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

Robert walks Langston Kerman through the story of Dr. George Church, a very real scientist who co founded the company making bullshit claims of "de extincting" dire wolves. (2 Part Series) Sources: George Church, Colossal W*nker – For Better Science https://forbetterscience.com/2023/06/26/george-church-colossal-wnker/ Can Gene Therapy Slow Ageing in Dogs? - Gowing Life https://www.gowinglife.com/can-gene-therapy-slow-ageing-in-dogs/ Never-ageing Anti-aging to cure COVID-19 – For Better Science https://forbetterscience.com/2020/05/14/never-ageing-anti-aging-to-cure-covid-19/ The original sins of Leonard Guarente – For Better Science https://forbetterscience.com/2023/04/17/the-original-sins-of-leonard-guarente/ Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html Biologist George Church apologizes for contacts with Jeffreyticl Epstein https://www.statnews.com/2019/08/05/citing-nerd-tunnel-vision-biologist-george-church-apologizes-for-contacts-with-jeffrey-epstein/ Genetics Company Wants To Bring Iconic Tasmanian Tiger Back From Extinction - Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/tasmanian-tiger-thylacine-extinction-colossal-biosciences-woolly-mammoth-1733900 Gene editing company hopes to bring dodo ‘back to life’ | Extinct wildlife | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/31/gene-editing-company-hopes-to-bring-dodo-back-to-life? CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other Jeffrey Epstein-Funded Geneticist Is Building a Dating App That Only a Eugenicist Could Love https://gizmodo.com/jeffrey-epstein-funded-geneticist-is-building-a-dating-1840315470 George Church Explains How DNA Will Be Construction Material of the Future - DER SPIEGEL https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/george-church-explains-how-dna-will-be-construction-material-of-the-future-a-877634.html Geneticist George Church gets funding for lab-grown woolly mammoths https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/13/geneticist-george-church-gets-funding-for-lab-grown-woolly-mammoths.html Wooly Mammoth De-extinction Scientist Reveals Plan To Create 'Arctic Elephant' - Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/wooly-mammoth-de-extinction-scientist-plan-create-arctic-elephant-1674509?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1643642848 Bringing back dinosaurs or making new ones? – DW – 06/10/2015 https://www.dw.com/en/could-jurassic-world-become-reality/a-18487900 ‘If you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying as hard as you could be’ — Harvard Gazette https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/05/if-youre-not-failing-youre-probably-not-trying-as-hard-as-you-could-be/ CRISPR gene editing on human embryos may be dangerous https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/crispr-gene-editing-on-human-embryos-may-have-dangerous-consequences-says-new-study/?cf-view Here are some actual facts about George Church’s DNA dating company | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/11/131611/actual-facts-about-george-church-dna-dating-company-digid8/ Scientist on the Loose: George Church Strays Into Eugenics—Again | Center for Genetics and Society https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/scientist-loose-george-church-strays-eugenics-again So... What do we think of Colossal Biosciences? : r/pleistocene https://www.reddit.com/r/pleistocene/comments/1axg97t/sowhat_do_we_think_of_colossal_biosciences/ The "de-extinction" of the woolly mammoth, a "Colossal" hoax? - Genomic chronicles | Medicine/Science https://www.medecinesciences.org/en/articles/medsci/full_html/2022/05/msc220068/msc220068.html Hiltzik: New frontiers in pseudoscientific baloney - Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-04-24/this-genetics-firm-didnt-resurrect-the-extinct-dire-wolf-but-did-achieve-a-breakthrough-in-hype Colossal Liar Wolves – For Better Science https://forbetterscience.com/2025/05/21/colossal-liar-wolves/ Meet The Disruptors: How Ben Lamm & Hypergiant Are Shaking Up the Space and AI Industries | by Jason Hartman | Authority Magazine | Medium https://medium.com/authority-magazine/meet-the-disruptors-how-ben-lamm-hypergiant-are-shaking-up-the-space-and-ai-industries-92d70b6b7b7c Millionaire Ben Lamm Warns Against Entrepreneurship - Great Entrepreneurs https://thegreatentrepreneurs.com/millionaire-ben-lamm-warns-against-entrepreneurship/ The Serial Entrepreneur Turned Billionaire: Ben Lamm’s Tech and Science Revolution | Where Business News Meets Thought Leadership https://priceofbusiness.com/the-serial-entrepreneur-turned-billionaire-ben-lamms-tech-and-science-revolution/ How 39-year-old Ben Lamm has started five companies https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/06/how-ben-lamm-started-five-companies.html Meet Ben Lamm: The World's First De-extinction Billionaire - Forbes India https://www.forbesindia.com/article/billionaires/meet-ben-lamm-the-worlds-first-deextinction-billionaire/95929/1 Oral history interview with George M. Church - Science History Institute Digital Collections https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/1e76gek Dr. George Church, Founding Father of Genomics | News | W. I. https://www.thewindwardschool.org/the-windward-institute/details/~board/beacon-archives/post/dr-george-church-founding-father-of-genomics The Church Of George Church https://www.popsci.com/church-george-church/ The World Has a Data Storage Problem. Is DNA the Answer? - proto.life https://proto.life/2021/07/the-world-has-a-data-storage-problem-is-dna-the-answer/ DNA: The Future of Data Storage?. DNA, with its amazing storage… | by Nithil Krishnaraj | TechTalkers | Medium https://medium.com/techtalkers/dna-the-future-of-data-storage-de564ea10dac See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow. Sophie, I don't know. I don't know if we can put that on the air. I mean, that's actionable threats against a sitting [BLEEP]. Wow. I mean, just Sophie, that's it's just dangerous to be saying stuff like that in this day and age. I know. Let's distract the audience and the federal agents listening in by bringing on our guest today, who definitely doesn't say stuff like that, Langston Kerman. Langston, do you condemn Sophie's statements, assuming they ever get out in unedited form?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  I was, I was tempted to hang up the Zoom right away. I, it was so inflammatory that I said, I can't be a part of this.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  No, no, it's time to bring peace to the country, you know, that's, that's what we all need to be focusing on is peace.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. We gotta get back to what we were, which was normal and peaceful.

• 0:54Robert Evans?

  Which was normal and good. Everyone knows things used to be good in this country for everybody, right?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  We were chilling for a long time.

• 1:01Robert Evans?

  We were so cool. Yeah. Things were so great. And I think what'll get us back to that is talking about puppies, right? Everybody loves a good puppy, right?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I like puppies.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Puppies are wonderful. And there's been some really cool new puppy news.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I am really nervous.

• 1:16Robert Evans?

  What is he talking about? Oh, God, we're gonna talk about puppy mills. No, don't worry. This is a fun one, everybody. We're gonna have a good time this week. Like, it is a guy I think is a piece of shit, but it's gonna be fun.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will say, before you even go, the one of the only taboos that exists in film and television is murdering dogs.

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  And I'm getting so scared before we even start. I know nothing.

• 1:38Robert Evans?

  No dogs are provably harmed yet in the, in the making of this story, although I do have to specify yet. But there is like a dog-like creature involved, because if you, if you spend any time online, if you've been on social media or just been watching the news, I think probably close to 100% of our audience caught this. There was a big story a couple of weeks back about how this company brought back the dire wolf, right?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  Which is an extinct kind of wolf. And they did it using some, I think we could call it Jurassic Park style machinations, right? Like, that's what everyone thought of. And this is all the work of a, of an actual like science, like bio science startup called Colossal Biosciences, which is just by name, a company that could not sound more like it belonged in a Michael Crichton novel if they just called it Engine, right? Like, it's, it's amazing.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  It really feels like a fourth grader was like, I got it.

• 2:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, trying to rewrite. Like when I was in fourth grade, trying to rewrite Jurassic Park. Yes.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, we'll get sued. That's fine.

• 2:41Robert Evans?

  It's fine. It's fine. Michael Crichton's not gonna sue a four-year-old.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Colossal.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  Biosciences.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  Original. Yeah, someone will publish this.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 2:58Robert Evans?

  Season four of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is here. This year, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso are unzipping the truth, challenging stereotypes, celebrating sex positivity, and keeping things delightfully unfiltered. Tune in for jaw-dropping, hilarious, and insightful chats with some of the boldest voices in the queer community, and dive into the history of cruising, queer scenes from Atlanta to Puerto Rico, how OnlyFans is reshaping adult content, and so much more. Feeling curious? Maybe a little bold? Just push play. Listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free dude wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients.

• 3:43Robert Evans?

  They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, dude wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a dude wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Most dog food brands don't really want you seeing how their food is made. Just Food for Dogs is the opposite. They actually invite you in. You can walk into any of their kitchens and see real, human-grade ingredients, like chicken, beef, carrots, and peas, being prepared right in front of you. It's real food, made in real kitchens. Nothing is hidden behind labels. And that kind of transparency says a lot. Nothing to hide, everything to love. Go to JustFoodForDogs.com and get 50% off your first order.

• 4:41Robert Evans?

  So most news coverage of this whole dire wolf thing kinda casually accepted the PR claims being made by Colossal and its co-founder slash scientific spokesman, Dr. George Church. Time published an article with the title "The Return of the Dire Wolf," and it's as hype an article as it could possibly be. And on the front of it, there's a photo of a very charismatic looking wolf as the header image. I mean, that's a beautiful wolf, right?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  That wolf has charm.

• 5:10Robert Evans?

  That wolf has charm. That is a screen-ready wolf.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  You can tell, you can tell that wolf knows how the business works. That's not a wolf that you gotta like, uh, put a caretaker on.

• 5:22Robert Evans?

  You know, they said that they put some dire wolf genes into this wolf. I think they might have stuck one or two Tom Cruise genes in there, because that wolf knows where the camera is, right?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  That wolf, that wolf does its own stunts. I hear you.

• 5:35Robert Evans?

  That wolf does its own stunts, right? Obviously, it's a good-looking wolf. No one's throwing shade against these animals here. They're gorgeous. But they're not dire wolves, right? And that's kind of where we're starting here. It gets much more fucked up than that. Dire wolves were a very real species of wolf, which roamed the Americas. They were found in parts of both North and South America, from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene period, which is a span of somewhere over 100,000 years. Its bite force, like when these animals lived, they had a stronger bite force than any known modern wolves, so they, they were pretty formidable. But the reputation for them being like the size of horses is something they largely accrued via Game of

• 6:18Robert Evans?

  Thrones, because dire wolves were around the same size as the largest modern wolves. A little bigger, but we're talking like 10 or 20 pounds heavier than like a Yukon wolf on average. And there was a, right?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  There's a, a pretty extensive collection of dire wolf bones in the La Brea Tar Pits Museum.

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, right. Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And boy, was I disappointed when I saw how little those bones were. I thought I was-

• 6:45Robert Evans?

  You're expecting some Game of Thrones shit, yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Man, I walked in there and I said, "I'm gonna see the biggest wolf that's ever was." And those wolves look like, uh, schnauzers. They're tiny little dogs, as far as I'm concerned.

• 6:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cuz you, I mean, like, the average size of a dire wolf was like 150 pounds, which is like a good-sized canid, but like-

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It's a good wolf?

• 7:04Robert Evans?

  I've known dogs bigger than that. I've known some 200-something-pound mastiffs, right? Like, and they're not that big on average, yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  Um, so, yeah, again, these are, they're bite, in terms of bite force, very formidable animals, but they're not huge. Like, that's stuff that George R.R. Martin put in his book, because George R.R. Martin knows how to make a book cool, right?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Robert Evans?

  You gotta zhuzh up reality a little bit, you know? Especially if it's a fantasy novel.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  He knows how to make a book cool, and he knows how to make a hat cool. He's got cool hats, cool books, and scarves.

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  Cool hats, cool books, and he's achieved, I have a lot of respect for George. He's achieved every writer's dream, which is to never have to write again, right? Like, that's what we're all shooting for? So just live in a lighthouse and never finish your series.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  He's done.

• 7:51Robert Evans?

  I say as I'm two years overdue with my novel. Um, but the name of the species is presumably the major thing that inspired George R.R. Martin. It's just a cool name, dire wolf, like, there's, dire wolves have been in D and D before George put them in his books, right? Because it's just, it's a cool thing to call a wolf. It's like, "Yeah, that sounds like a scarier wolf to me." Um, and Colossal Biosciences, knowing and being primarily, this is a company that describes themselves as being in gene sciences. They're in the PR business as much as anything else. And they made the wise decision to rely heavily on the popularity of the Game of Thrones books and TV shows to act as advertising for their quote-unquote "dire wolf," right?

• 8:34Robert Evans?

  And in fact, this is even written into that Fawning Time coverage. And here's a quote from that article. Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient preserved DNA, colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, two-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter, effectively for the first time, de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool vanished long ago. Time met the mates. Khaleesi was not present due to her young age at a fenced field in a US wildlife facility on March 24th, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  Now, naming a dire wolf after a character in the books who had nothing to do with dire wolves was by far the cringiest possible choice here, right?

• 9:27Speaker 04

  What a missed opportunity.

• 9:28Robert Evans?

  There were dire wolves with names.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  There were a lot of Starks. They could have just gone down the Stark lineage. They didn't have to go to Khaleesi.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Quite literally.

• 9:37Robert Evans?

  She had nothing to do with the wolves. Did she even meet any of the wolves?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  She was a dragon lady.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  She met, she, she, last, the, the, yes.

• 9:46Robert Evans?

  Did she, she met, okay, she met Jaws, maybe, okay. Right, ghost, right, okay, so maybe one.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  We don't, we don't talk about that last season.

• 9:53Robert Evans?

  We don't talk about that last season.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  I got really sad for a second there.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  But it's a bummer, folks. You should do, you should do that season as one of the bastards, frankly.

• 10:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, we're, we're working on a six-parter. But having the animals, they also had the animals posed with George R.R. Martin as part of like the press tour, and that was a particular choice. First off, look at this, which again, no shade on George. I want to hold a wolf pup, right?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, it looks cuddly as hell. But that's also kind of part of the problem, because like, that wolf is actively yawning, right? Like, it seems pretty chill to be there. And that's interesting to me, because if the information given to the team at Time by colossal biosciences was accurate, there's no way this photo should exist. Here's what Time claimed right at the start of their article. "The angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans, trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses, is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches." Even if one of the handlers who raised them from birth can only get so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat, this isn't domestic canine behavior. This is wild lupine

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  behavior. The pups are wolves. Not only that, they're dire wolves, which means they have cause to be lonely. And again, just genetically, they're not dire wolves. But also, why is George cuddling that animal then?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  Are you, you're either forcing the animal into a situation that makes it distinctly uncomfortable, but the animal looks like it's yawning. So maybe they're just not as wolfy as you're pretending.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're really trying to weave a story here. And that's, that's a nice dog. That seems like a really polite, uh, sweet dog.

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  It seems chill. It looks like a husky. Yeah. I don't know, man.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  And frankly, George, why are you not finishing the books?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Well, he's got a lot of wolves to me.

• 11:35Robert Evans?

  I'm not gonna give him shit for that. Again, I also haven't. And if I had the chance to cuddle a wolf, rather than spend another day working on my novel, I would be heading to that wolf so fucking fast.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I understand.

• 11:47Robert Evans?

  The man owns a lighthouse. How is, how are you expecting to finish a book? He's finished other books. Um, I'll give him shit for his involvement in this company, though.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  That's cool to make that much money and be like, I'm gonna buy a lighthouse.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna get a lighthouse. Yeah, of course.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I'm not sleeping where normal people sleep anymore. I've got a different thing going on.

• 12:05Robert Evans?

  No, I'm gonna recreate that great Robert Pattinson movie.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Where everybody was fine at the end. Nothing bad happened.

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  No, no. Really good movie with a good ending. So the fact that there's this photo of George R.R. Martin with one of these dire wolves makes a lot more sense when you learn a few things about both the company behind these animals and the actual science behind the project itself. For one thing, George R.R. Martin is an investor in colossal biosciences and also an advisor to the company, which advisor in what? George R.R. Martin's a number of things. He's not a scientist. He's not a geneticist. He's not an expert in real dire wolves.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  He's got sunglasses on.

• 12:50Robert Evans?

  He does have sunglasses. Like, he invented fake dire wolves for his novels. I don't understand, like, under what circumstances would he be an advisor to this company doing genetics work? That's like if they hired the guy who played Dr. Alan Grant to advise a company cloning dinosaurs. It's like, well, but he doesn't really know anything about dinosaurs, right?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  That's actually not his forte.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  He's actually, he doesn't even speak with that accent. He's pretending.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like it's like bringing Jeff Goldblum onto the project. Well, you know, if you, if you're trying to, like, I just don't think he has the expertise. Nothing against Jeff.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  If you want to flirt with the dinosaurs.

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  If you want to flirt with people, yes, bring Jeff in.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  You want them dinosaurs horny as hell, get Jeff, but otherwise you gotta.

• 13:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he could do that shit.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  You gotta talk to a scientist.

• 13:41Robert Evans?

  You might want to bring in like Robert Backer or someone if he's still alive. But anyway, an article by Michael Hillsit for the Los Angeles Times explains how Martin is being credited as an advisor here. He's named as a co-author on a technical paper the company published as a non-peer reviewed pre-print describing its de-extinction effort. The text credits him with the review and editing of the paper's text among 36 other credited co-authors in that category. So he's one of 36 people who helped copy edit an article?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, to your point, this is just PR.

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  This is just PR. First off, it never takes 36 people to edit an article.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And they didn't let those other 35 people hold that dog and that's pretty fucked up.

• 14:26Robert Evans?

  No, no, just George. They just brought George in there for that. Yeah. Anyway, to kind of enforce the point I made earlier, these wolves, well, very cute, are not dire wolves. They, there's some genes that they found while sequencing dire wolf genetics that have been put into a normal wolf. But that doesn't, it's kind of like how, like some people have some Neanderthal DNA in there, but they're not themselves Neanderthals, right? They're just, they're people, you know?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  That's gotta be a tough thing to, to figure out for yourself, though, that you got a little bit of that in there, cause.

• 15:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you got some DNA from a species we wiped out?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can kind of see it and then, then that bumps you out where you're like, ah.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  Sure, like Jon Hamm, I assume, right?

• 15:12Robert Evans?

  Big, big ol' head, big ol' head. Yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  So, Colossal Biosciences is not actually in the de-extinction business. They are in the modifying animals genetically in ways that, in some cases, hadn't been done before business, and that is interesting, but it's not de-extinction. And so, they are doing stuff. They are doing something new and something that is, in some ways, very interesting, but it's not what they're claiming they're doing. So, I can't call this a straight-up con, right? Because they did make an animal that didn't exist before, but it's also not a dire wolf, and they're not de-extincting anything. And I think the evidence shows they are massively inflating what they and their technology can do in order to win VC funding.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  The whole explanation as to why will take a while, but I'm gonna start by talking about the claims that first brought the company public attention. Back in September of 2021, a whole spate of almost identical articles dropped announcing the creation of Colossal Biosciences and their plan to clone a woolly mammoth by 2027. So, we got two more years before there ought to be mammoths, right?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  We're getting woolly mammoths back, y'all. This is exciting.

• 16:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, very soon, like, probably right around the same time we get Severance Season 3, you know, if we're lucky.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  You know what sucks about?

• 16:30Robert Evans?

  They could drop the same year.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  What sucks about woolly mammoths, too, is, is they also are not bigger than elephants.

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I thought this whole time that woolly mammoths were like these giant beasts that we would never be able to see again, and they're like smaller than the average African elephant.

• 16:47Robert Evans?

  No, and again, it's one of those things, whenever people start to think about, "Oh, it's a bum, we've missed all the coolest animals that existed." The largest thing to ever exist on Earth is still around. It swims in the sea, and we're currently killing them.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Okay, something, something you missed in this story that you've brought up, the woolly mammoth, is, uh... Part of the investors for this company are like a TikTok.

• 17:10Robert Evans?

  Oh, no, I'm getting to it. I'm getting to that, Sophie. Don't you worry.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  I was like, I was like, I know this. Why do I know this shit?

• 17:17Robert Evans?

  We're getting to the other investors in this fucking company. Don't worry.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. But here's a, here's a representative example from like the, the press that explosion around this woolly mammoth claim. So this is a CNBC article, lab grown woolly mammoths could walk the earth in six years if geneticists new startup succeeds. This was published in 2021 and the geneticist that they're discussing and the guy the article is based around interviewing is co-founder of colossal biosciences, Dr. George Church, who claimed that he'd had the idea kicking around for years. And research supports this fact. He's been pushing this idea in one form or another for like a decade or more, but that he'd just been given $15 million in seed funding and a company had been established with serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm as CEO. And we will talk about Ben Lamm some more in part two.

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Church, though, Dr. George Church, is a real doctor and his credentials are impeccable on paper. And just to state, this guy's kind of a weird case where he's exaggerating a lot. And I think you could even argue lying about some things, but he's a real scientist with some very impressive achievements behind him.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  And I, I, I think it's important for us to say that scientists can be both legitimate and liars.

• 18:33Robert Evans?

  Bullshit, right?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  We, we often, I think, conflate it somehow where scientists are like these moral beings that exist above us all. And no, they can be liars and also really smart and capable people.

• 18:45Robert Evans?

  Right. It's like you could be a great science fiction author and racist as fuck, right?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Robert Evans?

  Those two things have existed or like Isaac Asimov, where you're like, wow, what a genius. And also sex pest, right?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:57Robert Evans?

  Like those things do not conflict whatsoever, you know?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  It might've helped him. I don't know.

• 19:03Robert Evans?

  Who knows? So George Church's credentials, I'm not calling Church a sex pest, although he has some shady involvement with people that we'll talk about. None of it involves accusations of his specific behavior, just his choice of company. Anyway, his academic credentials.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 19:20Robert Evans?

  He is the, oh, we're, this, this episode ends, you know, I'm not going to give you a hint, but you're, you're going to be psyched. You're not going to be psyched. You're going to be bummed.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  I can't wait.

• 19:29Robert Evans?

  He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member at the Weiss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, also at Harvard. So, you know, that alone, pretty big achievement, right?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And he still holds those positions today?

• 19:45Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. As far as, as I'm aware, yes. Church has his name on more than 100 patents. And, you know, some of those are things where like, maybe he got on there because he helped someone else. But a lot of them are because he contributed really significant work to those patents. He started the Personal Genome Project, and he has also helped found more than 20 companies. Now, that last claim was the first thing I read about him that made me wonder like, okay, is there something like shady here? Because 20 companies is too many. No honest man has found more than 20 companies? You're doing some fucked up shit, right?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  You gotta focus, big man. That's a few too many companies.

• 20:21Robert Evans?

  That's, that's too many companies. And then when I read about the actual claims colossal through Church was making about why cloning mammoths was not just like a cool thing to do, but like necessary for conservation, I went fully over the edge. This is when I was like, okay, I gotta dig more into this guy. There's gotta be something fucked up here. And he has made claims like this, quote, this is a quote from the article, proponents of the project, and they're talking about Church, say rewilding the Arctic with woolly mammoths could slow global warming by slowing the melting of the permafrost where methane is currently trapped. That's not true.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  How?

• 20:57Robert Evans?

  It has something to do with them stomping down the ground to stop like trees from growing up. So the permafrost days, but like, that's if theoretically there were a massive healthy mammoth population, it might do that. We're not talking about, number one, they're not talking about making mammoths. They're talking about modifying African elephants as a spoiler for where we'll be in part two. But also like, that's just not a feasible place for this project to end with like massive herds of mammoths clomping across the tundra.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Stomping the ground.

• 21:25Robert Evans?

  To say, to fix. Also, no amount of mammoth is going to fix global warming at its current. Like, the problem is not just there's too many trees in Siberia, there's other shit going on.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  If that's the approach you're taking, you're missing the mark quite a bit.

• 21:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Mammoth, mammoth can't be our first start at fixing the problem for sure.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  I don't think a lack of mammoths is the primary reason this is a problem. Yeah. Um, further shady factoids about the business include the fact that it is a for-profit enterprise. Now, Ben Lamm, who's his co-founder and the CEO, was quick to tell CNBC, none of our investors are focused on monetizing right now, which is great. But then you read about who those investors are and you wonder, I don't know if I believe that. Because investors in colossal outside of George R.R. Martin include self-help grifter Tony Robbins and Winklevoss Capital. Oh, we got Winklevi. The Winklevoss Twins.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 22:21Robert Evans?

  Winklevi.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  They'd only be involved in a real project.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  This is like when a bunch of celebrities open up an ice cream store. And you're like, why do y'all know each other?

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, one of you's moving coke and you guys needed a way to launder shit. Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  What is this relationship that somehow fostered naturally between you?

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. Something's wrong here, I'm missing something. And yes, there are some famous TikTokers involved as well and some other celebrities who should not be involved in a biosciences company that we'll talk about later.

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  So by the time I read about the Winklevoss Twins being involved, I was fully on team fuck these people. Winklevi. The Winkles V. But that's not enough to actually like justify accusing a person and their company of being bastards, right? Just like, even I wouldn't do that. So I looked deeper and boy, howdy, did I find some shit. Before we get into everything that's fucked up about this company, a lot of what's fucked up here is actually Dr. George Church. And talking about what this guy's done and where he's come from, because this is a story of like a great scientist who makes some choices that I would argue puts him into a series of very unethical situations. Because there's money in it, right? That's what I think is going on here, but I'm just gonna read you his bio.

• 23:39Robert Evans?

  George McDonald Church was born on August 28th, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He grew up in Clearwater, the capital of Scientology, but I can't hold that against him. He's got no ties that I found to the organization. He just grew up there. He just got lucky. He just got lucky. Thank God. Yeah. He's near Blue Base, I think. That's the big base in Clearwater. His family life was somewhat chaotic by most people's standards, as he laid out in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. "I had three fathers as my mother remarried. The first one lasted about eight months post-birth, and he was an Air Force pilot, a pretty colorful character. I knew him off and on through the years, up until his death. He was the sort of father that a young boy would admire, because he wasn't tied down by actual responsibilities.

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  That was Stu McDonald. He was called Barefoot Stu. He was inducted into the Water Ski Hall of Fame. He wasn't a terrific athlete. I mean, obviously, he was a pretty good one, but his real contribution to the sport, which was relevant to me, was that he was a good communicator. He was the first ABC Wide World of Sports color commentator. He was also just generally charismatic. He was a male model. He worked on film, television stuff as well." What? Right, right. So, and this guy, he's also primarily a communicator now, right? And he's like, he's very old now, but he's like a handsome kind of old, like he's the, you would cast him to be like the old king in like a fucking New Robin Hood movie, like comes back at the end, right? Like, he is that kind of old guy.

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  "He was my birth dad, but I don't think he really influenced me that much intellectually. My second father was a lawyer and had the least influence. Third dad was a physician who had two pretty important roles. He sent me away to school to an awesome high school. Both my stepbrother and I went away at roughly the same time. It might have just been to get the young teenage boys out of the house, but in my case, it was very good. It was a liberal East Coast school, Andover, which is where the Bushes went. I don't know if I'd call that liberal, but..." And Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides and a bunch of other interesting people. And the other thing he did was just being a physician. I could look at his medical technology and somehow be enthralled by it. And Dr. Dad is where he gets the last name Church. So that definitely seems to be the guy he primarily considers to have been his father.

• 25:48Robert Evans?

  And that summary of events does kind of smooth over a couple of things, including what seems to have been a difficult start for George at school. He's always very bright, but he has learning disabilities. He had to repeat the ninth grade as a result. George has claimed in recent years to have dyslexia, narcolepsy, OCD and ADD. All of which he says, it's a lot of stuff. He says they were all mild, but it made me feel different, right? And so he became kind of desperate in grade school not to stand out or get attention, right? Like, he doesn't want to seem weird, which is a pretty normal way for kids to feel in school.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So far, it's the thing I've related to him most on.

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I get that.

• 26:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  That I connect to.

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Saying you reinvented wolves is a different conversation.

• 26:32Robert Evans?

  The wolf thing I'm having trouble with.

• 26:36Robert Evans?

  You very rarely claim that, Langston.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  It's almost never come up in our conversations, at least.

• 26:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, seldom. Prior to going to Andover, Church attended both public and Catholic schools, but had bad experiences in both systems. He just says the schools in Florida weren't very good. Again, I don't have trouble seeing that.

• 26:56Robert Evans?

  Despite his difficulty with academics, he was a voracious reader and good at self-directed learning when he was interested in something. He built an analog computer when he was 10, and when he started at Andover, they had a time share computing program with nearby Dartmouth College. So he was able to spend time on a computer before most people his age did, which is like, you see similar stories with like a lot of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a lot of the guys who were like around this age and also wound up being major tech players, right?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was such rare technology to access at that age that I bet if you really were able to invest the time and energy, you advanced a chess piece so far for yourself.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  And you were generally kind of a rich kid. Right? Which is, you know, the case with even though he's got, you know, he goes through a couple of dads, this, this, this last one is, is very comfortable financially. And as a result, he gets this opportunity. And as a result, then his story sounds less like a lot of big science guys and more like a lot of tech startup dudes, right? Like, that's the kind of background this dude had.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  They always talk about how like, uh, Bill Gates started Microsoft in his garage, but it's like, oh, you had an entire garage that you could work in?

• 28:06Robert Evans?

  You had a nice garage?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Most people have to store things and park cars in there. And you were just like, no, the garage is a workspace.

• 28:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. Um, speaking of garages, if you want to afford a garage, I don't know, I can't help you, but you can buy these products.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. This is a beautiful segue.

• 28:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Duskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big time advocate in LGBTQ plus health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there, finding a doctor who's

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  not so judgy, and so much more. It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  This is Chelsea Hallner from Dear Chelsea. If you travel a lot with your dog, like I do with Doug, feeding them well on the road can get surprisingly complicated, especially when you're touring 30-plus cities, staying in hotels, flying, driving, and basically living out of a suitcase. Frozen dog food sounds great until you realize you don't exactly have a freezer backstage. That's why I started bringing Just Fresh from Just Food for Dogs. It's real fresh dog food made with human-grade ingredients with meat and vegetables you can see in the bowl. But the difference is it's shelf-stable, which means I don't need a freezer or a cooler, and there's no prep. So now I can throw a few packs in my bag, and Doug still gets a healthy meal wherever we are. Doug absolutely loves it, and I like knowing I am feeding my baby something that's actually good for him.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  It's also the number-one vet-recommended fresh dog food made without preservatives or fillers. Go to JustFoodForDogs.com and get 50% off your first order.

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  We're back. Okay, so, so far, it's been a pretty similar story to a lot of tech guys. And George has a story about how he was like 10 or so, he goes to the New York World's Fair, and that has a huge impact on him. He gets to see very early touchscreens, which are obviously a precursor to a real technology, and also a lot of fake future technology, like personal jetpacks and stuff that like, I mean, there's technically some jetpacks, but it's not what we thought it would be, right? We're not flying around in those things, you and me.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I thought it was gonna be Rocketman shit, and it's not that at all.

• 31:01Robert Evans?

  No, no. I thought, right up to the fact that I thought we'd all be shooting Nazis. And it turns out we chose other things to do with Nazis, which is unfortunate.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Turns out some of us think it's they're a better hang than we anticipated.

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  Certainly the better hang than the Rocketman, the Rocketeer thought.

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  So, but, you know, a lot of the tech he sees is also just stuff that like never happened, right? And George would later say, quote, "It didn't take too long for me to become disillusioned. Not only was it not like that in Florida, it probably wasn't even like that in New York once they shut down the World's Fair. And it might not ever be like that if I didn't do something about it. So I sort of felt like if I want that, I have to work for it." And you can take two things out of this. Either he realizes the World's Fair is largely like a PR thing, and most of this stuff isn't coming, or at least not coming anytime soon. And like, well, then I'm gonna get into, I'm gonna become a cutting-edge scientist to try to make this future real. Or maybe what he learns is like, It's really easy to lie to a lot of people about what you can do and like get money.

• 32:04Robert Evans?

  And maybe that's, maybe that's a lot easier than inventing the future.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I think spotting a grift is real profitable, real fast.

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  It can be. Yeah. Now, maybe, to be fair, maybe both of those things hit him because he does get into some real making the future shit at first. Church wound up attending summer courses in quantum physics at MIT. He gets into crystallography, which I don't really understand, but is important science. And he describes this as showing him, quote, "the intersection of computers and biology," which is going to be like a, a constant source of fascination for him. Now, he does still have issues in school. He has to repeat his first year of graduate school. And depending on where you find him interviewed, this is explained differently. I found one article that just said, "Well, he was just taking so many classes, too many classes, so that he couldn't graduate. And he was just like too interested in doing too many different things.

• 32:58Robert Evans?

  And it just like graduating kind of slipped by him." And that's not really accurate. The way he explained it in this Harvard student paper is different from that, but it's also kind of weird. "Sometimes I could get away with barely going to classes. Other times, like in organic chemistry, I loved it so much, I did every single problem set in the back of each chapter. They didn't even assign any of them. I did them all. It was a full year course, and I think I finished the book, including all the problems in it, by halfway through the fall semester. That was pretty typical. But I guess the reason I did it in two years was that it was, I was cheap money-wise. Like a lot of teenagers, I didn't want to keep being a burden on my parents. Steve Jobs dropped out of college because he was worried about his parents' finances. He did not. I didn't drop out. I just finished early.

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  I also think I had this feeling that if I took four years to do it, I would probably flunk out, so it would be better to finish fast. That turned out to be true. At about the three and a half year point, I did flunk out, but out of graduate school." And you see how that doesn't make sense, how he's like, "Well, I graduated early, so I wouldn't be a burden to my parents." But actually, I flunked out after three and a half years. And I was like, "Well, I don't understand what you're saying."

• 33:58Speaker 01

  And I think if we're going back, that really speaks to both the, the passionate learner and the grifter.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Working in, in, in sort of synchronicity.

• 34:08Robert Evans?

  Right. If you'll forgive me, Lex, and he has two wolves inside him.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  The man contains two wolves.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  One dire, one pretty much a regular wolf.

• 34:19Robert Evans?

  One trying to sell you Amway.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't forgive you.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  Now, the way he describes this other times is that he didn't even realize he'd flunked out of graduate school because he was so excited about the crystallography work his advisor had him doing. And his advisor was like, hey, man, you're, you're actually flunking, you know, you're going to, you've got to like, you're getting kicked out and hired him as a technician, but was like, you can't just keep doing this. You have to reapply to graduate school somewhere else. And Church eventually reapplies to Harvard and describes himself as being shocked at getting in because he'd flunked out of Duke. But he had also gotten accepted to Harvard before he went to Duke. And anyway, whatever, he gets accepted, did some stuff happen behind the scenes with his dad in Harvard? I don't know. It may just have been that he'd been accepted before.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I was about to say, I bet having rich parents and, and a nice little parachute probably helped him figure that out.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  And, and he's got this professor who's probably going to bat for him too, because he is good at some things. But anyway, it's the how he dropped out and exactly why is like a little bit different every time I read it, which always kind of like raises my grifter hackles just a skosh, but maybe I'm missing some things. At any rate, he gets into Harvard and he does better here. He gets into chemistry and genomic sequencing, which is what he does his thesis on. His 1985 PhD from Harvard, per a write-up on edge.org, quote, included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcoding. These led to the first genome sequence, pathogen helicobacter pylori in 1994. His innovations have continued to nearly all next generation DNA sequencing

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  methods and companies. And as far as I can tell, and I even like reached out to a friend of a friend who's in this field, that is accurate. He is a legitimately like foundational mind in modern genome sequencing. His work has been massively influential in like specifically personal genome of people. He didn't invent genome sequencing, right? But when we like first started sequencing, it cost billions of dollars to do that the first time. And he's a major reason why individuals can do it. And why you can do it for, I think it's like 750 bucks to get your genome sequence now, right? Like, he is a big part of that process, right? Not even, not to just write it down to just him either, but his role is substantial. And this is meaningful, important science, right? And I don't, I'm not going to try to take that away from him or pretend like this does not seem

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  to be exaggerated. Other aspects of his, his achievements will be. This does not seem to be, right?

• 36:49Robert Evans?

  A write-up on him in Popular Science by Janine Interlandi summarizes, "Scientists are now using it, personal genome sequencing, to identify intractable diseases such as cancer and schizophrenia, and doctors are beginning to use it to identify genetic mutations that cause rare and until now, undiagnosable illnesses." So, Church becomes a PhD, seems like he earned that.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Doing some good work.

• 37:12Robert Evans?

  Doing some good work. He initiates the Personal Genome Project at Harvard in 2005 with the goal of sequencing and publicizing the complete genomes and medical records of 100,000 volunteers to further research into personalized medicine. And all this is great. But there's also, even in just this, you could be like, well, these people are volunteering, so maybe it's cool, but like, there is some potential troubling privacy stuff about publicizing everybody's genomes, you know? I think we all, we've all thought about that more in the last couple of years.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I prefer to keep my genomes pretty private.

• 37:45Robert Evans?

  To me, yeah. I know a lot of people who use those 23andMe companies and are like, actually, I kind of wish I hadn't done that now, knowing what they do with the data, right?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can like, they can refuse a mortgage because you, you've published this and now they're like, oh, we, we think you're going to have diabetes and diabetes means you won't be able to pay 30 years' worth of mortgage. So nah, we're good.

• 38:11Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those things, you're not necessarily a bastard for like, being in a science that is used by corporations and that isn't fundamentally evil, but gets used in some shady ways. But kind of what this does show is I don't really think he often thinks about the negative applications of what he's involved in. That is going to be kind of a through line with George Church, as we'll talk about later. But that article in Popular Science continues. More so than any other scientist in this field, he is helping to forge a new kind of biology, one less geared towards studying DNA than harnessing it for our own aims. And this is where the fucked up shit starts to kind of come in is like, he is a, DNA is no different from, you know, a computer chip, right? And we shouldn't think of it as different than that in terms of allowing us to build new technologies.

• 38:56Robert Evans?

  And I can understand on some extent that attitude, but it is also different. It's not, it's not a computer chip.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  I really get nervous whenever the language starts dehumanizing human experiences.

• 39:11Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  That there has to be some attachment to what it means to be a person for this to remain healthy, normal, applicable in a way that isn't just you scamming us into something much more scary, evil.

• 39:27Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. And that's the thing is like, there's a degree to which if you're just talking purely logically, right? There's a degree to which you can be like, well, I guess it makes sense to say like, you know, if I'm open to the idea of like genetically editing people to make them, you know, available more resilient to diseases or something, maybe it makes a little sense to think of it as a technology in that way. But the line from that to thinking about the people and other living beings you create as just smartphones, that, how do you, what stops you? What guardrails are you building in to stop that? If this is how you're looking at it, where are the guardrails?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  People, people turn into Minesweeper real fast.

• 40:10Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  It's not, you're not dealing with bodies anymore in that scheme.

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  And that's not great. And that is kind of where we're headed here. So Church's success led to Harvard funding the establishment of his lab. He has like a lab that is funded by Harvard that has been for quite some time. And he brings in, you know, minds that excite him and hires them, basically pays them to like fuck around and try to figure shit out. And he uses this, like, this is both a valid thing to do in terms of science, but it's also. So he uses it as like an incubator for startup ideas. Like, once people do stuff that shows promise, they'll, he'll often spin what they're doing off into a company. Per an article in Popular Science, the result is that his lab manages to be both one of Harvard's top producers and a well-known receiving center for science's misfit toys.

• 40:59Robert Evans?

  There's an artist encoding Wikipedia entries into Apple genomes to create a literal tree of knowledge, and an insurance industry refugee who fled his office job over a decade ago, worked several months for free while teaching himself biochemistry, and now serves as co-head of the lab. So again, that, that, that sounds kind of cool, potentially, you know?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  I guess. What's the true knowledge?

• 41:20Robert Evans?

  What is that supposed to do? Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  That's cool. I guess. I don't know. It sounds awesome.

• 41:26Robert Evans?

  Sounds like an art project. Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:28Robert Evans?

  The article, we'll talk a little bit about like DNA coding. That's actually, there's some science there. But, um, the article quotes a former student of Church's who founded a genetic engineering screening company that looks for inherited diseases. And he said, "We always joke that the only thing you need to do to join George's lab is show up. There is zero organization. His style is just to let things happen. Mostly, you have the constant sense that exciting things are happening or about to happen. And if you miss out on it, you have only yourself to blame."

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, you know, that's kind of the tech industry FOMO, you know, PR thing in a nutshell.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  That's also just not a good thing to, to sort of, I guess, have is like what people know about you that like, yeah, if you show up, he'll give you a job.

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  He'll give you a job. He didn't give, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not checking. He's looking for bodies who are fucking around. Now, in the mid aughts, Church participated in kind of his first noteworthy project after the genome sequencing stuff that we'll talk about, which is a project to actually encode digital data made of text into binary code and then transfer that into genetic code, thus using DNA to store digital data. In his case, this was also a marketing stunt because the thing that he stored in DNA was like 70 billion copies of the book that he had written with another guy that was just about to come out. Right? So he does this as a PR move, right?

• 42:52Robert Evans?

  And it's a brilliant PR move. The book Regenesis was about to hit shelves and suddenly there's all these articles about how he stored 70 billion copies into like a dot of DNA, no longer than like a fucking period on a piece of paper that he was able to store so many copies. Like, isn't that amazing? Right? And it is, it is pretty interesting, right? Like that he synthesized a strand of DNA, replicated it and like, uh, put it onto a scrap of paper and it contained real data, right? Um, this in fact was so interesting that it got him an appearance on the Colbert Report, right? Uh, where he pulled out the paper scrap, which was like the size and shape of a fortune cookie slip and showed it off to everybody. And this got representatives of different companies who like archive films

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  and other stuff, uh, reaching out to him because they were like, oh shit, you know?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Oh shit, he has a piece of paper.

• 43:42Robert Evans?

  He's got a piece of paper, right? Yes, yes, yes.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  His paper got a dot on it. We should work with him.

• 43:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He's, it is funny. Like again, I don't know that this is exactly how a scientist should be putting out a discovery of this magnitude apparently, but it's also, it's one of those things that's both like really cool and interesting and somewhat less impressive than it sounds when you drill into what's actually happening here, right? Um, because like the, like that article by Interlandi, like makes it seem like, and this is obviously like a proof of concept for something that could be potentially a huge deal for like data storage. And that's not entirely untrue, but it's, it's not totally accurate either. The article goes on to summarize the book that he co-wrote with Ed Regis, who it's weird to me that his co-author's name is Ed Regis because Ed Regis is also a character

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  in the book Jurassic Park. Um, he was the public relations manager for Injun in the novel.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 44:37Robert Evans?

  Um, he doesn't wind up in the film. It's just really weird to me that his co-author on this book has that name.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I bet he gets eaten. He sounds like he got eaten.

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, man. That motherfucker gets the hell eaten out of him. Yes. If I am remembering right, he's one of the ones who gets eaten like a son of a bitch. I think he gets replaced with the lawyer in the movie. So the book Regenesis that Church writes with Ed Regis, quote, envision the future this new biology could bring, one in which bacteria fuels cars and commercial jets and humans are immune to cancer. It may sound like science fiction, or at least like a litany of overhyped pipe dreams that science so often sells, but George Church's pipe dreams have an uncanny record of becoming reality. And I'd say this is the fundamental lie about George that keeps getting repeated and spread by a too credulous media. The man makes constant wild and almost impossible

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  claims about what's going to happen in the future. And then people will be like, yeah, it sounds nuts, but his crazy dreams have become reality before, so we should take them seriously. And we shouldn't, because while Church contributed massively to the science of gene sequencing, at no point were his ambitions in that field a pipe dream. No one was ever like, no one can do what you're trying to do, George. You can't personally sequence the human genome. Scientists had been doing that, right? There were teams of people who had figured out aspects of this before he got into the field. And while what he discovered to do was really meaningful, nobody was like, this will never get done. It was more like, well, someone's got to figure it out. And he was the one who figured it out. I'm not saying that's not impressive, but it's not, it was never a pipe dream,

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  right? At least not by the time he got into it. And the stuff he's talking about in this book, like altering human biology to make us immune to cancer, that is a pipe dream. There's no evidence that will ever be possible, in part because cancer is a bunch of different diseases. There's never going to be a single thing that like renders you immune to cancer, unless you start uploading people to the cloud, which is also probably not possible.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I also get really nervous when the science includes both car technology and cancer elimination. That feels like, wait a minute, you gotta focus, big dog. Both of those things can't be true from your single discovery.

• 46:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's like if you like, you know, you're a Hollywood actor who's like starting to go bald and you go in for like Turkish hair transplant and the doctor's like, hey, man, if you want a new liver, like I haven't, I got one. I'd be like, wait, what, wait?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I don't. I actually don't. I prefer to keep the one I have. I know it sucks, but I'll keep it.

• 47:10Robert Evans?

  I just came in here to get the Joel McHale, man. I really was not interested in a new organ.

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  Never have hair transplants worked out better for a man. My god.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. His are low and they're strong. I really respect it.

• 47:24Robert Evans?

  The Mona Lisa of hair transplants. So even when it comes to the cool things Dr. Church actually did, like store his book in DNA, and I do think that's a cool idea, the practical reality behind it is a lot less exciting than the hype. Now, before we bust that, I want to show you a video of Church presenting the exciting promise of DNA storage in a video that was part of the promotional campaign for his books. And he's being interviewed here with one of his colleagues for this encoding project.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  And yes, he does look exactly like I thought he would.

• 47:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, he does.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  The density is remarkably high, as little as one bit per base, one base per cubic nanometer.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  And so we can store on the order of almost a zetabyte in a gram of DNA, a milliliter volume.

• 48:17Speaker 07

  The theoretical density of DNA is that you could store the total world's information, which is 1.8 zettabytes, at least in 2011, and about four grams of DNA.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  And it leverages rapidly improving next generation reading and writing of DNA.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  He looks like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush.

• 48:38Robert Evans?

  He does look like he'd be friends with Stockton Rush. I think he's a lot smarter than Stockton, though, although that is a very low bar because Stockton was really dumb.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  Old Stockton turned into paste Rush.

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  He does have the vibes of a guy that gets eaten by his own dinosaurs, but I don't think that's gonna happen to him either, which is really tragic. That actually does bum me out.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  It definitely felt like late-stage James Cameron. You know what I mean? It felt like, "You're telling me about the avatar technology, but this movie still sucks, so what's happening?"

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  So what he says here isn't technically wrong. Like, that's all technically accurate about what you could do with DNA. But it doesn't mean that DNA is currently or will be in any kind of timeframe, a good way to store data. Now, obviously, there's a need for a much better way to store data. Digital data storage is not forever and has a lot of problems. And like, is it just a really bad way to long-term protect human knowledge? And obviously, like, paper is actually, in some ways, better if you're storing it in like, the right conditions, like, it will degrade less than digital data over a long enough timeframe. But there's obvious problems with paper, right? Like, or other things. Like, if you've got like, a climate sealed place to store books versus some hard drives,

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  those hard drives will break on a faster timeframe, assuming you manage to keep that place, you know, properly stored and whatnot. But, so we do need ways that are much more space efficient, because also, the amount of data humanity is producing, you know, especially since we have projects like the Hadron Collider going, there's so much data being made, and storing it is a problem, right? Like, because you need these massive facilities in order to even store a lot of this stuff. So these are issues that we have, right? And DNA and the fact that you could store data with such density in it could be a solution to aspects of it, but it's kind of framed a lot as like, and this is in the future, Netflix will keep all its data in like, DNA drive, yada, like, everyone, like, everything

• 50:39Robert Evans?

  will be stored, and that probably is never gonna happen. I can't say definitely, but there's, because there's a lot we don't know about this, how this technology would work, but there's shit, the shit we haven't figured out yet is really significant. For example, there's a high error rate when you write data to DNA currently. And since it's really easy to fuck up writing the data, the current best practices is to store multiple redundant copies of each piece of information. So you have some that are right, which is like, he puts 70 billion copies of that book on like, a dot, right? Like, that's, that's kind of what we're talking about here. You store a shitload of copies of something, because, you know, and scientists don't even know how many redundant backups we need yet, right? I found a study where they're just trying to figure that out, like, okay, what is the

• 51:22Robert Evans?

  actual best practice for the actual number of different redundant copies to store? Because we really hadn't locked that down yet.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  So all of those, all of those books, there's like six of those books that are right. And then 70 billion others that are like just mid, like really shit books.

• 51:40Robert Evans?

  I don't know if it's that bad, but we like the, I think the problem is like, we don't actually know how many you, we should be doing, right? We're still figuring that part of it out. And then there's a separate issue of like, okay, well, you've got that on this dot, but you can't like, that dot's not connected to a computer. Like, sure, the data is there, but how would you access and store it and use it if you wanted to, right? Like, could you get that on a Kindle easily? And the answer is no, right? I found an article on DNA data storage written by Nithal Krishnaraj that lays out some of the other practical issues inherent to doing this for any practical reason.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Quote, "DNA has horrendously slow read and write speeds, so it isn't ideal for real time storage and activities like streaming video and gaming definitely won't be viable at this time. As a result, DNA data storage loses some of its versatility and as of now, it would only work best for long-term storage. It's also not rewritable. Once you encode data into DNA, there's no way of making changes to your data without redoing the encoding process. There's also no random access functionality, which means you can't access a certain part of the data without decoding all of it. And this is still like interesting and potentially a way, again, you could have a bunch of different places where all of the data we've, you know, made up to a certain point is stored on DNA somewhere and that would potentially allow future people to access a lossless version of it.

• 53:00Robert Evans?

  And in a way that might be really helpful, but we're not talking about something that's going to alter daily life in its current form. And maybe not ever on any timeframe, any of us will see, because it's just not practical, right?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Netflix isn't going to exist when this is actually a thing.

• 53:16Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes. Yes. Like at some point in the future, maybe they'll figure out all this stuff, but that is not any kind of timeframe. Anybody should be like waiting for, right? Just again, not to say this isn't interesting or doesn't have a potential use. It's just, it's just prepped as like, this is the future of data storage. And it's like, well, maybe in like a couple hundred years, I don't know.

• 53:39Robert Evans?

  Now, there's also something in that video that I find creepy as an aside, which is that Dr. Church proposes one use of this technology would be to create permanent records of the brain activity of a human being. And I just don't like the way he says this.

• 53:53Speaker 06

  Or you could imagine other huge data sources like all the neuronal firings in the brain, which could be encoded into DNA. And again, you could do selective reading of that as needed.

• 54:04Robert Evans?

  Yikes. I don't love that. No. No. He's saying like, well, you could do some really groundbreaking medical studies if you had access to this much data. And sure. But when you talk about making perfect records of a human brain's activity, you're also getting into the kind of territory where I'm like, I want to immediately hear what you think about the potential for surveillance and violation of privacy, right? You kind of have to bring that up right away. You can't just be interested in the technology here.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like you want to download some information from people that maybe they didn't want to give you. That's some nasty work there, Dr. George.

• 54:41Robert Evans?

  I'm a little, and I promise you, we're so far getting into all this, well, theoretically, there's stuff about this that could be wrong, or he's exaggerating. The actual fucked up stuff starts right about now, right?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:52Robert Evans?

  Because when we're talking about like, this is a technology that could be good or could have some major problematic ethical, you know, implications, you'll want to know the scientist working on the technology that could have fucked up ethical implications has a strong history of personal ethics, right? And this brings me to Dr. Church's history with our old friend of the pod, Jeffrey Epstein.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Jeffrey Epstein.

• 55:17Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. That's the monster at the end of this book.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:23Robert Evans?

  Or at the end of this episode, Dr. Church has long ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, indeed. Buddy.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Well, well, well.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  Surprise, Epstein.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  The Babadook emerges.

• 55:35Robert Evans?

  Literally. He is the thin white duke of evil scientists. It's fucking Jeffrey Epstein.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  That's really cool. That's like a really exciting plot twist that you don't see coming. I love this.

• 55:47Robert Evans?

  It's like the end of the second or third Kingsman movie when Hitler comes out of nowhere. Like, oh, there we go. There we go. I know him.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  You guys really built that a long way.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. Great. Dropping him like Thanos.

• 56:04Robert Evans?

  Ever wondered how to cruise? And I'm not talking about boats. Season four of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is finally here, and it's hotter, smarter, and spicier than ever. Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso know their stuff, and this year, they're not afraid to get a little hands-on. They're serving up jaw-dropping, insightful, and seriously hilarious conversations with some of the boldest voices in the queer community, from celebrities and comedians to kingsters and cruising pros. This new season's all about challenging stereotypes, celebrating sex positivity, and keeping things delightfully unfiltered, because intimacy doesn't always look like candlelight and roses. Sometimes, it's spontaneous, curious, and a little unexpected. Get ready for deep dives into the history of cruising, trending gay cosmetic procedures, dispatches from Atlanta to Puerto Rico,

• 56:49Robert Evans?

  how OnlyFans is reshaping adult content, and so much more. So if you're feeling curious, maybe a little bold, consider this your official invitation to push play. Listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Tuesday. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Think about it. When it comes to your own food, you can walk into a restaurant, see what's being made, and know exactly what you're getting. But with dog food, most brands keep that completely hidden. Just Food for Dogs does the opposite. They've built their entire brand around open kitchens. You can actually walk in and watch them prepare your dog's meals with real, human-grade ingredients, like chicken, beef, carrots, and peas, cooked right there in front of you. No mystery, no behind-the-scenes you're not allowed to see. That kind of transparency is rare in the pet food world. And it's a big reason they've become the number-one vet-recommended fresh dog food, earning trust from pet parents who want to feel confident in what they're feeding. When a brand is willing to show you

• 57:52Speaker 03

  exactly how your dog's food is made, it says a lot about the care, quality, and standards behind every meal they produce. Nothing to hide, everything to love. Go to JustFoodForDogs.com and get 50% off your first order.

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  So, some sources, I have said, say that Church and Epstein's relationship started in 2005. I've heard Church claim 2006, but people have said that he was receiving funding from Epstein as far back as 2005. It may just be that his lab started receiving unrestricted funding from Epstein before they met. And I will remind you here, they were receiving funding from 2005 to 2007. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of sex trafficking, although that's not the end of their relationship. But let's talk about those first couple of years. Now, at that point in his career, 2005, right? He is, he's just started the Personal Genome Project. His primary focus and the thing that he's most famous for is his work on like gene sequencing and gene editing. You know, he's into both of these

• 58:55Robert Evans?

  things. An article for the New York Times that discusses Church's and other scientists' associations with Epstein described Dr. Church in this period as, quote, "a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans."

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Uh-oh.

• 59:10Robert Evans?

  Uh-oh. Oh, boy. Don't like that.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Superior humans, that's a trigger word for me.

• 59:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Boy, has anyone ever said those two words and not been doing something horrifying?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 59:26Robert Evans?

  So, Dr. Church was an early pioneer for the use of CRISPR to edit human genes. And one of his ambitions was and is to create a method of gene therapy to, in his words, "knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can't get AIDS anymore because the virus can't enter your cells." And hey, that sounds fine. AIDS is bad. Stopping people from being able to get it, lovely. The issue is that Church's ambitions don't stop here. And Epstein was not drawn to Church's life work for anything as humanitarian as stopping a virus. I have found a couple stories of how Church and Epstein actually met for the first time. Church has claimed that he was connected to Epstein first, either, and he's give, he

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  says, "I don't know which," either through the chairman of Harvard's psych department or through his literary agent, John Brockman.

• 1:00:19Speaker 08

  Sure, buddy.

• 1:00:20Robert Evans?

  I feel like I remember how I first met Jeffrey Epstein, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  That, but that, that speaks to his multitude.

• 1:00:27Robert Evans?

  It's the, he's a busy man, right?

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  It could either be a money man, or it could be an academic man, but one of them

• 1:00:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Introduced me.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  And both of them are implicated in some sketchy Epstein stuff, to be clear.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  We were all there with Jeffrey.

• 1:00:42Robert Evans?

  But in another interview, Church seemed to suggest that Epstein probably reached out to him because Epstein was friendly and working with a biologist and mathematician named Martin Noack. Church and Noack had worked together on various applications of CRISPR to edit genes. Per an article in STAT by Karen Begley, "At the get togethers with Noack," Church said, "Epstein seemed interested in the science of life's origins and mathematically modeling the evolution of viruses, cancer cells, and life itself." Epstein did not leave much of an impression on him, Church said. The meetings weren't really about Jeffrey. They were about the scientists who were talking with each other. Normally, expectations are low for people who sit in on meetings far outside their field of expertise. So he's kind of like, well, it was mostly just a scientist talking, and Jeffrey didn't really

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  know much. And when he talked, it didn't really make an impression as a result, right?

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:01:31Robert Evans?

  And if that's the truth, which I have trouble believing, because their relationship goes on after this, but, you know, if that's the truth, then all Church did was take this guy's money, who was not convicted of a crime yet, and show up at some dinners to talk about science. And that wouldn't be so bad, right? And in fact, there are some people who got some funding from Epstein and were not involved in the sketchy stuff, because he funded a lot of guys, and they didn't all go to his parties or have sex with teenagers, right? And I'm not saying Church did.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  He made enough money to buy an island.

• 1:02:04Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  You can't do that with only sex pets. Some people

• 1:02:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Had to be on some version of an up and up.

• 1:02:10Robert Evans?

  There's some people who were involved with him who have been tarnished unfairly, right? I'm also not saying that Church is tarnished unfairly here, because I don't think he is. However, I would be remiss if I did not read a different description of the dinner parties and events that Epstein held for scientists around this time. Maybe these are a different set of parties than church attended, although they include people he's listed as his friends. So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he was invited by colleagues, including Martin Noack, a Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, and the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss to salons and coffee clashes at which Mr. Epstein would hold court. On multiple occasions, starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch

• 1:02:55Robert Evans?

  as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an advisor to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it. It was not a secret. The advisor, for example, said he was told about the plans not only by Mr. Epstein at a gathering at his Manhattan townhouse, but also by at least one prominent member of the business community. One of the scientists said Mr. Epstein divulged his idea in 2001 at a dinner at the same townhouse. The other recalled Mr. Epstein discussing it with him at a 2006 conference that he hosted in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Once at a dinner at Mr. Epstein's mansion in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Mr. Janier, and he's talking about Jaron Lanier, said that he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein's goal was to have 20

• 1:03:38Robert Evans?

  women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside of Santa Fe.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  It is pretty impressive to find out that Jeffrey Epstein is somehow more of a piece of shit than I thought. I was like, nah, he's just a monster. I don't think he's like a super monster. God damn.

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  No, I don't think he's got a baby ranch. Oh, yeah, he's got a baby ranch.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Fuck.

• 1:04:06Robert Evans?

  Or he tried to have a baby ranch. Now, Stat News, to their credit, did ask Dr. Church after Epstein's death about Epstein's eugenics baby ranch, being like, you're working in like gene editing people and Epstein wanted to do this. Did he talk to you about this? Could you guys knew each other when he was talking about this, right?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

  Now, I have no proof either way. For his part, Dr. Church said, "I never heard anything about it." Although he went on to say, and I find this curious, "I'd have thought that I would have been involved in that kind of conversation, but it didn't." Tend to go in that direction. But also, I think people tend to behave themselves around me. That's a weird thing to say after that.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  What a strange little guy.

• 1:04:48Robert Evans?

  Honestly, bro, if someone asks you whether or not you're involved in Jeffrey Epstein's baby ranch, you end the statement with, "I never heard anything about it."

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  No, yeah, you don't have to be like, "I would have liked to talk to him about it."

• 1:04:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I would have, I'm kind of offended. He didn't bring me in. But also, what are you?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  That actually sounds awesome. I just, no, I didn't talk to him.

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  But also, then when you say it didn't tend to go in that direction, well, tend doesn't mean never. Does that mean sometimes it kind of did? Like, what are you saying?

• 1:05:16Robert Evans?

  You seem like a man who's precise with his language. I don't know why you're phrasing it this way.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein's like, uh, you know, I want to start a baby ranch. And he's like, huh? And he's like, oh, nothing, nothing.

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  I thought he was gonna bring it up again, but he didn't, you know?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Never mind.

• 1:05:30Robert Evans?

  Never mind.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I thought you'd be, I thought you'd be cool about it.

• 1:05:32Robert Evans?

  I thought you were cool. Yeah, it's like Jeffrey being like, "He wants some coke?" "What? Oh, nothing. I didn't say anything. Nothing." "I don't do coke." Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  No. Sober, sober.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  Sober Jeffrey Epstein, that's what they call me. I'm gonna go to the bathroom, like 15 minutes. I'm gonna come out really excited. I love peeing.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  We're gonna talk business as soon as I get out.

• 1:05:50Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna look like Robin Williams in 1985 when I step out of that thing. It's nothing weird. So perhaps that is the truth, that he had nothing to do with this. Friends and colleagues of Dr. Church expressed surprise when after Epstein's death, the years of close connections between Epstein and Church were made public. One associate pointed out that Church even brought a philosopher into his Harvard lab to flag potential bioethics issues in experiments, and that he teaches a research ethics class, which is uncommon for a scientist in his field working at his level. And so they're like, "Well, it's weird to me that he would have any relationship with Epstein, because I have always considered him one of the most concerned with ethics people in our field." And again, to emphasize for legal and moral reasons, there is no evidence that Church

• 1:06:33Robert Evans?

  was working on any kind of eugenics baby project for Epstein. Not that there would be, because Jeffrey Epstein didn't publish all the details about everyone he was involved with, with everything. We just know he talked about this plan during several coffee clatches and other events with his pet scientists, and that Church was at similar events. Dr. Church claims that working with Epstein at all was an ethical lapse, but not entirely his fault. He points out that universities are supposed to vet donors before they meet with faculty. And he told STAT, "My understanding is this vetting is the responsibility of the development office," which is yet another reason why scientists are a little more relaxed. They feel they have administrators who, in theory, do the difficult job of figuring out who's legit. So, "Sir, I'm just a little guy.

• 1:07:18Robert Evans?

  How could I be expected to think about this sort of thing? That's someone else's job."

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  And now, and now he's picking who introduced him. Previously, he didn't know who introduced him. It turns out it was Harvard the whole time.

• 1:07:30Robert Evans?

  It was Harvard, yeah. Now, he added that scientists, quote, "Myself included, are not very good at screening or judging human beings," right? That just like, "Ah, we're all just kinda, you know, bad at people, you know? It's not really our strong suit." And to be fair to, also, first off, I just don't believe that for Church, because he's an incredibly skilled public relations expert. I think he's very good with people, right? I think he's probably very good at judging people, because that's what he does. Anyway, to be fair to Church, he went on to make a good point in that STAT interview that almost does sound like a mea culpa. He states that a lot of scientists working on cutting-edge projects with important applications feel what he described as an exceptionalism, which is a sense that anything they do is

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  okay if the work is important enough. This is almost like a precursor to like effective altruism type feelings, right? He predates that, but I don't think he's, I don't think he's wrong here. I do think that's a thing that a lot of scientists working in important fields feel, which is that like, "Well, if I have to do something a little fucked up to further this research with incredibly important like implications, it's worth it." And he cited the case of a Nobel laureate, a biologist named Sydney Brenner, who took $15 million from Philip Morris to fund a biology institute. And Sydney's argument was that like, "Look, if Big Tobacco keeps this money, they'll use it for something worse than I will using it for science," which is like... An arguable point, but also like, well, big tobacco is put, give you that money

• 1:08:57Robert Evans?

  because it's a write-off and like, they're gonna, they're expecting something. They're expecting something from it, right? Aren't they, Sidney? Are you giving them anything? Are you sure? Right?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  And also, there, you picked the worst guy. You know what I mean? Like, it's not like you picked a comparable, uh, space to be putting this money into.

• 1:09:17Robert Evans?

  It's, it's one thing, like Walmart needed a tax write-off. So they funded this like medical thing I was doing and like, you know, Walmart's a sketchy corporation, but also like the science is good. It's like, no, this is the tobacco industry. Like, their product is literally killing more people every year than World War II.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  They win. They win the murder game. You did it.

• 1:09:37Robert Evans?

  It's just a little different, you know? But anyway, there is an argument about like, well, how? Obviously, I'm in the advertising business. There's always an argument, how many moral compromises should you make to fund something valuable? Right? And the answer isn't none. You know, this is capitalism. I would say big tobaccos, maybe like $15 million of Philip Morris money is maybe a step beyond that, but you know, people feel differently, you know? Like, is it fine to advertise vaping? I don't know. Um, whatever. What's less arguable is that after Epstein was charged, convicted and sentenced in 2008, Dr. Church continued his association with the, by this point, known sex criminal. Right?

• 1:10:20Robert Evans?

  So 2005 to 2007, we don't know if he was involved in the weird eugenics stuff. We know he's taking Epstein's money, but Epstein's not a known criminal. Right? He could have been, you know, kind of innocent. He continues associating with Epstein repeatedly after he is convicted as a sex criminal in 2008. And that's crossing a line for me, right?

• 1:10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. At one point, it's like, I fear this man just lacks common sense and no, no, this is an active decision to associate with one of the world's biggest monsters.

• 1:10:54Robert Evans?

  You're, you're making a choice here, brother.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  He was like, nah, Jeffrey's awesome to me and I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna keep hanging.

• 1:11:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so when Church's book, Regenesis, came out in 2012, it elevated his profile. And Epstein seems to have gotten back in touch with him soon after. And this would have been, you know, after Epstein finished doing his quote unquote "time", which doesn't really, not by, was not time by normal people's standards, right? Like, his slap on the wrist didn't even get a slap on the wrist, right? Yeah. And it's not clear to me when they got back in touch, or if they ever got out of touch after 2007. I don't even know that. Whatever the case, Dr. Church has posted a public online calendar every year since 1999, and it shows that he had six separate phone calls or meetings with Epstein in 2014. STAT News writes, "Sample Entry, June 21, 2014, Lunch with Jeffrey Epstein,

• 1:11:47Robert Evans?

  12 to 1:30, Martin Noack's Institute." And that's a lot of times to talk to Jeffrey Epstein, right?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  That's a long lunch.

• 1:11:53Robert Evans?

  That's a lot of, that's a long lunch, too.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  12 to 1:30, you really, you guys were chatting.

• 1:11:59Robert Evans?

  You were pushing it, huh? When interviewed after Epstein's death, Dr. Church admitted to meeting Epstein several times each year since 2014. And STAT was like, "Didn't you hear that he'd been convicted of all those sex crimes? And like, you're a father and a grandfather. Did it not skeeve you out to be involved with this guy?" And Church replied, "I did read a couple of news articles, like 10 years back." Quote, "But they weren't clear enough for me to know if there was a serious problem." Now, I should note here that reporting in 2008 alleged that Epstein had received massages from teenage girls.

• 1:12:38Robert Evans?

  You didn't know?

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:12:40Robert Evans?

  You didn't know, huh? You're a researcher.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Robert Evans?

  Like...

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  That's a real R. Kelly, "When we say teenage, how are we talking?"

• 1:12:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, we talking, right? Now, when he asked if he felt Epstein had paid his debt to society, STAT's like, "So do you think he'd like paid his debt to society after 2008 and deserved a second chance?" And I, I kind of, I really respect STAT for sitting down with this guy and kind of drilling him on this. Church responded with what I would call a non-answer. So they like, "Hey, so is it that you thought, you know, he'd made good? That everything was okay now?" And he said, "As far as I know, people just didn't have that conversation, but it should've." So let's break that down. He's asked, do you think that after 2008 Epstein had paid his debt to society? And he said, as far as I know, people, not me, didn't have that

• 1:13:34Robert Evans?

  conversation, but it should have.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  It's it. I guess the people, the.

• 1:13:41Robert Evans?

  Your grammar should be better than that, man. But like, what do you, what do you mean?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  I think he's like, I'm not gonna answer for myself. You, you, the single body of people that exist around me should have had the conversation with Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:13:56Robert Evans?

  Okay, man. Now, he went on to add in that interview, I would think, I would think to like that people's reputation is multi dimensional and multi year. It takes a long time to build up, but also to tear down. And stat notes, he was speaking generally and about himself, as in like, this shouldn't destroy my reputation, because like, I've done other things. But it's kind of hard not to read that as I'm talking about Epstein too. That like, well, he's a complicated guy. He's got other stuff that he's done besides the sex crimes. Great. Love an answer like that from our ethics man working on brain reading. For what it's worth, George Church did ultimately apologize for taking Epstein's

• 1:14:38Robert Evans?

  money in a 2019 interview. Although, you want to guess what he blamed his lapse in judgment on?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, just tell us, there's no way.

• 1:14:51Robert Evans?

  Nerd tunnel vision.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:14:54Robert Evans?

  I'm just too much of a nerd to have a problem with sex crimes.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  He's like, whoa, I don't even notice pussy.

• 1:14:59Robert Evans?

  You know, you know how it goes. You're watching Star Wars, your friends trafficking teenage girls around the world. It just happens.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. There is this, um, this, this, again, it's just this, this want to like cutify themselves out of like, the human experience. It's like, oh, I'm just a nerdy little cutie boy. I didn't even notice that bad things were happening. Like, you're, you're a grown man who's trying to manipulate genes. This isn't. You're not a sweetheart at all.

• 1:15:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's just very, it's, it's great stuff. Good work, good work, Dr. Church. Now, that's pretty bad, ending on Epstein in part one, not ideal. It gets so much worse in part two. There's so much eugenics coming. There's so much fucked up shit on the way. I'm so excited to tell you the rest of this story, Langston, but first, let's talk about you. You know, what's your favorite color?

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Favorite color is coral.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  Coral. I honestly didn't call that. Okay. I didn't actually call anything. I had no idea what your favorite color would be.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for years I used to say blue to protect myself from, from my own insecurities. But then at some point I had to be honest and say, no, my, my favorite color is nuanced and slightly effeminate, I guess.

• 1:16:19Robert Evans?

  I have been looking for a pair of coral shorts for the summer. It does seem like a nice, nice short color, you know?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  My brother wears a lot of coral. It's a good color.

• 1:16:28Robert Evans?

  We're all getting over our insecurities here, you know, just like George Church got over his insecurities about his friend Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  He's like, you know what?

• 1:16:36Robert Evans?

  No, not like that.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  I can get past this.

• 1:16:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we can get past this and we can get past the part where we talk about George Church to talk about your pluggables. What are they?

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Oh, you can listen to my podcast. It's called My Mama Told Me. I do it with my friend David Bory, who is also a alumnus of this, this gorgeous podcast and we talk about conspiracy theories, specifically black conspiracy theories. And it's really fun and silly and we do not nearly as effective research as you do, Robert.

• 1:17:09Robert Evans?

  My only hope is that George Church gets integrated into a series of conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein. Cause everyone else who was tied to him has been. And look, you know, are the, all of those accurate? No. Are they all fun? Yes. And why should George miss out, you know?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  I will say, there was that era on what is now X, but formerly Twitter, where they were just making up lists of the people who were on the flight logs. And it was always a funny list. It never failed, no matter who wrote it, the right, the left, the, the sickos, the imagineers, they were always funny lists of people.

• 1:17:48Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. One of my favorite things about that is just like, you know, maybe that's sketchy that fucking Eddie Murphy wound up in there. But I could also like, it's a perfect thing for an Eddie Murphy movie where he just finds out he's been on this sex criminal's plane a bunch of times. Like, I'll, I'll watch that 90 minute comedy.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  There were a few people on some of those flight logs where I was like, I don't think they knew what they got on the plane for.

• 1:18:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you might've just been going to a thing with him, right? You go into some sort of conference.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Somebody said, get on the PJ and you were like, yeah.

• 1:18:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, get on a private jet, sure.

• 1:18:23Robert Evans?

  It has, I will say, one thing that I have learned as a result of this, because previously, before I knew anything about Jeffrey Epstein, if some rich guy had been like, hey, we're gonna pay you to go to a conference, you wanna ride in my private jet? I probably would have been like, yeah, fuck, man, that sounds dope, you know? Fucking 25 year old me probably wouldn't have had the wherewithal to be like, I don't know, but now, absolutely not.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Someone asked me the other day if, if I would get on that Trump plane, the, the one that, that Qatar gave him. It's like, for the story alone, I kinda think I have to.

• 1:18:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, no, that one, yes, yes, yes. That's justifiable for journalism.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just gotta ride this wave and, and deal with the fallout later.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm good. I'm staying home.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  You would stay at home, you wouldn't touch it.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  No, I'm good, I'm staying home.

• 1:19:11Robert Evans?

  But no, folks, the lesson here is that if a rich guy wants to fly you and pay you to speak at some sort of weird conference, tell him first class from a real airline, right? You know, it's nice enough. And no one can be like, was, well, what if that, was that Delta flight like implicating you in crimes? The only thing that Delta flight implicates you in is crashing at Newark, right? Sorry, that's, that's bad.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  That was dark.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  They said they'll do better. They said they'll do better.

• 1:19:40Robert Evans?

  They said they'll do better. Everyone's gonna do better.

• 1:19:44Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  That's the episode.

• 1:19:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

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

• 1:20:14Robert Evans?

  Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battle's there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a Dude Wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude Wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Think about it. When it comes to your own food, you can walk into a restaurant, see what's being made, and know exactly what you're getting. But with dog food, most brands keep that completely hidden. Just Food for Dogs does the opposite. They've built their entire brand around open kitchens. You can actually walk in and watch them prepare your dog's meals with real, human-grade ingredients, like chicken, beef, carrots, and peas, cooked right there in front of you. No mystery, no behind-the-scenes you're not allowed to see. That kind of transparency is rare in the pet food world. And it's a big reason they've become the number-one vet-recommended fresh dog food, earning trust from pet parents who want to feel confident in what they're feeding.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  When a brand is willing to show you exactly how your dog's food is made, it says a lot about the care, quality, and standards behind every meal they produce. Nothing to hide, everything to love. Go to JustFoodForDogs.com and get 50% off your first order.

• 1:21:47Speaker 08

  Deciding on what to listen to is hard. Using Zumo to stream music from iHeart 90s Radio is easy. Or play iHeart Country Classics Radio or Hip Hop Beats. Your choice, all for free. Stream easy with Zumo Play. Get live and on-demand entertainment with no logins, no signups, no accounts, no hassle. Get cozy on the couch and binge your favorite movies like About Last Night starring Kevin Hart, Panic Room starring Jodie Foster, and more, all streaming free on Zumo Play. Go to play.zumo.com now. Life is hard, Zumo is easy.

• 1:22:17Speaker 09

  Honestly, honestly. Honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP. PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.