Ep. 711: So Are Dire Wolves Back From The Dead Or Not?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Matt James https://colossal.com/team/matt-james/, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Spencer Neuharth https://www.instagram.com/spencerneuharth/?hl=en, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics discussed: The ascendancy of Dr. Steve, PhD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG58rDNdts8.; are dire wolves back? https://colossal.com/direwolf/; cracked robin eggs; our book Catch A Crayfish, Count the Stars https://store.themeateater.com/products/catch-a-crayfish-count-the-stars is out now in paperback; alligators killing people; skull morphology; similarities between grey wolves and dire wolves; how similar a carrot is to a human; cloning DNA; Colossal's dire wolf care manual https://colossal.com/wp-content/themes/colossal/Dire_Wolf_Husbandry_Manual.pdf; how a household somewhere has the dire wolves' dog momma surrogate; the ghost portion; genetic rescue efforts; transgenics and taxonomy; spurring conversation about the biodiversity crisis; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's Location Sharing puts your whole group on one live map. So you can look and tell where everyone is.

• 0:48Steven Rinella?

  And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with Location Sharing from OnX Hunt. You need credit to buy, well, pretty much any big thing. So how do you get started? Easy. The One Pay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. One Pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans and the One Pay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit.

• 1:29Steven Rinella?

  Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones, buying a new car or a new house. Or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the One Pay Builder Card. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless. We hunt. The Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  You can't predict anything.

• 2:30Steven Rinella?

  The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com.

• 2:50Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody, hot damn.

• 2:53Steven Rinella?

  This first episode is Dr. Rinella.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Oh, you stole the... Okay, Phil, cue up the music. I was... You weren't supposed to introduce yourself that way. It was gonna be a surprise.

• 3:07Steven Rinella?

  My daughter teased my ears with that hat on.

• 3:13Steven Rinella?

  Do you know you can tell by the hat?

• 3:17Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what you got going on? Yeah, like lesser people with the square hat, they don't... They're not... They don't have that hat. Notice that.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  You got an octagon going there.

• 3:26Steven Rinella?

  You get a different hat.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  We're looking at a studio taken photo of Steve with his diploma.

• 3:32Steven Rinella?

  Hey, man, you guys are just jealous.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Straight back.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Is there a tier above that? Of other hats?

• 3:38Steven Rinella?

  No, I think that's the top hat.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Okay, it's like Pope after that.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  I don't know that they make a better hat than that.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  Where'd you put that diploma?

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's just the, you know, little inside baseball here.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  It's just a mock-up?

• 3:53Steven Rinella?

  That's a prop.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:55Steven Rinella?

  My actual diploma... My actual diploma is a big framed thing, and you can imagine that it'll be...

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Right over your head there.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  Probably right here.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Uh, is the tassel...

• 4:07Steven Rinella?

  I had the time of my life down there.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Does the tassel go on a certain side?

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  It's pinned.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 4:12Steven Rinella?

  It's pinned in place.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:18Steven Rinella?

  A couple of things. You guys think it's all like, you guys think it's all gravy having that happen to you. Well, I'll tell you something. Something you might not realize.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Woe is you.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  The hardships.

• 4:28Steven Rinella?

  So you go up, you, you, you go up, it's, it's in the, it's in the arena, you know, like hundreds, like 650 students, all their parents. You march up and the seat they give you is right by the, right in the line of action.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 4:46Steven Rinella?

  And it's televised. Okay.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Totally new concept.

• 4:50Steven Rinella?

  So you stand up and you get what they call hooded. Which you can't really see in that picture because it's all going on behind you. Your hood's all going on behind you. They gave you that, you give up and you give your speech. And I gave a speech called, There's No Plan B. Then.

• 5:08Steven Rinella?

  Um. You sit down and then they have to hand 650 diplomas.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  How long was that ceremony?

• 5:16Steven Rinella?

  The camera is aimed in such a way that you're there.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Not doing anything.

• 5:21Steven Rinella?

  They warn you. Don't fiddle around.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Don't pick your nose.

• 5:25Steven Rinella?

  Look at your phone.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  I fell asleep during my graduation. There's a picture of me sleeping.

• 5:33Steven Rinella?

  I was wide awake. Cause you had to sit there for all those people.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  How long did that take? Couple hours? Yeah.

• 5:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  So there was a morning and an afternoon ceremony, right?

• 5:43Steven Rinella?

  They split the schools.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Which, which one were you?

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  I was in the morning ceremony.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Is that one more prime time?

• 5:49Steven Rinella?

  I don't think that anybody looks at it that way.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:52Steven Rinella?

  They split the schools. So my, my honorary doctorate was from the School of Forestry and Conservation.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:59Steven Rinella?

  So that school, all the foresters were coming up. Which is like a stressful time to be coming out of a forestry program right now. Because that was like, uh, you know, so many of those kids that come out of that forestry program going to land management agencies. It's stressful.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  It's crazy how you got a doctorate in an area outside of your, your area of expertise.

• 6:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Steven Rinella?

  Well, like technically, like I think the forestry part, but the school of forestry and conservation covers a lot of areas that are of relevance.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 6:34Steven Rinella?

  In fact, I went and had a, I went and did like a Q and A with the forestry students who have a lot of considerations around conservation, funding and other issues.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. You've got some.

• 6:44Steven Rinella?

  So I don't think they mean that I'm like as good as Seth is telling what trees are what.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 6:51Steven Rinella?

  Joe, when Seth was in forestry school, there's a test where you have to identify a hundred and some trees by the bud.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  Not the leaf, a stick.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  Bet you Doug Dern could do that.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's pretty good.

• 7:08Steven Rinella?

  Today, we're doing a podcast on something hardly anyone know about, except for people who listen to this show. This is old subject for people to listen to the show.

• 7:16Steven Rinella?

  Um, but other than that, everybody found out about him from Game of Thrones.

• 7:23Steven Rinella?

  Dire Wolves. This is our, current estimates this to be our second and a half episode on this subject.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yeah, because we had a first one.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  We had a first one, which was episode four, six, six.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:35Steven Rinella?

  Which was called Dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, which was with Dr. Angela Perry. That was number one.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. And then our half one.

• 7:45Steven Rinella?

  Half one.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Touching on it with today's guest.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  With today's guest, Matt James from Colossal Bioscience. As we touched on dire wolves, so there's 1.5. At the conclusion of today's episode, the count will be up to 2.5. If you, if you did learn about that there was such a thing once upon a time called a dire wolf from Game of Thrones, which was a misleading portrayal, um, then you might have caught headlines such as.

• 8:17Steven Rinella?

  Everywhere, a headline everywhere, everywhere on the planet, you could possibly have a headline. Scientists say they have resurrected the dire wolf. The return of the dire wolf. The dire wolf is back. Scientists revived the dire wolf or something else. Um, massive amounts of coverage everywhere about colossal biosciences, dire wolf project. So today we're going to dig into all kinds of questions around that, including the big one. Why, why would you do that? Um, what exactly are they? And, uh, is it in fact, like, how do you make it relevant to conservation? But first the news. Here's my news item.

• 9:01Steven Rinella?

  We already covered my, my, uh,

• 9:05Steven Rinella?

  heightened level of everything.

• 9:09Steven Rinella?

  Which is my ascendancy. Certainly a framing. Coming home from my ascendancy. We, we drive all the way home and I'm pulling into my, you know, like not my driveway, but our circle.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  Where our house is off. And I see a crow.

• 9:27Steven Rinella?

  Like we pull in and up ahead of me.

• 9:31Steven Rinella?

  I see a crow like regurgitate what I take to be a synthetic item. Baby blue, like a babe. And I'm like, and I already tell my kids like, what is that thing doing? And all of a sudden he's, he like deposits out of his mouth, two robin eggs. He carried at the same time.

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  Just standing in the road and he like spits two robin eggs out. He starts pecking at one. And pulls out a little robin. An undeveloped robin. By this point, my younger boy and my daughter are out of the truck. Heading toward the crow.

• 10:20Steven Rinella?

  Which leaves its whole project in the road and flies off. My older boy is now heading to, he's like making plans to kill the crow. In retaliation. But my daughter gets there and she comes back to the truck and in her hand is a little writhing.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 10:38Steven Rinella?

  Featherless, pink robin. Wow. And in the other hand is an egg with a little crack.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Hmm, I know where this is going.

• 10:48Steven Rinella?

  I make my older boy dispatch the.

• 10:52Steven Rinella?

  I make him kill the one that isn't gonna survive. What, would he use his boot or what? His fingers. Okay. Then, my daughter goes around everywhere trying to find a robin nest to put the egg in. And I'm telling her, it won't work because it's cracked. And then she's getting upset, more upset, can't find a nest. I said, but I want to return to what I was telling you, it'll never live. It's cracked. So it now is living in our, it's buried in our garden.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought it was gonna be.

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  I was like, its nutrients will return to the earth.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought this was like, you're gonna put it under like a pet pigeon.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  Raise up a robin.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 11:28Steven Rinella?

  She was, she was, she's like, I know it's expensive. But we need to get it incubated.

• 11:36Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, sweetheart, it's cracked.

• 11:40Steven Rinella?

  Like, there's nothing you're gonna do.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  You're gonna put some tape on it.

• 11:42Steven Rinella?

  So it's returning to the earth. Hmm. In fact, it's gonna turn into.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Raspberries.

• 11:48Steven Rinella?

  No, it's, it's actually where it's positioned, it will be a corn squash.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  We've got, we've got a robin nest up under our porch right now. And I'm just waiting, you know how those babies, they can't, they'll come out of the nest, but they can't really fly real well? When that happens, the dog's gonna eat them.

• 12:07Steven Rinella?

  We've, this is just gonna happen.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I mean, what am I gonna do, move the whole nest?

• 12:12Steven Rinella?

  No, it wouldn't be smart.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  No.

• 12:15Steven Rinella?

  You know what was one of the more interesting things we've had on the show, uh, over the years is, you know, the myth that if you like go near the egg, it'll abandon it?

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Touch them or something.

• 12:24Steven Rinella?

  Do you remember when we had, you know, the whole thing, if you touch a fawn?

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 12:28Steven Rinella?

  Remember we had, um, Randall Kaufman and Matt, uh, from Keith or Monty?

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 12:36Steven Rinella?

  He's like, well, that's true. None of our collaring projects would ever work out.

• 12:41Steven Rinella?

  Where we like net them, handle them.

• 12:47Steven Rinella?

  And then they stand up and go back with their mom, you know?

• 12:51Steven Rinella?

  Uh, but I was raised to believe it's. Good assumption to operate under. That's what I was telling my daughter too. She says, well, she won't take care of it anyway. I'm like, that's a myth, but they tell you that so you don't mess with stuff. But it's not true. It's just they're manipulating you into not, they're manipulating you into not messing with things you shouldn't mess with.

• 13:11Steven Rinella?

  Um, two book thing news is one for every, for those of you awaiting it. Our guide to wilderness skills and survival is out in Japanese.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  How many other languages?

• 13:23Steven Rinella?

  Don't know. I don't know. Sure of any other.

• 13:25Speaker 05

  I don't think any other.

• 13:26Steven Rinella?

  So they usually buy, when they buy it, it'll get, it'll go to like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. This is the only translation I'm aware of.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 13:35Steven Rinella?

  But you being, you know.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Asian Japanese adjacent.

• 13:41Steven Rinella?

  Here we go. Significantly Chinese, perhaps you can help me with something.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Yep. There, there are some Kanji. Uh, there's, there's, yes, there are some, uh, script characters that are similar, but I long, long forgot.

• 13:55Steven Rinella?

  In China, do they read books backwards or forwards?

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Uh, so traditionally it's compared to us backwards and.

• 14:04Steven Rinella?

  It's not backwards.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Right. It's not backwards to them and it's.

• 14:07Steven Rinella?

  Let's be frank.

• 14:09Steven Rinella?

  Let's be frank. I'm looking at this from an American perspective.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Right to left. If I'm not mistaken, right? I think that's what it is traditionally.

• 14:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That's interesting. You're, you're already kind of answered my question traditionally because I have a Japanese fish cleaning book, which is my favorite book of all the books I've ever owned. It's like process descriptions on how to clean all kinds of fish.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  That's so cool.

• 14:29Steven Rinella?

  But if you read it the right way, the American way, the fish get put back together.

• 14:36Steven Rinella?

  So you're like, this is a book about resurrecting fish.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  That's what Rosie needs for that little baby robin.

• 14:42Steven Rinella?

  But you're supposed to go back to what would be for us back to front.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  So when I picked this up, I expected it to be that they would have reversed it. But they.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Cause it's more modern now. I don't think they print any books that way.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  So you might, if you lived in Japan, you might grab a book and you might encounter a book that is read from our, from our perspective, back to front, or you might pick up a book that's read front to back.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:07Steven Rinella?

  And it would just be like, whatever. You're adaptable either way.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  I think, I think more, I think books that are printed, uh, these days are just done in the, I don't know if, I mean, Western orientation. Yeah.

• 15:22Steven Rinella?

  Me and Dr. Randall were trying to find the translator online. We found her, um, LinkedIn.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 15:29Steven Rinella?

  But I couldn't read it.

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  It being in Japanese.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Just in Japanese. She just put in English.

• 15:35Steven Rinella?

  I wanted to get her impressions.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  I thought that was a bootleg copy when I saw it.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  It's interesting how they put a dust jacket on a paperback.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  I thought that too. I also thought this version was prettier than the English version. That's a gorgeous cover.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Why, why didn't the American one look like that?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  I think that's a very Japanese sensibility.

• 15:52Steven Rinella?

  Americans aren't that discreet.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  As well, like the, the Japanese have this wonderful art at packaging things up. So if you, if you go there and you buy, uh, I don't know, cookies, there's a problem because there's a ton of waste. But individual cookies have their own wrapping and then these wrapped individual cookies are in a wrapped box, maybe with wrapping paper around it as, you know, presentation as a reflection of respect and of,

• 16:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  And so it's not surprising.

• 16:24Steven Rinella?

  Excited about all that. Cause he's like, it's three times the packaging.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  He's in international business.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  He's like, I feel so three times.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. Um, I mean, they have a huge like plastic waste problem, uh, in Japan, but I'm not surprised that there is a cover on a soft bound book.

• 16:44Steven Rinella?

  Uh, another paper, oh, I, you know, I had a joke I liked a lot. And when I put that Japanese book on Instagram and I said, if this book would have come out in 1940, we'd still be fighting in the Pacific.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  That was pretty funny.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  You get it?

• 16:57Speaker 04

  That was pretty funny.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  This, uh, catch, our, our, our kid's book, Catch Crayfish, Count Stars is out in paperback.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 17:06Steven Rinella?

  So I was saying, if you had a kid that you don't like enough for a hardcover, or who's not well behaved enough to deserve a hardcover.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Hmm. Or if you have a kid that trashed the hardcover.

• 17:16Steven Rinella?

  Now, there's a softcover. Every kid in America should deserve a softcover.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:21Steven Rinella?

  But there's no kids that are that bad.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh, number one, New York Times bestseller, this book, Catch Crayfish, Count Stars, Fun Project Skills and Adventures for Outdoor Kids. So if you want to raise outdoor competent children who understand, as Doug Durn puts it, life and death on the farm, or life and death on the asphalt with bird eggs, um, this is a, this is a, a phenomenal book to get your kid involved with. It's just projects, it's things they do, and ways to engage with them with discussions about ecology and biology and everything outdoors.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Yep. May 27th.

• 18:00Steven Rinella?

  The goal being, if you see a mouse and you say to your kid, grab that, it'll grab it.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. And then ideally turn it loose.

• 18:09Steven Rinella?

  Well, it'd be just the fact that they'll.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:12Steven Rinella?

  You know, that's why I like my kids. You tell them to grab a mouse, they're probably gonna grab it. It's doing a lot of outdoor stuff.

• 18:18Speaker 05

  Spiders.

• 18:19Steven Rinella?

  We have an arachnophobia problem. But I, I've accepted that it's true.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  It's, it's not just.

• 18:27Steven Rinella?

  I think it's a psychological, like, I think it's a legitimate psychological thing, the arachnophobia. Um, God, this is harrowing. In Florida,

• 18:38Steven Rinella?

  a 61-year-old woman and her husband were in a canoe in central Florida. They went over, they passed over an 11-foot alligator. It's, it seems like it's spooked. And does the noise of it spooking, in shallow water, flipped the canoe.

• 19:00Speaker 05

  And then decided to.

• 19:02Steven Rinella?

  And then killed the woman. Tiger Creek, near Lake Kissimmee, south of Orlando. How harrowing.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Be a rough way to go.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  I think it'd be worse than getting eaten by a grizzly bear.

• 19:18Steven Rinella?

  Her husband. How harrowing for her husband. Oh, way worse than getting killed by a grizzly bear. There's just not a lot of romance in it.

• 19:26Speaker 05

  No.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  Hopefully drowned first, I guess.

• 19:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 19:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, just.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  The question is, is, is are more people getting killed by alligators these days than in days past?

• 19:44Steven Rinella?

  Well, here's the real question. You're right, but there's a way to arrive at that that I like. I can't remember who introduced this idea. Oh, I think it was a podcast guest. Remember we had Adam Pankratz on the show?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Like, reporting and what we?

• 19:57Steven Rinella?

  Well, there's, there's, there's, so, like,

• 20:02Steven Rinella?

  so grizzly bears dust off, like, that's, that's crass. Grizzly bears kill a person or two every year in Montana. Right? So you'd look and be like, as grizzly bears have recovered and hit recovery objectives, and there's like more bears at higher populations, you'd be like, are bears more likely to kill a person? Be like, well, let's look at what an individual's bear, an individual bears chance of having a violent encounter with a human.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Or a run in with a human to begin with, and you look at human populations.

• 20:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but the thing, but what I'm getting at is like, a bear today, a grizzly today in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, a grizzly today, it, an individual bear is not, that bear is not more likely to maul a person.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  No.

• 20:53Steven Rinella?

  It's not like their psychology has changed. There's more of them.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 20:59Steven Rinella?

  So, I, I, if you went, point me if you went and looked at Florida, like, you know, alligators were in, had endangered species protections in the seventies.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  They sure were hanging out.

• 21:10Steven Rinella?

  Now they got like 1.5 million?

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they're living in golf course ponds and canals in people's backyards.

• 21:18Steven Rinella?

  So I don't, yeah, it's not like gators are like, like individual gators are like, man, I wouldn't have before, but now I'm gonna bite a person. It's just like, there's, you know, so it might even be that an alligator, an individual alligator still has a point oh, oh, oh, oh, whatever, percent chance of doing it, and an individual alligator's not like more likely to attack a person, but you just have more opportunities. But still be like, what, a couple people, I don't know how many people get attacked every year in Florida. Couple die.

• 21:53Steven Rinella?

  We've talked about a bunch that died. But I mean, what is it like five, six people per year? That's easy.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  So in March.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  Get bit in Florida. How many people get bit in Florida by an alligator? Divided by a million.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  I think Spencer is checking up on that, but in March. Uh, the same area where this woman got was, was killed. Another woman was killed.

• 22:13Steven Rinella?

  Really? In March?

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, in March.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  Did that one have something to do with a dog? Rescuing a dog or something?

• 22:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  Or something about a dog.

• 22:22Steven Rinella?

  Cause yeah, eighteen hundred grizzly bears in the lower forty eight, eighteen hundred grizzly bears kill a couple of people a year.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  So in, in, in, so they're more dangerous per bear than gators. If you have a thousand gators.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:38Steven Rinella?

  But the other thing is you got tons of dinky gators that you can't really count. You have to start counting them at a certain size, I guess.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Since nineteen forty eight, there have been four hundred fifty documented alligator bites in Florida. Thirty of them were fatal.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 22:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  So it's a seventy year, seven year span.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  I think we should finally get you on a gator hunt for an episode.

• 23:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you know, I'd like to. I just never had, not that I don't want to. There's a lot of stuff to do in this life. There's a lot of stuff to do in this life.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  But gator nuggets are really good.

• 23:11Steven Rinella?

  I've, I've, yeah, I've had friends give me sacks of gator meat. I just have never like.

• 23:17Steven Rinella?

  Planned it, you know what I mean? Um. This got us thinking about this. Did you know that there used to be?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  It's so crazy.

• 23:27Steven Rinella?

  An eleven thousand pound alligator.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  And it's teeth were six to eight.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  Like ten years ago, like ten million years ago?

• 23:40Steven Rinella?

  Seventy, eighty million years ago.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Like colossal probably doesn't want to work on this.

• 23:45Steven Rinella?

  No. Yeah, that one's a little too old for us. It's old. Six to eight foot long.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Scary.

• 23:51Steven Rinella?

  Teeth.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  Wait a minute.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Six to eight inch long.

• 23:55Steven Rinella?

  What am I saying?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  That would be, that would be, that's Godzilla.

• 23:59Steven Rinella?

  That's how my older kid would report it.

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  But do you maybe mean inches? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Um. Six to eight inch teeth. There's a picture of one eaten. There's like a, like a fanciful painting of one.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, an artist's rendering.

• 24:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, but it's like, it's not an actual photo.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Right. Right, not a polaroid.

• 24:21Steven Rinella?

  One grabbing a T-Rex, which I love. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Which you can't rule out. An 11,000 pounder. Uh, they found the bones from one in North Carolina in the 1850s. How long?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, that's an alligator the size of an orca.

• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  I, ha-

• 24:40Steven Rinella?

  Can you imagine? Sitting there with your kid.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Dean, Dean, no.

• 24:43Steven Rinella?

  And they're nudging up to the edge of the pond. And the, the, the, head would be the size of this table.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Geez.

• 24:53Steven Rinella?

  You'd be able to see him from so far away.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Ah, I don't know.

• 24:56Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing I think about with dinosaurs is like, uh, what's that big ass dinosaur? The big plant eater? Brachiosaurus?

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Brachiosaurus, yeah.

• 25:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you were driving down the road, you'd be like, hey, look, five miles away, there's one. Do you know what I mean? It'd be so obvious.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 25:14Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 25:18Steven Rinella?

  Quick, how many other news items we got?

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Just this.

• 25:20Steven Rinella?

  No, there's two.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Thirty-five feet in length. Is that, uh, that gator?

• 25:23Steven Rinella?

  That's even bigger than an orca. This is an interesting deal because we, we had a wildlife, we had a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service agent on the show not long ago talking about the smuggling of wildlife parts. And there's, this is reported that there has been a post-COVID decline in the smuggling of pangolin scales and elephant ivory.

• 25:52Steven Rinella?

  Related to a Chinese encyclopedia of medicine, having said, perhaps there is no health benefit to pangolin scales.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 26:07Steven Rinella?

  And ivory. Well, how is the ivory tied to medicine? I don't know.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  And I feel like the black market is always operated outside of what traditional medicine would say is useful for curing or, or doing something. So I, I, I can't believe that like, they're attributing this to an official journal saying, hey, pangolins don't, uh, help your libido or whatever.

• 26:35Steven Rinella?

  Um, in 2019, smugglers, crime syndicates were shipping vast quantities of the two products from Africa.

• 26:46Steven Rinella?

  Into China, says trafficking fell during the pandemic, has remained low. Law enforcement efforts have helped, falling prices have helped, and it goes on to say, another possible factor is that in 2020, pangolin scales were removed from an important encyclopedia of Chinese medicine.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  We found out why ivory.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Quote, ivory can purge the body of toxins and enhance the complexion.

• 27:17Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Now, do you just like rub a piece of ivory on your face? Or do you grind it up?

• 27:23Speaker 04

  I think you grind it and eat it, you know, obviously not backed by science, but that's the.

• 27:28Steven Rinella?

  My wife was getting all of her toxins out last week.

• 27:32Steven Rinella?

  She did a cleanse. And I was like, what toxins specifically?

• 27:39Steven Rinella?

  No, it's the same way anybody answers it. They don't know. I was like, like, what? Tell me what toxins are coming out of you.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  PFAS, which we can't get out of us.

• 27:53Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. Every successful hunt eventually leads to the workbench or the kitchen counter. The deer is broken down, the meat is trimmed, and it's time to grind burger, make sausage, prepare jerky, and package everything for the freezer.

• 28:36Steven Rinella?

  It's an important part of the field to table process. LEM Products makes the equipment designed to help you get the job done. From big bike grinders, which are phenomenal, and sausage stuffers, to slicers, dehydrators, vacuum sealers, and more, LEM offers professional-grade equipment built

• 28:55Steven Rinella?

  For home meat processing. For more than 30 years, LEM has been helping hunters, anglers, and field to table enthusiasts process and preserve their harvest with confidence. Visit lemproducts.com and use promo code STEVE15 to get 15% off plus free shipping. That's lemproducts.com promo code STEVE15. LEM, built for the work, there for the journey. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing

• 29:34Steven Rinella?

  we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 30:17Steven Rinella?

  I had a social media hissy fit when the Trump administration canceled some federal spending on the lamprey problem in the Great Lakes, which I thought was a huge mistake and perhaps quite expensive in the long run. And better news, they're following through now with trying to keep big head carp, silver carp, the Asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes. And in fact, what surprised me is they've now working with Michigan's governor, Jennifer Whitner, Whitmer, the administration is fast-tracking a barrier system to keep carp going through the Chicago Canal and into the Great Lakes. There's often,

• 31:01Steven Rinella?

  there's also been a big argument among ecologists and fisheries people is would those carp even like the Great Lakes anyways? I mean,

• 31:13Steven Rinella?

  The current thinking is The only way to figure that out is let them get in there, right? Like what you don't, I mean, that could be devastating to the Great Lakes. The current thinking is they would, because some people said that, well, they probably wouldn't like it. The current thinking is that they would like it and that it would be devastating.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Well, the problem with Carpus, they seem to like almost everybody at water they've ever been in.

• 31:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I like everything.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:41Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 31:43Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna do a little background on Dire Wolves here.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  You mentioned Game of Thrones twice earlier. Have you seen Game of Thrones?

• 31:49Steven Rinella?

  Never. I'm aware of it.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:51Steven Rinella?

  Have you?

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yes, but I wanted your review on it.

• 31:55Steven Rinella?

  Never watched it.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  You'd probably like it.

• 31:58Steven Rinella?

  I don't watch serial dramas. I wouldn't like it.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Didn't you watch Narcos? Oh, wait. What's you Narcos and then what's that?

• 32:04Steven Rinella?

  But that's a that's a.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Dane. Wasn't there a Danish serial drama with Miles Miggleson?

• 32:08Steven Rinella?

  Pusher one, pusher two, and pusher three.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, but Steve's not into like fantasy stuff, other than Star Wars.

• 32:13Steven Rinella?

  I'm a little bit of a Star. I'm a Star Wars guy, a little bit of a Star Wars guy. I don't watch serial dramas because I don't. With the exception of, what did you just name that I did watch?

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Wasn't there like a Danish drama? Oh, and Narcos?

• 32:27Steven Rinella?

  There's no date. Yeah. Okay. Drop Narcos. Yes. That's it.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Oh, there's another one.

• 32:34Steven Rinella?

  Pusher one, pusher two, and pusher three.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Or something, an Italian, an Italian series.

• 32:40Steven Rinella?

  I did watch that for a while.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Subterrana or something. Yeah.

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  No, Gomorrah.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Gomorrah.

• 32:45Steven Rinella?

  Well, because Gomorrah was a book, was a nonfiction book about the Italian mafiosa. Out of that came a film called Gomorrah, which was a devastating film about the Italian mafia. And then out of that, so I watched because I was liking Gomorrah the book, Gomorrah the movie. I watched some of Gomorrah the series. What I, not that it matters, what I don't like about serial dramas is after a while I want to get on with my life.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Did you watch Breaking Bad?

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Can I ask you?

• 33:15Steven Rinella?

  No, of course not.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I've got the top five here. See if you've seen any of these five.

• 33:18Steven Rinella?

  Top five what?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  TV dramas of all time from the University of Pennsylvania.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  The Sopranos.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  The Wire.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  You ever watch The Wire?

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Mad Men.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones.

• 33:28Speaker 05

  No.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Okay, over five. I'll, I'll, I trust you though.

• 33:31Steven Rinella?

  I'm not hacking on it. I just can't.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 33:34Steven Rinella?

  I need to move on. Like, I can't give, you know how many movies I could have watched in that amount of time?

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 33:40Steven Rinella?

  And then I could start, here's the other problem I have, and I don't want to take up too much of our time here. I can start to smell the writers keeping it going. The minute I get a whiff of them keeping it going.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Get an extra season or two of.

• 33:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it is like, oh, brother, you know, you can just smell them keeping it.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Jump the shark.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Well, the good news about Game of Thrones is it wasn't that they were struggling to keep it going, is they were struggling to condense it into what they did.

• 34:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Because the books are just so prolific.

• 34:04Steven Rinella?

  The books kept it going for them.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:08Steven Rinella?

  Um, oh, interesting thing here, just about wolves in general. So the two dire wolves we're going to discuss today are Romulus, were named Romulus and Remus, which are fitting for wolf names because, uh, Romulus killed his brother. Was that part of your thinking?

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Well, we were hoping to avoid that part of the story.

• 34:25Steven Rinella?

  Nobody, wolves are hip to fratricide.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  They are, yeah, exactly. It was fitting, plus the, you know, raised by a she-wolf.

• 34:31Steven Rinella?

  And, and, uh, there's a statue in, in St. Mary, Michigan of Romulus and Remus suckling from the mother's, the wolf's teats.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Do we feel like rolling pictures for the video audience?

• 34:43Steven Rinella?

  Put a picture up.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  On the, the little.

• 34:47Steven Rinella?

  The two.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  Do you want to start with the pups?

• 34:48Speaker 04

  And then adults. I mean, they're now, what, Matt, you said, seven and a half months?

• 34:52Steven Rinella?

  Seven point five months old.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  And they're tipping the scales nearly a hundred pounds.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  They're little, white, fluffy pups.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Cute.

• 35:04Steven Rinella?

  Uh, let me, let me kick off a little bit. Despite characteristics, like, like Game of Thrones is supposed to be up north, right?

• 35:12Speaker 06

  It is a fictional, uh.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:15Steven Rinella?

  It's like an up north show.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  Well, it takes place in Canada.

• 35:19Steven Rinella?

  Was it?

• 35:20Speaker 05

  It's a whole world, so there's like up north stuff and down south.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  The family associated with dire wolves, they're in the north.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  Yes. Despite, because in my thing I have here, I wrote this, like, despite characteristics otherwise, dire wolves were southern animals.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:33Steven Rinella?

  They ranged throughout the lower forty-eight. Um, they liked the south and the hot so much that four thousand died in LA.

• 35:43Steven Rinella?

  Have I told my story 18 times about my first date with my wife?

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Twenty eight times.

• 35:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, at least. Uh, there were dire wolves in Mexico. There were dire wolves in South America. I think there's one instance of a dire wolf showing up in extreme southern Canada. A way to think about it, which I realized looking at maps.

• 36:05Steven Rinella?

  If you look where turkeys are. That's where dire wolves were. Little teeny bit in Toronto, like a little teeny bit in Ontario.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  The National Park Service says they were found as far north as Alaska.

• 36:18Steven Rinella?

  That's not true.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I'm just telling you what the National Park Service says.

• 36:22Steven Rinella?

  We've debated that and we haven't even talked about it with our multiple people.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  But, but the one guy who debated it said that they weren't found at the La Brea Tar Pits.

• 36:34Steven Rinella?

  Who said that? Angela Perry?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  No. He was an older feller. Got, it got mildly uncomfortable because I was like, no, I've, I've seen him there.

• 36:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, we talked about that with an old person?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 36:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, we didn't?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Not with.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  I, I could probably find it.

• 36:51Steven Rinella?

  You're talking about the guy that fishes mosquitos all the time.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  We can come back to this.

• 36:58Steven Rinella?

  I think you're, I think you're talking about a dream sequence you had. They're definitely in La Brea. A lot of them. A lot of them. I have to tell my story about my first date with my wife all over again?

• 37:08Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 37:10Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Oh, do you mean?

• 37:11Steven Rinella?

  They seem to have light water.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Jack Carr? No, I'm not Jack Carr.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  No, you wouldn't have said that.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Not, sorry, sorry.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  We can revisit this, I, I will find it.

• 37:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let's move on. We know they're there.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  John Horner.

• 37:23Steven Rinella?

  No, Jack Horner.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Jack Horner.

• 37:24Steven Rinella?

  He was on the show. Big dinosaur guy. He wouldn't be talking about.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  John Horner's a computer composer.

• 37:31Steven Rinella?

  They seem to have light water, Florida and Texas have a lot of dire wolves. I don't believe we have good archaeological sites showing humans and dire wolves together. How do you feel about that statement, Matt? I think that's directionally accurate.

• 37:49Steven Rinella?

  If you took a dire wolf skull and a gray wolf skull and you take fat 15 measurements on it, this is a good little tidbit.

• 37:57Steven Rinella?

  Four of those measurements are different.

• 38:00Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to know on a black bear and a grizzly bear, how many measurements are different on their skulls? So if you take like somehow like you're doing like skull skull morphology, they have four differences wider. Wider and burlier than a gray wolf.

• 38:20Steven Rinella?

  Colossal says that 99.5% similarity between a gray wolf and a dire wolf, which always sounds like a lot until you think about some other things. They say we have 60%, we humans have 60% genetic similarity with a carrot.

• 38:40Steven Rinella?

  So in this world, what I'm pointing out is in this world little, do you know what I mean? Like in this world, little things get different. I mean, like the differences of when you start talking about these like numbers. What you're arguing about is what comes after the last decimal point.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  And we're talking about billions of base pairs in the genome. Okay. So when you say 99.5%, you're still looking at 0.5% of 3 billion base pairs.

• 39:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, a lot, but I mean, like hearing it in the percentage thing gives you like a different idea.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  And the percentage thing can be, is, is one way to explain it. It's a hard way to conceptualize it because at the same time you could say African elephant and Asian elephant are only 98% similar.

• 39:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, well, because I was just going to point out that according, and then people debate these counts.

• 39:29Steven Rinella?

  Humans and chimpanzees 98.8% similar.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And I think an important part of to remember when we talk about percentages of genome is what part of the genome is coding for very specific traits that end up expressing as differences between us and a chimpanzee. Size, strength, you know, musculature, hair, some pretty significant differences.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  So that, that doesn't require a huge piece of the genome to make those changes. A lot of the genome actually doesn't code for anything. It's just sort of. You know, it's what we call non-coding regions that we don't fully understand.

• 40:08Steven Rinella?

  That's the part, that's the part of this that puzzles me that I don't get. And that's probably why you can't look up how much genetic similarity do we have with carrots? Which I was doing because it's like a lot of people like, yeah, that's not really a good way of looking at it.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  I've seen a few people that look like a carrot.

• 40:24Steven Rinella?

  Well, it's dude, you know?

• 40:27Steven Rinella?

  A form, a former.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  His genetic similarity might be like 61% instead of 60.

• 40:33Steven Rinella?

  Um, okay.

• 40:38Steven Rinella?

  Explain that 0.5%. Like it, like to you, Matt, explain if, if there's a gray wolf and a dire wolf, and it seems like a gray wolf and a dire wolf are 99.5% similar. What is the 0.5? And is it accurate to go and look and say, like, when I was thinking about this with chimpanzees? Just to set up the question a little more specifically, because everybody knows humans because you're one. We're all one. And we know chimps because we've been watching nature documentaries for a long time. So if humans and chimps are 98.8% similar, is it fair to say 240 genes separate us from chimps? Or is that a dumb way to look at it?

• 41:24Speaker 00

  I mean, we're waiting into dangerous territory because I'm more a conservation guy than a geneticist. I just play a geneticist at back home, right? I work with really smart people like Beth, who, who really explain these things really well. But yes, I think it would be an oversimplification to say 240 genes separate us from a chimpanzee.

• 41:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  That said, I mean, when we talk about the differences between dire wolves and gray wolves, what we're really looking for, what are the core phenotypes? What are those key areas of the genome in that 0.5%? That we need to target in order to confer the difference, the primary difference, which is, like you said, you know, sort of a robustness of a size, a musculature, a hair difference, a coat difference that we've identified. Um, and how can we then identify those within that 0.5%? And pick the few most impactful changes?

• 42:17Steven Rinella?

  How do you decide, look at?

• 42:21Steven Rinella?

  Let's look at color.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  Why white?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  So if you look at the genome of the dire wolf, and this is a really great question and one that kind of goes back to, you know, when you talk about having Dr. Perry on earlier, right? Dr. Perry was part of that paper that came out of 2021, along with Beschapiro, our chief scientist, who sequenced the genome of the dire wolf. And they only got what we would say is about 0.25% or 0.25X coverage. So sort of on average, they were able to sequence a quarter of the genome one time.

• 42:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  So not a lot of data. We went back and we started and found two samples of dire wolf specimens that we were able to sample and sequence their DNA. One from a 72,000 year old skull and another from a 13,000 year old tooth. We ended up producing what we would call 13X coverage. So on average, we sequenced every base pair in that genome about 13 times. So that gives us a really robust data set as compared to the 2021 paper. What we identified when we have this new robust data set is that there between these two specimens, that one was from Idaho, one from Ohio, one from 72,000

• 43:36Speaker 00

  years old and one that's 13,000 years old, both code for the same light coat color.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Not necessarily stark white, like what we ended up getting, but they could have been, we don't know that.

• 43:49Steven Rinella?

  But did you guys tweak it to make it white?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  No, so it-

• 43:52Steven Rinella?

  Because it's like such a wild, I mean, you have to admit, like the Game of Thrones thing and people, like the writer is involved with you guys, like he makes them white.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, he made one of them white.

• 44:04Steven Rinella?

  Like for the show?

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's five of them that are sort of characters in that show. Only one of them is white. The other have very typical morph, I'm sorry, wolf sort of coat colors.

• 44:14Steven Rinella?

  So, but when it was born, you didn't know what color it would be?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Oh, you knew. Yeah, we already knew because we had made that change. So-

• 44:22Steven Rinella?

  So you had like purposefully made it white?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. So when we identified that definitely over this 60,000 years of divergence and this huge geographic distribution between Ohio and Idaho, both animals coded for a what? A very light colored coat as compared to what we would have seen in a gray wolf.

• 44:42Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, like perhaps it was like coyote colored?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Could have been. Yeah, it could have been or it could be even lighter, like this white we saw.

• 44:50Steven Rinella?

  They'd call that a mountain pale.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Oh, I like.

• 44:52Steven Rinella?

  If you look over your shoulder.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that could certainly be it. Um, or it could be white. Um, you know, there, there are reasons for that, that white coat that could have persisted. But, um, since we saw this common trait between, across space and time in these two specimens, we said, well, that's certainly interesting. We only have two sequences, so that means a hundred percent of what we sampled, um, you know, had this coat color. So we said, well, we should code for that. The trick there is that we also identified very close to that gene. And what we had seen, if you use the genetic background of a wolf, wolves that have that same mutation all, also often can have, uh, an issue with deafness or blindness.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  So we said, well, we don't want to use the exact variant from the dire wolf genome that we sequenced because it could confer a deafness or blindness issue.

• 45:44Steven Rinella?

  Can you, can you explain that more? I don't understand. I, I, I don't still have the background to understand what you mean.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  The dire wolf had this specific trait. We know when we've seen that trait in the, in a gray wolf.

• 45:57Steven Rinella?

  Like, did it, did it naturally occur?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  It's a naturally occurring.

• 46:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I see.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  We, it would be closely associated with deafness or blindness.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Gray wolf would be more likely to.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Have that, those issues.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  So we made a decision, we said, well.

• 46:12Steven Rinella?

  So that, that's not something that was found out, no, that's not something that people found out by trying to insert that into.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  No, that's just from people that have studied canine genetics across, you know, across multiple species.

• 46:23Steven Rinella?

  That's what I didn't understand. I was like, cause I was like, that would be a lot of experimentation to realize.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:28Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  So our computational team is able to sort of run these simulations that tell us what they think the gene will code for, what it could also be associated with, what could be an off-target effect if you made that edit and it, you know, it had an unintended consequence. So we elected, you'll, you'll see in our press release or in our news, we talked about, we made 20 edits across 15 genes with 15 specific dire wolf variants. That means there are five variants that we edited for that were not actually dire wolf. What we did is we went and found analogous genes in closely related species. In the case of the white coat, it was from domestic dogs. We chose that specifically because we wanted to confer the coat phenotype without risking

• 47:10Speaker 00

  welfare of the animal. So we made a decision that said the safest way in order to do this functional, the extinction project we were working on without risking the animal's health or welfare.

• 47:22Steven Rinella?

  Was to pluck it from a dog.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  So that's why, you know, people go, is it 100% dire wolf? And you go, well, number one, this whole 100% thing, we just talked about percentages of relatedness. It's kind of hard. It's not a very clean way to explain it. 100% is kind of a bullshit argument. But it's also not.

• 47:40Steven Rinella?

  Why is that not a good way of looking at it?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Well, just the variation between two individuals like you and I have a significant variation. We're not 100% identical. So if aliens came and abducted you and I, right? They would not then go and clone a human and make Corinne, right? They would say, well, all humans look like you and I. Well, we know that we represent a very small portion of the genetic variability across the globe.

• 48:05Steven Rinella?

  Well, the one's got an honorary doctor.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  That coded in there, I'm sure, yeah.

• 48:12Steven Rinella?

  So you probably have a legit one, right?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Not a doctor, no. I stopped at the master's level and said, this isn't for me. So, uh, so we, we, we tried to avoid this 100% thing because that's really cloning, right? And we're not creating the identical individual we sequenced.

• 48:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because I think this is the thing that, that people don't understand, and it's hard for me to understand, is that there's an idea from watching like Jurassic Park or whatever, that you're able to pluck some living thing out of a dire wolf bone and like add it into something. It's more like you're looking at.

• 48:56Steven Rinella?

  I'm trying to think of it like a, I shouldn't do an analogy, but it's like you're, you're looking at a, someone's got a paint sample.

• 49:07Steven Rinella?

  And you're like, oh, I could make something that color. I don't know how they made that that color, but I could make something that color. Right?

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:16Steven Rinella?

  And in the end, I'd look and be like, wow, that is that kind of same color, but it might have different constituent parts.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 49:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Was that a good analogy?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  I think that's a pretty good analogy. I might use it later too.

• 49:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  It's good. I like it.

• 49:25Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna refine it.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:26Steven Rinella?

  Let me refine it for a day or two.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  A doctor should have a more refined.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  The way I think about it is when we sequence ancient DNA, which is what Beth's specialty is, right? When we go in, what we're really sequencing is we're pulling out like a two billion piece puzzle from that specimen. The DNA has been fragmented over time and time and, you know, things have been introduced like bacteria that chop up DNA into small pieces.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  All we get out is we're able to sequence all that. We get these two billion puzzle pieces and we have to figure out how to put them back together. But we don't have the reference on the cover of the puzzle. Right? So we have to use artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms in order to help tell us how to do that. We also have to align it to a close living relative. So then we go, well, we know a dire wolf was sort of like a gray wolf, so we can start building towards a gray wolf. Then there are specific parts that we go, well, we know it wasn't totally gray wolf, so we have to start making educated decisions here, almost guesses, as to what puzzle piece goes where. And so that's when you, you won't end up with a hundred percent accurate representation of the animal you sequence, because there was non-viable DNA in there. You can't clone it.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  And now we're trying to put something back together without a clear picture of what it should have been.

• 50:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So. Let me hit you with this one. Let's say you took one of, um, you took one of your animals, Romulus or Remus, and you, uh, heaven forbid.

• 50:53Steven Rinella?

  Something were to happen to it.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 50:54Steven Rinella?

  And you boiled its skull down and cleaned it up. And threw it into a pile at La Brea Tar Pits. Right?

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:02Steven Rinella?

  And then there's the person there sorting skulls. What do you think the likelihood is that they would grab that skull and they would throw it in the dire wolf pile?

• 51:10Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I haven't thought about it that way. I would do it in a much less fatalistic way. I would, we, we can use, you know, high-tech CT imaging and actually 3D print their skeleton, which is one of the things we will be doing is as they mature, as they kind of come into their full size, we're, we're using CT imaging in order to kind of get a clear picture of morphology from a skeleton.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna add, like Steve mentioned that we know, like, there's four skull measurements that are different. Like, did you build that into these?

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, the dire wolf variants we picked were specific to changes that we knew would be associated with those few morphological differences between the species.

• 51:51Steven Rinella?

  So you could, you were, you looked in at like, what is with the wide skull, the strong skull? Or whatever you put it. You know, we were talking about dogs, and I go, this is one of, and reading all the coverage about your projects. Why did the dogs get, why did the dog that birthed, why was it a cesarean section?

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Well, so it's a good question. I, so one of the things we did is while we were starting this project, I, me and my team, we put together this 160-page document that is the Animal Care Manual of the Dire Wolf. Right? So we wrote an animal care and management manual for species that nobody's ever worked with. That's 12,000 years extinct. Super fun project. In there, we had very specific protocols for how would we birth this animal? Well, one of the fears was, is, we don't know the fetal development rate and the size of a, of a newborn dire wolf. So we had, one contingency was cesarean section, the other plan was natural birth. As we got closer, we were taking skull measurements via ultrasound. Oh. And comparing that to the pelvic opening of our surrogate. Turns out, would have been totally fine.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  We could have passed those pups naturally. But that's the consideration. Yeah, however, day sixty-two was sort of our cutoff. We said, if she doesn't give birth by day sixty-two, their gestation's about sixty to sixty-three days. But using cloning technology, usually you're a day or two ahead. Right, because the embryo has developed in vitro, before you've transferred it.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  So, say, day sixty-two might be more like day sixty-four, day sixty-five. So, we just had, just like most humans, sort of, their doctor, if they're pregnant, will tell them, hey, if you don't give birth by this date, we will induce you. Yeah, yeah. Well, we don't really do inductions with dogs. The safest way to remove all the variables was just a cesarean section. And it's a very common procedure with dogs. And we have, you know, we had an amazing team of surgeons that were able to do it. And, you know, I think the results speak for themselves. We remove those variables, we give birth to two healthy puppies, a third on a second litter. And then, and then, all the moms, you know, ended up great. And now they're in their forever homes, you know, living life.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  When you say a second litter, like, did you, was there only two puppies? And, like, you weren't trying to grow six of them? It was like two?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Well, right, embryology is a numbers game. If you've, you know, know anybody that's gone through IVF, you know, years ago, they used to put multiple embryos into a mom. Same idea with us, is when we're transferring embryos into a surrogate, we're transferring, you know, twenty-five embryos, understanding that only two to six of those would take. In our case, we got two of them. We had another female that was, had...

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Was pregnant with a second litter and that's where Khaleesi, our third, our female dire wolf was born in January. She actually had a second puppy that she was born with. That puppy unfortunately passed away on day 10 of aneuritis. So basically a perforated gut and she got septically ill, which is, you know, we did a lot of looking and we were able to determine it wasn't related to any sort of effects of editing or cloning. It was sort of an unfortunate event of puppy development that we see, you know, a certain level of mortality. So that's how we got to three. We originally thought we were going to have four. Will the dire wolves be fertile? Yes, yeah, they would be very fertile.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  We have specific strategies we can deploy in order to ensure that they would only breed when we intend to breed. Right now, our interest is not in breeding at the moment, but we could use things like contraceptive strategies or reproductive management of, you know, timing when the female is with the pack or outside of the pack.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech.

• 56:16Steven Rinella?

  They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean. They'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do you start building credit? It's easy. With One Pay's Builder Card.

• 57:02Steven Rinella?

  There's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Can you give us some other examples of things that are in this manual for raising a dire wolf? And how do I get my hands on one?

• 57:42Speaker 00

  The manual or the dire wolf?

• 57:43Speaker 03

  The manual. The manual. Well, both, but I'm, I'd settle for a manual.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  The really cool thing is we publish the manuals on our website. So if you go to thecolossal.com/direwolf, you'll see there is a downloadable animal care manual there. So it's everything from the part tuition issues. So how do you take care of a whelping litter of puppies to how do we manage them socially as they grow up? What is the diet that they should be eating as they grow? What are the expected milestones, developmental milestones? These are things we're sort of extrapolating from our work with gray wolves and other wild canids.

• 58:19Steven Rinella?

  Who nursed them? The dog didn't nurse them?

• 58:21Speaker 00

  So the dog did nurse them for the first few days. And, and so Romulus and Remus, their surrogate was a very attentive mother. And she got to be so attentive that she, if you've ever had puppies with a mom, sometimes they get to be a little nervous and they pick them up and they just poke them too much, starts to interrupt their feeding and sleeping cycles. So we just said, you know, similar to the precautionary approach we took with cesarean section, we said, we're going to pull them and we're going to hand rear them on bottles. So on day three, we ended up pulling them.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  Where's that dog now? That'd be a valuable dog.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  It's a very valuable dog and it was sort of.

• 58:56Steven Rinella?

  It'd become a famous little, like a famous little donor dog.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did this, uh, we worked with, uh, the American Humane Society is sort of the oldest global, uh, welfare society in the, in, in the world. Uh, we worked through them to do a double blind adoption. So they vetted, uh, a home for them.

• 59:12Steven Rinella?

  Whoever has it doesn't know they have it.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Has no idea what they have.

• 59:14Steven Rinella?

  Whoa. Wow. Really? They don't know?

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah. Nobody knows. I don't know where they are and, and the home doesn't know.

• 59:21Steven Rinella?

  Someday that dog is gonna do like a lot of people do. Where they start getting like, I need to find out my real parents. It's gonna look for its children. Incredible Disney movie. Yeah, I know. It's trying to find its children. It'll be quite surprised when it finds them. You're so big and white.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  What kind of dog was this? You probably don't wanna say, cause it's give it up.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was a mutt, right? It was, it was a large hound that was mixed with a lot of other.

• 59:48Steven Rinella?

  Roughly how big?

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Somewhere between forty and seventy pounds.

• 59:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So you're an American, you know, I don't know if you're an American. You recently got a dog.

• 1:00:00Steven Rinella?

  It's forty to seventy pounds.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  I should have adopted the dog like in Australia or something where they would have no idea.

• 1:00:07Steven Rinella?

  They'll never put it together.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Steven Rinella?

  I know. It'd be like a real, it's a little science project.

• 1:00:13Steven Rinella?

  So that's what happened to it.

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  Um, what are you feeding those things now that they're six months old?

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  So they, they started on a very typical, um, milk replacer formula. Once we pulled them from mom and then we started introducing ground meats, like really slurried meats and, and until they eventually started eating ground meats, mostly beef and, and horse meats.

• 1:00:30Steven Rinella?

  Raw meat.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, raw meat. And then we also had some dry kibble in there, you know, essential nutrients, things that like that for development. Now that, you know, they're almost eight months old, we're, they're, they've transitioned from that sort of ground meat to whole prey items. So they'll get a whole rabbit. A whole chicken. They'll get a quarter of a deer, things like that. So we're starting to get them away from the two square meals a day to a, a sort of a gorge and fast, um, more similar to a wild, um, uh. Cadence of feeding.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  Are they in like a big outdoor enclosure?

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so. I heard a rumor where it is. Oh, you did? Yeah, that should be good.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Wait, are you letting out rabbits?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Tell him the rumor. No, I'll tell him the rumor privately.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  I'll tell him the rumor privately. In case it's accurate. Yeah, because it might be accurate. I just heard and I was like, really? Uh huh. Oh, that would be good. I want to hear that. I'll tell you what I, what I, I'll tell you what I heard. I will tell you, they are in the northern continental United States. And they live on about 2,000 acres of a wildlife preserve. Oh, yeah, that fits. Yeah, well, we might be on to something. We might have to go, you know, snuff somebody out if they're telling our secrets. The real, uh, the real reason behind the secrecy is, um, there. Did you guys see that we came out with this news about a month before Direwolf that we made a woolly mouse? Yeah. You saw this? Yeah. Kind of a silly thing, but a lot of fun. The idea was this was like a phenotype validation study.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  We were taking traits we knew existed in woolly mammoths and that were targets for us to edit into woolly mammoth. But we wanted to say, oh, these edits are having the intended effect. Yeah. So we didn't take the same woolly mammoth edit and edit that into a mouse that just wouldn't work. We found the analogous genes in mice and conferred those changes and we made these little woolly mice. The idea that it showed that they had the same effects on coat, length, coat color, adipose tissue, things like that. That, that would be important to make an Asian elephant a woolly mammoth. Um, we came out that news and I, I thought, I can't believe we're going to go public with this thing. And it broke the internet. People just started showing up at our front door of our office building. Not where the mice are. Like wanting one.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  They wanted one. They wanted to see one. They wanted to talk to the people that did that. So we quickly said, well, this was a month before launch of Direwolf. We knew we were about to launch Direwolf. We said, there's no way we could tell anybody, even what state these animals are in. Because suddenly people will be showing up. And 2,000 acres is a lot to protect.

• 1:02:59Steven Rinella?

  So if they're on 2,000 acres, they, there's no way you have a 2,000 acre parcel that's free of other animals.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  No, yeah, it's, it's.

• 1:03:08Steven Rinella?

  So are they hunting whatever's on this 2,000 acres?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  They're, they're fed so regularly, it's like a zoo animal.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  But they're interacting, they're interacting with wildlife.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  I've seen them chase deer off, um, things like that. So they definitely have that instinct and they're interested in it. Uh, but yeah, they also don't have some adult wolf that's showing, this is how we sort of stalk a prey and then we get on it and this is the kill move. Yeah, they don't have that yet. We could, over time and over generations, do that similar to what they do with Mexican gray wolves and red wolves in terms of preparing them for introduction to the wild.

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  And you, aren't you worried that like, they could pick up like canine distemper or some disease from a wild canine?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  So we, we're pretty meticulous in our site selection process and one of the things we wanted to ensure was that, uh, it was an area that, you know, gray wolves were, had been extirpated from, so there wasn't an, a potential issue there. Obviously there's still coyotes in those areas, so we have to worry about that. We have coyote per fencing, but coyotes are pretty wily, they can get through some of that. So.

• 1:04:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you've got 2,000 acres with no coyote on it, there's gonna be some people that want to talk to you.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, they, they, they undergo a, a pretty typical vaccination regimen, similar to what we would do with other animals.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm, I'm looking at the care, uh, program milestone. There's a lot of things about social interaction in here. How, how does that work when you only have two of these?

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Well, we have three. So we have three and there is an intention that we'll bring new litter on, um, because our goal was to get to six to eight. Sort of a typical pack size. Obviously, you know, we ended up at three, so we'll look at adding another litter to that, to that group.

• 1:04:50Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the, we're gonna get into this earlier. Tell me the why. I mean, I get the why, like, I get the why from a showman, like, that you would build a park. Right? You'd be able to use them for movies, and that'd be valuable. You'd build a theme park, and that would be valuable, but what is like, the, what is the why? Like, or maybe that is the why. Like, what is the why?

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could do those things. That is not our why. That is not what we're doing. Um, our why is really built more around, um, around this selection process that we had about two years ago. We were looking at, you know, knowing that our big three projects, woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, those are gonna take us a while. They said, well, we should start working on other projects that we could also help develop some of these de-extinction pipelines, get through this process a little quicker, and be able to see and learn and help inform the other projects. In addition to that, in 2016, the IUCN came out with a uh, proxy species rewilding guide or creation guide. Basically, this guideline document that an independent group of international experts wrote,

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  something like 35 key points in this guideline that talks about if you were to pursue the de-extinction or the creation of a proxy of an extinct species, which is easier, just called the extinction. Here is how you should do it. And one of the most important things that it talks about there is, you know, there's a big welfare implication, which sort of goes back to why we selected the specific edits we selected. There's also this process that these things should happen sort of in this contained, almost laboratory environment, where we, if you're going to pursue this the first time you do it, you should find a species that you know a lot about. You should do these things in a very controlled setting, so you can study all the impacts from cradle to grave.

• 1:06:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Oh, just to, just to be clear, the IUCN did this independent of you guys?

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  In 2016, way, way before colossal was the thing.

• 1:06:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that long?

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Steven Rinella?

  So they were operating on a, like, an assumption that we'll get there, but we weren't there yet?

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  And that was when

• 1:06:51Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  the woolly mammoth de-extinction stuff was really bubbling up, and so it started, biotechnology was getting to a point where they said, we should come up with some sort of

• 1:06:58Steven Rinella?

  Ahead of time.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  So it was really, it was great forethought. We use that as, as a bit of a guiding light in the way that we designed this project because, so. We know a lot about canids and canid genetics, right? We know more about canids than almost any other species, mostly because we all have, you know, a gray wolf in our house, right? I mean, it is dog days, right? We all have dogs, we all love our dogs, we study a lot about them. And we know a lot about North American canids. So that gave us a really strong foundation in order to be able to predict what were the effects of edits, what genes were responsible for what physical trait, things like that. At the same time, there was this sort of, you know, opportunity for us to show the

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  de-extinction pipeline is a real thing. I think when we talk about bringing back woolly mammals, people sort of giggle and they go, that's never gonna happen. So there was sort of this proof of principle need that we said, well, we could show how this would work. And finally, there was also the pop culture bit. You touched on dire wolf, right? This idea that we could bring science into the pop culture, blend those, bring more eyes and attention on to de-extinction, on to extinction, conservation, things like that. So there was this perfect Venn diagram that sort of overlapped with gray wolf and dire wolf, that we could do all of those things while creating technologies that were responsible or could help save other endangered canids like the American red wolf, which, you know, lost in our bit of a media circus that occurred after dire wolf was this idea that we were

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  also working on American red wolves. And there's some cool stuff that we should talk about there. But so the why was sort of that perfect opportunity to blend in pop culture with a proof of principle of de-extinction and taking that first pass at de-extinction that this 2016 guideline sort of showed us how to do it. And that really outlined, you know, know a lot about the animal, put them in an area where you can study them closely, and these would not be animals that would be a generation ready for release. We knew dire wolves were not going back into the wild. We made these as part of that pursuit of de-extinction.

• 1:09:06Steven Rinella?

  So you do it knowing they won't go into the wild? Because that's another question I was gonna have is how much do you like, how much, how worried are wildlife professionals? Because this is a question they hadn't had to grapple with before. How worried are wildlife professionals and conservationists that you would create a...

• 1:09:27Steven Rinella?

  That you would like create a creature that could potentially get out and then reproduce with imperiled species in a way that might be negative for those imperiled species. Like, that's gotta be a real concern. We're having a conversation right now where guys are like in the deer, in the servant world. People are saying, oh, we can make, we have some examples of deer that are very slow to develop CWD. They get CWD, but they're slow to be affected by it. And they say, what we'd like to do is cut these deer loose just to introduce some of this. Besides it being, as it's been explained to me by many

• 1:10:08Steven Rinella?

  servant experts, is um, kinda like, doesn't make sense when you understand the scale of the millions of deer out there and that you're gonna try to like, influence gene flow by cutting animals loose. But they also point to all these moral issues and other, like, issues like, what if those things also carry a susceptibility to other diseases? What if that infers upon them a sort of hidden weakness? Right? So if you have these creatures and they get out and they start breeding with wolves, I assume they could breed with wolves.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:10:45Steven Rinella?

  Um, how nervous are people that that'll happen?

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  I mean, that's a question we get almost every day when, when people talk about it. So first, the first step to protect against that is the facility itself. You know, extremely secure, double fence, actually triple fences, if you include our perimeter fence. Um, you know, we just, we've had to have really thorough conversations with government agencies to explain all the measures that have been taken to ensure it's a biosecure facility. So there's that piece of it. Um, the other side of it is, is really sort of like, the CWD example is really good, is, you know, we, we need to know more about these animals before you would ever cut something loose. Whether it's a dire wolf or it's a woolly mammoth, right? We need to know a lot about these animals and what are the effects of

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  gene editing? What are the effects of cloning? What are the effects of the specific edits we chose? Which is exactly why we chose dire wolf, because we knew it'd stay in this area and we can do that cradle to grave sort of research with them. Uh, so this is a great opportunity for us to show what are those impacts. But, you know, the CWD example's really interesting because You are, you know, we get the question about playing God a lot and that is sort of one of those sort of God decisions we're making is we said, these animals have this specific prion gene that makes them more resistant or, you know, more can can bear the prionic disease more than others. But what are the, what are the things that tag along with

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  that? Or if all that's, say, all the whitetail in Texas were suddenly wiped out by CWD and only the animals that were released are, are remain, you've created this sort of genetic bottleneck because my guess is you didn't make 10,000 of those, right? You only made 100 of them.

• 1:12:29Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  So there is that, you know, there, there are a lot of these ethical decisions we have to have. I love the extinction. I love colossal. I love the dire wolf project because it puts that debate forward because we're going to have to start having these conversations more.

• 1:12:42Steven Rinella?

  Right. That's, that's like, in my mind, that is the, like, that is the conversation. And, and I credit, like, to get somewhere, like, you know, let's, let's say you look at the people that are eager about the idea of colonizing Mars.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Steven Rinella?

  There's all kinds of questions, huge questions about the possibility of that. But at some point you just go like, well, we'll start going that direction. We'll solve what we can solve, understanding that there could possibly be a wall that we don't see. Like, you start before the pathway is clear.

• 1:13:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  Right? You're just like, I don't know, we'll start walking that way and one, what happens, what happens? Maybe we fall off the end of the earth at some point. It was all for not, but we got to start.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:29Steven Rinella?

  Asking questions, answer questions. I, I feel that with anything to do with de-extinction, like, because I don't understand the sci, I'm not like trained enough, smart enough to understand the science.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  You are a doctor, though.

• 1:13:41Steven Rinella?

  I am. Other area.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  A forestry.

• 1:13:44Steven Rinella?

  Other area. I can't understand the science. Like, I'm incapable of understanding the science. But I can understand this. At some point, the de-extinction process will be that we have, like, we have a Tasmanian tiger or a thiosine.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  Or an approximate, we have an approximate ivory build woodpecker.

• 1:14:08Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:10Steven Rinella?

  We humbly ask your permission to let it go.

• 1:14:15Steven Rinella?

  And like, I can just imagine the resistance.

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:20Steven Rinella?

  Maybe even a knee jerk resistance, maybe an unwarranted resistance. But that will, that to me, not insurmountable, but that to me is the, the final argument.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Because there's got to be a like, what's going to happen if we do?

• 1:14:35Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  We want to see what's going to happen, right?

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  I think, but I think what's missed often in that sort of that very conservative approach to these things of, well, we need to answer every question before we take the next step is what is the opportunity cost of not acting?

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  Right? If we could restore thylacine to Tasmania, could we start to reduce wildlife disease and, and level out prey populations in a way that helps support biodiversity of Tasmania? Yeah, I think we could. Are there some other negative effects? There might be, and we should understand those, but we also can't say we need to, tick 100% of the boxes before we take the next step because we will never get anywhere. Yeah, I think, you know, Teddy Roosevelt had that really famous quote, in the moment of any decision, the best thing to do is the right thing, the next best thing to do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing to do is nothing. Right? And so that's really our mentality is we need to push forward, we need to push technologies forward, that give us an opportunity to solve for some issues. And could there be this butterfly effect that creates an unforeseen issue?

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Should we be prepared as possible before we take those steps? Absolutely. I'm not debating that. But right now, there is, there is an issue in the conservation community that we are accepting status quo, because we're afraid of the unknown. And we haven't acknowledged that status quo means a reduction of biodiversity over the next 25 years of maybe up to 50% of the biodiversity that exists today.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  We need to start taking steps and bringing tools to the to the conservation game that create fundamental change, that create magnitudes of change because we are getting our asses kicked on the biodiversity front.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  So another why that that I've heard is like, why work with a species like a dire wolf that ultimately proved to be like unsuccessful? You know, it had its time and then was unable to cope with whatever changes led to its extinction? Why not work with like Siberian tigers that are like imperiled and you could grow those?

• 1:16:39Steven Rinella?

  Cause they won't let them cut them loose.

• 1:16:40Speaker 05

  I'm just saying like.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  I think it's also not a either or proposition. That's not how we work. We are a more is more yes and type of group. So we love using de-extinction as this ability to bring new eyeballs, new funding to the table, bring attention and awareness and money to the conservation battles that we face on the endangered species front by using de-extinction as an engine to to fuel that that fight. So with the with the de-extinction of the dire wolf, we have also been working on the genetic rescue of the American red wolf, right? Red wolf declared extinct in the wild in 1980. In the 60s and 70s, US Fish and Wildlife realized that we had almost killed them all. So they went to Louisiana and Texas and they captured what they thought was the remaining

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  group of red wolves using very specific morphological measurements, similar to this dire wolf, gray wolf debate, right? Well, what in reality, what they did is they caught 14 animals and they said, this is now the founding population of a captive group that will then be kept in human care until we figure out how to get them back into the wild.

• 1:17:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And what was the island they put them on?

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I can't even, St. Elizabeth.

• 1:17:47Steven Rinella?

  Was it off South Carolina?

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was off South Carolina. Now they're now they're in northeastern North Carolina, which is the experimental release site. Well, the problem with that is they were looking for a very specific phenotype and they didn't have the power of genetics in the 70s when they were trying to understand what was a red wolf and what was a coyote in Louisiana and Texas. So what they did is they caught 14 animals that fit a very specific bill.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Wind the clock back about eight, nine years ago, Bridgette Von Holt from Princeton University and Chris Ambreski from Michigan Tech, they rediscovered that there is actually this extremely high level of red wolf ancestry in that canid population in Louisiana and Texas. And if you look at the genetics of those canids from the sort of hotspot and it radiates out, you can see that the proportion of red wolf within these Louisiana and Texas populations is about 70% red wolf, 30% coyote. Okay. As you radiate out, you sort of flip it. And by the time you get to like Dallas, where I live, it's totally inverse. It's barely any red wolf and totally coyote. So this is a very unique group of canids that have persisted since the 70s. Meanwhile, the

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  closed population that's used, the captive population that's used for reintroduction to North Carolina, has had the same 14 founders, actually only 12 of those bred and are represented. So now you have about 250, 270 animals in captive population that stemmed from 12 individuals. Okay. Huge genetic bottleneck and totally missed, you know, some of the phenotypic diversity of the red wolf. Going back to when aliens abducted you and I, they would have missed all the people you live in in Asia and Africa and South America. And they would, you know, they would think everybody looks like us. And that would be a horrible representation of what our species actually is. They did, similar to that, they missed a lot of genetic

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  diversity that still exists there. So we've created, using the same technology used to make dire wolves, we now have this ability to be able to sequence all of these red wolves, or these Gulf Coast canids is what we call them, or ghost wolves, because they have such high levels of genetic ancestry of the American red wolf. They also have a portion of their genome that's not assigned to any other canid. So it's likely that ghost portion is the ancestral red wolf, the pre-extinction red wolf, that we don't have a reference to yet. But we're creating, we're doing historic sequencing to understand before the extinction what was red wolf. And then that would assign how much red wolf are these coyotes. Now that's an opportunity, and this is one of the things we've been meeting with the US

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  government and Secretary Bergamon, is now we have this opportunity to create a genetic rescue tool that could be an, you know, sort of an opportunity to the US Fish and Wildlife Recovery Program to say, "Your species is sort of headed for extinction because of its extreme genetic inbreeding. We have a fresh set of genetics that we could plug into your population and help sort of revitalize, similar to when Texas cougars went into the Florida panther population. We could do that type of genetic rescue effort."

• 1:20:55Steven Rinella?

  Which was controversial at the time.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  And now people hail it as one of the biggest successes in North American conservation.

• 1:21:00Steven Rinella?

  But it was like, well, you're corrupting the Florida gene pool. It's not the same thing. Those Florida Panthers will now be not quite Florida Panthers.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  But they won't be cross-eyed and kilt-tailed.

• 1:21:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and people are like, "Well, they're closer than none," would be the argument.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  And that's our focus, is function within an ecosystem. Can we create a direwolf that would have performed the same function in its ecosystem? Or can we help rescue a species and it still perform the same function? The answer is yes, we absolutely can. And we need to be more focused on the pragmatic idea of what function does a species provide to its ecosystem versus genetic purity and this weird eugenics mentality we have about species. So that's why we sort of, I think, raise eyebrows is because we are more focused on that side than this idea of what is 100% gray wolf, what is 100% direwolf.

• 1:21:54Speaker 05

  I think there's some of the blowback is like, you have an animal, and that animal is that animal out in the wild, and it becomes like, less wild when you start tinkering with its genes and laying the hand of man on it, and you know what I mean?

• 1:22:09Steven Rinella?

  But in that case, the hand of man, I mean, they were in a pen.

• 1:22:15Steven Rinella?

  Off of, they were in an enclosure on an island. Right. To build up a reproducible number. I understand. I'm just saying. But it is, it's very different. Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, and the hand to man is why they're going extinct, right? We were.

• 1:22:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  We were poaching them out of existence.

• 1:22:31Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech.

• 1:23:15Steven Rinella?

  They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do you start building credit? It's easy. With OnePay's Builder Card.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  There's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 1:24:34Steven Rinella?

  But let me hit you with a Red Wolf criticism.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Steven Rinella?

  And in some ways, I think this criticism was a little bit unfair because it's not like you're taking federal money that would normally go to Red Wolf Recovery and using it for something else.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:24:47Steven Rinella?

  So it's like, the work is additive, but there's the criticism that would say this, like, guys that work on the Red Wolf problem are like, our problem is that people shoot them.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:24:57Steven Rinella?

  And they get hit by cars.

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:25:00Steven Rinella?

  So, we're not looking for new animals. We're looking for, how do we create an atmosphere in a place where they don't get shot and hit by cars? So, it was like, it's like, that's beside the point.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  It is, it is not a silver bullet to the Red Wolf problem. It provides a genetic rescue and buys them more time. Their captive population will begin to suffer as it's a closed population, right? So this gives us an opportunity to inject fresh genetics. Also, that North Carolina site, you know, whatever, you take it back eight years ago or so, the US Fish and Wildlife announced, hey, we're going to start finding a second site, a parallel effort. Because obviously, you know, if you're familiar with the Red Wolf issue, Red Wolf population in that area got north of 150 individuals in around 2013, basically. People started shooting them, they started getting hit by cars. Today, their primary issue is car strikes. What's interesting is it's a different area in Louisiana and

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  Texas. You have larger landscapes, but you don't have, you don't have as many public lands that protect the animals there. And those animals have persisted since we thought they would have gone extinct. I think there is this weird issue that people sort of say, well, if we acknowledge that these animals are predominantly Red Wolf, or maybe even truly Red Wolf, as we understand more about their genetics, that's also acknowledging the fact that we didn't need to intervene in 1970s.

• 1:26:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  They would have continued to persist, persist in that area.

• 1:26:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because where they do, where they did bring them, they've tried to keep coyotes.

• 1:26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, that understanding of that species with coyotes, and then here you have that other source population that probably has a bleeding edge.

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:35Steven Rinella?

  Where coyotes roll in.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  People talk about admixture, you know, people will say, call it hybridization. Hybridization is the wrong word, but admixture is sort of this idea that two species have this, you know, blending of genetics. They look at that as a bad thing, as it, as diluting the gene stock of a species. But, you know, hybridization and admixture of species is a natural process. It's actually evolutionary process that confers evolutionary advantages to animals. Gives them the opportunity to thrive with a new, within an evolving habitat. They can look at a species and say, oh, that coyote actually is, you know, much faster or stronger, whatever it is, and they breed with that and that, that it brings that into their gene pool. That's an adaptive strategy.

• 1:27:16Steven Rinella?

  That, that's a criticism you hear of the Linnaean system.

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:19Steven Rinella?

  Of, you know, that we,

• 1:27:23Steven Rinella?

  uh, what's wolf, canis lupus?

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, canis lupus.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  We're Homo sapiens. Um, the rainbow trout is on crin, on crinthis micus?

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  Micus, yeah.

• 1:27:32Steven Rinella?

  Whatever the hell. You go in and you say like, I'm gonna take all creatures on earth and I'm gonna say that they're all whatever.

• 1:27:42Steven Rinella?

  Causes you to lose sight of the long time. And the long time is that there's fluidity.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:27:49Steven Rinella?

  Things, right?

• 1:27:51Speaker 00

  It's similar to-

• 1:27:52Steven Rinella?

  Things come together and fall apart and it's not static. It's a snapshot.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  When we talk about species recovery, it's the same problem. We say recover to what? And right, are we recovering, you know, in, in North American centric conservation, we say recover to 1492. Right, recover to before Europeans came in and ruined the place.

• 1:28:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That's always my view.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. But, you know, there was a, there are ebbs and flows before that and there would have been ebbs and flows after that. At what point, why do we pick an arbitrary point in time? Why do we pick an arbitrary definition of a species in time to say that's the species? It's a, it's, I think it makes sense from a communication standpoint. We need to be able to talk about these things, classify things, have goals. That's very important. But to use that as this ideology that we cannot stray from, I think is naive.

• 1:28:41Steven Rinella?

  When, I had many conversations with friends of mine in the wildlife world when, when colossal made its announcement about the dire wolves. One of the conversations, I can't remember who the hell I was talking to, was saying to me, you know where this would be really helpful.

• 1:28:55Steven Rinella?

  Black-footed ferrets.

• 1:28:56Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:58Steven Rinella?

  Black-footed ferrets went through a 10-ferret bottleneck?

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but I want to return, I want to do the regulatory thing about ivory-billed woodpeckers and black-footed ferrets. Who, like, who what would ever have to say, okay, to be that, like, our population, our global population of black-footed ferrets was reduced down to 10 animals? But we have all these specimens

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  that show a level of genetic diversity that did not exist in those 10. The black-footed ferrets aren't getting shot, they're not getting run over, right? They're fairly easy to protect. Who has to say yes to start inferring lost genetic diversity into black-footed ferrets? Like, who would be the, who is the one that goes, okay?

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  It's hard. So, black-footed ferret's a great example because they've been using biotechnology to try to genetically rescue black-footed ferret because people were banking tissues of black-footed ferrets back into the 70s.

• 1:30:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  So, if you heard Elizabeth Ann, she was the clone that they brought back. She was, you know, an unrepresented founder. They cloned her. Unfortunately, that, that single individual, she didn't actually, she wasn't able to reproduce, but they cloned her again. And now they've had the first ever clone, breed, and give birth to offspring.

• 1:30:22Steven Rinella?

  Who's they?

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  The US Fish and Wildlife Service Recovery Program. So, that's where we would start. You start with the US Fish and Wildlife Service because they are the ones that are mandated by the Endangered Species Act to recover species listed by the act. So, they have the jurisdiction in that area. Now, if we were just using cloning, like what they did, US Fish and Wildlife has been able to do that on their own. Now, if we were to bring colossal-type technology, which is cloning plus genetic editing, and we said, one of the primary drivers of the black-footed ferret extinction crisis we're facing is sylvatic plague. Sylvatic plague is present in their obligatory prey species, the...

• 1:31:03Steven Rinella?

  Prayer dog.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Prayer dog, thanks. Yeah, that's a hard one to remember. So, prayer dogs are carrying sylvatic plague, and that, when they predate on an animal that has plague, they also get plagued and they die. We know for a fact that the closest living relative of the black-footed ferret, which is the domestic ferret... Has a naturally occurring resistance to plague.

• 1:31:24Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  And it's a very small change. So you could go in and make a genetic edit within the blackfooted ferret genome. And suddenly ferrets are resistant to blackfooted, to, to a silvatic plague. And now we can make a huge difference in the recovery of, of blackfooted ferrets.

• 1:31:41Steven Rinella?

  But someone's like, now we're gonna have, whatever.

• 1:31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, now.

• 1:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Someone's gonna not like this.

• 1:31:46Speaker 00

  Now we're dealing with multiple agencies, the USDA, the FDA. They all have, they all have some jurisdiction in what we call intentionally altered genomes.

• 1:31:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  There are examples of US Fish and Wildlife Service, like, saying this is an acceptable level of genetic representation, like, in Colorado, they, like, with cutthroat trout, they would find, like, an isolated, like, subspecies of cutthroat trout and be like, eh, it's, like, pretty much there, so we're gonna put it back into this place and... So, I mean, someone's capable of saying, like, it's close enough.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, and that's US Fish and Wildlife typically. But once we start getting into gene editing, you start inviting more regulators to the table. And that's what we're doing right now. And we're actually pushing the boundaries of the regulatory environment because this, you know, these were all hypotheticals and now they're realities and people are scrambling to say, how the hell do we do this?

• 1:32:41Steven Rinella?

  So could you run, could you, how, how long does a blackfooted ferret live?

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, ten, twelve years.

• 1:32:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Could you run, would it make sense that you would run a generation?

• 1:32:56Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:32:56Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:57Steven Rinella?

  You'd, you'd make a plague-resistant blackfooted ferret. If you ran it for a gen, if you just let it go for a generation in captivity, would you then be able to be like, would you then be able to dispel, would that be enough time to dispel some of the questions?

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that-

• 1:33:15Steven Rinella?

  Or does it take like, would you have to run five generations?

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  That's a good question.

• 1:33:20Steven Rinella?

  So that puts you 60 years down the road.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  I mean, I certainly don't think Colossal has the answer for that, for that specific question. I think that is a regulatory question, you know, at what point do we feel comfortable with this? Now, knowing that they have a close living relative with this exact gene, do we, how much do we need to do? Because we've studied domestic ferrets for hundreds of years, right? That might inform what's happening here. But I think you could set up an experimental population where you're able to do a lot of those things and within a generation or two, begin to put animals back into the wild. Now, the trick with black-footed ferret is that, you know, we probably need to find some resistance for prairie dogs as well. All right, if they're going to continue being the vector of the disease, you need to remove the vector.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  And they have to, you know, you have to have prairie dogs because prairie dogs or black-footed ferrets rely on their holes, plus they eat them. So, you know, ranching folk don't really love prairie dogs. They create a lot of problems for cattle. And so to go and convince people that we should do something to protect prairie dogs might be a harder sell.

• 1:34:24Steven Rinella?

  Like, you feel that, that the constant exposure could, in time, that the susceptibility could return?

• 1:34:34Speaker 00

  Potentially.

• 1:34:35Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  A month ago, Time Magazine reported that the Mandan and Arikarat tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying. So, two things. One, that seems to go against what you said earlier about the dire wolves living in the wild. And then, two, what is that tribal communication been like with you guys about why they have a desire to have dire wolves on their reservation?

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't say it goes against what I was saying earlier. I think it would be replicating what we've done already, but on tribal lands. So.

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  Like a 2,000 acre enclosure.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. So a year and a half ago, we, we launched Colossals Indigenous Council, which was bringing leaders in the conservation community from the indigenous world to the table to say, how can we enhance the conservation work you're already leading? How could we adopt, you know, things like coexistence strategies that, that our Native American partners have been much better at than we have? And, and so part of that was, you know, one of the, the reasons for dire wolf, when we were launching is we were working with Chairman Fox at MHA Nation in North Dakota. And we were talking to him about some bisogenetic work that we were doing because Beth has a big background in bisogenetics. And, and Chairman Fox had started telling

• 1:35:54Speaker 00

  us an origin story of his, of his people. And it talks about the great wolf, which was this large, extremely large wolf. It was, it was a white wolf or a light colored wolf, similar to what we're talking about. And it was part of their origin stories passed down through oral tradition. And their people believe that, that, that they had coexisted with dire wolves. And that's part of their origin story. So there was a big interest. They said, if you guys are able to do this, we would love to bring the dire wolves back to our land. So we can also honor this, this ancestral wolf that's important to our people.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  Who has done, this is a global story. Who's done a good or a bad job from your perspective of covering it?

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  That's a, that's a great question.

• 1:36:37Steven Rinella?

  I know, I know the bad one. There was one that was crazy.

• 1:36:42Speaker 00

  What's that one?

• 1:36:44Steven Rinella?

  It was like, I don't even want to say on there. It was like a cult reporter.

• 1:36:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  We won't give them any clicks. That was wild. That was, that was just Looney Tune stuff. I think there's some been some bad stuff. A good example is, um, what is it? Cowboy Statesman? There's a Wyoming publication, right? They wrote an article about, you know, this is what's going to happen when dire wolves are introduced to Yellowstone. Like, there's such a leap of logic, so many steps.

• 1:37:12Steven Rinella?

  They were cut right to the end.

• 1:37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And it was just, you know, this is gonna be horrible for Yellowstone.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  I like their stuff generally, but they are kind of bulldogs. I could see how they could take a story like this and do exactly what you're saying.

• 1:37:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but it's skipping a lot of steps.

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Another one that did a poor job that I was disappointed with, because it's a friend of ours that we know pretty well, was the Washington Post said, after Secretary Burgum had come out with a public statement of support for de-extinction technologies as a tool for conservation, was basically, the headline was this really superficial stretch that said, oh, Secretary Burgum and the Trump administration will use de-extinction to gut the Endangered Species Act. And they've said that. Well, they didn't say that. I mean, his quote, which is pretty powerful, and I was blown away that he took such a bold stance, basically said, "This is technology that could be fundamentally game-changing to the recovery of species, which would lead to delisting." This wasn't just gutting the endangered species.

• 1:38:10Steven Rinella?

  I read that, and that was, but that's a very common kind of environmental reporting.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Steven Rinella?

  That it was, um, he was, he said something to the effect of, "In a perfect world, we would never get there."

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:38:25Steven Rinella?

  And then that was taken, like, in a perfect world, we would never get to needing the ESA.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  Which would wind up being, if you polled a bunch of Americans and said, "Would you like to live in a world where the Endangered Species Act was never necessary?" Everyone would go, "Well, sure. He says that, and it's that he must mean he's gonna get rid of it."

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was just funny, and having that.

• 1:38:52Steven Rinella?

  It was like, it was a wild extrapolation. But I see what they were getting at. They were getting at that it'd be like, oh, they're gonna use a squishy definition, right? Like, like, here's the fear, I'm guessing, like, what's driving the mentality? It would be that...

• 1:39:09Steven Rinella?

  You get down to 10 black-footed ferrets. And someone would say like, wow, they really should have ESA protection. And they'd be like, don't worry, we just ordered 200.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  But what's missing in that?

• 1:39:22Steven Rinella?

  And like, that's like, I think that's what they're getting at. That would become the play.

• 1:39:25Speaker 00

  In that sort of, that just, you know, menu of options and ordering the next species of interest. What's missing in that whole thing is habitat. And, and that's what I think a lot of these environmental reporters that have taken that very hardline stance are missing is this idea that recovery has very specific parameters around habitat requirement, right? And sustainable population in the wild. So in order to achieve recovery, there's this habitat requirement. Also, I think de-extinction technologies and using de-extinction technologies to recover endangered species also has this really great sort of beacon of hope and sort of inspirational effort that if we said tomorrow, we could

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  bring back the ivory-billed woodpecker, would we start suddenly protecting, be doing a better job of protecting habitat in Arkansas?

• 1:40:11Speaker 05

  Well, that's the thing. I mean, is the ESA comes with what many people would call like onerous regulations, right? Regarding protecting habitat, other people would be like, oh no, it's like, we need that.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  We need more, yeah.

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  So bringing them back doesn't necessarily solve the problem.

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  Exactly. It is a tool that could help accelerate and scale recovery. That's what it is.

• 1:40:36Steven Rinella?

  I want, I want to narrow one on the ivory-billed woodpecker. Maybe you can correct me on some of this, but here's why it excites me. It's like,

• 1:40:45Steven Rinella?

  there, there still is habitat.

• 1:40:47Speaker 00

  There is.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  Like, people gotta re-

• 1:40:49Speaker 00

  More today than when they went extinct.

• 1:40:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, I mean, there was a lot of habitat destruction that led to the problem. But there is habitat. This was so recent, right? There's people alive, right now, there are people alive that saw ivory-billed woodpeckers.

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's actually like-

• 1:41:10Steven Rinella?

  Photographs of them.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  There's a reel-to-reel video of what they think was the last ivory-billed woodpecker leaving as Singer was cutting down the tree.

• 1:41:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Speaker 00

  Like, it's pretty powerful stuff.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's like, yeah, that's the craziest part about it.

• 1:41:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  Dan Flores talks about that in Wild New World is, um, they're like, oh yeah, there's some in that tree. And literally, I mean, I'm not joking. Literally that they they actually cut the tree during a logging project. There was a contentious logging project, cut the tree. No one really knew that it was the last ones, but they knew it was damn near and it turned out probably to be the last ones. They cut the tree down. Yeah. With the thing in there as like a, hey, man, don't tell me what to do kind of thing. So here you have where there's habitat.

• 1:41:58Steven Rinella?

  Um, it's.

• 1:42:02Steven Rinella?

  It like, it's hard to put it, I try, like, it might as well have not gone extinct. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like, it went extinct. It seems to almost have gone extinct by like a freak chance. Or it might as well, if it didn't, if it had, if it had stayed intact, we wouldn't think it was weird. Yeah. Follow me? Yep. If if we had, if we had kept short-faced bears intact, it would be a thing that people remarked on. Every time they killed a person, you know, it'd be like, my God, can you believe, right? The same way we marvel over alligators, we marvel over grizzly bears, we marvel over polar bears. It'd just be a bird. Yep. It'd be like a bird. It was kind of cool, but like a bird, you know?

• 1:42:47Steven Rinella?

  So like, it's not an earth-shattering environmental thing to have it around. The ranch and farm community is not gonna have a, be jeopardized by this. Yep. Um, I can't think of anyone except a piliated woodpecker that would maybe be annoyed. They would like, they're like, dude, we were the biggest woodpecker. Now we're not. Like, they might be annoyed, but it's just, there's no, it doesn't seem like there's friction. No, there's not. If you went to hold people, you go like, how would you feel about bringing the ivory-billed woodpecker back? Most people would be like, the what? Yeah. Like, oh, the woodpecker was here not long ago. We're gonna put it back. It's a, it's a woodpecker. They'd probably be like, huh, okay. Leave me alone.

• 1:43:31Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? Like, like, that seems to me, just from a novice perspective, that seems to me like the thing.

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

  To do first. Well, first is hard, right? There's technical challenges in de-extinction of a bird. Right? So, we have, we have the dodo project, which is our flagship avian species. And this is sort of leading the charge and overcoming the technical challenges. The biggest challenge is there is an important step in, in de-extinction where you've edited a cell line to the point where you go, this is now a cell of the animal of interest. This is now a direwolf cell. Now, we'll use somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is, you know, most famously, Dolly the Sheep cloning. That's called somatic cell nuclear transfer. And that's taking your, the DNA from that cell, removing the DNA of an egg cell and putting your DNA in. And that fertilizes the cell and it becomes an embryo and then you can transfer it into a surrogate.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  With birds, very early on in the development of their egg, they're calcifying the outside of it. We can't access the eggs internally of a bird. We have to wait for them to lay those eggs. So, we are creating new platforms in order to edit germ cells, or the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. So, as an egg is laid, you can window the egg, you can extract a few microliters of blood. You can plate that blood and take out what we call them primordial germ cells. Those primordial germ cells are the cells that are circulating freely in the blood of this early fetus. And they eventually migrate to the gonads and they become sperm or egg, depending on the gender of that egg.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  If we then edit those while they're plated, you can create a stable line of these in vitro. Then now you have edited the germ cell that will eventually become sperm or egg. And then in a different egg, which is, you know, sort of an egg that's been engineered to be sterile. So, they don't produce any of their own sperm or egg. At that same point of development, you inject your edited germ cells. They migrate to the gonads. And then you could have a pigeon or a chicken that's creating the sperm or egg of a dodo. When they breed, they give birth. They lay a dodo egg, or in this case, an ivory-billed woodpecker egg. Hmm. So, we're overcoming those challenges right now. We don't know a lot about woodpeckers, so we need to study more.

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  Last year, we launched Colossals Nonprofit, the Colossal Foundation. I'm the executive director of that foundation, which is meant to sort of be where the rubber of de-extinction meets the road. Meaning the road being the regulatory structure. Regulatory structure and critically endangered species. How do we literally keep species off our to-do list? Yeah. But also, in some cases, there's a North American conservation focus of that. So, one of the flagship projects for the foundation is the ivory-billed woodpecker. What is Maure- is it Mauritius? Mauritius, yeah. What is their attitude toward the dodo? It's interesting. It's a, it is a culturally significant icon of Mauritius. It is also closely associated with colonization, right?

• 1:46:37Speaker 00

  As colonizers showed up, they brought this species that wiped out this, the dodo. Now, what's interesting is there was not- Wasn't it people that wiped out the dodo? Yeah, it was the colonizers that came in, right? But what's interesting is Mauritius didn't have an indigenous people at that time. Hmm. Right, so they sort of came into the island, they introduced invasive species. So, it was primarily rats and cats that were introduced to the island that started decimating a ground nesting bird. Okay. And a flightless bird at that. That's what led to the dodo, plus- I thought they just ate them all. There, there's, there is a common misconception that they were a favorite food of sailors. There are also some really interesting, funny logs you can read of sailors that said,

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  they would bring them on to provision the boat, and then people would just resent having to eat it, because it was all they had. It was this gross, greasy bird. God. So, it was probably some combination thereof. Yeah. But the real issue was habitat was being destroyed as people came in to make room for colonies, and invasive species were just wiping out nests, and the dodo hadn't evolved with a mammalian predator.

• 1:47:41Speaker 00

  So it didn't have this natural instinct to run or to do anything. So it, you know, I think they said from the time dodo was discovered to when extinct was 80 years.

• 1:47:50Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:50Speaker 00

  It's just a really rapid extinction event. Um, so Mauritius is really interested in recovering the dodo. Um, they would

• 1:47:57Steven Rinella?

  On

• 1:47:57Speaker 00

  On Mauritius.

• 1:47:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  So we engaged directly with the government of Mauritius, with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to talk about how can we use the extinction to drive conservation projects and habitat restoration projects on the island of Mauritius and the islets that surround Mauritius. And then also in preparation for a dodo, can we start to find habitat, suitable habitat that uh would include us removing invasive species, not just invasive animals, but invasive plants have taken over. How can we restore the, you know, the lost ebony trees? How can we start to bring back, you know, the uh, the forest of 1600s um, in order to prepare it for uh, for the dodo? And so there's a, there's this amazing interest. We have this great underswell of support. We've uh, launched a council of people, a stakeholders group

• 1:48:41Speaker 00

  that is about 10, 15 people that sort of represent a variety of industry from tourism to science to government and regulatory um, so that we can begin to say, hey, we're making progress towards restoring the dodo from extinction. What do we need to be doing here with the people of Mauritius, with the land of Mauritius?

• 1:48:59Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:48:59Speaker 00

  In order to make sure society, society is prepared and, and ecosystems are prepared.

• 1:49:06Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best.

• 1:49:51Steven Rinella?

  They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're

• 1:50:31Steven Rinella?

  already buying? With the OnePay banking app, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose. So it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you've got your eyes on a new truck, or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the OnePay app, or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/rewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.

• 1:51:15Steven Rinella?

  So crystal ball it for me. What, okay, not the science, the social component. If you had to crystal ball the social component, what are the odds socially, socially, regulatory, whatever, that you would get, that you could get to where they would say, let's do it. Let's take this little islet, and let's put some out, and they're just gonna, they're gonna just live or die based on their ability to make a living here?

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  Ninety-nine percent?

• 1:51:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  I would never say anything's a hundred percent because we could get wiped out on an asteroid. But right, there's, there's.

• 1:51:51Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm ruling out that. I'm ruling out like, like that the earth kinda keeps going along.

• 1:51:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's ninety-nine percent.

• 1:51:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  Beth and I went to Mauritius last year and had an incredible visit. We're going again this year and the idea is to kinda keep these conversations moving forward. Mauritius has done an incredible job on their own of going and recovering some of the islets around there. There's this really famous island or islet on the north end of Mauritius called Round Island. It's this massive round rock island. You know, you can't even, you know, we landed a helicopter on it in order to get out there. And you're sort of at this twenty-degree angle as you land and you're landing on top of giant tortoises. And it was basically an island that was stripped down to just the rock. All the soil and plant life had been completely eradicated because they had introduced goats.

• 1:52:38Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:39Speaker 00

  And the goats were left there so that when you sailed by, you could pick up a few, you know, and you could provision the boat. Well, they just grazed the hell out of the whole thing. And basically, every species native to that little islet was basically wiped out. So they've been recovering it for twenty years.

• 1:52:55Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:52:55Speaker 00

  And when you go and see where they, where to where they are today, it's incredible work.

• 1:52:59Steven Rinella?

  For other reasons, they've been recovering it.

• 1:53:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they just wanted to bring back Round Island. It has a lot of endemic species that were important to, to try to save. So they're, they're already doing this great work. I think colossal showing up with an opportunity to accelerate, enhance, bring more funding, try, try to bring technology to the table to do just that. So there are, the reason why I think it's so high in Mauritius, the chances are so high in Mauritius, it's because there's all these islets that are sort of like living laboratories. You know, you can mitigate risk of some of these fears around GMOs or, or what is gonna be the effect of this reintroduction by putting them on an island.

• 1:53:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, like if, if suddenly tomorrow, all the grizzly bears in the lower forty-eight went extinct.

• 1:53:43Steven Rinella?

  Caught a virus.

• 1:53:44Speaker 05

  And you guys were like, oh, that's okay, we can, we can repopulate. There's still only, so there, there, there's not a lot of appropriate habitat available for them, right? So i- in an island situation, you, you have way more control over like. But it, but it seems like your challenge is not like. Growing the animal, it's like cultivating a place where that animal can live successfully.

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of challenges around preparing the habitat for one of these animals and making sure the protections are in place, but also making sure that the people are ready for that. I think this is a huge step for a society to say, we want to take this next step. Whoever is, will be the first government regulator, culture to say, we want to introduce a species returned from extinction to the wild. I mean, that is a massive step. I mean, that is going to take somebody very bold. And I think that's why island nations are a little more, they have a little more opportunity because they can mitigate the risk. Because they don't have to worry about their neighbors saying, timeout, you're doing what? You know, if we did this in the US, Canada would say, what the hell are you doing?

• 1:54:58Steven Rinella?

  We know it's a little bit interesting, a similar approach was we want to introducing wild turkeys. In a lot of places that wild turkeys weren't from. So, you know, they think that historically you had turkeys in what's today 34 states. Now we have turkeys in 49 states. Very little friction. There was, I remember one state, there was some friction in there and it was worried about some rare anole.

• 1:55:34Steven Rinella?

  And these guys went up doing a big crop survey, like bird crops, you know? And they just didn't find anything analogous to this in wild turkeys around the world or around the country. Like it just doesn't seem a thing turkeys would prey on. But that was like one little test and they let them go. And it wanted to be in it, we always talk about, well, you have like invasives which are bad. But it wanted to be in like, it's like a species of no known negative. It's like no, no negative.

• 1:56:06Steven Rinella?

  But the climate's changed so much, you might not get away with that, what they were doing with turkeys in the 70s, 80s, early 90s. You might not today. Be able to go into, I'm not trying to pick on California, today might not be able to go into California and say, hey, we're going to turn some wild turkeys loose.

• 1:56:24Speaker 00

  Oh, like the cultural climate change.

• 1:56:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, like you might hit resistance for something that was just that happened. Because if you look at like the shift too, in the 50s, they brought Audad into Texas. They brought Ibex into New Mexico, they brought Oryx into New Mexico, and there was kind of a, let's just see what happens. Like, they can't be bad attitude that's, that's built up resistance. And now even when people look like with elk, we've only recovered elk on

• 1:56:54Steven Rinella?

  14% of his, 20% of his historic range, 14% of historic range, it's kind of mind boggling.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:01Steven Rinella?

  And, and that recovery effort is ground to a halt over chronic wasting disease. Just, there's a less of an appetite to move cervids from one area to another. Cause like disease transmission. So it is in, in the conversation about will we get to a place where we're actually trying to do this? It's like the, the appetite seems to be just generally declining to like any kind of dice rolling.

• 1:57:28Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I think, you know, there is a certain aspect of this that is you know better and you do better. Right? So we know that these animals, you know, a, a foreign animal or an invasive animal would have certain impacts on an ecosystem. So that is important that we had, had, take that precautionary approach because now we know better, so we must do better. However, I think the pendulum swung all the way. Where now it's, you know, any change is bad.

• 1:57:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:57:55Speaker 00

  And right now, if we do anything, if we try to change anything about the status quo, there are things we're, we cannot account for yet. Therefore, we should not take that step. And so we've moved into this fear-based decision, decision-making, which is grinding recovery to a halt of a lot of species.

• 1:58:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:12Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:58:12Steven Rinella?

  Like I just mentioned with elk.

• 1:58:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I think we need to sort of, the pendulum needs to come back to the center. I think, you know, in most things in life, this moderate approach is probably the best approach. So how can we make the most informed decision while also having a certain appetite for risk? And with this idea that without risk, there is no chance for, for a win out there, right? We need to take certain risks in order to recover species.

• 1:58:35Speaker 03

  You you mentioned earlier that you didn't care for the reporting by Washington Post and Cowboy State Daily. Who did a good job of covering the story?

• 1:58:43Speaker 00

  Oh, well, we had a lot of great folks. I mean, you know, obviously, we were blown away that we got the cover of Time Magazine. And Time did a great job. Jeff, Jeff Pluger, he did this great article on the whole thing. The New Yorker broke our embargo and published the story.

• 1:59:02Steven Rinella?

  Did they?

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  Oh. Really? So although we're mad at them, if you read the story, it's pretty good. It's a pretty good story.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  Did they know they were breaking it?

• 1:59:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, they did. There's, you know, there's, I'll just put it this way. There's some emails going back and forth saying, can we do this? And we said, no. And then they did it anyways. So that was heartbreaking because there's so, you know, there's 175 people at Colossal that were working their tails off to do this thing. Our marketing team is killing themselves. Our PR teams are killing themselves to have this really ambitious launch event. And then for somebody to selfishly try to go first was really frustrating. But despite all of that, New Yorker read a pretty cool piece. Now, that said, he gave me like the dumbest quote ever in that thing, so I'm a little upset about it.

• 1:59:42Steven Rinella?

  He gave you a bad quote?

• 1:59:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you know, I was, I was out of the country when he was visiting, so I was zooming into a few calls and he was interviewing me over Zoom. And I just didn't have a lot of time. He basically said, what do you do here? Chief Animal Officer is not a title. People really know what the hell it means. I'm not sure I know what it means.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  It's like you're a zookeeper or something.

• 2:00:01Speaker 00

  Chief Zookeeper, yeah. One of my guys on my team calls me the Chief Pet Officer.

• 2:00:07Speaker 00

  So I just told him, I play with animals. Just joking. Of course, that's the one thing he publishes.

• 2:00:12Steven Rinella?

  Then you look cocky and like, you look cocky.

• 2:00:14Speaker 00

  So I was thrilled with that. I was like, there's a lot of thought that goes into what I do, right? But, but it was fine. But yeah, I think there was a vast majority, I'd say 95% of the, of the things that were published, I thought were fair, balanced, shed a positive light on what we were doing. 5% of them were hyper negative to, as like almost just for the purpose of clickbait.

• 2:00:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to acknowledge that there's a real stirring of the pot.

• 2:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:44Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you're stirring the pot.

• 2:00:45Speaker 00

  That's what I like about it. I think the conservation pot needs to be stirred. Like I said, I think we've gone to this fear-based approach where, you know, in the Teddy Roosevelt quote, we're at the, we're at the third point where we said, you know, the worst, we're doing the worst thing, which is we're not making decisions.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  But do you guys feel an urgency to?

• 2:01:04Speaker 05

  You're not going to stop messing around with ancient extinct species. But do you feel an urgency to like do something like more timely like with a species that that is like?

• 2:01:16Speaker 00

  We, I mean, the American red wolf is a good example of how, what, exactly what we're doing. But the foundation, the colossal foundation has 45 conservation partners. That's 45 separate projects that we're running for endangered species conservation. Everything from how can we use artificial intelligence to unlock the language of wolves right here in Yellowstone, working with Yellowstone Wolf Project, Yellowstone Forever, Jeff Reed and the Grizzly Systems Team, trying to unlock language in a way that we can track wolves over space and time without requiring collars and understand what are they talking about, to conferring resistance to toxins from invasive species. The northern quoll from the Northern Territory of Australia is being decimated because one

• 2:01:58Speaker 00

  of the animals it predates on is the invasive cane toad, which has a bufo toxin, that neurotoxin kills the cane, the quoll when they eat them. So we've actually found one base pair change that animals that co-evolved with the cane toad in South America have evolved that. So we're changing that one base parent quoll, and we've already shown in the lab that it confers resistance to bufo toxin. So now we can give that to the government of Australia and say, here is, you know, a tool for you guys to recover your northern quoll. And as a bonus, they'll eat all those cane toads that are invasive and are sort of one of the most famous examples of an invasive species. We also created a vaccine to help elephants with one of the most deadly viruses they

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  face, the elephant endotheriotropic herpes virus, which kills about 30% of elephants in human care and more and more, we understand that is decimating wild populations. So, you know, we have 45 of these projects ongoing. Obviously, what makes it to the top of that, of the storyline is always the extinction. But that's the power of the extinction, is it does bring awareness, it brings attention, it brings funding. Four hundred and fifty million dollars we've raised over four years to support the business of Colossal, and we've raised another seventy-five million dollars for the Colossal Foundation. So, you know, we talk about conservation is an under-resourced fight. We're bringing resources to the table. These are not a distraction of resources from places where, you know, you would have

• 2:03:26Speaker 00

  normally given money to WWF. No, we're going to Silicon Valley, we're going to capital, you know, venture capital investors. But what are they getting, though? Like, what in the end? Because you're not a nonprofit, you're not an environmental organization. We have a nonprofit. Yeah, you have, oh, not, there's a foundation. But then there's a for-profit component. What in the end, what is the product? The product is the, all of the technology we're creating. So it's more about process, less about product. We're creating processes that, then we can license that IP to other fields of science, human healthcare research, you know, university research, things like that. We've already spun out two companies out of Colossal that are now standalone businesses, self-sufficient businesses.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  One is a computational biology platform, so it's an AI tool that essentially helps you compare genes of animals and understand this gene codes for this trait. Got it. That type of thing. Clients being universities and research facilities. Exactly. I got you. Another one is a plastics degradation company. So we've identified a, a microbe that's able to, to consume almost every plastic we've ever thrown at it. Everything from really soft plastics to very hard, high-density plastics. And we're using genetic engineering to try to enhance those types of qualities. And so this gives us a, you know, a new tool in the way to recycle plastics. And it doesn't just recycle them into, you know, smaller pieces of plastic, microplastic. This is breaking down the molecular bonds of, of this. So that's sort of what we're doing, is we're this incubator of technology that we can spin

• 2:04:52Speaker 00

  out, and it funds the whole, the whole program.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I've seen how raptor recovery centers, when they're feeding like an eagle chick or a hawk chick, they'll cover themselves in a bed sheet and they'll put like a puppet on their end to feed the chicks to prevent human imprinting.

• 2:05:08Speaker 00

  And they go, hey, little chick, chick, chick.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  What kind of protocols do you guys have about dealing with your three dire wolves? Like, how many humans have they seen?

• 2:05:17Speaker 00

  Oh, they've probably seen... Say fifteen or twenty humans, but they see four or five on a regular basis. Um, these are not candidates for release into the wild. So we take a slightly different approach, right? If we're creating a stable population of captive animals that could eventually go back into the wild, which is not the case with the dire wolves, but with the red wolves that we cloned. Um, you know, this generation is not a candidate for rewilding. We'll begin to take a more hands off approach as you create subsequent generations and model after very similar projects that are already going on with red wolf release into North Carolina, Mexican gray wolf into the American Southwest. Um, so mammals are a little different. They don't imprint the way birds do.

• 2:05:58Speaker 00

  Birds have a very strong imprint, um, uh, potential. So, um, it's, you can really mess a chick up if, if it imprints on a human, whereas with mammals, they, they don't take that same level of habituation.

• 2:06:14Speaker 05

  There's a certain degree of like learned behavior too, right? Like wolves need to be taught how to hunt by their pack and.

• 2:06:22Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of opportunity for cross fostering. So, you know, you can create puppies and then you would drop into dens of wild wolves if you wanted to, like say this was a gray wolf project. Uh, as you know, the, the pack, it leaves the den for a bit, you can go and drop puppies in and that's called cross fostering. So we could do that. I'd drop Bunchner because someone's going to get at. A hundred percent.

• 2:06:45Speaker 05

  But, but as far as like, you'd never, you would never get, be able to get to a situation where you would have real, like dire wolves teaching dire wolves how to be dire wolves.

• 2:06:57Speaker 00

  No, that's impossible.

• 2:06:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible. It'd take generations to get to. But you'd first have to know what. There's no, there's no way to find out. Yeah. I mean, this kind of goes back to some of the debate that, you know, I thought people were going to say, you made a dire wolf? What the hell? This thing's an enormous hyper carnivore. Right? And really what they were going, well, that's not a dire wolf. And you go, well, if you're so sure that's not a dire wolf, can you please tell me what a dire wolf is? Because if you can't tell me definitively what it is, you can't tell me what it isn't. You know, there's, there's a lot of nuance to taxonomy and we don't know how transgenics fall into taxonomy. That, you know, taxonomy wasn't built with this idea that suddenly along the evolutionary tree, something just pops up on its own branch.

• 2:07:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:42Speaker 00

  Right. So, transgenics really challenged taxonomic classification. So, you know, we're trying to help the world cope with that. We're trying to challenge taxonomists to figure out, because transgenics are not, they're not gonna stop with dire wolf, they won't stop with colossal. Their, synthetic biology is now a tool that conservation can use to cover number of animals, a number of species issues. There will be the use of one gene from one animal, put into another animal, and then they go, well, how do you now classify that animal? You know, taxonomy wasn't built to handle that.

• 2:08:13Steven Rinella?

  But the, and the thing in the behavior thing, though, this isn't a hack on it, but I'm saying like, you just, you might get, you might get where you can win the debate and say like, based on an agreed upon definition, this is a dire wolf. But what, the problem is, when you, if you say like, behaviorally, we, there's no foundation for it.

• 2:08:39Speaker 00

  We can't say definitively, no. You would never know what the animal was doing. We haven't studied it. I mean, there's, how many species across the world that are alive today that we don't know behaviorally what they do, what is their function within the ecosystem?

• 2:08:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Speaker 00

  You know, so it, it's, it's a valid point, and it's one that, it will challenge the extinction as we go forward, but I don't think it's a reason to not pursue the extinction.

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  Has there been anything with their behavior that really surprises the people who watch them? Like, they never howl, or, boy, they sure like digging holes.

• 2:09:09Speaker 00

  They love sticks.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:09:11Speaker 00

  Big fans of sticks right now.

• 2:09:12Speaker 03

  But do like, wolf puppies love sticks? I don't know.

• 2:09:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think they get a lot of sticks.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:09:17Speaker 00

  We'll have to see.

• 2:09:17Steven Rinella?

  Do they like?

• 2:09:18Speaker 00

  Ask Rick McIntyre. They like carrying bones around, I don't know.

• 2:09:21Speaker 05

  Do you guys like, go in there and cuddle with them, or will they rip your arm off if you stick it through a fence?

• 2:09:25Speaker 00

  There's no cuddling at this point. You know, we were pretty specific, early on, contact was only what was required for the care and health of the animal. And now, contact is basically not required. We'll drive in, in order to drop feed and things like that. They also have a, an indoor building that they have access to, and a sort of a smaller pen where they, we can coax them into that, so that we can do some basic management stuff.

• 2:09:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Speaker 00

  If we ever had to, you know. Anesthetize an animal because it was sick or injured. We use these areas. So there is some habituation to those areas because it's a management advantage for us to be able to not have to go out there and dart one.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  So what about their behavior surprised you, though?

• 2:10:03Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's so early. It's hard to say, right? Because they were just really goofy puppies that were around people. And now they're really developing into their own. I think the level of, despite the habituation early on in their life, the level of flight distance that they still maintain with people outside of like two people on my team is pretty startling. Whereas I've worked with a lot of other captive wild canids and they go, oh, person equals food. And they come running over. These guys do not have that. There is a real fear of new people, new things.

• 2:10:39Speaker 05

  They howl like gray wolves do?

• 2:10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, they do. They have a good howl. There's a really famous video that we put on YouTube that was their first howl, which was a pretty powerful moment for the team. You know, I was sitting there holding them and one of the vet techs that works in the clinic, we were doing a checkup on them. It was like singing a song, a Little Mermaid song. And there's a part where it's like, uh. And she starts doing that. And all of a sudden, both boys just popped into a howl. That was pretty incredible.

• 2:11:08Speaker 03

  Is their body size on track with what you'd expect the body size of a dire wolf to be?

• 2:11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, so fossil record kind of suggests dire wolves were somewhere between that 130, 140 pounds up to 160 pounds. I think we're on pace for 140 pounds. Where we stand today, we're seven and a half months just shy of 100 pounds as is. Their growth curve is definitely leveling out. But what we know from gray wolves is we could expect them to continue to grow until they're about 12, 15 months. And then from there, they'll continue to put on weight. But they're pretty tall, leggy animals as they are today.

• 2:11:47Steven Rinella?

  I'm excited for this ivory-billed woodpecker situation.

• 2:11:52Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, we gotta, we gotta get you down to the lab and we can show you what we're doing with, with the woodpecker stuff.

• 2:11:58Speaker 03

  You know who else wouldn't like it, Steve, are the people who claim they see them now? Because they kind of, they're like special.

• 2:12:03Speaker 00

  We get that on the thylacine project, too.

• 2:12:05Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:12:06Steven Rinella?

  People are like, no need.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:07Steven Rinella?

  There's one behind my own back.

• 2:12:09Speaker 00

  We, we were at a town hall meeting, because we, we will visit Tasmania and have town halls and try to hear from, from the locals and we have it at that thylacine stakeholder group. And one of them said, you know, I, uh, this is 10 years ago, I was pumping gas down at this intersection and I saw one run by. And I was like, I don't want to be rude, but if they do exist, I don't think they're visiting gas stations.

• 2:12:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:31Steven Rinella?

  Do you guys use that term Lazarus?

• 2:12:34Speaker 00

  We, we haven't used it, yeah, but it is, it's good, it's a good analogy.

• 2:12:39Steven Rinella?

  Um, I was gonna get to this, but we're, we're running out of time, but, uh, crystal ball it on, um, crystal ball it on Tasmania, saying, hell yeah, let's cut some thylacines loose.

• 2:12:55Speaker 00

  Uh, I think the chances will go much higher once we have a thylacine in hand, because I think there will suddenly be a, oh, this is a real thing that we need to be very serious about. Um, Australia has a mu, a very conservative approach to wildlife management.

• 2:13:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:09Speaker 00

  And they've been burned in the past.

• 2:13:11Steven Rinella?

  Lord knows they don't have any non-natives.

• 2:13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've been burned in the past, right? Uh, cane toads is a great example.

• 2:13:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 2:13:18Speaker 00

  So I think there will be an onerous, onerous process in order to get there, but I would say, yeah. You know, uh, you know, that's sort of 75, 85% chance that they will definitely come along. I think Mauritius is, is much more willing to take that.

• 2:13:31Steven Rinella?

  What was the percent chance on Tasmania?

• 2:13:33Speaker 00

  75, 85, somewhere around there.

• 2:13:35Steven Rinella?

  Really optimistic.

• 2:13:36Speaker 00

  I'm telling you, once these animals are back, I think we'll

• 2:13:39Steven Rinella?

  It'll be tempting.

• 2:13:40Speaker 00

  fighting people to say, why is it in Texas, in the United States and not in Tasmania?

• 2:13:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48Steven Rinella?

  I love Willem Dafoe.

• 2:13:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Steven Rinella?

  One of the worst movies ever made.

• 2:13:51Speaker 00

  Horrible movie.

• 2:13:52Steven Rinella?

  His Thylacine movie.

• 2:13:53Speaker 00

  It's really bad.

• 2:13:54Steven Rinella?

  Just the logic.

• 2:13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13:55Steven Rinella?

  It had magical backpack syndrome.

• 2:13:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  What is that?

• 2:14:01Steven Rinella?

  Magical backpack syndrome is a person has a little knapsack.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:14:05Steven Rinella?

  But all throughout the movie, they're producing like.

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  All sorts of shit.

• 2:14:09Steven Rinella?

  It's like, wow, that must be very.

• 2:14:10Speaker 00

  It's like a Harry Potter bag. They just keep pulling stuff out of it.

• 2:14:14Steven Rinella?

  And it's, it's just the, the logic. It was like a great, they're like, we should do something or the idea was we should do something around Tasmanian tires.

• 2:14:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:14:22Steven Rinella?

  And then that's just what came out in the end. Terrible.

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  I, I assume.

• 2:14:26Steven Rinella?

  I love Willem Dafoe.

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  I assume your company.

• 2:14:27Steven Rinella?

  If you want to come on the show, I'd love to have him.

• 2:14:30Speaker 03

  I assume your company has competitors. Have they, have they been excited for you guys? Have they been critical of what you've done? Or they like, damn, we thought we'd land on the moon first.

• 2:14:41Speaker 00

  I think as far as I'm aware, we're the only de-extinction species preservation.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  There's nobody else.

• 2:14:45Speaker 00

  The only people we truly compete with would be other nation states. You know, Korea has pursued some of this stuff. We know China has an interest in it, but it's not really at a company level.

• 2:14:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:14:55Speaker 00

  I think.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  Good job, security.

• 2:14:56Speaker 00

  I think you're about to see people come in, but they're about four hundred fifty million dollars in five years late.

• 2:15:01Speaker 05

  Are you guys constantly?

• 2:15:03Steven Rinella?

  Not to discourage.

• 2:15:04Speaker 05

  Are you guys constantly getting like petitioned by people or, or organizations about like their pet, the extinction project or their pet project to prevent something from their animal?

• 2:15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, we get, we get a lot of that where it's, you know, hey, Thylacine is a really cool project, but did you consider about like the, the red piliated northwest woodpecker, right? It's like some random bird that you go, well, I didn't actually, let me look it up. And you go, well, it's not really, just extirpated from that area. It's still around. Yeah. There you get a lot of that type of stuff.

• 2:15:38Steven Rinella?

  Dude, thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:15:40Speaker 00

  Hey, always great to be here.

• 2:15:41Steven Rinella?

  You guys can come on anytime you want.

• 2:15:43Speaker 00

  I appreciate that, because I'll take you up on that, because, you know, we're working in Yellowstone on a pretty regular basis now, so we're up in your neck of the woods.

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  People aren't gonna like to hear that, I don't think.

• 2:15:51Speaker 00

  Well, it's not dire wolf related.

• 2:15:53Steven Rinella?

  Let me give you my end, let me give you my end sentiment about the whole thing. I think there's things that happen in American culture, global culture, whatever. There's things that happen that make everyone dumber. And there's things that happen that make everyone smarter. Right? This is definitely, whatever ends up hap- like, whatever happens with Romulus and Remus, like, whatever happened, this made everybody smarter. Because everybody said, wow, I never really thought about, what is a species? What is de-extinction? How do you define a blank? Is this okay or not okay? Like, everyone got smarter. And normally stuff happens, everybody gets dumber.

• 2:16:32Speaker 00

  I love that, I'm gonna steal that from you as well, because I think-

• 2:16:35Steven Rinella?

  I'm trying to think of things that made everybody dumber.

• 2:16:37Speaker 00

  This is net positive. Well, I think a lot-

• 2:16:39Speaker 03

  TikTok.

• 2:16:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Steven Rinella?

  Everybody got dumber.

• 2:16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, people got a lot dumber, TikTok. Yeah, net positive for the world. I think that's, you know, if we're boiling down the story, this is a net positive.

• 2:16:50Steven Rinella?

  Because no one got hurt.

• 2:16:51Speaker 00

  Nobody got hurt. We're injecting, you know, we're injecting science into pop culture, we're injecting conservation, we're, you know, if you look at Google search terms and hashtag trends from when we launched that first week, we saw all-time highs of Google searches for red wolf, for conservation, for the term extinction.

• 2:17:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:09Speaker 00

  You know, if we can push this into a dinner table conversation, for families to have with their kids, to talk about the biodiversity crisis, that is a win in and of itself.

• 2:17:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you didn't, but, and the other thing is, you didn't siphon off of limited federal spending.

• 2:17:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:17:25Steven Rinella?

  It was like willing seller, willing buyer, willing investor, willing investment.

• 2:17:30Speaker 00

  Ben loves to say, we spared the world another shitty software company.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  I like that.

• 2:17:38Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 2:17:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's a pot stir, dude, but it made everybody smarter.

• 2:17:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:17:43Steven Rinella?

  No, I like, I like it. It's like, it's like a real mental, um, it causes a lot of mental wrestling.

• 2:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Steven Rinella?

  You know, what was that quote we had recently? That's the last thing I'm gonna say, but it's not really applicable here, but I think we're talking to Dan Florries.

• 2:17:55Speaker 06

  Beans?

• 2:17:55Steven Rinella?

  No, it's a great quote.

• 2:17:56Speaker 06

  What?

• 2:17:57Steven Rinella?

  Dan Florries was saying about historians. He goes, the reason the arguments are so, the reason, it's like, the reason the arguments are so vicious is there's nothing at stake.

• 2:18:12Steven Rinella?

  But he was just making a joke about his own discipline as a historian, you know, like, how could people get so worked up about Clovis first? Or whatever, right? Um, but there's something at stake here, but I think the main thing is it's like, not the main thing, it's just fun to watch.

• 2:18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate that.

• 2:18:28Steven Rinella?

  It's fun to watch. People like, all of a sudden arguing about stuff that the day before they didn't know.

• 2:18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's perfect.

• 2:18:34Speaker 05

  You guys should do an Irish elk next.

• 2:18:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that'd be bad.

• 2:18:37Speaker 00

  I won't tell you we're not gonna need to do an Irish.

• 2:18:41Speaker 05

  Hunters would love that.

• 2:18:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  Dire wolves could eat them.

• 2:18:44Speaker 00

  It works for me.

• 2:18:45Steven Rinella?

  He's got the amusement park figured out.

• 2:18:48Steven Rinella?

  Alright, thanks, man. I really appreciate you coming on.

• 2:18:49Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 2:18:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:19:18Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 2:19:47Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of

• 2:20:31Steven Rinella?

  a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map, so you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in, and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep

• 2:21:11Steven Rinella?

  the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt.

• 2:21:17Speaker 04

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.