the tundra now are the ones
Speaker 2: that belong there now?
Speaker 6: Well, I think what we're what we find is that
Speaker 6: and this is there's a lot of evidence that shows
Speaker 6: us in West Africa forest elephants, is that the presence
Speaker 6: of a large mammal like that of Probsidian actually opens
Speaker 6: up moreological niches. So it's not really displacing species, it's
Speaker 6: creating more niches to bring more biodiversity. The Mamma step
Speaker 6: grassland ecosystem that existed four thousand years ago was as
Speaker 6: biodiverse as the African savannah, and today it is, you know,
Speaker 6: sort of a Martian landscape.
Speaker 5: Right, It's really bare.
Speaker 6: And so this idea that we could create more habital,
Speaker 6: habitable ecosystem for more biodiversity is really compelling in a
Speaker 6: time when we're facing the world's largest biodiversity crisis. We
Speaker 6: talk about climate change all the time, and people can
Speaker 6: debate that to their blue in the face. What you
Speaker 6: can't debate is that the extinction rates we see across
Speaker 6: the world are only accelerating. You know, by twenty fifty
Speaker 6: there are some people that estimate we could lose up
Speaker 6: to fifty percent of all mammal species. Right, we need
Speaker 6: to find solutions. We need to begin to say how
Speaker 6: can we support nature to be more resilient because nature,
Speaker 6: given time, space opportunity, will evolve and it's showing us
Speaker 6: that that's why we have the amazing ecosis since we
Speaker 6: have today, That's why we have yellows in National Park.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: His nature has provided something amazing. But when we continue
Speaker 6: to layer pressure upon pressure upon pressure. We're really paining
Speaker 6: nature into a corner in a place where now it
Speaker 6: cannot respond fasten us. Evolution cannot keep up, and so
Speaker 6: what we're looking to do is to provide engineering solutions
Speaker 6: to accelerate evolution, to provide nature a chance to keep
Speaker 6: up with humanity, which is really difficult. But you know,
Speaker 6: I think restoring ecosystems is the start of that. Removing
Speaker 6: evasive predators, right, We're using technologies like genetic biocontrols to
Speaker 6: remove an invasive predator from say Mauritius, so that it
Speaker 6: can prepare prepare an ecosystem for the Dodo is amazing.
Speaker 6: I think everybody agreed that rats, cats and monkeys don't
Speaker 6: belong on mauritious and.
Speaker 3: A genetic biocontrol would be making everybody mail.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that would be one form of a genetic biocontrol.
Speaker 6: Gene drives is another form, right, So we sort of
Speaker 6: have these multiple ways that you can create a deleterious
Speaker 6: allele within an animal's genome but also give them a
Speaker 6: biological fitness advantage. They go into an ecosystem, they spread
Speaker 6: that allele that gene throughout the population, and that helps
Speaker 6: suppress the population or in some case completely exterminate it.
Speaker 6: So you know, there are these amazing opportunities, they're just
Speaker 6: emerging technologies that don't have the regulatory guardrails yet, that
Speaker 6: don't have the social understanding to really support those And
Speaker 6: so that's one of the things is we want to
Speaker 6: help socialize those ideas and help bring these debates to
Speaker 6: the forefront, because for us, it's important that people that
Speaker 6: we acknowledge we don't have all the answers.
Speaker 5: We have some amazingly.
Speaker 6: Powerful tools, but we need to have debates about these
Speaker 6: things because the fact of the matter is the status
Speaker 6: quo is losing. We're falling behind every year, and we
Speaker 6: need to do something maybe a little more drastic, and
Speaker 6: that's what Colossal's providing right now.
Speaker 3: So with the case of the mammoth, like the road map, right,
Speaker 3: so Steve just talked about this one individual that enjoyed
Speaker 3: this giant historic range is just not going to have
Speaker 3: those types of freedoms, so you would try to find
Speaker 3: a suitable habitat with a lot of controls, right exactly.
Speaker 3: And also that first mammoth is going to be uh,
Speaker 3: pretty valuable. I'm gonna have quite the price tag attached
Speaker 3: to it, right.
Speaker 1: You know, I think what they ought to do, and
Speaker 1: I've said this, we need to make nice with Russia again.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I'm not talking about I'm not waiting
Speaker 1: into geopolitics. Let's say there's a world in which we
Speaker 1: made nice with Russia again and we went to Wrangle Island,
Speaker 1: which was the last place they existed. They didn't blink
Speaker 1: out till four thousand years ago.
Speaker 6: On Wrangle Island, the Great Pyramids of Gaza were under
Speaker 6: construction when the will of Mammoth went extinct. Like, I
Speaker 6: think that a lot of people don't have that context
Speaker 6: at time, right, They feel like this is such an
Speaker 6: ancient thing, you know, No, the Egyptians were a highly
Speaker 6: civilized group at the same time that Mammot swalk this earth.
Speaker 1: Remember Trump was some about buying Iceland. No, He's like,
Speaker 1: well buy Greenland, yeah, which people tease him about. But
Speaker 1: I thought I was like, that's a good idea. Maybe
Speaker 1: we can buy Wrangle Island.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, but yeah, like a situation like that, right, it's
Speaker 3: got its own fence.
Speaker 6: I think that's how you pilot these things, right, These
Speaker 6: have to be this a very thoughtful, stagegated process of rewilding.
Speaker 6: You cannot just make a lily mammoth and say godspeed.
Speaker 1: It's similar happened to that thing.
Speaker 6: No, we have to talk about, like, you know where,
Speaker 6: how does it start in a highly managed situation with caretakers,
Speaker 6: and then generationally that that level of care is decreased
Speaker 6: and that ecosystems are broader and broader, and eventually we'll
Speaker 6: get to a point of what we would call a
Speaker 6: soft release, which is sort of this vast ecosystems probably
Speaker 6: fenced or has some sort of physical barrier that allows
Speaker 6: us to say, okay, here is the experimental condition that
Speaker 6: people need to understand what's happening, and then one day
Speaker 6: you would open that gate and truly rewild and then.
Speaker 3: Just a crazy amount of consistent data on what's happening
Speaker 3: to the landscape because.
Speaker 6: Of And that's so exciting is there's all these sort
Speaker 6: of things that have to happen in ten twenty third
Speaker 6: years for this to happen, and today we're building technologies
Speaker 6: to answer those questions.
Speaker 1: So, and you also have the eis with the the
Speaker 1: environmental impact statement.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, that's why we should do rub it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah, it's like doing an environmental impact statement
Speaker 1: on it is going to be arduous.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, But I think there's a lot of opportunity in
Speaker 6: many of these efforts because there's emerging economies around conservation
Speaker 6: that help drive and support, you know, sustained effort. If
Speaker 6: you were able to improve biodiversity in area that currently
Speaker 6: has a low baseline of diversity, and you could create
Speaker 6: this African savannah like diversity in the Arctic, you could
Speaker 6: you know, eventually begin to apply for things like biodiversity
Speaker 6: and carbon credits. That becomes sustainable ways to protect nature,
Speaker 6: and it's investing in the preservation restoration in nature rather
Speaker 6: than extracting resources from nature.
Speaker 1: Let's let's take another example and and talk about the
Speaker 1: the Ivory built woodpecker. Yeah, okay, the Ivy built woodpecker
Speaker 1: went extinct.
Speaker 6: Maybe another Lasar instagrat.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to your Yeah, it's.
Speaker 5: Gone something everybody this season in c I.
Speaker 6: Think that's for Louisiana, right, that was the last one
Speaker 6: always affiliated woodpecker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's the thing of Ivory built woodpecker. People see it.
Speaker 1: It's affiliated pilated woodpecker. And then I went and held
Speaker 1: the Ivory build woodpecker. Remember at Cornell, who's there you guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I felt I used to kind of like, in
Speaker 1: my mind tease people who screwed mixed them up. And
Speaker 1: when I held it, I'm like, Okay, I'm never gonna
Speaker 1: tease anyone again for mixing.
Speaker 2: Not blurry bigfoot footage.
Speaker 1: No, it's just like not. When I picked up the
Speaker 1: Ivy built woodpecker, I was thinking i'd be picking up
Speaker 1: like a like a do you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: like like, and it was just it was kind of like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a delicate Yeah, it's got a different bill, but
Speaker 1: I mean it's like it's it's not this. I just
Speaker 1: in my mind I had them just enormous, you know,
Speaker 1: I had them like like a I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I just pictured him like giants and you see appiliated woodpecker.
Speaker 1: It's a good sized bird, but it's not that. And
Speaker 1: then I held one and I'm like, okay, I see
Speaker 1: it now, I see how you screwed this up. Like
Speaker 1: I wasn't. I was under no discredit to the Ivy
Speaker 1: built woodpecker. What I'm trying to say is I was
Speaker 1: underwhelmed by his size and felt sympathetic toward people that
Speaker 1: screwed up when they see appiliated woodpecker. But point being,
Speaker 1: it went it went extinct during for many of you listening,
Speaker 1: It's true of me, it went stinc extinct during your parents' lifetime.
Speaker 1: We know we could, someone could take you out and
Speaker 1: show you the tree where they were last known to exist.
Speaker 1: The singer you heard of, singer sewing Machines YEP. Singer
Speaker 1: had a forest that they held, a forest it had
Speaker 1: ivybuild woodpeckers on it. They went to do a timber cut.
Speaker 1: People begged them not to. They did the timber cut.
Speaker 1: They actually cut a tree that ivybuild woodpeckers were using.
Speaker 1: They saw them fly out as the tree was I'm
Speaker 1: not joking, and then they were extinct. The biggest problem
Speaker 1: they have is just needing large old girl trees with cavities.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's a really challenging one because it is
Speaker 6: a reliant on that old growth hardwood.
Speaker 1: And I brought it up to you being like, let's
Speaker 1: focus on that, and you talked about how birds are
Speaker 1: pain in the ass.
Speaker 5: Yeah, birds are really.
Speaker 1: Why is that? Why are birds of pain in the ass.
Speaker 6: Obviously we're focusing on birds because we have this DODO
Speaker 6: project right forty pound flightless pigeon essentially from Murcius. What's
Speaker 6: amazing about that is it's also this sort of engine
Speaker 6: that's driving an investment into avian conservation science that that
Speaker 6: that hasn't really been there so far. In the late
Speaker 6: nineties we figured out cloning with Dolly the sheep, and
Speaker 6: now we've improved it vastly in mammals. But mammal reproduction
Speaker 6: is very different as you could would imagine from avian reproduction.
Speaker 6: So typically we would, like like I mentioned with mammalian cloning,
Speaker 6: we would take a skin cell and pull the nucleus
Speaker 6: out and put it into an egg. Well, you can't
Speaker 6: just drop a nucleus into a bird egg because it's
Speaker 6: a calcified egg and.
Speaker 5: You need to fertilize it while it's still in the body.
Speaker 5: So what you can do.
Speaker 6: What you can do is when you have, say in
Speaker 6: the case of the Dodo and Nicobar pigeon egg, that
Speaker 6: is you know, within about three days of fertilization, so
Speaker 6: early incubation stage, we can actually window the egg and
Speaker 6: really using really small tools, you can pull a couple
Speaker 6: of micro leaders of blood out. And what's really unique
Speaker 6: about avian reproduction and development is that they're sorts the
Speaker 6: cells that pre date sperm and egg on primordi oalderam cells.
Speaker 6: They're floating around freely in the in the bloodstream, and
Speaker 6: then they migrate to the gonads and that's where they
Speaker 6: begin to make you know, adult sperm and egg. While
Speaker 6: they're still floating within the within the bloodstream, we can
Speaker 6: pull those microleader to a blood out and culture those
Speaker 6: we call PGCs primarial dram cells, and.
Speaker 5: Use those to edit.
Speaker 6: And then we take those edited PGCs that are now
Speaker 6: not making chicken or pigeon, they're making Dodo sperm and egg,
Speaker 6: and put them back into the surrogate egg of a
Speaker 6: of a sterilized like say chicken or pigeon line. And
Speaker 6: then there those cells will migrate into their gonads and
Speaker 6: suddenly have this nicobar pigeon that's actually creating Dodo sperm
Speaker 6: or egg. The two pigeons will mate and they'll make
Speaker 6: a Dodo.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, how are they making it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was picturing the vent.
Speaker 6: So this is why, you know, one of one of
Speaker 6: the things we talk about is, you know, pigeons, probably
Speaker 6: our pigeons will be the genomic donner. The actual animal
Speaker 6: serga would be a large hen chicken. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 6: even that big. I mean there are there are domestic
Speaker 6: breeds of chickens way too. Yeah, you don't need that
Speaker 6: big now, So so we could so we could use
Speaker 6: it that chicken.
Speaker 1: Line, domestic chicken that could handle a egg like that. Uh.
Speaker 3: It just dawned on me that you have got to
Speaker 3: be spending as much time, if not more, on eradicating species, Yeah,
Speaker 3: as opposed to creating. Because I think of the big
Speaker 3: island of Hawaii. You're gonna have to get rid of
Speaker 3: introduced mongoose. You're gonna have to get which they've proven
Speaker 3: that they can't. Right, You're gonna have to get rid
Speaker 3: of mosquitoes, right, You're gonna have to get rid rid
Speaker 3: of snakes. You're gonna have to get rid of feral cats,
Speaker 3: which people are gonna love my crowd is at least.
Speaker 3: I mean, all of that has got to get done
Speaker 3: before you put this new experimental species back on the ground.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, they're developing tools that As they're developing tools, it
Speaker 1: could be helpful for that, right, Yeah, which are also
Speaker 1: subject to all kinds of scrutiny biocontrols.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, and I would say we regionally are
Speaker 6: targeted eradications. Right, just to be clear, you know, we
Speaker 6: don't want to just make all any mangoo species but
Speaker 6: poof off the face of the earth.
Speaker 5: Right, it needs to be in Hawaii.
Speaker 6: And so the habitat remediation work that has to occurb
Speaker 6: ahead of rewilding your species reintroduction is as important as
Speaker 6: the extinction. And that's why you know, we have such
Speaker 6: a large conservation focus of the company. That's why a
Speaker 6: big part of the job that me and my team
Speaker 6: have been tasked with is is going in forming partnerships
Speaker 6: with local stakeholders, local NGOs and governments and international NGOs
Speaker 6: so we can begin to pair habitats. You know, in
Speaker 6: a three weeks time, I'm jumping on a plane and
Speaker 6: flaming into Mauritius. I'm going to go there to meet
Speaker 6: with our partners at Marsian Wildlife Foundation to talk just
Speaker 6: about this. What are the islands around surrounding Mauritius that
Speaker 6: currently have invasive species that we would need to remove.
Speaker 6: And it's not just animals, it's also plants. Plant invasives
Speaker 6: are as bad as you you know, you could imagine.
Speaker 1: I mean, in order to begin grooming the landscape for dodos.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can't.
Speaker 6: There's no sense in putting a dodo, which is a
Speaker 6: ground dwelling, ground nesting bird, in a place that the
Speaker 6: macaque was it, which was introduced by the Dutch. Is
Speaker 6: that monkey is still present where it's going to raid
Speaker 6: the nests and eat the eggs. We need to remove
Speaker 6: the macacus before we introduce the dodo. So those are
Speaker 6: sort of the issues. But also the dodo had specific
Speaker 6: dietary requirements and native plants are important, but you know,
Speaker 6: there's been a lot of introduced plant life there, so
Speaker 6: we have to also work with the amazing work that
Speaker 6: Marcian Wildlife Foundation has been doing to date. We're just
Speaker 6: trying to provide more tools, more funding, more more resources
Speaker 6: so that we can really make a difference before our doto,
Speaker 6: because the worst thing we could do is sit there
Speaker 6: with the dodo and not have a place to put
Speaker 6: it right. Then that's a that's as much of a
Speaker 6: failure as missing the target altogether.
Speaker 7: Well, the flip side of that is in some way
Speaker 7: having that Dodo ready to go incentivizes that work in
Speaker 7: a way that there isn't currently maybe as strong an
Speaker 7: impetus to take those stuffs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm happy you called that out because I think
Speaker 6: one of the really amazing things about the Dodo in particular,
Speaker 6: but all the species that we're working on, is this
Speaker 6: idea that they become these shining lights of inspiration and
Speaker 6: to really help focus efforts back into habitat remediation and
Speaker 6: invasive removals and things like that. So you know, people say, well,
Speaker 6: what ecosystem function did the dodo provide? Well, it's not
Speaker 6: as critical as say an apex predator like the Tasmani tiger,
Speaker 6: but it does bring interest to a biodiversity hotspot to
Speaker 6: help bring funding, to help bring attention to repairing those
Speaker 6: ecosystems and preparing and preparing them for a Dodo means
Speaker 6: also improving life for so many other endemic species of
Speaker 6: the island immercies.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean just think of the eco tourism dollars right, Like,
Speaker 3: so there's incentive there, but there's also going to be
Speaker 3: the battle of like, uh, we can't build a hotel
Speaker 3: right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's funny about the eco tourism aspect of it is, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kids trip out about dinosaurs. They were so drastic.
Speaker 1: Part well, yeah, but you'd be like, but but you
Speaker 1: know what, man, the biggest animal to ever exist on
Speaker 1: Earth exists right now, ye, And why are you not
Speaker 1: eager to go look at that? It's there right now?
Speaker 1: Because it's the animal to ever exist on Earth is
Speaker 1: alive right now. And everyone wants to tell me how
Speaker 1: big dinosaurs were as that not as big as a
Speaker 1: blue whale?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you've kind of gotten at this a little bit.
Speaker 2: But why why instead of Tasmanian tigers and dodos, instead
Speaker 2: of making them, why not make a bunch of California
Speaker 2: condors and Siberian tiger like now to help them? Now
Speaker 2: you know, obviously it's not like right now, but.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would say it's not an either or proposition
Speaker 6: for us. It is use these these really compelling case
Speaker 6: studies to help drive the research, drive the investment to
Speaker 6: be able to apply it immediately to California condor.
Speaker 5: We've been meeting with, you know, we have.
Speaker 6: We'll be making this big announcement about some of our
Speaker 6: focus on North American species coming up here probably about
Speaker 6: the time this podcast drops. And one of those is
Speaker 6: also to work with Native American tribes and work in
Speaker 6: Indian country where they're already doing amazing conservation and and
Speaker 6: what's happening with California condor, and now there's reintroduction efforts
Speaker 6: that are being focused on in Idaho and as person,
Speaker 6: and I think that's where we want to begin to focus.
Speaker 5: So we have these toolkits.
Speaker 6: And there are already amazing groups working on California condor.
Speaker 6: There's so much attention on tigers, right, we can focus
Speaker 6: other places that great tools that then begin to bleed
Speaker 6: over and can be optimized back to those other species.
Speaker 6: So we're creating open source tools that are free to
Speaker 6: the conservation world. As we unlocked primordial germs, hell derivation
Speaker 6: and editing, we'll just give that to the California contour
Speaker 6: people or will help support it ourselves.
Speaker 1: When I'm having when when I'm talking about with with
Speaker 1: friends about colossal uh, I never use this term, but
Speaker 1: in explaining it immediately everybody says, oh, Jurrassic Park. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The fact that we're an hour into this and this
Speaker 6: is the first time it came up might be a
Speaker 6: world I've.
Speaker 1: Been holding my tongue and I'm not bringing it up
Speaker 1: to have that conversation, but I am bringing up to
Speaker 1: do this. We We talked about mingus. Oh, did you
Speaker 1: want to say more about holding your tongue? No, No,
Speaker 1: I I just been wanting to say that word.
Speaker 3: I can Trassic park.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm gonna all right. Please please If you don't
Speaker 1: like my approach, no, I am not to answer it.
Speaker 7: I'm I'm I'm following along. I thought we were just
Speaker 7: going to dig in.
Speaker 1: No, we're going We're going right now. I'm following a
Speaker 1: part of it. We talked about mingus, where we go
Speaker 1: pluck blood from mingus. We talked about a marine mammal,
Speaker 1: an imperiled marine mammal, where you go and just shoot it,
Speaker 1: get a plug out of it, like some kind of
Speaker 1: little surgical thing that you fire from a blowgun or
Speaker 1: a drone or whatever, and get a little thing plug,
Speaker 1: a hide off them, and you got that so living.
Speaker 1: We talked about what we have when we find a
Speaker 1: frozen you know, come thawing out of the permafrost, A
Speaker 1: mammoth that may be froze within hours of death or
Speaker 1: within days of death, has been frozen ever since, right,
Speaker 1: and we get it, and you'd still see like blood
Speaker 1: clots where something bit it, and you see what it
Speaker 1: ate last and it's still got vegetation in its teeth, right,
Speaker 1: But what happens when we get back to the t rex?
Speaker 1: Like what don't you have and what is the likelihood
Speaker 1: you'd ever find it?
Speaker 6: Well, the first thing we don't have is an interest
Speaker 6: in dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Just okay, I mean I don't mean you, I don't
Speaker 1: mean a collective week what would stop somebody.
Speaker 3: Just like a big donor comes down?
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, I just be like, yeah, human understanding of course,
Speaker 1: like what is not don't I know something's not there?
Speaker 1: But what is not there?
Speaker 5: We don't have DNA okay, and just don't.
Speaker 6: So even if you know, typically most of the dinosaur
Speaker 6: specimens we would uncover our fossils.
Speaker 5: So those are rocks that took the place.
Speaker 6: Of a bone, right, So there's no DNA in that rock,
Speaker 6: so you can't even sequence it if you were to
Speaker 6: find a very well preserved sixty five million year old specimen.
Speaker 5: Time is still an enemy UV and.
Speaker 6: Temperature and bacteria contamination is still an enemy to DNA integrity.
Speaker 6: So even if when we talk about nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 6: we talked about highly degraded DNA, it takes incredible amounts
Speaker 6: of genomic sequencing, and so much brute force to sequence
Speaker 6: that over and over. If you think about over time,
Speaker 6: DNA starts as a single strand, just as an oversimplification
Speaker 6: starts as a single strand over time, it just cuts
Speaker 6: in half once, cuts in half twice, and it just
Speaker 6: that process repeats.
Speaker 5: So you go from maybe in.
Speaker 6: Nineteen thirty six we had a five hundred piece puzzle
Speaker 6: that we had to use artificial intelligence and computational biology
Speaker 6: to put back in order to.
Speaker 5: Make that puzzle.
Speaker 6: If you go back sixty five million years ago, it
Speaker 6: might be a five trillion piece puzzle.
Speaker 1: You just have dust.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's so hard. The other side of it is
Speaker 6: we don't actually have a reference gam so you'll hear
Speaker 6: us talk about reference genomes a lot of a living relative.
Speaker 6: One of the ways that we solve those puzzles when
Speaker 6: we have these highly degraded DNA samples is we find
Speaker 6: something that's closely related and we go, oh, so it's
Speaker 6: sort of like a cheat sheet. You know what the
Speaker 6: puzzle should look like. So you know, oh, well the
Speaker 6: green sections up here, so I'm going to put this
Speaker 6: over here. And that's what the AI is doing, and
Speaker 6: the computational biologist they're working on with dinosaur is that
Speaker 6: just doesn't doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: So this is not acknowledging that this is not your
Speaker 1: area of folks. I mean, this is not a thing
Speaker 1: that's good. This is not a problem that's going to
Speaker 1: be overcome.
Speaker 5: No, not not.
Speaker 7: Tried looking for dino blood in mosquitoes preserved amber and
Speaker 7: then using the DNA of a West African tree frog
Speaker 7: to splice it in.
Speaker 1: And what was that?
Speaker 6: A loosing uh you know, you give them a loosinge dependency.
Speaker 7: Doctor Henry Wu figured all that out under the tutelage
Speaker 7: of John Hammond.
Speaker 6: I think Beth Shapiro from our team has actually shown
Speaker 6: that ambers are really poor.
Speaker 5: To good actually looked.
Speaker 6: Into it, which is amazing. I think that's why she's
Speaker 6: so so cool.
Speaker 1: But so people can put that out of their minds.
Speaker 5: Take it out of your mind in.
Speaker 1: The case.
Speaker 3: It's you know, they're that the plight of that little
Speaker 3: marine mammal is tied to fishing practices.
Speaker 1: Well do you know about this thing?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was so embarrassed you showed me pic. I never
Speaker 1: even heard of the son of a Bitch. I looked
Speaker 1: at the picture and I've never seen it.
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: what a lot of people can't say, eat, live, and breathe,
Speaker 3: but they live and breathe. That animal I've never heard of.
Speaker 3: It's clocks ticks.
Speaker 6: The world's most dandered mareen mammal, and it is, you know,
Speaker 6: like anime level charisma. Right, It's one of the cutest
Speaker 6: things you'll ever see in your life.
Speaker 3: But you know, like if if I were in your
Speaker 3: shoes and you're like, okay, we have it in the
Speaker 3: in the bank, what there's no point in bringing it
Speaker 3: back right now until these fishing practices change.
Speaker 6: No, But that's the beauty of biobanking, is the idea
Speaker 6: is we need to take snapshots today, what is the
Speaker 6: biodiversity that exists, and not just the Noah's ark of
Speaker 6: one by one.
Speaker 5: We don't need one male and one female.
Speaker 6: We need the largest population representation we can get. Unfortunately,
Speaker 6: with this species of akida, there's only thirteen. But ideally
Speaker 6: somebody could go out and get thirteen, all thirteen biobanked,
Speaker 6: and that would give us the opportunity that if in
Speaker 6: ten twenty one hundred, one thousand years we finally figured
Speaker 6: out all of the you know, socio political pressures that
Speaker 6: are driving the extinction of the species, then it could
Speaker 6: be resored, which is amazing.
Speaker 3: But the human the conundrum right is like if you
Speaker 3: have that approach of like, okay, we got on biobanked,
Speaker 3: these people aren't going to change, We'll wait till it changes.
Speaker 3: Will it change with the absence of that animal?
Speaker 6: I think similar to what we're talking about the DOTO,
Speaker 6: it actually provides an inspiration to accelerate the change and
Speaker 6: push you know, we talked about the moral hazard a lot,
Speaker 6: which is this idea that if we have a technology
Speaker 6: that can mean extinction is not forever, will people care
Speaker 6: less about extinction?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I we'll get to you later.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: But my argument is they're already doing that, right. The
Speaker 6: level of care about the biodiversity loss is shockingly low.
Speaker 6: So we need to figure out tools to make sure
Speaker 6: that we can begin to reverse extinctions because nobody else cares.
Speaker 5: And I know that's a.
Speaker 6: Very broad statement, but to be fair, the amount of
Speaker 6: investment that goes into conservation is just we should all
Speaker 6: be ashamed. You know, the Pulse And Institute did this
Speaker 6: amazing research study into conservation, spending a couple of years
Speaker 6: back and what they found is that on average, annually,
Speaker 6: between philanthropy and government spending on the conservation of endangered
Speaker 6: species the globe globally, we spend about one hundred and
Speaker 6: seventy five billion dollars a year. They also did an
Speaker 6: estimate of what would the investment take to stop the
Speaker 6: biodiversity crisis or reverse it, and that's nine hundred billion
Speaker 6: dollars a year, which really, if you think about defense
Speaker 6: spending or some other you know, you can find another
Speaker 6: way to contextualize that.
Speaker 5: It's not a ton of money.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: Stefano on my team gave me this amazing quote that
Speaker 6: every year the globe spends four hundred and eighty billion
Speaker 6: dollars on soda.
Speaker 3: What would you rather have?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's that's not that's not to acknowledge maybe all
Speaker 6: the downstream health care cost right and things like that.
Speaker 6: So it just shows you that unfortunately, the level of
Speaker 6: interest and investment is so low today that I don't
Speaker 6: think the moral hazard is a real value, valid valid
Speaker 6: argument because people do not care enough today.
Speaker 2: If you had, I was gonna say, if you want
Speaker 2: to get hunters interested, you need to look into the
Speaker 2: Irish Elk put that on your list.
Speaker 1: So I've got to get bod get behind that one.
Speaker 1: I've got just to get a look at one.
Speaker 6: I've got this dream list going and yeah, if you
Speaker 6: could do anything in the world for me, it's not dinosaurs,
Speaker 6: it is it's ungulates. That's where I found my passion
Speaker 6: for for conservation, primarily in Africa. But you know Irish
Speaker 6: elk Is, you know you look at a twelve foot
Speaker 6: span of vantler, right, like just insane, so tall and
Speaker 6: so big that when the force started growing and they
Speaker 6: they that's what was pushing them out of their habite
Speaker 6: because they couldn't even fit between trees, like just an amazing.
Speaker 3: The shed hunting world would just poof.
Speaker 1: They let me hit you with the one here, uh,
Speaker 1: because we would Brody mentioned like, why not go focus
Speaker 1: on Siberian tigers? Okay, so let's talk about Siberian tigers
Speaker 1: from it. How many are there? Roughly less than a thousand?
Speaker 5: Correct, Yeah, it's easily.
Speaker 1: So let's say you did cultivate a population and you
Speaker 1: and you worked up where you got a dozen of
Speaker 1: them cloned Siberian tigers. Could you ever get so comfortable
Speaker 1: with what you'd created that you would not as that
Speaker 1: you would cut them loose and let them integrate into
Speaker 1: that population in breeding. Yes, you could. You could get
Speaker 1: so you could get comfortable that you weren't having some
Speaker 1: reticence that like, dude, I don't know, maybe there's something
Speaker 1: I'm not seeing and this is going to be the
Speaker 1: final death knell.
Speaker 7: And relatedly, are you able to fiddle around enough that
Speaker 7: you don't have concerns about genetic bottlenecks if you're bringing
Speaker 7: twelve tigers out of a lab, like you're going in
Speaker 7: there and kind of buzzing around the edges.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because if they're all gone, you know, you talked
Speaker 1: about like like de extinction. If they're all gone, there
Speaker 1: becomes like a what's to lose? Like, you know, if
Speaker 1: if you do the dodo and you want to find
Speaker 1: in appropriate habitat, you do all the work, you put
Speaker 1: dodos out and yeah, like there's a thing you hadn't
Speaker 1: thought of which is totally possible, and it didn't work,
Speaker 1: you'd be like, oh, we didn't have them before, we
Speaker 1: don't have them now, what can we try? But in
Speaker 1: the case, it's like with this question about the Siberian tiger,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, what's to lose. Is we don't know
Speaker 1: yet that there remains a chain ants, so by helping it,
Speaker 1: what's the risk.
Speaker 6: Of Yeah, and I think that risk has to be
Speaker 6: put in context of what is the current risk of extinction?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 6: Just because it is still present doesn't mean it will
Speaker 6: be president in your time. So I think that is
Speaker 6: an important comparison. But not only am I comfortable with it,
Speaker 6: I mean that's my dream, That's why I work here.
Speaker 5: I want to go and find.
Speaker 6: These amazing programs where we can go make a difference
Speaker 6: in that way. But it's also important to note that
Speaker 6: that you know, this is such a thoughtful and long
Speaker 6: process that it's not just like I said earlier, you
Speaker 6: don't just make them and let them lose. We'd have
Speaker 6: to work in concert with NGOs, with government agencies to
Speaker 6: figure out how can we build a reintroduction program that
Speaker 6: allows us to answer all these sort of risk mitigation
Speaker 6: questions before we get to that release point. But yes,
Speaker 6: one hundred percent, my goal in life is that before
Speaker 6: I die, I want to see an endangered species saved
Speaker 6: by this technology.
Speaker 1: Not save, not de extinct, but preventing extinction.
Speaker 6: No, I mean for us, it's both you know, we
Speaker 6: view the extinction as a conservation tool and I think
Speaker 6: you know, I can see ways that we can fix
Speaker 6: habitats using the extinction from lost species, and that we
Speaker 6: can save currently imperiled populations of animals.
Speaker 1: Knowing what you now know, did they do the right
Speaker 1: thing on the Florida panther or like we had current technologies,
Speaker 1: would you have approached the Florida panther question differently?
Speaker 6: I mean, using today's tools, we could have done it
Speaker 6: differently and you wouldn't need to go to Texas to
Speaker 6: get more expensively. And this is an amazing toolkit we're building.
Speaker 6: And this goes back to that northern white rhino example.
Speaker 6: Is one of the things we're doing. And this should
Speaker 6: be right up Hunter's Alleys right is we're going back
Speaker 6: into people's private collections. We're going back into museum collections
Speaker 6: and understanding if you hunted a northern white rhino in
Speaker 6: the fifties, sixties, eighties, whatever it was, and you have
Speaker 6: this specimen, we want to sequence it. We want to
Speaker 6: go in and we want to figure out what was
Speaker 6: the genetic diversity representative of this species before it became
Speaker 6: extremely bottlenecked, functionally extinct and now we have twelve lines
Speaker 6: of Northern white rhinos, so essentially you only have twelve
Speaker 6: founders for the population.
Speaker 5: When we talk about.
Speaker 6: Florida panther, it was a a couple hundred and they
Speaker 6: were so inbred, so it tells you that there's a
Speaker 6: really low level. But what we can do is take
Speaker 6: those twelve lines and leave them sort of what we
Speaker 6: call wild type, and then start to use the genetic
Speaker 6: diversity information we found from those samples and edit that
Speaker 6: diversity back in, so we're actually artificially building more founder
Speaker 6: representation into the population. So that's what's happening right now
Speaker 6: for us with Northern white rhino. That's our key role
Speaker 6: in that project. We're going to Mauritius to talk about
Speaker 6: doing this with pink pigeons, which were a highly bottlenecked
Speaker 6: population that went extinct in the wild, and now we're
Speaker 6: looking at where else could we apply that. So for
Speaker 6: the Florida panther question, we could have done the same thing,
Speaker 6: or we could just go into the western cougar and
Speaker 6: identify what parts of of the genome would be most
Speaker 6: impactful back So without taking all of the Western cougar
Speaker 6: and mixing it in, you could take pieces of it
Speaker 6: and be more deliberate or intentional about what you want
Speaker 6: to do. Obviously that's more high tech and science y,
Speaker 6: so it becomes more expensive than just translocating western cougars,
Speaker 6: but it is a way to sort of, I think,
Speaker 6: answer some of the concerns about are you diluting an
Speaker 6: endemic subpopulation.
Speaker 3: And is there any temptation to alter these gene sequences,
Speaker 3: like to find these like Jurassic Park type ways of being, Like, oh,
Speaker 3: instead of like eradicating all the rats, can we make
Speaker 3: it so that ground nesting bird doesn't smell. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: to where the rats don't even see the nest because
Speaker 3: they can't.
Speaker 6: So we just announced this amazing project a couple weeks ago,
Speaker 6: I think. And so there's this A species in Australia
Speaker 6: comes from the Northern Ratory of Australia called the Northern
Speaker 6: quall quoll. It's a dazzy year it so it's closely
Speaker 6: related to Tasmanian devils. Years and years ago, cane toads
Speaker 6: marine toads were introduced to Australia as some attempt to
Speaker 6: control other invasives and just became an invasive in and
Speaker 6: of themselves, right, cane toads excrete buffotoxin boufotoxin. You know,
Speaker 6: so these are animals native to South America. Boufotoxin is
Speaker 6: a neurotoxin that kills animals that do not have a
Speaker 6: resistance to it. So when the cane toad was introduced
Speaker 6: to Australia, it really impacted the coal because it's a
Speaker 6: perfect size and sort of niche for the coal to predate,
Speaker 6: and when the qualls predate on them, they eventually die,
Speaker 6: and so it's really impacting the population. So what we're
Speaker 6: doing sort of in that same light is we've identified
Speaker 6: that animals that co evolved with the buffotad marine toad
Speaker 6: in South America actually have this natural resistance to that toxin.
Speaker 6: And as it turns out, it's a very simple that
Speaker 6: it's like one base pair change. So we're we just
Speaker 6: announced that we are going and making that change in
Speaker 6: northern coal lines so that we can release those genetically
Speaker 6: edited quill back into the Northern territory. And that that's
Speaker 6: amazing because it does two things. It saves the northern
Speaker 6: qual from this imminent extinction, which almost certain extinction, and
Speaker 6: they can start those kill down there. A nature based
Speaker 6: way to remove an invasive space. So it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's so exciting, and I think that is so to
Speaker 6: your question, yeah, we want to continue to find solutions
Speaker 6: like that.
Speaker 1: Wow, are there regulatory hurdles on that one?
Speaker 3: People got to be freaking out.
Speaker 6: I mean we talk about there's a big fear about
Speaker 6: genetically modified organistness, right, and I think there is also.
Speaker 1: A I got news for everybody, you're eating them?
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: That was going to be what I was gonna say,
Speaker 6: is I think anybody vacation and like Florida, right, and
Speaker 6: it's like you see helicopters spray and stuff everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah, chemicals are much worse.
Speaker 3: So yeah, right, and you're like, do you want that
Speaker 3: or do you want Well, that's three choices. Get absolutely
Speaker 3: eaten live by mosquitoes, have them aerial sprayed everywhere, or
Speaker 3: you can have a genetically modified mosquito in there that
Speaker 3: makes everybody uh male right, yep, males don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that would be one way to do it.
Speaker 6: But you know, I think to your point, there's an
Speaker 6: unwillingness to acknowledge that we have been domesticating our dogs,
Speaker 6: We've been domesticating our agriculture crops for tens of thousands
Speaker 6: of years, right, Like, that's sort of what we've done.
Speaker 6: That tomato that you eat every day isn't representative of
Speaker 6: what a tomato really is. That's what we've made it.
Speaker 6: But we did it through traditionally, through you know, artificial selection,
Speaker 6: back breeding, cross breeding, things like you know, sort of
Speaker 6: that Mendelian idea of genetics. If we like this phoenotype
Speaker 6: in this one, we're going to breed them and see
Speaker 6: what happens. We're doing the same thing. We're trying to
Speaker 6: get this gene from that target that we like, but
Speaker 6: we're just going to do it in an accelerated way
Speaker 6: in a lab. So we're still going to pull the
Speaker 6: same gen and put it in there as you would
Speaker 6: might achieve through selective breeding, but we're going to do
Speaker 6: it much faster and with fewer maybe unintended consequences.
Speaker 7: And isn't there an example of a species of zebra
Speaker 7: that they the quaga, that they brought back by doing
Speaker 7: sort of the Mendelian you pick out.
Speaker 5: There there's two efforts underway.
Speaker 6: So the quaga, which is is a closely related zebra
Speaker 6: and sort of it's very phenotypically different, has no stripes,
Speaker 6: it's like more brown, it's about it and the ROC
Speaker 6: from Europe. Right, there are two efforts to use back
Speaker 6: breeding to do that, and they're making headway, and they
Speaker 6: can do so with much less fanfare and and maybe
Speaker 6: criticism because people are really comfortable with breeding.
Speaker 7: Because it looks like what people were doing, yeah, tens
Speaker 7: of thousands of years ago.
Speaker 6: But the process, when you really get down to it,
Speaker 6: if you really want to oversimplify, is essentially the same.
Speaker 6: You're targeting very specific phenotypes in instead, we're figuring out
Speaker 6: what gene makes a phenotype and then we're trying to
Speaker 6: get that to be expressed in our line of interest,
Speaker 6: so we can do it much faster, and.
Speaker 5: I think that's much intention more.
Speaker 2: Probably what scares people though, like without leaning too far
Speaker 2: into like the paranoia and conspiracy theory thing, like it's like,
Speaker 2: who's making sure they're not going too far with this, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Or in the case of the tiger, right, and it's
Speaker 3: like somebody in labs like, but we want them a
Speaker 3: little more pissed off.
Speaker 6: But I think that's why, you know, we invite the
Speaker 6: regulatory environment. We want to be the subject matter expert
Speaker 6: that builds those guardrails, because frankly, there are very few
Speaker 6: people in the world that understand the true power of
Speaker 6: this technology more than.
Speaker 5: The people at Colossal.
Speaker 6: So we need to sit down with the world leading
Speaker 6: experts in ethics and regulation to say, this is how
Speaker 6: we think we can use this, and here's how we
Speaker 6: think it could probably go wrong, right, and let's build
Speaker 6: a guardrail that keeps us on this path. Because when
Speaker 6: we have this first breakthrough, when we blow all your
Speaker 6: minds with this first restored spaces from extinction, we won't
Speaker 6: be the only show anymore.
Speaker 5: And then Pandora's box is wide open.
Speaker 6: And luckily we'll be light years ahead of it and
Speaker 6: anybody else. But somebody else can start to work from
Speaker 6: the same foundation that we built.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 6: So we need responsible regulation and I want it for me.
Speaker 6: The only way I could ever achieve my dream of
Speaker 6: putting a restored spaces back into the wild or preventing
Speaker 6: an extinction is to have really strong regulation that invites
Speaker 6: that type of work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're a You're in an interesting position of when
Speaker 1: it comes to policy and legislation, you're in the interesting
Speaker 1: position of needing to point out what it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like you'd be like, like.
Speaker 1: Hear me out. I'm gonna tell you about a thing
Speaker 1: we're figuring out how to do that you're probably not
Speaker 1: aware of. And then I'm gonna tell you some things
Speaker 1: that you might want to do in order to get
Speaker 1: your hands around the thing. I'm gonna tell you exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And that's why you've said I don't if if
Speaker 6: you've looked into us a bit, you know, one of
Speaker 6: the one of the groups that invested in Colossal Is
Speaker 6: is the venture capital Alarm of the intelligence community here
Speaker 6: in the US, because they want to understand more of
Speaker 6: that so we we can work in concert and show
Speaker 6: them sort of what are the capabilities of today and
Speaker 6: and so that's why they've invested in US, because they
Speaker 6: understand that it's also important to national security that the
Speaker 6: United States leads this effort. If we're not doing it,
Speaker 6: somebody else is doing it, we better be the best
Speaker 6: at it.
Speaker 3: You may put a chimp into outer space, but you
Speaker 3: haven't put a colossal.
Speaker 1: Because if our enemies come out with a psychic war elephant, right,
Speaker 1: they're gonna look at you and be like, well, how
Speaker 1: come out of that a psychic war elephant? You know
Speaker 1: what you know what you know, you'll be you'll be
Speaker 1: pleased to know. I just thought of how to tackle
Speaker 1: the dinosaur deal.
Speaker 5: Oh great, let's hear it.
Speaker 1: Check it out. Everybody now knows that, like, uh, you know, birds,
Speaker 1: people are like, well, dinosaurs didn't really go away because
Speaker 1: some of them became birds. Somewhere deep in that bird's
Speaker 1: blood I mean, yeah, turkey, Maybe a crane somewhere deep
Speaker 1: in that turkey is probably the secret of what you're
Speaker 1: looking for. Deep in his blood.
Speaker 7: All of Steve's best ideas begin with everybody knows X,
Speaker 7: but deep down in his blood, I mean the blood
Speaker 7: in the middle of his heart.
Speaker 6: And we might have just been looking at the wrong
Speaker 6: part of the aim is probably some clue. Have you
Speaker 6: seen a watson? Watson, Watson. It's a South American beard
Speaker 6: that looks like a tiny velociraptor.
Speaker 1: That might even better than a crane.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that might be where it's there. They're terrifying looking.
Speaker 6: They have little claws on their wings.
Speaker 1: Well they do.
Speaker 9: I like the fact that nature has sort of put
Speaker 9: up a roadblock according to you, that is going to
Speaker 9: hopefully prevent us from doing what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Too far back, too far back.
Speaker 9: Yeah, or that its just and to me in a way,
Speaker 9: like I've said this for a long time, I get
Speaker 9: a lot of like frowned and like weird looks, and
Speaker 9: I say it, But extinction if it happened way back then,
Speaker 9: we lost all these species.
Speaker 3: It was a crazy place.
Speaker 9: It was a very diverse world, and then all of
Speaker 9: a sudden, like something hits the Earth and it changes,
Speaker 9: all the shit goes wrong. It would lose everything. But
Speaker 9: look right now or one hundred years ago. Wow, we
Speaker 9: have another very diverse, cool place. And there's nothing to
Speaker 9: say that as bad as we fuck it up in
Speaker 9: the next five hundred to one thousand years and we
Speaker 9: are gone that ten thousand years after that, it won't
Speaker 9: be another beautiful place.
Speaker 1: I look forward to us all being gone, humans all gone,
Speaker 1: and then let millions of years go by and then
Speaker 1: come back and look it'll be cool, like good lord.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm certain that they're.
Speaker 2: Gonna put in the bio bank so you can come.
Speaker 6: Back, come back, Ted Williams, just your head, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: Ted Williams style. I'm certain that in you know, nature
Speaker 6: and Earth will survive. It just won't be the nature
Speaker 6: of Earth that we know. And we're pretty attached to right,
Speaker 6: so it'd be nice. I think you're a little optimistic
Speaker 6: to think that civilization will last.
Speaker 5: Five hundred or thousand years.
Speaker 6: So at this rate that we're that we're we're chasing
Speaker 6: down biodiversity loss. You know, people think that biodiversity loss
Speaker 6: is only about, you know, the intrinsic value of nature.
Speaker 6: It's important to your food security, your health, you know, everything.
Speaker 6: Without a balance in nature, humanity will not thrive. That's
Speaker 6: why we have people looking at figuring out how to
Speaker 6: go to Mars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, I mean just our increasing understanding
Speaker 1: of the microbial structure of soil. Yeah, Like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We talked about Aldo Leopold the other day, his idea
Speaker 1: of of someone that doesn't really understand a watch looking
Speaker 1: at a disassembled watch and being like, I don't see
Speaker 1: what good this part is, right, it's not obvious you
Speaker 1: know that part does, and flick it out.
Speaker 10: And then later be like, god, damn it that I
Speaker 10: think that's the part that does the And we do
Speaker 10: that every day when we say, you know, you know,
Speaker 10: commercial fishing is over fishing our seas and we're seeing
Speaker 10: different you know, sizes of fish or different populations of
Speaker 10: fish out there just because of industrialized fishing.
Speaker 6: You know, we talk about when we are even doing
Speaker 6: you know, development for human housing, we're just digging up
Speaker 6: pieces of land that we got well, nothing that we
Speaker 6: know of today was important there.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: A great example to that was there's this this small
Speaker 6: lizard from Australia again in Victoria called the Victoria and
Speaker 6: Grassland early Dragon, and it went extinct in nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: nine and never seen again. And then they were one
Speaker 6: guy was digging up some housing some land in Victoria
Speaker 6: to put up a housing development, had to do an
Speaker 6: ecological survey and they discovered the Victorian Grassland early Dragon
Speaker 6: while they.
Speaker 7: Were destroying its What's great about that is our partners
Speaker 7: at Zoos Victoria and in Australia called us and they said,
Speaker 7: you know, unfortunately the Australian economy is not strong right
Speaker 7: now with all the stagnations stagflation issues down there, and
Speaker 7: they said, unfortunately, there's no money to save this animal.
Speaker 6: We ended up fight, Yeah, we ended up funding it.
Speaker 6: We ended up supporting all the genetics and genemic research
Speaker 6: and Zoos Victoria has done an amazing job, maybe one
Speaker 6: of the best species recovery stories I've ever heard of.
Speaker 6: They're the most prepared. They thought, one day, somebody's gonna
Speaker 6: find this lizard. So they went and found a closely
Speaker 6: related lizard and perfected its husbandry. In the first year
Speaker 6: that we put that animal at Ze's Victoria, they laid
Speaker 6: eggs and now there's we went. Yeah, we went from
Speaker 6: sixteen animals to about seventy or so.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, I mean just amazing, right, absolutely incredible story. And
Speaker 6: I think that's just goes to show you that, you know,
Speaker 6: just because things aren't obvious, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 6: to nature that we don't understand or that we just
Speaker 6: that that you kind of miss and couldn't have these
Speaker 6: insane ripple effects.
Speaker 1: Well that was great, Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 6: I mean, this is uh you got a lot of
Speaker 6: fans that lass uh yeah, yeah, I'd be remiss if
Speaker 6: I didn't give shout out to our head of animal husbandry,
Speaker 6: Steve Metzler. He's the biggest fan of you guys, so
Speaker 6: he was jealousy couldn't be here. But we really appreciate
Speaker 6: the audience with you and and uh and and and
Speaker 6: getting to share a little bit of what we do.
Speaker 6: We hope we have some exciting updates for you coming up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to. I want to make my final
Speaker 1: clarification here. Like we had we we joked a little
Speaker 1: bit and had some lass about things, right, But I
Speaker 1: I do think that when we had dinner last night,
Speaker 1: we talked about that I used to had this, I
Speaker 1: had the wrong idea that I always saw people justified
Speaker 1: the space race by pointing to Teflon, you know, and
Speaker 1: I was and then someone pointed out tough On didn't
Speaker 1: come from I thought it came from our efforts to
Speaker 1: land on the movie. Either way, I was bringing up
Speaker 1: this idea that you chase a thing, right, and and
Speaker 1: and and and maybe it's not clear why the why
Speaker 1: we have this desire at the time me this desire
Speaker 1: to go to the moon, right, it's kind of what
Speaker 1: are you gonna do when you get there? And it's
Speaker 1: an open question, but it leads you down this path,
Speaker 1: and for us, it led down this path of set
Speaker 1: you know, eventually, satellite technology, internet whatever. It opens up
Speaker 1: all these things. And I do really appreciate in the
Speaker 1: conversations that we've had, I do really appreciate that there's
Speaker 1: this kind of like North Star idea that's very arresting
Speaker 1: about like that we would make a mammoth, right, we
Speaker 1: would de extinct a mammoth, And I appreciate that for
Speaker 1: its It's it's like lunar shot appeal, right, But the
Speaker 1: way in which that, like looking at that north Star,
Speaker 1: the way in which that has created and will continue
Speaker 1: to create strategies and technologies that would be like applicable
Speaker 1: to real world current problems is like it's noteworthy.
Speaker 5: Yep, I agree.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm supportive. I'm supportive of the pursuit mostly
Speaker 1: as much as I'd love to see a mammoth. I'm
Speaker 1: supportive of the pursuit because of the all the implications
Speaker 1: that you discussed about ways in which you can be
Speaker 1: currently currently helpful on real problems of species blinking out.
Speaker 6: You know, absolutely the journey is as important as a
Speaker 6: destination in this case, right we are. We are doing
Speaker 6: amazing things along the way. If we ever get to
Speaker 6: the point where we've had so much success that your
Speaker 6: concerns about the destination come into play, We've hit such
Speaker 6: a home run that we have made such a difference
Speaker 6: to the natural world that I think people really understand,
Speaker 6: you know, in retrospect.
Speaker 5: Why this pursuit is so important.
Speaker 1: When it comes time to find out the regulatory structure
Speaker 1: on mammoth haunts. I would appreciate if you guys can
Speaker 1: talk to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely hope.
Speaker 5: Hunter's orange necessary.
Speaker 1: All right, Matt James, some colossal biosciences. Thanks for coming out, man,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Guys, appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 4: It's a fresh instead of eyed. We'll always find more.
Speaker 11: Be crawl down in the car for them on your
Speaker 11: hands and knelt on my being the worm to tell you.
Speaker 4: You don't wrong. But come on, baby, last, not tonight.
Speaker 4: So listen to my song. Honey, I a hot pos
Speaker 4: Sam the pot with you.
Speaker 11: There's nothing that I can do, so feed the flame, Honey.
Speaker 4: I love you. I'm your pusson the hot line, my
Speaker 4: how phossum o you.
Speaker 11: There's nothing el that I can do, Sophia the Flame, Honey.
Speaker 2: I love you.
Speaker 4: You're Pusson. Oh wow, Pusson.
Speaker 11: You don't believe my honey, I'm You're person