Speaker 1: Media. Oh, wow, Sophie, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we can put that on the air. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's actionable threats against a sitting.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean, just Sophie, that's it's just dangerous to be
Speaker 1: saying stuff like that in this day and age. I know,
Speaker 1: let's distract the audience and the federal agents listening in
Speaker 1: by bringing on our guests today who definitely doesn't say
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Langston Kerman, Langston, do you condemn Sophie's statements,
Speaker 1: assuming they ever get out in unedited form?
Speaker 2: I was. I was tempted to hang up the zone
Speaker 2: right away. It was so inflammatory that I said, I
Speaker 2: can't be a part of this.
Speaker 1: No. No, it's time to bring peace to the country.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: That's that's what we all need to be focusing on.
Speaker 2: Is peace. We got to get back to what we were,
Speaker 2: which was normal and peace.
Speaker 1: Was normal and good. Everyone knows things used to be
Speaker 1: good in this country for everybody, right, that's chilling for all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: things were so great, And I think what'll get us
Speaker 1: back to that is talking about puppies. Right. Everybody loves
Speaker 1: a good puppy, right, puppies. Puppies are wonderful, and there's
Speaker 1: been some really what is he talking about? God, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about puppy mills. No, don't worry, this is
Speaker 1: a fun one, everybody. We're gonna have a good time
Speaker 1: this week. Like it is a guy I think is
Speaker 1: a piece of shit, but it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 3: YEA.
Speaker 2: I will say before you even go, one of the
Speaker 2: only taboos that exists in film and television is murdering dogs. Yes,
Speaker 2: and I'm getting so scared before we even start.
Speaker 1: I know nothing, No dogs are provably harmed yet and
Speaker 1: in the making of this story, although I do have
Speaker 1: to specify yet, but there is like a dog like
Speaker 1: creature involved. Because if you if you spend any time online,
Speaker 1: have you been on social media or just been watching
Speaker 1: the news. I think probably close to one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of our audience caught this. There was a big story
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks back about how this company brought
Speaker 1: back the dire wolf, right, which is an extinct kind
Speaker 1: of wolf, and they did it using some I think
Speaker 1: we can call it Jurassic Park style machinations, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's what everyone thought of, And this is all the
Speaker 1: work of a of an actual like science like bioscience
Speaker 1: startup called Colossal Biosciences, which is just by name, a
Speaker 1: company that could not sound more like it belonged than
Speaker 1: a Michael Crichton novel if they just called it engine right,
Speaker 1: like it's it's amazing.
Speaker 2: It really feels like a fourth grader was, like.
Speaker 1: I got it, like when I was in fourth grade
Speaker 1: trying to rewrite Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, okay, we'll get sue.
Speaker 1: That's fine, it's fine, it's fine. Michael Crichton's not going
Speaker 1: to sue a four year old Colossal Science original. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it'll publish this. So most news coverage of this
Speaker 1: whole Dire Wolf thing kinda casually accepted the pr claims
Speaker 1: being made by Colossal and it's co founder, slash Scientific spokesman,
Speaker 1: doctor George Church. Time published an article with the title
Speaker 1: the Return of the Dire Wolf, and it's it's as
Speaker 1: hype an article as it could possibly be, And on
Speaker 1: the front of it, there's a photo of a very
Speaker 1: charismatic looking wolf as that I mean, that's a beautiful wolf, right,
Speaker 1: that charm that that is a screen ready wolf.
Speaker 2: You can tell you can tell that wolf knows how
Speaker 2: the business works. That's not a wolf that you gotta like,
Speaker 2: uh put a caretaker on, you.
Speaker 1: Know, you gotta. They said that they put some dire
Speaker 1: wolf jeans into this wolf. I think they might have
Speaker 1: stuck one or two Tom Cruise jeans in there, because
Speaker 1: that wolf knows where the camera is, right.
Speaker 2: That wolf, That wolf does its own stunts.
Speaker 1: Wolf does its own stunts, right. Obviously it's a good
Speaker 1: looking wolf. No one's throwing shade against these animals here.
Speaker 1: They're gorgeous, but they're not wolves, right. That's kind of
Speaker 1: where we're starting here. It gets much more fucked up
Speaker 1: than that. Dire Wolves were a very real species of
Speaker 1: wolf which roamed the Americas. They were found in parts
Speaker 1: of both North and South America from the late police
Speaker 1: Decene to the early Holocene period, which is a span
Speaker 1: of somewhere over one hundred thousand years. It's bite force like.
Speaker 1: When these animals lived, they had a stronger bite force
Speaker 1: than any known modern wolves, so they were pretty formidable.
Speaker 1: But the reputation for them being like the size of
Speaker 1: horses is something they largely accrued via Game of Thrones
Speaker 1: because dire wolves were around the same size as the
Speaker 1: largest modern wolves, a little bigger but we're talking like
Speaker 1: ten or twenty pounds heavier than like a Yukon wolf
Speaker 1: on average.
Speaker 2: And there was a sub Right, there's a pretty extensive
Speaker 2: collection of dire wolf bones in the Librea Tarpits Museum.
Speaker 2: Oh right, and boy was I disappointed when I saw
Speaker 2: how little those.
Speaker 1: Bones were, right, he gave a throat shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, I walked in there and I said, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna see the biggest wolf that's that ever was. And
Speaker 2: those wolves look like snauzers. They're tiny little dogs as
Speaker 2: far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you I mean, like, the average size of
Speaker 1: a dire wolf was like one hundred and fifty pounds,
Speaker 1: which is like a good sized caneid. But like, I've
Speaker 1: known dogs bigger than that. I've known some two hundred
Speaker 1: pound mastiffs, right like, and they're not that big on average. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: so yeah, again, these are they're bite in terms of
Speaker 1: bite force, very formidable animals, but they're not huge.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 1: That's stuff that George R. Martin put in his book,
Speaker 1: because George R. And Martin knows how to make a
Speaker 1: book cool. Right, Yeah, you gotta judge up reality a
Speaker 1: little bit, you know, especially if it's a fantasy novel.
Speaker 2: He knows how to make a book cool, and he
Speaker 2: knows how to make a hat cool. He's got cool hats,
Speaker 2: cool books and scarves.
Speaker 1: Cool hats, cool books, and he's he's achieved. I've have
Speaker 1: a lot of respect for George. He's achieved every writer's dream,
Speaker 1: which is to never have to write again, right like that,
Speaker 1: that's what we're all shooting for. So just live in
Speaker 1: all lighthouse that never finished your series, I say, as
Speaker 1: I'm two years overdue with my novel. But the name
Speaker 1: of the species is presumably the major thing that inspired
Speaker 1: George R.
Speaker 2: Martin.
Speaker 1: It's just a cool name, dire Wolf, Like there's it's
Speaker 1: dire wolves have been in D and D before George
Speaker 1: put him in his books, right because it's just a
Speaker 1: cool thing to call a wolf. It's like, yeah, that
Speaker 1: sounds like a scarier wolf to me. And Colossal Biosciences
Speaker 1: knowing and being primarily this is a company that describes
Speaker 1: themselves as being in gene sciences. They're in the pr
Speaker 1: business as much as anything else, and they made the
Speaker 1: wise decision to rely heavily on the popularity of the
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones books and TV shows to act as
Speaker 1: advertising for their quote unquote dire wolf right. And in
Speaker 1: fact this is even written into that Fawning Time coverage.
Speaker 1: And here's a quote from that article. Relying on deft
Speaker 1: genetic engineering an ancient preserved DNA, colossal scientists deciphered the
Speaker 1: dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common
Speaker 1: gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as
Speaker 1: surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus and their sister, two month
Speaker 1: old Kalisi into the world during three separate births last
Speaker 1: fall in this winter, effectively for the first time, de
Speaker 1: extincting a line of beasts whose live geenpool vanished long ago.
Speaker 1: Ti met the mates. Kalisi was not present due to
Speaker 1: her young age, at a fenced field in a US
Speaker 1: wildlife facility on March twenty fourth, on the condition that
Speaker 1: their location remain a secret to protect the animals from
Speaker 1: prying eyes. Now, naming a dire wolf after a character
Speaker 1: in the books who had nothing to do with dire
Speaker 1: wolves was by far the fringiest possible.
Speaker 4: Choice here opportunity.
Speaker 1: There were dire wolves with names.
Speaker 2: There were a lot of Starks. They could have just
Speaker 2: gone down the Stark lineage they didn't have to go
Speaker 2: to Kali.
Speaker 1: Literally, she had nothing to do with the wolves. Did
Speaker 1: she even meet any of those?
Speaker 2: A dragon lady?
Speaker 5: She met the Yes, that.
Speaker 1: She met Okay, she met jobs maybe okay, ghost right, Okay,
Speaker 1: so maybe one we.
Speaker 4: Don't talk about that.
Speaker 1: Last season, we don't talk about that. I got really
Speaker 1: sad for a second.
Speaker 2: But it's the bummer, folks, should you should do that
Speaker 2: season as one of the bestards from Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1: What we're working on a sixth parter, but having the animals.
Speaker 1: They also had the animals pose with George R. Martin
Speaker 1: as part of like the press tour, and that was
Speaker 1: a particular choice. First off, look at this which again
Speaker 1: no shade on George. I want to hold a wolf
Speaker 1: pup right, absolutely, yeah, Like it looks cuddly as hell.
Speaker 1: But that's also kind of part of the problem because
Speaker 1: like that wolf is actively yawning, right, Like, it seems
Speaker 1: pretty chill to be there. And it's interesting to me
Speaker 1: because if the information given to the team at time
Speaker 1: by Colossal Biosciences was accurate, there's no way this photo
Speaker 1: should exist. Here's what Time claimed right at the start
Speaker 1: of their article. The angelic Exuberance puppies exhibit in the
Speaker 1: presence of humans, trotting up for hugs, belly Rob's kisses
Speaker 1: is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a
Speaker 1: person approaches, even if one of the handlers who raised
Speaker 1: them from birth can only get so close before Romulus
Speaker 1: and Remas flinch and retreat. This isn't domestic canine behavior.
Speaker 1: This is wild lupine behavior. The pups are wolves. Not
Speaker 1: only that they're dire wolves, which means they have cause
Speaker 1: to be lonely, and again just genetically they're not dire wolves.
Speaker 1: But also, why is George cuddling that animal? Then if
Speaker 1: you can't, are you you're either forcing the animal into
Speaker 1: a situation that makes it distinctly uncomfortable. But the animal
Speaker 1: looks like it's yawning, so maybe they're just not as
Speaker 1: wolfy as you're pretending.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're really trying to weave a story here. And
Speaker 2: that's that's a nice dog. That seems like a really polite,
Speaker 2: U sweet dog.
Speaker 1: Shill it looks like a husky. Yeah, I don't know man.
Speaker 4: And frankly, George, why are you not finishing the books?
Speaker 2: Well, he's got a lot of looks.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to give him shit for that. Again,
Speaker 1: I also haven't, And if I have the chance to
Speaker 1: cuddle a wolf rather than spend another day working on
Speaker 1: my novel, I would be a added to that wolf.
Speaker 4: So fucking fast.
Speaker 1: The man owns a lighthouse, how you expect him to
Speaker 1: finish a book? He's finished other books. I'll give him
Speaker 1: shit for his involvement in this company, though.
Speaker 2: That's cool to make that much money and be like,
Speaker 2: I'm a buy a lighthouse.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get a lighthouse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course I'm not sleeping where normal people sleep anymore.
Speaker 2: I've got a different thing going on.
Speaker 1: No, I'm going to recreate that great Robert Pattinson movie.
Speaker 2: Where everybody was fine at the end everyone No.
Speaker 1: No, really good movie with a good ending. So the
Speaker 1: fact that there's this photo of George R. R. Martin with
Speaker 1: one of these dire wolves makes a lot more sense
Speaker 1: when you learn a few things about both the company
Speaker 1: behind these animals and the actual science behind the project itself.
Speaker 1: For one thing, George R. R. Martin is an investor in
Speaker 1: Colossal Biosciences and also an advisor to the company, which
Speaker 1: advisor and what George R. Martin's a number of things
Speaker 1: he's not a scientist, he's not a geneticist. He's not
Speaker 1: an expert in real dire.
Speaker 2: Wolves because of sunglasses.
Speaker 1: He sunglasses, like he invented fake dire wolves for his novels.
Speaker 1: I don't understand, Like, under what circumstances would he be
Speaker 1: an advisor to this company doing genetics work. That's like
Speaker 1: if they hired the guy who played doctor Alan Grant
Speaker 1: to advise a company cloning dinosaurs. It's like, well, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't really know anything about dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: Ye, he's actually he doesn't even speak with that accent.
Speaker 2: He's pretending.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like it's like bringing Jeff Goldblum onto the project. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you if you're trying to like, I
Speaker 1: just don't think he has the expertise. Nothing against Jeff.
Speaker 2: If you want to flirt with the dinosaur.
Speaker 1: People, yes, bring Jeff in.
Speaker 2: Yeah you want them dinosaurs horny a al get Jeff.
Speaker 2: But otherwise you gotta yeah, he could do that ship
Speaker 2: you gotta talk to a scientist you might.
Speaker 1: Want to bring in, like Robert Backer or someone if
Speaker 1: he's still alive. But anyway, An article by Michael hills
Speaker 1: It for the Los Angeles Times explains how Martin is
Speaker 1: being credited as an advisor.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: He's named as a co author on a technical paper
Speaker 1: the company published as a non peer reviewed preprint describing
Speaker 1: its de extinction effort. The text credits him with the
Speaker 1: review and editing of the paper's text, among thirty six
Speaker 1: other credited co authors in that category. So he's one
Speaker 1: of thirty six people who helped copy edit an article.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is okay to your point, this is just pr.
Speaker 1: This is just PR. First off, there's everything else thirty
Speaker 1: six people to edit an article.
Speaker 2: And they didn't let those other thirty five people hold
Speaker 2: that dog. And that's no fucked up, no, no, just George.
Speaker 1: They just pressed George in there for that. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: to kind of enforce the point I made earlier, these wolves,
Speaker 1: well very cute, are not dire wolves. There's some genes
Speaker 1: that they found while sequencing direwolf genetics that have been
Speaker 1: put into a normal wolf. But that doesn't It's kind
Speaker 1: of like how like some people have some Neanderthal DNA
Speaker 1: in there, but they're not themselves Neanderthals, right, They're just
Speaker 1: they're people.
Speaker 2: You know, that's gotta be a tough thing to figure
Speaker 2: out for yourself. Though that I got a little bit
Speaker 2: of that in there, because yeah.
Speaker 1: You get some DNA from a species we wiped out.
Speaker 2: Yeah you can kind of see it. And then then
Speaker 2: that bumps you out where you're like.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, like John Hamm, I assume right. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Colossal Biosciences is not actually in the de extinction business.
Speaker 1: They are in the modifying animals genetically in ways that
Speaker 1: in some cases hadn't been done before business, and that
Speaker 1: is interesting, but it's not the extinction. And so they
Speaker 1: are doing stuff. They are doing something new and something
Speaker 1: that is in some ways very interesting, but it's not
Speaker 1: what they're claiming they're doing. So I can't call this
Speaker 1: a straight up con right, because they did make an
Speaker 1: animal that didn't exist before, but it's also not a
Speaker 1: dire wolf, and they're not de extincting anything. And I
Speaker 1: think the evidence shows they are massively inflating what they
Speaker 1: and their technology can do in order to win VC funding.
Speaker 1: The whole explanation as to why we'll take a while,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to start by talking about the claims
Speaker 1: that first brought the company public attention back in September
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one. A whole spate of almost identical
Speaker 1: articles dropped announcing the creation of Colossal Biosciences, and they're
Speaker 1: planned to clone a wooly mammoth by twenty twenty seven,
Speaker 1: so we got two more years before to be mammoths, right.
Speaker 2: Megan, Wooly mammos back, y'all, this is exciting.
Speaker 1: Very soon, like probably right around the same time we
Speaker 1: get Severn season three. You know, we're lucky.
Speaker 2: You know what its about the same year talks about
Speaker 2: wooly mammos two is they also are not bigger than elephants.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: No, I thought this whole time that wooly mammoths were
Speaker 2: like these giant beasts that we would never be able
Speaker 2: to see again. And they're like smaller than the average
Speaker 2: no African elephant.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: And again, it's one of those things whatever people start
Speaker 1: to think about, Oh, it's it's a bum. We've missed
Speaker 1: all the cool, coolest animals that existed. The largest thing
Speaker 1: to ever exist on Earth is still around swims in
Speaker 1: the sea and we're currently killing them.
Speaker 4: Okay, something something you missed in this story now that
Speaker 4: you've brought up the wooly mammoth is uh. Part of
Speaker 4: the investors for this company are like a I'm.
Speaker 1: Getting to it. I'm getting to that, So don't show
Speaker 1: where I was, Like it was a guy know this?
Speaker 1: Why do I know this?
Speaker 4: Shit?
Speaker 1: We're getting to the other investors in this fucking company.
Speaker 1: Don't worry God. But here's a here's a representative example
Speaker 1: from like the press that explosion around this wooly mammoth claim.
Speaker 1: So this is a CNBC article lab grown wooly mammoths
Speaker 1: could walk the earth in six years of geneticists, new
Speaker 1: startup succeeds. This is published in twenty twenty one. And
Speaker 1: the geneticist that they're discussing, and the guy the article
Speaker 1: is based around interviewing is co founder of Claw Biosciences,
Speaker 1: doctor George Church, who claimed that he'd had the idea
Speaker 1: kicking around for years and research supports this fact. He's
Speaker 1: been pushing this idea in one form or another for
Speaker 1: like a decade or more, but that he'd just been
Speaker 1: given fifteen million dollars in seed funding and a company
Speaker 1: had been established with serial entrepreneur Ben Lamb as CEO.
Speaker 1: And we will talk about Ben Lambs Moore in part two. Church,
Speaker 1: though doctor George Church is a real doctor and his
Speaker 1: credentials are impeccable on paper. And just to state, this
Speaker 1: guy's kind of a weird case where he's exaggerating a
Speaker 1: lot and I think you could even argue lying about
Speaker 1: some things. But he's a real scientist with some very
Speaker 1: impressive achievements behind him.
Speaker 2: And I think it's important for us to say that
Speaker 2: scientists can be both legitimate and liars. Oh with shit, right, yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: we often I think conflate it somehow, where scientists are
Speaker 2: like these moral beings that exist above us all and no,
Speaker 2: they can be liars and also really smart and capable people.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It's like you could be a great science fiction author
Speaker 1: and racist as fuck, right, like those two things have existed,
Speaker 1: or like Isaac Asimov where you're like, wow, what a
Speaker 1: genius and also sex pest, right, like those things do
Speaker 1: not conflict whatsoever. You know, it might have helped him,
Speaker 1: I have helped him. Who knows. So George Church's credentious.
Speaker 1: I'm not calling Church's sex pest. Although he has some
Speaker 1: shady involvement with people that we'll talk about, none of
Speaker 1: it involves the accusations of his specific behavior, just his
Speaker 1: choice of company anyway, his academic credentials anyway, He is
Speaker 1: the oh we're this this episode ends. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to give you a hint, but you're
Speaker 1: you're going to be psyched. You're not gonna be psyched,
Speaker 1: You're gonna be bummed. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor
Speaker 1: of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member
Speaker 1: at the Weiss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, also at Harvard.
Speaker 1: So you know that alone pretty bigical achievement.
Speaker 2: Right, and he still holds those positions.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, as far as I'm aware. Yes, Church has
Speaker 1: his name on more than one hundred patents. And you know,
Speaker 1: some of those are things where like maybe he got
Speaker 1: on there because he helped someone else, but a lot
Speaker 1: of them are because he contributed really significant work to
Speaker 1: those patents. He started the Personal Genome project. And he
Speaker 1: has also helped found more than twenty companies. Now, that
Speaker 1: last claim was the first thing I read about him
Speaker 1: that made me wonder, like, Okay, is there something like
Speaker 1: shady here, because twenty companies is too many? No, honest,
Speaker 1: man has found more than twenty companies. You're doing some
Speaker 1: fucked up shit, right.
Speaker 2: You gotta focus, big man. That's a few too many companies.
Speaker 1: That's too many companies. And then what I read about
Speaker 1: the actual claims colossal through Church was making about why
Speaker 1: cloning mammoths was not just like a cool thing to do,
Speaker 1: but like necessary for conservation. I went fully over the edge.
Speaker 1: This is when I was like, Okay, I got to
Speaker 1: dig more into this guy. There's gotta be something fucked
Speaker 1: up here. And he has made claims like this quote.
Speaker 1: This is a quote from the article proponents of the project,
Speaker 1: and they're talking about Church say rewilding the Arctic with
Speaker 1: wooly mammoths could slow global warming by slowing the melting
Speaker 1: of the permafrost where methane is currently trapped. That's not true.
Speaker 1: How it has something to do with them stomping down
Speaker 1: the ground to stop like trees from growing up so
Speaker 1: the permafrost days. But like that's if theoretically there were
Speaker 1: a massive, healthy mammoth population, it might do that. We're
Speaker 1: not talking about number one, they're not talking about making mammoths.
Speaker 1: They're talking about modifying African elephants as a spoiler for
Speaker 1: what will be in part two. But also, like that's
Speaker 1: just not a feasible place for this project to end with,
Speaker 1: like massive herds of mammoths clumbing across the top say
Speaker 1: to fix. Also, no amount of mammoths is going to
Speaker 1: fix global warming, and it's current, Like, the problem is
Speaker 1: not just there's too many trees in Siberia. There's other
Speaker 1: shit going off.
Speaker 2: If that's the approach you're taking, you're missing the mark
Speaker 2: quite a bit. Yeah, I think mammoth mammoths can't be
Speaker 2: our first start at fixing the problem, for sure.
Speaker 1: I think a lack of mammoth says the primary reason
Speaker 1: this is a problem. Yeah. Further shady factoids about the
Speaker 1: business include the fact that it is a for profit enterprise. Now.
Speaker 1: Ben Lamb, who's his co founder in the CEO, was
Speaker 1: quick to tel CNBC none of our investors are focused
Speaker 1: on monetizing right now, which is great, But then you
Speaker 1: read about who those investors are, and you wonder, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I believe that, because investors in Colossal
Speaker 1: outside of George R. Martin include self help grifter, Tony
Speaker 1: Robbins and winkle Boss Capital. Oh we got winkle By
Speaker 1: the Winklebostuins.
Speaker 2: Wow, Winkleby, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: They'd only be involved in a real project.
Speaker 2: This is like when a bunch of celebrities open up
Speaker 2: an ice cream story, right, Eli, Why do y'all know
Speaker 2: each other?
Speaker 1: Oh, one of you's moving coke and you guys need
Speaker 1: it away? Alounder shity, What.
Speaker 2: Is this relationship that somehow foster naturally.
Speaker 1: Between uh huh, this is something's wrong here and missing something.
Speaker 1: And yes there are some famous TikTokers involved as well,
Speaker 1: and some other celebrities who should not be involved in
Speaker 1: a biosciencest company we'll talk about later. So by the
Speaker 1: time I read about the Winklevoss twins being involved, I
Speaker 1: was fully on team fuck these people winkleby the Winkles V.
Speaker 1: But that's not enough to actually like justify accusing a
Speaker 1: person and their company of being bastards, right, just like
Speaker 1: even I wouldn't do that. So I looked deeper, and boy, howdy,
Speaker 1: did I find some shit. Before we get into everything
Speaker 1: that's fucked up about this company, a lot of what's
Speaker 1: fucked up here is actually taught doctor George Church and
Speaker 1: talking about what this guy's done and where he's come from,
Speaker 1: Because this is a story of like a great scientist
Speaker 1: who makes some choices that I would argue puts him
Speaker 1: into a series of very unethical situations because there's money
Speaker 1: in it. Right, That's what I think is going on here.
Speaker 1: But I'm just gonna read you his bio. George McDonald
Speaker 1: Church was born on August twenty eighth, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: on McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He grew
Speaker 1: up in Clearwater with the capitalist scientology. But I can't
Speaker 1: hold that against him. He's got no ties that I
Speaker 1: found to the organization. He just grew up there.
Speaker 2: He just got lucky.
Speaker 1: He just got lucky, thank God. Yeah, he's near Blue Base.
Speaker 1: I think that's the big base in Clearwater. His family
Speaker 1: life was somewhat chaotic by most people's standards, as he
Speaker 1: laid out in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, I
Speaker 1: had three fathers as my mother remarried. The first one
Speaker 1: lasted about eight months post birth, and he was an
Speaker 1: Air Force pilot, a pretty colorful character. I knew him
Speaker 1: off and on through the years up until his death.
Speaker 1: He was the sort of father that a young boy
Speaker 1: would admire because he wasn't tied down by actual responsibilities.
Speaker 1: That was Stu MacDonald. He was called barefoot stew He
Speaker 1: was inducted into the Water Ski Hall of Fame. He
Speaker 1: wasn't a terrific athlete. I mean, obviously he was a
Speaker 1: pretty good one, but his real contribution to the sport,
Speaker 1: which was relevant to me, was that he was a
Speaker 1: good communicator. He was the first ABC wide World of
Speaker 1: Sports color commentator. He was also just generally charismatic. He
Speaker 1: was a male model. He worked on film television as well.
Speaker 1: Right right, So, and this guy he's also primarily a
Speaker 1: communicator now, right, And he's like, he's very old now,
Speaker 1: but he's like a handsome kind of old Like he's
Speaker 1: the you would cast him to be like the old
Speaker 1: king in like a fucking new Robin Hood movie, like
Speaker 1: comes Back at the Air, right, Like, he is that
Speaker 1: kind of old guy. He was my birth dad, but
Speaker 1: I don't think he really influenced me that much intellectually.
Speaker 1: My second father was a lawyer and had the least influence.
Speaker 1: Third dad was a physician who had two pretty important roles.
Speaker 1: He sent me away to school, to an awesome high school.
Speaker 1: Both my stepbrother and I went away at roughly the
Speaker 1: same time. It might have just been to get the
Speaker 1: young teenage boys out of the house, but in my
Speaker 1: case it was very good. It was a liberal East
Speaker 1: Coast school, and over which is where the Bushes went.
Speaker 1: I don't know if i'd call that liberal, but and
Speaker 1: Harvard chemistry professor George Whiteside and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: interesting people. And the other thing he did was just
Speaker 1: being a physician. I could look at his medical technology
Speaker 1: and somehow be enthralled by it. And doctor Dad is
Speaker 1: where he gets the last name Church, So that definitely
Speaker 1: seems to be the guy he primarily considers to have
Speaker 1: been his father. And that summary of events does kind
Speaker 1: of smooth over a couple of things, including what seems
Speaker 1: to have been a difficult start for George at school.
Speaker 1: He's always very bright, but he has learning disabilities. He
Speaker 1: had to repeat the ninth grade as a result. George
Speaker 1: has claimed in recent years to have dyslexia and narcolepsy
Speaker 1: OCD and add all of which he says it's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff. He says, they were all mild, but
Speaker 1: it made me feel different, right, and so he became
Speaker 1: kind of desperate in grade school not to stand out
Speaker 1: or get attention, right, Like, he doesn't want to seem weird,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty normal way for kids to feel
Speaker 1: in school.
Speaker 2: So far, it's the thing I've related to him most
Speaker 2: on Right, I get that, Yeah, I get it that
Speaker 2: I connect to Saying you reinvented wolves is a different conversation.
Speaker 1: But the whole thing trouble with you very rarely claimed
Speaker 1: that Langston.
Speaker 2: It's almost never come up in our conversations at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, seldom. Prior to going to Andover Church, attended both
Speaker 1: public and Catholic schools, but had bad experiences in both systems.
Speaker 1: He just says the schools in Florida weren't very good. Again,
Speaker 1: I don't have trouble seeing that. Despite his difficulty with academics,
Speaker 1: he was a voracious reader and good at self directed
Speaker 1: learning when he was interested in something. He built an
Speaker 1: analog computer when he was ten, and when he started
Speaker 1: at Andover they had a time share computing program with
Speaker 1: nearby Dartmouth College, so he was able to spend time
Speaker 1: on a computer before most people his age did, which
Speaker 1: is like you see similar stories with like a lot
Speaker 1: of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a lot of
Speaker 1: the guys who were like around this age and also
Speaker 1: wound up being major tech players.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it was such rare technology, Yeah, to access
Speaker 2: at that age.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 2: I bet if you really were able to invest in
Speaker 2: the time and energy, you advanced a chess piece. So far, yes,
Speaker 2: for yourself.
Speaker 1: And you were generally kind of a rich kid, right,
Speaker 1: which is you know the case with even though he's
Speaker 1: got you know, he goes through a couple of dads,
Speaker 1: this this last one is very comfortable financially and as
Speaker 1: a result, he gets this opportunity and as a result,
Speaker 1: then his story sounds less like a lot of big
Speaker 1: science guys and more like a lot of tech startup dudes, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the kind of background this dude has.
Speaker 2: They always talk about how like Bill Gates started Microsoft
Speaker 2: in his garage, but it's like, oh, you had an
Speaker 2: entire garage. Most people have to store things and park
Speaker 2: ours in there. You were just like Noah, the garage
Speaker 2: is a workspace.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, speaking of garages, if you want to
Speaker 1: afford a garage, I don't know. I can't help you,
Speaker 1: but you can buy these products.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, this is a beautiful segue.
Speaker 1: Yeah we're back. Okay, So so far it's been a
Speaker 1: pretty similar story to a lot of tech guys. And
Speaker 1: George has a story about what how we knew was
Speaker 1: like ten or so, he goes to the New York
Speaker 1: World's Fair and that has a huge impact on him.
Speaker 1: He gets to see very early touch screens, which are
Speaker 1: obviously a precursor to a real technology, and also a
Speaker 1: lot of fake future technology, like personal jet packs and
Speaker 1: stuff that, like, I mean, there's technically some jet packs,
Speaker 1: but it's not what we thought it would be, right,
Speaker 1: We're not flying around in those things.
Speaker 2: You and be like, I thought it was gonna be
Speaker 2: rocketman shit, and it's not that at all.
Speaker 1: No. No, I thought right up to the fact that
Speaker 1: I thought we'd all be shooting Nazis, And it turns
Speaker 1: out we shose other things to do with Nazis, which
Speaker 1: some of us think.
Speaker 2: It's they're a better hang than we anticipated.
Speaker 1: Certainly the better hang than the rocketman for the rocket
Speaker 1: to your thought. So, but yeah, a lot of the
Speaker 1: tech he sees is also just stuff that like never happened, right,
Speaker 1: And George would later say, quote, it didn't take too
Speaker 1: long for me to become disillusioned. Not only was it
Speaker 1: not like that in Florida, it probably wasn't even like
Speaker 1: that in New York once they shut down the World's Fair,
Speaker 1: And it might not ever be like that if I
Speaker 1: didn't do something about it. So I sort of felt
Speaker 1: like if I want that, I have to it. And
Speaker 1: you can take two things out of this either he
Speaker 1: realizes the World's fair is largely like a pr thing
Speaker 1: and most of this stuff isn't coming or at least
Speaker 1: not coming anytime soon, and like, well, then I'm going
Speaker 1: to get into I'm going to become a cutting edge
Speaker 1: scientist to try to make this future real. Or maybe
Speaker 1: what he learns is like, wow, it's really easy to
Speaker 1: lie to a lot of people about what you can
Speaker 1: do and like get money, and maybe that's maybe that's
Speaker 1: a lot easier than inventing the future.
Speaker 2: I think spotting a grift is real, profitable, real fast.
Speaker 1: It can be. Yeah. Now, maybe to be fair, maybe
Speaker 1: both of those things hit him, because he does get
Speaker 1: into some real making the future shit. At first, Church
Speaker 1: wound up attending summer courses in quantum physics. At MIT,
Speaker 1: he gets into crystallography, which I don't really understand but
Speaker 1: is important science. And he describes this as showing him,
Speaker 1: quote the intersection of computers and biology, which is going
Speaker 1: to be like a constant source of fascination for him.
Speaker 1: Now he does still have issues in SCO he has
Speaker 1: to repeat his first year of graduate school, and depending
Speaker 1: on where you find him interviewed, this is explained differently.
Speaker 1: I found one article that just said, well, he was
Speaker 1: just taking so many classes, too many classes, so that
Speaker 1: he couldn't graduate, and he was just like too interested
Speaker 1: in doing too many different things, and it just like
Speaker 1: graduating kind of slipped by him. And that's not really accurate.
Speaker 1: The way he explained it in this Harvard student paper
Speaker 1: is different from that, but it's also kind of weird.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I could get away with barely going to classes.
Speaker 1: Other times, like in organic chemistry. I loved it so much.
Speaker 1: I did every single problem set in the back of
Speaker 1: each chapter. They didn't even assign any of them. I
Speaker 1: did them all. It was a full year course, and
Speaker 1: I think I finished the book, including all the problems
Speaker 1: in it, by halfway through the fall semester. That was
Speaker 1: pretty typical. But I guess the reason I did it
Speaker 1: in two years was that it was I was cheap
Speaker 1: money wise, like a lot of teenagers, I didn't want
Speaker 1: to keep being a burden on my parents. Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: dropped out of college because he was worried about his parents' finances.
Speaker 1: He did not. I didn't draw it out. I just
Speaker 1: finished early. I also think I had this feeling that
Speaker 1: if I took four years to do it, I would
Speaker 1: probably flunk out, so it would be better to finish fast.
Speaker 1: That turned out to be true at about the three
Speaker 1: and a half year point. I did flunk out, but
Speaker 1: out of graduate school. And you see that doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense how He's like, well, I graduated early so I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a burden to my parents. But actually I
Speaker 1: flunked out after three and a half years. I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't understand what you're saying.
Speaker 2: And I think if we're going back, that really speaks
Speaker 2: to both the passionate learner and the grifter working in
Speaker 2: in sort of synchronicity.
Speaker 1: Right, if you'll forgive me likes and he has two
Speaker 1: wolves inside him.
Speaker 2: The man contains two wolves. Oh yeah, one DIYer one
Speaker 2: pretty much a regular.
Speaker 1: One trying to sell you a way.
Speaker 4: I don't I don't.
Speaker 1: Forgive it now. The way he describes this other times
Speaker 1: is that he didn't even realize he'd flunked out of
Speaker 1: graduate school because he was so excited about the crystallography work.
Speaker 1: His advisor had him doing and his advisor was like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: you're you're actually flunking. You know you're going to You've
Speaker 1: got to like you're getting kicked out, and how hired
Speaker 1: him as a technician, but was like, you can't just
Speaker 1: keep doing this, you have to reapply to graduate school
Speaker 1: somewhere else. And Church eventually reapplies to Harvard and describes
Speaker 1: himself as being shocked at getting in because he'd flunked
Speaker 1: out of Duke, but he had also gotten accepted to
Speaker 1: Harvard before he went to Duke. And anyway, whatever he
Speaker 1: gets accepted, did some stuff happen behind the scenes with
Speaker 1: his dad and Harvard? I don't know. It may just
Speaker 1: been that he'd been accepted before.
Speaker 2: As I was. I bet having rich parents and a
Speaker 2: nice little parachute probably helped him figure that out.
Speaker 1: And he's got this professor who's probably going to bat
Speaker 1: for him too, because he is good at some things.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's how he dropped out, and exactly why
Speaker 1: is like a little bit different every time I read it,
Speaker 1: which always kind of like raises my grifter hackles just
Speaker 1: to scoch. But maybe I'm missing some things. At any rate,
Speaker 1: he gets into Harvard, and he does better here. He
Speaker 1: gets into chemistry and genomics sequencing, which is what he does.
Speaker 1: His thesis on his nineteen eighty five PhD from Harvard
Speaker 1: PERI write up on edge dot org quote included the
Speaker 1: first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing, and bar coding.
Speaker 1: These led to the first genome sequence pathogen Helicobacter pylori
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four. His innovations have continued to nearly
Speaker 1: all next generation DNA sequencing methods and companies and as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, and I even like reached
Speaker 1: out to a friend of a friend who's in this field,
Speaker 1: that is accurate. He is a legitimately like foundational mind
Speaker 1: in modern genome sequencing. His work has been massively influential
Speaker 1: in like specifically personal genome of people. He didn't invent
Speaker 1: genome sequencing, right, but when we've like first started sequencing,
Speaker 1: it costs billions of dollars to that the first time,
Speaker 1: And he's a major reason why individuals can do it
Speaker 1: and why you can do it for I think it's
Speaker 1: like seven hundred and fifty bucks to get your genome
Speaker 1: sequence now, right, Like, he is a big part of
Speaker 1: that process, right, not even not to just write it
Speaker 1: down to just him either. But his role is substantial
Speaker 1: and this is meaningful, important science, right, and I don't
Speaker 1: I'm not going to try to take that away from
Speaker 1: him or pretend like this does not seem to be exaggerated.
Speaker 1: Other aspects of his achievements will be this does not
Speaker 1: seem to be right. A write up on him in
Speaker 1: Popular Science by Janine Interlandi summarizes scientists are now using
Speaker 1: it personal genome sequencing to identify intractable diseases such as
Speaker 1: cancer and schizophrenia, and doctors are beginning to use it
Speaker 1: to it enough by genetic mutations that cause rare and
Speaker 1: until now undiagnosable illnesses. So Church becomes a PhD. Seems
Speaker 1: like you're in that doing some good work, doing some
Speaker 1: good work. He initiates the Personal Genome Project at Harvard
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, with the goal of sequencing
Speaker 1: and publicizing the complete genomes and medical records of one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand volunteers to further research into personalized medicine. And
Speaker 1: all this is great, but there's also even in just
Speaker 1: this you could be like, well, these people are volunteering
Speaker 1: so maybe it's cool, but like there is some potential
Speaker 1: troubling privacy stuff about publicizing everybody's genomes. You know. I
Speaker 1: think we've all thought about that more in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years about before.
Speaker 2: Maybe my genome's pretty private to me.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people who use those twenty
Speaker 1: three and me companies that are like, actually, I kind
Speaker 1: of wish I hadn't done that now, knowing what they
Speaker 1: do with the data.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they can like they can refuse a mortgage
Speaker 2: because you've published this and now they're like, oh, we
Speaker 2: think you're going to have diabetes, and diabetes means you
Speaker 2: won't be able to pay thirty years worth of right mortgage,
Speaker 2: So naw again.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things you're not necessarily a
Speaker 1: bastard for, like being in a science that is used
Speaker 1: by corporations and that isn't fundamentally evil but gets used
Speaker 1: in some shady ways. But kind of what this does
Speaker 1: show is I don't really think he often thinks about
Speaker 1: the negative applications of what he's involved in. That is
Speaker 1: going to be kind of a through line with George Church,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about later. But that article in Popular
Speaker 1: Science continues more so than any other scientist in his field.
Speaker 1: He is helping to forge a new kind of biology,
Speaker 1: one less geared towards studying DNA than harnessing it for
Speaker 1: our own aims. This is where the fucked up shit
Speaker 1: starts to kind of come in. Is like, he is,
Speaker 1: a DNA is no different from you know, a computer chip, right,
Speaker 1: And we shouldn't think of it as different than that
Speaker 1: in terms of allowing us to build new technologies. And
Speaker 1: I can understand on some extent that attitude, but it
Speaker 1: is also different. It's not it's not a computer chip.
Speaker 2: Like, I really get nervous whenever the language starts dehumanizing
Speaker 2: human experiences, like, right, that there has to be some
Speaker 2: attachment to what it means to be a person for
Speaker 2: this to remain healthy, normal, applicable in a way that
Speaker 2: isn't just you scamming us into something much more scary evil.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah. And that's the thing, is, like, there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which, if you're just talking purely logically, right,
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which you can be like, well,
Speaker 1: I guess it makes sense to say, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if I'm open to the idea of like genetically editing
Speaker 1: people to make them, you know, more resilient to diseases
Speaker 1: or something. Maybe it makes a little sense to think
Speaker 1: of it as a technology in that way, but the
Speaker 1: line from that to thinking about the people and other
Speaker 1: living beings you create as just smartphones that how do
Speaker 1: you what stops you? What guard rails are you building
Speaker 1: in to stop that? If this is how you're looking
Speaker 1: at it, where are the guard rails?
Speaker 2: Yeah, people turn into mind sweeper real fast. Exactly, it's
Speaker 2: not exactly You're not dealing with bodies anymore in that skin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's not great. And that is kind of
Speaker 1: where we're headed here. So Church's success led to Harvard
Speaker 1: funding the establishment of his lab. He has like a
Speaker 1: lab that is funded by Harvard that has been for
Speaker 1: quite some time, and he brings in, you know, minds
Speaker 1: that excite him and hires them and basically pays them
Speaker 1: to like fuck around and try to figure shit out.
Speaker 1: And he uses this like this is both a valid
Speaker 1: thing to do in terms of science, but it's also
Speaker 1: he uses it as like an incubator for startup ideas.
Speaker 1: Like once people do stuff that shows promise, he'll often
Speaker 1: spin what they're doing off into a company. Per an
Speaker 1: article in popular science. The result is that his lab
Speaker 1: manages to be both one of Harvard's top producers and
Speaker 1: a well known receiving center for science's misfit toys. There's
Speaker 1: an artist encoding Wikipedia entries into apple genomes to create
Speaker 1: a literal tree of knowledge, and an insurance industry refugee
Speaker 1: who fled his office job over a decade ago, worked
Speaker 1: several months for free while teaching himself biochemistry, and now
Speaker 1: serves as co head of the lab. So again, that
Speaker 1: sounds kind of cool potentially.
Speaker 2: You know, ah, yes, what's the true knowledge?
Speaker 1: What is that supposed to that do?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's cool, I get I don't know, it sounds awesome.
Speaker 1: It sounds like an art project.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The article we'll talk a little bit about like DNA coding.
Speaker 1: That's actually there's some science there. But the article quotes
Speaker 1: a former student of Churches who found it a genetic
Speaker 1: engineering screening company that looks for inherited diseases. And he said,
Speaker 1: we always joke that the only thing you need to
Speaker 1: do to in George's lavish show up there is zero organization.
Speaker 1: His style is just to let things happen. Mostly, you
Speaker 1: have the constant sense that exciting things are happening. We're
Speaker 1: about to happen, and if you miss out on it,
Speaker 1: you have only yourself to blame.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah, that's kind of the tech industry fomo,
Speaker 1: you know, PR thing in a nutshell.
Speaker 2: That's also just not a good thing to to sort of,
Speaker 2: I guess have is like what people know about you
Speaker 2: that like, yeah, we show up, he'll give you a job.
Speaker 1: He'll give you a job he didn't give Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's looking for bodies who were fucking around now. In
Speaker 1: the mid aughts, Church participated in kind of his first
Speaker 1: noteworthy project after the genome sequencing stuff that we'll talk about,
Speaker 1: which is a project to actually encode digital data made
Speaker 1: of text into binary code and then transfer that into
Speaker 1: genetic code, thus using DNA to store digital data. In
Speaker 1: his case, this was also a marketing stunt because the
Speaker 1: thing that he stored in DNA was like seventy billion
Speaker 1: copies of the book that he had written with another
Speaker 1: guy that was just about to come out, Right, So
Speaker 1: he does this as a PR move, right, and it's
Speaker 1: a brilliant PR move. The book ReGenesis was about to
Speaker 1: hit shelves and suddenly there's all these articles about how
Speaker 1: he stored seventy billion copies into like a dot of
Speaker 1: DNA no longer than like a fucking period on a
Speaker 1: piece of paper, that he was able to store so
Speaker 1: many copies, Like, isn't that amazing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And it is? It is pretty interesting, right, like that
Speaker 1: he synthesized a strand of DNA, replicated it, and like
Speaker 1: put it onto a scrap of paper and it contained
Speaker 1: real data, right, This, in fact was so interesting that
Speaker 1: it got him an appearance on the Colbert Report, right
Speaker 1: where he pulled out the paper scrap which was like
Speaker 1: the size and shape of a Foresten cookie slip and
Speaker 1: showed it off to everybody. And this got representatives of
Speaker 1: different companies who like archive films and other stuff reaching
Speaker 1: out to him because they were like, oh shit, you know.
Speaker 2: Maybe this is a paper.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes it is. We should work with him, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's it is funny. Like again, I don't know that
Speaker 1: this is exactly how a scientist should be putting out
Speaker 1: a discovery of this magnitude apparently, but it's also it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that's both like really cool and
Speaker 1: interesting and somewhat less impressive than it sounds. When you
Speaker 1: drill into what's actually happening here, right, because like the
Speaker 1: like that article by INTERLANDI like makes it seem like
Speaker 1: and this is obviously like a proof of concept for
Speaker 1: something that could be potentially a huge deal for like
Speaker 1: data storage. And that's not entirely untrue, but it's it's
Speaker 1: not totally accurate either. The article goes on to summarize
Speaker 1: the book that he co wrote with Ed Regis, who
Speaker 1: It's weird to me that his co author's name is
Speaker 1: ed Regis because Ed Regis is also a character in
Speaker 1: the book Jurassic Park. He was the public relations manager
Speaker 1: for engine in the novel. He doesn't wind up in
Speaker 1: the fell. It's just really weird to me that his
Speaker 1: co author on this book has that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I bet he gets eaten. He sounds like
Speaker 2: he got eaten.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man, that motherfucker gets the hell eaten out
Speaker 1: of him. Yes, yeah, if I am remembering right, he's
Speaker 1: one of the ones who gets eaten like a son
Speaker 1: of a bitch. I think he gets replaced with the
Speaker 1: lawyer in the movie. So the book ReGenesis that Church
Speaker 1: writes with Ed Regis quote envisioned this the future, This
Speaker 1: new biology could bring one in which bacteria fuels cars
Speaker 1: and commercial jets, and humans are immune to cancer. It
Speaker 1: may sound like science fiction, or at least like a
Speaker 1: litany of over hyped pipe dreams that science so often sells,
Speaker 1: But George Church's pipe dreams have an uncanny record of
Speaker 1: becoming reality. And I'd say this is the fundamental lie
Speaker 1: about George that keeps getting repeated and spread by a
Speaker 1: too credulous media. The man makes constant, wild and almost
Speaker 1: impossible claims about what's going to happen in the future,
Speaker 1: and then people will be like, yeah, it sounds nuts,
Speaker 1: but his crazy dreams have become reality before, so we
Speaker 1: should take him seriously. And we shouldn't because while Church
Speaker 1: contributed massively to the science of gene c and saying
Speaker 1: at no point were his ambitions in that field a
Speaker 1: pipe dream, no one was ever like, no one can
Speaker 1: do what you're trying to do, George. You can't personally
Speaker 1: sequence the human genome. Scientists had been doing that right.
Speaker 1: There were teams of people who had figured out aspects
Speaker 1: of this before he got into the field. And while
Speaker 1: what he discovered to do was really meaningful, nobody was like,
Speaker 1: this will never get done. It was more like well,
Speaker 1: someone's got to figure out, and he was the one
Speaker 1: who figured it out. I'm not saying this is not impressive,
Speaker 1: but it's not. It was never a pipe dream, right,
Speaker 1: He's not by the time he got into it. And
Speaker 1: the stuff he's talking about in this book, like altering
Speaker 1: human biology to make us immune to cancer, that is
Speaker 1: a pipe dream. There's no evidence that will ever be possible,
Speaker 1: in part because cancers a bunch of different diseases. There's
Speaker 1: never going to be a single thing that renders you
Speaker 1: immune to cancer unless you start uploading people to the cloud,
Speaker 1: which is also probably not possible.
Speaker 2: I also get really nervous when the science includes both
Speaker 2: car technology and answer elimination. That feels like, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: you got to focus, big dog. Both of those things
Speaker 2: can't be true from your single discovery.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like if you, like, you know, you're a
Speaker 1: Hollywood actor who's like starting to go bald, and you
Speaker 1: go in for like Turkish hair transplants and the doctor's like,
Speaker 1: hey man, you want a new liver, Like I haven't
Speaker 1: I got one. I'd be like, wait, wait, wait, I don't.
Speaker 2: I actually don't know. I prefer to keep the one
Speaker 2: I have. I know it sucks, but I'll keep it.
Speaker 1: I just came in here to get the Joel McHale man.
Speaker 1: I really was not interested in a new organ. Never
Speaker 1: have hair transplants worked out better for a man? My god?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah his are? His are low and they're strong.
Speaker 1: I really respect it, the Mona Lisa of hair. So
Speaker 1: even when it comes to the cool things, doctor Church
Speaker 1: actually did like store his book in DNA, and I
Speaker 1: do think that's a cool idea, the practical reality behind
Speaker 1: it is a lot less exciting than the hype. Now,
Speaker 1: before we bust that, I want to show you a
Speaker 1: video of Church presenting the exciting promise of DNA storage
Speaker 1: in a video that was part of the promotional campaign
Speaker 1: for his books. And he's being interviewed here with one
Speaker 1: of his colleagues for this encoding project.
Speaker 4: And yes, he does look exactly like I thought he would.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, he does.
Speaker 3: The density is remarkably high, as little as one bit
Speaker 3: per base one base per cubic nanometer, and so we
Speaker 3: can store on the order of almost a zetabyte and
Speaker 3: a gram of DNA a millileter volume.
Speaker 1: The theoretical density of a DNA is that you could
Speaker 1: store the total world information, which is one point in
Speaker 1: setabtes at least in twenty eleven, and about four grams
Speaker 1: of DNA.
Speaker 3: And it leverages rapidly, improving next generation reading and writing
Speaker 3: of DNA.
Speaker 4: He looks like he'd be friends with Stocked in Rush.
Speaker 1: He does look like he'd be friends with Stocked and Rush.
Speaker 1: I think he's a lot smart than Stockton, though, although
Speaker 1: that is a very low bar because Stockton was really
Speaker 1: dumb all stocked at it turned into paste. Rush. He
Speaker 1: does have the vibes of a guy that gets eaten
Speaker 1: by his own dinosaurs. But I don't think that's going
Speaker 1: to happen to him either, which is really tragic. That
Speaker 1: actually does bum me out.
Speaker 2: It definitely felt like late stage James Cameron, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, Like it felt like you're telling me
Speaker 2: about the Avatar technology. This movie still sucks.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, So what he says here isn't technically wrong,
Speaker 1: Like that's all technically accurate about what you could do
Speaker 1: with DNA, but it doesn't mean that DNA is currently
Speaker 1: or will be in any kind of timeframe a good
Speaker 1: way to store data now, obviously there's a need for
Speaker 1: a much better way to store data. Digital data storage
Speaker 1: is not forever and has a lot of problems, and like,
Speaker 1: is it just a really bad way to long term
Speaker 1: protect human knowledge? And obviously, like paper is actually in
Speaker 1: some ways better if you're storing it in like the
Speaker 1: right conditions, like it will degrade less than digital data
Speaker 1: overall long enough timeframe. But there's obvious problems with paper,
Speaker 1: right Like are other things like if you've got like
Speaker 1: a climate sealed place to store books versus some hard drives,
Speaker 1: those hard drives will break on a faster timeframe, assuming
Speaker 1: you managed to keep that place, you know, properly stored
Speaker 1: and whatnot. But so we do need ways that are
Speaker 1: much more space efficient because also the amount of data
Speaker 1: humanity is producing, you know, especially since we have projects
Speaker 1: like the Hadron Collider going, there's so much data being
Speaker 1: made and storing it is a problem, right, like, because
Speaker 1: you need these massive facilities in order to even store
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff. So these are issues that
Speaker 1: we have, right and DNA and the fact that you
Speaker 1: could store data with such density in it could be
Speaker 1: a solution to aspects of it, but it's kind of
Speaker 1: framed a lot is like and this is in the future,
Speaker 1: Netflix will keep all its data in like DNA drive
Speaker 1: yet to get like everyone like everything will be stored
Speaker 1: and that probably is never going to have I can't
Speaker 1: say definitely, but there's because there's a lot we don't
Speaker 1: know about this, how this technology would work. But there's
Speaker 1: the shit we haven't figured out yet is really significant.
Speaker 1: For example, there's a high error rate when you write
Speaker 1: data to DNA currently, and since it's really easy to
Speaker 1: fuck up writing the data, the current best practices is
Speaker 1: to store multiple redundant copies of each piece of information
Speaker 1: so you have some that are right, which is like
Speaker 1: he puts seventy billion copies of that book on like
Speaker 1: a dot, right, Like that's that's kind of what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here. You store a shitload of copies of
Speaker 1: something because you know, and scientists don't even know how
Speaker 1: many redundant backups we need yet.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I found a study where they're just trying to figure
Speaker 1: that out, like, Okay, what is the actual best practice
Speaker 1: for the actual number of different redundant copies to store
Speaker 1: because we really hadn't locked that down yet.
Speaker 2: So all of those all of those books, there's like
Speaker 2: six of those books that are right, and then seventy
Speaker 2: billion others that are like just mid likely shit books.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's that, but we like the
Speaker 1: I think the problem is like we don't actually know
Speaker 1: how many we should be doing, right, We're still figuring
Speaker 1: that part of it out. And then there's a separate
Speaker 1: app asue of like, Okay, well you've got that on
Speaker 1: this dot, but you can't like that dot's not connected
Speaker 1: to a computer, Like, sure, the data is there, but
Speaker 1: how would you access and store it and use it
Speaker 1: if you wanted to write? Like, could you get that
Speaker 1: on a kindle easily? And the answer is no. Right.
Speaker 1: I found an article on DNA data storage written by
Speaker 1: Nithil Krishnaj that lays out some of the other practical
Speaker 1: issues inherent to doing this for any practical reason. Quote,
Speaker 1: DNA has horrendously slow read and write speeds, so it
Speaker 1: is an ideal for real time storage, and activities like
Speaker 1: streaming video and gaming definitely won't be viable at this time.
Speaker 1: As a result, DNA data storage loses some of its
Speaker 1: versatility and as of now, it would only work best
Speaker 1: for long term storage. It's also not rewriteable. Once you
Speaker 1: encode data into DNA, there's no way of making changes
Speaker 1: to your data without redoing the encoding process. There's also
Speaker 1: no random access functionality, which means you can't access a
Speaker 1: certain part of the data without decoding all of it.
Speaker 1: And this is still like interesting and potentially away. Again,
Speaker 1: you could have a bunch of different places where all
Speaker 1: of the data we've you know, made up to a
Speaker 1: certain point is stored on DNA somewhere, and that would
Speaker 1: potentially allow future people to access a lossless version of it,
Speaker 1: and in a way that might be really helpful. But
Speaker 1: we're not talking about something that's going to alter daily
Speaker 1: life in its current form, and maybe not ever on
Speaker 1: any timeframe any of us will see because it's just
Speaker 1: not practical, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Netflix isn't going to exist when this is actually a.
Speaker 1: Thing, right yes, yes, Like at some point in the future,
Speaker 1: maybe they'll figure out all this stuff, but that is
Speaker 1: not any kind of time frame anybody should be like
Speaker 1: waiting for. Right Again, not to say this is an
Speaker 1: interesting or as a potential use, it's just it's just prectice,
Speaker 1: like this is the future of data storage, and it's like,
Speaker 1: well maybe in like a couple hundred years. Side up. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: there's also something in that video that I find creepy.
Speaker 1: As an side which is that doctor Church proposes one
Speaker 1: use of this technology would be to create permanent records
Speaker 1: of the brain activity of a human being, and I
Speaker 1: just don't like the way he says this.
Speaker 3: Or you could imagine other huge data sources, like all
Speaker 3: the neuronal flowerings in the brain, which could be encoded
Speaker 3: into the d NA, and again you could do selective
Speaker 3: reading of that as needed.
Speaker 1: Yikes, I don't love that. Now he's saying like, well,
Speaker 1: you could do some really groundbreaking medical studies if you
Speaker 1: had access to this much data. And sure, but when
Speaker 1: you talk about making perfect records of a human brain activity,
Speaker 1: you're also getting into the kind of territory where I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want to immediately hear what you think about the
Speaker 1: potential for surveillance and violation of privacy right ex. You
Speaker 1: kind of have to bring that up right away. You
Speaker 1: can't just be interested in the technology here.
Speaker 2: It seems like you want to download some information from
Speaker 2: people that maybe they didn't want to give you. That's
Speaker 2: some nasty work there, doctor Jege.
Speaker 1: I'm a little and I promise you we're so far
Speaker 1: getting into all this. Well, theoretically, there's stuff about this
Speaker 1: that could be wrong or he's exaggerating. The actual fucked
Speaker 1: up stuff starts right about now, right, because when we're
Speaker 1: talking about like this is a technology that could be
Speaker 1: good or could have some major problematic ethical you know, implications,
Speaker 1: you want to know the scientist working on the technology
Speaker 1: that could have fucked up ethical implications has a strong
Speaker 1: history of personal ethics. Right, And this brings me to
Speaker 1: doctor Church's history with our old friend of the pod,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein, that's the monster at the end
Speaker 1: of this book. Okay, at the end of this episode,
Speaker 1: Church to Jeffrey Epstein, Yes.
Speaker 4: In need money.
Speaker 1: Surprise emerges literally he is the thin white duke of
Speaker 1: evil scientists. That's Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 2: That's really cool. Oh that's like a really exciting plot
Speaker 2: twist that you don't see coming. I love this.
Speaker 1: It's like the end of the second or third Kingsman
Speaker 1: movie when Hitler comes out of nowhere, like, oh, there
Speaker 1: we go, there we go.
Speaker 2: Oh, you guys really built that a long.
Speaker 1: Way great, dropping him like thanos. So some sources I
Speaker 1: have said say that Church in Epstein's relationship started in
Speaker 1: two thousand and five. I've heard Church claim two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, but people have said that he was receiving
Speaker 1: funding from Epstein as far back as two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: It may just be that his labs started receiving unrestricted
Speaker 1: funding from Epstein before they met, and I will remind
Speaker 1: you here they were receiving funding from two thousd and
Speaker 1: five to two thousand and seven. Epstein was convicted in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight of sex trafficking. Although that's not
Speaker 1: the end of their relationship. But let's talk about those
Speaker 1: first couple of years. Now. At that point in his
Speaker 1: career two thousand and five, right, he is, He's just
Speaker 1: started the personal gene known project. His primary focus and
Speaker 1: the thing that he's most famous for is his work
Speaker 1: on like gene sequencing and gene editing. You know, he's
Speaker 1: into both of these things. An article for The New
Speaker 1: York Times that discusses Churches and other scientists associations with
Speaker 1: Epstein described doctor Church in this period as quote a
Speaker 1: molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could
Speaker 1: be altered to create superior humans. Oh oh uh oh oh, boy,
Speaker 1: don't like that.
Speaker 2: Superior humans. That's a trigger word for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, boy has anyone ever said those two words
Speaker 1: and not been doing something horrifying.
Speaker 2: Yikes.
Speaker 1: So, doctor Church was an early pioneer for the use
Speaker 1: of Crisper to edit human genes, and one of his
Speaker 1: ambitions was and is, to create a method of gene
Speaker 1: therapy to, in his words, knock out both copies of
Speaker 1: your CCR five gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and
Speaker 1: then put them back in your body. Then you can't
Speaker 1: get AIDS anymore because the virus can't enter yourselves. And hey,
Speaker 1: that sounds fine. AIDS is bad stopping people from being
Speaker 1: able to get it, lovely. The issue is that Church's
Speaker 1: ambitions don't stop here, and Epstein was not drawn to
Speaker 1: Church's life work for anything as humanitarian as stopping a virus.
Speaker 1: I have found a couple stories of how Church and
Speaker 1: Epstein actually met for the first time. Church has claimed
Speaker 1: that he was connected to Epstein first either, and he says,
Speaker 1: I don't know which, either through the chairman of Harvard's
Speaker 1: psych department or through his literary agent, John Brockman. Sure, buddy,
Speaker 1: I feel like I remember how I first met Jeffrey Epstein,
Speaker 1: but maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: But that speaks to his multitude.
Speaker 1: Man right.
Speaker 2: It could either be a money man or it could
Speaker 2: be an academic man. But one of them, yeah, introduced.
Speaker 1: Me, and both of them are implicated in some sketchy
Speaker 1: Epstein stuff. To be clear, we were all there. But
Speaker 1: in another interview, Church seemed to suggest that Epstein probably
Speaker 1: reached out to him because Epstein was friendly and working
Speaker 1: with a biologist and mathematician named Martin Noack. Church and
Speaker 1: Noac had worked together on various applications of Crisper too
Speaker 1: edit genes Per an article in stat by Karen Begley.
Speaker 1: At the get togethers with Noak, Church said Epstein seemed
Speaker 1: interested in the science of life's origins and mathematically modeling
Speaker 1: the evolution of viruses, cancer cells, and life itself. Epstein
Speaker 1: did not leave much of an imperson impression on him.
Speaker 1: Church said the meetings weren't really about Jeffrey. They were
Speaker 1: about the scientists who were talking with each other. Normally,
Speaker 1: expectations are low for people who sit in on meetings
Speaker 1: far outside their field of expertise, so he's kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: it was mostly just as scientist talking, and Jeffrey didn't
Speaker 1: really know much and when he talked, it didn't really
Speaker 1: make an impression as a result.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: And if that's the truth, which I have trouble believing
Speaker 1: because their relationship goes on after this. But if that's
Speaker 1: the truth, then all Church did was take this guy's
Speaker 1: money who was not convicted of a crime yet, and
Speaker 1: show up at some dinners to talk about science. And
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be so bad, right. And in fact, there
Speaker 1: are some people who got some funding from Epstein and
Speaker 1: were not involved in the sketchy stuff because he funded
Speaker 1: a lot of guys and they didn't all go to
Speaker 1: his parties or have sex with teenagers.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying Church did.
Speaker 2: He made enough money to buy an island. You can't
Speaker 2: do that with only sex pests some people. Right, he
Speaker 2: had to be on some version of and up and up.
Speaker 1: There's some people who were involved with him who have
Speaker 1: been tarnished unfairly.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm also not saying that Church is tartished unfairly here,
Speaker 1: because I don't think he is. However, I would be
Speaker 1: remiss if I did not read a different description of
Speaker 1: the dinner parties and events that Epstein held for scientists
Speaker 1: around this time. Maybe these are a different set of
Speaker 1: parties than the ones Church attended, although they include people
Speaker 1: he's listed as his friends. So I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: the New York Times here. The Harvard cognitive psychologist Stephen
Speaker 1: Pinker said he was invited by colleagues, including Martin Noack,
Speaker 1: a Charvard professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical
Speaker 1: physicist Lawrence Krauss, to salons and coffee cloud at which
Speaker 1: mister Epstein would hold court on multiple occasions, starting in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands, mister Epstein told scientists and businessmen
Speaker 1: about his ambitions to use his new Mexico ranch as
Speaker 1: a base where women would be inciminated with his sperm
Speaker 1: and would give birth to his babies. According to two
Speaker 1: award winning scientists and an advisor to large companies and
Speaker 1: wealthy individuals, all of whom mister Epstein told about it,
Speaker 1: it was not a secret. The advisor, for example, said
Speaker 1: he was told about the plants not only by mister
Speaker 1: Epstein at a gathering at his Manhattan townhouse, but also
Speaker 1: by at least one prominent member of the business community.
Speaker 1: One of the scientists said mister Epstein divulged his idea
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one at a dinner at the
Speaker 1: same townhouse. The other recalled mister Epstein discussing it with
Speaker 1: him at a two thousand and six conference that he
Speaker 1: hosted in Saint Thomas and the Virgin Islands. Once, at
Speaker 1: a dinner at mister Epstein's mansion in Manhattan's uper East Side,
Speaker 1: mister Janeer and he's talking about Jeron Lanier said that
Speaker 1: he talked to a scientist who told him that mister
Speaker 1: Epstein's goal was to have twenty women at a time
Speaker 1: impregnated at his thirty three thousand square foot Zoro ranch
Speaker 1: in a tiny town outside of Santa Fe. Whoa cool.
Speaker 2: It is pretty impressive to find out that Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 2: is somehow more of a piece of shit than I thought.
Speaker 2: I was like, Ah, he's just a monster. I don't
Speaker 2: think he's like a super monster god.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I don't think he's got a baby ranch.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's got a baby ranch. Yeah, or he
Speaker 1: tried to have a baby ranch.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Stat News, to their credit, did ask doctor Church after
Speaker 1: Epstein's death about Epstein's eugenics baby ranch, being like, you're
Speaker 1: working in like gene editing people and Epstein wanted to
Speaker 1: do this. Did he talk to you about this because
Speaker 1: you guys knew each other when he was talking about this.
Speaker 1: Right now, I have no proof either way. For his part,
Speaker 1: doctor Church said I never heard anything about it, although
Speaker 1: he went on to say, and I find this curious.
Speaker 1: I'd have thought that I would have been involved in
Speaker 1: that kind of conversation. But it didn't tend to go
Speaker 1: in that direction. But also, I think people tend to
Speaker 1: behave themselves around me. That's a weird thing to say.
Speaker 4: After want to want a strange little guy.
Speaker 1: Honestly, bro, if someone asks you whether or not you're
Speaker 1: involved in Jeffrey Epstein's baby Ranch, you end the statement
Speaker 1: with I never heard anything about Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2: You don't have to be like I would have liked
Speaker 2: to talk to him about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have. I'm kind of offended he didn't
Speaker 1: bring me.
Speaker 2: In, but also sounds awesome. I just not didn't talk
Speaker 2: to him.
Speaker 1: But also, then, when you say it didn't tend to
Speaker 1: go in that direction, well, tend doesn't mean never? Does
Speaker 1: that mean sometimes it kind of did? Like what are
Speaker 1: you saying? You seem like a man who's precise with
Speaker 1: his language. I don't know why you're phrasing it this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jeffrey is like, you know, I want to start
Speaker 2: a baby ranch, and he's like huh, He's huh nothing nothing.
Speaker 1: I thought he was going to bring it up again,
Speaker 1: but he didn't.
Speaker 2: You know, never mind, never mind. I thought you'd be
Speaker 2: cool about it.
Speaker 1: I thought you were cool. Yeah. It's like Jeffrey being
Speaker 1: like he wants a coke? What nothing. I didn't say anything. Nothing.
Speaker 1: I don't do coke.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sober sober Jeffrey Epstein, that's what they call me. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go to the bathroom like fifteen minutes. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: come out really excited. I love pen.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk a business like it.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna look like Robin Williams in nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: when I step out of that thing. It's nothing weird.
Speaker 1: So perhaps that is the truth, that he had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with this. Friends and colleagues of doctor Church
Speaker 1: express surprise when, after Epstein's death, the years of close
Speaker 1: connections between Epstein and Church were made public. When associate
Speaker 1: pointed out that Church even brought a philosopher into his
Speaker 1: Harvard lab to flag potential bioethics issues and experiments, and
Speaker 1: that he teaches a research ethics class, which is uncommon
Speaker 1: for a scientist in his field working at his level,
Speaker 1: and so they're like, well, it's weird to me that
Speaker 1: he would have any relationship with Epstein because I have
Speaker 1: always considered him one of the most concerned with ethics
Speaker 1: people in our field. And again, to emphasize for legal
Speaker 1: and moral reasons, there is no evidence that Church was
Speaker 1: working on any kind of eugenics baby project for Epstein,
Speaker 1: not that there would be because Jeffrey Epstein didn't publish
Speaker 1: all the details about everyone he was involved with with everything.
Speaker 1: We just know he talked about this plan during several
Speaker 1: coffee clatches and other events with his pet scientists, and
Speaker 1: that Church was at similar events. Doctor Church claims that
Speaker 1: working with Epstein at all was an ethical lapse, but
Speaker 1: not entirely his fault. He points out that universities are
Speaker 1: supposed to vet donors before they meet with faculty, and
Speaker 1: he told Stack, my understanding is this vetting is the
Speaker 1: responsibility of the development office, which is yet another reason
Speaker 1: why scientists are a little more relaxed. They feel they
Speaker 1: have administrators who, in theory do the difficult job of
Speaker 1: figuring out who's legit. So sah, I'm just a little guy.
Speaker 1: How could I be expected to think about this sort
Speaker 1: of thing that's someone else's job.
Speaker 2: And now and now he's picking who introduced him. Right,
Speaker 2: Previously he didn't know who introduced him, Hurn, it was
Speaker 2: hard the whole time.
Speaker 1: It was Harvard. Yeah. Now, he added that scientists, quote
Speaker 1: myself included, are not very good at screening or judging
Speaker 1: human beings. Right that just like, ah, we're all just
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, bad at people. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not really our strong suit. And to be fair to also, first,
Speaker 1: I just don't believe that for Church, because he's an
Speaker 1: incredibly skilled public relations expert. I think he's very good
Speaker 1: with people, right, and he's probably very good at judging
Speaker 1: people because that's what he does. Anyway, to be fair
Speaker 1: to Church, he went on to make a good point
Speaker 1: in that stat interview that almost does sound like a
Speaker 1: Mia Kolpa. He states that a lot of scientists working
Speaker 1: on cutting edge projects with important applications feeled what he
Speaker 1: described as an exceptionalism, which is a sense that anything
Speaker 1: they do is okay if the work is important enough.
Speaker 1: This is almost like a precursor to like effective altruism
Speaker 1: type feelings.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He predates that, but I don't think he's wrong here.
Speaker 1: I do think that's a thing that a lot of
Speaker 1: scientists working in important fields feel, which is that like, well,
Speaker 1: if I have to do something a little fucked up
Speaker 1: to further this research with incredibly important like implications, it's
Speaker 1: worth it. And he cited the case of a Nobel laureate,
Speaker 1: a biologist named Sidney Brinner, who took fifteen million dollars
Speaker 1: from Philip Morris to fund a biology institute, and Sydney's
Speaker 1: argument was that, like, look, if big Tobacco keeps this money,
Speaker 1: they'll use it for something worse than I will using
Speaker 1: it for science, which is like an arguable point, but
Speaker 1: also like, well, big Tobacco's put give you that money
Speaker 1: because it's right off, and like they're gonna they're expecting something.
Speaker 1: They're expecting something from it, right, aren't they, Sidney? Are
Speaker 1: you giving them anything? Are you sure?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And also there you picked the worst guy, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean, Like, it's not like you got a
Speaker 2: comparable uh space to be putting this money into.
Speaker 1: It's when they like Walmart needed at tax right off,
Speaker 1: so they funded this like medical thing I was doing,
Speaker 1: and like you know, Walmart's a sketchy corporation, but also
Speaker 1: like the science is good. It's like, no, this is
Speaker 1: the tobacco industry. Yeah, their product is literally killing more
Speaker 1: people every year than World War Two.
Speaker 2: They win, they win the murder game.
Speaker 1: You did it. It's just a little different, yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: But anyway, there is an argument about like, well, how
Speaker 1: and obviously I'm in the advertising busines. There's always an
Speaker 1: argument how many moral compromises should you make to fund
Speaker 1: something valuable?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And the answer isn't none. You know, this is capitalism.
Speaker 1: I would say big tobaccos, maybe like fifteen million dollars
Speaker 1: a Philip Morris money is maybe a step beyond that.
Speaker 1: But you know, people feel differently, you know, like to
Speaker 1: you should is it fine to advertise vaping? I don't
Speaker 1: know whatever. What's less arguable is that after Epstein was charged, convicted,
Speaker 1: and sentenced in two thousand and eight, doctor Church continued
Speaker 1: his association with the by this point known sex criminal. Right,
Speaker 1: So two and five and seven we don't know if
Speaker 1: he was involved in the weird eugenic stuff. We know
Speaker 1: he's taking Epstein's money, but Epstein's not a known criminal, right,
Speaker 1: he could have been, you know, kind of innocent. He
Speaker 1: continues associating with Epstein repeatedly after he is convicted as
Speaker 1: a sex criminal in two thousand and eight, and that's
Speaker 1: crossing a line for me. Yeah. At one point it's.
Speaker 4: Like, I fear this man just lacks common sense. Nope, No,
Speaker 4: you should have known was an active decision to associate
Speaker 4: with one of the world's biggest monsters.
Speaker 1: You're you're making a choice here, brother.
Speaker 2: He was like, Nah, Jeffrey's awesome to me, and I'm
Speaker 2: gonna keep gett I'm gonna keep hanging.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, when Church's book ReGenesis came out in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: it elevated his profile, and Epstein seems to have gotten
Speaker 1: back in touch with him soon after. And this would
Speaker 1: have been, you know, after Epstein finished doing his quote
Speaker 1: unquote time, which doesn't really not by that was not
Speaker 1: time by normal people's standards, right like his slap on
Speaker 1: the wrist didn't even get a slap on the wrist, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's not clear to me when they got back
Speaker 1: in touch or if they ever got out of touch
Speaker 1: after two thousand and seven. I don't even know that.
Speaker 1: Whatever the case, Doctor Church has posted a public online
Speaker 1: calendar every year since nineteen ninety nine, and it shows
Speaker 1: that he had six separate phone calls or meetings with
Speaker 1: Epstein in twenty fourteen. Stant News writes sample entry June
Speaker 1: twenty first, twenty fourteen, Lunch with Jeffrey Epstein twelve to
Speaker 1: one thirty Martin Noak's Institute. And that's a lot of
Speaker 1: times to talk to Jeffrey Epstein, Right, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of that's a long lunch too.
Speaker 2: Twelve to one. You guys were chatting, You were pushing it, huh.
Speaker 1: When interviewed after Epstein's death, doctor Church admitted to meeting
Speaker 1: Epstein several times each year since twenty fourteen, and stat
Speaker 1: was like, didn't you hear that he'd been convicted of
Speaker 1: all those sex crimes? And like, you're a father and
Speaker 1: a grandfather. Did it not skiv you out to be
Speaker 1: involved with this guy? And Church replied, I did read
Speaker 1: a couple of news articles like ten years back quote,
Speaker 1: but they weren't clear enough for me to know if
Speaker 1: there was a serious problem. Now. I should note here
Speaker 1: that reporting in two thousand and eight alleged that Epstein
Speaker 1: had received massages from teenage girls. You didn't know you
Speaker 1: didn't know. Huh, you're a researcher.
Speaker 2: Like that's a real arch when we say teenage, how
Speaker 2: are we talking?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we're talking right now. When he asked if
Speaker 1: he felt Epstein had paid his debt to society, stats like,
Speaker 1: city you think he'd like paid his debt to society
Speaker 1: after two thousand and eight and deserved a second chance?
Speaker 1: And I kind of I really respect stat for sitting
Speaker 1: down with this guy and kind of drilling him on this.
Speaker 1: Church responded with what I would call a non answer.
Speaker 1: So they like, hey, so is it that you thought,
Speaker 1: you know, he'd made good, that everything was okay now?
Speaker 1: And he said, as far as I know, people just
Speaker 1: didn't have that conversation, but it should have. So, ok,
Speaker 1: let's break that down. He's asked, do you think that
Speaker 1: after two thousand and eight Epstein had paid his debt
Speaker 1: to society? And he said, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: people not me, didn't have that conversation, but it should have.
Speaker 2: It's it, I guess the people.
Speaker 1: Your grammar should be better than that man, But like,
Speaker 1: what do you what do you mean?
Speaker 2: He's like, I'm not going to answer for myself. Yeah
Speaker 2: you yeah, you the single body of people that exist
Speaker 2: around me should have had the conversation with Jeffrey.
Speaker 1: Webs okay man. Now, he went on to add in
Speaker 1: that interview, I would think I would think to like
Speaker 1: that people's reputation is multi dimensional and multi year. It
Speaker 1: takes a long time to build up but also to
Speaker 1: tear down and stat notes. He was speaking generally and
Speaker 1: about himself, as in like, this shouldn't destroy my reputation
Speaker 1: because like, I've done other things. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: hard not to read that as I'm talking about Epstein too, like, well,
Speaker 1: he's a complicated guy. He's got other stuff that he's
Speaker 1: done besides the sex crimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Great, love an answer like that from our ethics man
Speaker 1: working on brain reading. For what it's worth, George Church
Speaker 1: did ultimately apologize for taking Epstein's money in a twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen interview, although you want to guess what he blamed
Speaker 1: his lapse in judgment on.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no, no, just tell us there's
Speaker 2: no way nerd tunnel vision. There we go.
Speaker 1: I'm just too much of a nerd to have a
Speaker 1: problem with sex crimes.
Speaker 2: WHOA, I don't even notice.
Speaker 1: Plus you know, you know how it goes you're watching
Speaker 1: Star Wars Friends trafficking teenage girls around the world. It
Speaker 1: just happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, there is this this, there's again. It's just
Speaker 2: this this want to like cutify themselves out of like
Speaker 2: the human experience. It's like, I'm just a nerdy, little
Speaker 2: cutie boy. I I didn't even notice that bad things
Speaker 2: were happening. Like, you know, you're a grown man who's
Speaker 2: trying to manipulate genes. This isn't You're not a sweetheart
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's just very it's it's great stuff.
Speaker 1: Good work, good work, doctor Church. Now that's pretty bad
Speaker 1: ending on Epstein and part one not ideal. It gets
Speaker 1: so much worse than part two. There's so much eugenics coming.
Speaker 1: There's so much fucked up shit on the way. I
Speaker 1: am so excited to tell you the rest of this story, Langston.
Speaker 1: But first let's talk about you. You know, what's your
Speaker 1: favorite color?
Speaker 2: Favorite color is coral?
Speaker 1: Coral. I honestly didn't call that, Okay, I didn't actually
Speaker 1: call anything. I had no idea what your favorite color
Speaker 1: would be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think for years I used to say blue
Speaker 2: to protect myself from yeah, from my own insecurities. But
Speaker 2: then as the same I had to be honest and say.
Speaker 1: Not a safe place.
Speaker 2: My favorite color is nuanced and slightly effeminated.
Speaker 1: I guess I have been looking for a pair of
Speaker 1: coral shorts for the summer. It does seem like a nice,
Speaker 1: nice short color, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my brother
Speaker 1: wears a lot of coral. It's a good color. We're
Speaker 1: all getting over our insecurities here, you know, just like
Speaker 1: George Church got over his insecurities about his friend Jeffrey Epsto.
Speaker 2: He's like, you know what, no, not like, I can
Speaker 2: get past this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we can get past this, and we can get
Speaker 1: past the part where we talk about George Church to
Speaker 1: talk about your pluckables? What are they? Oh?
Speaker 2: You can listen to my podcast. It's called Ma Mama
Speaker 2: told me. I do it with my friend David Borie,
Speaker 2: who is also alumnus of this gorgeous podcast. And yeah,
Speaker 2: we talk about conspiracy theories, specifically black conspiracy theories, and
Speaker 2: it's really fun and silly, and we do not nearly
Speaker 2: as effective research as you do, Robert.
Speaker 1: My only hope is that George Church gets integrated into
Speaker 1: a series of conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein because everyone
Speaker 1: else who was tied to him has been And look,
Speaker 1: you know, are the all of those accurate?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Are they all fun? Yes? And George miss out.
Speaker 2: You know, I will say there was that era on
Speaker 2: what is now X but formerly Twitter where they were
Speaker 2: just making up lists of the people who were on
Speaker 2: the flight logs, and it was always a funny list.
Speaker 2: It never failed, no matter who wrote it, the right,
Speaker 2: the left, the sickos, the imagineers, they were always funny
Speaker 2: lists of people.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. One of my favorite things about that is
Speaker 1: just like, you know, maybe that's sketchy that uh fucking
Speaker 1: Eddie Murphy wound up in there, But I could also
Speaker 1: like it's a perfect thing for an Eddie Murphy movie
Speaker 1: where he just finds out he's been on this sex
Speaker 1: criminals plan a bunch of time, Like I'll watch that
Speaker 1: ninety minute comedy.
Speaker 2: Like there were a few people on some of those
Speaker 2: flight lines where I was like, I don't think they
Speaker 2: knew what they got on the plane for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you might have just been going to a thing
Speaker 1: with him, right, you go into some sort of conference.
Speaker 2: Somebody said get on the PJ.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yea, I'll get in a private jet share. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has. I will say one thing that I have
Speaker 1: learned as a result of this, because previously, before I
Speaker 1: knew any about Jeffrey Epstein, if some richka had been like, Hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to pay you to go to a conference.
Speaker 1: You want to ride my private jet, I probably would
Speaker 1: have been like, yeah, fuck man, that sounds dope. You know,
Speaker 1: fucking twenty five year old mate probably wouldn't have had
Speaker 1: the wherewithal to be like and don't know, but now
Speaker 1: absolutely not.
Speaker 2: Someone asked me the other day if I would get
Speaker 2: on that Trump plane, the one that the Qatar gave him.
Speaker 2: It's like, for the story alone, I kind of think.
Speaker 1: I have to. Yeah, I know that one. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's justifiable for journalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just got to ride this wave and deal
Speaker 2: with the fallout later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm good, I'm staying home.
Speaker 2: You would stay at home, You wouldn't touch it.
Speaker 4: No, I'm good, I'm staying home.
Speaker 1: But no, folks, the lesson here is that if a
Speaker 1: rich guy wants to fly you and pay you to
Speaker 1: speak at some sort of weird conference, tell him first
Speaker 1: class from a real airline, right, you know, it's nice enough,
Speaker 1: and no one can be like, what if that was
Speaker 1: that Delta flight like implicating you in crime? The only
Speaker 1: thing that Delta flight implicates you in is crashing at Newark. Right, Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's that's bad.
Speaker 2: That was They said they'll do better. They said they'll
Speaker 2: do better.
Speaker 1: I said they'll do better. Everyone's got to do better,
Speaker 1: all right.
Speaker 4: That's the episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 5: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Speaker 5: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every.
Speaker 4: Wednesday and Friday.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to our
Speaker 4: Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards