Part Two: Dire Wolves, Dr. George Church & The De-Extinction Grift

Robert explores Dr. Church's weird history with eugenics adjacent projects, like the world's creepiest dating app, and how Colossal Biosciences was created and immediately used by the Trump administration as an excuse to attack the Endangered Species Act. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  What's Epstein, my Jeffries?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 0:09Robert Evans?

  Should we not? Is that bad, Sophie?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  He didn't like it the first time.

• 0:13Robert Evans?

  Should we not start that way? How many chances do you get now that he's dead? You know?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Zero. We don't need to do that.

• 0:20Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. That's the real tragedy.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:24Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't say tragedy.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:27Robert Evans?

  Langston Kermit, our guest. How are you?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. I'm excited to hear more. This feels weird to say out loud, but I'm excited to hear more about Jeffrey Epstein and everything he's been up to with our boy George Church.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, thankfully, we are past. We're done with the Epstein part of the story. Because you know how that ends. Obviously Bernie Sanders sneaks into prison and puts him out of his misery in order to keep some certain people's secrets. Or something, you know? Nobody knows, right? Some people are pretty sure they know. I don't know.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  It was like, I would say like four or five people who probably know exactly what happened.

• 1:05Robert Evans?

  Four or five, yeah, maybe who know exactly. Yeah. I, yeah, I continue to be, you know, an agnostic. I'm an Epstein agnostic. But definitely fucking George Church, I feel like knows more than he's letting on.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  He knows more than we do on this podcast, for sure.

• 1:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, man, but yeah, maybe it was George. No, that, that'll get us sued. We can't, we can't accuse this bio scientist of having Epstein guilt. Oh, fuck, yeah. Yeah, maybe he like inserted a gene into him that made him choke to death more than he can.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, just made, made something explode in the middle of prison somehow.

• 1:42Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, created a spontaneously grew a new set of his hair. So, oh, boy. Around the time he renewed his association with Epstein, which would have been in the 2014 to 15 era, unless he'd been continuing to talk to him, which we really don't know, but we have records of them starting to meet again multiple times in 2014. Anyway, and around that same period of time in 2014 and 2015, that's when Dr. Church first started seriously pushing de-extinction as a scientific topic, right? Where he was, I think you can find some quotes where he sort of talked about the possibility, but 2014 and 15 is when he really is like, this is an actual thing we can and should do and maybe even a potential business that I want to be in.

• 2:27Robert Evans?

  He had danced around the issue in his 2012 book, Regenesis, where he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals, which people always get angry are like, Robert, you're mispronouncing it again. That is how you say what most people call Neanderthals.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I, I'm not, um, I'm not brave enough to have ever challenged you.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  To quit to question me on it. Some people did in my novel and then they're like, oh shit, I looked it up.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  I, I say Neanderthal, but I'm a dumb dumb, so I'm glad.

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  They're all dead.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Like, who gives it, that's not what they call themselves, right? You call us what?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  They said ooga booga, so yeah.

• 3:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, wow, wow.

• 3:09Robert Evans?

  No, it's fine. We wipe them out because we're, uh, well, cause we're monsters. We're the devils here.

• 3:19Speaker 03

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• 3:23Robert Evans?

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• 4:27Robert Evans?

  So anyway, he had proposed bringing back Neanderthals by genetic engineering and using an actual human woman to serve as their surrogate mother.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 4:38Robert Evans?

  He described in the book, "The ideal surrogate to rebirth in the Neanderthal race as quote, "an extremely adventurous female human."

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  You can feel everyone about this, but my, maybe Sophie, you can chime in here, depending on how, if you feel I'm getting this wrong, it's kind of fucked up to call her a female human as opposed to like an adventurous woman. Like either way, it's fucked up, but female human seems worse somehow than like, we're going to find some adventurous woman, right? I don't know if neither is good, but female human, like you sound like a Star Trek character. You sound like Quark talking about ladies.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Female human as if.

• 5:17Robert Evans?

  Female human.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  It's, you didn't need both of those.

• 5:21Robert Evans?

  Could just say woman again.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Just say woman.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what that word is for. It literally was like.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  Female human.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Really weird.

• 5:30Robert Evans?

  It's just kind of awkward, man.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not being chill.

• 5:34Robert Evans?

  You're not being cool. Um, Der Spiegel, and Der Spiegel is a German news agency. I think it literally means the voice or something like that. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. I'm bad at German, but it's, it's a major, it's like their New York Times almost, right? It's a major publication over there. Interviewed Dr. George Church in 2015 because he had recently made the claim that it would soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. They asked him, "Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?" And he replied, "I think so, but boy, there are a lot of parts to that." He goes on a list, a few of the technologies that have developed recently, which might allow this kind of cloning, and then adds, "Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would

• 6:18Robert Evans?

  require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so?"

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now we're getting to what you really want here, George.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Now we're getting to the real sketchy shit.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Something tells me you're not as concerned with these wolves and these Neanderthals as you're pretending.

• 6:40Robert Evans?

  Now, Der Spiegel very reasonably said, well, you shouldn't maybe because it's super illegal, right? Like, you're not like, it's very illegal to clone human beings. And Church's response is, well, that may be true in Germany, but it's not true everywhere. And then he adds, and laws can change, by the way.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 7:00Robert Evans?

  Cool. That's like, if I was like, if someone's like, I think I'm gonna commit some murders. And he's like, but it's illegal to murder. Well, what if the law changed? That's not really my question.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  It's illegal to murder because you're living in the past, my man. I'm thinking about the future.

• 7:15Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Like, I'm not really like, if it were legal to murder, that wouldn't change my judgment upon you for wanting to murder somebody, you know?

• 7:25Robert Evans?

  And it's interesting because again, he's always described as having this deep consideration of ethics and, you know, putting even a lot of money into making sure that what he does is ethical. And he's asked like, yeah, but like, it's super illegal to clone human beings for like, obvious reasons. And he's like, well, what if it wasn't? Like, again, not my question, my dude.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's just fascinating. And the other thing that's interesting here is that like, not only is he like, his, his answer to like, this is kind of fucked up. Well, we could make it legal. But when he's kind of pressed by Der Spiegel on like, why would you want to do this? Like, what's the benefit? His answer is complete horseshit. First off, he's asked like, why would this be desirable? Right? And when you ask that, you're asking like, give me a good reason to want a Neanderthal clone. That's not like some sort of cheap profit. Like, why, why is this desirable? And his first answer is, well, that's another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what's technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  That is bad scientific ethics.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  First off, man, you shouldn't decide what's desirable based on societal consensus. Go back to the 50s. What was societal consensus on interracial dating? If you're letting that move you to decide what's desirable, you're gonna be bad.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  But he's also not taking genuine polls. He's just talking to Jeffrey Epstein.

• 8:51Robert Evans?

  And the average human probably doesn't give a shit about this, right?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I didn't know that bringing back a Neanderthal was possible and frankly, never was interested in.

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  Was not on my list of concerns. Yes. And the attitude that like, well, my only job is to determine like, what are people willing to let me do? And then what's technically feasible? You're literally doing the Ian Malcolm and Jurassic Park thing. Like you're literally, your scientists are so busy asking what they can do. They're not asking, should we? Is this fucked up?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  This seems bad.

• 9:24Robert Evans?

  Michael Crichton was not a good man, but he understood that this is bad ethics. Right? But just be like, I wonder if I can, it's like evil. It leads you to do evil.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  No, you should, you should chill out.

• 9:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Fine, probably fine. Fuck it. Yeah. So it's very interesting to me how just he has, he's completely incurious as to whether or not there's a practical benefit to doing this kind of cloning. And Der Spiegel has to prod him like two or three times to get him to answer kind of directly like, what is, is there any potential benefit to bringing back this species? And here's what Church eventually says, well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  I got a lot of issues here.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Fine, man. If we're just gonna pretend, fine.

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  First off, let's split the, my issues here into pragmatic and then ethical. Pragmatic, bigger brain doesn't mean smarter.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:31Robert Evans?

  Bigger brain, dolphins have bigger brain than us. They're not so far proven useful in getting us off the planet. They have other concerns, right?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  The other thing is, if you're creating, if you're bringing back this species, this is a sentient, sapient species, an independent species. And you are saying, we'll use their big brains to get off the planet. Well, what if that's not what they want? What if they have other interests, being their own independent beings? Cause it seems like your concern is like, well, we can just harness their big brains so that we can do the science stuff that I want to do. Cause they'll be smart. Well, but what if they don't want to do that? Are you just saying you'll own them? Is that kind of what you're saying? Is that kind of what you're saying?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  I think you're trying to make big ass slaves, man.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I think you're trying to make some big old slaves and that's

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  That's something you should maybe just say out loud instead of pretending like it has some other value.

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  It is one of those things. He's not saying, I want to make big ass slaves. But if you say, I want to bring back a new intelligent species, you kind of immediately have to say, and they will immediately be full citizens and right with the rights of human. But you have to like really emphasize that.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:43Robert Evans?

  If you don't want me to be like, you just want slaves.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Listen, they don't have to live with me. They can live wherever they want.

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  So that's the other thing because like this, this Der Spiegel journalist is like, how do you even go about raising this species that you've brought back to life? Right? Like they won't have parents or a culture. And as like, this is an intelligent hominid species. Presumably, most of how the real ones knew how to do the things that they did was that they were raised in families like us, right? Who like raised them, but there's no culture of these people anymore. So how do you raise them? And church is kind of vaguely like, well, you'd like make a bunch at a lot at at once, like a cohort, he calls them. And, and then he's like, maybe they'd become their own culture. Maybe they'd even become a political force.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 12:35Robert Evans?

  What does that mean?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  I keep coming back to Jurassic Park because you can't not when it's talking about de-extinction. But also, what's amazing to me is, again, Michael Crichton, the climate change denier, fucking weird guy, Michael Crichton, understood all of the ethical issues with this when applied to dinosaurs in a way this guy doesn't when applying them to like effectively a humanoid creature. Because in the actual book Jurassic Park, one of the things that becomes clear, like the raptors, which are super intelligent, the ones that engine clones, don't act like real velociraptors. They're terrible to their young. They like murder their own kids. They're just like crazy, violent and dangerous because they were not raised by adults that knew anything.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  They're just these monsters that got unleashed. And so they grew up completely without any kind of a culture that would teach them how to like raise their young. And as an intelligent, like Crichton imagined this when talking about dinosaurs.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:33Robert Evans?

  And George Church is just uncurious about it.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:37Robert Evans?

  Like literally read Jurassic Park.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  We literally have a, a, uh, an economic system where you see what raising people without their families does. And he's like, yeah, I bet these ones will figure it out.

• 13:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Like, no, that's not, that's not how it's gonna work, big dog.

• 13:55Robert Evans?

  Well, it's also like, just even when you're talking outside of Neanderthals, we're talking about like the animals he wants to raise. Like a major story from like, like animal, you know, biology and whatnot in the last couple of decades is we used to have these beliefs about alpha wolves that deeply influenced a lot of toxic aspects of human culture. And then the scientist who came up with the idea was like, I was completely wrong. I was looking at wolves raised in prisons, basically, and they don't act like wild wolves, right?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  Which again, if you're just bringing back a dead ancient animal and it has no animals of its own type to raise it, how the fuck are you going to have it? Cause his goal here is always for it to retake its original evolutionary niche. How would it do that? It doesn't know how to do that.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  You ever seen those videos where like, um, they'll like put a tiger in with a pig, like a baby tiger? And then the baby tiger starts acting like the pig a little bit.

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  It's like, well, yeah, that's because that's more influential than it being just raw tiger by itself.

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. This is why I intend to raise a human being with a bunch of tigers, but that's a separate point. I just want to see if they'll grow claws. All the scientists are saying no, but I have my own theories.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Scientists are saying a lot of things.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  They say a lot of shit as these episodes show.

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  So yeah, my opinion here is that his primary interest isn't even, I don't even think he ever intended to clone Neanderthals, right? I think he knows that this is not really going to happen. It's clear to me that his real interest is a mix of both like driving up hype because he's going to be starting this, he's trying to, and he's gotten very good at using his lab will do some work in like, like finding some Neanderthal DNA and sequencing it. And then he can use that to start making claims of we'll be able to clone them one day and eventually get investments so that he can spin off another startup company, right? And that's kind of part of where colossal bioscience is the dire wolf company comes from. That's part of what he's doing. I think the other thing that he's doing here, and this becomes clear later in the

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  interview, is he's sort of giving away that his actual interest is not to bring back extinct species, it's to find traits of those species and edit them into other animals for much less altruistic purposes. At one point, he has asked, like, do you think there's anything wrong with creating a whole new species? And he says, "The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species, and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you're at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would mainly be a question of societal risk avoidance." And that's a really good example of using, like, the language of social justice and liberalism to advocate for horrifying things.

• 16:34Robert Evans?

  Like, first off, human beings have mostly done fine without Neanderthals. I don't know that there's any evidence that they would make us, like, more diverse. But also, that's not what he's interested in doing. Later in the interview, Der Spiegel asks, "Hey, wouldn't you just be able to add some of their genes to a human and change the human?" And the answer Dr. Church gives makes it clear that this is what I think he's really interested in. Because he says, "Suppose you were to realize, wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. That could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity." And that's when I'm like, "Oh, you just want to create designer smart babies for rich people?"

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:13Robert Evans?

  Right? That's the blueprint here!

• 17:15Speaker 02

  You're just trying to make it so that, uh, so that the baby comes out exactly the way you planned and with no other stuff.

• 17:23Robert Evans?

  Right. And you can make hyper-smart babies for your rich friends that become a new species to rule over all of us. That's your goal.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, with blue eyes and, and no need for braces.

• 17:33Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  We get it.

• 17:34Robert Evans?

  Right. Right. That's your dream. Um, he continues, "Even if you don't have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it." And this is, this is where he lays out the blueprint for what Colossal's gonna do. Because he's like, "DNA doesn't last. We can't get full dinosaur DNA. You'll never be able to clone a real dinosaur." But then he's like, "Even if you don't have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you'd first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask, 'What's the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands?'" And you would try to identify the mutations to try and back engineer the dinosaur. "I think this will be feasible." And again, it's not really.

• 18:15Robert Evans?

  But

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a um, I learned about this recently, but there is somebody who's making something called the chicken source.

• 18:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Where they are essentially claiming that they're like re they've rediscovered or re giving us dinosaurs again. Via this chicken a sort, but it's just a fucked up chicken.

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  That like, looks like it's got like some dinosaur qualities.

• 18:39Robert Evans?

  And it's it's one of those things like, is that kind of interesting? Sure. Would I want something that looks like a dinosaur and is a pet? I'm not made of stone, of course. Is that a dinosaur that you've de-extincted? No, it's a thing you made. And there's still these ethical questions about like, well, what are the rights of that animal? Like yada, yada. Like, there's a lot of weird things, you know? Like, there's a lot of weird shit about that, right? I'm not thrilled with this, but that's my least kind of concern here is some guy who's like, look, this isn't a real dinosaur, but it looks like one. Do you want to have it as a pet? All right.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:15Robert Evans?

  I have bigger concerns, you know?

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Right. It's not. It's not the the true crime that is uh

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  That our boy George is working on the back end of this.

• 19:24Robert Evans?

  Although there's also the if it is like made out of a from a chicken, chickens are soulless monsters. Like, you don't want to make them more powerful.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And they're also not particularly bright. None of this feels like a great combination.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  No. If you know chickens, their favorite food is their own kind. Like, they are scary animals. Yeah. Um, my favorite that Werner Herzog has some great quotes about if you want to see be frightened stare into the eyes of a chicken, there's like nothing but blackness in there.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 19:54Robert Evans?

  It's good stuff.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Your chicken listeners are gonna be pissed. You're being nasty.

• 20:00Robert Evans?

  You know, we've all had like, I've had chickens. I remember once one of my chickens, a raccoon got in the coop and one of my brave chickens fought it off and got injured. And all of its friends ate it to death. Um, it's horrible. Chickens are nightmares.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I really didn't even like give him a

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  No, they don't give a shit. They don't give a fuck.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Holy shit. Oh, man. Chicken Run really sold me a different story about that.

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  No, chickens are not that good at solidarity, not their strong suit as a species. So we'll talk more in a little bit about his so-called de-extinction ambitions. But again, this starts in like 2014, 15. And the fact that he's like, working on this stuff, the fact that he's got this history with Epstein and Epstein's weird baby breeding project and all these, this genome sequencing, all these that he's talking in 2015 about like editing human genes to make designer babies. This all leads directly to the most fucked up thing about Dr. George Church, which is how often he winds up, shall we say, tugging at the fringes of outright eugenics. Right?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 20:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In a 2019 interview for CBS with Scott Pelley, Church talks about his goal, which is framed in the article as, "to protect humans from viruses, genetic diseases, and aging." In the interview, George talks about age reversal, which he says has been proven about eight ways in animals. Now, it hasn't, right? And that's a really vague statement for a scientist to make. And I want to know, what are the eight ways? What do you mean by proven, right? These are all the questions that aren't answered. I did find an art-

• 21:32Speaker 02

  There's that jellyfish that doesn't, that can like regenerate or like turn itself back into a child. But like, that's not proving it, that's just that species.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  Right. And there's like, there's like turtles that may basically live forever if they're not killed by something, right? Like, there's some tortoises that are like 300 years old, right? And there's some other species where it may be a similar thing, where like, they kind of only die if something gets them. Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:00Robert Evans?

  But that doesn't mean, you can't just like, maybe there will be some sort of life extension secrets in that animal, but maybe it's just different enough from us that like, there's no way to transfer that to human beings? He's saying that we have proved how to reverse age in animals, right? That we have done it using science. And that should be a falsifiable statement, but he doesn't give much more detail there. I did find an article for the Center for Genetics and Society that attempts to reverse engineer his claim. And they're like, he is almost surely overselling this. But they suspect one of the proven cases he's talking about here is a study about gene therapy for mitral valve disease in mice, right? And it's a study that showed that by editing some genes, you can fix like mitral valve disease in mice.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  Now that's important and may have some really crucial implications for science. May allow allow us to extend a lot of people's lives, right? I'm not saying that that's not good science.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  It's not age reversal, right? That is like, that's curing a valve disease, right? It's not exactly the same thing.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, you're still gonna die when you die. You just won't die from that.

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  You'll get older. It's just like you'll be this problem with your heart. We might be able to fix with gene editing. And obviously, like, is it possible, given enough time, that we will be able to extend human life enough that we keep extending it? It's not impossible. I'm not saying, I don't think it's necessarily likely because there's a lot of shit you'd have to figure out. And I just don't know if we're gonna get there, given all of the other things human civilization is gonna have to deal with. But it's not impossible. It's just the way he talks about this is so blasé and he glosses over so much that it's not like serious scientific talk. And some of the evidence for this is that like, when he gets pressed on like, how do you know? Where where are we actually making animals younger?

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  The only real evidence that he's able to cite is an ongoing clinical trial to see if gene therapy can extend the lifespan of dogs. And maybe that will be possible, but any resultant therapy is going to be, number one, it's not proven yet. And number two, any resultant therapy that might come out of this doesn't, we don't know that it would work on people because there's, dogs aren't people, right?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's some noticeable differences.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  Not in a genetic sense, Sophie. In an ethical sense, sure, but not in a genetic sense. We're differently constructed, right?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  It's really funny when people sort of like sink into these types of sciences because like, if you want your dog to live longer, just stop making it fuck its cousin. You know what I mean?

• 24:31Robert Evans?

  Right, that's part of it, right?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Stop breeding them till they're like sick the second they come out and let them be whatever random mutt that they all are kind of supposed to be.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you know, for the record, if we ever find a way to make dogs live like 60 years, I'm on board. Ditto cats, you know, I don't have an issue with like keeping our pets alive with us.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  I'd welcome their presence.

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  Their presence.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I would do so many things to keep my dog alive longer.

• 24:59Robert Evans?

  There's no evidence that this thing he's talking about is going to work really on dogs. And it's even if it can extend the lifespan, it's also, it's not the same as reversing age necessarily. But also, even if, and again, these are all many, these ifs are increasingly fractional long shots, even if this study works on dogs, and even if there proves to be an application on human beings, any resultant therapy that allows you to extend human lifespan or reverse human age will be exhaust, outlandishly expensive. So expensive that it will only be available to guys like Jeffrey Epstein, right? In response to Dr. Church's claims

• 25:40Robert Evans?

  about age reversal, science historian Nathaniel Comfort noted, lengthening the lives of rich Westerners, the obvious customers, would be the biggest ecological crime since Standard Oil. It's hard to argue with that.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  That's pretty fair.

• 25:54Robert Evans?

  Obviously, that doesn't mean we wouldn't do it. The question, there's two separate questions. Is this ethical? No. Is this possible? Also, so far, no. Right? That said, I should note that the ethics of this are not a topic that Church ignores. There's a whole nother CBS article I found where he talks about genetic equality and emphasizes the fact that he keeps an ethicist on staff. Quote, "He does not want to see a world in which big advances in genetic engineering are available only to those who can afford it. He considers equality both when manipulating genes for therapy, like correcting genetic defects to cure genetic diseases, and for enhancement, augmenting genes beyond what is normal." But like, it doesn't mean anything. Like, for one thing, the pharmaceutical companies

• 26:37Robert Evans?

  that buy this from you are going to set the prices, right? They'll pay you off.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  I just think it's always a bad sign when somebody has to outsource ethics.

• 26:47Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  Pay someone for the ethics?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  You need somebody else to handle ethics, because that's just not how you think is, you're gonna do some vile shit.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  That, that, that's probably a fair point, too. And it's, it's also hard for me to square this statement that like, well, I really, I don't want, you know, there to be genetic, you know, bias. I want everyone to have access to these wonderful things. We're definitely going to be able to do. His claims that that's what he wants are hard for me to square with other statements he has made, saying like, but that I quoted earlier, where he's like, hey, man, it's just my job to figure out what we can do, right? Whatever society's fine with is, is, you know, what's right, right?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  That's none of my business.

• 27:26Robert Evans?

  That's none of my business. It's a very Werner von Braun. When the rockets go up, who knows where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  I'm just here to make as many humunculi as possible. I don't, I don't decide where they go.

• 27:40Robert Evans?

  Look, man, I'm in the humunculi business. I'm not in the where humunculi go business, you know? He told CBS, we're not necessarily opposed to enhancement if everybody gets access to it simultaneously. And again, but there's no, how do you do that? You don't talking about how that would ever happen. You're just saying, obviously that's what I want. Are you going to turn down millions of dollars or billions of dollars to make sure that happens? Unless somebody guarantees it somehow? Are you? How? Doesn't seem real, doesn't seem likely. Anyway, he doesn't propose any way to ensure this, nor do I believe he truly cares. Scott Pelley, who's the journalist who interviewed Church, made this statement after talking to him. He doesn't see a great distinction between being able to travel 550 miles an hour on

• 28:23Robert Evans?

  an airliner or changing somebody's genome in order to make them maybe cognitively more astute. There's a big difference.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  That's why I fuck with Scott Pelley. He really, end of the day, he really breaks it all down in a, in a very succinct, clear way. He's like, that man that I just spoke to is a psychopath and you should know that.

• 28:44Robert Evans?

  That would be like, if like a weapons designer is like, what's really the difference between building a new artillery shell and genetically encoding a bomb into someone's DNA without them knowing? Is there really a difference?

• 28:55Speaker 02

  They're both dead.

• 28:56Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I can agree they're both dead.

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. They are both dead, but I do think there's a difference. Now, I know me saying like, I don't trust that this guy cares about ethics. I think he's lying about caring about equality here. Maybe that just seems like old Robert being an asshole because all the bastards he reads about. There's other good reasons to doubt George Church here. And I want to quote from that article from the Center for Genetics and Society. The massive Chinese company BGI sees synthetic biology as a promising field, and in 2017, launched the George Church Institute of Regenesis in Shenzhen. BGI's corporate culture has been criticized as "eugenics-like", and the company is currently involved in state surveillance and harassment

• 29:40Robert Evans?

  of millions of Uighurs, a Muslim minority group in Xinjiang.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  It's not great that the company that starts the institute named after you has been criticized as "eugenics-like", or for surveilling a minority being targeted by the state? None of those are good things.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  I really was hoping this wasn't gonna lead to you knowing who the test subjects were. But, uh, boy, oh, boy.

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  I can't prove that, but yeah. The other thing is that, like, just outside of those ethics, the George Church Institute of Regenesis? That's a dystopian name. I'm sorry, that's from like a cyberpunk source book. Like, that is-

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, George, you're fucked up, man. You're doing something fucked up.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  You should know that's a bad name. But, that said, I had to look further into this BGI and everything. When I heard the words "eugenics-like" for this company culture, I was like, "What the fuck does that mean?" And holy fuck, is this company screwed up. So, back in 2018, Wang Jian, who's a co-founder and president of the company, participated in a panel discussion at a conference. He stated that BGI's goal was for each of their employees to live to at least age 100. To ensure this, they have, like, they have to in order to work there, embrace three rules. And I'm gonna read you about these rules per an article for the English-language Chinese news website Sixth Tone. Quote, "The first rule is that BGI staff are not allowed to have children with birth defects.

• 31:06Robert Evans?

  If they were born with defects, it would be a disgrace to all 7,000 staff", Wang said. "It would mean that we are fooling society and just eyeing each other's pockets." Wang added, "There are no known serious congenital diseases among the 1,400 infants that have been born to the company's employees." Oh, boy! Oh, god!

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  Well, that's just, I mean, do I have to like, talk about why that's evil?

• 31:30Speaker 02

  God damn, that's, they're just saying stuff plainly.

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  Holy shit. Holy fuck.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  These people made a center named after you, George? Jesus Christ.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  They also, there's no way they mean that about like, the cleaning staff.

• 31:47Robert Evans?

  No.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Like, they're only talking about very specific employees at this company.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  That's nuts.

• 31:55Robert Evans?

  That's also, what do you consider a defect? Right? And I, I know this is actually tricky. The ethics here are really tricky, right? If I was having a kid and I learned like, hey, this, this future potential child would have a heart defect. We found evidence of, and we can fix it in utero. Of course, you'd want to fix that as a parent. You wouldn't want your kid to have the heart defect. What about if they're like, hey, your child, uh, they'll be perfectly healthy, perfectly intelligent, but they'll be on the autism spectrum or they'll have ADHD. And they give you an option to zap that, because that's kind of feels like genocide to me, right?

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 32:30Robert Evans?

  And this is-

• 32:30Speaker 02

  They're gonna have a, they're gonna have a sixth finger. They're, it can, the slope is so slippery for like, what they'll decide is acceptable and not acceptable.

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  Yes. And I, this is something we will have to grapple with, and it's not going to be easy, because obviously, if you're like, hey, your kid's going to be, has this genetic condition that will mean that there will be constantly in horrible pain for every second of their short life. But we can fix that right now. Who wouldn't want to fix that? But then, how do you build guardrails in so that you're not just saying, we're gonna get rid of everyone who's different, right? Like, eh.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And who, and who frankly are the scientists in charge of making those decisions?

• 33:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  We know for a fact it's a real, uh, I'll bring back dire wolves ass person.

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or Wang, who's like, none of the kids of my employees can be defective, right? Like, this is all just like, it gets really bad very, very quickly, right? And it's also like, you know, church makes this big claim of like, I'm a big believer in diversity. And he, he talks about like, I have narcolepsy and I have a lot of my greatest ideas in the, when I like, kind of have these quick narcoleptic naps and stuff. He's a big believer in neurodiversity, according to what he says, but also the science and the people he's working with are actively working to end neurodiversity.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:45Robert Evans?

  Like, that's the result of this, right? Like, we all know that's where these people would go.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Robert Evans?

  Is that not a problem?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  It's a real hit like it's like Hitler being like, well, my mom was Jewish. So that's why.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  I mean, yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  That's why I'm doing this.

• 34:00Robert Evans?

  That would have been a weird thing for Hitler.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, Hitler. No. BGI's second rule is that the company can't detect cancer later than hospitals do, which I guess is fine as an ambition, right? You want your company to do does these screenings to be faster than the current technology. Okay, give you a pass on that one. The third rule for BGI employees is almost as fucked up as the first. And I'm going to quote from Sixth Tone again. Employees are forbidden from having a heart bypass surgery. Instead, they are expected to rely on gene tech and clean living to prevent cardiovascular disease to promote fitness and healthy eating, Wang said. BGI tracks the dining habits of employees at its cafeteria and has put its elevators out of service. Now.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Man.

• 34:46Robert Evans?

  Wang describes this policy as a bit mean. He's also opposed women from the Chinese mainland getting HPV vaccines in Hong Kong, not because he's anti vax, but because he thinks that genetic testing is a better value for the money, which is like, that's just none of your fucking business, man.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Oh, man. He's like, no, don't, don't cure their disease. I want to figure out how to test more. I need more diseases to play with.

• 35:10Robert Evans?

  What if they get vaccinated and get you know, anyway? This company is fucked up and the fact that Dr. Church is involved with this guy and his company to such an extent that this BGI named a center after George Church says more than every vague claim he makes about ethics and genetic equality about what I think his actual ethics are. And the more you read about him, the more it becomes clear that there are two very different George Churches. There's the one who legitimately contributed to some huge scientific breakthroughs and who runs a Harvard lab that does work on some really cool projects. One of the companies he's affiliated with is working to like clone pigs with organs that can like be transplanted more easily into human beings. I think that's a really good idea, right? Not that there's no ethical concerns there, but like probably worth it in my opinion.

• 35:54Robert Evans?

  Some people will feel differently, but like. Not enough organs out there right now for everybody who needs them. But there's another George Church, and that's the guy who will work with absolutely anyone and anything if there's money in it for him, right? And will kind of say anything, you know? That's my interpretation of events, I'm not saying that's objectively true, my opinion. You see the first George in these hagiographic articles for the popular press that are talking about like how amazing he and his companies are. And you see the second George, when you actually look into a lot of the companies that he's either co-founded or had been hired to advise. For an example of a company he's co-founded, I'd like to introduce you to a venture that he co-founded in 2019 called Digit Eight or Digit Eight.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Digit Eight.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  Did you, do you think, do you think you know where we're going here?

• 36:42Speaker 02

  I have no clue.

• 36:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's a dating, it's a dating service. It's a genetic dating service.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  Oops. Oh.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Oh, shit.

• 36:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds bad.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 36:59Robert Evans?

  His co-founder is Bhargavi Govindarajan, who is a Harvard graduate who met Church at a school event. They got to talking about consumer genetic testing, and she seems to have like soft pitched him, like, what if we integrated genome sequencing into a dating app? And this is what she said later. "It did not take us much time to uncover synergies in terms of how we wish to build a nimble, modern platform that taps into molecular biology and accelerates the impact of preventative health for a variety of consumers. Within a year of the first meeting that seeded our conversations, we incorporated Digit Eight with planet-wide ambitions." God, that's just, it's both like such tech corporate speak and also evil supervillain speak.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Planet.

• 37:42Robert Evans?

  Planet scale.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's nuts. That's terrifying.

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  You can probably guess the basics of this idea. You give Digit Eight your DNA. They sequence it and they compare it to other people on the service to ensure that you only match with someone you're compatible with.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I really don't like where this is going.

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  You don't like where this is going, Sophie?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  This is really uncomfortable.

• 38:05Robert Evans?

  This sounds kind of like eugenics.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Robert Evans?

  Eugenics, me-genics, who knows?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  You plus me, eugenics.

• 38:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Us genics.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  No, guys.

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  The quote, "The idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people," and this is from the MIT Technology Review, "The idea is to use DNA comparisons to make sure people who share a genetic mutation, like those that cause Tay-Sachs disease or cystic fibrosis, never meet, fall in love, and have kids."

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I.

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  That's a really fucked up way to say it.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  That's like, like, yes, two people with cystic fibrosis are dangerous to each other if they're near, near each other, but.

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  Well, no, I mean, like, that's not even true. It's like, if, if two people who have, like, if two people are likely to have kids with a certain horrible disease, maybe, like, adoption's a better choice or something. I don't know.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  This is like wildly abusive and creepy.

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  Making sure they never meet is just like reducing human beings to things that combine DNA. Or maybe they're not interested in having kids, right?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:08Robert Evans?

  Maybe they just.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  They can meet, they can hang out, they can even talk about it.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  Love each other. Right? Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  They might be like, hey, you got that too? I'm good. Let's make other choices. Like, they're, they're, they have the ability to figure this out for themselves.

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just the whole, like, the goal is to make sure they don't fall in love. It's like, wow, okay.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I don't like this.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  So I want you to pull up the image of this tweet from Digidate in March 16th of 2021. Let's just take a look at this. I'm gonna read this. Digidate is here to help enhance your relationships, providing a dining experience that relies on communication, teamwork, and intimacy. Give it a try today. #couple, #dating, #virtualdate, #date. And then there's a little image macro that says intimacy isn't always easy, but Digidate is here to help. We provide a virtual dining experience for you and your date, leading to closer, more intimate connections. So again, they're advertising other aspects of this, which is like, we let you have a digital date before you meet. They're not talking in the public facing ads about the fact that, like, also, we're sequencing your DNA to determine who you'll make a good genetic match with.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  I don't like these two little fuckers in the corner. Nope.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  No, neither do I.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  I'll go so far as to say that, that, look how little they invested in the actual, like, images.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  They don't give a fuck.

• 40:28Robert Evans?

  I don't know if there's a lot of money behind this either. Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  They're like, just give us your DNA. If you're gonna fall for this, we're not spending a dime on advertising.

• 40:37Robert Evans?

  That's right. But you know who is spending a dime on advertising?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  That was perfect.

• 40:41Robert Evans?

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• 40:46Robert Evans?

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• 41:45Robert Evans?

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• 42:20Robert Evans?

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• 43:03Robert Evans?

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• 43:29Robert Evans?

  We're back. We're talking about crimes, but we're not going to tell you what crimes. We're not planning an Ocean's Eleven heist of a casino. Of course not. Langston's not also the best safe cracker in the business, you know? I'm not, you know, the world's best getaway driver. Surfy, so Surfy, Jesus, what the fuck was that? I was gonna make a joke about Sophie being trained in jujitsu, but I ruined it by mispronouncing your name. I'm sorry. That was weird.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I don't think I'd be very good at that. It's okay, but I'd be good at crimes.

• 44:01Robert Evans?

  You'll be good at, you're great at crimes. Theoretically, theoretically.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Now, I'm just thinking like, you know, if you find, I would, I would do so many crimes to keep Anderson alive longer.

• 44:11Robert Evans?

  I'm thinking of you as the mobster in, in the movie Ghost Dog starring Forest Whitaker.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  I love Forest Whitaker.

• 44:18Robert Evans?

  Great film. Yeah, you could, you could be using Ghost Dog to assassinate your rivals. He would love you. You could be his Damio. I think Damio.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  I'm looking directly into my dog's eyes.

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  Sorry, we got off the thing. We're talking about Digidate, the creepy genetic dating company.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  I was, I was trying to distract us away from it because it makes me so uncomfortable.

• 44:40Robert Evans?

  No, we still got worse shit to talk about. So here's the MIT Technology Review, the MIT Technology Review in this article about Digidate describes Church's lab as gravitating towards provocative projects. And they describe Digidate not as a separate dating app, but as a service like GPS, in the company's words, that could run in the background of any existing dating app.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Not like GPS.

• 45:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't like that either. So basically, every dating app could use Digidate's technology in order to have their users send in their DNA and get their genomes sequenced to stop them from meeting genetically incompatible people. Now genome sequencing costs like 750 bucks. So obviously this is not super easy to pencil out financially for a dating app, which generally is not that expensive. But Church thinks you could offset this by increasing the subscription price of dating apps. I don't know if I think this is a great business, hasn't taken off yet. But as usual, he puts what is effectively eugenics, like this is a eugenics dating

• 45:45Robert Evans?

  app in humanitarian terms, claiming it would eradicate huge numbers of diseases which cost, quote, "about a trillion dollars a year worldwide." And again, when it comes to horrific diseases, I'm all for stopping horrible diseases that harm people, but there's a lot of other ethical concerns when you start talking about this shit and you're just not dealing with them at all. As a guy who is like, "I'm not neurotypical and I think there's huge benefit in having people with brains that work different be involved in science." You're also creating an app to put an end to that maybe, and you're not talking about that problem at all.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not, and you're not being even transparent about, to your point, about what is being considered a deformity, a not typical thing inside of a person.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Cause it's like some scientists are like, "Hey, there's a disease where people's skin is born inside out. We want to stop that." I'd be like, "Yeah, man, I don't think we gain anything from babies having their skin inside out, right? But that's just never where it ends, you know?"

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Like also, I want you to know what color that skin is when we flip it around.

• 46:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  It's gonna be the color we like. It's not gonna be the color you like.

• 46:58Robert Evans?

  Right. What other stuff are you wanting to do with baby skin? This got announced, this dating service, for the first time during an appearance Church made on 60 Minutes. He later claimed that the section about Digit Eight wasn't supposed to air, like, "Oh, I had no idea they were putting that in the show. I was just talking." And that he'd intended to just talk about his pig clothing company. But here's how the documentary wound up sounding. I don't know if I believe him on this, but Sophie's just gonna play this whole clip for you.

• 47:28Speaker 07

  Thank you very much. Okay, wonderful. Church is a role model for the next generation. You got it working, it looks like. He has co-founded more than thirty-five startups. Oh, this is incredibly important. Recently, investors put a hundred million dollars into the pig organ work.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 47:47Speaker 07

  Another church startup is a dating app that compares DNA and screens out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease. You wouldn't find out who you're not compatible with, you'll just find out who you are compatible with. You're suggesting that if everyone has their genome sequenced and the correct matches are made, that all of these diseases could be eliminated. Right, it's seven thousand diseases, it's about five percent of the population, it's about a trillion dollars a year worldwide.

• 48:22Robert Evans?

  No. We just want to like prune about five percent of the population, you know, of those types of people happening. I'm problematic there.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  I just want to walk through like some kind of like conference and walk up to a board and go, this is important.

• 48:36Robert Evans?

  This is important. I do that, that's exactly what I'm like at CES, if I think they'll give me something cool.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, man.

• 48:43Robert Evans?

  When I do my consumer electronics show work, oh yeah, this is important, yeah. So if, when you're a tall guy with a beard and you walk around leaning into screens going, this is important, people will just give you stuff. It's nuts.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he really, um, he really sped past it in a way that it, it, it's more about the elimination of like the diseases and not the curation of

• 49:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  of another species, like truly saying like

• 49:09Robert Evans?

  This is important. Seven thousand, huh? Can I get a list?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  He's so tough, he's so tough to look at.

• 49:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Given how bad he wants perfect people.

• 49:20Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  It's like you would think that he should not get to say what a perfect person is, and yet here we are.

• 49:25Robert Evans?

  No, he, you know what he looks like? Do you remember back when like internet comedy websites were all funded by t-shirt ads where they would like Photoshop different t-shirts into the same like old white guy with a long beard who was like surprisingly jacked? He looks like that guy if he stopped taking HGH.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  So this this 60 Minutes interview caused a ruckus online, to put it lightly. And I don't think I need to go into the obvious issue people had with the Eugenics app, but it's worth emphasizing that this would be just a nightmare for a privacy standpoint. Dr. Church, like your genome being out there? OkCupid having your genome?

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 50:05Robert Evans?

  Maybe not the best.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  No, not all of these apps are created equal. I don't even know that they have the staff that could manage your genome properly much.

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. So Dr. Church responded to this by declaring his detractors clickbait critics who weren't thinking deeply about a complex problem. He assured everyone that any given person on the app would still be compatible with 95% of the population and that the app wouldn't provide health data to users. Although there's also stuff that got like brought up in that MIT article. They're like, what about people with like Huntington's disease markers? Cause like, there's no one technically that you could match them with and be totally safe. Do people who have those markers not deserve to have relationships? Is that kind of what you're saying? Like, that seems kind of bad. I don't know.

• 50:51Robert Evans?

  I also can't find where he says the data would never be sold or used for any other purpose ever. I certainly don't know that that's written down anywhere in like an EULA. Although again, this service does not exist really yet.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  I'm sure part of his funding says that he's not allowed to say that, that like, there's, we, we want to be able to use this in a different kind of way. And that's how we can, we can justify giving you all this money. Also, the elimination of diseases is such a silly concept because you also might make new ones. It's not like we know for sure that like, there's not, there's no new possibilities in these perfectly synchronized genomes.

• 51:30Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. Thank you for being the Ian Malcolm of these episodes and like reminding us all of chaos theory. If you want, you could drop a little bit of water down your hand. Maybe unbutton the top two buttons of your shit. Like really go for it here.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  I gotta get jacked first. I'll, I'll get there. I'll figure it out.

• 51:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, man, he did look good in that movie.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  He looked great.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  As to the whole Eugenics of it all, when he gets, got challenged on this, Church, who is a Twitter user, replied, Eugenics, US, comma, Germany, comma, et cetera, 1920 to 1970 interfered with human lives and personal reproductive choices.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  True.

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  Not just those two countries. Not just that type, but, but okay, okay. It's Twitter.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  If we're listing facts, yeah.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 52:19Robert Evans?

  And then he says, like, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to help people understand genetic risk. But you're, you're saying they won't even be matched with those people. So is that really accurate? Right? Now, in that MIT article also noted that like, what he's claiming to do, like, preconception genetic testing is already common. But that's a lot less sketchy because you're not saying, we want to stop people from meeting who aren't quote unquote compatible. That's just saying, if people decide they might want to have a kid, we can test them both and see, are there potential things that, like illnesses that those kids could have? Right? And there's a debate to have about that, too. But it is very different because those people have already met. Right? And Church even responded to this by saying, if you do it after you've already fallen in

• 53:03Robert Evans?

  love, it's mostly bad news by that point. A quarter of kids will be diseased. If you can go back in time before they fell in love, you get a much more positive message. And like, not everyone wants kids, George.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not everyone wants kids. Not everyone frankly wants kids the way you want them. It, it really is putting a lot of your, your decision making on random people.

• 53:25Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. It's, it's not great. So Digidate's motto is, science is your wingman. Which I think makes it clear that their desired clientele is more on the tech bro side of things. That said, they've also sought to go what he, after what he like was described in an ad as an untapped market at one point, which is communities around the world who do arranged marriages or only marry within a limited caste or tribe. Right? Like, we can make sure that you only marry Brahmins with Brahmins in India or whatever. And this is, this is what people were led to believe by a job ad posted on Digidate's website. And Church later claimed that post was an error and that, no, no, no, we'd never help anyone with that sort of thing. That's obviously unethical. Maybe.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  That's really smart to go that route. Cause I I'm so ignorant. I just presumed that he was going at like young singles in the city. It's like, no, you need nasty conservative sort of like

• 54:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  principles that have already been established.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  You gotta get the Saudi royal family here.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, to agree to this.

• 54:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, man. And it's like, yeah, he says, that's not what we wanted to do. I don't know. We'll see. Um, we'll see. So Digitate does still seem to exist in 2025, although it has not gotten a lot of press since the initial uproar, and it seems to be on George's back burner since the dire wolf stuff. Apparently the company is now more focusing on like general dating, planning and like health planning and stuff like that. Yeah, I kinda, I don't know that they actually have a much of a product. So let's talk about another company George is involved with, uh, this time as a board member and expert advisor, but not a co-founder. And this company is BioViva. They are a US biotech startup that sells anti-aging therapies.

• 55:13Robert Evans?

  And May of 2021, Stat News reported that the CEO, Elizabeth Parrish, was awaiting data from a human study of six patients who'd received experimental gene therapy for Alzheimer's in Mexico the year before. These were supposed to be six people with dementia who were getting an experimental like telomerase, like lengthening therapy that would help de-age their brains. Now, Langston, you've been on the show a while. Sophie, you've been on every episode. You all know that when we're talking in this show and say the words experimental therapy and Mexico, something not great is about to be happening, right?

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a reason there's that small of a sample size and it's because they're doing something pretty fucked up.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, per a write-up by science journalist and former molecular cell biologist Leonid Schneider on the website For Better Science, "The gene therapy these Alzheimer's patients received was an adeno-associated virus, AAV, carrying the telomerase enzyme TERT, which may have zero effect on rejuvenation but is known to be a potentially cancer-transforming oncogene, which makes these clinical tests even more exciting, especially because BioViva's CEO Parrish announced in July 2018 in a lifestyle magazine to have had TERT AAV injections herself. Quote, "Over a period that lasted well into the night, there would be more than 100 injections in her triceps and thighs and buttocks and even her face, just below the cheek. And again, we don't know that this has any impact on aging, but we do know it can cause cancer."

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:43Robert Evans?

  Weird thing to shoot yourself up with 100 times, ma'am.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  I love it when these people self-experiment.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  That's nuts.

• 56:52Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 56:53Speaker 02

  That's, that's full Red Hulk shit. You're really, uh...

• 56:56Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  You're doing something freaky.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck.

• 57:03Robert Evans?

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• 58:03Robert Evans?

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• 59:14Robert Evans?

  Now, the basis of this experiment was that, once again, it seemed like it worked on mice, right? Parrish is an outspoken believer in the fact that if a scientific study shows benefits in animals, human patients should be allowed to volunteer to receive it. The issue is, again, first off, that's not good. That's not ethical or good science. That's not enough, right? You don't just jump immediately to putting it in people because you get a study that shows maybe this helps animals.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:43Robert Evans?

  Like, that's just not enough, right? It's certainly not enough to let volunteers pay to get it, which is kind of what she's saying. The issue is, again, yeah.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  That's always where it gets icky is like...

• 59:55Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  The plan is never to put it like, uh, put it in people, you know, for the greater good. It's put it in people because you have funding to do that.

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  This to be profitable.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  And again, these enzymes can cause cancer. Now, the fact that that fact has made it very difficult to get approval to conduct these studies. And so, the inventor of the treatment, a guy named Bill Andrews, who worked at a different company before BioViva, tried to conduct a trial with this other company in Mexico in 2017, in which participants with mid to late-stage Alzheimer's would pay $11 million to attempt this treatment. Wound up not being able to find anyone with Alzheimer's who was willing to pay that probably because their families had control of the money and were like, I don't know, I kind of want that 11 million for me. Grandma's pretty old. Ain't gonna be here that long. No, no, no, I'm gonna keep that money in house. This proved impossible, so they tried to recruit patients for another trial in Columbia

• 1:00:52Robert Evans?

  for just $1 million each. I don't think that worked either. As far as I know, no evidence of it. Now the technology is in BioViva's hands and it's unclear how much they charged participants to be guinea pigs here. For his part, Church was asked in 2016 about ties to BioViva and he said, "I wouldn't call them ties. I advise people who need advice." And they clearly needed advice. He has been on the board of the company since 2015. This isn't like a informal, you're on the board, man. This is public. Ties? Being on the board is a tie? Alright. Do I have ties to iHeartMedia? I've advised them on podcasts.

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  I talk to them three, six times a week. Every two weeks, you know? They don't pay for my healthcare or anything, right? I drink blood with them every once in a while. It's not. Yes. Do I drink a little human blood? Is it the only way I can stay alive? Am I allergic to the sun? Of course, but I'm not a vampire. That'd be weird to call me a vampire. You're being crazy. You're honestly being crazy.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  When asked about the risk of causing cancer through this treatment, Church replied, "I think that's still an issue with telomerase. I would not sugarcoat that. So I'm not sure that it's time for that just yet, but it's close. It's extremely close." Meanwhile, Bioethicist Lay Turner of the University of Minnesota said of BioViva's study using this dangerous treatment, "Everything I'm seeing indicates the involved parties are not conducting a credible clinical trial with appropriate safeguards." Now, despite Church being cagey, whenever someone asks, hey, don't you work with that like sketchy anti-aging firm? In 2022, Church published a scientific article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences alongside Elizabeth Parrish and like 10 other authors.

• 1:02:44Robert Evans?

  So he's one of a bunch of authors on this article that suggests that you can vape a gene therapy vector called CMV in order to, if you like vaporize it and let a mouse inhale it, it will increase their lifespan by 41% without increasing the risk of cancer. The article concludes, "The impact of this research on an aging population cannot be understated as the global aging-related noncommunicable disease burden quickly rises." So the article is like, obviously, if it extends a mouse's life, we could extend human lives by 41% just by having people vape this thing, right? Like, that's what they're insinuating.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  You remember when, when they were claiming that vapes were, were like killing people? That everybody was dropping dead from vaping?

• 1:03:27Robert Evans?

  Seems like vapes make you immortal.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, now all of a sudden, this technology is not gonna make you drop dead, it's gonna make you live forever. Yeah, it's just weird.

• 1:03:35Robert Evans?

  You just gotta put the right thing in it, you know? You just gotta throw the right thing in it.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  You had those naughty cartridges. We're gonna put really top shit cartridges in there.

• 1:03:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the good stuff, right? We'll throw some Delta 8 in there, too. Fuck it, you know?

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Robert Evans?

  So, but it's also like, yeah, obviously, Church is a real scientist. Some of the people on this are scientists. Maybe this is a thing you could vape to extend. Why not? Let's look into it a little further. So that write-up by Leonid Schneider notes that this study was allowed to bypass the normal peer review process at PNAS, PNAS, the journal, and that George Church was listed as a contributor without noting that he and multiple other authors of this article, testing something BioViva's like advocating, all were employed by BioViva in various capacities. And you're supposed to do that. They had to like update the article to be like, oh, by the way, like, all these people work at this company that's got a financial interest in this. Sorry.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:35Robert Evans?

  Sketchy. We don't have time to discuss all the different shady life extension companies. Companies and schemes that George Church is tangentially connected to, but I would be remiss if I didn't bring up his colleague Aubrey de Grey. Now, if you've ever been interested in the sci- Sophie, pull up a picture of Aubrey de Grey real quick. If you've ever been interested in the, in the scientific quest for immortality, right? For people, or at least massively extending human lifespans, you've come across Aubrey de Grey. He was a major name in the, in the field for a very long time. He was the former-

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:05:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he looks like fucking Rasputin.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  And like, I get that sometimes, but he really looks like Rasputin. Like, look at that Rasputin-esque, "He's doing a Rasputin in that picture." He's got his like, hands out in a prayer pose. I'm sorry. What else is that supposed to be?

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  He looks like he's turning into a wise old tree.

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  Yes. He's got resting int face. Yes.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If an int was a sex criminal.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not a person.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  That's not an idle comment.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  And I don't appreciate that in, in a sentence with Ents, because Ents are great.

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  Well, you don't know about all of the Ents, Sophie. One of those Ents that attacked Isengard had to have like a problem at- that's why the entwives left, Sophie. They're gone for a reason.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  I won't, I won't take ent slander.

• 1:05:56Robert Evans?

  The entwives bounced and we don't know why. One of those Ents knows why.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  So Aubrey de Grey was the former head of an organization called the Sins Research Foundation, S E N S. Schneider describes Sins as, quote, "an anti-aging eugenics club for the very rich." And this is like a big thing in the earlier to mid aughts. A lot of, I think Peter Thiel at least had some tangential. A lot of like, very rich tech guys were super into this because the, the promises de Grey was making, and he did a ton of media. He was very similar to like, George Church, in that he was really good at getting a lot of media. George Church is an actual scientist in a way that Aubrey wasn't. But Aubrey has since been revealed as, per Schneider, "a disgusting sex predator and pimp."

• 1:06:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, pimp. Let's talk about that. So Aubrey DeGray has been accused by multiple women of various kinds of sexual harassment and abuse, women who like worked with and at Sins, his colleagues. You can find a lot of gross stuff about the guy online, but I'm going to just read one account because it reveals something important about the culture of the immortality for rich people movement and the organizations associated with it. Quote, "Sins funded much," and this is from a woman who claims that DeGray abused her. She's going to explain how. "Sins funded much of my undergraduate and graduate work, and as such, I was often paraded in front of their donors. The role of my attractiveness in discussions with donors, almost always older men, was made explicit by Sins executives.

• 1:07:28Robert Evans?

  At one such dinner, I was sat next to Aubrey by a Sins executive. I was told to keep him entertained. Aubrey funneled me alcohol and hit on me the entire night. He told me that I was a glorious woman, and that as a glorious woman, I have a, I had a responsibility to have sex with the Sins donors in attendance so they would give money to him." Whew, cool.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:07:51Robert Evans?

  Great guy, Aubrey. Maybe we'll talk about him more.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  I'm gonna need you to bone a few people in here so that I can make money.

• 1:07:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that is just like pimping for fucking VC money. Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  That's nasty.

• 1:08:05Robert Evans?

  Attempted pimping. Now, victims have alleged that sexual harassment of this type was, was normal within the Sins Foundation and practiced by more men than just Aubrey DeGray and was routinely covered up. Now, there aren't allegations that George Church participated in this, but he was on the Sins Scientific Advisory Board while DeGray worked there. They were colleagues. He worked for this organization with a very shady history of doing this with a guy who had a shady history of doing this. And I don't know, you look at that and you look at the Epstein stuff. It's just a lot of times where you're really close to some people doing questionable things, man, and haven't separated yourself from it.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Pimp me once, shame on you.

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  I wonder if like he'd he'd been the guy who blew the whistle on Aubrey de Grey or whatever, but like he didn't, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know multiple sex traffickers.

• 1:08:59Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  I think after a while it starts to feel like that's a thing you're into.

• 1:09:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, kind of a weird that it happened twice situation. Now, the Sins Foundation represented the crest of a wave in hype for anti-aging research and functional immortality that seems to be on a downswing at the present, largely because none of the promises people like de Grey were making around 2010 seem any closer to coming true. Schneider suggests that, being a smart guy, Dr. Church realized this early on and started pivoting to anti-aging cures for pets, because there's just as much money there, but you're not at any risk, right? Like, it's just a safer business to be in. In fact, I would say the primary genius George Church has exhibited over the last 20 years since his real scientific achievements has less to do with science and genetics and more to do with branding and merchandising.

• 1:09:50Robert Evans?

  He understands the same thing Elon Musk used to understand, which is that if you're good enough at announcing sexy new products that go viral, even if you only deliver like 5% of the time, people will think you're a genius, as long as you keep enough of those stories in the media, right? And you get very rich doing that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Robert Evans?

  This brings us back to the dire wolves, right?

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  We're back. They're back.

• 1:10:12Robert Evans?

  We've come around full circle, baby.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  I didn't know they were coming back. I thought I thought maybe they were gone for good.

• 1:10:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Church's whole point is that they're coming back, baby. So, let's talk about his whole crusade, the extinct animals. When the first claims of this went viral, uh, they were focused on, obviously, Neanderthals. And George and his lab at Harvard started working on a scheme to clone and bring back the woolly mammoth in 2014. This was a micro-budget endeavor for like a decade or more. George claims they spent about 100 grand on it prior to 2021, quote, "which is way, way less than any other project in my lab, but not through lack of enthusiasm. It's by far the favorite story. We've never done a press release on it in all those years. It just comes up naturally in conversation." And that may be true, but he talks about it in a lot of these media appearances, like he talks about this kind of shit, the extinction in that 2015 interview.

• 1:11:01Robert Evans?

  And that's his PR. He doesn't need to put out press releases because he's mastered the art of using journalists as his PR, right? And that's what he's doing with this dire wolf thing. The way Church tells it, in 21, Ben Lam, who's the CEO of Colossal Biosciences and his co-founder, kind of came out of nowhere to throw money behind the idea and help him start a company. Quote, "Ben came out of the blue, I think inspired at a distance from what he was reading about this very charismatic project, which was very underfunded." He and Ben met at Church's lab in Boston, which acts as an incubator and advertisement for his different business ventures. Lam, being another serial entrepreneur, gets involved, and colossal is Lam's sixth startup. His first was acquired for a fortune when he was 29, and the others he's created did

• 1:11:46Robert Evans?

  well enough that he's got, he's worth like 14 or 15 million dollars. So he's like rich, but he still hasn't, he's not a success by Silicon Valley standards yet, right? So he's still looking for his big hit. His past ventures are all pretty standard, chasing the zeitgeist tech stuff. He had an e-learning company, a mobile app development studio, a gaming company, and Hypergiant, an enterprise AI software company that once had Bill Nye on the board. In 2019, Hypergiant announced a world-changing product, the EOS Bio Reactor, which was meant to use AI to optimize algal growth to sequester carbon. And they were like, "It's a climate change solution. You can sequester more carbon per square, you know, acre or whatever than you can with

• 1:12:30Robert Evans?

  like a forest using this by optimizing algae growth." Sounds great, right? Now, I know you're wondering, is that real, though? Like, is that a real product?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  It crossed my mind.

• 1:12:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it crossed my mind. I can't say no legally. It was acquired by Tribe Capital in 2023, but a former employee on Glassdoor noted, and this is from an article called "Colossal Liar Wolves" for the blog For Better Science, "There's no secret sauce, there is no product, there is no money, just hype." And another former employee commented, "This isn't a software company, it's VC marketing hype." So those people claim there's no real product who worked there.

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. The people who work there saying, "We're not doing any work," is really awesome.

• 1:13:14Robert Evans?

  This is not a real company? Nothing, nothing really. Now, for this stage of George's plan, right? Like, the colossal biosciences stage, once they announced this company, his PR rep of choice was a journalist for CNBC who got the first big scoop. And when they put out this first big article about this, this new company, they're gonna bring back the mammoth in six years, uh, four years ago. One part of their article reads, "It could take as little as six years for colossal to create a calf," George told CNBC. "The timeline is aggressive," he admitted. "When people used to ask me that question, I said, 'I have no idea. We don't have any funding, but now I can't dodge it. I would say six is not out of the question.'" Now, obviously, there's no evidence that they're any closer to doing this here. And if you actually read these articles,

• 1:13:59Robert Evans?

  George isn't even really saying that they're trying to clone a woolly mammoth, right? Just like the dire wolf is just a wolf with a couple dire wolf genes kinda plucked in there here and there. What they're trying to do is alter the DNA of an endangered Asian elephant so it can withstand colder temperatures and then release a bunch of mutated Asian elephants in Siberia. When he was interviewed by The Times, Church even allowed that calling it a woolly mammoth was probably a bad idea. An Arctic elephant is a better term, right? But that's not what you're calling it, right? You're calling it a woolly mammoth in all of the press coverage.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also, so we can skip past the fact that you're not actually helping the existing elephants. You're just trying to create a new species that'll, um, mirror the old one.

• 1:14:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like if you go to like a family who's like, in like, living on the edge and about to lose their Section 8 housing, and you're like, "I'm gonna fix everything for you." And then you give them all haircuts that they don't like or didn't ask for. And you're like, "Problem solved, look at you guys, alright, I'm out."

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Guess what? All of you guys got the Rachel. Ain't that nice?

• 1:15:03Robert Evans?

  Isn't that good?

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  You all got the Rachel.

• 1:15:06Robert Evans?

  Anyway, bye.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  Here's what his business partner Ben Lam told CNBC in that same article. Our goal is the successful de-extinction of interbreedable herds of mammoths that we can leverage in the rewilding of the Arctic, and then we want to leverage those technologies for what we're calling thoughtful disruptive conservation. First off, using leverage twice in two sentences, that's a bad guy. That's just a bad guy. Disruptive conservation, not what conservation is.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  So first, we're gonna leverage these people over here, and that's gonna allow us to swoop in and leverage these people over here so that we can...

• 1:15:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So you know how conservation is trying to like stop species from going extinct and save ecosystems that are threatened? We're gonna disrupt that by just making new shit and dropping it random places.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  We're gonna fuck up the elephants in a new kind of way. Isn't that exciting?

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  That is disruptive, yes. A bunch of random elephants being in Siberia would disrupt things.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  If you think you know what elephants' problem is now, you are gonna be so surprised by the problems we're about to introduce.

• 1:16:11Robert Evans?

  Elephants are gonna have a bunch of drunk Russians sniping them, like all sorts of shit they don't have to deal with right now. So that article is a masterclass in what I call hype journalism, which primarily exists to pump up the perceived value of tech companies. It's like Theranos-style shit, right? And again, they make the claim that like, well, this could stop climate change by slowing the melting of the permafrost. And I think that, because they say it's like proponents of the project say this, I think it's just George Church, right? And I wanted to look into like, is there even any evidence this would work? And I found an article in the Journal of Medical Sciences that says, quote, "According to Colossal, the reintroduction of these animals into the environment for the ancient

• 1:16:54Robert Evans?

  mammoths would change the environment from tundra, wooded to steppe, stabilize the permafrost, and thus combat global warming." It's quite difficult to take these claims seriously. Now, the article goes on to note, it's, we don't even know if they can modify an Asian elephant, right? Modifying a wolf is one thing. It's a, there's a lot into like, let alone, it's not even, we're nowhere near being able to clone a fucking mammoth, right? Modifying an Asian elephant with mammoth genes is also a major undertaking, and they explain why. This presupposes the availability of early embryos of an Asian elephant, whose nucleus would be eliminated and replaced by that of a cultured pseudo mammoth cell. After a few divisions, this embryo would be implanted in the uterus of a female Asian

• 1:17:38Robert Evans?

  elephant and would develop until the animal is born. This is the pattern that led to Dolly's birth in 1996 and since then to the cloning of many other animals. But this is not an option in this case. The Asian elephant is an endangered species, and given the low success rate of cloning, generally less than 1%, obtaining the many embryos needed and using dozens of surrogate females is not possible, not only for ethical but also practical reasons. This is what is indicated in the work plan presented on the Colossal website, but it seems that Church and his company are now moving towards the use of induced pluripotent stem cell, iPSC, lines that would be obtained from the somatic tissues of the Asian elephant and could be used for cloning. These lines have yet to be obtained.

• 1:18:20Robert Evans?

  The next step is to ensure the development of the embryos, which according to Church's recent interviews, could involve the use of an artificial uterus that avoids the use of female carriers. But of course, this artificial elephant uterus has yet to be invented. It does not currently exist for any species, even if work is being carried out with this objective. So again, their first plan is illegal because you would be destroying a ton of embryos and endangering a lot of females of an endangered species. Your second plan, you've done none of the actual work to acquire what you'd need. And your third plan, again, the science doesn't exist and there's no evidence that you're getting closer to making it.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  And also, you just saying, "All right, we'll just make an elephant synthetically" is fucking nuts.

• 1:19:05Robert Evans?

  It's hard. No. We don't know how to do that.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not cool.

• 1:19:10Robert Evans?

  It's like me being like, "I'm just gonna make a car that runs on water. Easy enough." Hydrogen power is potentially a thing, and it's like, "Well, but..." "People have tried, it's really difficult. It's really hard."

• 1:19:23Robert Evans?

  When Colossal was brand new, Dr. Church talked constantly about their ambition to create an artificial womb. But as the years have gone by, this goal is evidently no closer to reality. And so Colossal and its marketing have shifted to focus on promising other easier kinds of de-extinction. Per Schneider's article in For Better Science, Church's problem is that as business investors and admirers in the media keep asking about the progress of his mammoth project, one has to throw them a stick to chase after. So here's Church's colossal new plan to de-extinct the thylacine, also known as that Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger. This Australian apex predator, the size of a smallish dog, got wiped out in the 1930s. Incidentally, it is a marsupial, meaning it doesn't gestate in a womb, real or artificial, for very long. You know, in case the artificial womb isn't working.

• 1:20:06Robert Evans?

  Detracting that yapping media and investors with a stick was a good idea, but even better to throw them two sticks. So after mammoth and thylacine, Church and his company Colossal announced in January of 2023 to de-extinct the dodo, the giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius, which was exterminated centuries ago. Birds don't need wombs to gestate. So again, we see the first pivot away from like, fuck, we can't figure this out. We're not doing a mammoth. It's not gonna work. Let's talk about this Tasmanian tiger. Let's try to get these dodos back.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  What about that bird that we beat the shit out of when it was walking down the street?

• 1:20:39Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah, yeah. We can bring that guy back, right? Now, if you're trying to bring back the dodo, and again, they died recently. This could be possible, right? We might be able to do that someday. Someday, just like it's possible. Someday, a mammoth, maybe. Who would you bring? What's the most serious scientist that you could bring on as an advisor to your project to bring back the dodo?

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  Hmm. The most serious scientist. I mostly can think of scientists who should not be there.

• 1:21:05Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Well, I'll answer, because obviously, the answer is Paris Hilton, right? That's who you bring on as an advisor for the dodo project, right? I mean, obviously, yeah. There's a fucking-

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  A brilliant mind.

• 1:21:19Robert Evans?

  Of course, she's advising the company.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  A person deeply connected to both science and dodo birds. Of course, you need Paris Hilton.

• 1:21:27Robert Evans?

  Of course, you need Paris. And again, she, she announced that she had been made an advisor in a post about their Series B funding. My guess is she just helped fund this thing. And so they're like, yeah, you're an advisor now, Paris. Great science. I should also note that during this fundraising round, Colossal was found to have stolen dodo artwork from another artist for their pitch deck. Very funny. Anyway, moving on.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  They're like, we can't even, we can't even draw a dodo, much less make one.

• 1:21:56Robert Evans?

  Draw fucking dodo. Yeah. So this brings us back to the start of the episode, and Colossal's first and only real success, the dire wolf. In their press release, they call this the world's first de-extinction and a revolutionary milestone in scientific progress that would lead to the de-extinction of other species. Robin Gansert of the Humane Society cheered that this would make extinction a thing of the past, which is nonsense for a lot of reasons. Actual scientists, like cell biology expert Paul Keppler at the UC Davis Medical Schools, had this to say, "The dire wolf genome likely differs from that of the gray wolf in millions or tens of millions of ways. Editing 14 genes is interesting, but it's not a reconstruction or de-extinction. It's not even close. The three produced gray

• 1:22:39Robert Evans?

  wolves with 15 genetics, making them genetically a smidgen more like dire wolves, are not a de-extinction event." Ben Lam responded with anger at this, saying, "Everyone just wants to argue about what to call these things. No one got deep into the science of how we created new models for ancient DNA extraction. And that's because Colossal has not been very transparent about telling people how they did that, because that's not what they're interested in. Those are company secrets, right? They're more interested in putting up photos with like George R.R. Martin." In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, however, Ben made it clear that the company does have plans to profit from this nonsense. And this is where shit gets really, this is, this is like a TeslaCon, right? "As for de-extinction projects, to the extent they contribute to efforts at conservation, we

• 1:23:21Robert Evans?

  just give them to the world for free," Lam told me. But he also foresees marketing biodiversity credits to other companies, similar to the environmental regulatory credits that Tesla sells to automakers without its zero emission footprint, revenue of, from which enabled it to report a profit for the first quarter of 2025 this week." So, he's like- You know, the animals are free. What we're selling is credits to companies that just like throw more fake dire wolves out there and like, you know what? Chevron, buy some wolves and suddenly you can offset your carbon footprint.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There we go. That's the con. That's the con.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  These aren't just wolves you're gonna like keep and take care of. You really, you're gonna leverage these wolves.

• 1:24:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'll admit when I first read the dire wolf article, I did, I called something being wrong. I did not call carbon credit scheme.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  No, it's really.

• 1:24:14Robert Evans?

  That I didn't get. Yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  It's really awesome. If you think about it, it's like such a long game for being able to not pay taxes everywhere else.

• 1:24:24Robert Evans?

  You gotta, you gotta have the long game if you really want to avoid the most taxes. So that LA Times article does a good job of puncturing the myth. These are animals are dire wolves. One thing they point out is that like, and they talked to a scientist about this, there's visible skin around the ears of these animals. You can see pink skin. Arctic wolves and other Arctic mammals have very thick fur around their ears because they need to survive and have their ears function while being constantly exposed to freezing temperatures. Right? And they also point out that like, well, dire wolves wouldn't have all looked, had white coats because they're not all Arctic animals. Actually, like they lived in a lot of places, but they didn't just live in freezing temperatures. And the, all of these are like,

• 1:25:09Robert Evans?

  like, like the dire wolves they made look pure white because that's how one of the dire wolves in Game of Thrones looked. Like, that's probably what's going on is they were like, yeah, people will buy this better.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Right. The arguably the most famous dire wolf in Game of Thrones was white. So

• 1:25:22Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  We'll just make that one that.

• 1:25:25Robert Evans?

  Make him look like Ghost. Uh, he also notes suspiciously colossal cannot stay consistent with how much dire wolf DNA they sequenced. According to colossal's pre-print, they achieved 3.4x and 12.8x sequence reads of the genomes from two different dire wolf. It is also claiming 55x times more and 70x more. If they only sequenced two individuals as they claimed, why am I seeing three differing figures? I don't know. It seems sketchy. There's a lot that's interesting about colossal based on recent reporting, like the fact that Dr. Church has no ongoing equity in the company he co-founded. Maybe he just only cares about the science, or maybe he's kind of a cash upfront guy because he doesn't see this one lasting. I don't know. Lamb has been the one to go on the Joe Rogan experience to talk about their

• 1:26:09Robert Evans?

  dire wolf where he responded to the criticism this way. They live in the sort of, this is his critics, this sort of fortune and glory world where it's a popularity contest. So one of the things people bitch about is they're like, you guys don't write scientific papers for everything you do. We're not an academic university. I don't have to write a paper on anything ever. If we wrote scientific papers for every single thing we did that went through peer review, like we would have 3,000 papers and no mammoths. But like you don't have any mammoths. Like, there's not-

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  We remain mammothless.

• 1:26:39Robert Evans?

  There's still no mammoths, man.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  There hasn't been a single mammoth and, and I guess, yeah, your other point is kind of moot.

• 1:26:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like, that, like, it's one of those things you could start making, maybe if, if you were making that statement, sit next to a mammoth, I'd be like, well, shit, he does have a fucking mammoth.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  This motherfucker got a mammoth. I can't argue with that.

• 1:26:58Robert Evans?

  But he doesn't. Um, that said, his company is now worth $10 billion, based largely on the strength of how viral those dire wolves meant. This is not real money. No. They have not, this is based on everyone getting hyped up about the dire wolves. There is so much more sketchy shit here. The company also claims to have cloned the nearly extinct red wolf, uh, but their red wolves are just coyotes with a few red wolf alleles stuck in there, right? And confusingly, Colossal claims that they have more red wolf DNA than any actual animals in the real red wolf recovery program, which isn't true because the red wolves in that program are not coyotes. Right?

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Right. They, they don't have coyote mixed in, so they can't be less, yeah.

• 1:27:44Robert Evans?

  No. And the final point I'll make in these episodes is about this kind of sketchiest thing about Colossal, which is the Trump administration has taken a lot of interest in their de-extinction claims. Trump's Department of the Interior head Doug Burgum visited Colossal and the Washington Post reports that he, he, he does like a big press conference talking about like, this is why we need to get over the Endangered Species Act. We don't need it anymore. We can de-extinct animals. No need to protect endangered animals anymore, right? Now, obviously- This causes problems for Ben Lamb and a lot of people who had backed the company as like, oh, are they just going to use this as an excuse to remove the Endangered Species Act? And Lamb goes on CBS and he's like, no, no, no, we need, we need an endangered species act.

• 1:28:28Robert Evans?

  Right? Um, but you know, Doug Burgum still wound up on Colossal's website. And to an extent, do I believe Ben Lamb really cares all that much as long as he stays a paper billionaire? And his, his company keeps getting investment dollars? I don't know. Is it possible Colossal would get in the business of selling credits? That allowed companies to create the illusion that they're keeping species alive? While also destroying more environmental regulations? Maybe.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the problem. It's just really hard to go back to like flying coach. You know what I mean?

• 1:29:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Whatever, whatever his lifestyle is, he's not going to sacrifice it for the greater good of tigers. And you know, dodo birds or whoever they're trying to protect.

• 1:29:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, there's billions of dollars in fucking selling, uh, carbon credits to company or de-extinction credits to companies who bake more random wolves that they shoot into the world. Cool stuff. I love it. I love it.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  This show is always a lot of fun and really sad.

• 1:29:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's great stuff. I love it. Well, Langston, how you feeling?

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  I feel great.

• 1:29:42Robert Evans?

  It's been a long one. I'm sorry.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  No, you, this is great. I'm happy that we got to do it. And frankly, I'm devastated to know that there's a new man to be afraid of out there.

• 1:29:52Robert Evans?

  There's a new bearded man to be frightened of.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Really scared of him and also don't, don't care to look at him, but here we are.

• 1:30:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, everybody, uh, you know, until next time, try not to take any of Jeffrey Epstein's money. Although if he's found a way to cheat death, I don't know. Maybe he's like a Sith Lord or something. Maybe that, I don't know. Whatever. Find your own ethical line.

• 1:30:22Robert Evans?

  Langston. Oh, wait, you need to plug your plugables.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  Uh, listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. I host it with my friend David Bory. It's about black conspiracy theories. Watch everybody's live on Netflix with John Mulaney. I was a writer and performer on that show and you can watch my special. It's called Bad Poetry. It's also on Netflix and I'm really proud of it. And that's it. Follow me at Langston Kerman on all social media platforms.

• 1:30:51Robert Evans?

  Follow Langston Kerman and yeah, if you see a dire wolf, no, you, you literally didn't.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  No, you're good.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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